The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

After returning Simone to the Nassau Inn — which had, obligingly, relocated her to a much nicer room on the top floor — and making sure she had finally fallen asleep, Lucas set out for the junior faculty housing on Harrison Street.

So much of what he’d seen in the film — the weird shapes cavorting in the mist, the gleam of light from the empty eye sockets of the skull — was inexplicable, but one image, appearing in only the last few frames, was not.

Someone real had run from the conservation room — the same someone upon whose heels another of the apparitions had followed like a faithful dog — and that someone, he strongly suspected, was Andy Brandt.

It was only a suspicion, but one thing he had learned in the war was that his suspicions were often spot-on. The guy was definitely a snoop, insinuating himself into Delaney’s lab whenever he could, always asking about the advancements in the radiocarbon processes, or kidding with Lucas about what he did all day, holed up in the art museum. “You’d think you had some top-secret weapon in there,” he’d joked, though he had also waited for an answer, which never came. But why had Brandt been in the conservation room in the first place, and what, if anything, did he know that Lucas did not?

Dusk had fallen and a light rain had begun by the time Lucas arrived at the barracks-like structures, built decades before and coming apart at the seams, that most of the young faculty and grad students inhabited. Not for the first time, he thanked his lucky stars that he had again landed his spot at Mrs. Caputo’s; if, as he imagined, strings had been pulled behind the scenes, by President Dodds or the OSS or whomever, he was grateful they had been.

Stepping into the open stairwell and shaking the rain off his leather bomber jacket, he scanned the tenant roster. Hand-lettered labels had been taped up on the board. “A. Brandt” was listed in apartment 2B, one of the upper units, and he climbed the darkened stairs cautiously. Although there was a light fixture in the ceiling, someone had made off with the bulb; they were in scarce supply these days and highly coveted as a result.

At the door with a metal “2” on it, and a “B” hanging by a thread, he raised a hand to knock, then paused when he heard a voice within. Bending his ear closer to the door, he heard the voice — Andy’s — continuing to talk, but nobody was talking back. He waited, but it was still only Andy talking, and in subdued tones at that — too subdued for Lucas to make out what he was actually saying. The chances of these apartments having individual phone lines was pretty much nil.

It sounded more like he was transmitting via a ham radio.

Was Andy a ham radio operator? He’d certainly never said anything about it that Lucas could recall, and even if he was, why would he be speaking in such a clandestine way?

Holding his breath, Lucas eased himself away from the door. His wet shoes made a sucking noise on the floor, and he stopped — but the broadcast went on.

One by one, Lucas went down the steps, backward so as to keep an eye on the door, and once outside again, he ran around to the back of the building, where a rusty fire escape rose to the second-floor units. He climbed the squeaking rungs as quietly as he could and then crouched in the rain outside Andy’s apartment. The blind was drawn, but like everything else in this housing block, it hung imperfectly, slanted to one side. Lucas peeked inside the room.

Andy was sitting on a wooden chair, with a radio transmitter on the table, speaking into a handheld microphone. Lucas recognized the radio — it was a standard issue, BC-1000, the same kind he had employed in Europe. He surveyed the fire escape for an antenna. There it was, fixed flush with the window frame, its customary olive green painted the same brown as the wood, presumably to camouflage it. He peered in again, and now he could see that Andy was consulting a batch of papers and reciting what he read there into the microphone.

Papers that were gathered in a blue folder — just like the one Simone said was missing from the suite.

Whatever he was up to, Lucas thought, it was time to put a stop to it. Digging into his pocket, he found his key ring, and picking the one with the bluntest end, he wedged it, as quietly as he could, under the antenna, until he had pried it loose from the window frame. At one end was a loop of wire, just long enough to coil around his wrist. He pulled hard, snapping it in two.

He didn’t wait to see what would happen next. He clambered down the escape, antenna in hand, and had just reached the muddy ground when the window sash rose, and Andy poked his head out into the drizzle. Lucas hid in the shadows of the building while Andy looked to the right and left, then ran his hand along the side of the window, feeling for the missing antenna. He craned his neck out farther and found the split wire. For a second, he looked puzzled, and then, after another quick look around, ducked his head back inside.

He would know it was no accident.

But what would he do next?

Running back around to the front of the building, Lucas concealed himself in the neighboring stairwell and waited. The rain had not let up, and the temperature had dropped into the forties. The wound on his arm, where Wally Gregg’s knife had slashed him, throbbed. Running his hand along his hair to brush the water off, he debated what his next move should be. Should he continue to wait here, or find a way to get to a telephone and call his contacts at the OSS, and then leave it to them to sort it all out? Was it possible that Andy Brandt was more than an annoying brownnoser? That he was actually an enemy mole?

While it seemed impossible at first, the more he thought about it, the more the pieces fell into place. By the time Lucas had arrived at Princeton, hadn’t Andy Brandt already secured a place for himself in the same science building as Professor Delaney, who was in the midst of conducting top-secret isotope testing? And since then, hadn’t Brandt done everything in his power to ingratiate himself with Delaney — which might have worked for a spy gifted with a better personality — and used every opportunity to penetrate the upstairs lab and procure its latest findings?

Could it have been Brandt who had stolen into Dr. Rashid’s suite at the Nassau Inn and made off with his papers? The blue folder was right there in plain sight on Brandt’s desk.

A wind ripped the treetops, sending a cascade of wet leaves onto Harrison Street.

The next question, however, was the most terrifying of all, for if Lucas followed the train of logic, it led to one conclusion alone. If Brandt had broken into the hotel room, had he been there when Dr. Rashid had suffered his fatal accident in the tub? Was it an accident at all? Or had Simone’s father been deliberately drowned?

He heard a door close, then footsteps descending in the next stairwell over. As Lucas kept watch from his hiding spot, Andy, wearing a long black rain slicker with a hood, stepped out into the rain, looking all around. Like some ghastly caricature of Santa Claus, he carried a canvas rucksack over his shoulder, bulging with something that made a clatter. Satisfied that he was unobserved, he walked up the street, staying out of the light of the occasional streetlamp, and stopping periodically to turn and look behind him.

Trailing him from a safe distance, Lucas watched as he skirted the little campus train station, built to resemble a Cotswold cottage, crossed the tracks, and entered the lower reaches of the campus. Lights were on in the dormitories, and lampposts glowed along the main walkways, but most of the grounds were black as pitch, and Lucas had a hard time just keeping Brandt in sight. The rain didn’t help. Fortunately, Andy was moving slowly, and whether it was due to the galoshes he wore or some kind of sprain, Lucas was grateful.

Nor was it long before Lucas could guess his destination. He was weaving his way through the dorms and classroom buildings, past the gardens of President Dodds’s house, and heading for the rear of the university art museum.

Where the conservation room was located.

The rucksack took on an ominous cast. But what was he planning to steal? The bones and artifacts had been removed to the labs, and he could hardly be planning to carry off the sarcophagus itself.

Lurking in a grove of trees, Lucas watched as Brandt, whose gait grew worse with every step, hobbled up to the ivy-covered wall of the museum. It was a sheer thirty or forty feet high, surmounted by the clerestory window. The glass had cracked on the night they had opened the ossuary, but as the pieces had held together, the grounds crew had not gotten around to fixing it yet. He saw Brandt tilt his head back, the rain running down his face, but there was something different about him. A firmer set to the jaw, a furrowed brow, an expression of what could only be called… fury. As if the brick wall had dared to thwart him, though not for long.

As Lucas wiped the rain from his eye, he saw Brandt loop the rope handle of the sack around his neck like a cape, then reach out to the ivy tendrils, and as gracefully as a chimpanzee, swing himself six feet up the wall. Clutching the vines, hand over hand, he scuttled up what had seemed only moments before to be an impregnable barrier, making his way, smoothly and swiftly, toward the window up top. Lucas watched in astonishment; it was a performance worthy of a circus acrobat, loose and easy and assured. Andy was swinging open the clerestory window when one of his galoshes came loose and tumbled to the ground. By then, Lucas knew that there was no time to lose. It would be impossible for him to match Andy’s feat, much less with his injured arm.

But he could still stop him, if he moved fast.

Barely catching his breath, he raced around to the front of the museum and, panting hard, unlocked the doors and quickly turned off the alarm panel, lest it provide Brandt with any warning. He wanted to catch him red-handed.

The galleries were only faintly illuminated by the night-lights along the baseboards, but it was enough to help him avoid the various statues and pedestals and display cases. The bigger problem was navigating with only one eye; he was constantly having to turn his head this way and that, in order to make sure he hadn’t missed something that was just out of his limited range of vision. The ancient Greek and Roman figures glowered down at him, as if he were disturbing their repose, and even the decorative vessels and vases reminded him now of the funeral urn for Dr. Rashid.

He had rounded the corner of the main gallery and was hurrying toward the conservation room when he heard the noise. A clunk, as if from a hammer or chisel, followed by a scraping. It wasn’t much, and he wondered if he’d actually heard it at all. Maybe it was just a noise in the pipes. It didn’t come again.

What did was a scuffling sound, accompanied by the rustle of something being dragged along the marble floor. He ducked behind the base of a massive kouros, three meters high and over two thousand years old, and waited. The limestone figure towered above him, like a guardian angel, but Lucas knew full well that he was on his own here. If he let Andy get away with whatever he was carrying, the fault would lie with him — and it was doubtful that Andy Brandt, or his purloined treasures, would ever be seen again.

The sound grew nearer, and now he could hear labored breathing. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have guessed it was an animal — a wild boar, or a lumbering bear — snuffling and snorting its way through the museum. A shadow passed in front of the kouros, but Lucas held still. He wanted to see exactly what he was up against — was Andy armed? And how was he toting the sack? A CRC man to his core, Lucas needed to ensure that, in any fracas that might ensue, he wouldn’t destroy some artifact that he had come there expressly to save.

Then the shadow had moved on, and Lucas still couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing. It was Andy all right, but he was almost doubled over, his head bent low beneath the hood of his black slicker, one arm dragging the filled rucksack behind him.

If Lucas had still harbored any doubts, they were resolved now. From the clattering alone, he knew that the sack was filled with the contents of the ossuary. But why would Andy have taken them from the lab and brought them back to the museum, before leaving with them again? He must have been up to something else. But what?

Like prey that had just caught the scent of a hunter, Andy suddenly stopped and lifted his nose in the air. He sniffed, turning his head to look all around. Lucas ducked back out of sight and held his breath. He was still trying to reconcile this strange creature in the corridor with Andy Brandt, the young anthropologist. After a few seconds, the sound of the rucksack being hauled along the floor resumed, and when Lucas dared to look again, he saw a wet trail and the second of the galoshes lying upside down.

Where, and when, Lucas wondered, should he confront him? Right here, there were several other display cases, containing extremely fragile terra-cotta amphorae. If a struggle ensued, this would not be a good place for it to occur.

Moving from the cover of one statue or display to another, Lucas kept pace, and in another minute or two, Andy had made his way out of the gallery and into the broad museum lobby. Once there, he stopped again, and as Lucas watched, he ripped off his shoes, too, and threw them to one side. His legs, like his arms for that matter, were cocked at an odd angle, and the hard breathing seemed now to be associated with some kind of pain, rather than exertion.

Whatever was going on, Lucas couldn’t wait any longer. As Andy looped the rope handle of the sack around his neck again, Lucas stepped out of the shadows and said, “Leave it there.”

Paying no attention at all, Andy straightened up and shifted the sack to fit neatly between his shoulder blades.

Had he heard him? “I said, leave it there.”

This time Andy glanced up from under the hood, but the look in his eyes was of utter incomprehension. For Lucas, it was like staring into the eyes of a beast, not a man.

Lucas repeated his order a third time, and Andy tilted his head to one side, as if out of curiosity. His eyes blinked furiously, uncontrollably, and then a light seemed to flicker on behind them. A yellow gleam, like a bolt of sunlight glancing off tarnished bronze. A gleam like the one Lucas had seen in the empty eye sockets of the skull.

As he watched in horror, a smile creased Andy’s lips, widening until it seemed almost to split his face, baring his teeth and projecting no mirth at all, only malice. Then he turned around and jumped with blinding speed directly at the doors to the museum, wrenching them entirely off their hinges and shattering the glass into a thousand pieces. As the shards, tinkling like tiny bells, rained down on the floor around him, Lucas saw Andy land on all fours on the walkway outside, shake the fragments of glass loose from the rain slicker, and then scramble with his rucksack into the night.

Lucas leaped through the jagged hole where the doors had been, and ran after him. In the dark and the rain, it was hard enough just to see him. To make matters worse, his quarry was loping along, close to the ground, like a wolf, dodging from one side to another, following no clear course, but gradually making his way up campus, and toward the lights of the town. There was a scream of terror as an unsuspecting student, heading home from the library, was bowled over. Lucas found him lying on his back in a puddle, his wire spectacles twisted on his face, mutely pointing in the direction that his attacker had fled. Lucas hurried on, gaining ground slowly but surely. In the distance, he could hear the commotion of traffic in town, and he could see that Andy was losing steam. Lucas picked up his own pace, and when he found himself within striking distance, lunged for the bottom of the rucksack. He tugged on it, hard, and Andy lost his footing on the damp grass, slipping onto his side. In the light of the lamppost, his face now was unrecognizable — it was a mask of pure depravity, frozen in the rictus of that agonizing smile.

“Stop!” Lucas shouted as he felt the stitches in his arm pop loose.

Then Andy was up on his feet again — or was it his paws? — and galloping with the sack toward a low stone wall that ran along the perimeter of the lawn on Washington Road. Lucas expected him to change directions and stick to the darkness of the campus, but instead, he took a mighty leap over the wall and skidded on all fours into the busy lanes of the street.

The first car he dodged, and the second, too, but a moment later a yellow bus slammed into him, sending his body flying, the black slicker spreading like the wings of a bat. The bus careened into a flimsy newsstand that disintegrated like a pile of twigs. Horns blared, people screamed, loose newspapers were picked up and blown around in the wind and rain. By the time Lucas got there, the bus driver was standing in the wreckage, saying, “Where’d he go? I know I hit somebody.” He bent down and ran his finger along the dent in his front fender. “And see? There’s blood.”

Lucas looked up and down the street, blazing with the headlights of stopped cars. Shielding his one good eye from the rain, he searched for any sign of Andy.

But the man and his rucksack had vanished into the night.