The Fallen Angel

there. To do so, it assembled a pool of journalists and camera crews from the world’s most authoritative news organizations and took them down through the network of aqueducts and cisterns, to the newly dug chamber 167 feet beneath the surface. There the chief of staff of the IDF showed them the massive bomb, while the head of the Israel Antiquities Authority walked them through the remarkable collection of artifacts that had been unearthed by the Waqf during years of reckless digging. The highlight of the tour were the two rows of limestone pillars, twenty-two in all, that had been part of the heikhal of King Solomon’s First Temple of Jerusalem.
    As expected, the reaction to the news was mixed at best. The video of the ancient pillars electrified the Israeli public and sent a tremor of anticipation through the global community of archaeologists and ancient historians. Most scholars immediately accepted the pillars as authentic, but in Germany the leader of a discipline of archaeology known as biblical minimalism dismissed them as “twenty-two hunks of wishful thinking.” Not surprisingly, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority seized on that statement when issuing its own response to the news. The pillars were an Israeli hoax, it said. And so was the “so-called bomb.”
    But what had led the Israelis to enter the Temple Mount in the first place? And who had been the ultimate mastermind of the plot to bring it down? The Israeli government, citing its long-standing refusal to comment on matters related to intelligence gathering, declined to go into specifics. But as the pillars emerged slowly from the earth, a series of stories appeared in the press that began to shed a diffuse light on the mysterious chain of events that had led to their discovery.
    There was the exposé in Le Monde about a Sorbonne graduate named David Girard, aka Daoud Ghandour, who had advised the Waqf on archaeological matters, and who, according to unnamed law enforcement officials, was a member of a criminal antiquities smuggling network with links to Hezbollah. And the story in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung about an Iranian connection to the bombing of Galleria Naxos in St. Moritz. And the investigative follow-up in Der Spiegel that linked David Girard to one Massoud Rahimi, the Iranian terrorist mastermind who had been briefly kidnapped in Germany. Which made it all the more interesting when, just twelve days later, that same Massoud Rahimi was killed in Tehran by a limpet-style bomb planted beneath his car. The television terrorism analysts had little doubt about who was behind the assassination or what it meant. Massoud had been the mastermind of the Temple Mount plot, they proclaimed, and the Israelis had just returned the favor.
    But there were many aspects of the story the press would never learn, including the fact that the affair had begun when Gabriel Allon, the wayward son of Israeli intelligence, had been summoned to St. Peter’s Basilica to view the corpse of a fallen angel. Or that Gabriel had spent the last two weeks sitting beside the hospital bed of the archaeologist whose blood stained the pillars of Solomon’s Temple. As a result, he was present when the archaeologist finally opened his eyes. “Rivka,” Eli Lavon murmured. “Make sure someone looks after Rivka.”
     
     
    That same evening, a tense calm fell over Jerusalem for the first time since the beginning of the Temple Mount crisis. Gabriel went to the Mount Herzl Psychiatric Hospital to spend a few minutes with Leah before meeting Chiara for dinner at a restaurant located in the original campus of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Afterward, he took her for ice cream and a walk in Ben Yehuda Street.
    “Donati called this afternoon,” she said suddenly, as though it had slipped her mind. “He was wondering when you were coming back to Rome to finish the Caravaggio and deal with Carlo.”
    “I’d almost forgotten about them both.”
    “That’s understandable, darling. After all, you did save Israel and the world from Armageddon and find twenty-two pillars from the First Temple of Jerusalem.”
    Gabriel smiled. “I’ll leave the day after tomorrow.”
    “I’m coming with you.”
    “You can’t. Besides,” he added quickly, “I have a job for you. Two jobs, actually.”
    “What are they?”
    “I need someone to look after Eli until I get back.”
    “And the other?”
    “The government has decided to put the pillars in a special wing at