The Fallen Angel ga-12

by Daniel Silva

  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 b
eneath 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.”

  Dina hung up the phone and stared at the television. The pope had just arrived at the sixth station of the cross, the spot where Veronica wiped the face of Jesus.

  “We adore thee, O Christ, and we praise thee.”

  Blood never sleeps. . . .

  42

  TEL AVIV–JERUSALEM

  “ARE YOU JOKING, DINA?”

  With her expression, she made clear she wasn’t.

  “Walk me through it,” Navot said.

  “There isn’t time.”

  “Make time.”

  She pointed to a photo of the ruined Galleria Naxos in St. Moritz.

  “What about it?”

  “According to Massoud, David Girard knew that Gabriel was investigating the murder of Claudia Andreatti at the Vatican and that Gabriel had gotten too close to Carlo Marchese.”

  “Go on.”

  “Why was Girard still in Europe? Why didn’t he pull up stakes and head back to Hezbollah Land?”

  “Because they wanted to leave him there as bait for Gabriel.”

  “Correct. But why?”

  “Because they wanted to kill him for blowing up their centrifuges.”

  “It’s possible, Uzi. But I don’t think so. I think they wanted Gabriel to come to St. Moritz for another reason.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Taqiyya.” Dina pointed to another photo—the Iranian assassin named Ali Montezari and the El Greco girl who served as his accomplice. “They gave the job to someone we would recognize. They wanted us to know they were behind it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they also wanted us to find this.” She was pointing to another photo—Massoud and Girard, side by side on a Zurich streetcar. “I checked the weather in Zurich on the day this picture was taken. The sun was shining, but it was bitterly cold.”

  “Why is the weather important?”

  “Because Massoud isn’t wearing gloves.” She pointed to the bandage on the back of his right hand. “He wasn’t wearing gloves because he wanted us to see it.” She paused, then whispered, “He wanted me to see it.”

  “You’re saying Massoud wanted us to know he was linked to David Girard and the bombing of the gallery?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why?”

  “Taqiyya,” she said again.

  Navot’s expression had lost any trace of skepticism. “Keep going.”

  “The Iranians dangled Massoud in front of us and left us no choice but to bite by bombarding us with chatter about a coming terrorist attack and putting Hezbollah’s forces on the move in southern Lebanon. It was a classic feint. And it had but one purpose. Taqiyya.”

  “Displaying one intention while harboring another.”

  Dina nodded.

  “But the cell in Vienna was real.”

  “True. But it was never going to be allowed to carry out its assignment. Massoud always planned to reveal its existence to us in dramatic fashion, leaving just enough time for us to act.”

  “You’re saying the cell was taqiyya?”

  She nodded. “It was like General Patton’s ghost army during the Second World War, the one the Allies put in East Anglia to make the Germans think the invasion of France would come at Calais instead of Normandy. The British and American deception officers filled the airwaves with false signals because they knew the Germans were listening. Even after the first troops landed on the beaches, the German army was paralyzed by indecision because they believed the decisive battle of the war would be fought at Calais.”

  “So under your scenario, Vienna was Calais.”

  “It’s not my scenario. It’s Massoud’s.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Do the best you can, Dina.”

  She showed Navot the two steganographic images that had been discovered by Unit 8200. Navot furrowed his brow.

  “David Girard standing in a cave, and a map that looks as though it was drawn by a five-year-old.”

  “But look what happens when you compare that crude map to this.”

  Using her computer, Dina superimposed the image over a map of the Temple Mount.

  “Close,” Navot said.

  “Close enough.” Dina quickly explained her theory about the significance of the number 689, that it represented the depth of the underground cavern where David Girard was standing in the photo.

  “Are you certain he sent those images to Massoud?”

  “No. But we have no ch
oice but to assume that was the case.”

  “Why would he?”

  “Because he’s a classical archaeologist, not a geologist or an engineer. He needed someone with the right background to run the numbers for him.”

  “What numbers?”

  “He needed to know how much high explosive he would need to bring down the Temple Mount.”

  Navot’s face was now ashen. “Who’s the other man in the photograph?”

  “Imam Hassan Darwish,” Dina said. “He oversaw the expansion of the Marwani Mosque. He’s also regarded as the most radical member of the Waqf.”

  Dina held up the VEVAK message that had gone out the previous night.

  Blood never sleeps. . . .

  “Saladin?” asked Navot.

  Dina nodded. “I think it’s a signal to prepare for the violent uprising that would sweep the Islamic world the instant the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque are destroyed. If anything happens to those buildings . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It’s over, Uzi. It’s lights out.”

  “Even the Iranians aren’t that crazy,” Navot said dismissively. “Why would the mullahs blow up two of Islam’s most important shrines?”

  “Because they’re not their shrines,” Dina answered. “The Noble Sanctuary is a Sunni sanctuary, and we all know how Sunnis and Shiites feel about each other. All the Iranians would need is one apocalyptic maniac inside the Waqf to help them.”

  “You think Darwish is their maniac?”

  “Read his file.”

  Navot lapsed into a thoughtful silence. “You can’t prove a word of it,” he said at last.

  “Are you willing to bet I’m wrong?”

  He wasn’t. “How long do we have?”

  She looked at the television. “If I had to guess, the Temple Mount will come down at three o’clock while His Holiness is inside the Sepulchre.”

  “The hour that Christ died on the cross?”

  “Precisely.”

  Navot looked at his watch. “That leaves us ninety minutes.”

  “Tell Orit to put me through next time I call.”