The Last Man Page 28

  He paddled backward toward the entrance for a few feet while adjusting his diving rig and checking for problems. Everything seemed to be okay except his wildly beating heart. Then he focused on where his headlamp was pointing. The passage ahead was extremely narrow, but it was definitely a natural cave. More important, ten feet into the upwardly sloping passage he could make out what looked like a vertical stone slab. The slab was white in his headlamp light, not like the dark rock walls of the cavern at all. Bingo, he thought, and then remembered to look at his timer. Overtime.

  He backed out and continued the ascent until his head bumped gently against the top of the drowned cavern. He looked for the reference light but could only see a faint, diffused glow well beneath him. There was no single point of light, just the glow. Idiot for not leaving a light in the entrance, he thought, as he fought down an impulse of panic. Then he regained control. His virtual depth was about two feet, so he had some time here, and still plenty of air. He swam around the rim of the cistern ceiling until he was pointed east again. Then he turned hard right and swam due south, trying to keep the glow directly beneath him. The first time he missed the line entirely and came up against the south wall. He turned left, went three feet or so, and then moved back out toward the center of the cavern, mentally trying to clamp down on his growing fear. The problem was that he was too far up above the damned light. If he didn’t find the line this time he would have to dive again, and that could cause him some nitrogen problems later. He needed to get out of the water and start the surface interval phase. He looked at his timer, which displayed an accusing zero on its dial.

  He steadied himself and his breathing, took a careful bearing on the compass, and set out again, watching the glow of the light below. From every position, it looked like it was right beneath him. He swam all the way across again and found nothing. Dammit! Had the line broken? Was the light sitting down there on the bottom? Then he had an idea. He swam back out into what he guessed was the middle of the sphere and then followed his bubble trail to the top. At the ceiling, he watched in chagrin as the bubbles turned behind his shoulder, marching in a silvery trail, bouncing across the ceiling. He followed the trail and popped up in the opening thirty seconds later, feeling like even more of an idiot. The line to the light was, of course, still there. He spat out the regulator and then hoisted himself up onto the edge using the steel pipes.

  Checking his watch, he found he had been down there for twenty-five minutes, well over the calculated bottom time. On the plus side was the fact that he had not been at depth for all of that. He should be okay from the point of view of getting the dreaded bends, with “should” being the operative word. It was almost one o’clock. He would rest on the surface for two full hours just to make sure, and then he’d go back down to explore that cave. He would take a fresh tank this time, although there was still air left in the first tank—and this time, he would light up the damned entrance hole! He turned around, fished his reference light back out of the cavern, and began stripping off his gear.

  22

  Judith was going through the motions of working midafternoon Friday when Professor Ellerstein called. He wanted to know how she was doing and how her first week back among the living had gone.

  “Not too badly,” she said, suppressing an image of the previous evening. Not too badly, indeed. “It is an effort, though.”

  “I understand, but it is a worthy effort. I will tell you that Strauss has noticed a difference. He is very pleased with your decision.”

  “Well, good,” she said. “The meetings are still pretty boring.”

  “Have you ever been to an exciting meeting, Yehudit?” he asked.

  “Not here, Yossi,” she said with a smile,

  “How’s the American doing, do you know?”

  “Ah, yes, the American. Actually—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I’ve been seeing the American. He insisted on taking me to dinner to make amends for his indiscretion at Metsadá. I even went on a diving expedition with him, to Caesarea Maritima, which ended very badly.”

  “The murder there? That German tourist? You were there?”

  She told him the whole story, and that she’d spent the rest of the day trying to settle the American’s badly rattled nerves.

  “Well, good for you, Judith. Good for you. Besides, he seemed like a nice man.”

  “Yes, well, he is a nice man,” she said evasively. She’d told him about their day, but not their evening. “Although right now I’m not sure what he’s up to. We were supposed to get together yesterday, but he left a message that he was still upset over what had happened. That he’d canceled his final diving tours, which I totally understand. Then today, when I called to check on him, the hotel people say he’s not there. I’m thinking the police have come back, maybe he got sick, you know.”

  There was an embarrassed silence at the other end.

  “So,” she said, bridling a little. “You think it’s a brush-off, yes?”

  “Um, well, I have no idea. It may just mean that he is walking around rubber-legged trying to get some fresh air. Like you say, after a night of hugging his toilet bowl.”

  “I suppose,” she said, trying not to sound petulant, although Yossi’s tone of voice sounded a lot like that damned concierge.

  “Perhaps I should check on him,” Ellerstein said. “Technically, I am his interlocutor here.”

  “I suppose,” she said again.

  “I’ll do that. Then I’ll call you back, at home, tonight.”

  “You don’t have to do this, Yossi.”

  “I want to, Yehudit. What do the Americans say—just to close the loop? I don’t know what is this loop, but I’ll let you know something as soon as I know something. Shalom.”

  She hung up, a little relieved that Ellerstein was going to check on Mr. David Hall. It was something he could do that she could not, not without awkwardness. Then she remembered the dive shop. Maybe he had shown up today after all? She looked up the number and called the shop again. No, he had not shown up, and they had no messages. He did have four of their tanks, by the way, and they were just a tiny bit concerned about that.

  “Four?” she asked.

  “Yah, four.”

  That threw her for a minute. They had taken four single tanks to their dive at Caesarea, but she was pretty sure they had all ended up back in the lovely instructor’s van. Why on earth would he have four of their tanks? That indicated either several dives or a couple of deep dives. She thanked the manager and hung up.

  Something not quite right here, she thought. Unless he was going to make more dives at other sites along the coast. The manager hadn’t seemed upset, just wondering where his tanks were. Perhaps that was it: David had gone diving somewhere else, just to get his nerve back after the awful thing he’d witnessed.

  She would wait for Yossi’s call tonight.

  * * *

  Ellerstein called the hotel in Tel Aviv and asked for Mr. David Hall’s room. He got hotel voice mail. He called the assistant manager, explained who he was and why he was calling, and asked the man to go check the room. The manager was not exactly enthusiastic, and Ellerstein proceeded to lay a little ministry authority on him. The manager said he would call him back. Ellerstein, on his government phone, said he would hold, thank you very much. As in, do it now, please. The man was back in six minutes. “The room is made up; his things are there. Housekeeping reports no signs of illness, and they should know. The bed has not been slept in since Wednesday.”

  “Ah, so? Since Wednesday?”

  “That’s what the floor supervisor reports. Perhaps Mr. Hall has found better circumstances, yes?”

  “That’s always possible,” Ellerstein mused. He thanked the man for his efforts and hung up. He leaned back in his chair. No signs of illness, and the maids would know. So where was the elusive Mr. David Hall? He was rich enough to have booked into another hotel somewhere while out on tour. He was supposed to be scuba diving, wasn�
��t he? For some reason, an image of the mysterious Colonel Lazarus crossed his mind.

  He had called Gulder after Skuratov’s visit, but Gulder hadn’t seemed very impressed. “He wants you to keep an eye on Ressner; so do we. What’s the problem?”

  “What’s the problem? The problem is—”

  “No, no, not on this phone, Yossi,” Gulder had interrupted. “Look: If your scary colonel is watching the American, he’s not watching other things. Then perhaps we can make him move in an unplanned direction. Keep doing what you’re doing, Yossi.”

  He’s not my scary colonel, Ellerstein thought. Still, maybe he should call Skuratov and tell him that Yehudit couldn’t find Mr. Hall. See what Skuratov knew—he supposedly had the man under surveillance. Maybe the old Russian could tell him something, so he could then put Yehudit out of her misery. He fished out the card the colonel had given him and called the number.

  “International Planning.”

  Right, Ellerstein thought. Spooks. He identified himself and asked for Colonel Skuratov. The colonel was not available. Could the man take a message?

  “Tell him that Dr. Ressner has not heard from the American, Hall, for a couple of days. Ask him if he knows where the American is.”

  “Got it,” the man said.

  “Do you have the first idea of what I’m talking about?” Ellerstein asked.

  “None whatsoever, Professor—but then I never do.”

  “The colonel hasn’t said anything about the names Ressner or the American, David Hall? There is no special alert?”

  “Look, Professor, I will deliver your message, okay?”

  Ellerstein thanked him, and the line went dead. Ellerstein looked at the phone for a moment and then hung up. So much for that great idea. He snorted—all this hugger-mugger about the American. Total nonsense. Now, what would he tell Yehudit? Nothing, he told himself. Coward, an inner voice whispered.

  23

  At three o’clock, David suited up again and prepared for his second dive. The operative mean depth was going to be about thirty-five feet, since he had already inspected the bottom of the cavern. From the dive planner, the no-decompression time limit was two hundred and forty-five minutes. Over three hours. Temperature and residual nitrogen were no longer factors because he needed to be out of the cavern by four anyway, dressed and down the mountain before five thirty, when the site closed down for Shabbat.

  This time he tied off the underwater flashlight close to the slab hole before submerging. The water felt colder as he swam just under the roof of the cavern to the west side and then descended to thirty-five feet of indicated depth. It still took him fifteen minutes to find the cave opening, only to find that this was not the cave. This passage went into the rock wall about ten feet and simply ended, momentarily wedging his tank before he was able to back out. Damn, he thought. How many caves are there in here? He searched some more and finally found what looked like the cave he had seen on the first dive. The entrance was a narrow circle, which then expanded somewhat once he swam in. Following the purple beam from his headlamp, he used his hands to pull himself along the rock wall, sending up small clouds of muddy water as he inched his way forward. His tank clanked on the rock, and he looked up to see that the top of the cave was narrowing rapidly to an acute apex.

  Rolling slowly in place to put his tank beneath him and then continued crawling forward, upside down, feeling the first signs of claustrophobia as he pressed forward, entering a cave inside a cave, and under thirty-five feet of water besides. He banished the distracting thoughts and kept going, inching forward now to keep his gear from being damaged. He realized he was breathing too fast and stopped for a moment to calm down. Then he realized his air bubbles were going ahead of him. Hunh? They should have been going behind him, out along the roof of the narrow chamber and back up to the slab hole.

  He craned his neck straight back to see how close he was to the white slab. Make that the purple slab. The rock walls pressed in on all sides, and he imagined that he could feel them moving, slowly constricting like some stone python to capture him in here for all eternity. Focus, dammit! The slab was right ahead of him, shimmering now in the bright light of his headlamp, the colors rippling from white to purple. He reached over his shoulder like a man doing a slow-motion backstroke to touch the slab and hit—nothing.

  He stopped cold. Nothing! He inched forward again, deeper into the cleft ahead, and again reached out to touch the slab. His hand passed right through it.

  There was no slab.

  It was an air-water interface. What had looked like a slab was nothing more than the refraction taking place where air and water met.

  He inched forward again and felt sand along his hips, then stuck his head into the air of what looked like a round cave. He wriggled himself all the way into the cave and sat up, only then realizing that he had been swimming uphill inside the tunnel as he oriented himself once again on solid ground. The entrance back out to the main cave was now a black, rippling patch of water in the light of the headlamp. He started to take his mouthpiece out but then stopped. How old was the air in here? Was there even oxygen?

  Continuing to breathe on the tank, he began to look around. The cave was not really spherical but more in the shape of an ax-head lying on its back, flat and open at the bottom, closing into a knife edge up some twenty feet above his head. There were two sheer, almost vertical walls. The bottom, on which he sat, was deep, loose sand, rising in a gentle slope like a sandy beach from the watery aperture leading back out to the main cavern. The whole cave was perhaps thirty feet in length and no more than ten feet across at the base. There was a structure of some kind, a table or bench, at the far end, under which lay a bundle of rags. Something metallic glinted dangerously near the rags as he shone the light on them.

  He tried to figure out why the cave was dry. The only explanation was that the main cave had been dry at one time and then slowly filled with water over the centuries. Eventually the water would have risen past the lower entrance to the tunnel, sealed by that boulder, after which, leaking past the boulder, it would have begun to compress the air inside the sealed cave. When the water pressure outside equaled the air pressure inside, stasis would have occurred, with the air inside becoming a trapped, pressurized bubble.

  He checked his elapsed time: thirty minutes. He had to move fast now, do a quick exploration of this virtual time capsule, and then get back out. He decided to stay on the scuba tank. God only knew what ancient microbes might be trapped in this place. He got up on his hands and knees, stood up, took off his fins, and then walked carefully across the sandy floor toward the structure and the rags. When he got closer, he realized that the bundle of rags contained a badly decomposed skeleton, barely recognizable as human bones, complete with a jawless skull. The bones were no longer attached to one another and were clustered around a huge dagger. He didn’t touch anything but just stood there, looking down at the human remains. From how long ago, he wondered. Was this one of the Zealots? There were small clay pots scattered around the sand floor of the cave, and their blackened tops showed that they had been used as lamps. His light swept the wall, and he realized that it was covered in writing. It looked like it had been done in charcoal or perhaps lampblack. He could not begin to decipher it, but an examination of both walls revealed that they were entirely covered in some kind of Arabic or Hebraic script, to the height that a man could reach on tiptoes.

  He looked up at the bench structure. It was made of wood and shaped like a large table. The legs didn’t match: Some were rough-hewn; others appeared to be made of highly polished and richly carved wood. There were rough planks across the top, which was slightly higher than he could see. Ghostly remains of some kind of heavy, decorated cloth draped like spiderwebs down one side. Moving awkwardly in his scuba rig, he walked over to the right side of the cave, where the floor was slightly higher than on the left side. From here, standing on tiptoe, he could just see up onto the top of the structure, and what he saw took
his breath away.

  The altarlike structure was much deeper than he had thought, its top surface going back into the angle between the two sloping cave walls some four feet. There was a cracked marble slab lying on the planks, and on top of that, lying on its side, was an enormous menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum of Jewish ritual. It looked to be almost five feet from its boxy base to the top of its outflung arms, and close to four feet across. The base was heavily engraved. Two of the seven arms were damaged, bent out of the original plane, but it was still magnificent. The entire artifact appeared to be made of either bronze or even gold, he couldn’t be sure. Next to the menorah were several ivory cylinders, their circular bronze or gold ends heavily engraved. The cylinders were shaped like rolling pins and were some six inches in diameter, with ornate wooden handles sticking out of each end. He was pretty sure these were scroll holders. The scrolls, if they were still there, would be sealed inside. The cylindrical sides were embossed with what looked like gold filigree. To the left of the enormous menorah was a pile of what had probably been vestments of some kind, long since rotted away, with only a few patches of color visible in his light. The only other object on the altar top was a small, very plain bronze bowl or cup, eight inches or so in diameter at the top, which was set off to one side with a small pile of what looked like old coins lying right next to it. The cup did not appear to have any markings whatsoever, contrasting dramatically with the glorious objects around it.

  He lowered himself to a more comfortable position and tried to slow his heartbeat down. He’d found it. If these objects were sacred relics from the Second Temple, it would be the find of the century. Of course, he had no way of proving that, but the writing on the cave walls, once deciphered, might tell the tale. He examined the pile of bones, kneeling down to study that wicked-looking iron blade. It was almost eighteen inches long, with a workmanlike leather handle. He wanted to pick it up, feel its heft, but knew better than to touch anything. He shone the light on the walls again, covered with their strange symbols. He didn’t even know where the text began and ended—but Judith Ressner, ancient language expert, sure as hell would.