The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER FORTY

“Come on!” Lucas called to Simone as he turned away from the empty display case and charged toward the stairs. Bolting up the steps three at a time and rounding the landing like a thoroughbred at the last turn, he made it to the top in a matter of seconds. Down the hall he could see the door to Delaney’s lab standing open, fluorescent light spilling onto the linoleum floor.

He had a bad feeling, made even worse when he got closer and smelled the clammy aroma of a peat bog.

“Are you in here?” he shouted. The lab looked like a cyclone had hit it — microscopes and other equipment smashed on the floor, papers strewn everywhere and blowing about in the wind from the open window.

“Oh my God,” Simone said, coming up behind him.

The big green steel locker — the one that had held the artifacts from the ossuary — had been ripped from its bolts in the wall, and knocked over. It was covered with dents and twisted out of shape, its door wrenched completely loose — but underneath it, Lucas thought he could detect a body, the empurpled fingers of one hand barely escaping from the crushing weight above it.

“Delaney?” he said, crouching down to peer under the wreckage.

But he couldn’t see anything more, and if he simply shoved the locker aside with his shoulder, he was afraid of hurting him even more.

“We need a lever,” he said, and Simone, looking around, grabbed the steel panel that had been the door, wedged it under the edge of the locker, and leaned against it. The cabinet lifted slightly, and Lucas said, “Yes — keep going!” as he reached under to grab Delaney by the arm. The locker came up another few inches, and Lucas pulled harder, drawing the body, headfirst, out from under its cover.

It was almost completely free before he realized his mistake, and jerked his hand away as if his fingers had been singed on a hot stove.

Simone, too, saw what it was and let the locker drop back into place with a heavy thud, crushing again the calves and feet of the creature she had been trying so hard to release.

The Caithness Man lay there, still as a mummy, its dark brown limbs twisted like tree branches, its body contorted. The head was turned sideways, revealing its beak-like nose, hollow cheeks, and the bloodless slash that was its mouth.

And of course the slit where its throat had been cut for good measure.

Lucas sat back on his haunches, studying the specimen for any sign of life, before thinking how profoundly absurd that was. It hadn’t gotten up here on its own; it was just a museum exhibit, a petrified man who had been tied to a stake and slaughtered, centuries ago, then buried in a bog. Why would anyone have broken into the display case and dragged it up here?

And how had it wound up under the battered, and no doubt burgled, locker?

“Where’s Patrick?” Simone said, asking the question that was just then coming to the fore in Lucas’s mind, too.

One thing was sure — he wasn’t in this lab. But there was every sign of his having put up an enormous fight. Lucas’s eye went to the open window. Had Delaney escaped that way? He went to the windowsill and leaned out — there was no fire escape here, just ivy vines clinging to the walls. A few of them, though, were hanging loose, dangling in the breeze, as if they had just been torn loose. Delaney was a big guy — could they have possibly supported him? The bushes below were dense, and unless he was mistaken, Lucas thought he detected a depression in them, where something heavy might have recently fallen into the thicket.

Had Delaney climbed out the window, even as Lucas and Simone had been coming up the stairs?

Why would he do that? It made no sense.

When he turned back to Simone, however, she had a look of grim certainty in her eye, and said, “It’s inside him now.”

“What is?”

“It needed a body — it always does — and so it borrowed the Caithness Man. But now it’s using Delaney instead.”

“To go where?” he asked. “To do what?”

Simone surveyed the ruins of the empty locker. “It’s already stolen the last physical evidence of its own existence. We’ll never see those things again. So now I guess it’s just rounding up and getting rid of the remaining witnesses.”

Andy Brandt was already gone. So was Agent Taylor. So was the janitor, Wally Gregg. And Dr. Rashid. That left him. And Simone.

And one other target — a target that had already been attempted once.

“I have to get to Mercer Street fast,” Lucas said. “Einstein’s house.”

“He’s not there,” she replied.

“Where is he?”

“I saw him heading down toward Lake Carnegie. With a friend.”

“When?”

“About an hour ago.”

He could run down to the lake in minutes. “Do you know where the police station is? On Witherspoon Street?”

“Yes. I had to fill out a report there after my father died.”

“Get hold of Chief Farrell and tell him to send a patrol car down to the lake. Then stay at the station where you’ll be safe.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Find Einstein before Delaney does.” He felt disloyal to his old friend even saying it.

Before he could go, Simone said, “Wait,” and reaching under the collar of her blouse, removed the pentagram medallion her father had given to her. “Keep this on,” she said, looping it over his head and tucking it into his shirt.

“What for?”

“Protection.”

“If you say so,” he said, touching her cheek as if in a final benediction, before stepping carefully around the splayed figure of the Caithness Man. He hated to leave her there, in such a dreadful spot, but he knew there was no time to lose. He ran from the room, down the stairs, and out into the quad. A group of students scattered as he ripped right through them like a linebacker, zigzagging across the campus under Gothic archways and quiet cloisters until he got to Washington Road and then across it, so haphazardly that a milk truck had to skid to a sudden halt and the driver shouted, “Hey, pal — you blind?”

The woods were cool and gloomy, and he slipped and slid on the fallen leaves and patches of damp moss as he raced toward the lake. Once or twice he had to vault over rotting logs, and he kept losing the trail, then picking it back up again. But he knew that as long as he kept moving through the trees, and down the gently sloping hill, he would eventually hit the lakefront. With only the one eye, he had to keep turning his head back and forth to ensure he didn’t collide with anything. Even so, he was swatted in the face, over and over again, by low hanging branches, and several times he nearly tripped over rocky outcroppings. Almost there, he lost his footing on some slick leaves, landed hard on his butt and wound up skidding on the slick forest floor for a good fifteen yards before his fall was arrested by a dense clump of brambly bushes.

Through the remaining foliage he could see, dead ahead, an orange pennant fluttering high above the treetops. Breaking free of the brush, he scrambled wildly down the rest of the slope, until he came up beside the boathouse, with its collection of canoes and sculls lashed to their racks under protective tarps. The bottom canoe was uncovered.

“Professor Einstein!” he called out as he burst through the door. A startled man in owlish glasses turned, his face white with shock, and dropped a book to the floor.

Lucas recognized him as the mathematician, Kurt Gödel.

“Is the professor here?” he said, panting for breath.

“Yes.”

“Where?” Lucas said, looking all around the rustic interior filled with oars and plaques and stacks of saggy life jackets. “Where?” he shouted.

Gödel raised a trembling finger toward the lake. “He’s sailing his boat.”

Lucas didn’t know if this was good news or bad — did it mean he was out of danger, or moving right into its path? He ran to the window, and he could just make out, maybe half a mile away, the yellow sail of Einstein’s little boat. Looking back into the room, he spotted the binoculars used by the race officials and grabbed them; the last time he had raised a pair of binoculars, it had been to check for snipers in an abandoned and bombed-out church on the outskirts of Strasbourg — and back then he had had the use of two eyes. Now he adjusted the lenses and focused on the boat skimming along before the rising wind. It was tacking, and to his relief he could see the familiar figure of Einstein — in his brown leather jacket and corolla of white hair — sitting up straight, manning the tiller, looking perfectly alone and perfectly in control.

But just as he started to drop the binoculars, the little blue boat came about, the sail shifted, and to Lucas’s surprise, he saw another figure sitting on the starboard side.

A man, a bulky one, bundled deep into Delaney’s distinctive overcoat.

Lucas adjusted the lenses again, but he couldn’t discern anything more. “He’s sailing with Professor Delaney?”

“No. No one. We came here together. Just the two of us.”

The bad feeling Lucas had had was growing stronger every second. It was the same feeling he’d had on the night that he and another CRC man had stumbled into an ambush outside a school, or the day he’d discovered the ossuary in the underground cavern and the German boy had stepped on the land mine. He feared that something bad — very bad — was about to happen.

What could he do from here, however?

“Is there some danger to Albert?” Gödel asked, with genuine concern. “Is there something that I should do?”

“Come and help me outside!”

The temperature had dropped, and the sunny sky had become pale and overcast. Lucas could think of only one thing to do — pull the uncovered canoe down from the rack and paddle out after the sailboat before something terrible transpired. Although Gödel was the least likely person to help out, he was also the only one around; despite his frailty, he proved able to hold up one end of the canoe long enough to help get it down to the water.

Once Lucas had climbed into it, the canoe wobbling from side to side as he settled onto the plank that served as a seat, he lifted the paddle stowed under the thwarts, and said, “Give me a shove.”

Gödel, bravely and uncharacteristically stepping into the cold water, waded a foot or two deep to launch the canoe. As the boat moved away, Lucas shouted, “Now wait there for the police!”

“The police are coming?”

“They’d better be!”

Gödel floundered back onto the bank as Lucas, who hadn’t wielded a paddle since a brief excursion in boot camp, took his first tentative strokes. It took a dozen or so before he started to remember how it was done. Dip, with the blade flat, pull back from the shoulder with an even stroke, then feather the paddle to reduce the wind drag as you raised it, dripping, from the water. Switch sides every few strokes, so as to keep the canoe on an even course. But how was he ever going to close the distance between his little craft and Einstein’s sailboat, especially with the wind picking up like this? Already he could see a phalanx of dark clouds skimming in from the east.

The water grew choppier by the minute, and the prow of the canoe bounced up and down. His shoes and socks were soaking wet, and his woolen pants’ cuffs were stuck to his skin. The canoe tilted this way and that, buffeted by the waves, and often he had to quit paddling altogether in order to let it slow down enough to stop rocking and get settled in the water again. He’d neglected to bring a life jacket, and there was none he could see in the boat.

The sailboat was heading toward the center, and probably the deepest, part of the lake. Although it was still far off, Lucas thought he saw Delaney, or the shell that was left of him, reaching out over the side of the boat once or twice, and dropping something into the water. It wasn’t hard to guess what was being discarded.

The eastern sky was growing darker, and the water in the lake went from blue to black. Even the leaves on the trees ashore changed from gold and crimson to a dull copper and a dusky rose. It was as if all the color were being drained from a picture. With every stroke of the paddle, his coat pulled at his shoulders, and he had to stop again, long enough to wrestle it off and drop it in the bottom of the canoe. Despite the cold air, getting colder all the time, he was sweating from the exertion, and he wiped the back of his shirtsleeve across his brow. The distance between the two boats was closing, the wind from the east driving the sailboat, luckily, in his direction. Paddling against the choppy water, Lucas kept his eye on the yellow sail, and on its sailor, sitting in the stern with one hand on the tiller. His passenger reached out again, dropped something else in the lake.

When he was done with the items in the bag, what would he throw overboard next?

Lucas dug the paddle deeper into the water and pulled with all his might.