The Fallen Angel

joined them. Then, after speaking a few words into the ear of a policeman, he slipped around the magnetometers and entered the Jewish Quarter.
    Directly before him, across a broad plaza, rose the honey-colored Herodian stones of the Western Wall, the much-disputed remnant of the ancient retaining barrier that had once surrounded the great Temple of Jerusalem. In AD 70, after a ruthless siege lasting many months, the Roman Emperor Titus ordered the Temple destroyed and the rebellious Jews of Roman Palestine obliterated. Hundreds of thousands perished in the bloodletting that followed, while the contents of the Holy of Holies, including the great golden menorah, were carried back to Rome in one of history’s most infamous episodes of looting. Six centuries later, when the Arabs conquered Jerusalem, the ruins of the Temple were no longer visible—and the Holy Mountain, the place regarded by Jews as the dwelling place of God on Earth, was little more than an elevated garbage dump. The Arabs erected the golden Dome of the Rock and the great al-Aqsa Mosque, thus establishing Islamic religious authority over the world’s most sacred parcel of real estate. The Crusaders seized the Mount from the Muslims in 1099 and turned the shrines into churches, a tactical mistake the Israelis chose not to repeat after capturing East Jerusalem in 1967. Israeli authorities now maintained tight control over access to the Mount, but administration of the Muslim holy sites, and the sacred land beneath them, remained in the hands of the Islamic religious authority known as the Waqf.
    The portion of the Western Wall visible from the plaza was 187 feet wide and 62 feet high. The actual western retaining wall of the Temple Mount plateau, however, was much larger, descending 42 feet below the plaza and stretching more than a quarter mile into the Muslim Quarter, where it was concealed behind residential structures. After years of politically and religiously charged archaeological excavations, it was now possible to walk nearly the entire length of the wall via the Western Wall Tunnel, an underground passageway running from the plaza to the Via Dolorosa. Waiting for Gabriel at the entrance was a young woman dressed in the modest skirt and headscarf of an Orthodox Jew. “He’s been working nonstop at a spot near the Cave,” she said in a confiding tone. “Apparently, he’s found something important, because he’s a complete wreck.”
    “How can you tell?”
    The woman laughed and then led Gabriel to the top of a narrow aluminum staircase. It bore him downward beneath the Old City and backward through history. He paused for a moment beneath Wilson’s Arch, the bridge that had linked the Temple Mount and Jerusalem’s Upper City in the time of Jesus, and then set out along a newly paved walkway at the base of the wall. The massive foundation stones were aglow with lamplight and cool to the touch. Just a few feet above were the chaotic market streets of the modern Muslim Quarter, but here in the basement of time the silence was absolute.
    The section of the tunnel known as the Cave was actually a tiny grotto-like synagogue, set against the portion of the wall thought to be the nearest point to the ancient location of the Holy of Holies. As usual, a small group of Orthodox women were praying in the synagogue, their fingers pressed reverently to the stone. Gabriel slipped quietly past them and made his way toward a tarpaulin curtain hanging a few yards away. A small handwritten sign warned of danger and instructed visitors to stay away. Gabriel parted the curtains and peered down into an excavation trench approximately twenty feet deep. At the bottom, bathed in the glow of harsh white lights, a single archaeologist picked gently at the black earth with a tiny hand trowel.
    “What is it?” Gabriel asked, his voice echoing into the void.
    “It’s not an it ,” replied Eli Lavon. He moved aside to reveal the focus of his labors—the shoulder, arm, and hand of a human skeleton. “We call her Rivka,” he said. “And unless I’m mistaken, which is highly unlikely, she died the same night as the Temple.”
    “Proof, Professor Lavon,” Gabriel said, challenging him playfully. “Where’s the proof?”
    “It’s all around her,” said Lavon, pointing to the rectangular stones embedded in the soil. “They’re from the Temple itself, and they’re lying here because the Romans hurled them over the wall the night they laid waste to the