name is Nasir—Arabic for eagle.”
“Oh. Kristall wants me to take this one over. Got any ideas?”
“We followed him this morning, on foot through Damascus Gate to his house. After a few minutes he motored out and we traced him electronically this far. None of our taps give any indication of his agenda for today.”
“He wouldn’t be broadcasting it, would he? Any known contacts in Ramla? Women?”
“He is hooked up with a woman, a Dr. Adawi, who lives in Nablus.”
“Wrong direction.” Ari turned and saw something on the driver’s seat of his car. It was a note. He picked it up and scanned it quickly.
“Um…Toad, something’s come up. Keep me in the picture, will you? I’ll ring you later.”
Jaffa Gate, Old City, Jerusalem, 1545h
The last thing Ari expected to see in his life was Tovah Kristall playing the tourist. She stood just inside the Jaffa Gate wearing white capri pants and a blue-and-white striped shirt, sunglasses, and a sailor’s hat. That skin the sun had rarely touched gleamed a fishy yellow. She was arguing with a street vendor over the price of a cheap alabaster chess set that she held with one hand while waving her cigarette with the other.
“Look, I collect chess sets. I could buy one of these from anybody in this town. There are a hundred places. But I chose you. I’ll give you seventy-five euros.”
“You’re killing me. A hundred.”
She looked up at Ari, who now stood smiling next to her. “Can you imagine? This cheap little man. I offered him seventy-five euros…five times what he paid for it.” She turned back. “Keep it. I won’t deal with a pirate.”
Kristall grabbed Ari by the arm and led him away. The vendor followed, moaning “eighty…eighty…”
“Why don’t we go up to the Wall now? I’ve wanted to do that for such a long time,” she said a little too loudly. She headed for the entrance to a staircase nearby, where for a few shekels a tourist could mount the steps and walk about half the circumference of the Old City Wall.
“So now you’re Mata Hari, the famous tourist?” he whispered.
“Come on.”
At the ticket window he waited for her to pay, but she just looked at him; then he pulled his GeM from his pocket and paid both their admissions. Halfway up the steps, she stopped to cough. It was a noise like pebbles and sand in a cement mixer. He put his hand on her arm to steady her.
“It’s all right, Davan.” She shook it off and continued up the stairs.
From the Wall, they could see the roofs of the Old City dominated by the Dome of the Rock, rising into the air like the sun. They walked slowly in the heat along the parapet.
“I didn’t know you were such a chess enthusiast.”
“Everything is chess, Davan.”
He paused. “I’m here, as you asked. You were quick getting here yourself. What other tricks do you do?”
“I like to play spy now and then, don’t you? It reminds me how fun this job is.”
“You like to get out into the field, get in touch with reality.” It was quiet sarcasm.
“My friend, reality is back in that blue hellhole of mine.” It was true; he had rarely seen her outside of the hazy blue-paneled situation room. But she was not convincing; he knew that she liked it there at the center of things.
They stopped in shade beneath a stone tower in a corner of the wall. The blinding gold Dome seemed near enough to touch. She turned and spoke quietly:
“You think there’s some kind of plot concerning the Temple Mount.”
Ari was surprised—he thought she had dismissed the idea. “Yes?”
She gazed again at the Dome. “I knew Shor was connected with a group that wants to build the Temple.” Gnawing silently at her cigarette, she breathed smoke in and out while Ari waited for her to surface again from her thoughts. Then she started speaking, as if to herself.
“This mess is deep. Religious crazies. An itinerant Palestinian contractor. And a new kind of weapon…” She caught herself and looked at Ari. “I couldn’t, or rather didn’t want to, get into this after you forced me to record our conversation. In certain circles, it’s best to dismiss this sort of thing.”
She crushed her cigarette on the ground.
“Any threat to all that Vatican over there I take seriously,” she said, pointing to the Temple Mount. “I take it very, very seriously. These people who want to rebuild Solomon’s Temple—they are the worst enemies we have.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because, Davan, no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. Look at it.” She gazed again at the Dome. “The Mosque of Omar. Built thirteen centuries ago on the rock where Mohammed went up to Heaven. Go back thirteen centuries before that, and the Temple of Solomon stood on the same spot. Built on the rock where Jacob ben-Isaac laid his head and announced, Surely this is the House of God.”
Again, Ari was startled at the things the irreligious Kristall knew about religion.
“Obviously, to build the Temple, you have to remove the Dome. And that brings catastrophe. The whole Muslim world would rise up like one person—one very angry person—and they’re no longer the pitiful army our grandfathers routed sixty years ago. For decades they’ve looked for any excuse they can find to ‘eradicate the Zionist Entity.’ They mean it, Davan. I’ve looked in their faces.
“So the very last thing we want is a religious paranoid-delusional blowing up the Dome of the Rock to make way for some fantasy of a Temple. It’s been tried before. One of my first cases. A man named Solomon Barda. A lunatic, an Israeli who lived in the States for a while, joined some mad cult, and came back here to start his own religion. A bizarre concoction of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. He had splendid success—three followers as crazy as he was—who believed they could coax the Messiah down from Heaven by destroying the Dome. They had got hold of enough dynamite and C-4 and Semtex to turn it into rubble.”
“What happened?” Ari asked.
“It was forty years ago. No, more than that.” Kristall’s voice had hardened. “We caught them in the act. They all went to prison. All but one…the one who escaped.
“And that’s why we have paid to put up the best 24-hour security system on the planet around that Muslim shrine. ‘Flaming Sword.’ No one, nothing gets through it undetected. Weapons, explosives easily spotted. But a missile—that’s something else. In August, we came awfully close to disaster. If the Synagogue hadn’t burned…”
She trailed off again.
“If you think my idea is so laughable, why are you going on like this?” he asked her.
“No one’s laughing, Davan. I brought you out here to talk it through with you because no one else wants to talk about it. Not the Prime Minister, not anyone. They all think we’re invincible. I told him, there are two billion Muslims in the world, and the number is rising fast. There are five million Jews in this country, and the number is going down.”
Ari interrupted her. “What’s the new weapon?”
She was quiet for a moment, but took a rattling breath and went on as if she hadn’t heard him. He knew then he would get no answer.
“To make things worse, there are all these fringe groups who are tired of waiting for the Messiah to come. They all believe the Temple has to be built first, so they want to speed things up a bit. To give God a nudge and force the Almighty’s hand by blowing up the Dome.”
“I’ve heard about all that. Do you think