Ellerstein pulled his glasses down to look directly at Skuratov. “So this information is not news? You did this thing?”
“I did not put him there,” Skuratov said. “He put himself there. I just made sure he stayed there.”
“All right, Yossi, I’ll take it from here,” Gulder said as he walked up. Ellerstein was surprised at the aide’s tone of voice. This was a different Israel Gulder. He could see that the American, unable to understand Hebrew, was totally baffled. Judith, on the other hand, looked as if she were going to explode.
“It was you?” she hissed. “You who closed the slab on my husband? It was you who closed it on us, too, wasn’t it?”
“What are they saying?” David asked Ellerstein in English. The professor just shook his head. “That’s Colonel Malyuta Lukyanovitch Skuratov, of the Israeli security service known as Shin Bet,” he said softly to David in English. “Very important at Dimona. I believe he murdered Yehudit’s husband.”
Judith advanced on Skuratov, pushing past Colonel Shapiro to get right in the old man’s face. “I know he murdered my husband,” she said, in English now. “Just like he tried to murder us. Why? Evil bastard, look at me! Why?”
“Because you had no business being down there, in that cistern,” Skuratov thundered in heavily accented English. “Neither of you: It is forbidden! Do you understand me? Forbidden!” He glared at David. “You goddamned Americans think you can go anywhere, all over the world, and do anything you please? Well, not here, you can’t. Absolutely not. It is forbidden!”
“Did you know about the cave?” David asked him. “With the Temple relics?”
Skuratov hesitated but then waved his hand dismissively. “What cave? What relics? Is this some more of your emotional dreams about Metsadá, American fool? There is no cave.”
“Yes there is, you bastard,” Judith yelled. “Now explain yourself: Why have you done these terrible things? What are you hiding down there?”
“Your security, and Israel’s. Your husband took an oath, and then he broke that oath when he consorted with antinuclear traitors. We knew what he was up to, of course. When he came here, to find the D2O, he went too far. We took the appropriate measures. That is all.”
“D2O?” David asked softly. “Did you say D2O?”
Skuratov squinted his eyes for an instant and then sighed. “Ah. I forgot. Our American here is an engineer.” He rubbed the sides of his face. “Yes, I said D2O. So now you know.”
“Know what?” Gulder said. Ellerstein said something to him in Hebrew. Gulder’s face tightened, and then he looked at David.
Judith wasn’t interested in D2O. “I don’t care!” she shouted, clearly on the verge of hysteria. “You murdered my husband!”
Skuratov snorted his contempt, but Colonel Shapiro moved closer to Judith.
“In Hebrew, please,” Gulder said, glancing again at David. “Yossi, what is this D2O business?”
“Deuterium oxide, Mr. Gulder,” Ellerstein said. “Also known as heavy water. The American mentioned pipes. I’m going to guess that the cistern is part of a heavy water distiller, supplied from an evaporation plant nearby. Right, Colonel?”
Skuratov nodded once but then stared away into space. The breeze wafting up from the cliffs below carried a faint whiff of warm brine.
“They were making heavy water?” Gulder asked. “Here, in this place? In this desert?”
Ellerstein told Gulder about the cylinders. “That is why you killed Dov Ressner, isn’t it? There was no radiation accident, and it wasn’t because he was talking to antinuclear dissidents. He’d figured this place out, hadn’t he? He saw the geothermal plant down there and realized there had to be a storage point, a very big storage point.”
“What is this heavy water?” Judith asked, looking first to Gulder and then to Ellerstein. Then she looked to David and asked it again, in English.
“It’s the key to making really big nuclear weapons,” David said. “Or making smaller ones much more powerful. You can derive tritium from heavy water, and you can make plutonium in a heavy water reactor. That’s why nonproliferation agencies track it — it’s a marker. Large quantities of heavy water usually indicate a nuclear weapons program.”
“But make deuterium oxide?” Ellerstein asked again. “How? The expense — it would be astronomical. There is no way—”
“Yes, there is,” David interrupted. “Deuterium oxide occurs in nature, but in very dilute form, as little as one molecule in ten million in seawater, for instance.” He pointed with his chin to the Dead Sea below them. “Like that seawater.”
Ellerstein lifted his hands in a gesture of consternation.
“The key was that geothermal plume down there,” David said. “If you had to pay for the energy to boil down millions of gallons of saltwater to get heavy water, you’d never do it — but this energy was free, wasn’t it, Colonel Skuratov? All you had to do was fill the cistern with freshwater, distilled from the Dead Sea, then recycle all that water through a second distiller down in that plant, concentrating the deuterium oxide on each pass. Over and over again, for months on end, until the millions of gallons became, what, twenty gallons? At a ten percent concentration?”
“Thirty,” Skuratov whispered proudly. “Thirty percent concentration.”
David straightened up. “So you guys never did buy heavy water from Norway way back then, did you? That was all cover and deception. You were already making it right here in Israel.”
Skuratov gave him a wintry smile. “The Norway diversion — something for all you sanctimonious nonproliferators to chase after.”
“Then you’d concentrate it at Dimona?”
Skuratov sniffed and looked away without answering.
There was a moment of silence. Gulder broke it, switching back to Hebrew. “There is something missing here,” he said. “Our nuclear program is an open secret. What required extreme measures?”
“Because that is not what you wanted heavy water for, was it, Colonel Zealot?” asked Ellerstein, remembering from his days at Dimona the other use of heavy water.
Skuratov frowned at the use of the word “Zealot” but then seemed to relax, as if there were no longer any reason to pretend. “No, it was not,” he agreed quietly.
“What other use?” Gulder asked. Ellerstein told him.
Gulder, obviously excited now, moved closer to the colonel, forcing him to crane his neck up at him. “We’ve searched this area, everywhere around Dimona, ever since you stuck your nose in when the American came. We’ve even overflown the fortress with radiation monitors. Monitoring trucks up and down the roads at night. There was nothing.”
“First of all, heavy water is not radioactive,” Skuratov said. “Second, you were looking for weapons or weapons materials. There weren’t any.”
“So what are those cylinders for?”
“When the water level in the cistern is reduced to a few feet and the maximum concentration has been achieved, we command the cylinders to open and fill with the product.”
“The product.”
“Yes, the product.”
Gulder bent down to get in Skuratov’s face. “A product is something you sell, Colonel.”
“Just so, Mr. Gulder.”
“To whom?”
“To whom do you think, Mr. Very Important Assistant? Who in this region desperately needs heavy water?”