The Einstein Prophecy (8 page)

When he closed the door behind him, he leaned his back against it, face tilted toward the ceiling, and deeply exhaled. But he couldn’t shake the feeling, completely irrational, that something else was breathing, too, right on the other side.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Another?” the bartender asked, and Lucas just raised one finger from the glass to say yes.

The bartender poured him another double on the rocks, and Lucas pressed the cold glass to the spot on his forehead where the shrapnel had hit, rolling it back and forth across his skin. Sometimes the pain was sharp but brief, and other times, like tonight, it was a dull ache that no amount of aspirin could touch. All he could do was try to numb the sensation. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror that backed the bottles on display behind the bar, he saw a guy slumped on a stool, with a black patch over one eye, rocking a glass of scotch against his head, and it was clear why the stools on either side of him were conspicuously empty.

It had taken longer than he expected to get things cleaned up in the conservation wing, and once he had, he’d stopped by the hospital to check on the janitor. The nurse at the front desk told him that only immediate family were allowed to visit, but she didn’t look, or sound, sanguine about Wally’s prospects. That’s when the pounding in his head had started up again.

Benny Goodman was playing on the jukebox, and the lights were low. If he went home to Mrs. Caputo’s, she’d fuss over him, and Amy would try to read him her latest book report. All he wanted now was peace and solitude.

Which was why he was surprised, and not altogether pleased, when he heard the door open and close and sensed a woman had taken the stool just two seats over. He stared down into his glass as she ordered a Campari and soda, and only glanced up at the mirror again after the bartender had delivered it.

His gaze was met by a pair of dark eyes staring directly back at him. Startled, he looked down again. Christ, the last thing he needed was someone chatting him up, and, inevitably, asking him where he’d served in the war. But why, he wondered, did she look familiar?

Benny Goodman was replaced by Tommy Dorsey before he risked another glance at the mirror. Even as he did so, she was swiveling on her stool and saying, “Excuse me, but aren’t you Professor Athan?” It sure sounded like she already knew the answer.

He had to turn his head completely in order to see her with his good eye. She was a dark-haired beauty with a tawny complexion, wearing a crisp white blouse under a tweedy jacket.

“Yes.”

“Then allow me to introduce myself,” she said in an accent that bespoke Oxford or Cambridge. “My name is Simone Rashid.”

She stretched her hand across the empty stool, and he shook it. And now he did place her: she’d been at the art museum with the older man. “I’ve come a long way to meet you.”

A long way to meet him? “Why?” he said, genuinely perplexed.

“May I?” she said, moving to the stool beside him.

But this wasn’t really a question either, as she was already settling in.

“We’re in the same general field,” she said. “Antiquities.”

“I’m not a dealer,” he said, “if that’s what you mean. I’m just a professor—an associate professor at that—at the university.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that. But I’ve done a bit of research—that’s my forte, to be honest—and I see you’re also one of the leading lights in Greco-Roman art.”

“Are you a college recruiter?” he said, having met one or two in his time. “Because I’m perfectly happy here, and I have no plans to leave.” Not that the OSS would let him leave even if he wanted to.

“Hardly,” she said, taking a moment to sip her drink. “I work for the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. In Cairo.”

This was getting odder by the minute, though he caught the first glimmer of what it all might be about. He pictured the glyphs on the ossuary.

“I also know that you were assigned to the Cultural Recovery Commission.”

Now it was coming into even greater focus. But he would not, could not, give anything away, so he waited her out.

“And that you’re probably working for them still,” she said with a half smile. “How am I doing so far?”

“So far,” he conceded, “you haven’t struck out.”

“I don’t know exactly what that refers to,” she replied. “Baseball, I presume? But it sounds as if I’m on the right track.”

“What is it you want from me?” The throbbing in his head returned, but he left his chilled glass on the bar.

“I think you know,” she said, but when he gave no indication that he did, she added, “A certain artifact has recently been transported here. An artifact that belongs to me.”

“To you?” He raised a brow.

“My father and I were the ones who found it.”

Lucas had been under the impression that he was the one who had found it. “So that means you own it?”

“It means that it belongs to the Egyptian people.”

“That might not be how everyone sees it.”

“You mean the Third Reich?” she said, dismissively. “Well, they wouldn’t, would they?”

“I mean the United States.”

“But do you intend to keep it?”

Lucas did not know the answer to that one, nor was he immune to the issues inherent in cultural appropriation—no Greek who had ever seen the Elgin Marbles adorning a wing of the British Museum instead of the Parthenon from which they had been stripped was unfamiliar with the feeling. But he still had no idea who this woman really was.

“Conceding absolutely nothing,” he said, even his empty eye socket throbbing now, “I still don’t know what you’re getting at. Are you here to reclaim the artifact in question?”

“Eventually,” she said, “yes. But given the state of the world right now, it
is
probably for the best that it’s here right now. For safekeeping.”

“Safekeeping,” he repeated.

“And further study.”

She sipped her drink, and he took a slug from his own. He liked this bar, but it looked like he’d have to find a new place.

“I doubt you even know what you have,” she said.

“And you do?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you tell me.”

“In good time, once you’ve learned to trust me.”

She was spot-on there.

“Right now, it’s essential that you understand just one thing.”

He waited.

“It’s more than what it seems. Much more.”

“What isn’t?”

“Now you’re being glib. Don’t be. That box holds secrets you can’t even guess at.”

Whoever she was, he was beginning to think she was unhinged. And for that matter, what proof had she shown that she worked for the Egyptian ministry? For all he knew, she was an Axis spy. Throwing back the last of his drink, he tossed a couple of bills on the bar and slipped off his stool.

“Look, Mrs. Rashid—”

“Miss Rashid, not that it’s of any consequence.”

“Miss Rashid. I’m just a lowly professor, and the work I do is nowhere near as glamorous as you seem to think.”

“You need my help,” she said, pinning him with her gaze.

And God help him, but that look prodded awake something in him that had lain dormant for a long time. Something that had nothing whatsoever to do with ancient artifacts.

“You can find me at the Nassau Inn,” she said. “You will want to.”

Picking up his briefcase, he headed for the door.

“If you open that sarcophagus without me,” he heard her call out as the door was easing shut behind him, “you will live to regret it.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Well, Simone thought, swiveling her stool back toward the bar, that didn’t go as well as she’d hoped. She should have relied more upon her feminine wiles—she had noted a certain glimmer in his one good eye, and, truth be told, she might have responded to it under different circumstances than these—but it was too late now.

She took a hearty swallow of her Campari and smoothed her skirt over her lap.

The bartender studiously attended to wiping some glasses clean.

She knew she had no one but herself to blame. Despite her intelligence and vast erudition, she had never mastered the gentle art of persuasion. While there might be some people who were natural diplomats, she wasn’t one of them. She was forever butting heads with people, challenging them when she should have been convincing them, raising hackles where she should have been raising support. She had always been in a hurry, without always knowing where she wanted to go; she was too impatient to wait for the right time or the right confluence of events.

And she had inherited her late mother’s temper. Everyone said so, most notably her long-suffering father: “If your mother were here today, you’d finally have an even match.”

But without that inborn obstinacy, who knew if the ossuary, now resting only a short walk away, would ever have been uncovered? When her father had first found the ancient papyrus scroll in the storeroom of the Cairo Museum—one of the many papyri that had been ignominiously deposited in the genizah, the refuse pile of fragments and faded scraps that no one thought important—he had been unable to persuade anyone of the magnitude of his find.

“That’s very interesting,” the director of the national library had said, patting him on the shoulder. “We’ll be sure to follow up on that one day, Dr. Rashid.”

And when he’d tried to acquire funding from the Ministry of Culture in order to launch an expedition, he hit the same brick wall. The fact that Simone had recently landed a job there only made things worse; she’d had to recuse herself from any deliberations lest it look like nepotism.

“Can’t you see that my father might have found the true tomb of Saint Anthony the Anchorite?” she had declared at the one board meeting she had been allowed to attend, under a vow of silence that she’d failed to honor. “For nearly two thousand years, penitents and worshippers from all over the world have been making pilgrimages to an empty tomb in the desert monastery at Al-Qalzam.”

“We don’t know that it’s empty,” the minister said.

“Of course we do,” Simone had insisted. “We’ve done the ground tests. We only keep this myth alive to keep the tourists coming.”

The minister shot her a warning glance—but she had built up such a head of steam that there was no stopping her.

“Our country should be proud, rightly proud, of Saint Anthony,” she said, rising from her chair. “Not only did he found the entire Christian ascetic theology, he defied a Roman emperor and prevailed. He came to the aid of persecuted Christians and led the fight against the Arian heresy. Without him, there would be no tradition of monasticism in the church.”

“Yes, Miss Rashid, we all understand the saint’s importance.”

“So then why don’t you all want to find his actual sepulcher?” She waved a copy of the monograph that she and her father had written, in which they had outlined their theory and even marked a possible route to the tomb. “Doesn’t the truth interest any of you?”

And that’s when she’d been ejected, under threat of losing her job altogether. It’s also when she had decided to cash in some of her considerable resources and use the money to finance the expedition herself. Her father, though, had been torn between his determination to find the tomb and the dangers such a mission might pose to his daughter’s career.

“For me, it doesn’t matter so much,” he said, trying to sound resigned. “I’m an old man.”

“You’re hardly an old man.”

“Old enough,” he’d replied. “But you are just at the beginning of your career. You do not want to offend the powers that be. Life is a hard journey, with many unexpected setbacks,” he said, and she knew he was thinking that if he’d played the game better, he’d have been appointed the head of the ministry himself, long ago. “You do not want to make enemies along the way, as I did.”

“We are defined as much by our enemies as we are by our friends,” she’d retorted, and her father had turned up his palms in defeat, as he often did when they had an argument.

“You are cut from the same cloth as your mother,” he said.

“And as you.”

Within a matter of weeks, she had assembled a skeleton crew of drivers, bearers, and a Bedouin guide to take them where they would need to go—the Sahara el Beyda, or White Desert, a vast and largely uncharted section of wasteland that began fifty miles southeast of Cairo. Simone and her father had traced the location of the tomb by laboriously piecing together the shreds of the scroll that had been mixed in, rather inexplicably, with a clutch of Hebrew fragments recovered long ago from the storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat. The document, rendered in early Arabic, indicated that the monk Saint Anthony—perhaps the most famous hermit in the whole Christian canon—had been buried in a secret cavern under a “spitting cobra.” Plainly, no real snake could be expected to remain in one place, much less mark a spot for eternity. But Simone knew that the ancient limestone and chalk of the Sahara, which had once comprised the bed of a prehistoric sea and which lent the region its distinctive name, had been scoured by the winds of millennia into fantastic rock formations that resembled everything from teapots to minarets.

There would even be one, she strongly suspected, that looked like a spitting cobra, and if the document was true, it was located within a single day’s camel ride, due west, from the oasis at Baharīya.

The first leg of the trip was made in jeeps, carrying supplies and provisions, over the almost impassable road that followed the meanderings of a primitive camel track. But once they had reached the oasis, the jeeps could go no farther. There was not even a semblance of a road, and the sand dunes would only engulf the tires if they tried to drive any farther. Simone stretched out under the stars and palm fronds that night, while her father slept in the back of the jeep. For hours, as the others snored and slept around her, she could barely close her eyes, so eager was she to get up with the dawn and begin the search for the cobra rock and the sepulcher that the ragged scroll said lay beneath. The discovery would be a vindication of her father’s work, a laurel wreath to crown his career, and at the same time a brilliant start to her own.

The stars were so thick in the sky that she could not even begin to find the most elementary constellations. They were like a million glistening grains of sugar on a black velvet cloth, and the waning moon shone like a Saracen’s blade. Occasionally, she heard the furtive movement of the little desert foxes, sniffing the dying smoke from the fire, poking their noses into the encampment, once or twice snatching some bit of refuse and scurrying back into the blackness. It was as peaceful and beautiful a night as she could ever have imagined, and she understood what drew the Bedouins to this barren place and kept them there.

When the sun rose, the distant rocks took on the most magnificent hues—the peachy gold and pale strawberry and pistachio green of ice cream—and Simone was quick to mount a camel and, with spurs and a riding crop, urge it on.

“The rocks aren’t going anywhere,” their teenage guide, Mustafa, warned her from the back of his own lumbering beast. “If you push him too hard, he’ll dig in his heels.”

Simone’s father, bringing up the rear, laughed. “They’re a perfect match then.”

Simone smiled, but kept up the pace. The orange sand gave way to ground as white as snow, covered with a powdery chalk, and as she entered the field of rocks, some as big as locomotives, others the size of dogs and cats, she marveled at the variety of shapes they had assumed. It was like an enormous menagerie, miles long and miles wide, of real, and mythical, creatures. One rock looked like a sphinx with its paws extended; another like a heron about to take flight. And the wind, which had sculpted them, continued its incessant battering, knocking Simone’s hat off her head more than once and making the sleeves of her khaki shirt ripple like waves.

But she had yet to see a formation that resembled a rearing cobra. Mushrooms, yes—the wind had a way of scrubbing the bottoms of the rocks more harshly than the top, leaving what looked like a crop of enormous, teetering toadstools; acres of them surrounded her. But the papyrus was old, and perhaps this particular formation, which had once resembled a snake, had been reduced to dust by now. Somehow, in her haste, she had not considered how hard it might be to spot one fanciful shape among a battalion of others. She wished that the papyrus had been more explicit. While it had extolled the bravery of the sainted monk who had gone, alone, into the wilderness and wrestled there with demons—legend had it that Anthony had even broken the tail off of one, before strangling it with his bare hands—the scroll did not provide directions, and the compass had not yet been invented in Saint Anthony’s time.

Born into a prosperous family in the upper Egypt town of Coma in 251 AD, Anthony was orphaned at eighteen, and took the words of the Lord to heart: “If you want to be perfect, go and sell all you have and give the money to the poor—you will have riches in Heaven.” In obedience, he sold off everything he owned, including a vast herd of swine, and gave the money away. Then he deposited his sister with a community of nuns and wandered off to live alone in the barren desert, where his only companions were the snakes and scorpions, hawks and foxes.

But after years of solitude and self-abnegation, his fame began to spread, and soon enough, pilgrims were flocking to the cave where he had taken up residence, bringing him tribute of everything from animals to incense. Some were searching for spiritual guidance, others for more practical help. His natural poultices and remedies, made from the roots and brambles found in the arid soil, were said to cure many ills. He was especially known for treating skin afflictions, often with an application of pork fat, and as a result, he had come to be associated with such skin diseases as eczema and the eponymous Saint Anthony’s fire. Pigs became a symbol of his ministry, and in religious iconography he was generally portrayed as a swineherd, with a tau—T-shaped—cross in his hand.

Exactly what Simone hoped to find in the tomb, she wasn’t sure. It would not be riches; that was for certain. This was no Pharaoh. What she was looking for was the truth—proof that the man had lived, and died, as the Holy Scriptures said. Proof that the ancient stories weren’t just that—stories—and that there might be something more to this world than met the eye. For all her education and worldliness, Simone had a streak of the speculative in her. No girl brought up in the mighty delta of Egypt, where three of the major faiths had taken root, where the pyramids of kings had weathered sandstorms and floods for thousands of years, where seas had reputedly parted and prophets walked, could be without it. Even her mother, known for her wild ways, had become, particularly later in life as the cancer ate away at her, devoutly Catholic, and some of that, too, had been imparted to the young and impressionable Simone. What was it Cardinal Newman had once said? “If I have them at six, I have them for life.” Something like that. But Simone wasn’t of any one faith; she was simply a seeker, a scholar of the unseen and the ineffable as much as of the known and empirical world. In the undiscovered tomb of a saint, she hoped to find a mixture of both.

As the day waned, and the camels’ energy flagged, she knew that she must be close to reaching her goal. The scroll had said a full day’s ride, and now she had done it. The towering rocks cast deep and long shadows across the chalky ground. She was reminded of wandering through the Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford, back when she was at school there, and finding herself surrounded at dusk by the crumbling headstones and marble angels on every side. She had been visited not by a sensation of fear, or even dread, but of being a pilgrim in some alien landscape, somewhere altogether strange and unworldly. The surface of the moon, she felt certain, would bear a close resemblance to the place she was in now.

“It’s getting too dark to see,” her father said in a weary voice. “And the camels can go no farther.”

“Neither can I,” said Mustafa, pulling back on the reins, then sliding down from the saddle blanket to the ground. “We’ll have to look for this cobra in the morning.” He did not sound optimistic.

But Simone was reluctant to give up. Dismounting, she left the others to set up camp as she wandered across the rough and uneven terrain. Several times her boots slipped on the sand or chalk, and she fell to her knees. Each time, she got up, brushed the grit from her pants, and continued her search. The sun, as bright and round as a tangerine, slid below the horizon, and she removed the flashlight from her belt and aimed its beam at each configuration she came across.

So far, nothing looked remotely like a snake.