The Last Man Read online

  Again her vehemence startled him. “It’s not quite the same,” he began, somewhat defensively. He couldn’t see her face in the shadow of sunset, but her voice was trembling.

  “You said it was. We were in the same boat, you said.”

  “Well, I guess we’re not, are we? I kept hoping, believing when no one else did that she was coming back. That she would call. E-mail. Something. When I finally realized she’d dumped me, I finally accepted it.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, I did nothing, for a while. Then my friends started to invite me to parties or outings where there was always an unattached woman. I went through the motions, but…”

  “Me, too,” she said, surprising him. “Same thing. But…”

  “Well, it’s not like I haven’t seen other women since then. I just haven’t met the right one to marry, that’s all. At least I’m looking. I finally recognized that you have to do something to make something happen.”

  She gave a snort of derision. “That’s what it is about you Americans, I think,” she said. “You think that every situation can be, I don’t know, what’s the English—fixed? Fixed as long as you do something. You people go all over the world fixing things, doing things, whether or not you should, whether or not the people involved even want them fixed. Iraq. Afghanistan. Who’s next, I wonder.”

  “Ah,” he said. He turned back toward the hostelry and started walking again, forcing her to catch up with him this time. He had to acknowledge, though: Her life right now might be precisely what she wanted.

  “Ah?” she echoed. “What does this mean, this ‘ah’?”

  “Never mind, Mrs. Ressner,” he said. “I guess I’m just another ugly American. You were right: I’ve been making assumptions. Please forgive me.”

  That silenced her, and she remained silent as they picked their way through the reeking patches of solidified alkaline wastes back toward the road. He got to the road first and waited for her. The tour buses were all gone, and the security floodlights up at the tourist center pointed hot white eyes at them. Her face was a white blur in the darkness along the empty road. He turned to head up toward the hostel.

  “Please go on,” she said. “What assumptions?”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “Yes!” A moment. “No. Please.”

  “It’s the romantic in me, I guess,” he said, trying to keep it light. “I assumed you were looking for love.”

  “What do you mean by love, Mr. Hall?”

  He smiled in frustration. Damned woman. Now she did want to talk. “Well, the older I get, the more I feel that love is an accommodation more than a pursuit. Two people who meet and like each other. As friends first, and then as lovers in the physical sense. Who grow to care for each other. Who can give each other affection. Who have enough similar interests that they can enjoy doing things together, but don’t get upset over being apart occasionally. Who’ve outgrown all those unreasonable expectations we had when we were starting out. Grown-up love.”

  She didn’t reply for a moment. “Yes,” she said finally. “That sounds like love to me. Except perhaps for the being apart bit.”

  “Well, if you live entirely alone, dwelling on or in the past, you are by definition being apart.” He paused and then said, “The folks I’ve known who kept themselves apart from life usually ended up on the bottle, or drugs, or in frequent contemplation of a premature exit.”

  He heard her sharp intake of breath as she stopped in her tracks and then turned to face outward toward the sea. He mentally kicked himself. He had touched a nerve. He stopped behind her, close enough to reach out and touch her shoulders, but kept his hands to himself. He looked out over the purpling waters. He could just detect the scent of her hair on the evening breeze. What are you doing? a warning voice in his head asked.

  “You have to be out there for love to happen, Judith Ressner. Memories are simply not enough to sustain life, not until you get very old.”

  She didn’t reply for a minute, and when she did it was in a very soft voice. “They are very good memories.”

  “Want to tell the ugly American about them?”

  Surprisingly, she did. She sat down on a flat-topped boulder, and he did likewise, startled by the residual warmth in the stone. He noticed that, sitting together, they were the same height.

  She told him about her short life with Dov Ressner: the way they were so evenly matched intellectually, he the physicist, she the linguistics historian, not having to protect each other from the sharp edges of their own intelligence; their casual, almost bohemian existence after he finished his schooling and went to work for the government, while she worked to achieve the Ph.D. She described their mutual love of the outdoors and diving, their expeditions to Eilat and Caesarea, and the many recreational dives they shared along the Mediterranean coast of Palestine and in the Red Sea.

  Then she talked of how, as time passed, he had become disillusioned about what was really going on at Dimona, struggling to live up to his promises of keeping the government’s secrets but making it clear that he felt he was being used to facilitate something truly awful.

  “I probably should not be speaking about that,” she said.

  David knew a great deal more about Dimona than he was willing to let on. “Well, you’re right about Dimona,” he said casually. “I mean, that’s hardly a secret anymore. Everyone assumes Israel has a nuclear weapons capability, which is the whole point of the exercise. Nuclear weapons are basically useless except as a deterrent. If people don’t think you have them, then having them is pointless.”

  “Yes, but there is a difference between your assuming it and a government scientist coming right out and stating it as a fact.”

  “Your husband did that?”

  “Not … precisely, but he did take part in an anti-nuclear-weapons demonstration once. That caused a lot of trouble, for both of us. We even argued about it before he did it—and after. The site management took it as a major security breach. We had to spend some time with some very unpleasant officials. I thought we were going to lose everything, and I had not finished my Ph.D. yet. Our income, our apartment, everything depended on his job. Yet…”

  “For him, it was a matter of principle?”

  “Yes, exactly, and one of the most appealing things about Dov was that he was a principled man.”

  “How did you fix it?” he asked.

  “Fix it. That word again.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “No, actually, ‘fix it’ is an Israeli concept, too. Dov had a friend in the LaBaG who became something of a mentor, really.” She looked sideways at him. “Your interlocutor, Professor Ellerstein? He emigrated from America. He is a mathematician. He actually worked at Dimona for a while. He was sympathetic to LaBaG’s cause, but the fact that he was a member of LaBaG was a secret. I think that’s why he left Dimona, finally.”

  David’s brain was churning. He knew some of this, courtesy of Ellerstein, but didn’t want her to know that he knew.

  “Anyway, he ‘fixed’ it. Dov had to make amends, had to do some publicity work to restore the peaceful image of Dimona. Still, for several months, it remained very difficult for us, both at work and at home. Dov kept telling me that the program out there had gotten out of hand. That they were reaching for something they did not need. In the end, though, they needed him, so they kept him on.”

  “Some of the frustration must have come because he realized that someone else’s survival depended on his keeping a paycheck coming. Namely you. That all those lofty principles of his might have to be compromised, because to persist might be putting his wife in danger.”

  She turned to look at him. She has truly beautiful eyes, he thought, as she registered pleasant surprise.

  “You are perceptive, David Hall,” she said. “Yes, that was exactly correct. He made amends. He did insist that he would only work on peaceful uses for atomic energy: power plants, medical research, things like that. Never weapons. Dov was
good at that: taking a position, but then making people come around to his point of view by his obvious sincerity. I think there were other scientists out there who felt the same way, but Dov was the one who did something. Sometimes I think that the work he was required to do might not have been so clear-cut. I always had the sense that he had uncovered something else, that he knew more than he would tell me, but I also knew better than to ask. Our life was happy again, with just this one strange thread woven through it. Then one day”—she stopped and took a deep breath—“he was just … gone.”

  David wondered fleetingly if something bad had happened to rebel scientist Dov Ressner. Something bad that had nothing to do with radiation accidents. He could just imagine the kinds of people who might be working security for Israel’s nuclear program. The modern-day descendants of the Masada Zealots? What was their security organization called? Mossad? Bad MFs, from everything he’d read.

  “And ever since then, nobody’s quite measured up, has he?” he asked, trying for a safer direction.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know, really. That’s always an unfair comparison. We were just extremely well suited, that’s all. In every way. Marriage to Dov was so very easy. The only tension we had between us was physical, and the solution to that was wonderful. That’s what I mean about the memories.”

  “I have similar memories. Adrian was … difficult, but resolution was spectacular.”

  “Difficult how?”

  He let out a long breath. “She was too smart for her own skin. Everything I said was a challenge. For a while, it was interesting, exciting even. Then, truth be told, I got tired of the eternal sparring. I asked her once if she was always ‘on,’ and what it would take to have her turn all this intellectual fencing off.”

  Judith smiled. “How did that go over?”

  “A week of silence.”

  “What then?”

  “A week of the best sex of my life.”

  She smiled again. The transformation of her face was amazing, but then it faded.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I could never do that,” she said.

  “At some point, you must,” he said. “Even if you find a new guy, you must.”

  “A new ‘guy,’ as you put it, would not be interested in my lost husband,” she retorted.

  “The right guy would,” he said. “The right guy would have to accept your former marriage as a part of you. If he couldn’t do that, then he wouldn’t be the right guy.”

  “Then what would I do, Mr. Hall?”

  “Hell, look for another guy.”

  She smiled. “How very American. Always a solution: Do something until you get your way.”

  He laughed. “Well, yeah, persistence is an American trait, I suppose. That’s what we do. We want something, we go for it. It may take several tries and an expanding tolerance for failure along the way. We call that growing up, but we typically will give it a shot.”

  “You Americans are not embarrassed by failure, then?”

  “Sure we are. Just look at the state of politics in America right now. But some of us are even more afraid of regrets, as in, the thought of having never tried in the first place.”

  “Even if you think that what you are seeking may not ever happen again?”

  “Like you’ll never find another man as well suited to your love as the first man was? Well, what if he is out there and you never go looking? Do you really want to go out to the end of your life and then have to regret that you never even looked?”

  She stared down at her sandals.

  He remained silent, marveling that she had opened up. He was also surprised at himself. He could not figure out if he was attracted to her just because of her looks or because he was responding unconsciously to her need for an emotional bridge of some kind, a need that seemed to be missing absolutely in every female he’d met in Washington over the past few years. Get a grip, he reminded himself. You can’t afford to get involved with this woman. That’s not why you’re here. Focus, dammit.

  “It’s getting dark,” he said. “We’d better get back.”

  She nodded without replying, her silence implying that she was probably having second thoughts about revealing so much to this foreigner. They retraced their steps to the hostel building without talking. He was conscious that they had stepped beyond some barriers. Jesus, he thought, if she only knew …

  11

  At a quarter to one the next morning, David paused halfway up the siege ramp to catch his breath in the crisp night air. He bent over to ease a cramp in his side. The fortress loomed above him in the darkness, the edges of the ragged casemate walls tipped with gray starlight. The hike up through the ravines had taken slightly longer than two hours. He had slipped out of the hostel at ten, watched the observation point for a few minutes, and then walked down to the parking lot, from which he would have a clear shot up the southern ravine, retracing their steps of the morning. After an hour of steady climbing, he had reached the top junction, where the southern ravine met the western ravine. Which is when he had remembered that the army patrol had returned to the tourist center at midnight, emerging from this same area. It being just after eleven, he realized that the patrol might be headed back in toward the hostel even as he stood there on the slope about to start down into the western ravine, assuming they followed the same routine every night.

  He decided to find a clump of boulders and settle into the sand, after first poking around with his walking stick to run off any venomous wildlife. He shrugged his arms out of the backpack to give his back a rest for a few minutes while he waited. There was no way to tell if they would be coming through again, and, when he thought about it, it was doubtful they did follow the same routine every night. Dumb tactics if you were looking for bad guys. Predictable routines made for easy ambushes. On the other hand, this was the army: Dumb tactics were not entirely out of the question, although the Israelis were supposedly pretty good on the ground. He decided to wriggle his way down into the sand, in case they were using infrared scanning or night-vision devices. The deeper he was in the sand, the less the heat contrast. It was warmer, too.

  After twenty minutes of sitting in the total silence of the desert night, he started to fall asleep. Then he decided that they weren’t coming. He got up, brushed off the sand, remounted the backpack, and set out again for the ramp. His decision had been helped along by the fact that he had not heard any signs of the truck returning to the tourist center below. Besides, he was losing precious time—he needed at least an hour on the summit to set up and use his equipment.

  Now, poised on the steep slope halfway up the siege ramp to catch his breath, he almost couldn’t believe he was so close. After all the months of preparation, tonight might bring proof of the real reason why the defenders had chosen death over surrender. From his vantage point on the ramp he could see all the way down the widening mouth of the western ravine to his left, to the edges of the terrace palaces. A ghostly night bird called from somewhere up in the shadows of the ravine, and there was a slight stirring of the night air. He shivered. If ever a place was haunted, this place surely must be. Nine hundred sixty fugitives from seven years of brutal civil war had offered their throats to the knife rather than face capture, an act of desperation made more horrific by the fact that it had been fathers slaughtering wives and children. He could well imagine that tendrils of human energy remained behind after an event as horrifying as this one. He felt ghostly eyes watching him approach their ruined battlements.

  He stood up, wobbling a little with the effort of balancing the backpack, and continued up the slope to the western gate.

  * * *

  Judith jerked up in the bed with a muffled shout, her eyes wide open but momentarily unseeing. The nightmare had been terrifyingly vivid, ending with the sight of Dov, his back to her, slowly opening a large steel door, heedless to her shouts of warning as he was exposed to a green cauldron of radiation boiling over in a flare of unearthly light that first put him in s
ilhouette and then showed him as a skeleton, transfixed in the doorway, and then as nothing more than a humanoid wraith, leaving her shouting his name over and over but unable to move or make him hear.

  She gulped several breaths of air and then subsided back onto her pillow. The glowing door had been replaced by the blank wall of her room. Never before had she experienced a dream like that. Her chest was trembling, and her T-shirt was damp with perspiration. What on earth had brought that on? She thought back to her talk with the American. Maybe talking about Dov had evoked some long-hidden subconscious pain. She wanted to switch on a bedside lamp, but the austere hostel rooms had only the one overhead light. She rolled over and looked out the window, but there was only the shadow of the sand hill behind the building. A breath of cooler air came through the partially opened window. She decided she needed some fresh air.

  She got up and slipped on her jeans and sandals, considered and discarded the idea of a jacket, and went out into the corridor. She went downstairs and headed for the side door, not willing to take a chance on encountering some night owl from the hostel staff in just her damp T-shirt.

  The side door was a fire door, with a steel bar across the middle, and she looked for signs of an alarm system, but there were none. She opened the door into the cool night air and felt instantly relieved. Not wanting to be locked out, she fished in her jeans for something to stuff into the bolt receptacle, only to notice that there was already a piece of paper wadded in there. Frowning, she stepped back into the hallway and let the door close, then pushed gently on the door itself. It opened. Damned careless, this, she thought. She would have to speak to someone at the desk in the morning. For now, she took advantage, and went outside to get some fresh air and clear away the lingering images of her frightening dream.

  The night was dark, but there was good starlight, enough to see the ground. She walked out behind the building, glancing casually back at the hostel to see if there were any lights on, but the place was fully dark. The darkened mass of the fortress mountain loomed before her. The cable-car wire actually glinted in the starlight. A gentle breeze blew in from the western desert, pleasantly obliterating the sulfurous fumes of the Dead Sea.