“Actually I’m fine, Julie. It’s a bit complicated. But thank you. How about you?” Cringing, Charlotte pointed to her bandaged stomach.
“I’ll get to the hospital later. It’s just a graze.”
“Actually, maybe I can help you with that.”
93
******
Three Days Later
As Ghalib had hoped, the Israeli prime minister and president were claiming no responsibility for the events that had taken place at Temple Mount. Naturally, they were having great difficulty explaining why the Israeli army had laid siege to the site, and why an underground tunnel had been secretly excavated beneath the site by a fundamentalist rabbi who’d been a former member of the Knesset. The firefight that had erupted inside the Dome of the Rock, however, proved most difficult to spin.
“An attack upon Islam’s third-holiest shrine will not be taken lightly,” Ghalib’s delegate promised the prime minister.
Finally, a clear line had been drawn in the sand—the tipping point.
What Ghalib’s eyes had seen over the closed-circuit cameras he’d installed in the shrine had been astounding. He’d played silent witness to the uncovering of a most profound relic. Islamic legend told that the Ark of the Covenant heralded the coming of the true Messiah—and the beginning of the Last Judgment. He’d witnessed the woman open the box. He’d witnessed how it so horribly burned the rabbi alive in mere seconds.
Shortly thereafter, he’d watched the IDF secure the building. The goateed Israeli and the woman whom Cohen had taken hostage had coached the IDF commanders on how to safely remove the relic, how to cover it first with the blue cloth and animal furs. The audio feed had crisply recorded the entire conversation.
Less than an hour after the Israelis had locked down the shrine, the relic had been ferried outside by a team of men in blue jumpsuits, heavily guarded. They’d brought it down to the Western Wall Plaza and loaded it onto a truck.
Outside, Ghalib had used his digital camcorder to secretly shoot video of that too.
All that remained now was to compile the recordings onto a single DVD, carefully edit the footage, then have a courier deliver the video to Ghalib’s contact at al-Jazeera.
Soon the world would witness firsthand the savagery of the Israelis: the carnage, the desecration, the defilement. The audacity of it all. The Islamic outcry would be deafening.
This would breathe new life into the intifada and force the Arab nations to formulate a response to the Jewish nation’s growing threat to the region. No doubt, the coalition would grow by the day as the entirety of the Middle East would be forced to take a stance—to choose a side.
His tired caramel eyes gazed out at the Dome of the Rock’s cupola, which shimmered like liquid gold against the morning sun.
“Sorry I am late,” a breathless voice said from the doorway. “I came as fast as I could.”
Ghalib turned to the bearded Palestinian toting a laptop bag—the Waqf ’s lead IT specialist, who managed the council’s Internet sites, telecommunications, and press releases. “You are forgiven, Bilaal,” he said with a crooked grin, waving the young man inside. “Come. I am anxious to finish this.”
While Bilaal settled in at the conference table and powered up his laptop, Ghalib set beside him the mini DVD from his digital camcorder and the slim removable hard drive from the Dome of the Rock’s surveillance system.
“I need both of these on one disc—this one first,” Ghalib instructed him, pointing to the hard drive. “You can splice the videos, yes?”
“I can do anything you want,” he assured Ghalib.
Standing with arms folded tight, Ghalib watched over the tech’s shoulder.
Bilaal fished a USB cable from his bag and used it to connect the hard drive to his laptop. Then he activated a video editing program and accessed the files on Ghalib’s hard drive. “We’ll run through the video first. Then you tell me what you want to do.”
“Remember, Bilaal. You are not to tell anyone about this. Do you understand?” Ghalib warned him.
As he looked up at the Keeper’s baleful expression, an uneasy feeling came over Bilaal. “You have my word.”
Back on the screen, nine video clips simultaneously came to life in a neat three-by-three grid. The tech immediately recognized the various vantage points—all interior shots of the Dome of the Rock. He tried to recall if he’d ever seen cameras inside the shrine, but nothing came to mind.
Bilaal initiated playback.
On-screen, two plainclothes Palestinians anxiously paced the shrine’s dim ambulatory with semiautomatic machine guns, slipping out of one camera frame and into another. On the audio tracks, all was silent except for their bare feet plodding along the ornate Persian carpet and their heavy breathing. Camera nine provided an unchanging view of the empty cave beneath the rock—the Well of Souls.
When Bilaal studied the tiny date stamp and running clock in the lower right corner of each video window, his muscles went rigid. These were the minutes preceding the nasty firefight that had taken place at the shrine only three days ago. He’d only heard shocking rumors about the siege. But none included these armed men—these Muslims—being inside the shrine just before it all went down.
Ghalib bent and whispered, “We’ll need to delete these scenes. Understand?”
“I understand,” he tremulously replied.
“Now move it ahead about twenty minutes.”
