Farrell waited for more.
“I had to bang his head against the concrete to get him to stop.”
“And you think you killed him?”
“Yes,” Lucas said, “I killed him,” uttering words that he had never had to say out loud, even on the front lines in Europe. It was as if he were speaking some foreign, and abhorrent, tongue.
“Don’t worry about it,” Crowley said. “He was already dead.”
“Did he do anything else?” Farrell asked Lucas. “Did he say anything?”
The question gave Lucas pause. Should he bring up Wally’s bizarre Arabic curse? Could such information be of any possible use to the police? Or would it simply complicate things and cast doubt on his own credibility?
“Nothing that I could make out.”
Farrell mulled this over. “But Dr. Einstein’s okay, right?”
“Yes. He wasn’t injured. When I left, the ushers were escorting him out of the stadium.”
Farrell digested the additional information before pulling a card from his wallet and giving it to Lucas. “You think of anything else, you call me.”
Lucas slipped the card into his pants pocket.
“And only me. Don’t talk to anybody else. It’ll be my problem from now on. The hospital’s not going to need any more bad press than it’s already likely to get, and personally, I’d rather not have a bunch of state troopers looking over my shoulder. Are we all agreed on that?”
“Got it,” Lucas said.
“And that goes for you, too, Doc,” the chief barked. “Radio silence, from here on in.” Farrell ran a pudgy hand over the few stray hairs on his head. “What a mess,” he muttered.
“Dead,” Crowley reiterated, to no one in particular, his voice barely audible now. “I’m telling you, the man was clinically deceased.”
Impossible as that was, Lucas believed him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“The clutch is a little sticky,” Delaney apologized as the light changed and the old Ford jolted across the empty intersection.
On a day like this, no one in his right mind was even on the road. “As long as the wipers work,” Lucas said, “I think we’ll be okay.”
“Well, yeah, and that’s another thing,” Delaney said with a laugh as the wipers struggled to keep up with the torrential rain pouring down the windshield. “I meant to get them replaced. In 1939.”
The tires sloshed through puddles several inches deep, and the rain drummed down hard on the battered hood and roof of the car. It was one of those storms that hit New Jersey often in the fall, and Lucas only hoped that Delaney’s jalopy would be able to make it all the way to Fort Dix and back — forty miles all told — without breaking down. Given their progress so far, he had his doubts.
“I still don’t know why this couldn’t have waited until tomorrow,” Delaney said. “The army picked the film up by courier, didn’t they?”
“Yep,” Lucas replied. “The second I got back to Mercer Street with it.”
“So why couldn’t they have sent it back the same way?”
“Who knows? Maybe because it’s been developed now.”
“You think the urgency’s got anything to do with what happened at the stadium yesterday?”
Lucas shrugged. “I just know it was an order. Get the film, view the film, report back pronto with any additional info.”
“But you’re not in the army anymore. You don’t need to take orders.”
“Tell that to Macmillan.”
“Did he at least offer you a Purple Heart for the cut that maniac made on your arm?”
“He said he was relieved that nothing had happened to Professor Einstein.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Cannon fodder,” Delaney sighed. “That’s what we are. Cannon fodder.”
If they were nothing but cannon fodder, then what did that make innocent bystanders like Wally Gregg? Lucas had awakened in a cold sweat the night before, screaming in his sleep as Gregg slashed at him with, of all things, a scimitar. The man’s head looked like a smashed pumpkin, his mouth a crooked gash shouting the Arabic curse “Death to the swine!” through black and broken teeth. Mrs. Caputo had had to use her passkey to come in and wake him from the nightmare, and though he’d apologized profusely, he could still see a wary look even in little Amy’s eye the next morning. Lightning bolts shimmered across the southern sky, jagged as shattered glass, and when the thunder boomed, the whole chassis rattled. Lucas stared out the foggy window at the sickly gray, almost green, light of the day. It was as if they were driving through a monsoon. The wound on his arm tingled every time he shifted in his seat.
“The colonel did inquire about your progress, though,” Lucas said.
“Inquire?”
“What he said verbatim was, ‘What the hell is Delaney doing to earn his keep?’ ”
“Ah, that sounds more like him,” he said, steering the car carefully around a pothole flooded with rainwater.
“So what do you want me to say?”
“You can tell him—” Delaney began, before the car stalled out. “Damn.” Starting it up again, he said, “Tell him I’ve run three separate isotope tests, just to be sure, and I can say with confidence that the human remains date from about fifteen or sixteen hundred years ago. I can also say that the guy was old and infirm, which Andy Brandt has corroborated from an anthropological perspective. Life had given this guy, whoever he was, a real beating.”
Saint Anthony of Egypt, Lucas thought — that’s who the guy was. The only question was whether the physical damage had come from ordinary sources, or, as Simone and Dr. Rashid contended, at the hands of demons. The demon theory was not one Lucas had yet subscribed to.
The car hit a patch of slick roadway, and Lucas clutched the inside door handle as Delaney steered the car into the skid just to stay in his lane. Fortunately, there was nothing coming from the other direction. They were driving through a rural area, nothing but soaked fields and fallow farmland on either side. Crows sat on the tumbledown fences, or swooped perilously in front of the car.
“What about the wooden staff?” Lucas asked. Simone had confided that her father believed the staff in particular held some miraculous power. Maybe Hitler thought so, too. “Could you date it?”
“That part was easy. The wood dates from exactly the same period as the human bones. It’s native sycamore, by the way, the kind that grows along the borders of the Egyptian desert. The iron handle is consistent, too, with Middle Eastern metallurgy in the third or fourth century AD.”
“Sounds like you’ve made a lot of progress.”
“Yeah, well, then things get a little sticky.”
“How?”
“The problem is with the other bones, the ones from the smaller creature.” He took a deep breath. “Can you take a quick chemistry lesson?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Okay, then. As you’re aware, carbon 12 and carbon 13 atoms are nice and stable, they’re everywhere and in everything organic.”
“So you’ve told me before.”
“Right. Glad you were paying attention. But carbon 14 is extremely rare and extremely unstable, and it decays, slowly, to nitrogen 14, which has a half-life of around 5,730 years. As a result, and depending on how much of the carbon I can detect in a sample in the first place, my experiments can only go back as far as about 40,000 years. After that, kaput. There’s no more carbon 14 left to detect.”
“Okay,” Lucas said, waiting.
Delaney rubbed his jaw with one hand while clutching the wheel with the other. “The bones of this other creature, for want of a better term, are older than that. Much older, I’d say. That may be why Andy can’t identify them with any certainty, and why I can’t get a feasible date.”
“Are you suggesting,” Lucas said, “that the old man was buried with a fossil?”