Read Online The Einstein Prophecy by Robert Masello - Free Book Online

like a pendulum across the dock, catching the ensign square in the chest as he turned around and looked up. He was knocked off his feet like a bowling pin, his dolly skittering across the cement. The net came halfway back again before the crate ricocheted off the hood of a truck with an awful scraping noise and stopped a few feet from the body of the sailor.
    There was a moment of stunned silence on the dock, before Simone and a few of the stevedores raced to the ensign’s side, but it was clearly of no use. What was left of his chest looked like a squashed plum. The officer, his white uniform sprayed with blood, knelt over him, saying, “Jesus Christ . . . Jesus Christ,” over and over again.
    How she could focus on anything but the tragedy, Simone didn’t know, but her head turned. On the side of the shipping crate, the duct-taped pouch had been torn loose, and its contents were spilling out. The breeze was catching the papers already; she reached out and snatched one that was hovering in the air like a butterfly. It was crumpled, but not so much that she couldn’t read the delivery instructions: “Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Attn: Professor Lucas Athan.”

    The cab pulled up outside a well-maintained hotel done in the Colonial style—red brick, white wooden shutters—but when they got out, Simone’s father wanted to simply sit on the bench outside for a few minutes and catch his breath. Worry filled her. The last few days had been too hard on his heart.
    Simone followed their luggage into the lobby, and at the reception desk a young woman dressed in a frilly white blouse said, “How may I help you?” Her name tag read “Mary Jane.”
    “I will need either two rooms, or, if you have it, better yet a two-bedroom suite. I’m traveling with my father.”
    Mary Jane said, “Oh,” and after glancing at Simone again, started riffling through the pages of the reservation book. “Is this your first visit to Princeton?” she said, without looking up again.
    “Yes.”
    “Did you come a long way?”
    It seemed an odd question, but Simone answered it, anyway. “Yes. All the way from Cairo, as a matter of fact.”
    “Where?” the girl asked.
    “Egypt,” Simone said.
    “Oh,” Mary Jane said again, before excusing herself. “I’ll be right back. I just have to check on our availability.”
    Simone looked around the lobby, appointed with Oriental rugs, brass lamps, and oil portraits of Revolutionary War heroes. The rooms would not be cheap, but money wasn’t an issue. Her mother’s family had largely cut their daughter off after she’d made the colossal faux pas of marrying an Arab, but her father’s family had been very successful cotton merchants for generations. Simone stepped outside to check on her father.
    “Better now,” he said, using the cane to climb to his feet. “I would like to lie down and take a nap before dinner.”
    “That sounds like a good idea,” Simone said. She escorted him through the door and helped him into a wingback chair in the reception area. “They’re just checking on the rooms.”
    A manager now stood behind the desk, wearing a burnt-orange jacket and matching slacks. He smiled at Simone as she returned to the desk, but she noticed that his eyes kept flicking over her shoulder to her father resting with his eyes closed and his ebony walking stick propped against an end table.
    “Good evening, Miss . . . ?”
    “Rashid. Simone Rashid.”
    “Ah, yes,” he said. “Mary Jane tells me you are visiting America.”
    Simone hadn’t said exactly that, but it wasn’t worth arguing about.
    “Are you guests of the university?”
    “In a manner of speaking,” she replied. Although no invitation had been extended yet, she certainly meant to weasel her way in. But what was this all about? Was security this tight in American hotels now?
    “May I see your passport?”
    Simone dug it out of the canvas shoulder sack she carried in place of a