The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“The clutch is a little sticky,” Delaney apologized as the light changed and the old Ford jolted across the empty intersection.

On a day like this, no one in his right mind was even on the road. “As long as the wipers work,” Lucas said, “I think we’ll be okay.”

“Well, yeah, and that’s another thing,” Delaney said with a laugh as the wipers struggled to keep up with the torrential rain pouring down the windshield. “I meant to get them replaced. In 1939.”

The tires sloshed through puddles several inches deep, and the rain drummed down hard on the battered hood and roof of the car. It was one of those storms that hit New Jersey often in the fall, and Lucas only hoped that Delaney’s jalopy would be able to make it all the way to Fort Dix and back — forty miles all told — without breaking down. Given their progress so far, he had his doubts.

“I still don’t know why this couldn’t have waited until tomorrow,” Delaney said. “The army picked the film up by courier, didn’t they?”

“Yep,” Lucas replied. “The second I got back to Mercer Street with it.”

“So why couldn’t they have sent it back the same way?”

“Who knows? Maybe because it’s been developed now.”

“You think the urgency’s got anything to do with what happened at the stadium yesterday?”

Lucas shrugged. “I just know it was an order. Get the film, view the film, report back pronto with any additional info.”

“But you’re not in the army anymore. You don’t need to take orders.”

“Tell that to Macmillan.”

“Did he at least offer you a Purple Heart for the cut that maniac made on your arm?”

“He said he was relieved that nothing had happened to Professor Einstein.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Cannon fodder,” Delaney sighed. “That’s what we are. Cannon fodder.”

If they were nothing but cannon fodder, then what did that make innocent bystanders like Wally Gregg? Lucas had awakened in a cold sweat the night before, screaming in his sleep as Gregg slashed at him with, of all things, a scimitar. The man’s head looked like a smashed pumpkin, his mouth a crooked gash shouting the Arabic curse “Death to the swine!” through black and broken teeth. Mrs. Caputo had had to use her passkey to come in and wake him from the nightmare, and though he’d apologized profusely, he could still see a wary look even in little Amy’s eye the next morning. Lightning bolts shimmered across the southern sky, jagged as shattered glass, and when the thunder boomed, the whole chassis rattled. Lucas stared out the foggy window at the sickly gray, almost green, light of the day. It was as if they were driving through a monsoon. The wound on his arm tingled every time he shifted in his seat.

“The colonel did inquire about your progress, though,” Lucas said.

“Inquire?”

“What he said verbatim was, ‘What the hell is Delaney doing to earn his keep?’ ”

“Ah, that sounds more like him,” he said, steering the car carefully around a pothole flooded with rainwater.

“So what do you want me to say?”

“You can tell him—” Delaney began, before the car stalled out. “Damn.” Starting it up again, he said, “Tell him I’ve run three separate isotope tests, just to be sure, and I can say with confidence that the human remains date from about fifteen or sixteen hundred years ago. I can also say that the guy was old and infirm, which Andy Brandt has corroborated from an anthropological perspective. Life had given this guy, whoever he was, a real beating.”

Saint Anthony of Egypt, Lucas thought — that’s who the guy was. The only question was whether the physical damage had come from ordinary sources, or, as Simone and Dr. Rashid contended, at the hands of demons. The demon theory was not one Lucas had yet subscribed to.

The car hit a patch of slick roadway, and Lucas clutched the inside door handle as Delaney steered the car into the skid just to stay in his lane. Fortunately, there was nothing coming from the other direction. They were driving through a rural area, nothing but soaked fields and fallow farmland on either side. Crows sat on the tumbledown fences, or swooped perilously in front of the car.

“What about the wooden staff?” Lucas asked. Simone had confided that her father believed the staff in particular held some miraculous power. Maybe Hitler thought so, too. “Could you date it?”

“That part was easy. The wood dates from exactly the same period as the human bones. It’s native sycamore, by the way, the kind that grows along the borders of the Egyptian desert. The iron handle is consistent, too, with Middle Eastern metallurgy in the third or fourth century AD.”

“Sounds like you’ve made a lot of progress.”

“Yeah, well, then things get a little sticky.”

“How?”

“The problem is with the other bones, the ones from the smaller creature.” He took a deep breath. “Can you take a quick chemistry lesson?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay, then. As you’re aware, carbon 12 and carbon 13 atoms are nice and stable, they’re everywhere and in everything organic.”

“So you’ve told me before.”

“Right. Glad you were paying attention. But carbon 14 is extremely rare and extremely unstable, and it decays, slowly, to nitrogen 14, which has a half-life of around 5,730 years. As a result, and depending on how much of the carbon I can detect in a sample in the first place, my experiments can only go back as far as about 40,000 years. After that, kaput. There’s no more carbon 14 left to detect.”

“Okay,” Lucas said, waiting.

Delaney rubbed his jaw with one hand while clutching the wheel with the other. “The bones of this other creature, for want of a better term, are older than that. Much older, I’d say. That may be why Andy can’t identify them with any certainty, and why I can’t get a feasible date.”

“Are you suggesting,” Lucas said, “that the old man was buried with a fossil?”

“No, because in that case, the bones would be fossilized. And these aren’t.”

“Now you’ve got me confused.”

“Good. You should be. Because although the radiocarbon testing I’ve done suggests that this second creature was very old indeed — and by that I mean tens of thousands of years older — all the other physical evidence, both mine and Andy’s, suggests that it died at the same time as the old man it was buried with.”

“That can’t be.”

“But it is, my friend, it is,” Delaney said, sounding relieved just to have admitted it. “There’s a junction up ahead,” he said, peering through the sheets of water cascading down the windshield. “Is that where I turn?”

“Yes,” Lucas said, remembering it well from his own induction and basic training at the fort. “Turn left on Monmouth Road.”

“You getting nostalgic?” Delaney said.

“No danger of that. It wasn’t what you’d call a good time. And God knows I never thought I’d be coming back again.”

“Much less for a roll of film, right?” Delaney maneuvered the car around a fallen branch before turning left at the junction, where a sign read “US Army Base, Fort Dix. Only Authorized Personnel Beyond This Point.”

“I guess we’re what you’d call authorized,” Delaney said, squinting through the rain. “I don’t want a tank to unload on us.”

“Macmillan said they’d have the canister waiting for us at the main gate.”

“How far’s that?”

“About a mile, straight ahead.”

Although it was only late afternoon, the day was still so dark that the lamps along the roadway were on, revealing high cyclone fences surmounted by coils of razor-wire lining both sides. Another sign appeared, warning, “No Civilian Access Beyond This Point. No Contraband. All Unauthorized Vehicles Are Subject to Search and Seizure.”

“We’re not carrying any contraband, are we?” Delaney asked.

“Not unless a pack of cigarettes counts.”

Armed sentries, wearing ponchos and helmets, monitored their progress from tall, steel towers. Spotlights were abruptly illuminated and angled to take in their car, bathing the interior in a blinding white glare. Speed bumps, spaced every hundred feet or so, slowed the car to a crawl; Lucas was worried that if they hit one of them too hard, the whole car would literally disintegrate.

The red brick walls of the old fort, erected in 1917, appeared ahead. At the main gate, the security post was brightly lit, and a heavy metal arm, painted with white and yellow stripes, extended across the roadway. A young soldier in rain gear stepped out as the car came to a stop. Delaney waited until the last possible second to roll down his window.

“This is a restricted zone,” the soldier said, bending close and combing over the interior with his flashlight. “Please state your business.”

“The name’s Patrick Delaney. My passenger is Lucas Athan.”

Leaning over toward the open window, Lucas added, “Colonel Macmillan, at the OSS in DC, has authorized us to pick up a package.”

“ID, please.”

Delaney had to lift one heavy haunch in order to fish his wallet out of his back pocket and offer his driver’s license. Lucas handed his across, too — the stitches in his arm stinging from the motion — and the soldier returned to the guard post. Delaney hastily rolled up the window, but the driving rain had already soaked his pant leg.

“I’m putting in for combat pay,” he said.

“You were never in the armed services.”

“Can I help it if my work here was judged more crucial to the war effort than risking my life in a foxhole?”

When the soldier returned, Delaney grudgingly cranked the window down again. Handing them back their licenses, the soldier said. “He’s coming.”

“Who’s coming?” Delaney asked.

“The guy from the film office.”

The window went back up, but through the windshield, Lucas could see another soldier jogging out of the fort with his head held down against the pelting wind and rain. He was holding something under his arm like a football while he struggled with his free hand to keep the hood of his poncho up.

When he got close enough, Delaney rolled the window down again, and put out his hand.

The soldier stopped, however, and instead of simply giving it to him, he doubled over to get a good long look at both of the passengers in the car.

“Are you the guys who shot this film?”

“No, but we were there,” Delaney replied.

“Then who shot it?”

“What difference does it make?” Delaney said, getting soaked all over again.

“Was it his first time with a Bell and Howell Eyemo camera?”

“Yes, it was,” Lucas said, “but the ‘he’ was a ‘she.’ ”

“Maybe that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

The soldier didn’t say, only glanced at the tightly sealed plastic bag as if he was reluctant to pass it on without first issuing some kind of caveat. “The original went to Washington. You know that, right?”

“We do,” Lucas replied.

“But it’s no better than this copy. I told them so.”

Maybe that was why Macmillan was so eager to have them view it separately. “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

A sudden gust of wind blew the soldier’s hood back — he looked like he couldn’t be more than nineteen — but he let it be. The rain plastered his hair down and streamed down his face. “See for yourself,” he said, finally delivering the bag to Delaney, who promptly dropped it into Lucas’s lap. “But it wasn’t my fault. The lab here is first-rate.”

Delaney exchanged a glance with Lucas, and at the soldier’s salute, closed the window one last time, backed up, and turned the car around again. “Sounds like our friend Simone will never direct another picture,” he said, shifting gears.

What could be so wrong with the film? Lucas wondered as the car bounced slowly over the first speed bump. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw the young soldier still standing in place, hood down, poncho rippling in the wind and rain, staring after their car.