The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (35 page)

“So, if Al-Greeb blows up the Dome of the Rock, what? The world comes to an end?”

“That’s a hell of a statement,” Kate said, repeating it: “’There is no single factor so likely to unite the Arabs in starting a holy jihad as the destruction of the Dome of the Rock.’”

“They’re predicting a fire, a conflagration that can’t be put out,” Carulla said.

“Well, think about it. Muslims would attribute the destruction of the Dome of the Rock to the work of Jews, Jews would blame—I’m not sure who they would blame, take your pick, there are so many folks out to get them, possibly the Iranians, possibly the Hand of God, indicating that the Temple should be rebuilt. I think what they’re saying is that the destruction of the Dome of the Rock would almost certainly ignite a global war. The Dome of the Rock is one of those amplification points of destructive power, a symbol so powerful that it magnifies whatever is done there.”

“Sounds interesting but a little
recherche
to me,” Carulla said.

“Yeah, I guess so. Somebody must have had a slow day at Liberty Crossing, or too much caffeine. It is fascinating though.”

Adam Belfy, tour guide, antiquarian, and a thirty-year resident of Israel, was fond of telling his American tourist clients in Jerusalem that ancient maps of the world often depicted the Holy City as the geographic center of the planet’s surface, mirroring the notion that Jerusalem was also its religious epicenter. Indeed, it is still today a holy city for the three most important religions in Europe and the Middle East, the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Adam Belfy also knew that he could usually get a few surprised ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ from his charges by pointing out some of the incongruities that characterized the ancient metropolis. For example, he would mention that Jerusalem was the legal capital of Israel as well as its largest city, though not accepted as such internationally (maps usually identified Tel Aviv as the Israeli capital), and home to all branches of the Israeli government, including the Knesset (the Israeli legislature), the residences of both the Prime Minister and the President, and home also to the Supreme Court of Israel.

And yet, in spite of its importance to Israel, there were important sections of Jerusalem that were off-limits to Israelis, most notably the Temple Mount, home now to the Dome of the Rock, in ancient times the location of the Jewish Temple.

Since the 1967 Six-Day War, Belfy knew, non-Muslims had been allowed limited access, though never to pray or to bring any manner of religious artifact or object there, or even anything with Hebrew lettering on it. The Dome of the Rock itself was maintained and administered by the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Amman, Jordan, an arm of a foreign government. Israeli police even helped to enforce the proscription against non-Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount.

Belfy made it his business to know the detailed rules for access, because his livelihood depended on it. Belfy and his paying guests were permitted onto the Temple Mount for four hours in the morning, from 7:30 AM to 11:30 AM, and for one hour only in the afternoon, between 1:30 PM and 2:30 PM, except on Fridays, Saturdays, and on Muslim holidays, when access was forbidden for the whole day.

Non-Muslims were never permitted on the premises on any day after 2:30 in the afternoon. How one gained access to the plateau was also prescribed in great detail. Though Muslims entered the mosque directly, via the small public square by the cotton market, Christians and Jews could gain access to the Mount (but not the Dome of the Rock itself) through a narrow walkway of wood planks rising from the prayer plaza on the left side of the Western Wall, which was as close as most Jews would ever come to the precincts of their ancient Temple.

Some Orthodox rabbis regarded entry to the compound at the top of the wall to be against Jewish law, on the theory that since the exact location of the Holy of Holies, a place so sacred that only the ancient Jewish priests were permitted to enter it, could not today be determined, the restriction applied to the entire compound. Therefore the whole Temple Mount was forbidden territory to devout Jews. Other rabbis were not so exacting.

Three days after Ayman al-Zawahiri released his infamous tape announcing Al Qaeda’s entry into the nuclear club to
Al Jazeera
television headquarters in Doha, Adam Belfy gathered his current crop of paying guests in the lobby of the ninety-year-old stately pink quartz citadel known as the King David Hotel. This magnificent palace was at 23 King David Street, to the east of the Old City in central Jerusalem. He looked around the elegant chamber, as more often than not he found a gratuitous benefit for his visitors in pointing out one or more iconic world leaders on his or her way to a morning meeting. Elderly tourists loved telling relatives that they had ‘run into Henry Kissinger at the King David.’

Seeing no such celebrity within eyesight or earshot, Belfy went into his customary preparatory spiel.

“How many of you here remember General Moshe Dayan?” he asked in his rich tenor. “The famous Israeli soldier with the eye patch? The man who liberated Jerusalem in 1967?”

His flock nodded. Almost all of them were old enough, like Belfy himself, to have personal memories of that distant era.

“Well, back in the day, Moshe Dayan, who was Israel’s defense minister at the time, decided that, for the sake of peace, he would graciously leave the holiest site in Judaism in the hands of the Muslim Wakf after Jerusalem’s reunification. This decision has been debated over the years, but it was probably the right one at the time.”

Belfy saw nods of agreement, but also a few somber faces.

“It really hurts me to see photographs of Jewish brides turned back by Israeli police,” an elderly American lady said. “They just want to bring God’s favor into their lives on their wedding day.”

“You’re right, my dear, it hurts me too,” Belfy said. “But we’re making progress on that front, progress measured in decades, not days. Remember, Mount Moriah is where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac. We’re reaching back here to the very beginnings of recorded history. And the good news for us today is that we’re going to walk in the footsteps of Jesus on Solomon’s Portico, stand on the bedrock of the Dome of Spirits, near the spot where God cried out to Abraham to spare Isaac, and I will show you a place where you can carefully peek into the Dome of the Rock itself and see the huge interior, the floor covered in beautiful carpets donated by the King of Morocco.”

Adam Belfy led his troupe to the front of the hotel, where his driver and a small tourist bus awaited them. With the group aboard, the driver took a familiar route north on King David Street to Shlomo, circumnavigating the Old City along its northern boundary and the Islamic Quarter. The little bus then headed due south to the southern terminus of the Old City and the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, a trip of about two miles. Given the choking traffic, it took nearly as long to drive this distance as it would have taken to walk it, but the confines of the bus allowed Belfy to continue his patter.

“The Dome of the Rock is a unique building, not typical in any way. It was not built facing Mecca, but as an octagon corresponding to the cardinal points of the compass, the only such mosque in the world...”

The bus deposited its cargo of tourist passengers at the periphery of the enormous prayer plaza at the base of the Western Wall. Belfy herded his guests across the plaza, pointing out the designated areas where male and female Jews gathered separately, according to Orthodox Jewish custom, to pray, lamenting the destruction of the ancient Temple or to make more personal requests.

An elderly black-garbed Jew, a devout Hasid, stood next to a young Israeli soldier carrying a rifle. Both placed tiny pieces of paper inscribed with messages into cracks between the stones in the belief that prayers sent from this holiest of spots are more likely than others to be answered by God.

Belfy led his group up the rickety wooden ramp to the top of Mount Moriah and the Stone of Foundation, which was the likely site of the Old Temple. This was the part of the tour that always made him the most nervous, the transition through a kind of no-man’s land from the side that belonged, by tradition, to Jews, at the base of the Wall, to the precincts close to the Dome of the Rock, at the top of the Wall, controlled by Muslims. In this zone no one was really in control, and when no one was in control in a place as incendiary as Jerusalem, the risk of bad things happening necessarily rose.

Today, all events seemed to be wonderfully calm, if a bit out of the ordinary. Workers in traditional Arab dress were moving equipment in boxes around the site of an archeological dig that had begun at the base of the Western Wall after the Six-Day War from the prayer plaza northwards. The plateau beneath their feet was a honeycomb of ancient secret passages, newly dug tunnels, cisterns and arched chambers, some perhaps yet undiscovered by scientists.

It was at this moment that Adam Belfy saw something he had never seen before, right above the Temple Mount, an apparition in the sky, an enormous Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter with Jordanian markings hovering above the archeological digs. Seen so close, it looked for all the world like a flying ocean liner.

“Will we get a helicopter tour of the Temple Mount?” asked one of the tourists.

“Helicopters aren’t allowed anywhere near these holy places,” Belfy said, shock evident in his voice. And yet a helicopter had clearly moved above the Dome of the Rock, and then, to Belfy’s even greater amazement, a team of three dozen young men dressed for combat and wearing the elite maroon berets of airborne special forces dropped down a rope from the aircraft and quickly overcame the workers handling the boxes and other equipment. Though weapons were evident, no shots were fired.

At the same time, teams of land-based fighters dressed in combat fatigues swarmed around the mosque and up the gangplank behind Belfy and his group. He heard Arabic, Hebrew, and English, and realized that whatever was going on was a combined assault made up of special forces from several countries, including Israel, Jordan, and the United States.

The Temple Mount was secured within minutes, and under control of military forces.

***

The CIA chief of station at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, Valery Ross, called Olof Wheatley minutes after the Temple Mount was secured. She was a Wheatley protégé who had also transferred laterally back into the Agency after a short stint in the private sector, in her case in the telecommunications industry.

“It was a piece of cake, just as I predicted,” she said. “The Israelis and the Jordanians have lots of experience putting down riots in that part of Jerusalem. The injuries are usually the result of rioters throwing stones, not the actions of the military, and in this instance there were no rioters. Not a single shot was fired. Not a scratch on anyone.”

“And you’re certain you have the object we were seeking?”

“No doubt at all. I saw it myself. A Soviet tactical device in the RA series. Last one made was some time in the 1980s. It was in an ordinary-looking wooden box strapped shut with canvas belts.”

“Jeez, thanks be to Christ. Well, make damn sure nothing happens to it until our team gets there to take it apart,” Wheatley said. “And try to keep the lid on this thing. I’m not sure how much about what really happened today we want generally known.”

“I understand,” Valery Ross said, “but you need to understand that I don’t control Mossad or the Jordanians—or the media. Whether or not leaks get stopped will depend a lot more on phone calls made by the people you work for in the White House than phone calls from me. If the Israelis let it be known that a terrorist nuke was found in Jerusalem, that might be a piece of propaganda they would find very useful.”

“Could be, but it could also backfire. They want our help on Iran, not in dealing Al Qaeda, a group Israel has already written off as
kaput
. We won’t know until someone who knows what he’s talking about can take apart that Soviet thing. What if it’s a dud?”

Wheatley asked her for details about preparations for the technical team of bombs experts. Satisfied with her reply, he rang off. He had already chalked this one up as a victory.

***

Valery Ross could recite the names of the few competent female officers in CIA from memory, and she had taken a special interest in following the career of Kate Langley, whom, she had heard, Olof Wheatley had also taken under his wing after she was PNG’d from Islamabad. Ross was a firm believer in the Old Girls Network to help offset the privileges and perks routinely provided to men by other men in the Agency. It helped level the playing field just a tiny bit. She called Langley, whom she knew had been in Suez at the time of the Al-Zawahiri tape.

“Looks like your long-lost nuke has been found just in the nick of time,” she told Kate. Though she knew Langley was using a wireless device, it held the latest NSA voice encryption technology and was as secure as any phone at headquarters.

“And what about Yasser al-Greeb?” Kate asked. “Has he been located in the clean-up?”

“No sign of Al-Greeb, not even a trace. The guys we caught were just the delivery boys. Apparently the big event was still some time off. We don’t know if the device is even operational, though I’m assured by the techs that the plutonium is real. It made their sensors clang like alarm clocks.”

“That’s very worrisome,” Kate said. “This isn’t over until Al-Greeb is either dead or in custody.”

“I just got off the phone with Olof, who has already decided this is one for the history books. But I’m with you on seeing a lot of loose ends still hanging. Help me out in understanding how you determined that the bomb was on the Temple Mount?”