“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.”