by Glen Craney
She was numb with fear. Her techno-geek friends had guaranteed her that her home and office PCs, though networked, would be impregnable, even to those Anonymous creeps who kept hacking global corporations. Virtually everything she knew was on the hard drive sitting under her desk behind her.
“Please, you’re going to have to trust me,” the man said.
Steve’s voice in her head told her to back away, but she unbolted the locks anyway, leaving only the chain hooked. She leaned against the cold steel door while glimpsing the man on the other side. He was young, about her age. Tall, lean and pale, with a mop of black hair. He was wearing jeans and a blue hoodie. Probably just a student. Despite her fear, she put on an air of authority. “Tell me what you want.”
“This is complicated. Just let me in.”
“Over my dead body.”
The man moved his lips closer to the crack in the door and whispered, “I came here to warn you. A very dangerous man is coming after you—”
“What’s your name?”
“You have two seconds before I blow the door.”
She heard a metallic click.
She cracked the door a bit wider to see if he had a gun—
The intruder crunched through the chain with a small cable cutter.
The next thirty seconds passed in a blur. He swept into her apartment, sat at her desk, and manhandled her computer equipment. He reached into the pocket of his hoodie and pulled out a black flash drive. Sliding it into one of the USB ports on the front panel, he banged on the keyboard while keeping one eye on her.
A red light began flashing on the inserted drive.
The man swiveled around to face her and crossed his arms as if waiting to for her to say something. His black eyes and pale face were cold, his silence as icy as winter rain.
“Who are you?” she cried, on the verge of tears. “What do you want?” She nodded at her computer. “What could you possibly want from that?” Then she snarled at him. “What are you doing to it with that jump drive, anyway?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
She remained motionless on the futon as the intruder looked at his watch. When a green light on the flash drive flickered, he slid the small drive out of the USB port and slipped it into his hoodie. She became even more baffled. He couldn’t possibly have downloaded all the data in her computer—that would take days. Besides, no removable drive on the market had enough memory to store all of that information.
He stood up, looking even more menacing and talking in an accent she could place. He lunged toward the couch and grabbed her forearm. “We’re going to visit a little hangout of mine not far from here.”
She tried to scream, but he covered her mouth as he dragged her down the stairs, through the front door, and across the rain-slicked sidewalk. A couple of pedestrians walked by, and he pulled her, struggling, into an alley until the strangers disappeared down the street. She bit at his hand, causing him to curse under his breath.
When the way was finally clear, he yanked her hair back in retaliation for the chomping. “Do that again, and you’re gonna need dentures.”
“Bastard! Takes a real tough guy to manhandle a woman!”
He pushed her into the passenger seat of a beat-up Hyundai. “If you roll down that window, you’ll get more than a mouthful of air.”
She hung to the door handle, debating whether to try for the locks, but the kidnapper started the engine before she could get up the courage to escape. They raced the car toward the bridge over the East River. Crossing into Queens, the driver sucked at the blood on the back of his wrist, muttering something that sounded like a curse.
“Where are you taking me?”
He refused to answer her.
“Look, if you’re going to kill me anyway, why not let me know why?”
Finally, he said, “You are a known expert in rocks.”
Shaking with fear, she couldn’t stop a smile. A known expert? Mysterious people capable of abducting and killing people considered her a “known expert?” She found something weirdly validating about that. Still, she crossed her arms and said, “So what if I am?”
“We get your knowledge. Or we kill you.”
“Is the Mafia so desperate these days that it’s moving in on the rare stones business?” She found herself talking as if nobody else sat in the car with her. “You’re trying to get rid of legitimate retailers of scientific stones like me to corner the market!”
He sighed heavily, making the same sound she often gave her graduate students who just didn’t get it. “Some powerful and dangerous people want something that I must find first. If not, the geopolitical makeup of the planet may be forever disrupted.”
Marly’s mouth dropped. “You mean … like World War Three?”
He refused to elaborate.
What could he possibly be talking about? Sure, she knew a lot about rocks from outer space. But why would anybody in organized crime be interested in what she knew about meteorites? The driver’s ice-cold intimidation finally pushed her over the edge. She’d seen enough television dramas to know that they would kill her anyway after using her for what they wanted, so why not go down fighting. She began flailing at him. “You murdering sonofabitch!”
The kidnapper recoiled against his door, trying to distance himself from her while still controlling the zigzagging car. “You trying to kill us?”
“You’re going with me!” She grabbed for his crotch, but he snatched his pistol from a shoulder holster and jammed the barrel against her forehead. “You hit me one more time, and it’s the last.”
She stared down the cold cylinder of a gun model that looked familiar.
“This is a Desert Eagle,” the man said with an eerie calm. “At point blank, a bullet from this will blow your brains through the window behind you. Have I made myself clear?”
Everything she knew about guns had come from Steve. “An Israeli weapon,” she whispered to herself. “My boyfriend—”
“Killed by an AK-Forty-Seven, not one of these.”
“How could you know that?”
“You would be amazed by what I know,” the man said. “Now listen closely to me. A maniac with half a deck for brains is trying to contact you.”
She noticed that he kept checking the side mirror, distracted, as if watching for someone following. She tensed, waiting for the right moment.
“His name is Cas Field—”
She lunged and scratched at his arm, clawing him and drawing blood.
He turned, trying to avoid her attack, but she jammed her hand into the exposed back pocket of his jeans and ripped out his wallet.
She threw it out the window, hoping to make him stop.
“Now, that was not a good move!” He raised the butt end of his pistol to strike her and—
She grabbed his gun hand and slammed it against the dashboard.
The gun went off.
* * *
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cleveland, Ohio
WALKING DOWN THE DARK CORRIDOR, Lenny Kowalski fastened the top button of his starched gray collar and ran a hand through his thinning hair, preparing to settle in for another long shift.
And, as had been the case with almost every night for the past six years, he’d be spending it alone with Lucy.
Not that he minded, not at all. Sure, the boys back home at Okie’s Bar in Tulsa kidded him about it. They said he was whipped, head over heels in love, the way he constantly talked about her. Some of them even claimed it was a little weird, given Lucy’s age and all.
They were just jealous. After all, how many fellas could say they got up close and personal on a regular basis with the oldest woman on Earth?
Let’s see, this was Tuesday, so it had to be the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. He had been traveling with Lucy so much, he tended to lose track of the cities they visited. He reckoned that he had already set the world’s record for spending nights alone in the most museums.
Maybe he should contact tho
se Guinness Book people.
He strolled across the Kirtland Hall of Prehistoric Life, checking the locked doors and motion sensors with his Corfams thumping across the earth-tone floors. The T-rexes and saber-toothed cats stared at him with their meat-cleaver jaws open for business. He had to admit that never in his wildest dreams had he thought he’d be with the old girl so long. Six years. When the exhibit consortium offered him this security job, they’d told him it would be a month’s assignment at most. But he was so dedicated to protecting Lucy and offering visitors unsolicited tidbits about her life that he became almost as popular as the exhibit. In reward, the museum sponsors had doubled his salary and made him Lucy’s personal bodyguard for as long as she stayed in the United States.
Tonight, looking proudly at the glass case sitting at the far end of the corridor, he thought of that haunting song by the young fella from Idaho—Ritter, his name was. One of the other security guards gave him the CD for Christmas, as a joke, but he listened endlessly to the piano melody about an archaeologist who falls in love with a mummy. In front of him, the display case shimmered in the pale moonlight that pushed through the sooty windows.
There she was, such a babe.
He walked up to the upright replica of Lucy—a plaster cast of her fragments hung on a wire model of her spine and ribs—and blew her a kiss. “How you doing tonight, hon?”
Man, she had long arms. And she had walked with a lurching gait, they said. He found oddly sexy. The lower half of her jawbone was still there, with a few teeth intact. The left pelvic bone was in damn good shape, too. “Yeah, I’ll bet you could shake those hips, couldn’t you, sweetheart?”
Lucky Lucy … Mother of us all.
Mitrochondrial Eve.
That’s what the highfalutins from the universities called her when they dropped by to admire her bones. Truth was, he never understood what that term meant. Mitochondrial—hell, he could barely pronounce it. As far as he was concerned, she was Eve, the real Eve, that Eve from the Garden of Eden, the good girl who’d gone bad with a single apple.
The archaeologists had named her Lucy because the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, happened to be playing on their radio when they discovered her in the red African clay in 1974. But he preferred her Ethiopian name, Dinkenesh. After all, that’s where they had found her, in Ethiopia, so it had to have been her home. He didn’t see her as the traveling type, moving from forest to forest in search of greener … not sure what they had for pastures back then. Just getting from one cave to the next would have been tougher than driving through East Cleveland. What with flying predators and giant dinosaurs lurking around every tree, and all.
Anyway, her Ethiopian name meant: You are amazing.
He liked that, liked it a lot. Even sang it out from time to time, substituting Dinkenesh for Danke Schoen, from that Wayne Newton song. Man, he loved ol’ Wayne. Saw him way back in the day at the Stardust in Vegas. That boy could croon the chrome off a Chevy. Now he had two melodies noodling in his head, from that upstart Ritter boy and from the oldie-but-goodie. Pretty soon, he’d start serenading her with both tunes at the same time, maybe even waltzing with her in his imagination, with only the glass case separating them.
Smiling at the thought, he walked over to the controls on the wall and tweaked the overhead halogens, chasing the shadows on the exhibit and putting Lucy in her best light. Next to the reconstructed plaster skeleton of her on the iron hoist lay a glass case that held her real bones. Forty percent of them, anyway. They were set out like diamonds on a cloth of black velvet and positioned in a two-dimensional representation, from head to toe.
And only 3.2 million years young.
“You don’t look a day over two million,” he whispered to her as he leaned closer, careful not to touch the glass and set off the alarms.
She had everything a hominid man could want in a woman. Small skull capacity, similar to apes. The ability to walk upright on two feet like humans. Wide pelvis for good child bearing.
A real heartbreaker.
“I’ll bet you loved to show off for the boys, didn’t you, hon?”
Of course, she did. That’s why she came back after all these years—and why the crowds still flocked to see her. He could almost see her preen and pose when the museum patrons came in to gawk at her. One time, when the exhibit was in Los Angeles, one of those forensic-police artists stopped by and carved a clay model of her head and face from her bone structure. Damn, he couldn’t get that image of her high brows and piercing eyes out of his head. Reminded him of one of his old girlfriends back when he was in the service.
Sometimes, when he got lonely and bored on the job, he’d imagine what it must have been like living with the queen of all humanity. Knowing her as he did, he figured she probably had the best cave in Africa. He loved to think about how she probably talked to her cave husband so long ago …
He blew her another kiss goodbye and, whistling the Wayne Newton ditty, strode down the aisle to check the next viewing room.
Three steps from the exit, a flash of instinct turned him around. Something about Lucy hadn’t quite look right. But he couldn’t exactly put his finger on it. He returned to the glass case and studied her bones—the real ones—up close. Was that a tooth missing from her jaw? He counted them again. One … Two … Three … Four. Wait, she’d always had five teeth.
The last molar was missing.
He ran a finger down the bevel between the translucent lid on the glass enclosure and its stainless-steel sarcophagus. He brought his fingertip to his nose. Smelled like the solvent that the curators used to break the airtight seals. This wasn’t making any sense. Every other bone fragment was still in its place. Someone had broken into one of the most secure museums in the world to steal … a tooth?
* * *
CHAPTER NINE
Manhattan, New York
MARLY AWOKE WITH A SPLITTING HEADACHE. Looking around, she slowly realized that she was lying in a hospital room at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. The last thing she remembered was racing up Queens Boulevard with a black-haired, pasty-faced punk at the wheel. Her left ear felt as if it had been plastered shut with mud. Through the sleep-film hazing her eyes, she saw standing over her a distinguished looking man with a gentle smile and a halo of gray wispy hair. She tried to reach up and touch him, but her hand fell to her head. She felt a thick gauze bandage over her ears and forehead.
“Shhh,” the man whispered, putting his forefinger to his lips. “They’ve given you some sedatives to help you rest.”
Her eyes slowly focused. “Paul?”
Dr. Paul Brady, chairman of Columbia University’s History Department, was the friend she had almost called when … she tried to work her memory back into focus.
What was he doing here?
Not that she didn’t appreciate his company. He was a Columbia legend, a fixture at the university ever since the riots in the 1960s. After stepping down from his official government post, he had remained affiliated with the department through the end of the Cold War. But everyone knew that he had never really left his first love. Recruited by the OSS before graduating from Yale, he had worked for the CIA through the McCarthy era. Even while teaching at Columbia, he remained the confidante of presidents and generals, retaining a stratospheric security clearance. Word was that he had friends in the highest—and lowest—of places.
“Yes, it’s me.” He stroked her bangs away from the itchy bandage. “You’re damn lucky, Marly.”
“What happened?”
“A cop found you on a gutter outside Nick’s Restaurant.” He spoke softly into her right ear, continuing to answer questions so that she wouldn’t have to ask them. “It’s a good thing you were in Forest Hills. The neighbors there always look out for everyone. And at least you chose to pass out near one of the best pizza joints in the city.”
She tried to smile, but that hurt, too.
“They ran a rape kit. Good news on that, at least. You weren’t sexua
lly assaulted. Somehow, I guess, when you were scuffling, you managed to rip off some of your assailant’s skin. NYPD forensics collected a few bits of his DNA out from under your fingernails.”
She tried to sit up. Her eyes widened a little, but she felt so drowsy. She reached for the Styrofoam cup on her rolling dinner tray and swallowed some water with a mouthful of crushed ice. She coughed, and felt a bruise around her midsection. Had she been thrown from the car?
Dr. Brady eased into the chair next to the bed. “A colleague at Langley gave me the heads up. He said a certain female professor on campus here had become a person of interest. Anyway, NYPD forensics came back with a genetics match that set off some alarms along the Potomac. Usually when something like this hits their radar, they send an agent to follow up with an interview. But when my contact there told me the name, I assured them that we were friends. He asked me to stop by, talk to you a bit, informally.”
She was still trying to catch up. “Genetics match?”
He coughed into his fist, almost apologetically, as if to mask his embarrassment at having such deep connections in the intelligence community. He refilled her cup and asked, “Would you prefer something else? Juice, maybe?”
She shook her head, eager to learn what exactly had happened to her. “The guy had a gun.”
“Believe me, if he had wanted you dead, you wouldn’t have lasted more than a minute.”
She tried to bring back the features of the stranger who had weaseled his way into her apartment.
He smiled, sensing her confusion. “Your kidnapper’s DNA profile gave a positive hit for an Israeli national named Avram Isserle.” He looked down as he talked, as if to blunt the fact that he was breaking at least a dozen regulations telling her this. “Last I heard, Isserle was a member of an elite unit of assassins known as kidon. That’s Hebrew for ‘bayonet.’”
She lifted to her elbows. “An assassin? You mean, like some kind of mob gangster?”