The Sinai Secret

FORTY-SIX

At the Same Time

It was like pushing to the top from the bottom of a very dark pond: Light was visible but far away. No, not a pool-the ocean, because consciousness kept coming and going like the tide, leaving a bitter, salty taste in her mouth.

It had been like this for…?

Perhaps hours or years; there was no way to be sure. Too many tides had risen and fallen.

Alicia had only hazy memories, fragments from some nearly forgotten dreams that came as regularly as the waves. At first she thought she could hear them murmuring against a distant shore, but she decided it was only the sound of her own pulse pumping in her temples.

But she knew she had not been in the sea forever, because there was one thing she knew was true, a single bit of memory unclouded, clear, and focused: She had come out of her bathroom in her house, the same way she had every day since moving to Atlanta, and…

What?

There had been strange men in her bedroom?

The idea seemed absurd, but no more so than the sounds and smells of an airport she thought she remembered. Yet maybe she had been in the hospital. She knew she was in a bed with side rails while a tube of some sort was in her arm. And she couldn't move. There were straps around her arms and legs. But at the same time she was certain-as certain as she could be about anything right now-that she had been in an airplane.

Was that possible?

She supposed it was, that she could have been medevaced somewhere.

But why?

Had she been in some sort of accident on the way to work?

No, she thought it all had more to do with those men in her bedroom.

And Lang. Had he been there?

She sorted through the misty images, tried to put the pieces together to make a single picture, like a child's jigsaw puzzle. No use. There were too many parts missing. Some things, like starting out at home, she was sure of. Others, like the nurse or person whose dark silhouette showed up to replace the tube in her arm, she was not sure were real. One thing she was sure of: The pitch of the engine sounds had changed slightly, and the pressure on her ears told her the plane was descending.

And she seemed closer to reaching the surface of the ocean than before.

The familiar shape was beside her bed. It extended an arm, and lights went on. She tried to shield her eyes before she remembered she could not move her arms or legs.

Even through eyes held almost closed, she could now see a face on the figure. She had seen him somewhere before.

In one hand he had what she recognized as a small recorder. The other held a single sheet of paper.

"Ms. Warner," he said in a voice she also recognized, "I want you to read these lines into the recording device."

The first words she had heard since… since she had found herself at the bottom of the ocean.