P. Deutermann - The Last Man

“Some of the frustration must have come because he realized that someone else’s survival depended on his keeping a paycheck coming. Namely you. That all those lofty principles of his might have to be compromised, because to persist might be putting his wife in danger.”

She turned to look at him. She has truly beautiful eyes, he thought, as she registered pleasant surprise.

“You are perceptive, David Hall,” she said. “Yes, that was exactly correct. He made amends. He did insist that he would only work on peaceful uses for atomic energy: power plants, medical research, things like that. Never weapons. Dov was good at that: taking a position, but then making people come around to his point of view by his obvious sincerity. I think there were other scientists out there who felt the same way, but Dov was the one who did something. Sometimes I think that the work he was required to do might not have been so clear-cut. I always had the sense that he had uncovered something else, that he knew more than he would tell me, but I also knew better than to ask. Our life was happy again, with just this one strange thread woven through it. Then one day”—she stopped and took a deep breath—“he was just… gone.”

David wondered fleetingly if something bad had happened to rebel scientist Dov Ressner. Something bad that had nothing to do with radiation accidents. He could just imagine the kinds of people who might be working security for Israel’s nuclear program. The modern-day descendants of the Masada Zealots? What was their security organization called? Mossad? Bad MFs, from everything he’d read.

“And ever since then, nobody’s quite measured up, has he?” he asked, trying for a safer direction.

“Yes. No. I don’t know, really. That’s always an unfair comparison. We were just extremely well suited, that’s all. In every way. Marriage to Dov was so very easy. The only tension we had between us was physical, and the solution to that was wonderful. That’s what I mean about the memories.”

“I have similar memories. Adrian was… difficult, but resolution was spectacular.”

“Difficult how?”

He let out a long breath. “She was too smart for her own skin. Everything I said was a challenge. For a while, it was interesting, exciting even. Then, truth be told, I got tired of the eternal sparring. I asked her once if she was always ‘on,’ and what it would take to have her turn all this intellectual fencing off.”

Judith smiled. “How did that go over?”

“A week of silence.”

“What then?”

“A week of the best sex of my life.”

She smiled again. The transformation of her face was amazing, but then it faded.

“What?” he asked.

“I could never do that,” she said.

“At some point, you must,” he said. “Even if you find a new guy, you must.”

“A new ‘guy,’ as you put it, would not be interested in my lost husband,” she retorted.

“The right guy would,” he said. “The right guy would have to accept your former marriage as a part of you. If he couldn’t do that, then he wouldn’t be the right guy.”

“Then what would I do, Mr. Hall?”

“Hell, look for another guy.”

She smiled. “How very American. Always a solution: Do something until you get your way.”

He laughed. “Well, yeah, persistence is an American trait, I suppose. That’s what we do. We want something, we go for it. It may take several tries and an expanding tolerance for failure along the way. We call that growing up, but we typically will give it a shot.”

“You Americans are not embarrassed by failure, then?”

“Sure we are. Just look at the state of politics in America right now. But some of us are even more afraid of regrets, as in, the thought of having never tried in the first place.”

“Even if you think that what you are seeking may not ever happen again?”

“Like you’ll never find another man as well suited to your love as the first man was? Well, what if he is out there and you never go looking? Do you really want to go out to the end of your life and then have to regret that you never even looked?”

She stared down at her sandals.

He remained silent, marveling that she had opened up. He was also surprised at himself. He could not figure out if he was attracted to her just because of her looks or because he was responding unconsciously to her need for an emotional bridge of some kind, a need that seemed to be missing absolutely in every female he’d met in Washington over the past few years. Get a grip, he reminded himself. You can’t afford to get involved with this woman. That’s not why you’re here. Focus, dammit.

“It’s getting dark,” he said. “We’d better get back.”

She nodded without replying, her silence implying that she was probably having second thoughts about revealing so much to this foreigner. They retraced their steps to the hostel building without talking. He was conscious that they had stepped beyond some barriers. Jesus, he thought, if she only knew…

At a quarter to one the next morning, David paused halfway up the siege ramp to catch his breath in the crisp night air. He bent over to ease a cramp in his side. The fortress loomed above him in the darkness, the edges of the ragged casemate walls tipped with gray starlight. The hike up through the ravines had taken slightly longer than two hours. He had slipped out of the hostel at ten, watched the observation point for a few minutes, and then walked down to the parking lot, from which he would have a clear shot up the southern ravine, retracing their steps of the morning. After an hour of steady climbing, he had reached the top junction, where the southern ravine met the western ravine. Which is when he had remembered that the army patrol had returned to the tourist center at midnight, emerging from this same area. It being just after eleven, he realized that the patrol might be headed back in toward the hostel even as he stood there on the slope about to start down into the western ravine, assuming they followed the same routine every night.

He decided to find a clump of boulders and settle into the sand, after first poking around with his walking stick to run off any venomous wildlife. He shrugged his arms out of the backpack to give his back a rest for a few minutes while he waited. There was no way to tell if they would be coming through again, and, when he thought about it, it was doubtful they did follow the same routine every night. Dumb tactics if you were looking for bad guys. Predictable routines made for easy ambushes. On the other hand, this was the army: Dumb tactics were not entirely out of the question, although the Israelis were supposedly pretty good on the ground. He decided to wriggle his way down into the sand, in case they were using infrared scanning or night-vision devices. The deeper he was in the sand, the less the heat contrast. It was warmer, too.

After twenty minutes of sitting in the total silence of the desert night, he started to fall asleep. Then he decided that they weren’t coming. He got up, brushed off the sand, remounted the backpack, and set out again for the ramp. His decision had been helped along by the fact that he had not heard any signs of the truck returning to the tourist center below. Besides, he was losing precious time — he needed at least an hour on the summit to set up and use his equipment.

Now, poised on the steep slope halfway up the siege ramp to catch his breath, he almost couldn’t believe he was so close. After all the months of preparation, tonight might bring proof of the real reason why the defenders had chosen death over surrender. From his vantage point on the ramp he could see all the way down the widening mouth of the western ravine to his left, to the edges of the terrace palaces. A ghostly night bird called from somewhere up in the shadows of the ravine, and there was a slight stirring of the night air. He shivered. If ever a place was haunted, this place surely must be. Nine hundred sixty fugitives from seven years of brutal civil war had offered their throats to the knife rather than face capture, an act of desperation made more horrific by the fact that it had been fathers slaughtering wives and children. He could well imagine that tendrils of human energy remained behind after an event as horrifying as this one. He felt ghostly eyes watching him approach their ruined battlements.