The Last Man Read online

  “Did he indeed?” He looked at her for a moment. “Some principles are more important than others. I think your husband actually made an accommodation with his principles, Mrs. Ressner. Perhaps that bothered him.”

  “If he did, he never told me,” she said. Her chest felt tight. The man was frightening her, but she resolved not to back down.

  “Because he was not allowed to, you see. Many sincere men and women have had to put aside their principles and sometimes compromise their very souls to accomplish what has been brought forth out there in the desert. Do you know what some people call that place?”

  “Dimona? Of course. The Third Temple. The weapons are called the Temple Weapons. The final resort.”

  “Just so, Doctor. So many names. The Samson Option. The Temple Weapons. A ‘final solution’ all of our own making, yes? Such irony. Only this time we will be on the delivery side of the equation. The thing is, those who work there believe these things. They think it is all worth it, the excessive security, the cost, and, yes, the occasional human loss. They are zealous, and if we can believe Josephus, that’s what those Jews at Metsadá believed, too.”

  She looked down at the floor, unable to think of anything clever to say.

  He stepped to the door. “Remember, please call me if something seems wrong about this American.”

  She nodded but did not answer him. He opened the door by himself, went out, and closed it behind him. After a moment she sensed that he was still standing outside the door and discovered she had been holding her breath. She made a noise putting up the security chain lock, and only then did he go limping down the stairs.

  7

  David came out the hotel’s front door at five twenty the next morning and was surprised to find Judith already waiting for him. It was barely daylight, and the sun was not yet showing over the city’s skyline. She was driving an elderly white Subaru station wagon. David felt a momentary pang of regret for the spurned Mercedes. He lugged his gear around to the hatchback and stuffed it in. She had brought only one small bag and a portable computer. He got in the passenger seat and said good morning.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hall,” she replied in a cool tone of voice as she maneuvered out of the hotel’s circular driveway. There was very little traffic, and she piloted the small car at a smart clip through the city’s streets. David was dressed in khaki trousers, low-cut sneakers, and a long-sleeved white safari shirt with lots of pockets. He had aviator-style sunglasses and a sun hat. Judith was wearing jeans and a peach-colored sleeveless blouse. Her hair was pulled into a severe bun on the top of her head, and she wore oversized mirrored sunglasses that hid her eyes. She was bustier than he had remembered, but he quickly took his eyes off her figure.

  “We need to stop for some petrol,” she announced after a few minutes. Her English was accented, but not very heavily.

  “For which I’m paying,” he offered immediately, but she shook her head.

  “I have a university credit card,” she said. “Government discount. You can repay the university. Trust me: They will bill you.”

  “Okay.” He tried to think of something else to say but couldn’t, and she was not exactly a bubbling font of conversation. She pulled into a sidewalk gas station and got out to take care of fueling the Subaru. David had been about to get out and do it, but she was acting as if he were not even there. He got out and bought coffee instead. He raised the small cup in her direction, but she shook her head emphatically. Right, he thought. Isn’t this going to be fun.

  In five minutes they were on their way. She told him the trip would take about two hours, and then lapsed back into silence as she concentrated on getting them out of Tel Aviv. She took the main highway up toward Jerusalem and then continued right back out of the capital city on Highway 30, which, according to the multilingual road signs, led toward Amman, Jordan. Once out of Jerusalem, the countryside changed rapidly, evolving from city buildings to high sierra desert almost immediately. On the rocky hills above the road there were occasional clusters of white apartment buildings, interspersed with rocky pastures dotted with goats. He assumed the distant buildings were the notorious West Bank settlements to which the Palestinians objected.

  “Are there good roads all the way to Masada?” he asked.

  “Metsadá,” she said, correcting him. “Near the cities, yes. Along the Dead Sea, they are so-so. We’ll take this road to Highway 90, and then we’ll go south, past Qumran and Ein Gedi, right along the Dead Sea.”

  “Professor Ellerstein said you were a specialist on this site. Do you go down there often?”

  “No. I haven’t been to the mountain for years. My academic focus is not the site; I study the relationship between the scroll fragments found at the site and the scrolls of Qumran, actually.”

  “There is a relationship?”

  She sighed impatiently. “There is a body of thought that holds that the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls were not created by the so-called Essene community, but rather that they are a collection of scrolls brought down from Jerusalem in the final days of the Second Temple.”

  “Just before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, around A.D. 70.”

  “Of course.” As in, yes, of course, dummy.

  David put on his sunglasses. The glare from the surrounding countryside was growing with every minute of sunlight as the day began. Everything out there, sand, rocks, cliffs, seemed to be painted in dazzling shades of white. He figured that they were headed almost directly east, and evidence of human habitation was getting scarce. David recalled some lines from the Bible about scorpions, sand, and stones, and he could now appreciate the reality of it. It was also getting hotter by the minute as the sun rose. He glanced over at the console and saw a button for air-conditioning. She must have seen him looking.

  “There is no air-conditioning at Metsadá, Mr. Hall, at the site, of course, or in the hostel. I recommend you acclimate yourself to the heat. And I hope you brought a jacket.”

  “I did. I’ve been in the desert before.” She didn’t reply, and he decided to quit trying.

  He saw more road signs for Amman, Jordan, in Hebrew and English, and also for Ein Gedi and Qumran. After another thirty minutes of increasingly heavy truck traffic, the road finally bottomed out and they came to the highway that led south along the western edge of the Dead Sea. Fifteen minutes later she pulled off the road by a sign that said KHIRBET QUMRAN and drove up a dusty hill that led to a tourist information center. There were some low cliffs above and beyond the building, and when he saw the caves, David realized that this must be the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls discoveries back in 1947. He decided not to ask her if he was right. She pulled up next to the building.

  “It’s not open yet,” she announced, “but the public toilets are always open. It’s another half hour or so down to Metsadá.”

  She walked around one side of the building, and David went to the other side to pump bilges. When he came back out, an army jeep was coming down a dirt track leading from the bare cliffs and ruins behind the tourist building. The jeep wasn’t going very fast, but even so it was raising an enormous cloud of dust. Judith came out from the women’s room and waited for the jeep, which pulled up next to her. Two bored-looking soldiers sporting submachine guns spoke in Hebrew to her for a few minutes. From their bantering tone of voice and easy smiles, it was apparent they were a lot more interested in talking to an attractive woman than in any issues of security. One of them gestured toward David, and Ressner’s reply provoked some more smiles. After a few minutes they broke it off, waved good-bye to her, and then turned the jeep around and headed back up the hill, followed by their trusty dust cloud.

  Judith returned to the car without further comment and got in. David joined her. The sun was fully up now, and the little car had become an oven in the few minutes of their stopover. Once they were back on the highway, David wiped his brow and asked if there were army outposts all along the Dead Sea.

  “Along this road, the army guards Qumran, Ein G
edi, and Metsadá, Mr. Hall,” she replied. “Primarily the major tourist sites. It supposedly makes the tourists feel safer, and it also discourages the treasure hunters.”

  “Is treasure hunting still a big problem out here in the desert?”

  “Yes, it is. The Bedouin do most of the poking and digging, as they have been doing for centuries. It was a Bedou shepherd who discovered the original Dead Sea Scrolls. Also, there is a thriving market for antiquities in the cities.”

  David wished he had positioned the water bottles in the backseat instead of in the way-back of the car. He hoped there was a concession stand at the Masada visitors center, because he was also getting hungry, a hunger accentuated by the fact that there was absolutely nothing out here in this shimmering wasteland except the coppery expanse of the Dead Sea on their left and lots more sand, stones, and scorpions on the sterile escarpments to their right.

  The Dead Sea was appropriately named. It was in reality a salt lake that was roughly four hundred square miles in area, lying in the northernmost reaches of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, between Israel and Jordan. At over 1,300 feet below sea level, the Dead Sea was the lowest topographical point on earth. There were no fresh and cooling breezes coming in from the water, only the stink of sulfur and assorted halogens, a residual, he surmised, of the destruction of Lot’s wife and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. The biblical legends took on a little more substance when you could actually smell the lake. The Jews of old had called it Lake Asphaltites, because it threw up gobs of bitumen from time to time.

  “Tell me, Mr. Hall,” she said, speaking up over the wind noise from the opened windows. “How much do you really know about the history of Metsadá? The place, not the events.”

  David had been expecting this question. He had even prepared enough of an answer to satisfy her that he was not totally ignorant, without revealing the true extent of his knowledge.

  “The name Masada—Metsadá—means ‘fortress,’” he recited. “It was built upon a huge outcropping of rock at the southern end of the Dead Sea, half a mile long and an eighth of a mile wide, in the shape of a broad spear point. On the Dead Sea side, it rises about twelve hundred feet from the water. On the other, western side, it is about four hundred feet to the bottom of the uphill gorge. It was probably first occupied by Alexander Jannaeus, and then King Herod added to it with palaces, storehouses, and a curtain wall with battle towers all around the top rim. When the first Jewish revolt began in A.D. 66, a band of Zealots seized the fortress from its Roman garrison and began guerrilla raids around the countryside. When Jerusalem fell in A.D. 70, the remnants of the city’s defenders and their families fled south to join their allies on the mountain.

  “The Romans followed the next spring and began a siege that lasted for over two years. Since the mountain was impregnable to direct assault, and well stocked with water and supplies, it should never have been taken, but the Romans built a dirt ramp on the uphill, or western, side of the fortress and then moved a siege tower into position on the ramp to break down the walls. After a protracted fight, the defenders realized that they were going to be overrun, so they elected to commit mass suicide rather than surrender to the Tenth Legion. Of about nine hundred and sixty defenders, only two women and five children survived. The fortress fell in either A.D. 73 or 74, and the Romans occupied the site for the next several decades before finally abandoning it. There were Byzantine settlements on the mountain a couple of hundred years after that.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “What primary sources have you studied?”

  “Well, I’ve read the Yigael Yadin final reports of the Israel Exploration Society’s archaeological expedition in the early sixties, and of course I’ve read Flavius Josephus’s first-century A.D. history of the Jewish Wars. The Roman historian Tacitus.”

  She nodded again. “You are limited to American English, I presume?”

  “Yes, I am. Limited.”

  She gave him a quick glance. “I did not mean anything critical by that, Mr. Hall. It’s just that there has been a lot more written about Metsadá than the sources you mentioned, primarily in German but also, of course, in Hebrew. In my experience, nonacademic Americans are usually not literate in other languages.”

  David chuckled. “Have you had a lot of experience with Americans, Mrs. Ressner?”

  “Not really, Mr. Hall. I have not traveled outside of Israel except for university and a brief honeymoon trip to Cyprus. Most of the Americans I have seen are tourists.”

  He nodded. “I live in Washington, D.C. We have thousands of tourists there every summer, and the crowds can be a royal pain. The reason I asked is that you seem to dislike Americans.”

  She was silent for almost a minute, negotiating a series of curves in the highway. When the road straightened out she answered him.

  “Not dislike, Mr. Hall. Resent, perhaps. We all know Israel is a client state of America, and dependency does not engender affection. We, too, feel that the hordes of tourists are a royal pain, as you put it, but we desperately need their money. The problem is that our two countries’ appreciations of the political realities here in the Middle East are quite different, but yours often governs, does it not?”

  “Well, I can understand that this trip probably falls into the category of a royal pain, too, Dr. Ressner. I hope you know that I did not request a minder.”

  She shrugged.

  “What are your instructions, if I may ask?”

  She looked at him again, although he could not see her eyes behind those mirrored surfaces.

  “I’m not sure that is any of your business, Mr. Hall. To keep you from doing any harm to the site would about sum it up, I suppose.”

  David grimaced. On one hand, he needed to keep this woman at arm’s length and in the dark about what he was up to; on the other, he disliked the fact that she was being so standoffish, if not outright hostile.

  “Doctor—may I call you Judith, by the way, since we’re going to be together for nearly a week?”

  “Mr. Hall, I would prefer Doctor, or Mrs. We Israelis are quite informal, but our relationship is going to be very much business, not personal, okay?”

  “Fine, Mrs. Ressner. By all means, let’s not get personal. I’m sorry you’re so insecure about American informality.”

  “I am not insecure about anything, Mr. Hall.”

  “Given that you got tagged with being my babysitter, that necessarily must not be true,” David snapped and then regretted it.

  What the hell am I doing, he thought—the more formal their relationship, the better chance he would have of getting away from her. You wouldn’t have said that if she were a he, he told himself. The “she” did not reply, concentrating instead on her driving.

  He gave up. After a little while they passed a sign for Ein Gedi, but she drove right past it. He wondered why they hadn’t stopped there instead of Qumran. Then they rounded a corner and he could finally see the mountain fortress of Masada looming up above the Dead Sea some ten miles distant.

  It was as impressive in real life as in any of the many dramatic photographs Adrian had shown him. From their vantage point northeast of the mountain it looked like the looming bow of a stone ship, frozen in passage up the west coast of the Dead Sea, its sheer walls rising straight up over one thousand feet above the dunes and bromine marshes. At this distance he could not yet make out the ruined palaces of King Herod that he knew were perched on descending, stepped terraces facing them. To the right, or west, were the shadowed recesses of the Wadi Masada, a four-hundred-foot-deep ravine dammed up now by the bleached bulk of the siege ramp the Romans used two thousand years ago to conquer the fortress. Farther west and slightly above the ravine was a sloping plateau, which David knew contained the outlines of the main Roman camp’s walls, with other perfectly square outposts scattered on the plateaus overlooking the fortress, or in the ravines beneath it. He remained absorbed with the mountain as she sped down the dusty two-lane road, deciding that he would talk to his minder
only when it was necessary.

  The Masada visitors center was a single-story glass and metal building, which also served as the boarding station for a cable car that went up to the summit. A two-story barrackslike building was set off to one side. There were expansive parking lots, empty at this hour, except for two army vehicles. The sky was still clear in the glare of the morning sunlight, but David sensed that it would soon develop a blistering haze. A large thermometer mounted next to the front entrance gave the temperature in Centigrade. It was showing 39.

  Judith parked the car, and they got out. It was just after eight o’clock, and there were signs of life in the visitors center and even the smell of coffee.

  “The cable car will not start running until the first tour bus arrives, and that is another hour or so away,” she announced. “We can go in and see to our rooms.”

  “Fine.”

  She led the way up the steps from the parking lot and into the visitors center, which was basically a ticket lobby for the cable car, with a small restaurant on the side nearest the mountain. There was no one at the ticket counter, so Judith went into the restaurant and found the hostel clerks having breakfast. David could see through the restaurant’s doors that one table was occupied by six Israeli soldiers, their ubiquitous submachine guns all slung over the backs of their chairs. An annoyed-looking clerk followed Judith back out to the lobby, wiping doughnut sugar off his chin as he opened a booking register.

  “Papers, please,” he said to David, who handed over his travel documents.

  “Where is the hostel?” David asked.

  “Through there, in the annex,” the clerk announced in a bored voice, pointing with his chin. “First floor or second?”

  “Ground floor,” David replied immediately.

  “Second,” Judith said.

  “Individual or group?”

  At the moment they were the only visitors, which meant that they had a choice of individual or the cheaper group bunkrooms. They both requested individual rooms. The clerk briefed them on the hours of the restaurant, pointing out that it was not open at night, closing when the last tour buses left in the afternoon. David realized that this meant his main meal would be at midday. He would have to stash some fruit and bread in the room for the evening. The clerk also pointed out that bottled water was for sale, and he recommended laying in some for their rooms.