The Last Man Read online

  She sighed as she walked slowly over to the sand bluffs overlooking the parking lots. This was, what, Wednesday night. One more full day here on this ridiculous assignment, babysitter to David Hall, American philosopher, and then back to Jerusalem on Friday. In time for another glorious Sabbath, alone in her apartment. Alone in her life. As she stood on the sand, she pondered her unusual openness with this man. She had talked to him about Dov and the emptiness of her life as she had talked to no man, to no one, actually, in the five years of living alone. Why was that, she wondered. Because he was a foreigner and was soon, as he had pointed out, going to leave, to go back to that strange planet called America? Or because he seemed to be a sympathetic as well as an attractive man?

  She shivered in the darkness as she looked up again at the fortress. It had been different when she had been down here on digs. The hostel had not existed. There had been little more than a guard shack, with no cable car or even parking lots for tour buses. They had camped in semipermanent tents up on the western plateau next to the main Roman camp, courtesy of the army engineers. Their water had come through an oil company’s makeshift pipeline, and the weather had been atrocious, but there had been good times, too: nights around the fire like in the kibbutzim. Stories, academic gossip, deep intellectual arguments. The comradeship of the profession.

  The symbolism of the expedition had been hard to avoid. Even Yadin had commented on it in the reports from his earlier excavations. With their camp cheek by jowl with that of the Roman army, and the IDF’s temporary cable lift for tools and machinery mounted on the siege ramp itself, the parallels were hard to miss: They were the new besiegers, digging in the dust of the centuries to find—what? Proof of Josephus’s tale? Artifacts? Treasure? Some indication of how those miserable men, as Josephus called them, could have steeled themselves to do what they had done rather than surrender. Was this what the American had come to find out, too? The whole grim story had remained lodged in myth until the Yadin expedition had found what looked very much like the ten lots described in the story of the Last Man, told in meticulous, bloody detail by Josephus, the turncoat. The Last Man, who would go among the dead and dying, to “extend the privilege” to anyone who might require it, before then thrusting his sword through himself with all his strength.

  She shook her head, as if in defiance of all the brooding sadness up there. Israel: Your history is written in blood like no other nation’s, and from the beginning of time, too. She had begun to wonder lately if she should get out of the archaeology business altogether, go find a job as a secretary or librarian, something that would lift her nose and her spirits out of the sanguinary past and into contemporary life before she became a complete ghost. Hall had said it, as only an American would be brash enough to say it: You are wasting your life, Judith; you’re compost in a hole. Not even Dov would want you to exist like this.

  Her breasts were cold with just the undershirt. She decided to go back in. Try again for sleep, and pray that the terrifying dream did not come back. That was part of her problem, she knew: not knowing what had really happened to Dov. And what had that security man with the skull-like face said? That she would never know. As she went through the door, she reached down for the piece of paper jammed in the lock but then thought better of it. She would leave it there, rub the manager’s fat face in it in the morning. What kind of security was this, anyway?

  * * *

  At one fifteen David stood just outside the ruined walls of the western palace, the backpack at his feet. He studied the gradual slope of rock that seemed to converge, like a very shallow amphitheater, on the small cluster of stub walls and rubble down by the eastern gate. From this elevation, he could see over the eastern casemate walls, across the glittering Dead Sea, and into the lumpy, dark foothills of Jordan on the other side.

  The question was this: If it rained up here, where would the runoff go? The top of the mountain was not flat. The major portion of the area between the southern fortifications and the entrance to the northern palace-villa, nearly five acres by David’s estimate, consisted of a shallow, bowl-like—no, he thought, more like a shallow, tilted dish. He bent down to the backpack, and extracted a tennis ball. From his crouching position, he launched it gently down the slope and watched to see where it would go. The white ball, barely visible in the starlight, bumped across the rough surface, hitting some small stones but rolling in almost a straight line directly to the mound of rubble surrounding what looked like a shallow pool about fifty feet back from the entrance to the eastern gate. He went down there, retrieved the ball, and repeated the exercise three more times from different positions at the top of the slope. Each time, the ball ended up near or in the same mound of rubble.

  Okay, that computes, he decided. Now, if that’s where the water would go, and I’m right about all this, there should be another cistern, something a hell of a lot bigger than that pool, somewhere under this slope. It can’t be too close to the gate, or the Yadin expedition would have found it. They had found and mapped all of the rim cisterns that pitted the eastern and southern wall of the mountain. What had attracted Adrian’s attention a long time ago when she had begun studying the mystery of Masada was that none of the rim cisterns would have tapped the biggest catchment area of the mountaintop. There had been speculation that the top of the mountain had been under cultivation in Herod’s time, but David did not accept that this had been farming in the traditional sense. Ornamental gardens and parks in the palace precincts, yes, but even two thousand years ago, there would have been no real topsoil up here on this barren wedge of rock. He knew that an inch of rain on a flat acre accumulated twenty-seven thousand gallons of water. So five, maybe even six acres of rocky slope would have produced a fairly decent runoff of water down there by that gate. He had seen no signs of drainage holes or channels when he approached the eastern gate from the Serpent Path, and he had been looking. More than ever, he was certain that they had not wasted that bounteous runoff. Adrian had been convinced that there had to be one more cistern, probably a natural cave system of some kind. Time to find out.

  He scooped up the ball, went back over to the backpack to extract the survey equipment, and then checked his watch. Twenty until two. He smiled as he began laying out the equipment, remembering the salesman’s curiosity as to why a nuclear engineer would want to buy a geologist’s seismic survey pack. He had told the man that he owned property up in the Shenandoah Valley and wanted to search one of his fields for caves. The salesman had recommended a refraction survey set, which consisted of a small explosive sound source, four geophones, a data collection unit, and a software package that would draw a vertical profile of the area under the geophone array from the data collected. Since he was doing a vertical survey, he placed the seismic source as close to the middle of the open area as he could figure, then placed the four geophones in a rough square around the source at a radius distance of about one hundred and fifty feet. Before placing the source, he scuffed the ground to expose bare rock and then found a large stone building block from one of the casemate wall sections to put on top of the source disk. Once he had the source positioned, he used his hat to gather sand from around the area to bury the source charge in order to deaden the sound.

  Returning to his backpack, he extracted a small coil of wire and made connections to the terminals on the side of the source disk. He stretched the wire out to its full extent, about sixty feet, and left it there while he went around to the four geophones and took the tape off their battery connections. He repeated the precaution of clearing away any sand or loose soil to ensure that the geophones were in contact with bare rock, raised their tiny stub antennas, and then placed a small stone on top of each one to maintain firm ground contact.

  Working quickly now, he set up his portable computer, using the backpack as a cushion, and then ran a cable between the computer and the data collection device, which he perched on a rock so that it was in clear line of sight of all four geophones.

  He stood
up and surveyed the layout. Geophones equally spaced around the source, the seismic source tamped with a good-sized rock, the data collection block in position to receive the signals from the geophones, the computer on and hooked up to the data collection block. Good. He took the spare battery for the computer over to where the end of the wire lay in the dirt and put it down. Then he walked around the geophone pattern and energized each one, getting a tiny green LED light in response showing readiness to record and transmit. He walked back to the data collection block and turned it on, checking to see that it was receiving a carrier wave on its first four channels.

  All right. He went back to the computer and brought up the data display program, which on-screen looked like nothing more than a piece of graph paper, with X and Y axes. Ready.

  He looked at his watch again. Two ten. Still feeling a nagging sense of concern about that army patrol, he walked all the way back over to the western wall gate, stepped down through the casemate stairs, and peered out over the siege ramp. He could see both ends of the deep ravine, but there were no signs of activity down there in the shadows. He wondered how many slave skeletons were buried under that ramp. The rubbled walls of the Roman camp were etched in gray spidery lines on the plateau opposite, adamantly foursquare after two thousand years.

  He walked quickly back up the stone steps and across the open space to his computer. Checking one more time that the device was ready to receive data, he went over to the end of the wire. He hooked up one conductor to the negative terminal of the battery, and then, pausing to take a deep breath, he touched the other conductor to the positive terminal. There was a flash of dull red under the big stone as the sand was blown out, and simultaneously a thump. He was glad he had piled the sand on top of the source charge: Otherwise that noise would have carried for miles in the still desert air. The rock had not moved, though, which meant that the bulk of the energy had gone down into the rock.

  He disconnected the wires, slipped the battery into the backpack, and walked back down to the source, rolling up the wire as he went. He picked up the large stone, scuffed out the black smear under it, picked up the scorched disk, and carried the stone back over to where he had found it. Then he went around and picked up each of the geophones, turning each one off and ejecting its batteries into the backpack. Finally he returned to the computer, kneeling down on the hard ground to examine the screen. He punched a few keys, confirmed that data was available, and then, again holding his breath, hit the DISPLAY command. His heart sank when the NO DATA message appeared on the screen.

  There had to be data. He hit the HELP key, which dropped a box of instructions. Do it again, he told himself. Slow down on the keyboard. Be precise. Then his heart started to pound when he saw the dancing cursor, beginning at the top of the virtual page, begin to scrawl fine, densely packed horizontal lines across the screen.

  One line.

  Five lines.

  Seven lines. Straight as a die, indicating solid rock.

  C’mon, c’mon, he thought. Don’t tell me this has all been for nothing.

  Then, on the eighth, a partial line, a space, and then a completion. He held his breath to see if it was simply a data anomaly. No—the ninth line, the cursor did the same thing, only the space in the middle of the line was infinitesimally bigger. As was the tenth.

  He felt a rush of excitement as the display continued to show, line by line, a large, very large cavity in the rock below. She’d been right, by God!

  No more theories: There it was, and it was big, as big as, if not bigger than, the northern wall cisterns. He stared down at the left-hand scale as the cursor descended down the screen, outlining a huge spherical cavity. When it had finally reached the bottom of the screen it was showing one hundred and eight feet vertical height on the cavity, with one end shallower, at about eighty feet. One edge of the cavity image was missing; he would have to figure out what that meant. There was no way of telling precisely how wide across it was, because the shot had provided only a single vertical acoustic profile. The geophones had a maximum separation of three hundred feet, so at least that wide. This damned thing wasn’t big: It was huge!

  He rocked back on his heels. The main thing was that it was indeed there, and, even better, it looked like the top of the cavity was within only a few feet of the surface somewhere over there, near the eastern wall. Precisely where, in relation to the sound source, was not possible to determine from the screen, but his experiments with the rolling ball gave him a pretty good idea.

  He closed his eyes, trying to visualize the huge cavern. At last, he thought. Adrian had studied and thought about the incredible history of this place for years, and here was the dramatic final piece of her theory. The story he’d told the academics was a cover. The truth was that Adrian had never been able to swallow the theory that the Zealots had died only to defend their personal honor. These were the survivors of the Roman holocaust at Jerusalem. These people had been the defenders of the last, great Second Temple. They were the Zealots, the wild-eyed Daggermen who had instigated the revolt against Rome in the first place. These had been men who had started a civil war with the superpower of their day over the issue of the Romans bringing graven images of their own pagan gods into the Temple precincts. They had been first and foremost fighters, not philosophers. She’d been convinced that there had to have been more to this tragedy, something else that drove them to their incredible mass suicide. She was certain they had been protecting a great secret, and now he had direct evidence of the place where they might have hidden it.

  From her study of the history, Adrian had been convinced they would have brought out holy objects from the Great Temple, religious scrolls, or even perhaps some of the fabled Temple treasures described in the Copper Scroll of Qumran, and they would have brought these things here, to Masada, the last stronghold, which they believed to be impregnable to direct assault and impervious to a siege. Her theory was this: When they finally realized that the Romans were, after all, going to take the place, they elected a dagger in the throat to ensure the Romans would never parade the sacred final relics of their god’s holy Temple in front of the barbaric mobs of faraway Rome.

  So why hadn’t the archaeologists found them? The Romans had never found anything of value, because Flavius Josephus, their principal apologist for the Jewish wars, would have mentioned it. Adrian had shown him pictures of existing Roman coins that depicted a triumphant soldier standing next to a palm tree, against which sat a despondent woman, surrounded by the inscription JUDAEA CAPTA. Adrian felt that these coins celebrated the destruction of Jerusalem, not Masada.

  Adrian had fixated on a single line in Yigael Yadin’s final report: The cisterns have not been explored. Subsequent digs had gone into the cisterns, but nothing of real interest had been found. He himself had looked into the main cisterns yesterday morning, and they were indeed, as Judith said, big dry holes, impressive feats of ancient engineering, undeniably, but still empty. On the other hand, if Adrian had been right about all this, there was a good chance that he might find their secret hoard in this enormous undiscovered cistern. The one she felt had to be there, because, otherwise, all that runoff water would have been wasted. The one that appears, he exulted, to be right where she thought it would be!

  He stood up. Time to get back to the hostel. Tomorrow he would come back up here, minus Judith, if he could manage it, and search for a way into the cistern. He hoped that if he found it, there would be steps cut into the walls like in the northern cisterns. If not, he had come prepared to lower himself on a wire, using his diving harness, if he had to. Assuming he could find the entrance during the day, he would stick to the schedule of going back down around three and going to bed early, and then he would come back up here tomorrow night to explore the cistern and see if he could discover what the Zealots had been protecting. He might find another empty hole, but his excited heart told him otherwise.

  He gathered up all the equipment, checked again to make sure that any signs of t
he seismic source explosive were gone, slipped into the backpack, and headed for the western gate. It was almost 3:00 A.M.; moonrise would come in about an hour. He wanted to be most of the way back to the hostel before then. He let himself through the western gate, went down the steel platform steps to the siege ramp, and paused for a few minutes to survey the ravines on either side and to listen. There was only the sound of the night breeze whistling gently through the latticework supporting the steps. The ramp stretched down in front of him like a competition ski jump.

  His adrenaline was pumping, but, by God, she had been right! All the professional explorers had missed the fact of another cistern, and a huge one at that. Much bigger than the ones on the northern face. Maybe too big to have been made by human hands: Probably it was a natural cavern and not a cistern at all. Maybe it had been unknown to even the Herodian occupants.

  He sighed. “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he muttered out loud.

  He retrieved his stick and set off down the ramp, trudging in short, sliding steps down the loose sand and gravel to keep his balance. Except for the strain on his thighs, it was still a lot easier than climbing up had been. He turned left off the bottom of the ramp and slid down the western edge of the ravine until he scrambled all the way to the bottom in a shower of sand and small rocks. He rested again for a few minutes and then set out to make the climb up the western ravine. It took him forty-five minutes to get to the junction at the southwest corner of the mountain. He was more tired than he had expected to be.

  Physical reality was setting back in, especially now that the excitement of discovery was wearing off. He topped the western ravine and stumbled over the crest, where, unbalanced by the pack and unexpectedly soft sand, he sat down hard and slid halfway down the slope of the south-side ravine, losing his stick. Pursued by a silent avalanche of sand and small rocks, he fetched up hard against a large boulder that knocked the wind out of him. What little wind was left, he thought. When everything stopped moving, he shrugged out of the backpack and flopped over onto his back in the sand to rest, after first making sure he hadn’t landed next to a snake. It was dark down here, but his eyes were fully night adapted and the starlight was much brighter. Amazingly, the sand was still warm, and he scrunched down into it.