The Einstein Prophecy (11 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The day had begun bright and sunny, with a light breeze and a blue sky, but by noon, the Indian summer had abruptly ended. Fall had come in with a vengeance. A chill wind was blowing, and as Lucas left the house on Mercer Street, Mrs. Caputo called out to him, “Don’t forget your umbrella. The radio says there’s going to be another thunderstorm today.”

The radio, as usual, was right.

The campus lawns were soaked with rain, the walkways were submerged beneath puddles of water and piles of soggy dead leaves. The floorboards of the lecture hall in the art museum were slippery from the wet shoes and galoshes of his students. Lucas himself had nearly taken a tumble off the steps to the podium, and several of the less-hardy students had already caught their first colds of the season. As he took the class around the galleries to observe some of the statues and urns, the squelching of their shoes was accompanied by a chorus of honking and coughing and bleating into handkerchiefs.

So far, however, Lucas had remained impervious to contagion, in large part because he spent so much of his time alone, sequestered in the conservation wing with the ossuary, or in the university library trying to make sense of whatever he had gleaned.

Making sense of it all was a herculean task. He had taken copious notes, rolls of photographs, several rubbings, but he was no closer to identifying the precise origin of the box, or the identity of its occupant, than he had been before. Normally, a sarcophagus bore few markings, and those that were there hewed to a simple theme—identifying the name of the deceased, perhaps his occupation in life, and maybe a word or two about his relation to some other known person or family. “John, son of Joseph. Merchant.” And always in just one language, whether it be Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew.

Not this one.

This one had vague, faintly incised inscriptions in several tongues, as if by a committee, or else by someone who was intent on issuing his admonitions in every conceivable way. In addition to the traditional Egyptian glyphs, probably carved by some Coptic stonemason, there were enough eroded but legible letters to lead Lucas to brief passages in both the Old and New Testaments.

As for the ancient Greek lettering—assuming he was making it out correctly—this took on a more martial air: “Eternal victor, vanquished foe.” Could the box contain the bones of mutual antagonists? That would be a first, and might suggest some reason why the Third Reich had been so interested in it. But the time for suppositions was fast disappearing, and the time for answers was here. He’d received a strongly worded communiqué only that morning from Colonel Macmillan at the OSS.

“Information and findings needed ASAP,” the telegram read. “Do not attempt to transmit. Courier will be dispatched for written report immediately upon notice. We await results without delay.”

Although he was still puzzled as to why this particular sarcophagus, unique though it might be, should be of such vital importance to the military chain of command, Lucas knew enough from his days in the army not to disregard the telegram. Up ’til now, he had been reluctant to sever the chains holding the lid in place before he had made a thorough examination and assessment of all the exterior markings, measurements, and appearance. As any art historian or archaeologist knew, once you had taken any particular step, it became impossible to reverse the results or course of action. There was something he’d recently heard of, called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, having to do with the fact that the very act of observing something changed the position and course of the thing being observed—at least on the subatomic level. In like manner, he didn’t want to open the box until he had gathered all the data he could from its unopened state. The only exception he had made was to allow Delaney to make a surgical excision of some of the stone, in order to complete his own analysis.

Perhaps those weren’t the only reasons for his delay. Perhaps there was a part of him—a larger part than he was willing to admit—that dreaded any contact with the box at all.

When the class ended, and the students had been dismissed—half of them no doubt to their sick beds—he left the museum and wandered across the campus to Guyot Hall, where Delaney maintained his geophysics lab. Surely he would have made some progress on his analysis of the physical composition and origin of the stone by now, information that Lucas could relay to the OSS to sate their immediate hunger.

A brooding gray Gothic structure, built in the style of so much of the campus, Guyot had housed the university’s museum of natural history on its main floor since 1879. Its grim exterior was adorned with over two hundred gargoyle-like figurines depicting extinct or extant animals, all of which had been carved by Gutzon Borglum, the man most famous for sculpting Mount Rushmore. Entering its lobby was like running the gauntlet at a bestiary.

Inside, it felt even stranger. Dimly lit display cases held geological, biological, and anthropological specimens gathered by Princeton’s scientific expeditions everywhere from the arid deserts of the southwestern United States to the windswept cliffs of Patagonia. Some of the cases held split geodes, while others housed the skeletons of saber-toothed cats and three-toed horses; one in particular displayed an Eocene perch preserved in the act of swallowing a herring. But the most popular of the exhibits by far—especially with the kids from town, who were admitted freely—was the Caithness Man, discovered in a Scottish bog and later donated to the university collection by Wendell Walker III, the salutatorian of the graduating class of 1904 and, in his spare time, an amateur explorer.

A fully intact corpse, wearing a snug leather cap and laced breeches, the Caithness Man took his name from the location of the acidic peat bog in which his remains had been petrified and perfectly preserved for over a thousand years. Although his crime would never be known, his punishment was clear: He had been bashed in the skull, then lashed to a stake, where he had been strangled. And all of that was done before his throat, for good measure, had been cut.

“This kind of triple killing,” the plaque inside the case explained, “signified a ritualistic execution. These were done to cure demonic possession, or as punishment for transgressions of a heretical nature.” The pole had then fallen, or been knocked over, into the muck. Now, the haggard Caithness Man stood erect again, still indissolubly wedded to the stake, which was just as petrified as he was, in a tall glass case lit from below. His flesh had turned the same mahogany brown as the wood, and every wrinkle in his skin, every lash on his closed eyes, every whisker on his gaunt cheek and pointed chin, was immaculately preserved. He looked as if, at any second, he might awaken from his awful slumber, open his eyes, and utter some garbled cry.

“I didn’t expect to see you there,” Lucas heard from down the hall. “Usually it’s a bunch of kids from the grammar school.”

He turned to see Andy Brandt lifting his head from the drinking fountain.

“Most of the time, they’re daring each other to touch the glass,” he said, “and I have to tell them to knock it off or the Caithness Man will come and get them.”

“Does it work?”

“For about five minutes.”

Now that it had been mentioned, Lucas could see some of their grubby fingerprints on the display case.

“What brings you to these parts?” Andy asked, nosy as ever.

“Professor Delaney,” Lucas said. “Is he up in his lab?”

“Let’s have a look-see,” Andy said, moving toward the stairs, but Lucas said, “That’s okay. I’ll check myself.”

“I need the exercise,” Brandt said, taking the stairs two at a time. “I’ve been cooped up all day.”

For someone who’d been declared 4-F due to a heart murmur, he certainly took the stairs in stride.

Lucas wanted no interference just now. What he had to discuss with Delaney had to be discussed in private. By the time he’d caught up, however, Brandt was already throwing open the door marked Department of Mineralogy and Geophysics, and saying, “Anyone home?”

To Lucas’s surprise, more than one voice was raised in objection. He heard Delaney saying, “Didn’t I tell you that you were banned?” and a woman’s voice saying, “And who are you?”

The woman spoke with a British accent.

Inside, he saw Delaney and Simone Rashid, standing on either side of a lab counter.

Lucas was stunned. Simone looked taken off guard, too. Before he could ask what she was doing there, Delaney was shoving Andy back out the door—“Consider this lab off-limits!”—and closing the door behind him. Brushing his hands together—as if to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish”—he gestured toward Simone and said, “I gather you two have already met.”

“It’s good to see you again,” she said coolly.

“What are you doing here?”

“I guess you haven’t heard,” Delaney said. “Miss Rashid has received a visiting appointment to the Middle Eastern Studies Department.”

“I didn’t even know they were hiring.”

Raising an eyebrow and speaking with great deliberation, Delaney said, “They are when Colonel Macmillan makes the call.”

Lucas felt like he would never be able to keep up. “So,” he said to Delaney in a low tone, “she knows about . . . the project?”

“I can hear you,” she interrupted, “and of course I do. Once the Egyptian ministry—and Egypt is an ally, I might add—expressed its interest in this case, things moved swiftly.”

“We’ve actually gotten a lot done,” Delaney said. “I was planning to call you.”

As Lucas perched on a stool and tried to get his bearings, Delaney went on to explain that, based on the sliver he had drilled from the underside, he had determined that the alabaster of the box was of the so-called Oriental variety. “That’s the calcite kind, harder than the gypsum you generally find in Europe. Watch.” Removing the sample of the stone from a drawer and placing it on the counter, he used an eyedropper to touch it with a clear liquid. Minuscule bubbles appeared, then quickly disappeared. “That’s from the hydrochloric acid. You wouldn’t get that effervescence on the softer sort of alabaster.”

“The ancient Egyptians often used it for their canopic jars,” Simone said, “especially when the jars were being used to hold the vital organs of Pharaohs.”

“Are you saying that we have the ossuary of a Pharaoh?” Lucas asked.

“No,” Simone replied, “not at all,” though her tone suggested she knew more than she was saying. Delaney, meanwhile, charged ahead.

“This particular strain of alabaster,” he said, “was only quarried in certain regions of Egypt and Syria.”

“The region around the Sahara el Beyda,” Simone said. “Or White Desert.”

“Starting about three thousand years ago.”

“I can tell you right now,” Lucas said, glad at last to have something to contribute, “that the ossuary dates from no more than two thousand years ago. Probably a century or two less.”

“How do you know that?” Delaney asked.

“From the Latin inscriptions on its lid. One of them refers to a passage in the Scriptures.”

“Well, that would be your department,” he conceded.

“What about the other markings?” Simone said, readily falling into the role of colleague. “Have you made any progress with those?”

Despite the ease with which she had adapted, Lucas still found it hard to press on. This project had been delivered into his hands under such bonds of secrecy that he was hesitant to divulge his findings willy-nilly. “I’m working on them.”

“Perhaps I can help.”

Delaney nodded his head in encouragement, but Lucas ignored him.

“We really need to get back into the room with the sarcophagus,” Simone remarked. “I think we’ve done as much as we can with what Professor Delaney has on hand.”

“Call me Patrick,” Delaney said, and Simone smiled. “But I think she’s right,” he added, fixing his gaze on Lucas. “We can send all this geophysical data on to DC, but Macmillan won’t be satisfied for long.”

Lucas could sense Simone’s impatience, but he looked instead at the sliver of alabaster lying next to the microscope on the counter.

“What he really wants to know,” Delaney went on, “is what’s inside it.”

“Don’t you?” Simone said.

“And I can’t use my radio isotope research to put a date on bones that haven’t been removed yet,” Delaney complained. “If I don’t come through with some results soon, it could cost me my funding.”

Lucas felt like he was under a barrage.

“The box needs to be opened,” Delaney concluded.

“When it is,” Simone said, “I am now authorized to be there.”

“All right, all right,” Lucas said, giving up, “we’ll open it.”

“When?” Simone insisted.

“Tonight. After the museum closes at eight.”

Then, lest he be pushed any farther into a corner, he asked Delaney to write up his notes and slip a copy under his study door, turned around, and left the room. He knew that opening the ossuary was inevitable, but now that he had committed to doing it in a matter of hours, he felt a cold and numb sensation descending on his limbs. It had to be done, but he did not want to do it.

Lo and behold, Andy Brandt stood just across the hall, pretending to be absorbed in the flyers tacked to the Mineralogy and Geophysics Department’s bulletin board. How much had he been able to overhear, Lucas wondered?