She stopped.
Out of the corner of her eye, she'd caught a glimpse of something shiny. She turned, looked again. For a moment, she couldn't find it, but then she did.
It was a small piece of glass, protruding from the earth.
"Andre?" she said. "I think there's more."
The glass was thin, and perfectly clear. The edge was curved and smooth, almost modern in its quality. She brushed the dirt away with her fingertips and exposed one lens of an eyeglass.
It was a bifocal lens.
"What is it?" Andre said, coming back to her.
"You tell me."
He squinted at it, shone his light very near. His face was so close to the glass, his nose almost touched it. "Where did you find this?" He sounded concerned.
"Right here."
"Lying in the open, just like now?" His voice was tense, almost accusing.
"No, only the edge was exposed. I cleaned it off."
"How?"
"With my finger."
"So: you are telling me it was partly buried?" He sounded like he didn't believe her.
"Hey, what is this?"
"Just answer, please."
"No, Andre. It was mostly buried. Everything but that left edge was buried."
"I wish you had not touched it."
"I do, too, if I'd known you were going to act like - "
"This must be explained," he said. "Turn around."
"What?"
"Turn around." He took her by the shoulder, turned her roughly, so she was facing away from him.
"Jesus." She glanced over her shoulder to see what he was doing. He held his light very close to her backpack and moved over the surface slowly, examining it minutely, then down to her shorts. "Uh, are you going to tell me - "
"Be quiet, please."
It was a full minute before he finished. "The lower left zip pocket of your pack is open. Did you open it?"
"No."
"Then it has been open all the time? Ever since you put the pack on?"
"I guess. . . ."
"Did you brush against the wall at any time?"
"I don't think so." She had been careful about it, because she hadn't wanted the wall to break loose.
"Are you sure?" he said.
"For Christ's sake. No, Andre, I'm not sure."
"All right. Now you check me." He handed her his light, and turned his back to her.
"Check you how?" she said.
"That glass is contamination," he said. "We have to explain how it got here. Look to see if any part of my pack is open."
She looked. Nothing was.
"Did you look carefully?"
"Yes, I looked carefully," she said, annoyed.
"I think you didn't take enough time."
"Andre. I did."
Marek stared at the earthen mound in front of them. Small pebbles trickled down as he watched. "It could have fallen from one of our packs and then been covered. . . ."
"Yes, I guess it could."
"If you could clean it with a fingertip, it was not tightly buried. . . ."
"No, no. Very loose."
"All right. Then somehow, that is the explanation."
"What is?"
"Somehow, we brought this lens in with us, and while we were working on the oilskin documents, it fell from the pack, and was covered by dirt. Then you saw it, and cleaned it. It is the only explanation."
"Okay. . . ."
He took out a camera, photographed the glass several times from different distances - very close, then progressively farther back. Only then did he bring out a plastic baggie, lift the glass carefully with tweezers, and drop it into the bag. He brought out a small roll of bubble wrap, encased the bag, sealed it all with tape, and handed the bundle to her. "You bring it out. Please be careful." He seemed more relaxed. He was being nicer to her.
"Okay," she said. They climbed the dirt slope again, heading back outside.
They were greeted by cheers from the undergraduates, and the oilskin package was handed over to Elsie, who quickly took it back to the farmhouse. Everyone was laughing and smiling, except Chang and Chris Hughes. They were wearing headsets, and had heard everything inside the cave. They looked gloomy and upset.
Site contamination was extremely serious, and they all knew it. Because it implied sloppy excavation technique, it called into question any other, legitimate discoveries made by the team. A typical instance was a minor scandal at Les Eyzies the year before.
Les Eyzies was a Paleolithic site, a habitation of early man beneath a cliff ledge. The archaeologists had been digging at a level that dated to 320,000 B.P., when one of them found a half-buried condom. It was still in its metallic wrapper, and nobody thought for a moment that it belonged at that level. But the fact that it had been found there - half-buried - suggested that they were not being careful in their technique. It caused a near panic among the team, which persisted even after a graduate student was sent back to Paris in disgrace.
"Where is this glass lens?" Chris said to Marek.
"Kate has it."
She gave it to Chris. While everyone else was cheering, he turned away, unwrapped the package, and held the baggie up to the light.
"Definitely modern," he said. He shook his head unhappily. "I'll check it out. Just make sure you include it in the site report."
Marek said he would.
Then Rick Chang turned away and clapped his hands. "All right, everybody. Excitement's over. Back to work!"
In the afternoon, Marek scheduled archery practice. The undergraduates were amused by it, and they never missed a session; recently Kate had taken it up, as well. The target today was a straw-filled scarecrow, set about fifty yards away. The kids were all lined up, holding their bows, and Marek strode down behind them.
"To kill a man," he said, "you have to remember: he is almost certainly wearing plate armor on his chest. He's less likely to have armor on his head and neck, or on his legs. So to kill him, you must shoot him in the head, or on the side of his torso, where the plates don't cover."
Kate listened to Marek, amused. Andre took everything so seriously. To kill a man. As if he really meant it. Standing in the yellow afternoon sunlight of southern France, hearing the distant honk of cars on the road, the idea seemed slightly absurd.
"But if you want to stop a man," Marek continued, "then shoot him in the leg. He'll go right down. Today we'll use the fifty-pound bows."
Fifty pounds referred to the draw weight, what was needed to pull the string back. The bows were certainly heavy, and difficult to draw. The arrows were almost three feet long. Many of the kids had trouble with it, especially at first. Marek usually finished each practice session with some weight lifting, to build up their muscles.
Marek himself could draw a hundred-pound bow. Although it was difficult to believe, he insisted that this was the size of actual fourteenth-century weapons - far beyond what any of them could use.
"All right," Marek said, "nock your arrows, aim, and loose them, please." Arrows flew through the air. "No, no, no, David, don't pull until you tremble. Maintain control. Carl, look at your stance. Bob, too high. Deanna, remember your fingers. Rick, that was much better. All right, here we go again, nock your arrows, aim, and . . . loose them!"
It was late in the afternoon when Stern called Marek on the radio, and asked him to come to the farmhouse. He said he had good news. Marek found him at the microscope, examining the lens.
"What is it?"
"Here. Look for yourself." He stepped aside, and Marek looked. He saw the lens, and the sharp line of the bifocal cut. Here and there, the lens was lightly spotted with white circles, as if from bacteria.
"What am I supposed to see?" Marek said.
"Left edge."
He moved the stage, bringing the left edge into view. Refracted in the light, the edge looked very white. Then he noticed that the whiteness spilled over the edge, onto the surface of the lens itself.
"That's bacteria growing on the lens," Stern said. "It's like rock varnish."
Rock varnish was the term for the patina of bacteria and mold that grew on the underside of rocks. Because it was organic, rock varnish could be dated.
"Can this be dated?" Marek said.
"It could," Stern said, "if there was enough of it for a C-14 run. But I can tell you now, there isn't. You can't get a decent date from that amount. There isn't any use trying."
"So?"
"The point is, that was the exposed edge of the lens, right? The edge that Kate said was sticking out of the earth?"
"Right. . . ."
"So it's old, Andre. I don't know how old, but it's not site contamination. Rick is looking at all the bones that were exposed today, and he thinks some of them are later than our period, eighteenth century, maybe even nineteenth century. Which means one of them could have been wearing bifocals."
"I don't know. This lens looks pretty sharply done. . . ."
"Doesn't mean it's new," Stern said. "They've had good grinding techniques for two hundred years. I'm arranging for this lens to be checked by an optics guy back in New Haven. I've asked Elsie to jump ahead and do the oilskin documents, just to see if there's anything unusual there. In the meantime, I think we can all ease up."
"That's good news," Marek said, grinning.
"I thought you'd want to know. See you at dinner."
They had arranged to have dinner in the old town square of Domme, a village on top of a cliff a few miles from their site. By nightfall, Chris, grumpy all day, had recovered from his bad mood and was looking forward to dinner. He wondered if Marek had heard from the Professor, and if not, what they were going to do about it. He had a sense of expectancy.
His good mood vanished when he arrived to find the stockbroker couples again, sitting at their table. Apparently they'd been invited for a second night. Chris was about to turn around and leave, but Kate got up and quickly put her arm around his waist, and steered him toward the table.
"I'd rather not," he said in a low voice. "I can't stand these people." But then she gave him a little hug, and eased him into a chair. He saw that the stockbrokers must be buying the wine tonight - Chateau Lafite-Rothschild '95, easily two thousand francs a bottle.
And he thought, What the hell.
"Well, this is a charming town," one of the women was saying. "We went and saw the walls around the outside. They go on for quite a distance. High, too. And that very pretty gate coming into town, you know, with the two round towers on either side."
Kate nodded. "It's sort of ironic," she said, "that a lot of the villages that we find so charming now were actually the shopping malls of the fourteenth century."
"Shopping malls? How do you mean?" the woman asked.
At that moment, Marek's radio, clipped to his belt, crackled with static.
"Andre? Are you there?"
It was Elsie. She never came to dinner with the others, but worked late on her cataloging. Marek held up the radio. "Yes, Elsie."
"I just found something very weird, here."
"Yes. . . ."
"Would you ask David to come over? I need his help testing. But I'm telling you guys - if this is a joke, I don't appreciate it."
With a click, the radio went dead.
"Elsie?"
No answer.
Marek looked around the table. "Anybody play a joke on her?"
They all shook their heads no.
Chris Hughes said, "Maybe she's cracking up. It wouldn't surprise me, all those hours staring at parchment."
"I'll see what she wants," David Stern said, getting up from the table. He headed off into the darkness.
Chris thought of going with him, but Kate looked at him quickly, and gave him a smile. So he eased back in his seat and reached for his wine.
"You were saying - these towns were like shopping malls?"
"A lot of them were, yes," Kate Erickson said. "These towns were speculative ventures to make money for land developers. Just like shopping malls today. And like malls, they were all built on a similar pattern."
She turned in her chair and pointed to the Domme town square behind them. "See the covered wooden market in the center of the town square? You'll find similar covered markets in lots of towns around here. It means the town is a bastide, a new, fortified village. Nearly a thousand bastide towns were built in France during the fourteenth century. Some of them were built to hold territory. But many of them were built simply to make money."
That got the attention of the stock pickers.
One of the men looked up sharply and said, "Wait a minute. How does building a village make anybody money?"
Kate smiled. "Fourteenth-century economics," she said. "It worked like this. Let's say you're a nobleman who owns a lot of land. Fourteenth-century France is mostly forest, which means that your land is mostly forest, inhabited by wolves. Maybe you have a few farmers here and there who pay you some measly rents. But that's no way to get rich. And because you're a nobleman, you're always desperately in need of money, to fight wars and to entertain in the lavish style that's expected of you.
"So what can you do to increase the income from your lands? You build a new town. You attract people to live in your new town by offering them special tax breaks, special liberties spelled out in the town charter. Basically, you free the townspeople from feudal obligations."
"Why do you give them these breaks?" one of the men said.
"Because pretty soon you'll have merchants and markets in the town, and the taxes and fees generate much more money for you. You charge for everything. For the use of the road to come to the town. For the right to enter the town walls. For the right to set up a stall in the market. For the cost of soldiers to keep order. For providing moneylenders to the market."
"Not bad," one of the men said.
"Not bad at all. And in addition, you take a percentage of everything that's sold in the market."
"Really? What percentage?"
"It depended on the place, and the particular merchandise. In general, one to five percent. So the market is really the reason for the town. You can see it clearly, in the way the town is laid out. Look at the church over there," she said, pointing off to the side. "In earlier centuries, the church was the center of the town. People went to Mass at least once a day. All life revolved around the church. But here in Domme, the church is off to one side. The market is now the center of town."
"So all the money comes from the market?"
"Not entirely, because the fortified town offers protection for the area, which means farmers will clear the nearby land and start new farms. So you increase your farming rents, as well. All in all, a new town was a reliable investment. Which is why so many of these towns were built."
"Is that the only reason the towns were built?"
"No, many were built for military considerations as - "
Marek's radio crackled. It was Elsie again. "Andre?"
"Yes," Marek said.
"You better get over here right away. Because I don't know how to handle this."
"Why? What is it?"
"Just come. Now."
The generator chugged loudly, and the farmhouse seemed brilliantly lit in the dark field, under a sky of stars.
They all crowded into the farmhouse. Elsie was sitting at her desk in the center, staring at them. Her eyes seemed distant.
"Elsie?"
"It's impossible," she said.
"What's impossible? What happened here?"
Marek looked over at David Stern, but he was still working at some analysis in the corner of the room.
Elsie sighed. "I don't know, I don't know. . . ."
"Well," Marek said, "start at the beginning."
"Okay," she said. "The beginning." She stood up and crossed the room, where she pointed to a stack of parchments resting on a piece of plastic tarp on the floor. "This is the beginning. The document bundle I designated M-031, dug up from the monastery earlier today. David asked me to do it as soon as possible."
Nobody said anything. They just watched her.
"Okay," she said. "I've been going through the bundle. This is how I do it. I take about ten parchments at a time and bring them over here to my desk." She brought ten over. "Now, I sit down at the desk, and I go through them, one by one. Then, after I've summarized the contents of one sheet, and entered the summary into the computer, I take the sheet to be photographed, over here." She went to the next table, slipped a parchment under the camera.
Marek said, "We're familiar with - "
"No, you're not," she said sharply. "You're not familiar at all." Elsie went back to her table, took the next parchment off the stack. "Okay. So I go through them one by one. This particular stack consists of all kinds of documents: bills, copies of letters, replies to orders from the bishop, records of crop yields, lists of monastery assets. All dating from about the year 1357."
She took the parchments from the stack, one after the other.
"And then" - she removed the last one - "I see this."
They stared.
Nobody said anything.
The parchment was identical in size to the others in the stack, but instead of dense writing in Latin or Old French, this one had only two words, scrawled in plain English:
HELP ME
4/7/1357
"In case you're wondering," she said, "that's the Professor's handwriting."
The room was silent. No one moved or shifted. They all just stared in complete silence.
Marek was thinking very fast, running through the possibilities. Because of his detailed, encyclopedic knowledge of the medieval period, for many years he had served as an outside consultant on medieval artifacts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As a result, Marek had considerable experience with fakes of all kinds. It was true that he was rarely shown faked documents from the medieval period - the fakes were usually precious stones set in a bracelet that was ten years old, or a suit of armor that turned out to have been made in Brooklyn - but his experience had given him a clear way to think it through.
Marek said, "Okay. Begin at the beginning. Are you sure that's his handwriting?"
"Yes," Elsie said. "Without question."
"How do you know?"
She sniffed. "I'm a graphologist, Andre. But here. See for yourself."
She brought out a note that Johnston had scrawled a few days earlier, a note written in block letters, attached to a bill: "PLS CHK THIS CHARGE." She set it beside the parchment signature. "Block letters are actually easier to analyze. His H, for example, has a faint diagonal beneath. He draws one vertical line, lifts his pen, draws the second vertical, then drags his pen back to draw the crossbar, making the diagonal below. Or look at the P. He makes a downward stroke, then goes up and back to position to make the semicircle. Or the E, which he draws as an L and then zigzags back up to make the two added lines. There's no question. It's his handwriting."
"Someone couldn't have forged it?"
"No. Forgery, you have pen lifts and other signs. This writing is his."
Kate said, "Would he play a joke on us?"
"If he did, it isn't funny."
"What about this parchment it's written on?" Marek said. "Is it as old as the other sheets in the stack?"
"Yes," David Stern said, coming over. "Short of carbon dating, I'd say yes - it's the same age as the others."
Marek thought: How can that be? He said, "Are you sure? This parchment looks different. The surface looks rougher to me."
"It is rougher," Stern said. "Because it's been poorly scraped. Parchment was valuable material in medieval times. Generally it was used, scraped clean, and then used again. But if we look at this parchment under ultra-violet. . . . Would somebody get the lights?" Kate turned them off, and in the darkness Stern swung a purple lamp over the table.
Marek immediately saw more writing, faint but clearly there on the parchment.
"This was originally a bill for lodging," Elsie said. "It's been scraped clean, quickly and crudely, as if somebody was in a hurry."
Chris said, "Are you saying the Professor scraped it?"
"I have no idea who scraped it. But it's not expertly done."
"All right," Marek said. "There's one definitive way to decide this, once and for all." He turned to Stern. "What about the ink, David? Is it genuine?"
Stern hesitated. "I'm not sure."
"Not sure? Why not?"
"Chemically speaking," Stern said, "it's exactly what you'd expect: iron in the form of ferrous oxide, mixed with gall as an organic binder. Some added carbon for blackness, and five percent sucrose. In those days, they used sugar to give the inks a shiny surface. So it's ordinary iron-gall ink, correct for the period. But that in itself doesn't mean much."
"Right." Stern was saying it could be faked.
"So I ran gall and iron titers," Stern said, "which I usually do in questionable cases. They tell us the exact amounts present in the ink. The titers indicate that this particular ink is similar but not identical to the ink on the other documents."
"Similar but not identical," Marek said. "How similar?"
"As you know, medieval inks were mixed by hand before use, because they didn't keep. Gall is organic - it's the ground-up nuts of an oak tree - which means the inks would eventually go bad. Sometimes they added wine to the ink as a preservative. Anyway, there's usually a fairly large variation in gall and iron content from one document to another. You find as much as twenty or thirty percent difference between documents. It's reliable enough that we can use these percentages to tell if two documents were written on the same day, from the same ink supply. This particular ink is about twenty-nine percent different from the documents on either side of it."
"Meaningless," Marek said. "Those numbers don't confirm either authenticity or forgery. Did you do a spectrographic analysis?"
"Yes. Just finished it. Here's the spectra for three documents, with the Professor's in the middle." Three lines, a series of spikes and dips. "Again, similar but not identical."
"Not that similar," Marek said, looking at the pattern of spikes. "Because along with the percentage difference in iron content, you've got lots of trace elements in the Professor's ink, including - what's this spike, for instance?"
"Chromium."
Marek sighed. "Which means it's modern."
"Not necessarily, no."
"There's no chromium in the inks before and after."
"That's true. But chromium is found in manuscript inks. Fairly commonly."
"Is there chromium in this valley?"
"No," Stern said, "but chromium was imported all over Europe, because it was used for fabric dyes as well as inks."
"But what about all these other contaminants?" Marek said, pointing to the other spikes. He shook his head. "I'm sorry. I'm just not buying this."
Stern said, "I agree. This has to be a joke."
"But we're not going to know for sure without a carbon date," Marek said. Carbon-14 would enable them to date both ink and parchment within about fifty years. That would be good enough to settle the question of forgery.
"I'd also like to do thermoluminescence, and maybe a laser activation while we're at it," Stern said.
"You can't do that here."
"No, I'll take it over to Les Eyzies." Les Eyzies, the town in the next valley that was the center of prehistoric studies in southern France, had a well-equipped lab that did carbon-14 and potassium-argon dating, as well as neutron activation and other difficult tests. The field results weren't as accurate as the labs in Paris or Toulouse, but scientists could get an answer in a few hours.
"Any chance you can run it tonight?" Marek said.
"I'll try."
Chris came back to join the group; he had been telephoning the Professor on a cell phone. "Nothing," he said. "I just got his voicemail."
"All right," Marek said. "There's nothing more we can do right now. I assume this message is a bizarre joke. I can't imagine who played it on us - but somebody did. Tomorrow we'll run carbon and date the message. I have no doubt it will prove to be recent. And with all due respect to Elsie, it's probably a forgery."
Elsie started to sputter.
"But in any case," Marek continued, "the Professor is due to call in tomorrow, and we'll ask him. In the meantime, I suggest we all go to bed and get a good night's rest."
In the farmhouse, Marek closed the door softly behind him before turning on the lights. Then he looked around.
The room was immaculate, as he would have expected. It had the tidiness of a monk's cell. Beside the bed stood five or six research papers, neatly stacked. On a desk to the right, more research papers sat beside a closed laptop computer. The desk had a drawer, which he opened and rummaged through quickly.
But he didn't find what he was looking for.
He went next to the armoire. The Professor's clothes were neatly arranged inside, with space between each hanging garment. Marek went from one to the next, patting the pockets, but he still did not find it. Perhaps it wasn't here, he thought. Perhaps he had taken it with him to New Mexico.
There was a bureau opposite the door. He opened the top drawer: coins in a small shallow dish, American dollar bills wrapped in a rubber band, and a few personal objects, including a knife, a pen and a spare watch - nothing out of the ordinary.
Then he saw a plastic case, tucked over to one side.
He brought the case out, opened it up. The case contained eyeglasses. He set the glasses out on the counter.
The lenses were bifocals, oval in shape.
He reached into his shirt pocket and brought out a plastic bag. He heard a creak behind him, and turned to see Kate Erickson coming in through the door.
"Going through his underwear?" she said, raising her eyebrows. "I saw the light under the door. So I had a look."
"Without knocking?" Marek said.
"What are you doing in here?" she said. Then she saw the plastic. "Is that what I think it is?"
"Yes."
Marek took the single bifocal lens out of the plastic bag, holding it with a pair of tweezers, and placed it on top of the bureau, beside the Professor's eyeglasses.
"Not identical," she said. "But I'd say the lens is his."
"So would I."
"But isn't that what you always thought? I mean, he's the only one on the site who wears bifocals. The contamination has to be from his eyeglasses."
"But there isn't any contamination," Marek said. "This lens is old."
"What?"
"David says that white edge is bacterial growth. This lens is not modern, Kate. It's old."
She looked closely. "It can't be," she said. "Look at the way the lenses are cut. It's the same in the Professor's glasses and this lens. It must be modern."
"I know, but David insists it's old."
"How old?"
"He can't tell."
"He can't date it?"
Marek shook his head. "Not enough organic material."
"So in that case," she said, "you came to his room because . . ." She paused, staring at the eyeglasses, then at him. She frowned. "I thought you said that signature was a forgery, Andre."
"I did, yes."
"But you also asked if David could do the carbon test tonight, didn't you."
"Yes. . . ."
"And then you came here, with the glass, because you're worried. . . ." She shook her head as if to clear it. "About what? What do you think is going on?"
Marek looked at her. "I have absolutely no idea. Nothing makes sense."
"But you're worried."
"Yes," Marek said. "I'm worried."
The following day dawned bright and hot, a glaring sun beneath a cloudless sky. The Professor didn't call in the morning. Marek called him twice, but always got his voicemail: "Leave me a message, and I'll call you back."
Nor was there any word from Stern. When they called the lab at Les Eyzies they were told he was busy. A frustrated technician said, "He is repeating the tests again! Three times now!"
Why? Marek wondered. He considered going over to Les Eyzies to see for himself - it was just a short drive - but decided to stay at the storehouse in case the Professor called.
He never called.
In the middle of the morning, Elsie said, "Huh."
"What?"
She was looking at another piece of parchment. "This was the document on the stack right before the Professor's," she said.
Marek came over. "What about it?"
"It looks like there are ink spots from the Professor's pen. See, here, and here?"
Marek shrugged. "He was probably looking at this right before he wrote his note."
"But they're in the margin," she said, "almost like a notation."
"Notation to what?" he said. "What's the document about?"
"It's a piece of natural history," she said. "A description of an underground river by one of the monks. Says you have to be cautious at various points, marked off in paces, so on and so forth."
"An underground river. . . ." Marek wasn't interested. The monks were the scholars of the region, and they often wrote little essays on local geography, or carpentry, the proper time to prune orchard trees, how best to store grain in winter, and so on. They were curiosities, and often wrong.
" 'Marcellus has the key,' " she said, reading the text. "Wonder what that means. It's right where the Professor put his marks. Then . . . something about . . . giant feet . . . no . . . the giant's feet? . . . The feet of the giant? . . . And it says vivix, which is Latin for . . . let me see. . . . That's a new one. . . ."
She consulted a dictionary.
Restless, Marek went outside and paced up and down. He was edgy, nervous.
"That's odd," she said, "there is no word vivix. At least not in this dictionary." She made a note, in her methodical way.
Marek sighed.
The hours crawled by.
The Professor never called.
Finally it was three o'clock; the students were wandering up to the big tent for their afternoon break. Marek stood in the door and watched them. They seemed carefree, laughing, punching each other, making jokes.
The phone rang. He immediately turned back. Elsie picked it up. He heard her say, "Yes, he's here with me right now. . . ."
He hurried into her room. "The Professor?"
She was shaking her head. "No. It's someone from ITC." And she handed him the phone.
"This is Andre Marek speaking," he said.
"Oh yes. Please hold, Mr. Marek. I know Mr. Doniger is eager to speak to you."
"He is?"
"Yes. We've been trying to reach you for several hours. Please hold while I find him for you."
A long pause. Some classical music played. Marek put his hand over the phone and said to Elsie, "It's Doniger."
"Hey," she said. "You must rate. The big cheese himself."
"Why is Doniger calling me?"
Five minutes later, he was still waiting on hold, when Stern walked into the room, shaking his head. "You're not going to believe this."
"Yes? What?" Marek said, holding the phone.
Stern just handed him a sheet of paper. It said:
638
267
