The Fallen Angel (26 page)

He stood at the podium for a long moment as though Yad Vashem's unique combination of horror and beauty had rendered him incapable of speech. Having helped the Holy Father from the Children's Memorial, Gabriel knew it was genuine. But he also knew that His Holiness was about to begin his homily with a point about words versus deeds. His silence, therefore, had purpose.

“In this place of unbearable pain,” he began at last, “mere words cannot possibly describe the depths of our sorrow or our shame. This beautiful garden of memory is more than just a ceremonial gravestone to the six million children of God and Abraham who perished in the fires of the Holocaust. It is a reminder that evil, true evil, is present in the world. It is a reminder, too, that as Christians we accept a portion of the responsibility for what occurred during the Holocaust, and we must beg forgiveness. A decade ago, in the Great Synagogue of Rome, we spoke of our complicity in the crime that Yad Vashem commemorates. And today, we reaffirm our sorrow, and once again we beg forgiveness. But now, in this time of escalating tension in the Middle East, our sorrow is mixed with fear. It is a fear that it could happen again.”

The line sent a murmur through the crowd. Several of the reporters from the Vatican press corps were now staring bewildered at their copies of the speech. The pope sipped his water and waited for silence. Then he glanced briefly at Gabriel and Donati before resuming his homily.

“Since our appearance at the Great Synagogue of Rome, the Church has taken great steps toward eliminating anti-Jewish sentiment from our teaching and texts. We asked our Islamic brethren to undertake a similar soul-searching, but, sadly, this has not occurred. Across the Islamic world, Muslim holy men routinely preach that the Holocaust did not occur, while at the same time, radical jihadists promise to bring about another one. The contradiction is amusing to some, but not to me—not when a nation that has sworn to wipe Israel from the face of the earth is relentlessly developing the capability to do just that.”

Again, the audience stirred in anticipation. Gabriel's eyes swept over the perplexed members of the Curial delegation before settling on the diminutive figure in white who was about to make history.

“There are some leaders who assure me that Israel can live with an Iran armed with a nuclear weapon,” the pope continued. “But to someone who lived through the madness of the Second World War, they sound too much like those who said the Jews had nothing to fear from a Germany led by Hitler and the Nazis. Here in this sacred city of Jerusalem, we are reminded at every turn that great empires and great civilizations can vanish in the blink of an eye. Their antiquities fill our museums, but all too often, we fail to learn from their mistakes. We are tempted to think that we have reached the end of history, that it can never happen again. But history is made every day, sometimes by men of evil. And all too often, history repeats itself.”

Several of the reporters were now whispering into mobile phones. Gabriel suspected they were informing their editors that His Holiness had just taken a newsworthy departure from what was supposed to be a routine speech of remembrance at Yad Vashem.

“And so,” the pope resumed, “on this solemn occasion, in this sacred place, we do more than remember the six million who suffered and died in the Holocaust. We renew our bond with their descendants, and we assure them that we will do everything in our power to make certain it never happens again.”

The pope paused one final time, as if signaling to the reporters that the most important line of his address was yet to come. When he spoke again, his voice was no longer tinged with sorrow, only resolve.

“To that end,” he said, his arms spread wide, his amplified words echoing through the monuments of Yad Vashem, “we pledge to the people of Israel, our elder brothers, that this time, as you confront a challenge to your existence, the Roman Catholic Church will stand by you. We offer our prayers and, if you are willing to accept it, our counsel. We ask only that you proceed with the utmost caution, for your decisions will affect the entire world. The soil of this sacred city is filled with the remnants of empires that miscalculated. Jerusalem is the city of God. But it is also a gravestone to the folly of man.”

With that, the audience erupted into a thunderous ovation. Gabriel and the rest of the security detail quickly went to the pope's side and escorted him to the waiting limousine. As the motorcade headed down the slope of Mount Herzl toward the Old City, the pope handed Gabriel the notes for the address.

“Add that to your collection.”

“Thank you, Holiness.”

“Still think I should have canceled the trip?”

“No, Holiness. But you can be sure the Iranians are putting a bounty on your head as we speak.”

“I always knew they would,” he said. “Just make sure no one manages to collect it before I leave Jerusalem.”

40

JERUSALEM

D
ONATI AND THE
H
OLY
F
ATHER
were spending the night near the Jaffa Gate, at the residence of the Latin Patriarch. Gabriel saw them to the door, made a final check of security, then headed westward across Jerusalem through the late-afternoon shadows. Rounding the corner into Narkiss Street, he immediately saw the armored Peugeot limousine parked outside the apartment house at Number 16. Its owner was standing at the balustrade of the third-floor balcony, partially concealed by the drooping limbs of the eucalyptus tree, a sentinel on a night watch without end.

As Gabriel entered the apartment, he smelled the unmistakable aroma of eggplant with Moroccan spice, the specialty of Shamron's long-suffering wife, Gilah. She was standing in the kitchen next to Chiara, a flowered apron around her waist. Chiara wore a loose-fitting blouse with an embroidered neckline. Her hair hung about her shoulders, and her lips, when kissed, tasted of honey. She adjusted the knot of Gabriel's tie before kissing him again. Then she nodded toward the television and said, “It seems you and your friend have caused quite a stir.”

Gabriel looked at the screen and saw himself, following a few feet behind the pope as he emerged from the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem. A news analyst in London was talking about a wholesale realignment of the Vatican's policies toward the State of Israel. As Gabriel switched from news channel to news channel, it was more of the same. It seemed His Holiness Pope Paul VII had fundamentally altered the dynamic of the conflict in the Middle East, with the Vatican now squarely on the side of the Israelis in the conflict against Iran and radical Islam. And what made it all the more remarkable, the commentators agreed, was that the Vatican had managed to conceal the Holy Father's intentions prior to his departure from Rome.

Gabriel switched off the television and went into the bedroom to change. Then, after accepting two glasses of Shiraz from Chiara, he headed out onto the little terrace. Shamron was in the process of lighting a cigarette. Gabriel plucked it from his lips before sitting.

“You really have to stop, Ari.”

“Why?”

“Because they're killing you.”

“I'd rather die from smoking than by the hand of one of my enemies.”

“There
are
other options, you know.” Frowning, Gabriel crushed out the cigarette and handed Shamron a glass of wine. “Drink it, Ari. They say it's good for the heart.”

“I put mine in storage when I joined the Office. And now that I'm in possession of it again, it's giving me no end of grief.” He drank some of the wine as a breath of wind moved in the eucalyptus tree. “Do you remember what I said to you when I gave you this flat?”

“You told me to fill it with children.”

“You have a good memory.”

“Not as good as yours.”

“Mine isn't what it once was, which I suppose is fortuitous. I've done many things in my life I'd rather forget, most of them involving you.” He looked at Gabriel seriously and asked, “Did it help at all?”

“What?”

“Vienna.”

“I didn't do it for myself. I did it so someone else wouldn't have to bury a child or visit a loved one in a psychiatric hospital.”

“You just answered my question in the affirmative,” Shamron said. “I'm only sorry we had to send Massoud back to Tehran. He deserved to die an ignoble death.”

“We did the next best thing by burning him.”

“I only wish the flames could have been real instead of allegorical.” Shamron drank some of his wine and asked Gabriel what it was like being on the Temple Mount.

“It's changed since my last visit.”

“Did you feel close to God?”

“Too close.”

Shamron smiled. “The visit didn't go exactly as planned, at least from the mufti's point of view. But from ours . . .” Shamron's voice trailed off. “The pope's words of support couldn't have come at a more opportune time. And we have you to thank for it.”

“They were his words, Ari, not mine.”

“But I'm not sure he would have spoken them if it wasn't for your friendship. I just hope he stands by us when the inevitable becomes a reality.”

“You mean an attack on Iran?”

Shamron nodded.

“How much longer do we have?”

“Your friend Uzi will have to make that decision. But if I had to guess, it will be some time in the next year. In my opinion,” Shamron added, “we've waited too long already.”

“But even you're not sure whether an attack on their facilities will be successful.”

“But I
am
certain of what will happen if we do nothing,” Shamron said. “It's not a nuclear attack that I fear the most. It's that our enemies will use the protection of an Iranian nuclear umbrella to make our daily lives unlivable. Rockets from Gaza, rockets from Lebanon, entire sections of the country left uninhabitable. Then what? People get nervous. They slowly start to leave. And then the beautiful country that I helped to create and defend collapses.”

“It's possible you're being too pessimistic.”

“Actually,” Shamron said, “I was giving you my best-case scenario.”

“And the worst case?”

He turned his head a few degrees and gazed in the direction of the Old City. “It could all go up in a ball of fire, like the night Titus laid siege to the Second Temple.”

The sound of Chiara's laughter filtered from the kitchen onto the terrace. It softened Shamron's dark mood.

“Have there been any developments on the child front?”

“The pope is praying for us.”

“So am I,” Shamron said. “I read an interesting article about infertility not long ago. It said frequent travel can sometimes interfere with conception. It also said that the couple should remain at home as often as possible, surrounded by family and loved ones.”

“Have you no shame?”

“None whatsoever.” Shamron smiled and placed a hand on Gabriel's arm. “Are you happy, my son?”

“I will be as soon as I put His Holiness back on his airplane.”

“I assume you're planning to accompany him?”

Gabriel nodded. “I need to have a word with Carlo Marchese. I also have to finish that Caravaggio.”

“Never a dull moment.”

“Actually, I'd kill for one.”

“And when you're finished in Rome? What then?”

Gabriel smiled. “Drink your wine, Ari. They say it's good for the heart.”

 

As Shamron predicted, the pope's remarks during his visit to the Temple Mount did not go over well in the Muslim world. On Al Jazeera that evening, one commentator after another branded them an affront that could not go unanswered. Watching the coverage from his office, Imam Hassan Darwish found the outrage mildly amusing. He knew that in just a few hours' time, the pope's words would seem like a bit of loose talk by an old man in white. With his eyes fixed on the screen, he reached for the phone and dialed. The man he knew as Mr. Farouk answered instantly.

“Yes?”

“Deliver the Korans to the address I gave you.”

“Allahu Akbar
.
”

Darwish replaced the receiver and headed across the esplanade to the Dome of the Rock—not to the main hall of the shrine, but to the cave just beneath the Foundation Stone known as the Well of Souls. There he knelt on a musty prayer rug, listening to the wailing of the dead. Soon they would be free, he thought, because soon there would be no Well of Souls. In fact, if Allah allowed everything to go according to plan, there would be nothing at all.

41

THE OLD CITY, JERUSALEM

I
T WAS
G
OOD
F
RIDAY
, which meant Jerusalem, God's fractured citadel upon a hill, was in a state of near hysteria. In the predominantly Jewish districts of the New City, the morning proceeded with the usual last-minute preparations for the coming Shabbat. But in East Jerusalem, thousands of Muslims were making their way to the Haram al-Sharif for Friday prayers, while at the same time, a multitude of Catholics from around the world were preparing to commemorate the crucifixion of Christ with the man they believed to be his representative on earth. Not surprisingly, police and medical personnel reported an unusual surge in cases of Jerusalem Syndrome, the sudden religious psychosis brought on by exposure to the city's countless sacred sites. In one incident, a guest of the King David Hotel appeared in the lobby wearing only a bedsheet, proclaiming the end of days was near.

“Where is he now?” asked Donati.

“Resting comfortably under heavy sedation,” replied Gabriel. “He's expected to make a full recovery.”

“Is he one of ours or one of yours?”

“Yours, I'm afraid.”

“Where's he from?”

“San Francisco.”

“And he had to come all the way to Jerusalem to have a psychotic break?”

Smiling, Donati lit a cigarette. They were seated in the formal parlor of the Latin Patriarch's residence. On the table between them was a large-scale map of the Old City with the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Grief, marked in red. A narrow Roman road with steep, cobbled stairs in places, it ran two thousand feet across the Old City, from the former Antonia Fortress to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, regarded by Christians as the place of Christ's crucifixion and burial. Like most Israelis, Gabriel avoided the street because of the aggressive Palestinian shopkeepers who tried to ensnare every passing soul, regardless of their faith. Usually, the shops remained open on Good Friday, but not today. Gabriel had ordered them all closed.

“I have to admit that this is the day that worries me the most,” he said, staring at the map. “The pope has to walk along a very narrow street and stop at fourteen of the most famous places in religious history.”

“I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about the route—or the story, for that matter. His Holiness
has
to walk the same route that Christ walked on the way to his crucifixion. And he insists on doing it with as much dignity as possible.”

“Will he at least reconsider the Kevlar vest?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“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
madrassa
where the notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal was once a student. It was on that spot, according to the Gospels and Christian tradition, where Pontius Pilate, prefect of what was then the Roman-ruled province of Judea, condemned Jesus to death by crucifixion. Now, almost two millennia later, His Holiness Pope Paul VII stood on the same spot, his eyes closed, and said, “We adore thee, O Christ, and we praise thee.” Donati and the rest of the delegation surrounding the pope immediately genuflected and responded, “Because by thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world.” Gabriel looked at his watch. It was five minutes past noon. One down, thirteen to go.

 

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.

Blood never sleeps. . . .

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.

He could go places I couldn't go and talk to people who couldn't come within a mile of me. . . . He was my own private Federal Express. . . .

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
boeuf
bourguignon
. Decoding was a simple process that involved removing the proper number of bits from the color component of the cloaking image. Press a few buttons on a computer keyboard and the pretty girls became pictures of government buildings or subway platforms in New York City.

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,
beneath
the Temple Mount.

Now, alone in the team's subterranean lair, she stared at the secret photograph of David Girard standing in his. And at the faces of the four Hezbollah terrorists who had been killed in Vienna. And at Massoud Rahimi riding a streetcar in Zurich. And at the text of the priority message that had gone out the previous evening to all Iranian intelligence stations and bases. Then, finally, she stared at the team's battered television, where a small man in white was making his way slowly down the Via Dolorosa toward the church that Saladin had referred to as “the Dungheap.”

Blood never sleeps. . . .

And then she understood. She couldn't prove any of it, just as she couldn't prove that the man on the streetcar had been Massoud, but she
knew
it. And so she snatched up the receiver of her phone and dialed the extension for Uzi Navot's office. Orit, his unhelpful executive secretary, answered after the first ring. Inside King Saul Boulevard, she was known as “the Iron Dome” because of her unrivaled ability to shoot down requests for a moment with the chief.

“Not possible,” she said. “He's completely swamped.”

“It's urgent, Orit. I wouldn't be calling if it wasn't.”

Navot's secretary knew better than to ask what it was about. “I can give you two minutes,” she said.

“That's all I need.”

“Get up here. I'll squeeze you in as soon as I can.”

“Actually, I need him to come to me.”

“You're pushing it, Dina.”

“Tell him if he wants there to be an Israel next week, he'll drop everything and get down here right away.”