The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer Page B

a passage about the covenants between God and man. In the story of Noah, God made a rainbow as a sign of His covenant. With Abraham, God’s sign was a circumcision. And with Moses, the sign was the engraving on the tablets. But covenants could also be between people. That’s what the diary was, Ellis realized. He’d been so focused on the Cain part—on the tattoo and the dog—he’d nearly missed it. The diary was his true sign.
His
covenant. The promise from his mother. And the way, over a century later, surrounded by cricket songs, he finally found the Book that was more powerful than death itself.
    “Who may I say is calling?” the woman asked through Ellis’s phone.
    “He’ll know,” Ellis said as he tugged on the back doors of the truck. There was a rusty howl as the metal doors swung wide open, clanging against their respective sides of the truck. Surprised by his own excitement, Ellis was up on his tiptoes, peering through the mist of—
    It was supposed to be cold. And smell like shrimp. Why didn’t it smell like—?
    Reaching up and pulling frantically, Ellis yanked the nearest box to the ground. His breathing started to quicken as he ripped it open. Pineapples. Plastic pineapples. He pulled out another box. Fake. They were all fake. Like the government uses when they—
    Damn.
    They switched it. Switched the bloody trucks.
    “I’m paging him now, sir,” the secretary announced.
    “Paging?” Ellis asked. He looked at the phone. “Don’t page him. Leave him be.” Shutting his cell phone, Ellis stood there a second. Just stood there, eyes closed. A
rat-tt-tat
drumbeat—
rat-tt-tat, rat-tt-tat
—hammered at the back of his neck at the top of his spine. He clenched his jaw so hard, he heard a high-pitched scream rushing in his ears. Anger. All he had was anger now. People didn’t understand what a life’s worth of holding back and hiding could do.
    He wouldn’t hold back anymore.
    He knew who’d done this. Timothy. Timothy and the other one. The one who hurt Benoni. Cal.
    Cal caused this. Cal and his damn father. But Ellis had it wrong before. Lloyd wasn’t the only trickster. Cal was one, too. To switch the trucks—to steal what was inside—Cal hadn’t just stumbled into this. He’d planned it. Stolen it. And now Cal had the Book of Lies. He had what Ellis had waited a lifetime to find.
    But the one thing Cal didn’t have? A good enough head start.
    Ellis looked down at his tattoo. With the Book, Cain unleashed murder into the world. That was nothing compared to what Ellis would unleash on Cal Harper.

19
    D o you know what’s in the truck or don’t you?” my dad asks.
    I stomp my feet to shake off the excess water, then open the door to my van, hop inside, and flick off the blue lights. “Not yet.”
    “Whoa, whoa—hold on,” my dad says, climbing into the passenger seat. “I saw him take the truck and drive off with—”
    “He didn’t take anything.”
    Landing with a squish in the passenger seat, my father looks at me, then out at the empty road, then back at me. “No, I saw it—container number 601174-7. I checked the numbers myself. There’s no way you could’ve unloaded it that fast. And when I drove it out, you were following right behi—”
    I close my eyes and picture the black numbers on the side of the forty-foot rust-colored container: 601174-7. At three in the morning, in the dark, it’s amazing what you can do with some black electrical tape.
    “The numbers. You switched them, didn’t you?” my dad blurts. “That container Ellis just drove off with—”
    “Is filled with three thousand pounds of plastic pineapples, courtesy of the controlled delivery sting operations that Customs keeps prepared for just such an occasion.”
    Starting the van and noticing the exposed wires that Ellis used to hot-wire underneath, I swing the steering wheel into a U-turn and do my best to ignore the blue pulsing swirls as Timothy’s unmarked car fades behind us. Up above,