The Fallen Angel

moment, the three hundred and eighty thousand square feet of the great mosque were filled to capacity with more than five thousand people. Darwish had no choice but to turn them all into holy martyrs. And himself as well.
    He remained in the cistern beneath the Well of Souls for a moment longer, reciting the final prayers of the shahid . Then, with the Makarov pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other, he set out along a narrow, ancient passage. It bore him downward into the earth and backward through time. It was the time before Islam and the Prophet. The time of ignorance, he thought. The time of the Jews.
     
     
    The first aqueduct terminated after about fifty feet in a small fishbowl of a cistern, so they quickly retraced their steps to the Great Sea and entered the second channel. After just a few steps, Lavon came upon an aperture in the right side that led to still another passage. The ground was littered with fragments of loose limestone. Lavon inspected them in the glow of his headlamp and then ran his hand over the edges of the opening.
    “This is new.”
    “How new?”
    “ New new,” Lavon said. “It looks as though it was cut quite recently.”
    Without another word, he set off down the conduit, Gabriel at his heels. After a few paces, there appeared a flight of wide, curving steps that were obviously carved by modern stone-cutting tools. Lavon plunged downward in a rage, with Gabriel a few steps behind, struggling to keep pace. At the bottom of the steps was an archway with a few characters of Arabic script carved into the stone above the apex. They shot past it without a glance. Then, awestruck, they came suddenly to a stop.
    “What the hell is that?” asked Gabriel.
    Lavon seemed incapable of speech.
    “Eli, what is it?”
    Lavon took a few tentative steps forward. “Don’t you recognize them, Gabriel?”
    “Recognize what , Eli?”
    “The pillars,” he said. “The pillars that were in the photograph.”
    “And where are the pillars from?”
    Lavon smiled, breathless. “ ‘The House which King Solomon built for the Lord was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high.’ ”
     
     
    “What is it, Uzi?” the prime minister asked.
    “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
    “Try me.”
    “Eli thinks he just found remnants of the First Temple. And by the way,” Navot added, “they also found the bomb.”
    The prime minister looked up at the video monitor and saw thousands of Muslims streaming out of the al-Aqsa Mosque. Then he looked at the men seated around him and gave the order to send in the police and the IDF.
    “It’s better than the alternative,” Navot said, watching as the first Israeli forces entered the Noble Sanctuary.
    “We’ll see about that.”

46
     
    THE TEMPLE MOUNT, JERUSALEM
     
    T HE CAVERN WAS THE SIZE of a school gymnasium. Tilting his headlamp skyward, Gabriel noticed the crude light fixtures hanging from the roof and the power line that snaked down one wall to an industrial-grade switch. Throwing it, he flooded the vast space with a heavenly white light.
    “My God,” gasped Eli Lavon. “Don’t you see what they’ve done?”
    Yes, thought Gabriel, running his hand over the glassy smooth surface of the freshly hewn wall. He could indeed see what they had done. They had carved a massive hole in the heart of God’s mountain and turned it into a private museum filled with all the archaeological artifacts that had been unearthed during the years of reckless construction and secret excavations—the building stones, capitals, columns, arrowheads, helmets, shards of pottery, and coins. And now, for motives even Gabriel could scarcely comprehend, Imam Hassan Darwish intended to blow it all to bits—and the Temple Mount along with it.
    For the moment, though, Eli Lavon seemed to have all but forgotten about the bomb. Entranced, he was making his way slowly through the artifacts toward the two parallel rows of broken pillars that formed the centerpiece of the exhibit. Pausing, he consulted his compass.
    “They’re oriented east to west,” he said.
    “Just like the Temple?”
    “Yes,” he said. “Just like the Temple.”
    He walked to the eastern end of the pillars, touched one reverently, and then walked a few steps farther. “The altar would have been here,” he said, gesturing with his small hand toward an empty space at the edge of the cavern. “Next to the altar would have been the yam , the large bronze basin