“Because Our Lord did not wear a bulletproof vest on the way to his death. And neither will my master.”
“It’s just a reenactment, Luigi.”
“Not for him. When the Holy Father sets foot on the Via Dolorosa, he will be the embodiment of Jesus Christ in the eyes of his flock.”
“With one important difference.”
“What’s that?”
“His Holiness is supposed to survive the day.”
The pope came down from his rooms ten minutes later, his gleaming white soutane covered by a scarlet vestment, and climbed into the back of his limousine. It bore him around the northern edge of the Old City, past an endless throng of delirious Christian pilgrims, and eventually to the Lions’ Gate. The Vaticanisti waited there, along with a large delegation of clergy and Catholic dignitaries who would follow in the pope’s footsteps as he walked the stations of the cross. As Gabriel and Donati helped the Holy Father from the car, the crowd burst into rapturous applause. It was quickly drowned out, however, by the sound of the midday sermon blasting from the towering minaret of the al-Aqsa Mosque.
“What’s he saying?” Donati asked.
“It wouldn’t survive translation,” Gabriel answered.
“That bad?”
“I’m afraid so.”
The first station of the cross was located on a small flight of steps at the Umariya Elementary School, an Islamic
The office of Imam Hassan Darwish had two windows. One looked south toward the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque; the other faced west toward the Via Dolorosa and the domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Usually, Darwish kept the shades tightly drawn in the second window so he would not have to see what he regarded as a revolting temple of polytheism. But now, on the most tragic day on the Christian liturgical calendar, he stood there alone, watching the foolish little man in red and white leading a procession of apes and pigs along the street of sorrows. A moment later, when the pope entered the Church of the Flagellation, Darwish closed the blinds with a satisfying snap and walked over to the other window. The Dome of the Rock, the symbol of Islam’s ascendancy over the city of God, filled the horizon. Darwish cast a glance at his wristwatch. Then he twirled his prayer beads nervously round his fingers and waited for the earth to move.
At King Saul Boulevard, Dina Sarid was keeping a tense vigil of a far different kind. The room where she worked had no windows and no view of anything except for its walls. At the moment, they were cluttered with the fragments of the operation that had just ended successfully in Vienna. It was all there, laid out from beginning to end, step by step, link by link—Claudia Andreatti to Carlo Marchese, Carlo Marchese to David Girard, David Girard to Massoud Rahimi, Massoud Rahimi to the four Hezbollah terrorists who died outside the Stadttempel synagogue. But was the Iranian-Hezbollah operation truly over? And had the historic Stadttempel synagogue in Vienna been its real target? After hours of frenzied research and analysis, Dina now feared the answer to both questions was a resounding no.
Her quest had begun shortly after seven the previous evening, when Unit 8200 had intercepted and decoded a priority transmission from VEVAK headquarters to all Iranian stations and bases worldwide. The message contained just three words: BLOOD NEVER SLEEPS. The words had meant nothing to the mathematicians and computer geniuses at the Unit, but Dina, a scholar of Islamic history, immediately recognized the Iranians had borrowed the phrase from none other than Saladin. Spoken to his favorite son, Zahir, they were meant as a warning against the use of unnecessary violence. “I warn you against shedding blood, indulging in it and making a habit of it,” Saladin had said, “for blood never sleeps.”
Like most fathers, however, Saladin did not always heed his own advice. After defeating the Crusaders in the Battle of Hattin near the shores of the Sea of Galilee, he offered two hundred of the defeated knights the chance to save themselves by converting to Islam—and when they refused, he looked on happily as mystics and scholars from his court put them clumsily to the sword. Upon entering Jerusalem three months later, he immediately ripped down the Christian cross that had been placed atop the Dome of the Rock and dragged it through the city. His first instinct was to lay waste to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—he referred to it as “the Dungheap”—but in the end he allowed it to remain open so long as its bells remained silent. Indeed, until the nineteenth century, the tolling of church bells in Jerusalem was forbidden by Muslim edict. The creation of the State of Israel—and the capture of the Old City in the 1967 Six-Day War—upended the Islamic ascendancy in Jerusalem that Saladin’s conquest had brought about. Yes, the Haram al-Sharif remained under the control of the Waqf. But it was fundamentally a walled fortress of Islam within a majority Jewish city.
But why had the Iranians used the phrase in a coded transmission? And what did it mean? Was it a not-so- veiled threat against the pope? Perhaps, but Dina was troubled by something else. Why had the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, keepers of the third-holiest shrine in Sunni Islam, retained a Shiite Muslim from southern Lebanon to serve as its adviser on issues related to the Temple Mount’s archaeological past? It was possible the Waqf didn’t know David Girard was actually Daoud Ghandour. It was also possible that Girard’s connection to the Waqf was a coincidence —possible, thought Dina, but unlikely. Like all good Office analysts, she always assumed the worst. And the worst possible explanation for Girard’s frequent visits to the Temple Mount was that he had been sent there by his Iranian control officer, Massoud, the lucky one.
It was this gnawing concern that compelled Dina to ask Unit 8200 to urgently subject all the electronic intelligence related to David Girard to steganographic analysis—steganography being the practice of hiding important coded messages inside a seemingly harmless vessel. Its use pre-dated even Saladin. The word “steganography” was Greek in origin, and the first uses of “concealed writing” dated to the fifth century BC, when Demartus, king of Sparta, hid his secret correspondence beneath a layer of beeswax. In the digital age, secret messages could be transmitted instantly over the Internet disguised as something entirely harmless. Casing photos for a terrorist attack could be hidden within pictures of girls in swimsuits; a message to an active terror cell inside a recipe for
After 9/11, Israeli high-tech firms had been at the forefront of developing sophisticated software capable of quickly searching massive amounts of data for steganographic material. As a result, it took the Unit only a few hours to find two intriguing images that had been sent to the same Gmail address on the very same day. The first, hidden inside an apparently harmless photo of an Egyptian bronze cat, showed David Girard standing before a pair of ancient pillars in a darkened chamber, an imam at his side. The second image, hidden inside a snapshot of his wife, was a photograph of a trapezoid drawn freehand on a yellow legal pad. The trapezoid was empty except for a single small circle in the lower third. Next to the circle was a three-digit number: 689.
The trapezoid bore a vague resemblance to the outer boundaries of the Temple Mount plateau, which made the three-digit number all the more interesting; 689 was the year ‘Abd al-Malik, the fifth Umayyad caliph, had begun construction of the Dome of the Rock. Dina ran through several possible scenarios involving the number, but none made any sense to her. Then she placed the two images side by side and posed a simple question. What if the number had nothing to do with history and everything to do with location—specifically, the altitude of the chamber where Girard was standing? The Temple Mount plateau stood 2,428 feet above sea level, or 740 meters. Six hundred eighty-nine meters would therefore be 51 meters, or 167 feet,
Now, alone in the team’s subterranean lair, she stared at the secret photograph of David Girard standing in
