The Fallen Angel

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