“What is it?” she mumbled, stirring against his shoulder.
“It’s nothing,” he said as the fly made a lazy circle around their heads, and he rolled the newspaper into a viable weapon. “Go back to sleep.”
The fly made one more loop, then landed right back on the seat where it had been, rubbing its wings together. When the right moment came, Lucas struck.
“Gotcha,” he said, but when he looked at the paper for some telltale sign that he’d hit it, there was none.
EPILOGUE
At 1:15 in the morning on April 18, 1955, Albert Einstein, suffering from a ruptured aneurysm in his abdominal aorta, abruptly sat up in his bed at Princeton Hospital and blurted out several words in German. Unfortunately, it was a language that neither of the night nurses understood. Then, he gasped for breath, twice, and died. He was seventy-six years old.
As he had directed, his body was cremated, though not before his brain had been surgically removed for further study. His ashes were scattered to the wind on the wooded grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Days later, the English philosopher Bertrand Russell received in the mail the last communication that Albert Einstein had signed before his death. It was a letter authorizing Russell to append his name to, and make public, a document that came to be known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. Published in London on July 9, 1955, the manifesto was a stark declaration of the menace posed by the prospect of thermonuclear war, and at the same time, a dire prophecy of what might occur if the people of all nations did not find some way to live together in peace. In its closing, Einstein appealed to humanity’s higher instincts, asking the world to ignore its petty differences and quarrels in quest of wisdom and happiness instead. “If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise,” he predicted. “If you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, I am in debt to my indefatigable agent, Cynthia Manson, for her encouragement throughout this long endeavor.
And I would also like to thank my brilliant editor, Caitlin Alexander, and my very supportive publisher, Jason Kirk, for helping me in so many ways to bring the book to its full fruition. For his help as a translator, I wish to express my gratitude, too, to Mr. Christoph Haas-Heye.
Although much of the book is true to the historical record, some of it is speculation, too — most notably, Einstein’s involvement in the creation of the atom bomb. His discoveries may have laid the groundwork for the atomic age, and he did indeed alert President Roosevelt to the danger of nuclear weapons, but he was later denied a security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project, and there is no evidence to suggest that he had a practical hand in the actual process of developing the bomb. Nor were the Nazis all that far along; although they’d made a good start, once Hitler was warned by his scientists that a nuclear reaction could conceivably backfire and immolate the Reich itself, he decided to prosecute the war the old-fashioned way — with tanks and planes and battleships.
I have also taken some liberties — chronological and geographical — with the Princeton campus, the progress of the war in Europe, and the creation of the Cultural Recovery Commission; modeled on the Monuments Men, this particular group did not exist.
Overall, and as a way of accounting for all my other sins of both omission and commission, I would simply emphasize that this novel is, of course, a flight of fancy (dark fancy at that), and I am very grateful to you, the reader, for coming along.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native of Evanston, Illinois, Robert Masello is an award-winning journalist, television writer, and the best-selling author of many novels and nonfiction books. His most recent novels, published in over a dozen languages, include The Romanov Cross, The Medusa Amulet, and Blood and Ice. A longstanding member of the Writers Guild of America, he has often taught and lectured at prominent colleges and universities, ranging from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to Claremont McKenna College, where he served as the Visiting Lecturer in Literature for six years. He now lives and works in Santa Monica, California.