P. Deutermann - The Last Man

Judith was just about to declare victory in a software fight with her portable computer when there was a knock on the door.

“Yes?”

“Phone call for Dr. Ressner. From Tel Aviv.”

“Thank you.” She looked at her watch. Eleven o’clock. As good a time as any to break. The room was starting to heat up. David Hall had been smart to take a first-floor room. She energized the screen saver and went downstairs.

The sole phone for guest use was next to the front desk. She looked around at the lobby, crowded noisily with milling tourists, and asked if she could use an office extension. Forbidden. She sighed and picked up the receiver, putting a finger in her ear to silence the noise coming from the cable-car machinery room.

“This is Judith Ressner.”

The ghostly voice of Colonel Skuratov answered. “Good morning, Dr. Ressner. Skuratov here. Calling to see if everything is going smoothly. With the American.”

“So far, yes.”

“Very good. He is what he seems to be? A privileged tourist?”

“Yes. That is my impression. He has studied the history.”

“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.