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 this Mishmar of Emanuel Shor’s is involved in that sort of thing?”
“I’m not concerned about them. We’ve been watching them for years. As for Dr. Shor…well, never mind. They’re not on my mind right now. It’s this Palestinian, this Ayoub.”
Ari frowned. “Why would a Muslim want to destroy the Dome?”
“Doesn’t it occur to you that the best way to push Israel into the sea would be to get the Muslim world angry enough to attack us in force? What would motivate the combined armies and air forces of twenty Islamic countries to come at us all at once? What kind of an event might prompt ten million Muslim boys to wade through oceans of their own blood to get at us? The destruction of this Dome would do that.
“Davan, unlike you, I’m not a sabra. I wasn’t born in this country. I didn’t grow up with Hebrew on TV in a nice West Jerusalem neighborhood. I grew up in Ukraine, where we were zhids—the cause of everybody’s problems. Everything bad in life was because of the zhids. You don’t get paid enough? It’s the zhids’ fault. You lost your job? The zhids took it. Our neighbors hated us.”
Ari had never heard Kristall talk like this.
“At school, in the marketplace…it didn’t matter. It wasn’t what they said or even did. It was how they looked at me. Sometimes I wished they would say something to me. I dreamed they would, so I could smash their faces.
“When my family wanted to leave, the government laid an ‘emigration tax’ on us, supposedly to get back the money they had spent ‘educating’ us. It took everything we had, but we left for eretz Israel, and for a while it did feel like a new world.
“It didn’t take me long to find out that nothing had changed. We were still surrounded.”
The air was pale with heat and the exhaust of the streets, the reflection of the dimming sun spreading like a reddish stain over the Dome. Below the Wall, the evening auto traffic was pressed into a noisy, slow-moving wedge. Ari and Kristall looked out over the Old City, its trees and dusty roofs quiet in contrast with the world outside the Wall. Kristall absently pulled out a cigarette, looked at it, and threw it back in her bag.
“I want you to take responsibility for this Ayoub,” she said. “The Eagle is yours.”
At that moment, her GeM sounded from the bag. “What is it?” she snapped a tiny receiver into her ear and then was listening intently. Somewhere, over the noise of the traffic, a peacock gave a faint call. At last she rang off and looked up at Ari.
“You were saying something earlier about ‘ritual murder?’ ”
“If I remember right, you used that expression, not I.”
“How did the Pope die?” she asked. “And Shor?”
“Commando-style—one shot to the head, three to the chest on a horizontal axis.”
“The ceremony continues. You have two more. Died the same way, this afternoon. In an office tower in Tel Aviv.
“Who?”
“Shimon Tempelman and Catriel Levine.”
French Room of the Adolphus Hotel, Dallas, Texas, 1200h
Four playful cherubs danced down from a blue heaven trailing a tinselwork of flowers. The ceilings and walls, bright and mellow at once, flowed with ribbons of colored light. Through an arch of gilded plaster, a window revealed a row of bank buildings across the street, but softened the traffic sounds from the abyss below.
“Roast venison with rosemary potatoes.” Pastor Bob Jonas grinned decisively at the waiter, and then looked triumphantly around the table. “Six-shooter coffee with that,” he added in a loud whisper.
“I’ll have whatever Chef says,” Lambert Sable dismissed the waiter.
“Yes, Mr. Sable,” the waiter bobbed. “I’m sure he’ll want to greet you himself.”
“Tell him not to bother.”
There was a tricky silence. Then Pastor Bob laughed. “Not very often a servant of the Lord gets to eat in a place like this. Might as well leverage the opportunity.”
“You mean, to share a table with sinners?” the reporter
