The Last Man Read online

  The final objective for his Sunday walkabout was to find a camping supplies shop. He would need to set up a base camp at Masada from which to mount the dives, and after considering the empty and exposed terrain around the fortress, he had settled on using the rim cistern itself. It was not a place into which any tourists were likely to stumble, certainly not without a flashlight. The downside of this choice would be the need to hump the four heavy air tanks up that slope. The Yadin reports had mentioned a road, created by the army, cutting in from the coast north of the mountain and reaching up to the western plateau, where the ruins of the main Roman siege camp lay. If that was still there, he could maybe find a hiding spot near that for the vehicle. Then he would only have to haul the heavy tanks up the four hundred feet of the siege ramp instead of up the twelve hundred feet on the other side. Either way, he would need some tarps, a portable camp stove, water and food for forty-eight hours, and things like a sleeping bag, a camp shovel, toilet paper, and a first-aid kit. The usual stuff.

  By three he had located a trekking supplies shop after consulting a tour agent’s brochures. He placed a phone call from yet another tours shop. He told them what he needed and that he would be by to get it Wednesday afternoon. American Express? We can do that, Mr. Hall. We can deliver, if you want. For a small additional fee, of course. He told them to do that and gave them the name of his hotel.

  Throughout the afternoon, he kept one eye peeled for any signs that he was being followed or observed. A couple of times he thought he saw a familiar face in the crowd, or the same vehicle, but he couldn’t really be sure. Until he saw that overweight American woman again, across the street from the tour shop. He turned quickly and went back into the shop as if he’d forgotten something. From the shaded front windows he watched her go into the nearest shop, come back out, then walk quickly up the street.

  He sat down in one of the waiting room chairs and fanned his face, pretending that the heat had gotten to him. The pretty clerk behind the counter brought him a bottle of water, which he accepted gratefully.

  Sneaky bastards, he thought. Not a guy, nor a prowling government car, but a woman who looked like and sounded like another American tourist. He’d walked for a couple of hours at a pace that no fat lady could match, and yet here she was. Right across the street. Fancy that. Probably making the call right now—I’ve been made. He shouldn’t have made that quick turn back into the tours shop. Oh, well, he thought. Stay in character. The fat lady would have a backup.

  * * *

  “International Planning.”

  “Eyes Nine. I think I’ve been made. Eyes Thirteen is in place. Tell Skuratov.”

  “He’s an operative, then?”

  “I don’t think so, but…”

  “What has he done all day?”

  “Nothing, and he’s worked hard at it. The perfect American tourist. But…”

  “But.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, got it. Go home.”

  * * *

  On Sunday David had refined the front end of his plan. Assuming that any tails would have had enough after watching him be a duller-than-dogshit tourist for two days, he would go on the dives to Caesarea Maritima Monday and Tuesday, renege on Wednesday’s tour, and then, after picking up the car and packing out, decamp for Masada on Wednesday afternoon, timing his drive down to arrive on the Dead Sea coast road just after dark. His plan was to hide the car near the mountain, get all the gear up to the rim cistern during the night, then go back and sleep in the car until daylight and the first tour buses began rolling in. He would drive out to the coastal road, fall in behind a tour bus, park in the lot, join the gaggle of tourists, and take the cable car directly up to the fortress, hopefully keeping clear of the staff people in the hostel. Blend in with the tourists and wander around for a while, then check out with the site guards for a hike back down the Serpent Path. That would take care of the guards’ head count, and then he would simply disappear into the rim cistern.

  What about the rental vehicle? He would leave a note on the front seat of the car saying that it had broken down and that the rental agency had been notified and would be coming for it soon. He, the driver, had hitched a ride on a tour bus back to Jerusalem.

  From there, well, he would have to improvise. If the cistern contained artifacts, then he would need to get out and contact Judith to start the official explorations. Either way, he ought to know what he had by Thursday evening.

  He chafed at the thought of staying away from Masada for three more days, but he had to let all the bureaucratic dust from last week settle. The one thing he could not stand would be someone on his tail when he skipped town Wednesday. This was Sunday afternoon. Any way he looked at it, he had three more days to wait.

  He decided to have an early dinner and then study the Caesarea dive maps and refine his calculations for the dives in the big cave. He thought again about Judith as he rode the elevator downstairs. He still had her business card in his wallet. He was assuming that she’d come running if he found something dramatic in that flooded cave, but what if she became outraged and brought ministry cops instead? Maybe you ought to work on that problem, he told himself, especially since you have three days to kill before you make your move. Like what? Like call her up, see if you can make amends for what happened down there. At least make friends again. That way, when you do call her, you’ll have a chance of convincing her to come down there and see for herself what you’ve found. He knew exactly how to make her come to him: He’d tell her that she would be the archaeologist who saved the discovery from the amateur.

  He laughed as he walked out of the elevator doors, provoking some strange looks from the people waiting for the elevator. Now that’s really cynical, he thought, as he crossed to the lobby bar. You’ve tromped on her feelings once already, and now you want to set her up again. Well, maybe I just want to see her again. Yeah, right.

  He needed a drink.

  * * *

  At ten thirty Monday morning, Judith filed out of the chairman’s conference room behind Professor Ellerstein. The meeting had been blessedly short, thanks mainly to her taking the initiative as Ellerstein had suggested. She had almost laughed at the visible relief spreading over the chairman’s face as she covered the points. She would take on more teaching assignments, resume going along to support the digs, participate in the institute’s book projects, and even attend the dreaded international conferences. Ellerstein sat unmoving in his chair, his impassive face revealing no knowledge of how much of her little soliloquy had been prestaged.

  When she had finished, the chairman had been practically effusive in his praise, saying that he was just so delighted to have her rejoin her academic family and promising everyone’s support.

  Ellerstein wished her luck as they reached the corridor leading to her office. “I’m going to be on the campus for a few days,” he said. “I’m as delighted as the chairman, Yehudit. I know you probably don’t know exactly how you’re going to manage all this, but maybe just pretend you’re starting out all over again, and do the kinds of things a new faculty member would do.”

  “You make it sound so easy, Yossi.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “For a while,” he said, “you’ll simply have to go through the motions. Stop thinking about everything, and go live life. Spend time with people. See new people. Date attractive men. Sleep with some if you want to. You will think you are just going through the motions, but perhaps the motions will bring you back.”

  Judith was suddenly weary of all this personal exposure. Bring her back to what? “As always, I appreciate your support, Yossi,” she replied, a little more formally than she intended. Ellerstein smiled.

  “If you need more advice, you call me,” he said. “My advice is always free, and thus probably worth exactly what it costs you. By the way, what about the American?”

  She just looked at him. “What about the American? Surely you don’t think—”

  He put up his hands. “New thi
ngs, Yehudit. New directions. If he calls to apologize, don’t just cut him dead is what I’m saying.”

  “No, I won’t,” she said. “I’ll yell at him again.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, “but have a drink with him first. Then yell at him.”

  She smiled dutifully over her shoulder and went on down to her office, where she shut the door, dropped into her elderly leather chair, and then let out a big sigh. Yossi was precisely correct: It was one thing to announce that she was back among the land of the interested living. It was quite another to actually plunge back in. Go through the motions. Date some attractive men. Sleep with some. Really! An image of David Hall crossed her mind, and she felt herself blushing. Ridiculous. She decided a good place to start was with her messages. There was one: from the university parking office, reminding her that her campus sticker was expiring in three days. Ah, she thought. The important stuff.

  * * *

  David returned to the hotel at three o’clock Monday afternoon, tired but exhilarated by the morning dive at Caesarea. It had been two months since he had been in the water, and it had been a joy to dive again.

  He dumped his diving gear bag on the floor, extracted the wet suit, and went in to take a shower. His individual tour had turned into a group dive at the last minute, but he hadn’t minded. The undersea scenery had been spectacular, and there had been enough sunlight to really see. Besides, he would have happily followed their dive guide anywhere she wanted to take him. The submerged Roman port had been made into one of the world’s first underwater museums, with numbered sites marked across the entire area. Divers were given a tablet that had a map explaining the numbered sites. They had seen the base of Herod’s enormous seawall ashlars, immense stones weighing hundreds of tons and submerged by a third-century earthquake, extending in a great curve out into the dim sea. There were columns and statuary fragments everywhere and other evidence that many artifacts still lay beneath the swirling sands below. After the tour they had lunched in the restaurant called Herod’s Palace, with its second-story terrace and views of the sea and the walled Crusader city. The sea had been sparkling and lively enough to keep everything underwater moving.

  It won’t be like that in the cistern, he realized, a thought that diluted some of his enthusiasm.

  He cleaned all his gear with freshwater and then flopped down on the bed in a big sprawl and relaxed. Then he remembered to check the computer for signs of intrusion.

  He had put the laptop, stored in its briefcase, in the second drawer of the hotel room’s chest of drawers, nested in his underwear. Besides setting the counter to zero in the boot files, he had placed three grains of beach sand on a top corner of the outside case and then very carefully closed the drawer. When he opened the drawer, the grains were gone. Well, well, well, he thought. The maid snooping, or somebody else?

  He pulled the case out of the drawer, extracted the computer, and fired it up. He interrupted the boot sequence by pressing a function code key while the cursor was still blinking on the right side of the screen, then commanded the counter to display the count: 002. Once for this boot up, and once for the previous boot.

  Bingo. Someone had indeed taken a look.

  I wonder, he thought. Maybe the security people at Masada had found out that he had been into the rim cistern. If so, this wasn’t going to work at all. How could he find that out?

  Judith Ressner.

  Judith would certainly know something about a development like that. So call her—and ask her what? For that matter, would she even talk to him? You are no longer welcome in official Israel, Mr. Hall. Well, how about unofficial Israel? He thought it over.

  So maybe call her and just ask her to meet him for a drink. Don’t even bring up Masada. If there was a shit storm brewing, she wouldn’t return his call, or she might just to yell at him. Even if nothing was happening, she still might say no.

  Or she might say yes.

  Damn. More false pretenses.

  He got up and placed the call to her office. The department secretary, whose English was apparently limited, got the general idea of his name and the hotel number, but David didn’t hold out much hope for the rest of his message: Would she care to join him for a drink at the hotel this evening? He would send a car.

  When he hung up he felt even guiltier. Yet the part of his plan where he summoned her to the site and let her take over the discovery process made more and more sense. He had come here to make a discovery. He was halfway there. After that, he knew, he wasn’t qualified to exploit it properly from an archaeological standpoint. He remembered the pictures of the human remains found by the Yadin expedition. Scraps of bone and hair and disintegrated sandals embedded in the dirt and dust of centuries. A vital find that an amateur like himself might have trampled in his ignorance.

  Calling her in would be a dicey move, because somewhere along the line he was going to have to confess what he had been doing all along, since the very first day. She would be more than angry with him. All he could hope for was that the excitement of the discovery might overwhelm all that anger. By taking over, she would become the archaeologist who had discovered the secret of the mountain, at least within the fiercely competitive context of professional archaeology. It would be like the Dead Sea Scrolls: The shepherd boy who actually found the scrolls was rarely named in all the books about them.

  Or she might just call in the Israeli police. Accuse him of violating one of Israel’s most treasured monuments and pack his ass off to jail. Wahoo.

  * * *

  Judith was surprised to find David’s message when she came back to her office after a seminar with three Ph.D. candidate hopefuls, none of whom showed much promise. She wondered immediately if Mr. Hall was familiar with the Jewish concept of chutzpah, then marveled at Yossi Ellerstein’s clairvoyance. She turned the message note over and over in her hands, thinking about it. Six o’clock. His hotel was down in Tel Aviv, and she lived in Jerusalem. If she was going to do it, she had to leave now to get home and change. First, though, there was a second message, this one from the hostel manager down at Masada.

  She decided to return the Masada call first.

  “Dr. Ressner, Assad Ghanin. This concerns your friend, the American. The site security people confirm no signs of unauthorized activity on the part of your Mr. Hall.”

  “He’s not my Mr. Hall,” she said acidly.

  “He was under your charge,” the manager responded primly. “Not ours.”

  “Now you listen,” she began, but he interrupted her.

  “I’ve also checked with the army border patrol district headquarters at Ein Gedi—they’re the ones who supervise the patrols out here—and they said the incident report just says that the American was walking about in the desert at night. So I think this matter is closed, yes?” She could picture the fat little man wiping beads of perspiration off his face. On the other hand, this was good news.

  “Very well, Mr. Ghanin. That was our impression all along. I will pass this information to the IAA and to the institute.”

  “Okay, Professor. Shalom.”

  She hung up and then left a message with the chairman’s office relaying the gist of Ghanin’s report. Your Mr. Hall indeed. Well, they had been down there together, so it was not an unnatural assumption. She had to admit that the man was at least interesting. So: You’re going to start a new life here? Then go have a drink with him. It’s not like he’s propositioning you, and you’re all finished with Herod’s dreadful Masada. He leaves Israel in a week, so what can happen? It would also allow you to make a first move back into the social scene without involving a colleague. If he was contrite, she would spend some time with him. If he was an ass, she could always spend a little time with him, smile sweetly, pour a drink in his lap, and then cut him dead right there at the table. She placed a call to his hotel.

  * * *

  The message light on his bedside phone was blinking when David got back to his room. He had gone downstairs to check out the hotel
dining room to see if it might be a suitable place for dinner. It was Judith, saying she would meet him in the lobby bar for a drink at six thirty.

  He put the phone down and sat back on the bed. Now he really had mixed feelings. Okay, smart-ass, you called her, and now here she comes. So chances are nobody found anything worth shouting about. So who is doing the surveillance, and why? Just someone being very careful? But who?

  On a personal level, he did want to see her again. What man wouldn’t? She was smart, single, and eminently streetable. Still, there was no getting around the fact that it was going to be, once again, under false pretenses. Maybe the thing to do was to shut it off with her after a drink in the bar. Except, of course, there was his need for an archaeological lifeline once he came back out of the cistern. So a quick drink and dinner wasn’t an option, unless she was coming here just to fang him again for the first deception.

  He groaned out loud. Damned woman had him going in circles again. Wonderful.

  He went back down to the hotel front desk and retrieved his passport and then called the rental car agency on a lobby phone to give them his passport number. They told him to be sure to bring it when he picked up the car, along with his American driver’s license. When he was finished he stopped by the dining room and booked a table for two for seven thirty, in case things worked out. If not, he still had to have dinner somewhere. He went back to his room, belatedly remembered that Judith lived in Jerusalem and not Tel Aviv, called her back, obtained her address, and dispatched Ari and the Mercedes to pick her up.

  17

  At six fifteen, David was sitting at a table in the lobby bar, facing the door, a glass of white wine in front of him. He had changed into slacks and an open-collared, short-sleeved shirt under a white linen sport jacket.

  Judith came in a few minutes later, creating a small stir. She was wearing a blue open-front linen jacket over an ankle-length, gauzelike multilayered white skirt. Underneath the jacket she wore a bronze-colored blouse that looked to David like the top half of a bathing suit. With her hair styled and a hint of makeup, the previously stern and serious college professor had cleaned up extraordinarily well. Judith in war paint was a stunning woman and definitely a female, David thought, remembering only at the last moment to stand up as she approached the table.