Something not quite right here, she thought. Unless he was going to make more dives at other sites along the coast. The manager hadn’t seemed upset, just wondering where his tanks were. Perhaps that was it: David had gone diving somewhere else, just to get his nerve back after the awful thing he’d witnessed.
She would wait for Yossi’s call tonight.
Ellerstein called the hotel in Tel Aviv and asked for Mr. David Hall’s room. He got hotel voice mail. He called the assistant manager, explained who he was and why he was calling, and asked the man to go check the room. The manager was not exactly enthusiastic, and Ellerstein proceeded to lay a little ministry authority on him. The manager said he would call him back. Ellerstein, on his government phone, said he would hold, thank you very much. As in, do it now, please. The man was back in six minutes. “The room is made up; his things are there. Housekeeping reports no signs of illness, and they should know. The bed has not been slept in since Wednesday.”
“Ah, so? Since Wednesday?”
“That’s what the floor supervisor reports. Perhaps Mr. Hall has found better circumstances, yes?”
“That’s always possible,” Ellerstein mused. He thanked the man for his efforts and hung up. He leaned back in his chair. No signs of illness, and the maids would know. So where was the elusive Mr. David Hall? He was rich enough to have booked into another hotel somewhere while out on tour. He was supposed to be scuba diving, wasn’t he? For some reason, an image of the mysterious Colonel Lazarus crossed his mind.
He had called Gulder after Skuratov’s visit, but Gulder hadn’t seemed very impressed. “He wants you to keep an eye on Ressner; so do we. What’s the problem?”
“What’s the problem? The problem is—”
“No, no, not on this phone, Yossi,” Gulder had interrupted. “Look: If your scary colonel is watching the American, he’s not watching other things. Then perhaps we can make him move in an unplanned direction. Keep doing what you’re doing, Yossi.”
He’s not my scary colonel, Ellerstein thought. Still, maybe he should call Skuratov and tell him that Yehudit couldn’t find Mr. Hall. See what Skuratov knew — he supposedly had the man under surveillance. Maybe the old Russian could tell him something, so he could then put Yehudit out of her misery. He fished out the card the colonel had given him and called the number.
“International Planning.”
Right, Ellerstein thought. Spooks. He identified himself and asked for Colonel Skuratov. The colonel was not available. Could the man take a message?
“Tell him that Dr. Ressner has not heard from the American, Hall, for a couple of days. Ask him if he knows where the American is.”
“Got it,” the man said.
“Do you have the first idea of what I’m talking about?” Ellerstein asked.
“None whatsoever, Professor — but then I never do.”
“The colonel hasn’t said anything about the names Ressner or the American, David Hall? There is no special alert?”
“Look, Professor, I will deliver your message, okay?”
Ellerstein thanked him, and the line went dead. Ellerstein looked at the phone for a moment and then hung up. So much for that great idea. He snorted — all this hugger-mugger about the American. Total nonsense. Now, what would he tell Yehudit? Nothing, he told himself. Coward, an inner voice whispered.
23
At three o’clock, David suited up again and prepared for his second dive. The operative mean depth was going to be about thirty-five feet, since he had already inspected the bottom of the cavern. From the dive planner, the no-decompression time limit was two hundred and forty-five minutes. Over three hours. Temperature and residual nitrogen were no longer factors because he needed to be out of the cavern by four anyway, dressed and down the mountain before five thirty, when the site closed down for Shabbat.
This time he tied off the underwater flashlight close to the slab hole before submerging. The water felt colder as he swam just under the roof of the cavern to the west side and then descended to thirty-five feet of indicated depth. It still took him fifteen minutes to find the cave opening, only to find that this was not the cave. This passage went into the rock wall about ten feet and simply ended, momentarily wedging his tank before he was able to back out. Damn, he thought. How many caves are there in here? He searched some more and finally found what looked like the cave he had seen on the first dive. The entrance was a narrow circle, which then expanded somewhat once he swam in. Following the purple beam from his headlamp, he used his hands to pull himself along the rock wall, sending up small clouds of muddy water as he inched his way forward. His tank clanked on the rock, and he looked up to see that the top of the cave was narrowing rapidly to an acute apex.
Rolling slowly in place to put his tank beneath him and then continued crawling forward, upside down, feeling the first signs of claustrophobia as he pressed forward, entering a cave inside a cave, and under thirty-five feet of water besides. He banished the distracting thoughts and kept going, inching forward now to keep his gear from being damaged. He realized he was breathing too fast and stopped for a moment to calm down. Then he realized his air bubbles were going ahead of him. Hunh? They should have been going behind him, out along the roof of the narrow chamber and back up to the slab hole.
He craned his neck straight back to see how close he was to the white slab. Make that the purple slab. The rock walls pressed in on all sides, and he imagined that he could feel them moving, slowly constricting like some stone python to capture him in here for all eternity. Focus, dammit! The slab was right ahead of him, shimmering now in the bright light of his headlamp, the colors rippling from white to purple. He reached over his shoulder like a man doing a slow-motion backstroke to touch the slab and hit — nothing.
He stopped cold. Nothing! He inched forward again, deeper into the cleft ahead, and again reached out to touch the slab. His hand passed right through it.
There was no slab.
It was an air-water interface. What had looked like a slab was nothing more than the refraction taking place where air and water met.
He inched forward again and felt sand along his hips, then stuck his head into the air of what looked like a round cave. He wriggled himself all the way into the cave and sat up, only then realizing that he had been swimming uphill inside the tunnel as he oriented himself once again on solid ground. The entrance back out to the main cave was now a black, rippling patch of water in the light of the headlamp. He started to take his mouthpiece out but then stopped. How old was the air in here? Was there even oxygen?
Continuing to breathe on the tank, he began to look around. The cave was not really spherical but more in the shape of an ax-head lying on its back, flat and open at the bottom, closing into a knife edge up some twenty feet above his head. There were two sheer, almost vertical walls. The bottom, on which he sat, was deep, loose sand, rising in a gentle slope like a sandy beach from the watery aperture leading back out to the main cavern. The whole cave was perhaps thirty feet in length and no more than ten feet across at the base. There was a structure of some kind, a table or bench, at the far end, under which lay a bundle of rags. Something metallic glinted dangerously near the rags as he shone the light on them.
He tried to figure out why the cave was dry. The only explanation was that the main cave had been dry at one time and then slowly filled with water over the centuries. Eventually the water would have risen past the lower entrance to the tunnel, sealed by that boulder, after which, leaking past the boulder, it would have begun to compress the air inside the sealed cave. When the water pressure outside equaled the air pressure inside, stasis would have occurred, with the air inside becoming a trapped, pressurized bubble.