The Fallen Angel

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Fallen Angel is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Those who have made the ascent to the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica will surely remember there is a wire suicide barrier along the edge of the viewing gallery. I removed it in order to make a murder, and an accidental fall, more plausible. The conservation laboratory of the Vatican Picture Gallery has been accurately rendered, though in no way do I mean to suggest there are any problems of provenance regarding the Vatican’s extraordinary collection of antiquities, even by today’s exacting curatorial standards. The Vatican Bank, however, has a long and well-documented history of financial transgressions. The latest occurred in September 2010, when Italian authorities conducting a money-laundering probe seized $30 million from the bank and placed two of its top officers under investigation. The following month, police in Sicily announced they had uncovered a money-laundering scheme that utilized the Vatican Bank account of a priest whose uncle had been convicted on charges of Mafia association.

The headquarters of the Carabinieri’s Art Squad is in fact located in Rome’s Piazza di Sant’Ignazio, and the unit’s role in the investigation of convicted antiquities smuggler Giacomo Medici—and the recovery of the Euphronios Krater from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—has been faithfully portrayed. There is indeed an antiquities gallery on a picturesque square in St. Moritz, though I am quite confident it is in no way associated with the Shiite militant group Hezbollah. The Lebanon Byzantine Bank does not exist, but the Lebanese Canadian Bank does—and it is there, according to U.S. officials, that Hezbollah launders at least a portion of the money it earns through its global criminal fund-raising operations. It was an unnamed U.S. federal agent, speaking to the New York Times in December 2011, who first described Hezbollah as “the Gambinos on steroids,” not Uzi Navot, the fictitious chief of Israeli intelligence.

Massoud Rahimi, the Iranian intelligence officer who appears in The Fallen Angel, was created by the author, but his close ties to Hezbollah, a group often called the “A-team of terrorists,” are based entirely on fact. Hezbollah has carried out numerous acts of terror at Iran’s behest and would surely play a prominent role in Iran’s response to any attack on its nuclear weapons facilities. In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest Israel is already being targeted by Hezbollah for attempting to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program with acts of sabotage and assassination. In January 2012, authorities in Azerbaijan broke up a Hezbollah terror cell that had allegedly targeted the Israeli ambassador there and a rabbi from a local Jewish school. In February, Israeli diplomats in Georgia and India came under simultaneous attack. The next day, a bomb exploded in a Bangkok apartment, exposing an Iranian-Hezbollah cell that was preparing to kill Israeli diplomats in the Thai capital. But then, none of this should come as much of a surprise. In July 2006, Hossein Safiadeen, Hezbollah’s representative in Tehran, announced the group intended to murder Israelis and Jews wherever it could find them, declaring ominously, “There will be no place they are safe.” Surely, the remark found favor with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that must be removed. This coming from a man who is seeking the capability to do just that with the push of a button.

The sacred plateau in Jerusalem referred to as the Temple Mount by Jews and the Haram al-Sharif by Muslims is indeed under the control of the Islamic Waqf. The southern retaining wall of the Mount did in fact develop a precarious bulge as a result of the construction of the Marwani Mosque, and the description of archaeologically rich debris being hurled into the Kidron Valley is, sadly, all too accurate. I utilized the work of the great British archaeologist Sir Charles Warren while writing the climax of the novel, though I granted myself much license to move my characters as needed. For example, the secret tunnel that Gabriel Allon and Eli Lavon used to gain access to the interior of the Mount was created by the author, and in no way was it based on truth.

Regrettably, the same cannot be said when it comes to the beliefs and opinions of some of those who serve as the caretakers of the most sacred parcel of land on earth. In 1999, Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, then the grand mufti of Jerusalem, declared that “the Jew” was plotting to destroy the Haram al-Sharif. “The Jew will get the Christian to do his work for him,” explained Sabri, who holds a doctorate from Cairo’s al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam’s most important center of study. “This is the way of the Jews. This is the way Satan manifests himself.” In 2000, shortly before Pope John Paul II made his historic pilgrimage to Israel that included a visit to the Temple Mount, Sabri denied the Holocaust had ever happened. “Six million Jews dead? No way. They were much fewer. Let’s stop with this fairy tale exploited by Israel to capture international solidarity.” These were not the words of a fundamentalist cleric from an insignificant Salafist mosque. They were spoken by the man who controlled the third-holiest site in Islam.

It is little wonder, then, that Holocaust Denial is now mainstream thinking in the Arab and Islamic world, as is its first cousin, Temple Denial. Virtually the entire leadership of the Palestinian Authority—even some of those regarded as “moderates” in the West—deny there was ever an actual Jewish Temple atop the Temple Mount. At the Camp David summit in 2000, when President Bill Clinton worked tirelessly to negotiate a settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Yasir Arafat baldly asserted the Temple had stood not in Jerusalem but in Nablus. His outburst stunned President Clinton, who responded, “As a Christian, I, too, believe that under the surface there are remains of Solomon’s Temple.” Clinton’s chief Middle East negotiator, Dennis Ross, would later say of Arafat’s performance at the summit: “He created a new mythology by saying the Temple doesn’t exist there. It was the only new idea he raised in fifteen days at Camp David.”

Clinton would make several more attempts to bring peace to the Middle East during the last days of his presidency, including the so-called Clinton Parameters, which he placed before the Israelis and Palestinians during a dramatic meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House. A non-negotiable set of terms for a final agreement, the Parameters called for the creation of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and 96 percent of the West Bank. The Temple Mount plateau, sacred to the three Abrahamic faiths, would have been included in the Palestinian state, while the Western Wall and Jewish Quarter of the Old City would have remained under Israeli control. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted the terms, but Yasir Arafat, after much dithering and equivocation, did not. In his memoirs, President Clinton was remarkably candid about his feelings toward the man whose “colossal mistake” had denied him a historic foreign policy achievement. “I am a failure,” he told Arafat during a bitter telephone conversation. “And you have made me one.”

But did the Temple of Solomon, as described in wondrous detail in Kings I and Chronicles, truly exist? The best way to answer that question would be to conduct a thorough but careful excavation of the entire Temple Mount plateau, with Israeli and Palestinian scholars working side by side, perhaps under United Nations supervision. Given Islamic sensitivities and current political realities, that is unlikely. So, too, is a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, at least in the near future. At some point soon, Middle East watchers agree, there is likely to be another eruption of violence, a third intifada. Bombs will explode, bullets will fly, and children on both sides of the long and bloody contest over the twice-promised land will die. And to think it would have ended more than a decade ago if Yasir Arafat had only found the courage to speak a single word: “Yes.”