“Eleven a.m. Not a moment later. And I’m assigning Professor Olivieri to work with the priest. Father Cornelius isn’t going to transcribe a line without Olivieri looking over his shoulder.”
Walker snapped off a casual salute. “Absolutely.”
She studied him a moment, as if unsure whether he was agreeing with her or mocking her. Apparently satisfied, she nodded. “Go and fetch them, then.”
Walker knelt on the floor, studying the engravings in the coffin lid even as the glare from his work light made him squint. The wood bore a series of streaks, a pattern stained into the surface of the lid. They had drawn his attention the first time he had seen them, but now he had the time to take a closer look.
“I don’t know why you’ve made this leap,” Olivieri said behind him.
Walker did not turn. Olivieri hadn’t been talking to him. The professor had been seated next to Father Cornelius—or hovering over the priest—for the past two hours, muttering his doubts and quietly haranguing the other man in a constant, irritating stream of words. But Father Cornelius kept to his word. Well aware of the dustup his earlier mental lapses and his fearful prayer over the cadaver had caused, he had vowed to cooperate with Olivieri as long as the man did not interfere with his work. Walker was there to make certain they played nicely together.
So far, that meant they hadn’t killed each other.
But there had been something other than gentle patience in Father Cornelius’s eyes when he’d given Walker his promise. His upper left eyelid had developed a tic and his gaze darted nervously about, as if he worried that something hostile might emerge from the periphery at any moment. Walker had asked him about it. Just keep me on track, Father Cornelius had said. If I start to repeat myself again, or do anything else strange, bring it to my attention immediately.
Walker had promised. And now he listened as he worked, wary of any shift in the priest’s behavior. The promise had come easily, but not without igniting a fresh spark of real fear in him, for it was clear that Father Cornelius did not trust his own mind. His own self. What could any of them trust if they could not trust themselves?
“What is this, now?” Olivieri asked dismissively. “You cannot simply invent syntax in a language you have never encountered before. I agree that this grouping is quite likely to mean ‘days of rain,’ and this to mean ‘darkness,’ but logic suggests this symbol translates to something like ‘eternity’ or ‘infinity’—”
“Hittite language provides variable syntax,” Father Cornelius said patiently, “and they are cousins. Surely you see that. The translation is not ‘many endless days of rain.’ Why add ‘many’ to modify something ‘endless’ or ‘infinite?’ The author is telling us that the skies delivered many days of rain, and these were summoned to wash away an infinite darkness.”
Olivieri swore loudly and pushed back in his chair. “And again I say, you cannot invent syntax! Your interpretation is nothing but guesswork! You read the message you want to find here!”
“It isn’t invention, Professor Olivieri,” the priest said quietly, almost sadly. His voice wavered. “It’s intuition. In our line of work, it’s sometimes all we have. Scribble down your own translations and I’ll do the same with mine. Other eyes will examine them both in time, and they will decide which of us is right.”
Olivieri gave a huff. “I was brought into this project for my expertise. You were brought here as a courtesy. My notes will be the official opinion of the Ark Project.”
“How nice for you,” the priest said with a twitch of his upper lip. “Can we get back to work, please? We waste time bickering.”
Olivieri fumed, clearly trying to find a legitimate way to continue the mostly one-sided argument. When he could not invent one, at least at the moment, he shook his head and began furiously scribbling notes on a pad, half turned away from the priest as though he thought Father Cornelius might copy his answers on a middle school math test.
Walker smiled to himself, despite the ache in his skull. Father Cornelius seemed entirely himself, now. Troubled, yes, but not in the midst of any kind of mental crisis.
He focused again on his work, and his smile faded. The cold seeped up through the angled floor beneath him, emanating from the timbers as if the mountain were itself the icy heart of winter.
Flexing his fingers inside his thin gloves, Walker picked up the small scalpel he’d been using and reached into his kit for a tiny, plastic, sample container. Careful not to damage the engraving on the lid, he dug into the wood where one of those streaks seemed darkest. He carved a sliver, then another in the same spot, surprised at how deep into the wood the stain had spread.
Setting the scalpel down, he capped the container and held it up, staring at those two slivers. They’d come from the outside of the lid, not the inside, so they weren’t stains from the bodily fluids of the cadaver.
He suspected they were bloodstains, but if that proved true, it meant the blood splashed across the lid had come from someone who’d helped close it, or cover it in thick bitumen paste. Walker knew it was a mystery he could never possibly unravel, but it troubled him almost as much as the way Kim had gone briefly off the rails yesterday, or the way Father Cornelius had suffered some kind of cognitive slippage this morning. It suggested that violence had been erupting around the horned thing’s remains from the moment it had been sealed into that box.
DARPA would love it. But they would want to know why and how.
“What are you doing now?” Olivieri sighed behind him. “You can’t use four different languages as the basis for a translation.”
Walker turned in time to see the hard glare in Father Cornelius’s eyes, and the way the priest’s lips trembled before he finally allowed himself to speak.
“No, professor. You can’t. And that is the real problem here, isn’t it? Oh, certainly you understand bits and pieces of what I’m unraveling, but can we both just admit that you’re out of your depth?”
Walker winced.
Olivieri stood, knocking over his chair. “You arrogant bastard. I have spent decades lecturing on the finest details of ancient language. My studies of biblical history are the basis for hundreds of university classes in more than twenty countries. How can you—”
Father Cornelius set his pen down onto his open notebook and stared up at Olivieri, not bothering to stand. “Your greatest skill is in rearranging information others have provided so that you can better communicate it to those less informed and less accomplished than yourself.”
Walker hung his head, expecting Olivieri to explode in fury. When only silence ensued, he cocked one eye open and saw the professor fuming, dumbfounded, shaking his head slowly as he took one step backward.
Olivieri turned and strode away so quickly that he seemed to draw a gust of air into his wake. Walker watched him storm off and then turned to Father Cornelius.
The priest brushed at the air as if to wave him away. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“You were supposed to play nice.”
Father Cornelius’s face darkened, brows knitting so tightly they made him look like a bird of prey. “You’re not the one to instruct me on the subject of playing nice. Kim is here to do her job, just like you, but you’ve treated her like an intruder since we all met.”
“Can I help it if I don’t like having a babysitter?”
The priest’s glare darkened further, a hawk intent upon his prey. “She’s only a babysitter if you insist on behaving like a baby. She’s a professional, here to observe on behalf of the rest of the world. Don’t begrudge her that. In your words, play nice. One would have thought that surviving the ruin of your marriage would have taught you something about how to treat other people.”