"The Shin Bet sees in the group we're talking about on the extreme right a willingness to use firearms in order to halt diplomatic processes and harm political leaders," Diskin told him.
Ironically, that group Deker had been warned about for so long included Israel's current defense minister, Michael Gellar, who had made a surprise appearance at the office and now stood before him.
"You saw what happened on Rhodes?" Gellar demanded. "It was intended for me."
Deker had seen it. The Egyptian Abdil Zawas had managed to blow himself up while trying to wire a roadside bomb at the European peace summit. The man wasn't a bomb maker, and it all sounded fishy to Deker. But then Zawas was always trying to outdo the ghost of his late crazy military cousin Ali, and it wouldn't surprise Deker if the Egyptian playboy had gotten in so over his head that he'd lost it.
"Greek police found evidence in the car that Abdil's real target today is the Temple Mount. Analysis of his video claiming responsibility for the attempt on my life suggests that it was an attack code to his associates in Jerusalem to detonate a nuclear device."
Deker blinked. "Today?"
"You need to seal the Temple Mount."
"You want me to seal off the Temple Mount on Good Friday and the eve of Passover?"
"Yes."
"But that means closing off the Western Wall to worshippers, ticking off both Jews and Christians. That's on top of the Arabs, who are always mad."
"I know what it means, Deker." General Gellar was pulling rank. "You need to check all access points and your informants. Things the security feeds don't pick up."
Deker nodded, typed an alert on his BlackBerry, and then put it away.
"What did you just do?" Gellar demanded.
"I sent a quick 140-character text through Twitter to my network."
"Is that secure?"
"Yes and no."
The BlackBerry chirped, and Deker looked at the feeds and frowned. The guide at the Gihon Springs was reporting that a man and woman had gone into Hezekiah's Tunnel but never emerged from the tunnel exit at the Siloam Pool.
He called up the video, and as he watched the monitor, he watched Gellar. The blood from the general's face drained.
"That's Conrad Yeats and Serena Serghetti. Abdil's associates."
Yeats, maybe, thought Deker, who had heard plenty of stories in his days with the armed forces. Sister Serghetti, Mother Earth herself, never. Perhaps Yeats had abducted her at gunpoint and forced her to help.
Deker radioed Elezar, who was monitoring Warren's Shaft near Hezekiah's Tunnel. "Anything on the intruders?"
The radio crackled. "They're in the tunnels," Elezar reported. "Under the Temple Mount."
"Tell the Yamam unit to assemble in the Map Room right away." Deker turned to Gellar. "Too late to seal the Temple Mount now."
49
HEZEKIAH'S TUNNEL .JEWISH QUARTER
Serena knew that ancient cities couldn't exist without a water source, and Jerusalem was no exception. The City of David had developed around the only real water source in the area, the Gihon Spring, which ran through the bottom of the Kidron Valley. During the Assyrian and Babylonian attacks, King Hezekiah had constructed an aqueduct through which the waters could be hidden inside the city, an extraordinary engineering feat at the time.
It was through this tunnel that Serena followed Conrad through waist-high water in the dark with only one flashlight to guide them. It was all their driver from Gaza had on hand. They had been greeted at the beach north of Al Gaddafi by a van from the local Catholic church, which drove them up Salahadeen Road to the Erez industrial zone and the border gate with Israel. The Israeli official at the checkpoint had looked over their bogus work permits, which Serena had insisted would give them a better chance of getting into Israel than the underground smuggling tunnels, which Israeli warplanes bombed almost daily. A long minute later, the soldiers had waved them through. They had crossed the 1950 Armistice Line into Israel and driven toward Jerusalem, only forty-eight miles away.
The drive from Gaza had ended in Silwan, a poor Arab village of cinder-block houses crumbling down the hillsides to the Gihon Spring at the bottom of the Kidron. There, Serena found the Fountain of the Virgin and the church commemorating the spot where Mary once drew water to wash the clothes of Jesus. It was almost one p.m. and a Friday, so the caretaker was about to close the gate. But Conrad gave him a tip, and he let them descend the stone steps into the spring's cave.
It was here that Serena's expertise was exhausted and she had to trust Conrad's knowledge of Jerusalem's underbelly. But sloshing through the ever rising water, she was beginning to have doubts.
Hezekiah's Tunnel was a third of a mile long, mostly under three feet wide, and in some places, under five feet high. The caretaker at the entrance had warned them that the water was knee-high today and the walk would take them about forty minutes before they exited at the Pool of Siloam. Conrad, however, told her that they would be exiting halfway through, at the point where the tunnel took an odd S-shaped course through the rock. This was where Hezekiah's Tunnel branched from the tunnel leading from the Gihon Spring to the bottom of Warren's Shaft.
The tunnel had narrowed, and the dirty water was now waist-high. Serena bumped her head against the ceiling of the tunnel, which had started to slope sharply. The water was now up to her neck.
"The ceiling is lowest here, under five feet high, and the water level highest," Conrad told her. "So you'll have to hold your breath."
He took her by the hand, and they walked forward until their heads were underwater. They walked about three feet before the tunnel ceiling started to rise and their heads surfaced.
They were in a different tunnel, the water level dropping rapidly, and they soon reached a stone platform on the edge of a giant precipice. Serena felt chilled to the bone and wrung her dripping hair like a towel to squeeze out the water. When she looked down, she saw what looked like a giant subway tunnel with wide white limestone steps descending into the depths of the earth. She said, "This looks like the grand gallery of the Great Pyramid in Egypt."
Conrad nodded. "Why do you think Solomon married all those Egyptian princesses? To gain access to the sand hydraulic technology that built the pyramids. Except what he did here was amazing. He inverted the design so that everything you know is upside down."
That's crazy, she thought. But now that he mentioned it, the tunnel made sense.
Conrad said, "You know that shaft I was telling you about under the Dome of the Rock?"
She craned her head up and saw the opening in the ceiling overhead. It appeared to go all the way up to the top of the Temple Mount. "I thought I felt a draft."
"Back when the First Temple was up there, the top of the shaft was capped with a platform on which the Ark of the Covenant could be lowered during a siege," he told her. "Here, take this."
She looked down in her palm and saw a brick of C4 explosive. "Where on earth did you get this?"
"From the driver of your Sunday-school van in Gaza," he told her. "Now climb up on my shoulders and stick this inside the mouth of the shaft. We need to close it off in case we fail to stop the Flammenschwert. Otherwise, a geyser of fire is going to incinerate that mosque."
She took his hand, put a boot on his knee, and stepped onto his shoulders until her head was inside the bottom of the shaft. She planted the C4 on the wall of the shaft and jumped back down onto the stone platform.
She said, "You gave us only twenty minutes on the fuse."
"Insurance that we close the shaft to the surface before the Flammenschwert goes off," he explained. "The important thing is to make sure the mosque is still standing on the surface. Without Arab uprisings in the streets, Gellar can't justify the disproportionate Israeli response that will ignite a wider war. Whatever happens down below here is, well, secondary."
She looked down into the great gallery below. "The King's Chamber is down at the bottom, isn't it?"
"Right." He pulled out his Glock, t
he one he had killed Lorenzo with, and checked the clip. "So are the globes, the Flammenschwert, and God knows what else."
50
With a full-blown national emergency under way, Commander Sam Deker of the Israeli Shin Bet had no trouble assembling the elite five-member counter-terrorism unit known as the Yamam. They were beneath the temple in under six minutes.
They gathered inside the top-secret Map Room, itself a national secret. The chamber looked like a flight briefing room, with theater-style seating for six in front of computer consoles and a nine-by-twenty-four-foot curved screen with 160-degree views. Each officer carried the standard M4 assault rifle with a Glock 21.45 sidearm.
"We all follow the plan used in the Taibe raid a few years ago," Deker told them. "We're to capture or kill an armed group hidden in the tunnels below us and secure a device that may be nuclear in nature before it goes off. I cannot overemphasize how grave this threat is to the Temple Mount and the very existence of Israel."
High-definition three-dimensional images of the tunnel system filled the screen. In addition to live security feeds, the computer models used military flight-simulator technology to enable virtual remote viewing around the tunnels. Gellar in particular preferred a remote hookup. Being Orthodox, he refused to walk the holy limestone tunnels himself, leaving it to impure types like Deker.
"Four security zones make up the Temple Mount in descending order: this Map Room, Solomon's Hall, the King's Chamber, and the four River Gates region. We pair in three teams of two. Team One stations itself here. Team Two stations itself in the King's Chamber and monitors access to the River Gates. Team Three patrols the tunnels. Shoot to kill anybody who is not in this room. Should you exit the tunnels alive, you will not speak of this again."
The faces he saw understood him perfectly. Yamam forces specialized in both hostage-rescue operations and offensive takeover raids against targets in civilian areas such as the Temple Mount. Most of their activities were classified, and their success was credited to other units. Most important to Deker, they answered to the civilian Israeli police forces rather than the military, although most came exclusively from Israeli special forces units.
"Let's go," Deker said.
As the unit prepared to disperse, the officer who had been paired with Deker called him over to his console. "There's something you should see, sir," he said.
Apparently, the officer had been curious enough to research the construction of the Map Room and had called up the names of the A-list experts who had consulted on the project with the Israel Antiquities Authority and the UCLA Urban Simulation Team in the United States.
The top archaeologist on the list was Conrad Yeats.
"Looks like Yeats kept or cut a tunnel or two for himself," Deker said, red-faced. "If it's not on the map, it's not on the camera. We're going to have to move out with the others."
"There's more, sir," the officer said. "The shaft plugs to secure the tunnels were manufactured by an Israeli company based at the Tefen Industrial Park. It's a subsidiary of Midas Minerals amp; Mining."
Deker frowned. "The Midas conglomerate?"
"Yes, sir. And it appears that General Gellar has an interest in the Tefen subsidiary. What does it mean?"
Deker heard a thud and turned to see two Yamam on the floor and the rest gasping for breath. He smelled almonds in the air and realized it was cyanide gas. The door to the chamber was closing from the top down, and Deker knew that anybody trapped inside would die.
"Gellar has betrayed us!" Deker shouted, and made a flying leap for it.
51
The Flammenschwert was gone.
Conrad stood with Serena inside the King's Chamber-an expansive vault in the shape of a perfect one-by-two rectangle, its height of forty cubits exactly half the length of its eighty-cubic floor diagonal. In the center of the stone floor stood the three globes, but the armillary globe was split open like an empty womb. On each of the chamber's four walls was a towering archway, each leading down its own tunnel.
Four tunnels, two people, little time, Conrad thought. The Flammenschwert could have been taken down any one of the four shafts.
But Serena was already ahead of him, reading the ancient Hebrew letters over the archways, trying to figure out which tunnel to take, because they'd only have one shot.
"This is incredible," she said. "Do you know what these say?"
"I have my suspicions," he told her. "The star shafts of an inverted pyramid obviously can't point to the heavens. So I figured there weren't any beneath the Temple Mount. These are well shafts."
"Each one leads to a different river," she said. "Their names are written in some kind of Proto-Semitic language. It's practically pre-Atlantean. That door says Tigris, that one says Euphrates, that one over there says Pishon, and this one here says-"
"Gihon," Conrad said. "The four rivers of Eden. So Uriel is the angel with the flaming sword at the gate of Eden after all."
Serena said, "But Eden was in Mesopotamia, where the ancient Babylonian civilization originated."
Eden was like Atlantis, Conrad knew. Everybody had a different idea about where it could be, and archaeological evidence to back it up. But Jewish legend pinpointed the land of Israel as one distinct possibility. What seemed to throw off most archaeologists was the second chapter of Genesis, which described four separate rivers in the Land of Eden that shared a common headwater source. Only two were ever found-the Tigris and the Euphrates. Nobody had discovered the rivers Pishon or Gihon. But Genesis never said all four rivers were aboveground.
"Mesopotamia is just where the Tigris and Euphrates empty out," Conrad told her. "Their headwater source could be down here somewhere, along with the underground waterways of the Pishon and the Gihon."
"Genesis does refer to underground waterways providing water to the surface," she said, the linguist in her apparently rising to the surface. "The original Hebrew word is 'springs.' Genesis says the springs came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. And the Book of Revelation says that at the end of time, those four rivers will flow out from the temple."
Conrad closed the armillary globe and locked its two hemispheres in place. He could feel Serena's stare as he began to adjust the dial that controlled a tiny marker in the spiral groove representing the motion of the sun.
"This works just like the observatory deck at the Temple of the Water Bearer in Atlantis and the west patio of the U.S. Capitol," he said. "The only difference is that this deck is underground. You can't look at the skies with your naked eye to mark the position of the sun in relation to the stars. You have to use these globes."
"Gellar said the armillary uses planetary geometry," Serena said.
"It does," he said. "The planets align to form the Star of David. Which was how the Israelis got their national symbol in the first place. It's astrologically derived, just like the fish symbol of the early Church in the age of Pisces. Anyway, the trick is to follow the path of the sun across the alignment until X marks the spot. In this case, it's a location beneath the Temple Mount."
"Uriel's Gate," Serena said all of a sudden. "The gate to paradise. That's where Midas has taken the Flammenschwert."
"Eureka." Conrad checked the clip in his Glock again and rammed it back in. The click broke Serena's trance; she stared at the gun and at him. Which was what he'd intended. "The sun marker points to the Gihon shaft to reach Uriel's Gate," he said.
"You have to be sure, Conrad."
"This isn't a panel discussion at some conference. Look around you. We're in an ancient chamber deep beneath the Temple Mount with three globes and four doorways. The Gihon Spring of Jerusalem obviously has its source in the same Gihon River of Eden."
He stopped and stared at the gateway marked Gihon.
"That's it, Serena. That's the revelation of the globes: The Temple Mount guards the gate to Eden."
"The River of Life," Serena said. "The properties in the water contain the building blocks of life on earth."
<
br /> Conrad nodded. "This is what Midas was after all along, what all the money in the world can't buy him: life. He's using the Flammenschwert to light the Gihon ablaze and trace it back to its headwater source."
"And at the same time destroy the Dome of the Rock," Serena said.
Conrad heard another click of a Glock, but it wasn't his. He looked up at Serena, who was staring over his shoulder, and then heard a voice say, "Hands up, Yeats."
Slowly, Conrad turned to see an Israeli soldier pointing a gun at him-Sam Deker. Conrad knew him from his earlier digs at the Temple Mount. A good if humorless man.
"It's your boss you should be after, Deker," Conrad said.
Deker kept the gun trained on him. "What makes you sure Gellar is involved?"
"Because he told me," Serena said when a bullet struck Deker in the shoulder.
Conrad turned to see Vadim pop up from the entry of the Gihon Gate. He made a grab for Serena, and she screamed as he pulled her down into the hellhole.
"Serena!" Conrad shouted and ran over to the tunnel as a flurry of bullets flew up at him from the dark. He dove for cover. Breathing hard, he realized that Midas and Vadim were one step ahead of him-the final step. They must have removed the Flammenschwert from its globe and were preparing to detonate it at the source of the Gihon below. And now they had Serena.
"There's another way down to the Gihon," said Deker, who was sitting up against another wall, his hand on his shoulder, blood seeping through his fingers.
"Oh, so now you're convinced that I'm not with Gellar?"
"Just tell me what you're really after, Yeats."
Conrad said, "Stopping Armageddon. Midas has an incendiary weapon that's about to ignite the Gihon and everything on the surface. I have to stop it, and you have to go back up and stop Gellar if I fail."
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