“The last thing I remember was the helicopter hitting the water.” She sat up and focused on Marcus, gently touching his forehead. “You’re cut, and you’ve got a bump there. How do you feel?”
“A little woozy.” Marcus shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun off the water. “Maybe we’re somewhere near the coast of Sicily. Look, there’s a small harbor down there.” He pointed to a few fishing boats and sailboats anchored in the calm harbor. “I see one small boat moving. A fisherman, maybe.”
Alicia stared at the small boat in the distance. Marcus stood and stepped to the beach. There was an indentation where a small boat had come ashore. He stared back at the spot on the beach where they had been. “Maybe someone carried us from a boat to up here. We might be…”
“Might be where?”
“Maybe the Aeolian Islands. North of Sicily.”
Alicia’s face filled with hesitation, her eyes taking in the island and the harbor. “I have goose bumps all over. Are we alive or is this some come kind of death dream we’re sharing?”
“We’re alive, I think.” Paul smiled and added, “But a lot can happen in a dimension where time itself means nothing…‘for the things which are seen are sequential, but the things which are not seen are eternal.’ ”
Alicia looked down at the maternity dress, ripped and still damp from the sea. She laughed. “I didn’t dress very well for heaven.” She looked around her. “It’s beautiful here. Maybe this is paradise…let’s climb a little higher.”
They walked a rocky path that led them to a cliff that overlooked the sea. The island had a natural curve to its south face, the cliffs jutting straight down into cobalt blue waters. Marcus studied the terrain, his eyes drifting across the pastoral hills, down to the old-world harbor and the quaint seaside village. The air smelled sweet, pink heather cascading from the slopes, lemon and orange trees planted in nearby fields.
“I could grow to like this place,” Alicia said, the wind teasing her hair.
“Maybe we could call this home. We’ll be the nameless couple who drifted in with the tide one day and decided to stay.”
“You think?”
“Yes.” Marcus looked across the immense indigo blue ocean. He could see smoke from Mount Etna in the sky. “At this moment in time, I feel so much alive. For such a long time, I felt dead inside. Should I trust this new feeling? What do we really see, Alicia?”
“Maybe the world will listen and hear what you found…what you shared with them. Love between people is what we can see and feel…maybe we commit to that.”
“Maybe. That hope is about all we have left.”
“I disagree, Paul.” She took his hand in hers. “We have much more left. For whatever reason, you were picked. I don’t know for sure how or why. I don’t even know why I’m standing here on this beautiful windswept island with you. For a concise moment, we had the chance to experience the things eternal. You, Paul Marcus…you and Isaac Newton…had the window to the universe opened for a brief period. You recognized the patterns of the universe…and of human nature. You found some of the unseen links. With guidance from God, you showed your fellow man what it is…and most importantly…you showed them what it can be.”
Marcus watched the smoke from Etna on the horizon, and then his eyes met Alicia. He could hear the roll of the breakers on the beach below them. The breeze was blowing through her hair; and even in her disarray, she was beautiful. He reached out to her, took her face in his hands, and leaned in to kiss her gently.
She looked up at him, her blue eyes searching his face.
Marcus used his thumb to push a lock of hair from her eye. “I’m not the same man I was when this started. I could never be that man again. I’ve found what I didn’t know even existed. I love you, Alicia.” He kissed her again. Alicia’s eyes sparkled, catching the light off the sea. Marcus cupped her face in his hands and kissed her tenderly, the sound of breakers rolling, tears spilling from her eyes.
She smiled and said, “I love you, too, Paul.”
He took her hand, and they walked a small path through the verdant green of the island.
Twenty minutes later they came to a cottage on a small hill. Marcus said, “I bet the door’s unlocked.”
“You think so?”
“Somehow I don’t think it’s ever been locked.”
ONE-HUNDRED-EIGHTEEN
It was almost 9:00 p.m. when Bill Gray stood from his desk in the NSA complex and walked three doors down the hall to the media room. Half a dozen analysts sat behind computer monitors and read data. Seven wide-screen television monitors were at the far end of one wall. Network and cable newscasts were recorded and archived. Gray watched a live feed from CNN. “Could you turn it up, Ben?” he asked one man.
“Sure.”
The CNN newscaster said, “Authorities in Sicily say they’ve called off the rescue and search for the bodies of a man and a woman believed to have been Paul Marcus and Alicia Quincy who apparently died in a helicopter crash into the Mediterranean Sea. Paul Marcus, as you probably know, became a global household name in the last few days after he accepted the Nobel Prize for medicine and issued a warning to the world. Marcus’s website has words he says he photographed directly from prophecies that where sealed by the prophet Daniel more than four hundred years before the birth of Christ. Mysteriously, the information seems to make connections to many of today’s largest companies and the people who run them. Federal indictments have been handed down against six of the wealthiest people on earth. The last person known to have seen Marcus and Quincy is John Gravina, a thirty-five year old Sicilian who was shot by an unknown assailant and left for dead. From his hospital room, Gravina told police he drove Marcus and Quincy to the Adventure Flight Helicopter Service where the couple had made plans to fly over Mount Etna. A pilot from the flight service is missing and presumed dead as well. The helicopter was pulled from thirty feet of water. Its doors had been ripped off in the crash. There were no human remains found in the helicopter, and officials believe the bodies of the pilot, Paul Marcus and Alicia Quincy are lost at sea.”
Jonathon Carlson sat by himself in the dark. One small lamp was on near the overstuffed leather chair in his library. A few yellow flames licked at the split oak logs in the fireplace. Carlson’s cell phone buzzed softly. He looked at it on the lamp table next to his chair, ignoring the call from Russia for the third time in the last hour. Carlson lifted a bottle of sixty-year-old Macallan Scotch and poured the remaining portion into a crystal glass, the ice partially melted.
He raised the glass in a toast to a framed photograph on the wall of his grandfather taken inside the I. G. Farben building in Germany. His grandfather was frozen in time, shaking hands with two other men, an American and a German. Dozens of workers, mostly women wearing smocks, were out of focus, blurred images in the background. The German in the picture wore a fedora hat and trench coat, his face turned in profile, looking directly at Andrew Chaloner. A close observer could make out the dark of a small moustache above the German’s top lip.
Jonathon Carlson stared at the photograph, softly lit by a single low-wattage bulb above it. “I raise my glass to you Grandfather, and to your circle of friends. My circle is broken…as is this inheritance I’ve tried to build upon. I personally may have been defeated, but our cause will never die.” Carlson lifted an antique Colt .45 pistol. Without hesitation, he placed the end of the barrel next to his temple and pulled the trigger. Blood and brain matter splattered on the screen of his cell phone, which buzzed for the fourth time within the hour.