The Einstein Prophecy (28 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

After rummaging around in the bottom of the sack one more time, his stowaway found another relic—a long yellowed bone that the professor could swear he had once seen littering the floor of his garage—held it up for closer inspection, then tossed it overboard like a gnawed drumstick.

Einstein heard the splash, but his eyes remained riveted on his unwelcome passenger. He was a hulking brute, with a dark, vacant gaze and a strange way of moving. All his gestures and actions were herky-jerky, as if he might suffer from multiple sclerosis, or some other neurological disease. Whatever the cause, it lent him the air of a human marionette. Einstein suspected he had seen this man before, not out at the Institute for Advanced Study but somewhere around the university campus. Still, he couldn’t exactly place him, and when he’d asked him for his name, the man had made a bad joke of it, replying in a gravelly tone, “Call me Beelzebub.”

Lord of the Flies. Mankind’s oldest adversary. Clearly, the man was mad—the disease must have already infected his brain as well as his body—but he was just as plainly a deadly menace. He had emerged from under the canvas like a bear coming out of hibernation, dragging a sack after him. His body smelled like a corpse. Perched on the side of the boat, he’d sniffed at the air as if for the first time, and studied the increasingly turbulent sky with eyes so devoid of fellow feeling that Einstein was reminded of the brown-shirted thugs he had seen in the news reels, strutting through the streets of Berlin, or driving in open cars past the burning ruins of the Reichstag that they had set ablaze.

Off to the east, thunderclouds were approaching, but the dangers of being caught out on the lake in a storm were nothing, he realized, compared to what confronted him in the tiny boat. With a thick finger and bloodied nail, the passenger had pointed in one direction, then another—wordlessly—for the purpose, it seemed, of guiding the boat away from any shore. Einstein, a middling sailor at best, had simply done what he could do to comply and keep the man pacified. But how could he ever contrive to get back to dry land safely?

The passenger’s head was down as he peered into the open sack, removing one bone or artifact after another, and then, after close scrutiny, plunking it over the side. Einstein, always the most inquisitive of men, wanted to ask him why, but knew better than to challenge him in any way. Maniacs could be as volatile as nitroglycerin—even his own institutionalized son, Eduard, could go off like a bottle rocket—and his best bet was to humor him until such time as the sailboat could be maneuvered back toward the dock. If only he had listened to his sweetheart Marie Winteler, and all the others throughout his life, who had begged him to learn how to swim . . .

Too late now.

The bag apparently empty at last, the man scrunched it up and tossed it, too, into Lake Carnegie. Einstein watched as it drifted away, bobbing up and down on the churning waves. Only one thing remained in the boat—a long wooden staff with an iron handle. A shepherd’s crook, like the ones he had seen the farmers use in the valleys of Switzerland. To this lunatic, however, it seemed to be of especially great interest; he turned it this way and that, testing its heft, running his fingers down the shaft and gripping the crooked handle in different ways.

“There is a storm coming,” Einstein hazarded.

The man grunted, as if he had ordered it up himself.

“And I am not a very good captain. We should turn back while there is time.”

“It makes no difference. We are done.” Why was there such a strange disjunction, though, between the man and the voice that came out of his mouth? It was as if not only his movements, but his very words, were emanating from some foreign source.

“Done with what?” Einstein said, confused now as well as frightened. “What are we done with?”

The man looked up with a feigned expression of surprise. “Our work. We are done with our work.”

Now he recognized the man’s voice at last. It was the voice he had heard the night before while working in his office with the cat on his lap. He was stroking the animal’s back, and puzzling over the last unsolved problems in the creation of an atomic bomb, but the whole time it was as if some mysterious interlocutor had been murmuring in his ear, directing his thoughts, revealing one solution after another and urging him on to completion. What he had taken to be inspiration, he now realized, might have been something far darker. His hand had been scrawling equations on the blackboard in his office, or onto the sheets of the notepad, without hesitation, as if he had simply been a scribe taking dictation.

Who, however, had he been taking them from? Nuclear fission was a remarkably difficult and dangerous endeavor, one that could, according to some physicists’ calculations, ignite the very atmosphere. It was a devil’s brew, one that he had long warned against, and which he would never have even considered, were it not for the unthinkable possibility of its coming under the control of humanity’s worst enemies first. Now he had to wonder: Had his hand been guided by the Devil himself?

The man smiled, for all the world as if he were reading his thoughts. And that was when Einstein realized his greatest mistake—this was no ordinary man, it was quite possibly not a man at all. Hadn’t he said as much when he’d introduced himself?

Beelzebub.

A cold spray flew up from the bow of the boat, wetting Einstein’s wild white hair and bushy moustache. His hands were so slick, and shaking so hard, they could barely hold the tiller. “So, what more do you want from me?” he asked, using every ounce of his courage to speak in an even tone.

“Nothing.”

A bolt of lightning crackled across the sky, and in that split second, it was if a blinding flashbulb had gone off over a newsman’s camera. In that minuscule fraction of time, Einstein glimpsed beneath the brute’s face another one that was even worse—a face with sunken yellow eyes, a protruding brow, a mouth crammed with sharp and overlapping teeth. He had seen such a visage in antique works of art—from Dürer, Doré, Bosch. It was the kind of face worn by the soldiers of Hell.

The sun was entirely gone, eclipsed in an instant by a boiling black cloud. The wind made the sails snap like firecrackers.

And in the passenger’s vacant stare, Einstein saw the terrible truth. With this creature’s unholy complicity, he had been goaded toward the unleashing of Armageddon. The first drops of rain spattered on the deck and the top of his head.

But in doing so, hadn’t he helped the Allies to win the war one day? Why on earth would the Devil, or his minions, want to help defeat a scourge as brutal as the Third Reich? Wouldn’t a monster like Hitler be Satan’s most favored son?

“To us, the victor doesn’t matter,” the passenger said, again as if it were intuiting his thoughts. “Given the tools, your kind can be trusted to use them to destroy yourselves.”

The packet that Einstein had sent off to Los Alamos that morning would help pave the way—which left but one awful question hanging in the air. What further use could there be for one old, cold, and increasingly decrepit physicist?

Especially, he realized with mounting dread, one that had been allowed this plain view of humanity’s most ancient foe?

Obscured now by a light veil of gray rain, the creature was appraising him as if he were simply the next niggling detail that needed to be dealt with.

“Not that we are not grateful,” it said, rising from its seat and stepping toward him. “We could not have done it without you.”

Einstein reared away, but where was there to go other than over the side? Even if he could swim, he’d never make it to shore in these turbulent waters. Still, he was ready to take his chances in the lake—what other choice did he have?—when he heard a voice shouting behind him.

“Duck, Professor! Duck!” A dripping oar suddenly snagged the rope of the sail and yanked it backward over his head.

Something thudded up against the stern of the boat, and when he dared to turn around, he saw Lucas holding a wet paddle and pulling hard on the line while teetering on a rocking canoe.

A moment later, just as the canoe flipped over, Lucas leapt into the sailboat, falling against Einstein so hard that he was knocked off his seat. Before his wet hands could secure a grip on the tiller or anything else, the professor tumbled overboard, arms flailing and legs buckling, into the frigid waters of the lake.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Crashing onto the deck, the paddle still entangled in the lines, Lucas scrabbled for a hold on Einstein’s pants, but it was too late to catch him. And when he looked up, he saw Patrick Delaney standing, legs spread, in the pouring rain. In his hands, he held the saint’s crook.

“Patrick!” Lucas shouted. “What are you doing?” Einstein was fast receding in the wake of the boat. “We’ve got to turn around before he drowns!”

But Delaney—or what was now passing for him—didn’t move.

“A life jacket! Is there a life jacket?” Lucas looked all around the cramped shell. Underneath the corner of a canvas tarp, he saw faded yellow fabric. He scrambled on all fours toward it, yanked the life preserver free, and then bringing his arm back, slung it as far off the stern as he could. It sailed a couple of dozen feet, trailing a long rope, then plopped onto the water, well short of where Lucas could see the professor’s white head bobbing in the waves.

The only thing he could do now would be to jump in after him, and then try to ferry them both to shore. It wouldn’t be easy. He kicked off his shoes to rid himself of the excess weight, but just as he prepared to dive into the lake, he felt an iron hook wrap itself around his neck and drag him down into the boat. He landed hard on his back, his head thumping against a wooden thwart, and before he could gather his senses, a heavy boot pressed down on his chest.

Delaney stood above him, like a conquistador planting a flag on some new territory.

“What are you doing? Patrick, you’ve got to help me!” But even as he was appealing to his old friend, he knew it was a futile cause. Although the face was Delaney’s, as were the body and the clothes, it was something else entirely that he was addressing—something ancient and implacable and evil, something that had suppressed any shred of Patrick Delaney.

And it didn’t care a whit if Einstein drowned.

Lucas grabbed hold of the creature’s foot and pried it away from his chest, rolling to one side. He felt the boot kick him in his ribs, knocking the breath out of him, and then kick him again. When he tried to get up on all fours, the staff came cracking down on his shoulders with such astonishing force he was surprised it didn’t break in two. Or that he didn’t.

With each passing second, the possibility of the professor surviving in the stormy waters was diminishing.

Delaney lifted the staff to deal another blow, but stopped for an instant, suddenly fixated on something dangling free from Lucas’s bowed neck.

The medallion Simone had given him.

It was just enough of a reprieve for Lucas to scuttle toward the bow, his shoulders aching and skull throbbing.

But it was no more than that. His enemy snorted, and then tried to squirm around the sail, which was swinging wildly, back and forth across the boat. Lucas snapped the leather cord from his neck and held the ancient pentagram out in front of him. He had no idea what power it might possess, but he was fast running out of options. He shook it defiantly, but any protection he had hoped it could afford was dispensed of with the next swipe of the staff. The medallion was knocked loose and flew off into the lake where all of the other artifacts had disappeared.

A clap of thunder, loud as a cannon volley, rumbled across the sky, and the rain came down in a torrent.

“Stop!” Lucas shouted. He knew that at least one of his fingers had just been broken. “Can’t you hear me? Patrick, I know you’re in there!”

For one fleeting instant, he thought he saw, like a murky image staring up from the bottom of a pond, the actual face of his old comrade, a beseeching look in his bewildered eyes.

“I can see you there! Patrick, come back!”

Then the image was gone, like a slate wiped clean with a wet cloth, and Lucas was once again confronting nothing but an enemy bent on his destruction. In his head, he heard a voice, as if transmitted by a radio wave, gloating, “He’s not here anymore.” It wasn’t even Delaney’s voice. “And you, you should have died in that iron mine.”

Suddenly it was all before him again—Hansel reaching for the candy bar, the detonation, the shrapnel mangling Toussaint, killing the boy, and gouging out his own eye. All thoughts but one flew out of his head.

He had to kill it, this damn thing that had possessed Delaney, and he had to kill it now.

The sail whipped back again, and the paddle that had been tangled in the lines fell free, clattering to his feet. Grabbing it, he swung the flat blade at the creature’s head, but the blow was deftly parried by the iron-handled staff. His opponent didn’t even lose his balance in the rocking boat.

Lucas regained his own footing as best he could; the water in the hull was up to his ankles and sloshing back and forth. He pulled the paddle back over his shoulder like a baseball bat and swung again, this time with every ounce of strength that he could still muster. The paddle cracked against the petrified wood of the staff and splintered, a wide fissure running down its length and sending a shudder all the way up Lucas’s arms.

Lightning shimmered in the sky.

There was only enough of the paddle left for one more strike, and Lucas took it, but this time the shaft snapped in two and the blade went skimming off into the howling wind like a loose propeller. Lucas gripped the upper half, its end jagged as a knife, and lunged with it. The tip speared the fabric of Delaney’s sodden coat and got snared there. Lucas tried to pull it back, but it wouldn’t come, and he watched in horror as the ancient staff, with its crooked iron handle high in the air, rose above Delaney’s head, about to deliver a fatal strike. The moment of imminent action.

Unarmed, battered, barely able to stand, Lucas suddenly remembered what Saint Anthony had done when overwhelmed by the armies of Diocletian—he had raised the staff and called upon the powers of Heaven. Instead of trying to dodge the blow, or escape the boat, Lucas leapt at his adversary, gripping the wooden staff with both hands, and though his face was only inches from the creature’s foul breath, held on tight. He would either die in the next instant, or . . .

The explosion came in a blinding blue flash, the jagged lightning bolt touching the iron handle like the finger of God. A massive charge scorched the air and hurled Lucas flat against the mast.

The creature, its hands seemingly welded to the top of the staff, juddered from head to foot, jaws clamped shut, head snapped back, its entire body wrapped in a frizzling electric light.

Fire from the Heavens.

For several seconds, it managed to remain upright, limbs convulsing and flesh frying, its eyes bulging with a lurid golden gleam, before the surge ended. Smoldering, the staff still clenched in its hands, its legs buckled, and the demon toppled lifelessly over the side of the boat.

Lucas, tingling and twitching from head to foot, peered overboard and saw the charred body—black and sizzling as a hot coal—drift off. It no longer looked like Delaney—it no longer looked like anything but the remains of some incinerated beast.

Then the weight of its soaking clothes dragged it down beneath the water.

Wiping the rain from his one good eye, Lucas turned and scanned the lake behind the boat. To his dismay, he saw that the life preserver, still trailing astern by a long rope, was empty.

“Professor!” he shouted, praying for a miracle. Another one. Hands quivering, he groped for the tiller and the lines, trying to turn the boat around. Never having sailed before, it was all hit or miss, and by the time he had changed direction, he had all but given up hope of rescuing Einstein.

The blade of the broken paddle floated by, and then he saw, off to one side, the upside-down canoe, rising and falling like a cork on the choppy waters.

Sailing closer, searching for any sign of the professor, Lucas felt an all too familiar aching in his heart . . . the ache he had felt after the land mine, or after visiting the gravely wounded Private Toussaint in the hospital ward, or discovering the lifeless body of Dr. Rashid.

Then he spotted an arm, tenaciously thrown over the bottom of the capsized canoe.

And heard a feeble cry for help.

Shoving the tiller to one side so abruptly that he nearly overturned the sailboat, too, he shouted, “Hold on! Hold on!”

The sailboat came around, and now he could make out the professor’s head, the white hair plastered to his skull like wet goose feathers, as he clung to the canoe. Dropping the lines and tiller, Lucas stretched out a hand as the boat skimmed past, snagging the collar of Einstein’s leather jacket and dragging him along in the wake. It was another minute or two before he could finally wrestle him up and into the boat, where he landed like a hooked flounder, sputtering and spitting out water.

“Again,” Einstein gasped. “You have saved me again.”

“Not yet I haven’t. I’ve still got to get us to dry land.”

But the driving wind seemed to be pushing them toward the boathouse, and before long, the little sailboat had ground to a wobbly halt on the shore, a few hundred yards shy of the dock. Lucas jumped out, the water still up to his thighs, and extended a hand to Einstein.

“We are safe?”

“We will be once you get out of the boat.”

Overhead, he heard the roar of a low-flying aircraft, and looked up to see the military helicopter—no doubt with the ossuary safely stowed in its cargo bay—plowing its way south through the pouring rain and gusting winds.

As he helped Einstein plod onto the muddy bank, Lucas could see the police running toward them. Even Kurt Gödel, throwing all caution to the wind, was picking his way along the shoreline with his arms extended like a tightrope artist.

Ahead of them all, though, and leading the pack by a mile, was Simone.