The Atlantis Revelation (18 page)

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T
he catering truck pulled up behind Ohel Yitzhak, or the Tent of Isaac, synagogue in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. General Gellar stepped out in a caterer’s uniform, glanced both ways, and then gave the signal. The caterers brought out three food cases, each containing one of Solomon’s three globes, and wheeled the cases on carts into the kitchen.

The elegant synagogue had been blown up by the Jordanian army in 1948. After Israel captured the Old City in the 1967 Middle East War and annexed East Jerusalem, it was finally rebuilt and rededicated in 2008. One particular modification was a secret underground passage that connected the synagogue to the Temple Mount.

The passageway was supposed to be part of a large underground complex attesting to Jewish heritage in the contested city. It was funded by the semi-governmental organization known as the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, which had signed an agreement with Jewish-American donors to maintain the Ohel Yitzhak synagogue and the areas beneath it. Those donors had been active for decades in settling ultra-nationalist Jews in Arab areas of Jerusalem.

But General Gellar, who was on the board of the foundation, had never shared his purpose for the new passageway with his donors or submitted the final plans to the Israel Antiquities Authority for approval.

The passageway linked the synagogue with the Western Wall tunnels in the Jewish quarter. And those tunnels beneath the Western Wall in turn linked to a more ancient network unknown to either Muslims or Jews. As such, it violated Israel’s promise to stop digging within the Al-Aqsa compound. After all, the last time an Israeli prime minister had opened an archaeological tunnel near the holy sites, more than eighty people had been killed in three days of Palestinian riots.

Gellar could only imagine the reaction in a few short hours when the scourge of the Temple Mount would be wiped clean by a pillar of fire that would reveal the power of the one true God.

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sraeli troops armed with assault rifles guarded the Via Dolorosa, or the Way of Sorrows, as thousands of Christian pilgrims from around the world crowded the narrow cobblestone streets of Jerusalem’s walled Old City for the traditional Good Friday procession. Some Christians even carried large wooden crosses on their shoulders along the route that Jesus was believed to have taken to His crucifixion.

Ridiculous,
thought Midas, watching from the curb. He turned to Vadim, standing beside him, and said, “With the beating you’ve taken, you look like you could be one of the actors here.”

Vadim said nothing.

“At least you’re still alive.” Midas looked at his BlackBerry. “It appears the Israeli coast guard found an Otter seaplane four kilometers off the coast of Gaza this morning with a dead priest inside. Bullet to the head. The Israelis say it was drug smuggling gone bad. The local rabble-rousing Catholic bishop in Gaza City says it was the trigger-happy Israeli coast guard. I say it was Yeats.”

The Good Friday procession ended at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where tradition said Jesus was crucified and His body laid in a tomb. It was there, on Easter Sunday, that Christians would celebrate His resurrection.

Or so they believed.

The thought that the world would change in minutes, and that there was little Conrad Yeats could do about it, prompted a smile to replace Roman Midas’s impatient expression as he and Vadim made their way out the Damascus Gate.

They followed the north wall of the Old City toward Herod’s Gate and found an iron gate at the base of the wall. It was the cave entrance to Solomon’s Quarries, a huge subterranean cavern that extended beneath the city in the direction of the Temple Mount. Inside the quarries was a secret entrance to the Temple Mount, where General Gellar would meet them.

Midas looked at his watch. It was two-thirty p.m. The first in a series of gates was about to open before him.

The cave was an official tourist site, open to the public, and a couple of Israeli policemen were outside the entrance. But today, by design, it was sealed off for a private event. It was a semiannual ceremony hosted by the Grand Lodge of the State of Israel for the benefit of Masons visiting Jerusalem during Holy Week. Non-Masons were not allowed, which kept the Good Friday crowds away.

Midas and Vadim showed the policemen their identification cards issued by the Supreme Grand Royal Arch Chapter of Israel and were allowed to step into the cave.

Midas followed a well-lit path for a hundred yards as the floor sloped down about thirty feet and opened into a cavern the size of an American football field. It was known as Freemasons’ Hall, and the Masonic ceremony that Midas had hoped to avoid was under way in Hebrew and English. Twenty older gentlemen of various nationalities stood in their Masonic aprons as the Mark Master degree ceremony recounted the tale of an irregular rejected stone hewn from these very quarries that had turned out to be the capstone of the entrance to the temple.

But Midas already knew that. Ancient tradition said that the stones for King Solomon’s First Temple were quarried here. The cavern was especially rich in white Melekeh, or royal, limestone, used in all the royal buildings. Some caves had been created by water erosion, but most had been cut by Solomon’s masons.

Midas glanced up at the imposing ceiling of rock that was held up by limestone pillars just like the kind he used to make in the mines. It felt damp, and he could see beads of water trickling down the rough walls.

“Zedekiah’s tears,” he was told by an old Scot standing next to him. “He was the last king of Judah and tried to escape here before he was captured and carted off to Babylon. But the water comes from springs hidden all around us.”

Midas and Vadim nodded, then broke away from the gathering to follow an illuminated walkway out of the cavern into one of the inner chambers separated by broad columns of limestone. There, Midas found the royal arch carved into the wall they were looking for and waited. A moment later, there was a faint tap. Midas tapped back twice. The outlines of an arched doorway appeared more prominently, and the stone slid open to reveal Gellar.

The only way to enter the secret tunnel, Gellar had told him, was from the inside. The irony was that Gellar was so ultra-Orthodox and regarded the Temple Mount as so holy that he refused to enter its lower chambers himself. That left the dirty job of setting off the
Flammenschwert
to Midas and Vadim.

F
rom his small office near the Western Wall Plaza, Commander Sam Deker could look up and see the Dome of the Rock without the banks of monitors that helped him police the goings-on around the Temple Mount. For Jews, it was the rock on which Abraham had nearly sacrificed his son Isaac before God intervened, and later, the Holy of Holies within Solomon’s Temple where the Ark of the Covenant rested. For Muslims, it was where the Prophet Muhammad had put his foot down before he ascended to heaven. For Deker, it was like the pin of a grenade placed in his hand with orders not to blow up the world.

Especially today, Good Friday.

Three weeks ago, a Palestinian construction worker had plowed a bulldozer into a crowd of young Israelis. Two weeks ago, Israeli archaeologists had accused Muslims of destroying First Temple artifacts in an attempt to erase any traces of Jewish settlements on the Temple Mount. One week ago, Christian monks had broken into a brawl at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in advance of today’s celebration.

It was always something.

A secular Jew who had grown up in Los Angeles and served with the U.S. armed forces as a demolitions specialist in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Deker had been recruited by the former head of Israel’s internal security service, Yuval Diskin, to work for the Shin Bet. A man who specialized in the destruction of major structures, Diskin told him, was uniquely qualified to protect one such as the Temple Mount. However, Deker quickly gathered that his chief qualification was that he was Jewish but not a real Jew, if that was possible.

For some time the Shin Bet had been concerned that Jewish extremists could attack the Temple Mount in an attempt to foil peace moves with Palestinians. It had happened before, with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the Shin Bet didn’t want to see it again.

“The Shin Bet sees in the group we’re talking about on the extreme right a willingness to use firearms in order to halt diplomatic processes and harm political leaders,” Diskin told him.

Ironically, that group Deker had been warned about for so long included Israel’s current defense minister, Michael Gellar, who had made a surprise appearance at the office and now stood before him.

“You saw what happened on Rhodes?” Gellar demanded. “It was intended for me.”

Deker had seen it. The Egyptian Abdil Zawas had managed to blow himself up while trying to wire a roadside bomb at the European peace summit. The man wasn’t a bomb maker, and it all sounded fishy to Deker. But then Zawas was always trying to outdo the ghost of his late crazy military cousin Ali, and it wouldn’t surprise Deker if the Egyptian playboy had gotten in so over his head that he’d lost it.

“Greek police found evidence in the car that Abdil’s real target today is the Temple Mount. Analysis of his video claiming responsibility for the attempt on my life suggests that it was an attack code to his associates in Jerusalem to detonate a nuclear device.”

Deker blinked. “Today?”

“You need to seal the Temple Mount.”

“You want me to seal off the Temple Mount on Good Friday and the eve of Passover?”

“Yes.”

“But that means closing off the Western Wall to worshippers, ticking off both Jews and Christians. That’s on top of the Arabs, who are always mad.”

“I know what it means, Deker.” General Gellar was pulling rank. “You need to check all access points and your informants. Things the security feeds don’t pick up.”

Deker nodded, typed an alert on his BlackBerry, and then put it away.

“What did you just do?” Gellar demanded.

“I sent a quick 140-character text through Twitter to my network.”

“Is that secure?”

“Yes and no.”

The BlackBerry chirped, and Deker looked at the feeds and frowned. The guide at the Gihon Springs was reporting that a man and woman had gone into Hezekiah’s Tunnel but never emerged from the tunnel exit at the Siloam Pool.

He called up the video, and as he watched the monitor, he watched Gellar. The blood from the general’s face drained.

“That’s Conrad Yeats and Serena Serghetti. Abdil’s associates.”

Yeats, maybe,
thought Deker, who had heard plenty of stories in his days with the armed forces. Sister Serghetti, Mother Earth herself, never. Perhaps Yeats had abducted her at gunpoint and forced her to help.

Deker radioed Elezar, who was monitoring Warren’s Shaft near Hezekiah’s Tunnel. “Anything on the intruders?”

The radio crackled. “They’re in the tunnels,” Elezar reported. “Under the Temple Mount.”

“Tell the Yamam unit to assemble in the Map Room right away.” Deker turned to Gellar. “Too late to seal the Temple Mount now.”

H
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erena knew that ancient cities couldn’t exist without a water source, and Jerusalem was no exception. The City of David had developed around the only real water source in the area, the Gihon Spring, which ran through the bottom of the Kidron Valley. During the Assyrian and Babylonian attacks, King Hezekiah had constructed an aqueduct through which the waters could be hidden inside the city, an extraordinary engineering feat at the time.

It was through this tunnel that Serena followed Conrad through waist-high water in the dark with only one flashlight to guide them. It was all their driver from Gaza had on hand. They had been greeted at the beach north of Al Gaddafi by a van from the local Catholic church, which drove them up Salahadeen Road to the Erez industrial zone and the border gate with Israel. The Israeli official at the checkpoint had looked over their bogus work permits, which Serena had insisted would give them a better chance of getting into Israel than the underground smuggling tunnels, which Israeli warplanes bombed almost daily. A long minute later, the soldiers had waved them through. They had crossed the 1950 Armistice Line into Israel and driven toward Jerusalem, only forty-eight miles away.

The drive from Gaza had ended in Silwan, a poor Arab village of cinder-block houses crumbling down the hillsides to the Gihon Spring at the bottom of the Kidron. There, Serena found the Fountain of the Virgin and the church commemorating the spot where Mary once drew water to wash the clothes of Jesus. It was almost one p.m. and a Friday, so the caretaker was about to close the gate. But Conrad gave him a tip, and he let them descend the stone steps into the spring’s cave.

It was here that Serena’s expertise was exhausted and she had to trust Conrad’s knowledge of Jerusalem’s underbelly. But sloshing through the ever rising water, she was beginning to have doubts.

Hezekiah’s Tunnel was a third of a mile long, mostly under three feet wide, and in some places, under five feet high. The caretaker at the entrance had warned them that the water was knee-high today and the walk would take them about forty minutes before they exited at the Pool of Siloam. Conrad, however, told her that they would be exiting halfway through, at the point where the tunnel took an odd S-shaped course through the rock. This was where Hezekiah’s Tunnel branched from the tunnel leading from the Gihon Spring to the bottom of Warren’s Shaft.

The tunnel had narrowed, and the dirty water was now waist-high. Serena bumped her head against the ceiling of the tunnel, which had started to slope sharply. The water was now up to her neck.

“The ceiling is lowest here, under five feet high, and the water level highest,” Conrad told her. “So you’ll have to hold your breath.”

He took her by the hand, and they walked forward until their heads were underwater. They walked about three feet before the tunnel ceiling started to rise and their heads surfaced.

They were in a different tunnel, the water level dropping rapidly, and they soon reached a stone platform on the edge of a giant precipice. Serena felt chilled to the bone and wrung her dripping hair like a towel to squeeze out the water. When she looked down, she saw what looked like a giant subway tunnel with wide white limestone steps descending into the depths of the earth. She said, “This looks like the grand gallery of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.”

Conrad nodded. “Why do you think Solomon married all those Egyptian princesses? To gain access to the sand hydraulic technology that built the pyramids. Except what he did here was amazing. He inverted the design so that everything you know is upside down.”

That’s crazy,
she thought. But now that he mentioned it, the tunnel made sense.

Conrad said, “You know that shaft I was telling you about under the Dome of the Rock?”

She craned her head up and saw the opening in the ceiling overhead. It appeared to go all the way up to the top of the Temple Mount. “I thought I felt a draft.”

“Back when the First Temple was up there, the top of the shaft was capped with a platform on which the Ark of the Covenant could be lowered during a siege,” he told her. “Here, take this.”

She looked down in her palm and saw a brick of C4 explosive. “Where on earth did you get this?”

“From the driver of your Sunday-school van in Gaza,” he told her. “Now climb up on my shoulders and stick this inside the mouth of the shaft. We need to close it off in case we fail to stop the
Flammenschwert
. Otherwise, a geyser of fire is going to incinerate that mosque.”

She took his hand, put a boot on his knee, and stepped onto his shoulders until her head was inside the bottom of the shaft. She planted the C4 on the wall of the shaft and jumped back down onto the stone platform.

She said, “You gave us only twenty minutes on the fuse.”

“Insurance that we close the shaft to the surface before the
Flammenschwert
goes off,” he explained. “The important thing is to make sure the mosque is still standing on the surface. Without Arab uprisings in the streets, Gellar can’t justify the disproportionate Israeli response that will ignite a wider war. Whatever happens down below here is, well, secondary.”

She looked down into the great gallery below. “The King’s Chamber is down at the bottom, isn’t it?”

“Right.” He pulled out his Glock, the one he had killed Lorenzo with, and checked the clip. “So are the globes, the
Flammenschwert,
and God knows what else.”