“Do you know his whereabouts? Porter said you had the up-to-date facts on everybody who frequented your place.”
“I’ve the stomach of an elephant,” he said, taking up a black tray of filthy dishes and turning to the kitchen, “not the memory of one.”
* * *
Click-click-click-click. Click.
* * *
Outside of Bruno’s, Alred sucked in the salty air of morning. She stared for some time at a wooden telephone pole papered with cheap advertisements and pictures of lost dogs, cats, and kids. The storm had not subsided, but allowed the presence of a silent marine layer of high fog from the coast. Stratford wasn’t that close to the water, but few hills stood to block the recent chaotic winds.
She looked at the brown portfolio in her right hand.
* * *
Click-click.
* * *
Where would Alred be if she were a crazed Mormon who’d just lost all chance of graduating after seven years of worthy work?
She had to talk to Porter.
* * *
As Alred got into her faded gold Celica, which by appearance seemed to have more years than mileage, Bruno looked with sharp eyes through the glass.
“What’ve I gotta do to get some service ‘round here?!?” said a customer. A rumble of laughter from friends followed.
Without taking his eyes off the graduate student, Bruno said, “You wan’ me to stick someth’n down your throat?! You wait right there!” He popped the knuckles in both hands and the chortles continued.
The man across the street sitting in the dark blue Volvo put the camera with the telephoto lens on the passenger seat. Bruno watched him hit the ignition as Alred pulled into traffic. The spook stayed three cars behind her until both vehicles drove out of Bruno’s sight.
A drinking glass shattered in the kitchen.
Everyone laughed.
Except Bruno.
* * *
11:37 a.m. PST
Dr. Christopher Ulman kept his back to the bench in the covered bus stop while he peeked at the Volvo sedan with the cameraman inside.
It was drizzling again in front of what was informally called the Stratford Science Square. The center had really been named after Krishnamoorthy Ramanujam, which most students refused to pronounce.
Ulman would see his wife tomorrow.
If he guessed right, they didn’t care about her anymore.
But first he had to tell Alred not to—
The bus pulled quickly to a stop. Ulman bowed his head in the high collar of his new hunter-green raincoat. The door folded open.
John Porter stepped off the bus.
Ulman glanced up, and his skin suddenly chilled like a snake’s in winter. He pushed his eyes down the sidewalk.
As expected, Alred finally appeared through the tall, spired gate made of dark metal.
The professor had set himself between the public parking lot and the science buildings, waiting for his prized student to stride by when her business was complete.
He hadn’t expected the cameraman, who worked as feverishly with the black contraption in the cab of his car as he had when Alred entered the quad by foot.
The long lens focused solely on Alred. The spy turned his body slowly as Alred pressed toward the bus stop. A car driving by hit a puddle, which splashed the concrete in front of her. She gave the pilot a dirty smirk, then reformed her face to faraway thought.
The camera would catch Ulman in a moment if he stayed put.
“Are you getting on?” said the bus driver behind Porter, Alred’s graduate-student friend standing close enough to kick.
Ulman stood, his chin down. He didn’t know if Porter would recognize him, but he couldn’t chance it.
Porter saw Alred before she saw him. Ulman heard him growl as Porter turned and started off in the opposite direction.
“Buddy!” said the driver, his hand on the door lever, itching to pull it. “Let’s go!”
Ulman eyed the bus driver, then watched the camera in the Volvo twist in his direction the closer Alred came. Her eyes concentrated on the sidewalk hard enough to crack the cement with the pressure.
Ulman couldn’t get caught by the camera.
“Yo!!!” said the driver.
“All right!” Ulman said, his hands trembling as he reached for the railing. He looked at Porter not ten feet away, at Alred not twenty, at the camera in the blue four-door. Almost on him.
Ulman moved one foot onto the lowest step in the entrance to the bus.
Ulman’s pinching eyes zoomed in on Alred as his throat grew tight.
He cleared it with a bark.
Alred looked up.
The camera focused.
Ulman grit his teeth and slipped into the bus, which instantly rolled from the curb.
He would have to wait…until it was safe.
* * *
As the county transit vehicle slipped its long body by her, Alred frowned, wondering….
Then she saw, “Porter!”
He didn’t turn around.
Alred shuffled up behind him.
“We’ve already decided against correspondence,” Porter said for them both.
“You’ll want to listen to this,” she said.
Porter whipped his flushed face into hers. “In all my—”
“Be quiet, Porter!” she said, her words a fast flurry of machine gunfire. “I’ve had enough of your Junior High, tough-boy pouting. Your life’s going down the rat holes as long as you choose defeat.”
“Easy for my Nemesis to say.”
“If you’d open your eyes and take a second to breathe you’d see I’ve done what’s best, considering where we fall at present!” Her pupils spat fire. She stood with shoulders squared, her feet staggered, her left hand swelling red around the handle of her leather bag.
Thick exhaust passed around them from the road.
“We have nothing to talk about,” said Porter, keeping his ground.
She cocked her head. “Guess I’ll just take KM-3 to someone who really wants it!”
Silence smacked them both like a cold wind. The sound of cars driving on the wet road came from every direction, echoing inside her head, her heart humming like an overheating engine.
She’d gotten through.
He was listening.
“I tried to tell you after I turned in KM-2,” she said, running a hand through her breeze-blown hair. “No one at all knows about this manuscript. I had a scrap of it carbon dated.”
He said nothing.
“I just received the results,” she said, glancing back at the science square, then quickly into his eyes.
Porter’s empty mouth gaped powerlessly.
“450 years Before…Christ.”
His brow turned to putty.
“None of the words are Mayan, as far as I can distinguish. It’s all written in your ‘Reformed Egyptian Script,’ I believe. There are Mesoamerican characteristics all over…of a sort. Pictoglyphs. But I haven’t had much time to study them.”
Porter’s shoulders melted beneath his beaten suede jacket.
“Too busy looking for you,” she said. She smelled blossoms but had to be mistaken. Who smelled flowers on rainy days?
“Atkins did the dating?” said Porter.
“I didn’t trust her. Not after everything with the KM-2 codex. I talked one of her doctoral candidates into doing it for me.”
“Do…you have it here?” He eyed her portfolio.
Alred unzipped the top and drew out the ancient book, folded like a fan, so similar to the codex they’d recently lost. The shade of the paper was slightly darker.
Porter took it with slow hands, sliding it out of the plastic bag protecting it.
* * *
The man in the Volvo jolted forward, ramming the telephoto lens into his windshield.
He swore and fumbled with the instrument before banging it on his face where it should have stayed.
Pinching his lips together, he held his breath.
/> Click-click. Click-click-click-click-click-click-click….
* * *
Porter turned the pages while his tongue dried between his parted teeth.
The marrow of every bone in his system froze in waves. First in his hands, then from his arms to his shoulders, and quickly down his back.
“This is what we got out of Ulman’s secret security box,” said Alred, “I was waiting to tell you, but circumstances never permitted it.”
His fingers and wrists shivered with building emotion. His voice came out as a whisper. “You gave Stratford KM-2 to throw them off.”
Alred nodded.
“I…could kiss you!” he said in the same hiss, his eyes great ovals with pupils aimed at the dusty record.
She shook her head.
Three manuscripts all from the same find. Four, counting the one Peterson had cooked! This…the last….
“The bank box also contained a paper of Ulman theories and observations at the Kalpa site. That, I have read. It’s enough to stop your heartbeat.”
Breath escaped Porter’s lungs as if he’d been punched in the sternum.
“He wanted it published,” Alred said, “but-but evidently decided to do it himself when he got home from Guatemala. Of course I’m guessing. His wife has no academic blood in her whatsoever and would rather hide in a corner than shake a man’s hand, so sending her the essay would only add further stress to matters. I get the impression Dr. Ulman sent previous works to other parties for entering into professional journals or magazines, but they never made it.”
“Mrs. Ulman said she’d handed everything over to the FBI,” said Porter.
“Must have given them other things Ulman mailed home. We’ll never know what those artifacts were. I still wonder what the Bureau—”
“They weren’t FBI,” Porter said, putting KM-3 back in the bag, while his eyes scanned for unfavorable persons.
The sky hung gray and wet, turning the whole world a dim color.
He never looked at the blue Volvo down the road.
* * *
Click-click-click-click-click.
* * *
“How do you know?” Alred looked into his squinting eyes.
Porter grabbed her arm. “Ulman is alive! We have to find him…before he gets killed.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
7:51 p.m. PST
“Porter, we have to talk…now!”
The ex-doctoral candidate turned to see Dr. Kinnard holding himself firmly in the doorway of the little office. The professor had 8 x 10 inch photographs in his hand.
“You don’t seem like one bearing gifts to lift my burden,” Porter said placing his copy of Sumerian Ostraca in a brown box on his desk. With one hand he took three gray volumes with the title Hebrew Eschatology off the floor and put them on top of the first book. His black copy of the Tanach followed. He eyed the other filled containers, all four with the familiar word ‘U-Haul’ in bold letters on the side.
Kinnard lowered his voice and his brow. “I don’t care how you got it, but you’d better hand it over to the University.”
Porter glanced at him with a wiry smile. “My new Stone Edition of the Tanach? Are the Aryans persecuting the Jews again?”
Kinnard flashed the pictures.
“What are those supposed to be?” said Porter unworried. He stopped loading to look anyway.
Three shots. All details of Porter examining KM-3 on the street where Alred had caught up to him. But she was outside every frame. Who had taken the pictures? Who’d doctored the prints to show only Porter with KM-3?
“Where should I go, you think,” Porter said, returning to his packing. From the corner of the white room, he grabbed eight old Loeb Library books with red covers. “I admit my ignorance when it comes to applying for a Ph.D.—after failing the first. Suppose any school will take me? I can’t believe I waited so long to get it done,” he laughed to himself, because there was nothing else to do.
“You hear what I said?” Kinnard came into the room as Porter went to the far side of his desk, keeping his eyes on the papers and books on the floor. He carried two volumes by Michael Grant, one from Joseph Campbell, and an old E.A.W. Budge book.
Shuffling through the menagerie, gathering files in semi-organized fashion, Porter stuffed the rest of the box. He held a copy of Wardarcher Tiel’s, Merenptah, in the air and eyed it as if he’d never seen it before. “Whoops. Bet I have a major fine to pay for this baby.” With a smile, he looked at his supervisor. “Disagreed with the old man anyway.” He set it on the corner of his desk as Kinnard shook his head.
“In order to be successful in the world, Porter, you need to learn the rules of the game!”
“You know I don’t play sports, Kinnard,” said the student. Porter pulled on the roll of packing tape, and it screamed like a mugged woman in an echoing alley. The box sealed, he grabbed another and taped the bottom before loading it.
“I want the book!” said Kinnard, slamming his hand on the table.
Porter looked up, his face as bland as it could be. “You want it? What would you do with it?”
Kinnard’s tongue stuck to the bottom of his open mouth.
“Let me know one thing,” Porter said, packing as fast as a bank robber would if stashing money into his duffel bag. “I thought I saw sincerity in your eyes when you first gave me KM-2. Were you really helping me…or just giving me something to run around with since I had so little time anyway? Did you have any intention of letting me do a dissertation on Ulman’s find?”
“I tried to assist you,” said Kinnard taking off his dark-rimmed glasses.
“And then what happened,” said Porter. “When did you lose heart? When the other professors shoved you in a different direction?”
“It was a race that couldn’t be won.”
“Were you blackmailed? Coerced?” Porter said, looking at him with stabbing eyes. “Was there someone involved…that wasn’t Stratford staff?”
Gazing at Porter as if his mind had been read, Kinnard shut his mouth.
“Then I hold no blame on you.” Porter went back to packing, finding papers written by other students which he should have read and corrected by now. He left them next to the library book.
“You’re in a lot of trouble,” said Kinnard, his voice low and serious. “Where is the codex.”
“See it here?” said Porter waving an arm but not turning up his eyes.
“You are not listening to me, are you.” Kinnard leaned on the card-table desk, which rocked beneath his weight. “You could go to jail for this. You could be killed.”
Grinning again, Porter said, “Oh is that all? I thought you’d say something that would get my heart going. I’m already desensitized to those things, you see. Well, maybe you don’t. We’re driving on different tracks now.”
“I gave you Ulman’s manuscript,” said Kinnard, “I’m responsible.”
“You’re afraid they’ll kill you?” Porter flopped in his screaming chair to be closer to the stacks on the ground to his left, which he immediately reached for.
The heater came on.
“You don’t see how serious this is,” said Kinnard.
“Better than you realize!” Porter almost chuckled, tossing The Dead Sea Scroll Companion into the box, followed by Civilization Before Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the new one volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. “So who are they?”
Kinnard put his glasses back on his face and stood straight.
Porter stopped and looked at his teacher. “You taught me yourself that throughout history there have been shadow parties, gangs who have operated in the background, people who started small, but through secrets and careful planning rose to prominent power until they ran the government alone. Pharaohs, Roman Emperors…they’ve all been oppressed by these hidden sects built up for power and financial gain.” He lifted his eyebrows. “I agreed with you, remember? Great discussion we had that day. Lasted way into the night.”
“Give m
e the manuscript,” said Kinnard.
“How do you know I have it? Who took those photographs?”
“Where is the document, Porter!” Kinnard said, trembling. “I know you have it—everyone knows you have it!” He slowed his words but the energy stayed. “Shrapnel will fly until you hand it over. A lot of people will get hurt. I hate these people. I had to deal with them in the war, and I thought they were all gone.”
“‘Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to—’”
Kinnard wiped his hands on his blue slacks. “I’m through running around! I already told you this project is terminated. If you still don’t get it, Porter…you can consider your time at this university finished.”
“There’s a threat!” said Porter with a relaxed smirk. “That mean I get credit without the dissertation?”
Kinnard slammed two fists into the desktop. “It means you’re done, Porter! The University doesn’t know you anymore!”
* * *
Knocking on his forehead as if it were a door, Porter moaned and stared at the computer screen.
He typed the e-mail address, cocking his head, hoping it was right. If it wasn’t, there wasn’t anything else he could do.
Date: Wed, 30 April 1997 8:45:19 -0500 (PST)
To: [email protected]
From: Tomodachi
Subject: Immediate assistance
Stan,
I’m in the computer lab at Stratford University. Don’t reply to this message.
I need your help.
I don’t know if there is anything you can do. You’re a busy man but you are in the FBI so maybe you’ll have some ideas.
I’ve fallen into a very messy hole out here.
About three months ago, Dr. Christopher Ulman found a city in the highlands of Guatemala. Somewhere inside, he came upon a library with books written in some early form of Mayan. One of the codices has both this proto-Mayan and, though you won’t believe it, Reformed Egyptian.
One of the books fell into my hands. I translated half of it before it was taken from me. Albeit, the document came into the country illegally, that’s not what worries me. Someone else has been hovering around me like a silent cloud ready to snap out lightning.
The Kukulkan Manuscript Page 21