Preston Child - Mystery of the Amber Room

Detlef growled in his half-sleep at the audacity of the media to even insinuate that his wife would have anything to do with the killings. He could not decide which of the two lies vexed him more — the alleged suicide or the absurd misrepresentation of her involvement. Disturbed by the unfair speculation of the know-it-all journalists, Detlef felt a welling hate for those who besmirched his wife in the eyes of the world.

Detlef Holtzer was not a coward, but he was a serious loner. Maybe it was his upbringing or perhaps just his personality, but he had always been suffering around people. Diffidence had always been his cross, even in his childhood. He could not imagine that he was important enough to have an opinion and even while he was a man in his mid-thirties married to a stunner known to all of Germany, Detlef still tended to withdraw.

Had he not had extensive combat training in the military, he would never have met Gabi. During the 2009 elections, there was widespread violence due to rumors of corruption that had sparked protests and boycotts against candidates' appearances at certain venues throughout Germany. Gabi, among others, had played it safe by hiring personal security. When she had first met her bodyguard, she had instantly fallen in love with him. How could she not love a soft-hearted, gentle giant of a man such as Detlef?

He never understood what she saw in him, but that was all part of his low self-esteem, so Gabi had learned to take his modesty lightly. She never forced him to appear in public with her after his contract as her bodyguard had ended. His wife respected his inadvertent reservation, even in the bedroom. They were quite opposite in matters of inhibition, but they had found a comfortable middle ground.

Now she was gone, and he was all alone. His longin g for her crippled his heart, and he wept incessantly in the sanctuary of the couch. Ambivalence prevailed in his thoughts. He was going to do whatever was necessary to find out who killed his wife, but first, he had to get over his self-imposed obstacles. That was the hardest part, but Gabi deserved justice, and he simply had to find a way to grow more confident.

Sam and Nina had no idea how to respond to the doctor's question. With all the things they had witnessed during their adventures together, they had to concede that inexplicable phenomena existed. Although most of what they had experienced could be chalked up to abstruse physics and undiscovered scientific principles, they were open to other explanations as well.

“Why do you ask?” Sam asked.

“I need to be sure that neither you nor the lady here will not see me as some superstitious idiot at what I am about to tell you,” the young physician admitted. His eyes darted back and forth between them. He was deadly serious, but he was uncertain about trusting the strangers enough to explain such an apparently far-fetched theory to them.

“We are very open-minded when it comes to such things, doctor,” Nina assured him. “You can tell us. Honestly, we have seen some weird stuff ourselves. There is very little than can still surprise Sam and me.”

“Ditto,” Sam added with a juvenile chuckle.

The doctor took a moment to figure out how to convey his theory to Sam. His face betrayed his unease. Clearing his throat, he shared what he thought Sam had to know.

“The people in the village you visited had a very strange encounter a few hundred years ago. It is an account that had been passed on verbally through the ages, so I am not sure how much of the original story is left in today's legend,” he conveyed. “They tell of a gem stone that was picked up by a young boy and brought to the village to give the chief. But because the stone looked so unusual the elders thought it to be the eye of a god, so they covered it in fear of being watched. Long story short, everyone in the village died three days later because they had blinded the god and he poured out his wrath on them.”

“And you think my eye problem has something to do with that story?” Sam frowned.

“Look, I know it sounds crazy. Believe me, I know how it sounds, but hear me out,” the young man insisted. “What I think is a little bit less medical and leaning more towards the… um… the kind of…”

“Weird side?” Nina asked. Her skepticism seeped through her tone.

“Wait now,” Sam said. “Go on. What does it have to do with my sight?”

“I think something happened to you up there, Mr. Cleave; something you cannot remember,” the doctor speculated. “I'll tell you why. Because this tribe's forefathers blinded a god, only a man harboring a god would go blind in their village.”

Overwhelming silence enveloped the three, while Sam and Nina stared at the doctor with the most unintelligible looks he had ever seen. He had no idea how to clarify what he was trying to say, specifically because it was so utterly ludicrous and quixotic.

“In other words,” Nina slowly started to make sure she got it right, “you mean to tell us that you believe the old wives tale, right? So, this has nothing to do with a solution. You just wanted to let us know that you buy into this crazy shit.”

“Nina,” Sam frowned, not too pleased that she was so snappy.

“Sam, the guy is practically telling you that you have a god inside you. Now, I am all for ego and can even handle a bit of narcissism here and there, but for Christ's sake, you cannot possibly believe this bullshit!” she admonished him. “My God, that is like saying if you have an earache in the Amazon Basin you are part unicorn.”

The foreign woman's ridiculing was too much and too rude, forcing the young doctor to reveal his course of diagnosis. Facing Sam, he turned his back on Nina to ignore her in return for her disregard of his intelligence. “Look, I know how this sounds. But you, Mr. Cleave, have conducted an alarming amount of concentrated heat through your organon visus in a short amount of time and although it should have made your head explode, it left you with only mild damage to your lens and retina!”

He glanced at Nina. “ That was the basis of my diagnostic conclusion. Do with it what you will, but that is just a little too weird to dismiss as anything but supernatural.”

Sam was dumbstruck.

“So that is the reason of my crazy vision,” Sam said to himself.

“The excessive heat caused minor cataracts, but those can be removed by any ophthalmologist once you return home,” the doctor said.

Remarkably, Nina was the one who prompted him to elaborate on the other side of his diagnosis. With more respect and curiosity in her tone of voice, Nina asked the doctor about Sam's vision problem from an esoteric perspective. At first reluctant to entertain her query, he agreed to give Nina his take on the peculiarity of what had happened.

“All I can say is that Mr. Cleave’s eyes suffered a temperature similar to that of lightning and came off with minimal damage. That alone is unnerving. But when you know the villagers' stories, such as I do, you remember things, especially things like an angry blind god that killed the entire village with sky fire,” the doctor recounted.

“Lightning,” Nina said. “So that's why they insisted that Sam was dead while his eyes were rolled back into his skull. Doctor, he was having a seizure when I found him.”

“Are you sure it was not just a byproduct of the electrical current?” the doctor asked.

Nina shrugged, “Could be.”

“I remember none of that. When I woke up, I only remember being hot, half blind and extremely confused,” Sam admitted with a very perplexed frown on his forehead. “I know even less now than I did before you told me all this stuff, doc.”

“None of this was supposed to be a solution to your problem, Mr. Cleave. But this was nothing short of a miracle, so I at least owed you a bit more insight as to what might be happening to you,” the young man told them. “Look, I don't know what caused this ancient…” he looked at the skeptical lady with Sam, not wanting to provoke her derision again. “I don't know what mysterious anomaly caused you to cross the rivers of the gods, Mr. Cleave, but if I were you, I would keep it a secret while seeking the help of a witchdoctor or a shaman.”