Holy of Holies within Solomon's Temple where the Ark of the Covenant rested. For Muslims, it was where the Prophet Muhammad had put his foot down before he ascended to heaven. For Deker, it was like the pin of a grenade placed in his hand with orders not to blow up the world.
Especially today, Good Friday.
Three weeks ago, a Palestinian construction worker had plowed a bulldozer into a crowd of young Israelis. Two weeks ago, Israeli archaeologists had accused Muslims of destroying First Temple artifacts in an attempt to erase any traces of Jewish settlements on the Temple Mount. One week ago, Christian monks had broken into a brawl at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in advance of today's celebration.
It was always something.
A secular Jew who had grown up in Los Angeles and served with the U.S. armed forces as a demolitions specialist in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Deker had been recruited by the former head of Israel's internal security service, Yuval Diskin, to work for the Shin Bet. A man who specialized in the destruction of major structures, Diskin told him, was uniquely qualified to protect one such as the Temple Mount. However, Deker quickly gathered that his chief qualification was that he was Jewish but not a real Jew, if that was possible.
For some time the Shin Bet had been concerned that Jewish extremists could attack the Temple Mount in an attempt to foil peace moves with Palestinians. It had happened before, with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the Shin Bet didn't want to see it again.
'The Shin Bet sees in the group we're talking about on the extreme right a willingness to use firearms in order to halt diplomatic processes and harm political leaders,' Diskin told him.
Ironically, that group Deker had been warned about for so long included Israel's current defense minister, Michael Gellar, who had made a surprise appearance at the office and now stood before him.
'You saw what happened on Rhodes?' Gellar demanded. 'It was intended for me.'
Deker had seen it. The Egyptian Abdil Zawas had managed to blow himself up while trying to wire a roadside bomb at the European peace summit. The man wasn't a bomb maker, and it all sounded fishy to Deker. But then Zawas was always trying to outdo the ghost of his late crazy military cousin Ali, and it wouldn't surprise Deker if the Egyptian playboy had gotten in so over his head that he'd lost it.
'Greek police found evidence in the car that Abdil's real target today is the Temple Mount. Analysis of his video claiming responsibility for the attempt on my life suggests that it was an attack code to his associates in Jerusalem to detonate a nuclear device.'
Deker blinked. 'Today?'
'You need to seal the Temple Mount.'
'You want me to seal off the Temple Mount on Good Friday and the eve of Passover?'
'Yes.'
'But that means closing off the Western Wall to worshippers, ticking off both Jews and Christians. That's on top of the Arabs, who are always mad.'
'I know what it means, Deker.' General Gellar was pulling rank. 'You need to check all access points and your informants. Things the security feeds don't pick up.'
Deker nodded, typed an alert on his BlackBerry, and then put it away.
'What did you just do?' Gellar demanded.
'I sent a quick 140-character text through Twitter to my network.'
'Is that secure?'
'Yes and no.'
The BlackBerry chirped, and Deker looked at the feeds and frowned. The guide at the Gihon Springs was reporting that a man and woman had gone into Hezekiah's Tunnel but never emerged from the tunnel exit at the Siloam Pool.
He called up the video, and as he watched the monitor, he watched Gellar. The blood from the general's face drained.
'That's Conrad Yeats and Serena Serghetti. Abdil's associates.'
Yeats, maybe, thought Deker, who had heard plenty of stories in his days with the armed forces. Sister Serghetti, Mother Earth herself, never. Perhaps Yeats had abducted her at gunpoint and forced her to help.
Deker radioed Elezar, who was monitoring Warren's Shaft near Hezekiah's Tunnel. 'Anything on the intruders?'
The radio crackled. 'They're in the tunnels,' Elezar reported. 'Under the Temple Mount.'
'Tell the Yamam unit to assemble in the Map Room right away.' Deker turned to Gellar. 'Too late to seal the Temple Mount now.'
49
Serena knew that ancient cities couldn't exist without a water source, and Jerusalem was no exception. The City of David had developed around the only real water source in the area, the Gihon Spring, which ran through the bottom of the Kidron Valley. During the Assyrian and Babylonian attacks, King Hezekiah had constructed an aqueduct through which the waters could be hidden inside the city, an extraordinary engineering feat at the time.
It was through this tunnel that Serena followed Conrad through waist-high water in the dark with only one flashlight to guide them. It was all their driver from Gaza had on hand. They had been greeted at the beach north of Al Gaddafi by a van from the local Catholic church, which drove them up Salahadeen Road to the Erez industrial zone and the border gate with Israel. The Israeli official at the checkpoint had looked over their bogus work permits, which Serena had insisted would give them a better chance of getting into Israel than the underground smuggling tunnels, which Israeli warplanes bombed almost daily. A long minute later, the soldiers had waved them through. They had crossed the 1950 Armistice Line into Israel and driven toward Jerusalem, only forty-eight miles away.
The drive from Gaza had ended in Silwan, a poor Arab village of cinder-block houses crumbling down the hillsides to the Gihon Spring at the bottom of the Kidron. There, Serena found the Fountain of the Virgin and the church commemorating the spot where Mary once drew water to wash the clothes of Jesus. It was almost one p.m. and a Friday, so the caretaker was about to close the gate. But Conrad gave him a tip, and he let them descend the stone steps into the spring's cave.
It was here that Serena's expertise was exhausted and she had to trust Conrad's knowledge of Jerusalem's underbelly. But sloshing through the ever rising water, she was beginning to have doubts.
Hezekiah's Tunnel was a third of a mile long, mostly under three feet wide, and in some places, under five feet high. The caretaker at the entrance had warned them that the water was knee-high today and the walk would take them about forty minutes before they exited at the Pool of Siloam. Conrad, however, told her that they would be exiting halfway through, at the point where the tunnel took an odd S-shaped course through the rock. This was where Hezekiah's Tunnel branched from the tunnel leading from the Gihon Spring to the bottom of Warren's Shaft.
The tunnel had narrowed, and the dirty water was now waist-high. Serena bumped her head against the ceiling of the tunnel, which had started to slope sharply. The water was now up to her neck.
'The ceiling is lowest here, under five feet high, and the water level highest,' Conrad told her. 'So you'll have to hold your breath.'
He took her by the hand, and they walked forward until their heads were underwater. They walked about three feet before the tunnel ceiling started to rise and their heads surfaced.
They were in a different tunnel, the water level dropping rapidly, and they soon reached a stone platform on the edge of a giant precipice. Serena felt chilled to the bone and wrung her dripping hair like a towel to squeeze out the water. When she looked down, she saw what looked like a giant subway tunnel with wide white limestone steps descending into the depths of the earth. She said, 'This looks like the grand gallery of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.'
