“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said, feeling he had to say something. His watcher briefing had been cursory. A description of the American. A description of the professor. Eavesdrop. Report. The car was slowing. They had come full circle, a block away from the hotel. The car pulled over.
“That will be all, Sergeant,” Skuratov said.
“Do you—?”
“No, no, we are finished with him, this American. Be careful when you open the door, Sergeant. You are on the street side now.”
3
On Monday morning, David found his elderly but highly polished hired Mercedes 240D sedan waiting at the hotel entrance, right on time. His driver for the week was an intense older man named Ari, who appeared to be in his sixties. Ari was solidly built and presented the no-nonsense demeanor of an ex-military man. He spoke good English with what sounded to David like a faint German accent. He wore a loose-fitting sport coat over an open-throated white shirt and pressed khakis. Given the incipient heat, David suspected Ari was carrying. The option of having an armed driver had seemed prudent, considering the current state of tension in the country. Naturally, the hire car company had charged extra.
They made good time for about one minute down Hayarkon, and then traffic bogged down in a noisy stew of honking cars, smoke-belching buses, and Arabs on ancient bicycles, their djellabas tucked up around their knees and their heads hidden in multipatterned kaffiyeh headdresses. There were knots of pedestrians on every corner, blocky, canvas-covered military trucks with soldiers dozing in the back, and a surprising number of ragged children darting in and out of the traffic. David had been advised by the concierge to allow an hour and forty-five minutes to get to the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, and he wondered if even that would be sufficient now that he saw the traffic.
He was not entirely over his jet lag but doing much better than on the first day. He had spent Sunday playing tourist in Jerusalem, taking a hotel van up to the city from the hotel. He had taken in the model of ancient Jerusalem at the Holy Land Hotel, its waist-high buildings and walls giving an excellent perspective on Jerusalem at the time of Christ. He then walked through the narrow streets of the old walled city, stopping on the margins of tour groups whenever he overheard an English-speaking tour guide and stumbling onto the major tourist sites more by accident than by design. He had been conscious of the strategically placed soldiers, always in pairs, strolling throughout the Old City, or perched up on rooftops. There was much too much to see in just a one-day walkabout, and every time he stopped and asked for directions, he was pointed to yet another must-see holy place. By the middle of the afternoon he was hobbling, so he had a taxi take him to the Hadassah Ein Karem hospital to see the famous Chagall windows, after which he hired a sherut, or shared van, for a ride back to Tel Aviv.
“Are we going to make this in time, Ari?” he asked the driver.
“Yes, of course,” the driver replied. “No problem.” David smiled inwardly. Adrian had once explained about asking yes-or-no questions in the Middle East. If any answer but yes might embarrass either the one asking or answering the question, the answer was always going to be positive. At least the car’s air-conditioning was working, keeping at bay most of the brown diesel haze that served for an atmosphere in the city’s streets. They did the stop-and-go dance for about twenty minutes before the traffic began to thin out.
The purpose of the meeting this morning was to obtain the final written approvals from the IAA, the government bureaucracy responsible for the preservation and study of antiquities in Israel. Professor Ellerstein was going to run interference at the IAA and also be available to handle any language problems. David would have to go in and sign some documents promising to respect any and all sites he visited and not to engage in any physical disturbance of them. In other words, as Ellerstein had reminded him, no digging. Well, that shouldn’t be too hard: If things worked out the way he hoped, he might have to probe a little, but not dig. He was pretty sure all the pertinent digging had been done two thousand years ago.
Then back into the car and over to the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University for what would probably be a somewhat more ticklish session with the scholar archaeologists. He wasn’t afraid of them so much as impatient with their endless condescension, which never seemed to be satisfied by his own frank admission that he was very much an amateur. Suffer through it and humor them, he thought. Remember the objective. He sat back and dozed.
“Almost there, Mr. Hall,” the driver announced. David woke up to see that they were climbing the twisting highway that led up to Jerusalem from the coastal plain. The highway was bordered by dramatic ravines on either side, in which he could see the rusting hulks of armored vehicles, left there presumably to remind passersby of the intense battles for Jerusalem back in the 1948 war for Israel’s independence.
“Good deal, Ari,” he replied. He looked at his watch. They had made good time. He might actually be a few minutes early, which was probably a cultural offense in the Middle East.
Twenty minutes later they pulled up in front of the Rockefeller Museum. He was relieved to see Professor Ellerstein sitting on a park bench in front of the building, reading a newspaper and puffing away on his pipe. David got out, told Ari to find a place to hole up, and warned him that he had no idea how long this would take.
“Is government business? I will go for a coffee. You come out, I will see you. No problem, Mr. Hall.”
David walked over to the park bench, where Ellerstein was folding up his newspaper and knocking pipe ashes out onto the sidewalk.
“Good morning, Professor,” David said. “Or should I call you Dr. Ellerstein?”
“Here at the IAA, doctor. At the university, professor. Ready to grasp the flypaper?”
“Ready as ever.” David detected that the old man was a little less friendly this morning than he had been when they parted at the bar. Maybe it was the lack of Scotch.
“Okay,” Ellerstein sighed. “We go.”
Two and a half hours later they were back in the Mercedes and on their way to the university, with the professor this time accepting David’s offer of a ride. David vowed that he would never again complain about the District of Columbia’s bureaucracy, having now experienced the exquisite agonies of dealing with the Israeli variant. Flypaper indeed, but they had achieved their goals and now had a sheaf of vividly stamped documents to take with them to the Hebrew University. Doctor, now Professor, Ellerstein assured him that the academics were capable of every bit as much obfuscation and delay as the bureaucrats in the IAA, but the fact that he now had official documents in hand might ease his way somewhat.
“Besides, there will be a minder.”
“Minder?” David asked. What was this?
“Yes, well, I think it is the price you will pay for your unusual access to this site. Both the IAA and the university people thought it would be appropriate that you have an escort while you are at the site. Someone who knows it well, who can answer your questions, and perhaps even direct your explorations. That sort of thing.”
“I see.” Boy, did he. This was going to complicate matters. Could they possibly be suspicious? Had someone gone through his stuff in the customs hall and found the geophones? Or worse, the encapsulated source charge? He dismissed that idea — there would have been immediate hell to pay if they’d found the explosive disk, tiny as it was. He had been prepared to confess the whole scheme if they found the source charge, knowing full well that the Israelis had zero tolerance when it came to security issues. The charge though, was encased in a stainless steel cylinder that fit precisely into the chamber of his spare scuba regulator. If they had opened that regulator, they would have found only a very thin steel disk. Hermetically sealed, so no vapors to alert dogs or bomb-sniffing machinery. Four ounces, just enough to make a noise, and the geophones had been inserted between batteries in his underwater sealed beam diving light. All of it should look perfectly innocuous, just like the rest of his diving gear.