The Einstein Prophecy (23 page)

She was about to scream when he said, “Hold on!”

And she saw who it was.

“What’s wrong?” Lucas said, gripping her more tightly.

She gasped, and fell against him so hard he nearly toppled over the railing.

“What is it, Simone?”

A folder—blue—fell from under his arm, scattering papers on the stairs.

“Why are you running?”

She couldn’t answer; she had no breath yet. She turned her head to watch the stairs below.

“Where are your shoes?”

But all she could do was cling to him, and listen for the sound of the fire door being thrown open again.

It didn’t come.

“Simone, talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong!”

How could she explain? Instead, she clutched his arm and dragged him up the stairs, over his protests—“Wait, I need to retrieve those papers”—and toward the light and safety of the main reading room. Once they got there, she collapsed in a chair at the nearest table. A few students, annoyed at the commotion, looked up from their studies.

Lucas knelt beside her, holding her hands in his own and murmuring soothing words. A librarian hurried over to ask what was wrong. Lucas said, “I’m not sure yet.”

Neither was Simone, although, as her thoughts cleared and her heart slowed, she began to form, however reluctantly, a terrifying idea. It was the destruction in the carrel that gave it to her. Someone, or something, seemed intent on erasing its own trail, on eradicating all the evidence that had been amassed over the centuries, from all around the world, of its very existence. But to what end? Did it have some new and more monstrous havoc yet to wreak?

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

All morning, Einstein had been poring over the latest notes and internal queries that Oppenheimer had sent by secret courier. There was no escaping the sense of urgency. Apparently, some communiqués from the highest echelon of the Nazi command had been intercepted and decoded at Bletchley Park, and unless they had been deliberately devised to be leaked and thereby mislead the Allied scientists (which was always a possibility), the German physicists were honing in on the last steps necessary to create a nuclear reaction. The race to unleash the unparalleled power of the atom was picking up speed, and Einstein knew that if the Third Reich got to the finish line first, the civilized world would cease to exist. Washington, New York, London, Moscow—all of them would be consumed in balls of fire overnight, and Hitler would rule the globe unchallenged. Evil, in its purest distillation ever, would reign triumphant.

President Roosevelt himself had acknowledged as much in a phone call at dawn that day. “Even your friend Bertie Russell has come around and made some comments helpful to the war effort.”

For the world’s most renowned pacifist to do so, Einstein recognized, was newsworthy. Although no one concurred, he still believed that it might have been Russell who was the target in the stadium that day. They had once compared hate mail, and Russell had won by a mile.

“But those bastards in Berlin are breathing down our neck,” Roosevelt had explained, “and I don’t need to tell you, of all people, what it will mean if they crack this before we do.”

“You do not, Mr. President.”

He could hear another voice, insisting that the president come to a meeting.

“Duty calls,” he said, “but if there is anything you need, Albert, just say the word.”

The phone had clicked off, and after Einstein had calmed down Helen—it wasn’t every day that the White House telephoned—he’d gone straight back to work. Now, he could hear her in the yard below, calling for the cat.

That, at least, was one problem he could immediately address.

Lifting the window sash, he poked his head out—the autumn air was bracing—and said, “I know where she is.”

“Where? I put out fresh milk for her, but she hasn’t touched it.”

“Wait. I will come down.” A walk in the yard might clear his head.

Helen was at the back steps, by the bowl of untouched milk, when he came through the kitchen.

“She went into the garage last night,” he said.

“The garage is locked.”

“There is something wrong with the latch. Come, let’s get her out.”

The ground was uneven and matted with a brown carpet of damp leaves. Helen stayed close to his side, making sure he didn’t slip and take a fall. He didn’t know what he would do without her. When he had first employed her, seventeen years ago now, he’d had no idea how much he would come to rely upon her, for everything from household chores to protecting him from intruders and interruptions to his work.

When they got to the garage, the latch was again hanging loose, and the wooden doors, their white paint chipped and flaking, were rattling in their frame. He pulled one of them open, and the autumn sunlight fell on the clutter of cardboard boxes packed with papers, and some old office furniture he should have discarded long ago.

And on what looked, to his surprise, like a blanched and brittle femur.

“Is that what I think it is?” Helen said in wonder, as she inched past him to pick it up.

Now he could see that it was one of several bones, scattered around the dirt floor. Had some wild animal been making this its lair, dragging its prey inside for a leisurely meal?

“Oh my God,” Helen said, drawing back with one hand to her mouth and the other pointing with the bone into the darker recesses of the garage.

A pair of bare feet stuck out from behind a pile of cartons. Einstein put out an arm to hold Helen back, then stepped forward. Something told him that the man, whoever he turned out to be, was dead.

“Open the other door,” he said to Helen. “We need more light.”

She pushed it back as he came around the boxes.

The man lay sprawled on the ground, facedown, his arms flung out to either side like a skydiver in free fall. He was wearing a long black slicker, its hood drawn up over the back of his head. A canvas sack lay beside him, along with a sharpened chisel. He was utterly still.

Bending down, his back creaking, Einstein touched the man’s shoulder, then shook it gently. The motion went no farther down the body than the arm. He shook it again, expecting no response and getting none.

“Who is it?” Helen asked, without coming close enough to see. “Is he . . . all right?”

“No.”

“Should I call for an ambulance?”

“Too late. I think you must call the police.”

Helen scurried off to the house.

Was it a hobo, he wondered, who had taken shelter for the night? The poor soul, Einstein thought . . . to die like this, alone, on a dirt floor. With all of his earthly possessions in a canvas bag.

But what accounted for the bones? They appeared ancient. Why would he have been carrying those?

Delicately, Einstein drew the hood aside, revealing a thatch of dark blond hair, the kind only a young man might possess. And then, curiosity getting the better of him, he gently pushed the body onto its side . . . and instantly regretted that he had.

The skin of the face was puckered, as if it had been sucked dry, the lips were raised so tight the gums were showing, the eyes were open, empty, and staring into infinity. It was hard to tell if he had been twenty, or two hundred.

“I am sorry,” Einstein said softly. The man smelled like a swamp. “Very sorry.” He let the body roll back into its previous posture, and kept vigil beside it until Helen could return with the police. It would be wrong to leave the poor man alone again. Not knowing what else to do while he waited, he laid a hand gently on his shoulder and recited, under his breath and with his head bowed, an ancient Hebrew prayer for the dead.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Would wonders ever cease? Lucas thought.

He was hardly able to believe that he had the bones and relics back, that the police had been willing to relinquish them to his care. He carried the sack as gently as if it were a baby he was cradling in his arms. Never again would he let its contents be kidnapped.

Passing under the grinning gargoyles that cavorted along the roofline of Guyot Hall, he looked up at them with a newfound, and wary, appreciation. Although they were much eroded by time and the elements, he could still see the protuberant horns on their brow, the grasping talons, the pointed teeth and furled wings, and he was struck by how closely they resembled the shapes and shadows he had seen in the film made the night the ossuary had been opened. For the first time in his life, a thought crossed his mind—an unwelcome one that he would never before have entertained. Could these fantastical creatures, their visages so familiar from cathedrals and castles the world over, have been modeled on something other than the fever dreams of independent stone carvers? Could they have been cast from living specimens—or, perhaps, from the atavistic memories of such beings, harbored deep in every human soul? Could there be, as the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung had claimed, a “collective unconscious,” where such fears and apprehensions lurked? As children, weren’t we all afraid of the dark?

Maybe, he thought, we had reason to be.

In the lobby, a janitor was down on his knees with a screwdriver in front of the display case containing the Caithness Man; glancing back over his shoulder, he said, “If you ask me, this place should be off-limits to townies. Kids in particular.”

“Why?”

“They snapped the damn lock.”

“Was anything damaged?”

“You tell me,” he said, going back to screwing in the replacement.

Lucas stepped closer and looked into the case. The ancient figure’s lips and eyes were still sealed shut, its back was still pressed hard against the stake where it had been slaughtered. The leathern cap, its muddy color indistinguishable from the weathered brown skin, was right where it had always been. Lucas was about to turn away when something caught his eye.

A loose strip, hanging away from the pole.

He leaned over the kneeling janitor’s bald head to get a closer look.

“Something wrong, Professor?”

“I’m not sure yet.” He peered at the other side of the specimen, and saw that the strap that had held the prisoner in place had been severed there, too. Whoever had broken into the glass case had been trying to dismantle the display, either as an act of vandalism or, even worse, theft. Thank goodness the thing was still there at all. But Lucas couldn’t help but wonder if this particular crime wasn’t somehow connected to the stolen relics, or the destruction of the research materials in Simone’s carrel.

“The hall ought to be locked at all times,” the janitor said, packing up his tools.

“Students, and faculty too, have to get in and out all day.”

“Give ’em all keys,” he replied, lumbering to his feet again.

Lucas didn’t comment on the impracticability of dispensing hundreds of keys to the front door. He headed for the lab upstairs, where he was expected.

The door was already open, and as Delaney raised his head from a microscope, his eyes went straight to the sack of bones Lucas had told him about on the phone.

“Strange doings,” he said solemnly. “I never would have guessed it of Brandt.”

“Neither would I,” Lucas said, as he laid the bag on a countertop.

“Why the hell would he have done something like that?”

Lucas could not divulge, even to Delaney, what he knew. “Maybe he thought he’d make some great discovery and catch the fast track to tenure.”

“By stealing artifacts that even the OSS is keeping tabs on? Makes me wonder if the guy was dealing from a full deck.”

“I don’t think he was.”

“I mean, I’m not saying that he wasn’t a pain in the ass sometimes, but I still wouldn’t have wished what happened to him on anyone.”

And Delaney only knew the half of it. Lucas felt it would be unnecessary, and unwise, to share the gorier details of what he’d seen, only hours before, in that garage on Mercer Street. It was the FBI agent, Ray Taylor, who had summarily hauled him out of a lecture hall and driven him straight to Einstein’s house. The professor was in the yard, in a sweatshirt and a pair of rumpled trousers, holding an unlit pipe.

“This is a sad business,” Einstein said. “A sad business.”

But it was only when Lucas was ushered into the garage that he understood what the professor had been alluding to. The missing bones and relics were strewn around the dirt floor, as were a couple of other items—a chisel and a worn hammer. Toward the back, between teetering stacks of cardboard boxes, he saw a man in a jacket labeled “Coroner” bending over a corpse.

“It’s that guy Brandt, right?” Taylor said.

Lucas nodded, but at the same time he would hardly have recognized him—it looked more like the husk of a man than an actual corpse.

“And this is the other stuff that was missing? From the university?”

Looking around, Lucas said, “Yes.”

“Pick it all up, make an inventory, and give me a copy. Then do me a favor—lock it all up, someplace safe for a change.”

Trying to avert his eyes from the coroner’s grim work, Lucas gathered the things together—even the staff with the crooked handle—and slipped them into the canvas sack he had last seen looped around Brandt’s shoulders. On his way back through the yard, he was stopped by Einstein, who said, “You will come and talk sometime,
ja
? Afternoons are good.” There was an even more doleful look in his eyes than usual. “In times like these, it is good to talk about other matters. Art . . . music . . . the higher things.”

“I promise,” Lucas said.

“And maybe,” he said, in a low voice tinged with embarrassment, “you can bring with you some tobacco?”

“For sure,” he’d replied, as Einstein patted him on the arm and, head down, shuffled back through the screen door Helen was holding open for him.

“Here,” Delaney said, going to the green metal locker, twice the width of a normal locker, bolted securely to the wall. He threw open its door. “You can stash that stuff in here,” he said. “It’s where I keep my reports and the radiocarbon data for Macmillan. It’s got a padlock, and the door to the lab has a dead bolt on it, too.”

“Do you also sleep in here?”

“Occasionally, yes.”

Although he’d been kidding, Lucas wasn’t surprised. He deposited the bag, the crooked end of the staff poking out of one end and barely clearing the top shelf. Delaney closed the locker again, clamped the steel padlock shut, then yanked down on it for good measure.

“How’s Simone doing?”

“I called her this morning, and she sounded like she was still pretty shaken up.”

“Who wouldn’t be? First her father drowns in a bathtub, then she gets chased by some weirdo in the library. It’s a miracle she’s still standing. They figure out who did the damage to her carrel, by the way?”

“Not yet.” Lucas had originally suspected Andy Brandt, but now he knew that he’d guessed wrong. And when Agent Taylor had asked him, pointedly, why Brandt might have made his way—badly wounded by the bus—to Einstein’s house, of all places, Lucas had said it might have been dumb luck.

“Some dumb luck,” Taylor had replied. “A hundred garages between here and Washington Road and he picks this one to die in?”

Lucas was wrestling with his own suspicions. Could Brandt, like Wally Gregg, have possibly intended to attack the professor? Or—and this struck even closer to home—could Brandt have been on the way to the boardinghouse across the street, to silence the one man who knew his secret, Lucas Athan?

For the next hour or two, Lucas and Delaney went over the latest lab data—the radiocarbon tests were being better refined, it seemed, every hour, but it was unclear how much use they would be to Colonel Macmillan. When the janitor came in to empty the wastebaskets and to say that he would be locking up in a few minutes, they made sure that everything of importance was sealed in the green locker, then headed down to the exhibit hall. As Lucas stopped to turn up the collar of his coat, he happened to glance over at the Caithness Man, now locked away again in his display case; the low light at its base made it appear, for a split second, as if his eyes, sealed shut for centuries, had opened just a slit.

The campus was quiet, except for the tolling of the carillon in the chapel, and nearly deserted, apart from a few students charging off to commons for dinner, or to the library for a study session. Lucas was glad when the lights of the town came into view, the Nassau Inn presenting an especially cheery sight, with an amber glow emanating from its windows and a lazy curlicue of wood smoke drifting from the taproom chimney.

“I don’t suppose I can cajole you into one drink before you go upstairs?” Delaney asked.

Lucas, with another plan in mind, fumbled for a reply.

“Come on, pal, I can read you like a book.”

“Maybe we’ll both come down and join you,” Lucas said.

“I won’t be holding my breath,” Delaney said as he crossed the lobby. “Hope she’s recovered from that scare in the stacks.”

Lucas hoped so, too, and as soon as the creaky elevator had taken him to the top floor, he rapped gently on her door—twice, then twice again. A signal that they had agreed on.

Even so, he heard the latch on the peephole slide open, then the locks being turned. The door opened only halfway, and she said, “Quick—come in.”

Lucas ducked inside, turning to embrace her, but Simone was slamming the door shut and throwing the locks. Then she peered through the peephole again, twisting her head to see as much of the hallway as it would allow.

“Trust me, there’s no one else out there,” Lucas said. She looked, if anything, in worse shape than she had the night before when he’d accompanied her back to the room, waited while she took a sleeping pill, and then left her, still dressed in all but her shoes, under the quilt.

“Have you been out today?” he said.

“Why?”

“Because you look like you could use some fresh air.” Her white blouse was untucked, her skirt wrinkled, and her face drawn and pale. “The room could use some oxygen, too.” The little writing desk by the window was covered with papers and prints, a room-service cart was pushed up against the radiator, with a black fly—surely the last of the season—buzzing around a dirty plate and an upturned silver lid. Lucas went to the window and started to lift the sash, but noticed that an index card, wedged under it, had slipped free. Picking it up off the carpet, he saw a strange sign—a diamond tilted to one side, with a diagonal line crossed through it—drawn in pencil, and underlined three times.

“No, don’t do that,” she said, quickly replacing the card and pressing the window down on it.

But where had he seen that symbol before?

“Did you recognize it?” she asked, nervously.

“The sign?” Then, snapping his fingers, he remembered. “It was carved on the lid of the ossuary. Under the last chain we removed.”

Simone nodded. “It’s an ancient sign. It also appears on the Coptic papyri that we removed from the tomb. My father was studying it, just before . . .”

To keep her from having to complete the thought, Lucas said, “So what does it represent?”

“It represents the forces of containment.”

“So it’s a seal?”

“Correct.”

Now he could see where this was going. “And we broke it when we opened the ossuary.”

“Yes.”

Looking around the disorderly room, he asked, “But aside from the aroma of the food trolley, what are you trying to contain in here?”

“I’m trying to contain—I’m trying to
protect
—everything we’ve learned. To begin with, everything my father had collected in that blue folder.”

“Who do you think is coming to take it away?”

“The same thing that killed him.”

He knew she harbored doubts about her father’s death, but he had never heard her put it so bluntly.

“He was studying these pages just before he died,” she said. “It’s why they were stolen.”

He waited, not wanting to say anything that might increase the strain she was evidently laboring under.

“And they reveal the name of his murderer.”

“He had written it down?” he said, incredulously. “Before it even happened?”

“He didn’t have to. It’s all right there.”

“What is?”

“ ‘My name is Legion: for we are many.’ ”

Though he couldn’t have given the chapter and verse, Lucas recognized the line.

“Mark 5:9,” she said. “It’s the story where Jesus casts the unclean spirits out of the raving man, the Gadarene, who had been haunting the tombs and cutting himself with sharp stones.”

“Yes, I know the passage,” Lucas said.

“But do you remember what happens to the demons that Jesus casts out of the madman?”

“To the best of my recollection, they enter into the bodies of swine.”

“Demons can do that.”

“Enter swine?”

“They can enter anything. They can jump, like ticks, from one host to another. My father was documenting it. In fact, they have to do that. To function in this world, they have to find some physical form to get around in. Otherwise, they’re just disembodied and ineffectual.”