The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER THIRTY

Edward R. Murrow was doing his regular 8:00 p.m. broadcast on the radio, reporting this time from a pitched battle in a place called the Hürtgen Forest, when Simone heard a knock on her hotel room door. More cautious now than she had ever been in her life, she didn’t remove the chain or even look through the peephole before asking, “Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

Sliding back the chain and turning the lock, she threw the door open to find Lucas, soaked to the skin in his bomber jacket and leaning against the doorjamb as if too exhausted even to stand. He was holding his left arm with his hand.

“What’s happened to you?” she said, drawing him into the room and locking the door behind him.

“I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?’

But he didn’t answer — he sounded as if he barely had the breath to speak.

“Let me get you some water.”

“You wouldn’t have anything stronger, would you?”

She was about to say no, when she remembered that the hotel management, still trying to make amends for all of the tragedy that had befallen her under their roof (though how could they?) had sent up a basket of fruit and a decanter of fine brandy. She poured him a glass, and he tossed it down, wincing.

“Is it your arm?” she said, and he nodded. She helped him to remove the wet jacket, and then his shirt, draping them on the radiator to dry. The bandages were pink where several of his stitches had popped. “Oh my God, let me take care of this.”

Of the many things she had learned from her late father, one was never to travel anywhere without a first aid kit. Retrieving it from the bathroom cabinet, she poured him another generous shot of the brandy, then sat him down in the desk chair and said, “Now stay still.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“How did you do this?” she said as she knelt in front of him, intent as any surgeon, using Q-tips and antiseptic and fresh washcloths to clean up the area. She had never been this intimately close to him, never seen his bare chest or arms, never smelled his sweat or felt his breath on the back of her neck as she bent to her task. She tried to concentrate on the work at hand, dabbing at the wound, cutting and applying a strip of sterile bandages, but she was finding it hard to focus.

“I went by Andy Brandt’s apartment,” he began, and when she looked up inquiringly, he continued, telling her about his suspicions and what he had seen there, including the missing blue folder. He told her how he had chased Andy to the art museum, and from the museum, across the campus and on into town. The bus accident, the absent body. And now, here he was, making sure that she was safe and sound.

“I had to see for myself,” he said in a tight voice, “that you were all right.”

Simone, sitting back on her haunches, was moved by the emotion evident in his tone, and stunned by all that he had just told her. Although she realized that the accident with Brandt should have been the most troubling part of Lucas’s story — the man could be lying dead somewhere — that wasn’t the part that truly mattered to her. “How do we get the folder back?” she said.

“I had to give a police report at the scene,” Lucas said. “The cops know who was hit.”

“But even if they go to his apartment, that doesn’t mean they’ll surrender any of his property to us — even if we say it was stolen.”

“Actually, it does.”

“Why?”

“Because I made a call from the lobby. To Colonel Macmillan.”

“Oh,” she said, “of course. You had to.” Their entire mission had just gone up in smoke. She gathered up the supplies and stood before his chair.

“I had to tell him that the bones and artifacts had been stolen.”

Simone could well imagine the kind of reaction that the colonel, ill-tempered under the best of circumstances, had displayed. “Was it bad?”

Lucas cocked his head and gave her a wry smile. “Let’s just say I won’t be getting any medals soon. But he’ll have started the wheels turning, that much I can guarantee. Do you think I could have another shot of that brandy?”

She handed him the glass and the bottle, and went to the bathroom to put the first aid kit away. Resting her hands on the sides of the sink, she stared at herself in the mirror of the medicine chest, wondering who she was, who she had become over the past few weeks. She had circles under her eyes from lack of sleep, her long black hair was tangled and unbrushed. Her father was gone forever; she was staying in a strange hotel in a foreign country in the middle of a war. All of her possessions were stuffed into a couple of battered suitcases. And she didn’t seem to be any closer to figuring out the ossuary’s secrets or ensuring its return to Egypt. Even on a desert island, she doubted she could have felt more marooned.

Compounding the problem was the shirtless, wounded, and weary man sitting at her desk in the next room. What did she want from him? she asked herself. What could he give her?

And what was she prepared to offer in return?

In the mirror, she saw his face appear over her shoulder. His chin was sooty with stubble; his black patch glistened from the rain. She felt his hands turning her around, then pulling her close. His fingers went under her chin, tilting her face up toward his own, and though she knew full well what was happening, she felt immobilized, unsure, confused. She simply let him touch his lips to hers. She let him steal her breath as if it were his own. She let his scruffy face scratch her cheek.

Then he kissed her again, harder. Longer. More insistently.

She felt his hands coursing down her body, as if sculpting every inch, and before she could stop it — even if she had wanted to — something inside her, like a dam too swollen to hold fast, gave way, bursting wide open. Her lips pressed against his, tasting the sweet burn of the brandy, and her arms went up around his bare shoulders.

On the bed, he laid her sideways, her shoes thumping softly onto the carpet, her tousled hair fanning out on the cream-colored coverlet. Flicking off the lamp, he knelt beside her, his hands roughly unfastening the buttons of her blouse and tossing it aside, followed by the rest of her clothes. Above the drumbeat of her heart, she heard Murrow’s voice, scratchy with static, and the hissing of the radiator. Wherever Lucas touched her — and it was as if he were touching her everywhere at once — his fingertips left an electric trail. She let her mind follow that trail, let her thoughts evaporate, let her hands and lips go where they wanted… and when she felt his body on top of hers, firm and urgent and all enveloping, she could no longer tell where her own skin ended and where his began.