The Last Man

by P. T. Deutermann

  The throng of tourists bunched up again at the row of glass doors leading out to the public transportation area, and the watcher turned to look out the windows when his subject stopped. The American, David Hall, seemed to take the delay in stride, indicating that the driver should put the bags down for a minute, let the crowds ahead clear out. The American carried one large, awkward-looking case, probably his diving gear. He also carried what appeared to be a portable computer. The driver was humping two large suitcases and an overnight bag on an airport cart. Hall was holding on to that portable computer like it was his baby.

  Trying not to be too obvious about it, the watcher confirmed the briefed description: Caucasian male, close to two meters in height, late thirties, barrel-chested, eighty, maybe ninety kilos, black hair laced with some gray, square face, a Semitic nose that would make a rabbi proud, prominent chin, and the tanned complexion of an outdoorsman. This Hall fellow didn’t look like an engineer at all, certainly not like the Israeli engineers and scientists the watcher had seen on the telly. This one had big, strong-looking hands, wide shoulders, and a lot of solid muscle under that expensive sport coat. In that regard he truly stood out from the rest of the tourists, who were mostly old and overweight. Hall: Was that a Jewish name in America? He certainly had the Moses nose for it.

  The watcher took care not to stare directly. His instincts told him that the American appeared to be aware of his surroundings. He was definitely looking around in a manner that belied his informal, relaxed pose with the driver. The briefer had mentioned that there was an intelligence interest in this American, although what that was had not been explained. Even so, the watcher had been instructed to pay attention to his tradecraft, because there was always the possibility that this American had had some field training. The watcher looked at him again. No way, he thought. Guy looks like a rich playboy, with all that fancy luggage and his fashionably thin computer.

  One of the ubiquitous airport security teams, consisting of a man and a woman in rumpled army khakis, strolled by, the noses of their shoulder-slung submachine guns pointing lazily at the floor. They looked like brother and sister. They gave the nondescript Israeli lounging against a concrete pillar, dressed in tan slacks and a cheap sport shirt, the once-over and then, recognizing him for what he was, looked immediately away and kept going. By then the crowd at the doors was thinning out and the American was helping his driver gather up the bags, and then they were pushing through the glass doors to the usual chaos outside. The watcher followed them from inside the terminal building, observing until they stopped at a shiny if elderly four-door white Mercedes.

  The watcher waited for the American to get in the car, right rear seat, just like some stuck-up officer. Next stop would be the Dan Tel Aviv Hotel, unless of course they really were going to make a quick getaway and go underground to meet some CIA fiends. Right. Wanting a cigarette, he glanced at his watch. Four forty-five, almost Shabbat, so of course all the CIA agents would be bellied up to the bar at the Sheraton by now. The watcher was not religious, but he was definitely ready for a day off. This American was boring, like most of them. At least he wasn’t fat, like most of them.

  2

  David Hall pulled back the sheer curtains of his twelfth-floor corner suite and admired the ocean view. The Dan Tel Aviv, one of the city’s five-star hotels, was just across a small street from the Mediterranean, and the sea still looked cold, with rigid rows of whitecaps being driven in toward the beige, sandy beach by a chilly northwest wind. The sunset was bisected by the silhouette of the Yamit Towers. He looked to either side, where horizontal rows of windows seemed to propagate in every direction. No other faces were visible. The street sounds of the diminishing Tel Aviv evening rush hour echoed quietly up the concrete and glass palisades of the Hayarkon hotel district. He’d specifically asked for a seaside room to avoid the noise of Tel Aviv’s raucous traffic. He yawned and looked at his watch: seven o’clock here, one back in Washington. Why the hell was he sleepy, then?

  So far so good, he reflected. All the gear had made it through customs, and he’d received no special attention from any security types, just what appeared to be routine surveillance in the terminal. Suspecting that the nonchalant man in the short-sleeved white shirt and tan pants behind him might be a watcher, he had stopped abruptly thirty feet back from the doors, ostensibly to wait for the crowds. White Shirt had stopped dead in his tracks to examine the empty space between the terminal windows and the ramps. Okay, so maybe the guy had been following him, or perhaps someone else in the crowd of tourists ahead of him. There was absolutely no way they could know what he was really up to, especially since he had made all of his cover arrangements with the help of the Israeli government. That was the beautiful part of his plan. Adrian’s dream, but definitely his plan.

  He realized he was hungry, but then yawned again and decided maybe he would send down for room service. Sundown on Fridays brought the official beginning of Shabbat. All the travel guides warned of interruptions in every kind of basic services extending until sundown Saturday. He yawned again. All his great plans for adapting immediately to the local time zone were being defeated by an overwhelming urge to go to bed. He flopped on the expansive bed and thought about what he would order for dinner. Or was it lunch? Maybe wait a couple of hours. Then get something.

  The rattle of a room service tray out in the hallway woke him. He sat up in bed, groaned, and rubbed leaden eyelids against the bright daylight streaming in through the side windows. What the hell time was it? Nine thirty. In the morning? He had slept, what, fourteen hours? Many muscles protested. He looked again at his watch. Three thirty in the morning in Washington. Damn the jet lag. He felt like he’d been hit by a marshmallow train, and now he was really hungry, his earlier plans for room service having been swallowed up in a long if fitful sleep.

  He dragged himself off the bedcovers and sat up. He needed coffee and a shower and then breakfast and then some more coffee. His eyes felt sandy, and his neck was stiff from lying on his back all night. He could not remember ever sleeping that long. This was Saturday, the day he had budgeted to get himself acclimated to the six-hour time difference before the game began. If his present mental fogginess was any indication, he would need Sunday, too. He headed for the bathroom.

  Tonight he was to meet with a Professor Yosef Ellerstein for a drink in the lobby bar at six thirty. Ellerstein was his official point of contact at the Israel Antiquities Authority, the senior government bureau in charge of all archaeological sites. The Israeli cultural attaché at the Embassy of Israel, where Adrian worked, had gone to Columbia with Ellerstein, and they had remained professional and personal friends, even after Ellerstein had emigrated to Israel back in the early seventies.

  Whenever Adrian had talked about her obsession, she’d said that getting access to the site was going to require a connection with a senior guy in the IAA. Her boss, the cultural attaché, knew a professor at Columbia who was still connected to Ellerstein, who was now on the board of directors of the IAA. After Adrian disappeared, and David had made the decision to pursue her life’s dream, he’d called the attaché, who in turn had contacted Ellerstein, who eventually agreed to be David’s interlocutor within Israel’s archaeological establishment. David had corresponded with him for the past year while preparing for his trip, and the professor had suggested meeting Saturday night at David’s hotel before David had to face his first meetings at the IAA and Hebrew University on Monday.

  Finished in the bathroom, David went to the north window and stared again into the harshly bright sunlight. The whitecaps were gone. The glass felt warm against his face. So much for the cool breezes of fall, he thought. He walked around to the west windows and stared out at the sea again, trying to get his brain to function, but he still felt stupefied. He went over and sat on the edge of the bed, then realized he was going around in circles. Coffee time.

  * * *

  At six thirty that evening, David was waiting in the bar when his gues
t appeared through the double doors. The attaché had told him that Dr. Yosef Ellerstein was sixty-five years old. David spotted him at once from his corner table in the lounge and got up, waving the older man over. Ellerstein, looking more like seventy, was a short, round man who wore thick glasses over a prominent nose. His unkempt grayish white hair reminded David of Albert Einstein. The professor was wearing a rumpled white short-sleeved shirt over baggy dark trousers and plain shoes. The well-chewed stem of a pipe protruded from his right pants pocket, and there was actually a scattering of ash burns down the right seam of his trousers. The perfect image of the absentminded professor, David thought.

  Ellerstein made his way through the crowded room, filling now with tourists and bustling hotel staff in about equal numbers. David had learned that, besides being on the board of the IAA, Ellerstein was also a professor emeritus at Hebrew University, which gave him a foot in each of the two most important archaeological entities in Israel. David was counting on him to help him navigate the intricate and time-consuming maze of the Israeli academic bureaucracy. Once the university archaeological institute and the IAA had given their preliminary approval, Ellerstein had helped David with the paperwork. After almost a year of making arrangements, David was still not quite sure who was in charge of the site—the academics or the IAA. Ellerstein had told him that the Israelis probably didn’t know either.

  The professor approached the table and offered his hand. “Mr. Hall, I presume,” he said in a gravelly smoker’s voice. “Welcome to Israel.”

  “Dr. Ellerstein,” David said. “A pleasure to meet you in person after all those e-mails and letters.” They shook hands and sat down.

  “You don’t look like an engineer, Mr. Hall,” Ellerstein began, “and as for the accursed e-mail: a double-edged invention, that. In the old days, one had time to digest a letter, think about it, pretend you hadn’t received it, or at least have time to formulate some elaborate excuses. Now these things come in showers, instantaneously. One loses his maneuvering room.”

  David laughed. Maybe not quite so absentminded, David thought. There was a definite gleam of intelligence behind those thick glasses. “An American phenomenon, I think,” he replied, signaling a nearby waiter. “We seem to want everything instantly.”

  A waiter scurried over to their table and looked inquiringly at Ellerstein. The professor peered up at him myopically. “Whisky and soda, if you please, young man. Not so heavy on the soda.”

  He gave David an appraising look. “As you will soon find out, Mr. Hall, instant gratification is not the norm here in Israel. Especially when you propose to put both hands on the flypaper of our bureaucracy. Instant stasis is more like it. Everyone frozen in a tableau of earnest intentions, but doing absolutely nothing.”

  David smiled, remembering the months of paperwork to get the permissions. He waited while the waiter deposited Ellerstein’s drink with a flourish. When the waiter had gone, he raised his own gin and tonic in salutation. “To Israel,” he proposed.

  Ellerstein dutifully tipped his glass. “To Israel,” he grunted. He savored the Scotch for a moment and then put his glass down on the table with a clumsy thump. The waiter hovered nearby, having set up a small order stand near their table.

  “You speak excellent English, Professor,” David observed. “I apologize for not knowing Hebrew.”

  Ellerstein shrugged. “And why should you know Hebrew? As for my English, I was born and raised in America—New York, to be precise. Came over here supposedly to do graduate study after taking a degree in mathematics at Columbia, but mostly out of curiosity. A long time ago, it seems now. Never went back. Actually, you will find that many Israelis speak reasonably good English.”

  He looked around the crowded room for a moment. “So,” he continued, examining David as if he were an interesting specimen. “What is this really all about, hah? This business at Metsadá?”

  David felt a small snake of fear slip through his innards. There was absolutely no way in hell they could know, he reminded himself. No way in hell.

  “It’s really no more than I’ve said all along, Professor. I’m an amateur historian, or perhaps ‘student of history’ would be a less presumptuous term to a real academic.”

  “I’m a mathematician, Mr. Hall,” Ellerstein said. “Amateurs are not unknown in our world.”

  “Yes, well. I want to spend some time on the mountain, actually at the site. Something more than the typical tourist’s one-day excursion to Masada, which I’ve been told results in about an hour’s stay time up on the mountain. I want to spend three or four days there, maybe even go up at night and just keep watch. I want to soak it up, to get the feel of the place, to think about the terrible things that happened there, to perhaps commune with the spirits there.”

  The older man stared at him without blinking for a full minute before replying.

  “Commune with the spirits,” he murmured. “There are spirits on that mountain, to be sure … but all this to satisfy, what is it, your hobby?”

  There was mild disbelief evident in Ellerstein’s voice. Time for some elaboration, David thought.

  “Well, it’s a little more than that, Professor. I’ve been working in the nuclear energy world ever since college. It is, how shall I put this, a sterile existence for the most part. A total focus on the science and engineering of a nuclear reactor.”

  “A well-deserved focus, I should think.”

  “Yes, indeed. A reactor can be a very dangerous servant.”

  “I totally agree,” Ellerstein said. “I worked in our own atomic energy program for a few years. As only a mathematician, you understand, but still. I know precisely what you are talking about. So how did you take up ancient history, then?”

  “Met a very pretty girl,” David said.

  “Ah,” Ellerstein said with a smile.

  “I was doing a course at George Washington University,” David said. “The company sent me there for some refresher training in digital communications systems. Met Adrian at a Friday afternoon happy hour.”

  “This Adrian, she was an archaeologist?”

  “No, she worked at the Israeli Embassy,” David said. “Ministry of Tourism. Her name was Adrian Draper, and we became—close. Masada and its history was one of her fascinations, as she called it. Obsession was more like it, I’m afraid.”

  “Met-sa-dá, Mr. Hall. You might as well pronounce it correctly while you’re here. In Hebrew metsada means fortress.”

  “Met-sa-dá. Got it.”

  “So why is Adrian Draper not here with you?”

  David sighed. “Her work for the embassy required a lot of travel within the U.S. About eighteen months ago, she left on a routine trip to the West Coast and never came back.”

  Ellerstein frowned. “She simply disappeared?”

  “I expected her back on a Friday; when she didn’t show up I called her cell phone, but it was no longer in service. On Monday I called the embassy. They told me she’d been summoned out of the country on short notice and that she was fine. Not to worry.”

  “She didn’t bother to even call you?”

  “You had to know Adrian. She was a very independent woman. Our relationship was never boring. Anytime I made marriage noises, she’d go off on a trip. I assumed maybe she was sending me a message, and by then I was up to my neck in a problem of my own causing.”

  Ellerstein lifted his glass at the hovering waiter, who quickly brought him a refill. He raised his eyebrows at David, who shook his head. The alcohol was already affecting his jet-lagged head.

  “You mentioned that you were no longer working in the nuclear energy field because of a, what did you call it, ‘whistle-blowing’ matter?”

  “Yes,” David said with a wry smile. “My fifteen minutes of fame, in Washington at least. Short version or long?”

  “Short, please.”

  “After GWU I was reassigned to the company’s Washington office in the materials audit division. In the weeks before Adrian went walkabo
ut, I uncovered what looked like a materials diversion scheme within the company. Went to management, who told me to forget about it. Talked to my uncle, who is a senior bureaucrat at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He opened an official investigation, confirmed my findings, and fined the company. That in turn got me fired.”

  “They can do that? Fire you when you find out something illegal?”

  “Well, yes and no,” David said. “I then was called to testify before the congressional committee with oversight of the atomic energy business. Having been fired, I held nothing back. After that, I heard there were some discreet meetings with other government officials, although I never learned what that was all about, other than it seemed to involve some kind of espionage case and heavy water.”

  “Heavy water? Deuterium oxide?”

  “Yes.”

  “When was this?”

  “As I said, about six weeks before Adrian left on her trip. She wasn’t too happy about it, in fact. We’d been talking about our future together, and now suddenly I was unemployable in the nuclear industry. As the cop shows term it, I was officially ‘radioactive.’ It caused some tension.”

  “Perhaps she was having second thoughts, then?” Ellerstein asked. “Forgive me for presuming, but sometimes the prospect of permanence exposes fault lines that are not obvious in the bedroom. She was perhaps getting a case of the cold toes?”

  David laughed. “Cold feet, remember?” He paused to finish his drink. “That’s possible. She was a bit of a wild child. Very smart, quick, opinionated.” He thought back to some of their arguments. Cold feet? By now he’d realized it had always been him bringing up the possibility of marriage, never Adrian. “I guess you had to know her. She was mercurial sometimes. Impatient with people who weren’t as smart as she was. Loved to scrap, then make up. The name Astarte ring a bell?”