The Einstein Prophecy Read Online Free PDF Page B

charge of the cargo manifest now,” she said, rapping the bulging clipboard. “Every sailor is needed up top, in the wards.”
    “I can leave?”
    She held out her hand for the keys and said, in her most authoritative voice, “You’re to report to Jamison, the chief of surgery!”
    When he couldn’t unclip the key ring fast enough, Simone barked, “Get going, Sailor!”
    Plopping the ring into her outstretched hand, he ran for the stairs, holding on to his hat.
    The ship was putting on speed and taking a zigzag course designed to elude the torpedoes. This far below deck the air was hot and heavy, and the roar of the engines, operating at maximum power, was deafening. Overhead lights, bare bulbs behind mesh screens, flickered on and off as she made her way into the hold. Pallets of medical supplies and boxes of canned goods were lashed down with thickly braided coils of rope and stacked to the low ceiling.
    Simone knew that there was other game aboard, too. There were captured Nazi armaments for study and analysis, reams of official German correspondence that had been salvaged from one overrun outpost or another, and, of course, the ossuary that she and her father had retrieved from one of the most remote and inaccessible regions of the Sahara Desert. When the German tank divisions swept through northern Africa, they had pillaged Egypt’s artifacts and selected the choicest to be sent back to the Fatherland. The US Army had somehow intercepted the ossuary—for which she would be eternally grateful—but instead of keeping it safe for eventual restoration to its rightful place in the Cairo Museum, they had put it on this ship bound for New York Harbor.
    That was what Simone did not understand. Could the Allies know its secret?
    For fear of that, she had tracked the progress of the sarcophagus every step of the way. As an officer in the Egyptian Department of Cultural Affairs, she had access to all sorts of internal communiqués, transfer documents, and, most important of all, underpaid, midlevel functionaries at all of the artifact’s stops along the route—functionaries who could be persuaded to part with vital information for nominal sums, or for the promise (never fulfilled) of a romantic liaison with the fetching young woman so inexplicably obsessed with one ancient casket.
    If they had understood what it was, if they had been able to guess its significance and its power, they might not have been so puzzled, but Simone was not about to tell them. It had been her father’s lifework to discover the ossuary. For all that these bureaucrats knew, it was just another old stone box destined to gather dust in some museum gallery.
    There was just one thing she had not yet been able to ascertain: Where was the box supposed to go after its arrival in the United States? Rather than risk losing track of it altogether, she had contrived to book passage, for herself and her father, on board this ship. Now, if the ship didn’t sink in the next few minutes, she had her best chance yet of finding out.
    The ship rolled to one side, buffeted by the turbulent seas. Or was the rocking caused, she wondered, by the repercussions of depth charges exploding underwater? Discarding the clipboard, she put out a hand to steady herself and moved down the narrow aisles of supplies and matériel, scouring the work orders and delivery instructions secured in waterproof, plastic pouches affixed to their sides. She had made it to one end of the hold and was on her way back again when she noticed a khaki tarp thrown over a recessed area next to the wall. She could see a box marked “Antiseptics: USN” poking out from under one end of the tarp and had almost passed it by when something told her to take a closer look. The ship started to change direction again, throwing her off-balance, but she managed to grasp hold of the tarp’s flap and fold it back. Why did it crackle with a thin film of ice?
    Below the tarp, a rectangular wooden box, bigger