The Fallen Angel

“You need to go home and get some rest, my son.”

“I will.”

“When?”

“When he opens his eyes.”

Shamron twirled his Zippo between his fingertips. Two turns to the left, two turns to the right.

“Must you, Ari?”

Shamron’s fingers went still. “You have to prepare yourself for the possibility he’s not going to make it.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because it is the likely outcome. He’d lost nearly all his blood by the time they got him onto the table. His heart—”

“Is fine.”

“But it’s not as young as it once was,” Shamron said. “And neither is yours, my son. And I’m afraid of what will happen if it gets broken again.”

“I deserve it.”

“Why would you say such a thing?”

“I should have heard Darwish coming.”

“You both were distracted, which was understandable. It’s not every day that one has a chance to walk through the heikhal of the First Temple of Jerusalem.”

“Do you think the pillars truly are from the First Temple?”

“We know they are,” Shamron said. “We’re just waiting for the right moment to show them to the world.”

“Why wait?”

“Because we don’t want to do anything to make the situation any worse.”

“How much worse could it get?”

“There are ninety million Egyptians. Imagine what would happen if the Muslim Brotherhood convinced just ten percent of them to march on our borders. If that bomb had actually gone off . . .” Shamron’s voice trailed off. “It’s frightening to think how close we came—or how tenuous our existence is in this land.”

“How long are we planning to stay on the Temple Mount?”

“If it were up to me, we’d never leave. But the prime minister intends to hand it back to the Waqf as soon as all the archaeological material has been safely removed.”

“So we go back to the status quo?”

“Until the Islamic world is ready to accept our right to exist, I’m afraid the status quo is the best we can hope for.”

“I’d like to make one change to it, if it’s all right with you.”

“What’s that?”

“Massoud.”

Shamron smiled. “The next time a bomb goes off under his car, it won’t be a small one.”

Gabriel took hold of Lavon’s hand.

“If he dies, Ari, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“I should have made him leave.”

“There’s no way Eli would have ever left that mountain without knowing those pillars were safe.”

“They’re just stones, Ari.”

“They’re Eli’s stones,” Shamron said. “And now they’re soaked in his blood.”

48 JERUSALEM

IT WOULD BE ANOTHER SEVENTY-TWO hours before sufficient order had been restored to allow the government of Israel to fully explain to the world why it had entered the Temple Mount and what it had discovered there. To do so, it assembled a pool of journalists and camera crews from the world’s most authoritative news organizations and took them down through the network of aqueducts and cisterns, to the newly dug chamber 167 feet beneath the surface. There the chief of staff of the IDF showed them the massive bomb, while the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority walked them through the remarkable collection of artifacts that had been unearthed by the Waqf during years of reckless digging. The highlight of the tour were the two rows of limestone pillars, twenty- two in all, that had been part of the heikhal of King Solomon’s First Temple of Jerusalem.

As expected, the reaction to the news was mixed at best. The video of the ancient pillars electrified the Israeli public and sent a tremor of anticipation through the global community of archaeologists and ancient historians. Most scholars immediately accepted the pillars as authentic, but in Germany the leader of a discipline of archaeology known as biblical minimalism dismissed them as “twenty-two hunks of wishful thinking.” Not surprisingly, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority seized on that statement when issuing its own response to the news. The pillars were an Israeli hoax, it said. And so was the “so-called bomb.”

But what had led the Israelis to enter the Temple Mount in the first place? And who had been the ultimate mastermind of the plot to bring it down? The Israeli government, citing its long-standing refusal to comment on matters related to intelligence gathering, declined to go into specifics. But as the pillars emerged slowly from the earth, a series of stories appeared in the press that began to shed a diffuse light on the mysterious chain of events that had led to their discovery.

There was the exposé in Le Monde about a Sorbonne graduate named David Girard, aka Daoud Ghandour, who had advised the Waqf on archaeological matters, and who, according to unnamed law enforcement officials, was a member of a criminal antiquities smuggling network with links to Hezbollah. And the story in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about an Iranian connection to the bombing of Galleria Naxos in St. Moritz. And the investigative follow-up in Der Spiegel that linked David Girard to one Massoud Rahimi, the Iranian terrorist mastermind who had been briefly kidnapped in Germany. Which made it all the more interesting when, just twelve days later, that same Massoud Rahimi was killed in Tehran by a limpet-style bomb planted beneath his car. The television terrorism analysts had little doubt about who was behind the assassination or what it meant. Massoud had been the mastermind of the Temple Mount plot, they proclaimed, and the Israelis had just returned the favor.

But there were many aspects of the story the press would never learn, including the fact that the affair had begun when Gabriel Allon, the wayward son of Israeli intelligence, had been summoned to St. Peter’s Basilica to view the corpse of a fallen angel. Or that Gabriel had spent the last two weeks sitting beside the hospital bed of the archaeologist whose blood stained the pillars of Solomon’s Temple. As a result, he was present when the archaeologist finally opened his eyes. “Rivka,” Eli Lavon murmured. “Make sure someone looks after Rivka.”

That same evening, a tense calm fell over Jerusalem for the first time since the beginning of the Temple Mount crisis. Gabriel went to the Mount Herzl Psychiatric Hospital to spend a few minutes with Leah before meeting Chiara for dinner at a restaurant located in the original campus of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Afterward, he took her for ice cream and a walk in Ben Yehuda Street.

“Donati called this afternoon,” she said suddenly, as though it had slipped her mind. “He was wondering when you were coming back to Rome to finish the Caravaggio and deal with Carlo.”

“I’d almost forgotten about them both.”

“That’s understandable, darling. After all, you did save Israel and the world from Armageddon and find twenty-two pillars from the First Temple of Jerusalem.”

Gabriel smiled. “I’ll leave the day after tomorrow.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“You can’t. Besides,” he added quickly, “I have a job for you. Two jobs, actually.”

“What are they?”