The Last Man Read online

  “And he has covered the ground? Seen everything he wanted to?”

  “I think so. We’re not done yet, of course.” She had a sudden, alarming thought: Should she tell the colonel that Hall was up on the mountain by himself?

  “You are always with him in his excursions, yes?” Her throat went dry. Instinctively, she stalled.

  “I’m sorry, Colonel. I’m standing in a crowded lobby. Many tourists. Can you say your question again?”

  “Are you with him in his excursions?” The colonel’s voice was cold and very clear. “He is escorted when he is on the site, yes?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” she lied, suddenly afraid. She had just assumed …

  “Very good. Remember, call that number if there are any false notes. I may not be here, but my people will find me. You still have my card?”

  “Yes, I do, Colonel.” She hoped. Somewhere, anyway.

  “Very well, Dr. Ressner.” The dial tone appeared.

  She put the handset back onto its cradle and walked slowly over to the restaurant. All the tables were taken, but she threaded her way through the crowded room and peered out the big picture windows at the mountain. Should she go up there? It would be so damned obvious that she was checking up on him. There were the security guards, of course. Maybe call them, ask if they could see him, wandering around the site? He was going into the casemate walls, though. They would have to go search. Make a big deal. She decided to leave it alone. The old colonel was a little crazy to think this American was some kind of spy or something. That was nonsense.

  * * *

  The temperature inside the cavelike cistern was a good twenty degrees cooler than the outside, and the sunlight streaming in over his shoulder from the hole looked like the beam of a movie projector in a dusty theater. He slid across a mound of loose sand and wiggled his way down to the bottom. Maybe fifteen feet to the roof and twenty feet from front to back wall, and nothing in the hole but dry sand and a stinking substance he finally identified as bat guano. He looked up at the ceiling but did not see any bats.

  He tried to recall the diagrams in the Yadin report. There had been several of these small cisterns shown along the eastern and southern rims, which was topographically the lower, or downslope, edge of the plateau. In some cases the defenders had built well structures above them to service their living quarters in the casemate walls, but this was certainly not the giant cavity that had shown up on his screen last night. In fact, this cavity had not shown at all. Well, okay, he thought, that was a vertical refraction shot. The side edges of the big cavity hadn’t shown up, either. He walked around, looking for any signs of there being anything here but a dry hole, but there was nothing but soft sand on the bottom. He stood still in the middle of the bottom area. The water came down off the hill, collected in that shallow pool, which probably slowed it down, and then funneled into the Byzantine building, perhaps into a small bathing area, or a stock lagoon or other agricultural impound, and then the overflow went through the two channels across the floor of the casemate wall system, out the aperture in the wall, and down here into this cistern.

  Okay, so where did the overflow from here go? His research had shown that the rains in this end of Africa’s Great Rift Valley came only in the winter, but when they came, there was sometimes a deluge. The Yadin books had a picture of a flash flood going down the normally bone-dry western wadi, looking like a churning brown Niagara Falls, so he knew what quantities of water might come down across that hill. Yet there was no water in here. He looked back at the hole. Okay, so perhaps over time the rains had washed out the front opening used by the cistern diggers. The cavity would fill with rainwater, and most of it would spill out the opening, leaving a pool in the back to evaporate over the intervening eleven months.

  He climbed back to the main opening and saw that indeed there were traces of a gully below it. A gully meant erosion, which meant water. All right, that computes. So where was the entrance to the big cavity? He had a distressing thought: Maybe the cavity wasn’t a big cistern after all, but simply a hollow cave in the mountain that had had nothing to do with water. In which case, there would be no entrance. He swore, then crawled back down the sand, squatted at the back bottom of the bowl-shaped cistern floor, and tried to reconstruct the image from last night. Except for the ammonia stink of the bat guano, the deliciously cool air in the cave felt like air-conditioning. He wondered if anyone had seen him slip out through the eastern gate. He also wondered if Judith was going to be coming up here to see what he was doing, but he doubted that. She said she had some translations to work on, and she also seemed to be a lot more relaxed about his intentions for this visit.

  He caught himself in a giant yawn. Up all damn night. Stumped, he decided that this was a perfect place for a nap. He stared around at the bottom again, making sure there were no hostile creatures with the same idea, and then looked at his watch. Eleven thirty. Grab an hour or so of sleep, putter around up top some more, and then go back down. Have to come back tonight when he would be free to explore the surface buildings again. Maybe a flashlight would reveal what could not be seen in the light of day. He simply had to find the entrance. Assuming there is one, his internal Doubting Thomas reminded him.

  And if there isn’t one? He quashed the thought. It wasn’t as if he had all the time in the world. All he could do was to keep trying. The big difference now was that he knew the big cavity, cistern, cave, or something, was there. He yawned again, pulled up a small hill of sand for a pillow on the front slope of the cave floor, positioned his hat, lay back, and closed his eyes.

  He awoke with a start to the sound of voices, nearby voices. He sat up, disoriented for a moment, before remembering where he was. He realized the voices were speaking German. That mob that had come to stay in the hostel. Bunch of gung-ho German kids. They had probably climbed the Serpent Path. He shook his head and looked at his watch and did a double take. It was almost two thirty in the afternoon. So much for an hour’s nap. Time to get down the hill before Judith got suspicious. Then he had a bad thought: You better hope she hasn’t been wandering around the surface, looking for you.

  As he straightened to get up from his sandy bed he realized suddenly that his buttocks were wet. Wet? He felt the seat of his pants. Definitely wet. Noxious, too, he discovered as he smelled his hands. Ammonia, or worse. Bat urine? Oh, wonderful. He had bedded down in a bat manure pile. He stood up, reluctantly brushing off his backside, but when he looked down he stopped brushing. There, in the depression made by his buttocks, was the sheen of water. Standing water.

  Whoa, he thought.

  I wonder.

  He squatted down and dug at the depression, pulling away sand until he had a hole slightly more than two feet deep, which immediately filled up with water. He was about to give it up when his fingertips felt something hard—and smooth. The sun had long since gone over to the western side of the mountain, so he couldn’t see much in the dimming light of the cistern. Definitely should have brought a flashlight. Whatever it was, it was smooth, almost like polished stone. Maybe even metal.

  He stood up again and looked around. He was standing in the lowest point of the chamber, toward the back of the cave. He had to get down to the visitors center, reestablish contact with Judith, tell her all about his stimulating hours on the mountain, eat the one substantial meal of the day, take another nap, and then get back up here again tonight. This cave had to be the way in. The big question remained: Into what? He stepped up the slope of sand and out into the light of day. Once outside he sat down in the dry sand, squirming around to see if that might disguise the fact that he had soaked the back of his pants. There was, he realized, no disguising the aroma. Pray for an empty cable car down, and time to get to his room before he ran into Judith.

  13

  At 9:00 P.M. David lay in bed, fully clothed, recalling the hasty descent from the mountain earlier in the afternoon. He had hoped to shuck the eau de bat-crap without running into anyone, and, for the mo
st part, he had succeeded, although some of the American tourists had commented about the smell in the cable car. He had planted himself at one end of the gondola and kept his mouth shut, not wanting them to know he was an American. He was painfully amused by their immediate assumption that he could not understand what they were saying, but did not delay in getting to his room and changing the offending trousers, which he washed out in a deep sink in the bathroom.

  Judith had been waiting for him in the restaurant and was pleasantly conversational about his day on the mountain. She did manage to steer the conversation around to the subject of when they would go back.

  “I’d like to go up one last time in the morning,” he had replied. “Stay until about noon, maybe one o’clock, and then we can hit the road, if that’s okay. I’ll hike up the wadi to the ramp, maybe before sunrise.”

  She agreed, although she cautioned him that it was not permitted for anyone to leave the hostel before full daylight. He promised to observe the rules. After their meal, they walked again down to the shores of the Dead Sea and talked mostly about the history of ancient Israel and how many parallels remained with contemporary times. Their walk was cutting into his naptime, but, refreshed by his rest in the cistern cave, he was content to walk with Judith and listen to her talk. She seemed to need to talk now, he realized, and after her personal revelations during their last walk, she was much more at ease. He had learned the value of being a good listener from Adrian, who’d always been surprising him with the range of things she knew something about. Besides, he liked being with Judith. She was so damned serious about everything that he was itching to poke a little fun at her, get her to lighten up a little, but he had sensed that if he did, she’d get offended and go back into her prickly shell.

  They had walked up and down the grainy multicolored sands, stepping around salt-encrusted pools reeking of sulfur and halogen compounds. About a half mile south of the fortress, out of sight of the hostelry, there were some windowless concrete buildings, two squat steel tanks, and one tall tank, all surrounded by barbed-wire fencing. Clouds of steam were rising from vent pipes on one of the buildings. Judith explained that there were many mining operations along the Dead Sea, some of which used the heat from geothermal vents to concentrate minerals before the final extraction process. There was almost no vegetation growing along the seashore itself, and only sparse, stunted trees and thorn bushes populated the edge of the coast road. The sea itself was purplish in color, only grudgingly reflecting the hues of a glorious sunset shaping up over the Judaean hills. David was surprised to observe seabirds soaring here and there and wondered what they ate in this lifeless part of the world. Judith prattled on about the difficulties of getting things done in an academic bureaucracy while he mentally rehearsed tonight’s expedition back to the fortress.

  He would have his backpack and the flashlight this time. He needed something to dig with, to clear the sand away from the bottom of the cistern cave, but he thought he knew how to solve that problem once he got up there. He also had to take his diving harness and the wire rope in case there were no steps down into that big cavity. A good bit of weight to hump up that damned ravine, but tonight he needed real equipment, and a camera, in case there was something in there. In case, hell. There had to be.

  Now, what about La Ressner? She was the closest professional archaeologist. He had just about decided to include her in the project, assuming he found something other than a big empty hole. Adrian had been totally convinced that the whole point of the Masada legend was that they’d been protecting something incredibly valuable, some religious artifacts being more likely than a heap of gold. He promised himself he would tell Judith if he did find something and then let her call in the pros. She, hell, all of them, would be furious with him for going up there on his own, for doing precisely what he had promised not to do—intrusive exploration, sneaking around at night, and, worst of all, digging, the cardinal sin of archaeology: an amateur putting spade to ground. Even worse than worst, finding something important. That said, he suspected that if the find was big enough, all would be forgiven in the excitement of the discovery, as long as he let the professionals exploit the discovery. If he had been wrong all along, and the cavity on the screen was just an empty cave, well, he would fold his tents and steal away into the desert night, or rather, back to Tel Aviv, do some diving at Caesarea Maritima, and then slink home to Washington.

  A sudden assault by biting sand flies forced them to retreat to the hostel. The German kids had been organizing a picnic fire outside the building near the edge of the parking lot, and now David could hear soft singing coming through his single window. The night outside was still moonless, although tonight he would have to be more careful coming back down, as moonrise was around two. There had been no sign of the army patrol trucks when he had come up to his room. He peered out the window to see if the yellow rectangle of light coming down from Judith’s room upstairs was still visible, and it was.

  Ten minutes later he decided to make his creep. He rose from the bed, slipped the backpack on, and headed out the door and down the hallway toward the fire door. Besides the gear in the backpack, he carried a bottle of water and his walking stick. He paused to listen for sounds of someone in the bathrooms, then quietly walked to the fire door, opened it, and wedged another piece of wet paper into the bolt hole. He crept down the outside stairs to the ground and stopped. He listened again for sounds of anyone coming around this side of the building, but all he could hear was the sound of the kids’ party out front. With his eyes not yet night adapted, it was much darker out here than he had expected. He walked around to the back of the hostel building but this time went straight up the hill behind it, trying to keep out of the field of view of that observation post. He did not stop until he was over the first sand ridge and able to hunker down below the line of sight from the building.

  He peered back over the ridge and could see Judith’s window still lighted, but she was not in view. There were five other rooms with lights on the second floor, and three on the ground floor, but otherwise the building was dark. The observation box under the cable-car tower was also fully dark, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t manned. He waited for fifteen minutes, watching the box for the telltale signs of a cigarette, but there was nothing. There were still no army trucks in the parking lot, either. The flicker of light on the palm trees from the kids’ bonfire was the only movement around the hostel building. He decided to go for it and, crouching behind the sand ridge, began the hike up the southern ravine.

  * * *

  Judith put down her pen and rubbed her eyes. It was close to ten o’clock. She realized that she had been listening to the German kids singing out front instead of concentrating on her work, which was a sure sign that it was time to quit. She wasn’t really all that sleepy, but she really hadn’t been concentrating for the past half hour. Besides the distraction of the voices and guitar music out front, she couldn’t shake the building apprehension about going back to the university to face the chairman and his questions.

  She decided to go downstairs and perhaps sit out on the front steps of the hostel for a while. Get some fresh air and enjoy a little human contact. She smiled to herself as she reached for a sweater. Between her sojourns on the desolate beach with David Hall and talking to random tourists, security detail soldiers, and the kids staying at the hostel, she had had more social interaction in these few days than she had normally in a year at the university. She had almost forgotten the diversity of the human race, dealing as she did with the same small coterie of professional academics day in and day out. She stopped by the bathroom and then went out the hostel lobby corridor to the front steps.

  The kids were arranged in comfortable-looking clumps on blankets around a small bonfire. Two girls were strumming guitar, and another was playing a harmonica. Judith thought she saw some wine bottles being passed around and wondered where they had obtained wine at this desolate spot. They’re students, she remembered; silly questio
n.

  She sat in the shadows of the front steps for nearly an hour, her mind a blank screen across which images of times past flowed: growing up in Haifa, her own time at university, her days with Dov … and nights. Don’t forget the nights. What was it her next-door neighbor, a widow of the Yom Kippur War, had said: You never know, when they go out the door in the morning; you just assume they’ll be back at dark. David Hall, the American, was right, she mused. Going through the motions is no life at all. Leave it to an American to come right out and say it.

  She considered going back inside and down the hall to his door, to see if he might want to join her out here, but then dismissed the idea. He would think her much too forward. Besides, while he was obviously attracted to her, he seemed at the same time to be holding back. Attracted and interested were two different things. Yes, but to be interested there has to be at least an indication of a two-way street. She wasn’t sure she knew how to manage that anymore.

  The night air was cool and soft, and the bonfire, though subdued, warmed the night with its timeless, comforting light. She did not want to look up at the mountain, looming in the darkness over her left shoulder. Up there everything was dead. Down here there was life. She contented herself with just sitting there, if only on the edges of it.

  * * *

  It took David just under two hours to reach the western gate. Buoyed by a growing excitement, he had climbed steadily, passing now familiar landmarks along the way, waiting a few minutes at the top of the southern ravine to see if there were any patrols stirring but then pressing ahead. He had stopped again before ascending the ramp, just to make sure no one was advancing up the ravine or across the plateau of the Roman camp. There was only the night breeze, and the black shadow of bloody King Herod’s haunted mountain looming before him.

  He went up the ramp, crossed through the northern precincts of the western palace, and stood in a ruined archway for a moment, recovering his breath and looking down across the starlit stone slope. The battered white walls, scattered in haphazard clumps around the plateau, lay like bones in the starlight. Two thousand years ago. The Vision of the Dry Bones. He shook his head at the enormity of it and then walked down the slope to the eastern gate, where he dismounted the pack near the pile of scaffolding pipes and checked his gear. He wanted to switch on the flashlight, but once out that gate, even a small light could be seen for miles. So he switched off the Maglite, and it was darken ship until he was inside that rim-wall cistern. He walked over to the supposed olive grove site next to the Byzantine structures and found the historical marker sign, which he grabbed and worked out of the hard ground. One makeshift shovel, he thought, holding the sign in both hands. All he had to do was move some sand.