“Who are they?” she asked quickly, but he shook his head.
“No, it is best that you don’t know that. The incident and the program in which it occurred were then and are now highly secret matters. Everyone involved was and remains sworn to absolute silence. It was an accident, nothing more.”
“I was never sworn to silence.”
“Your husband was, and took his oath willingly, Mrs. Ressner,” he replied quickly, and this time the smile was gone. His eyes projected the cold gleam of official power. She realized that she had made an implied threat when she said she was never sworn to secrecy. “Your husband died, Mrs. Ressner,” he continued. “It was most unfortunate, but you cannot bring him back, no matter what you might do. Or say. Please keep in mind that the government did not put you out beyond the city walls after the accident, did they?”
She made as if to reply but then closed her mouth, understanding right away what he was talking about. An implied threat to counter hers.
He reached for the doorknob, slipping the homburg on his head. “I am sorry for your loss, Mrs. Ressner. Believe it or not, behind these official masks, even one as frightening as mine, we are also human. Nevertheless, some of us serve a higher responsibility than family, a responsibility that in the final analysis guarantees the very existence of our tiny nation.”
“Your precious freedom is worth a few deaths, is that it, Colonel? The occasional operational accident?”
“Your precious freedom is indeed worth a few deaths, Mrs. Ressner. I would have to assume that Dov Ressner agreed with that proposition.”
“Dov would not have worked on weapons, Colonel,” she said. “That’s what got him into trouble with LaBaG. Dov had principles.”
“Did he indeed?” He looked at her for a moment. “Some principles are more important than others. I think your husband actually made an accommodation with his principles, Mrs. Ressner. Perhaps that bothered him.”
“If he did, he never told me,” she said. Her chest felt tight. The man was frightening her, but she resolved not to back down.
“Because he was not allowed to, you see. Many sincere men and women have had to put aside their principles and sometimes compromise their very souls to accomplish what has been brought forth out there in the desert. Do you know what some people call that place?”
“Dimona? Of course. The Third Temple. The weapons are called the Temple Weapons. The final resort.”
“Just so, Doctor. So many names. The Samson Option. The Temple Weapons. A ‘final solution’ all of our own making, yes? Such irony. Only this time we will be on the delivery side of the equation. The thing is, those who work there believe these things. They think it is all worth it, the excessive security, the cost, and, yes, the occasional human loss. They are zealous, and if we can believe Josephus, that’s what those Jews at Metsadá believed, too.”
She looked down at the floor, unable to think of anything clever to say.
He stepped to the door. “Remember, please call me if something seems wrong about this American.”
She nodded but did not answer him. He opened the door by himself, went out, and closed it behind him. After a moment she sensed that he was still standing outside the door and discovered she had been holding her breath. She made a noise putting up the security chain lock, and only then did he go limping down the stairs.
7
David came out the hotel’s front door at five twenty the next morning and was surprised to find Judith already waiting for him. It was barely daylight, and the sun was not yet showing over the city’s skyline. She was driving an elderly white Subaru station wagon. David felt a momentary pang of regret for the spurned Mercedes. He lugged his gear around to the hatchback and stuffed it in. She had brought only one small bag and a portable computer. He got in the passenger seat and said good morning.
“Good morning, Mr. Hall,” she replied in a cool tone of voice as she maneuvered out of the hotel’s circular driveway. There was very little traffic, and she piloted the small car at a smart clip through the city’s streets. David was dressed in khaki trousers, low-cut sneakers, and a long-sleeved white safari shirt with lots of pockets. He had aviator-style sunglasses and a sun hat. Judith was wearing jeans and a peach-colored sleeveless blouse. Her hair was pulled into a severe bun on the top of her head, and she wore oversized mirrored sunglasses that hid her eyes. She was bustier than he had remembered, but he quickly took his eyes off her figure.
“We need to stop for some petrol,” she announced after a few minutes. Her English was accented, but not very heavily.
“For which I’m paying,” he offered immediately, but she shook her head.
“I have a university credit card,” she said. “Government discount. You can repay the university. Trust me: They will bill you.”
“Okay.” He tried to think of something else to say but couldn’t, and she was not exactly a bubbling font of conversation. She pulled into a sidewalk gas station and got out to take care of fueling the Subaru. David had been about to get out and do it, but she was acting as if he were not even there. He got out and bought coffee instead. He raised the small cup in her direction, but she shook her head emphatically. Right, he thought. Isn’t this going to be fun.
In five minutes they were on their way. She told him the trip would take about two hours, and then lapsed back into silence as she concentrated on getting them out of Tel Aviv. She took the main highway up toward Jerusalem and then continued right back out of the capital city on Highway 30, which, according to the multilingual road signs, led toward Amman, Jordan. Once out of Jerusalem, the countryside changed rapidly, evolving from city buildings to high sierra desert almost immediately. On the rocky hills above the road there were occasional clusters of white apartment buildings, interspersed with rocky pastures dotted with goats. He assumed the distant buildings were the notorious West Bank settlements to which the Palestinians objected.
“Are there good roads all the way to Masada?” he asked.
“Metsadá,” she said, correcting him. “Near the cities, yes. Along the Dead Sea, they are so-so. We’ll take this road to Highway 90, and then we’ll go south, past Qumran and Ein Gedi, right along the Dead Sea.”
“Professor Ellerstein said you were a specialist on this site. Do you go down there often?”
“No. I haven’t been to the mountain for years. My academic focus is not the site; I study the relationship between the scroll fragments found at the site and the scrolls of Qumran, actually.”
“There is a relationship?”
She sighed impatiently. “There is a body of thought that holds that the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls were not created by the so-called Essene community, but rather that they are a collection of scrolls brought down from Jerusalem in the final days of the Second Temple.”
“Just before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, around A.D. 70.”
“Of course.” As in, yes, of course, dummy.
David put on his sunglasses. The glare from the surrounding countryside was growing with every minute of sunlight as the day began. Everything out there, sand, rocks, cliffs, seemed to be painted in dazzling shades of white. He figured that they were headed almost directly east, and evidence of human habitation was getting scarce. David recalled some lines from the Bible about scorpions, sand, and stones, and he could now appreciate the reality of it. It was also getting hotter by the minute as the sun rose. He glanced over at the console and saw a button for air-conditioning. She must have seen him looking.