“Can you be sure she doesn’t have other reasons for interest. Dr. Ulman was Alred’s most preferred professor.”
Peter didn’t even blink. “Ms. Alred will no longer research the Ulman find.”
The man at the end turned his head to Mr. Andrews.
Andrews nodded. “I concur. We had her followed to a West Federal Bank, where she does not possess an account. We concluded there to be a connection with the Ulmans but it seems to have led her nowhere. We found no reason to assume she learned anything of relevance. And she is repulsed with those things relating to the find.”
“You’re investigating behind my back?” Peter said, his face flushing, but his body unmoving. “You question my competence.”
“Not at all, Peter,” said the man at the end. “We only want to be sure nothing is overlooked. We need to be.” He looked down at the table. “And John Porter?”
“Porter seems furious,” said Peter, “but he has no more leads. He can run around and say all he likes, but he’ll become a disreputable scholar and lose himself in the back of libraries.”
Smith, across the table from Andrews, spoke without leaving his restful position. “Then why has Porter boarded a flight for Columbus…Ohio.”
The man at the end looked from Smith to Peter with hard eyes. “You thought this unworthy of mention?”
“I…didn’t see that it mattered where he went at this point. As long as he didn’t head for Central America.”
Andrews wrinkled his brow. “How did he find out about Dr. Peterson’s connection?”
Smith closed his eyes and opened them again as he spoke. “The April edition of the Archaeological Journal contains the article written by Alexander Peterson, aforementioned.”
“The April journal was catalogued as one of Porter’s possessions when we first closed in on him and the codex,” said Peter.
“Andrews,” said the man at the end, “make sure Dr. Peterson expects Porter’s appearance. We don’t want Porter catching any loose ends. Peter, I think your work is finished for the day. Go home and rest.”
Peter would do that, he said with an emotionless nod. He only wondered if he’d wake up the next day.
* * *
8:09 p.m. EST
The young lady closed the door and Porter was thankful; it must have been only ten degrees outside, and the Ohio wind was blowing harder than he thought it could when carrying snow. He’d already stepped in a gutter full of slush, so his right Rockport was soaked and the tips of his toes stung.
The house was very large, and undoubtedly more expensive than anything he could ever hope to own. Porter figured the structure had been built in the early part of the century before the depression. The wide staircase to the second floor suited a historian. From the high ceiling hung electric chandeliers of twinkling crystalline shapes. Ornate rugs depicting a deep forest of twisting trees and scrambling bush covered the entire entry hall. There were at least six doors Porter saw along the walls of the hall and at least two at the top of the stars. Paintings as tall as six feet, depicting Mesoamerican warriors, kings, and ball games, and mirrors at least five feet wide took up the rest of the brown wall space. Of course the elaborate carpets were predominantly red.
“What did you say your name was again?”
“Oh,” Porter said with a fake laugh, “John. Peterson will know who I am. You work here?”
“My father does,” she smiled, young and pretty but as skinny as a mortal girl could become. She was literally a skeleton with an epidermis layer, one of those girls who saw fashion models as both unreachable and ideal examples of female figures, but tried to attain their supposed weight anyway. The anorexic result was unfortunate. Porter couldn’t help looking at the skinny poles with tendons and knobs halfway up which she used for legs as she climbed a few steps. The site repulsed him. Porter felt like a child with a cut on his hand that would heal if he’d leave it alone…and of course he couldn’t. He kept looking at the white corn stalks contrasting the candy-apple red carpet on the stairs and kept wincing until she looked back.
“Better wait there,” she said. “You’re not another student from the University, are you? Dr. Peterson’s already sent a number of them away. He is on sabbatical, you know. That’s why he’s not in his Columbus house.”
“No,” Porter said with a smile. “I’m from out of state. Only here for a few days.” He looked up the staircase at the bookshelves all along the top landing walls, trying to read the titles, which were too faraway. How could any professor afford all of this?!? Porter had no idea, but thought it best not to ask.
“So he is expecting you?” said the young lady with sky blue circles around her pupils and frosted brown hair. She’d be gorgeous if she put on a little weight, he thought.
“These students come unannounced?” Porter said.
“He shows them away when they call. They think he’ll help them out if they appear in person.” She pointed at him with a needle for a finger. “John?”
“That’s right.” Porter watched her go up the stairs and pass left and through a door he hadn’t seen.
He had no intention of waiting for the professor. If scholars had one thing in common, he figured, it was a degree of selfishness if the product was new enough. Ulman’s sure was! And Peterson probably wouldn’t be that keen on sharing it all with an eccentric Latter-day Saint.
Cutting quickly through one doorway, Porter started scanning for stairs. “Where would I study if I lived in this house?” he said. It had to be on the second floor. Maybe the third. This house was bigger inside than it looked. Places this size always had more than one staircase.
Weaving past other servant and doing his best to act as if he was a guest, and hoping his calm silence worked, Porter went up the stairs in the east wing and slid with quiet feet through the halls. Unless Peterson was prompt, Porter expected to have a couple of minutes to find what he needed and get out. If the professor was working on his book, he’d either tell the young lady to get rid of the visitor, or he’d come after ten minutes of making ‘John’ wait. Porter was betting on the latter.
Porter peeked in rooms and dodged mumbled conversations made by shadows striding by him without seeing anyone else until he poked his head into what had to be a den.
Closing the door behind him, leaving it slightly ajar so he could hear anyone coming up the hallway, Porter scanned the room. Beautiful Victorian wood curled under every table and over every bookshelf. There was plenty of light from the brass lamps hanging about. A fire cooked the Ohio air, giving it a sweet incense odor and filling the study with blankets of warmth.
“I’d fall asleep in here!” Porter whispered to himself. His eyes examined the heavy desk in the center of the room. Massive. Bright lights beamed over the piles standing in perfect order. Rolls rested together like sacred scrolls waiting to be opened by the pious. Two stacks of hand-typed pages stood on the right side. Three books hid beneath a fourth Porter found open and unfinished. They were handwritten journals.
He drew closer and saw the words: Kalpa, and KM-1, and buried site. Porter remembered the article Peterson had written for the Archaeological Journal, “The New Mesoamerican Mystery: Guatemala’s Hidden Treasure.” He took one of the scrolls made of modern paper and pulled off the rubber band.
The air in his lungs evaporated, and he stopped breathing.
It was a hand-drawn map.
It had to be Ulman’s site in Highland Guatemala. A small scale at the bottom implied the enormity of the find. The buildings, the towers, the canals, the streets…it was hard to fathom. Porter’s brain seemed to roll inside his head as dizziness set in.
He shut his mouth, closed the roll and grabbed the others, jamming them all under his arm. He’d examine every detail once he was safe. His eyes glanced at the door, still unmoved.
He looked at typed pages, tempting him. His eyes darted to the journals, which he closed and gathered in a scramble.
Porter came around to the front of the desk, knoc
king the black leather chair aside.
The fire popped behind him, and he spun to face it.
Nothing but hungry flames. Again he smelled the sweet wood burning.
He looked back at the claw-footed desk, at the dark wood drawers running down the front.
Good antique contraption. No working locks.
He checked the door. No one.
One of the rolls fell from under his arm.
But his free hand was already pulling a drawer open. Envelopes, pens, a small tape recorder.
He slammed it quietly and grabbed the next drawer. Wrenching it open—
He almost fell backward at the sight. He swayed, but his free hand caught his weight on the sinking leather of the chair.
Warm leather.
The pages in the drawer were the same. Crisp, but malleable.
Someone had been heating the seat only a few moments ago.
It was definitely bark paper, just like KM-2. And it was real! And it was in the states! And it was right in front of him! He saw the letters. All of them less Mayan, more pseudo-Egyptian.
Instinctive hands grabbed the codex, took up the fallen rolls—
Crack!
Porter turned his eyes to the fireplace again.
Only the flames.
Cold metal gently touched the back of his neck.
“John D. Porter…I presume?” said a British voice.
Nickel-plated .44 Magnum, Porter’s subconscious said as he raised himself slowly. He hadn’t heard the professor enter and couldn’t see him now—it had to be Dr. Peterson. Porter looked down at the ancient manuscript in his hands, unable to believe its reality, unsure there was really anyone in the room with him at all. The blood drained quickly from his head. “I’mmm…going to pass out,” his voice slurred.
“Well then, think boy!” came the British voice through a cloud. “Put your head at knee level.”
Trapped, caught, subdued, and losing the real world as he stood there, Porter lowered himself away from the cold barrel of the pistol until his head sunk below his waist. His throat made a weird sound, and he felt tears rising in his eyes.
Dad’ll be proud of me now! Porter said to himself sarcastically, considering his situation. “I can explain why—”
“I already know the reason you are here, John,” said the Englishman as he walked around the desk into Porter’s peripheral vision.
The doctoral candidate (turned madman) lifted himself to his full height. He looked into the professor’s squinting eyes, realizing the man didn’t hold a gun at all.
inlaid with silver, a brown cane with a steel tip pointed at Porter like a spike. “Put it down.”
Porter swayed as if he didn’t understand the words. His eyes glanced at the door on the other side of the desk.
“Unless you have a metal plate in your head, I doubt you would stand a single blow of this blunt weapon, Mr. Porter, now put my papers down!”
Porter dropped all of it carefully onto the desk and backed away as Peterson examined the attempted theft. Everything was present, though a little crushed and out of place in this organized room.
The fire spit sparks.
“They said you would arrive, but I didn’t expect you so soon,” Peterson said with life in his voice, as if he were addressing one of his students and not a thief.
“I know why the others were killed,” said Porter. “I know the truth, and I’m not turning my head.”
“There is nothing for you to see,” Peterson said with eyebrows raised, flipping the cane under his right arm. He took up the codex and inspected a new tear with his fingers.
“You know there’s more than ten years of investigation on that desk and you say—”
“That’s all behind us now,” Peterson said.
Porter stood breathless. “What?”
“Do you play chess, Mr. Porter?” said the professor hanging his cane on his arm. He took up the maps.
Porter didn’t say anything.
“Sometimes…you have to sacrifice a piece,” said Peterson.
“They’re pushing you, professor. I know about it. I can vouch—”
“You don’t have a clue as to what I’m saying,” said the professor. Dr. Peterson smiled, his skin tight as if he’d had a facelift or two. “Sometimes it’s…best to play a game that way. Keeping the end in mind, of course.”
The professor looked back at the fireplace.
His hand shot away from his body.
The codex dropped.
Starving, the fire attacked like golden hyenas over a sick wildebeest. The bark pages arched in pain, but the fire kept coming, biting, chewing. The ancient characters on the cover disappeared in mists of darkness. The book melted and began flying through the chimney to heaven in chunks of floating ash as Porter and the professor watched.
“Stay where you are,” Peterson said, lifting his cane as Porter took a step.
Porter stopped, his mouth loose, his eyes sagging out of his skull, his fingers trembling.
The maps went next, burning entirely and then soaring away in pieces.
“You’re…a…scholar,” Porter said in disbelief, his eyes still on the fire. “Who could make you do this?!?”
Peterson smiled, but Porter sensed pain behind his eyes as the professor took up his journals and set them neatly inside the overheated hearth. “Oh, my dear Mr. Porter. We probably would have been friends one day, you and I, under different circumstances. For you to come all this way…so quickly….”
“Who is making you do this!” Porter said, keeping his voice down so as not to draw any more attention.
But the door had already opened again, and the young lady stood looking at the professor. “Everything all right in here?”
Peterson gazed at her with his eyes unfocused, the typed pages in his murdering hands now screaming to the world’s subconscious for help. “All is well, Cerina. Please give us some time together.”
She closed the door as Peterson tossed the pages of his manuscript into the raging torrent of heat.
“They have no name,” the professor said.
“That can’t be true. I want to know who’s behind all this. It’s illegal!” Porter smelled the smoke of the sour bark.
Peterson grinned, his face flickering with yellow and orange firelight. “It’s all been against the law, Porter, you have to know that.”
“Is it the FBI?” Porter said. “Why would they be involved?!”
“They aren’t, to my knowledge.” He chewed his molars together. “You would do well to forget about them, young man.”
“I never will,” said Porter, his cheeks trembling.
“If they had a name, it would be a metonymic displacement for professional obfuscation,” said Dr. Peterson. “You will never find them, for they do not exist. Erase your name from their blackboard, Mr. Porter….You’ll live longer.”
Porter stared at the professor. “You’re letting me go?”
“At your age,” said the professor with a look upward as he thought, “I may have worn your shoes and matched your footsteps. I have nothing against you. But if you do not look away, they will ponder what reason you should remain on the planet….Get out.”
“I—”
“The conversation is over, Porter, I have been cordial enough.” Peterson pulled on the handle off his cane revealing a long blade of thin metal no longer hidden in the wood.
He pointed the short sword at the student.
“It’s an antique,” said the professor. “Handy. Its forgotten existence in this modern world makes it priceless for someone like me. Do you like it?”
“I won’t stick around for it,” said Porter, his face cold limestone. He felt numb in the warm room.
“Bad joke, Mr. Porter.”
“Not much left to do,” he said, leaving the room. “Everyone’s made sure of that.”
“On the contrary,” came the British accent behind him. “If you’re that obsessed…I’d start looking for Dr. Ulman. He sent me an
unfriendly e-mail last week.”
Porter turned slowly. “Ulman’s…alive?”
“Unsigned, of course, but I know the fool too well.”
Porter stared at the professor who glanced at the fire with aching eyes.
“Question is,” said the Englishman quietly, “can you find him…before they do?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
April 30
9:40 a.m. PST
Click-click-click-click-click.
* * *
Alred shoved her way through the glass door into Bruno’s cafe. Whether or not Porter wanted to see her, Alred would tell it all, even if she had to slap him to get his attention.
There wasn’t anymore time.
She didn’t understand the reason why, but her intuition, her female sixth-sense that something hung out of balance, raised her blood-pressure.
Tapping the old man in the thin T-shirt, she said, “Bruno, I need some help.”
* * *
Click-click-click-click.
* * *
Rubbing the ends of a mustache reaching for his beardless chin, the boxer turned and said, “My pies are the answer to everything!”
“I need to find John Porter.”
“Hasn’t been in today,” said the owner of the cafe, cleaning the table again. “Why should I be doing this stuff?!? Where’s that girl!” he said to the kitchen.
“Someone has tried twice to kill him,” said Alred. “He’s hiding out, and he’ll want to speak with me.” A little exaggeration. She meant Porter would be glad by the end of their conversation. Well, she hoped Porter would feel that way. But it was too complicated to tell Bruno.
The old man laughed a gritty chuckle, but his eyes jolted when she insinuated attempted murder.
Someone shouted, “Brussels sprouts, Brassica oleracea!”
“You’ll eat what I give ya and like it!” Bruno said to the student with the friends and about two-thousand flashcards.
They laughed.
He looked at his task of wiping down the next table. “Running from you, eh,” Bruno said to Alred. “Don’t sound like he’s that interested!”
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