David undid the waist belt, removed the blanket, and stood up to stretch. The four big turboprop engines had settled into a steady synchronized whine, and it wasn’t too noisy in the cargo bay. He was looking out the single porthole when he became aware that there was someone behind him. He turned around to find Judith standing there, her hands in her pockets. She looked like a football player in pads because of the oversized flight jacket she was wearing. Her eyes looked tired, and the dark pouches were back. He looked into her face for a moment and then embraced her. She relaxed and leaned against him. They stood this way for a long minute, and then David let her go and stepped back. She pressed a hand against his new beard and smiled. He led her to a seat on the long bench.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll bite. What’s going on?”
She smiled. “You owe this to Yossi Ellerstein. He convinced Gulder to let me come see you.”
“He didn’t know about that wine bowl, did he?”
She smiled. “Absolutely not, but he did figure it out pretty quickly once that story got loose in Jerusalem.”
He nodded. “That could have gone two ways,” he said. “They’d either give up and boot me out of the country or turn me into a good Palestinian.”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure how he managed it,” she said. “The media is in overload these days: Western nations defaulting, Arab uprisings, the Temple artifacts. His theory was that heavy water would be too hard a story. Too technical. No one would care.”
“How did the objects look when they brought them out, cleaned them up?”
“Spectacular beyond belief,” she said. “Even damaged, the menorah simply glistens, and the scrolls were intact inside.”
“Glows, hunh?” he asked. “Like a certain bowl?”
She giggled. “What bowl? No one knows anything about a bowl.”
“But the patriarch from Jerusalem—”
“Ah, yes, the patriarch. He went to the monastery. He returned. Apparently the room failed to glow.”
David sat back against the insulation on the side of the cargo bay. “Sure as hell did when I was there.”
“Yossi Ellerstein questioned me about that. Had I ever seen this mysterious glow.”
“And?”
“I told him yes, I had. The bowl does not glow: The room it’s in does. Know what he said?”
“What?”
“That the glow appears only when the bowl is in the presence of someone who believes Judah Sicarius’s testament.”
“That would be—”
“You and I, yes,” she said. “For now, it remains at the monastery chapel, and the monks remain outside. Yossi said that the government would open an inquiry on the bowl, just as soon as you and I come back to Israel.”
He took her hand. “That might be a long damned time, Judith. Especially the you-and-me part. The coming back to Israel? I don’t think so.”
“Well then, Mr. Hall. Mission accomplished, as Mr. Gulder would say, yes?”
He shook his head in wonder. “What about you?” he asked. “What are you doing here on my freedom bird?”
Her expression changed. “Yossi thought it might be nice for me to take a break from all the media circus business,” she said. “Suggested a trip to America. Perhaps give some lectures, but mostly to get away from it all for a little while.”
“At this juncture? With all the media interest?”
“Well, his ‘suggestion’ just might have to do with what was said up there on the mountain. About the nuclear stuff? I’m the other person who knows, remember?”
“Ah,” he said. “Yes.” David remembered Ellerstein’s comment about corresponding. He took her hands in his. “Will you come stay with me, Judith? In Washington? I mean, I’ve got lots of room. A housekeeper, even. I could show you Washington, hell, the whole country. If you’d like to, of course. I mean, that is, if you don’t have—”
“Yes, I would like that, Mr. David Hall,” she said, a shy smile on her face. “I think I would like that very much. Although it’s Yehudit, not Judith.”
He grinned like a teenager. Yehudit it would be. Maybe she could teach him some Hebrew, against the day when he went back to Israel. When they went back.
When pigs flew.
“I hope you’re right about all this,” Gulder said as the army staff car left the airbase and headed back toward the lights of Haifa.
“PM thought so,” Ellerstein pointed out, “and he’s the one under the gun from the Americans. The settlement question. Hamas making nice with Fatah. Egypt ‘resetting’ their diplomatic relations with us. Get this problem five thousand miles away from here — that’s a good plan, he thinks.”
Gulder grunted in the darkness of the backseat.
“You’ve alerted the appropriate people at the U.S. Embassy?” Ellerstein asked.
“Yes,” Gulder said. “One of our special friends has had a word with one of their special friends. Once Hall gets back to the States someone will come around, quite informally, of course. Invoking old associations when Hall was in the nuclear nonproliferation world. Just a few questions about some rumors of heavy water diversion at Dimona.”
“As a test?”
“Yes, as a test,” Gulder said. “Who knows what he will do. If he doesn’t talk, the matter is settled. If he does, then the PM can say to that dreadful woman, look, you people are pushing too hard. See what almost happened? What passions you’re stirring up here? Zealots again. We need some breathing room here. Back off, Madame Secretary. Get back on your fancy airplane and go fix the Arab street, eh?”
Ellerstein smiled to himself in the darkness. One of his professors back in New York had told him a golden rule: If you can’t dazzle them with brains, baffle them with bullshit. The cover stories were about right. Subtle, even, if he didn’t mind saying so himself. Gulder had had his doubts, but the PM had seen it right away. Besides, the American, Hall, had done Israel an amazing turn with his theories about the ancient Zealots. Ultimately, they owed the real debt to Adrian Draper. One of their own.
“Such amazing things they discovered.”
“Yes, indeed,” Gulder said. “That menorah. The scrolls, even the holders. Amazing, and so beautiful. Imagine what the whole thing must have looked like, so very long ago.”
“And the tablets — the bricks. All those names. Josephus got it right.”
“Nine hundred and eighty, not nine hundred and sixty.”
Ellerstein gave him a spare-me look. “Tell me,” he asked, “what did the Pharisees and Scribes decide about that bronze bowl?”
“A run-of-the-mill first-century wine bowl,” Gulder replied. “Nothing special. The patriarch was, apparently, not amused.”
The car phone rang. Gulder picked it up, listened, and began to dictate instructions. Ellerstein tuned him out, sat back in his seat, and fished for his pipe. Judith had told him again about the final lines on the wall, what she thought they might mean, and what that plain little bowl might really be. Of course, the lines had faded after being soaked during their escape, so now, once again, there was no evidence.
Something new for the Christians to argue about for a change, he thought with a smile. Wouldn’t that have been something, though.
BOOKS BY P. T. DEUTERMANN