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“I’d like to think so but—“

“But you know him as well as I do. OK, Kelly. What was he up to this time?”

Kelly could feel the heat entering her tone and he wondered if he had made a mistake in bringing this up. Yet he had come this far, and there was no way to back out gracefully now that he had dangled out these irregularities. He tried to explain.

“Well, the numbers were pretty significant—in file size, I mean. There were several hundred terabytes of data with altered checksums, and the whole block had been shunted off to the recycling bin. That was erased, but I was able to recover the base code for the data blocks and—“

“English please.”

Kelly scratched the back of his neck again and Maeve’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Only one thing could account for that much data,” he explained. “Oh, he used the secondary drive system, and had everything running through the simulator to make it look like it was just a trial run and all, but the data transfer tags were pretty clear.” He resisted the urge to explain the technical discrepancies and acceded to Maeve’s request. “It was coordinate information—temporal and spatial.”

“Coordinate info? For the Arch?”

“Yup.” He let that simple affirmation sit with her for a moment before he said anything else.

Maeve was staring at the Arabian coffee server, her eyes riveted to the gold plating as though inscribing her thoughts there. “And the money?”

It seemed to Kelly that she had already come to some inner conclusion, but she wanted to hear what he thought just to confirm her growing suspicion. “There was a spike in the electricity usage that month and the deposit was just enough to neatly balance our books.” He didn’t want to say any more.

Maeve pursed her lips until they were nearly white. She set her coffee cup on the settee, as if she was unwilling to hold anything as delicate as inlaid china while she let her emotions run with this latest surprise. There was a faint tremor in her hand as she released it. Kelly was just about to say something but she held up a warning hand to silence him. He had that pleading look in his eyes, as if all of this was his fault, but Maeve knew better.

“What in God’s name is that man up to,” she breathed, and the question was more an accusation. “He was running numbers and using gobs of electricity on the holiday weekend—when no one would be around to bother him. And you say he had a grad student sign in for a routine security call? Baloney! He used it, Kelly. He used the Arch, damn him. I knew something like this was going to happen if I let him out of my sight. I just knew it!”

She stood up, her knee jostling the service tray on the settee and Kelly put his hand on his forehead, regretting his candor and hoping he had not re-ignited the long-standing feud between Research and Outcomes.

Maeve’s anger continued to vent. “We’re going to have to lock that place down now, lease or no lease. My god—I still can’t believe he would try something like this. No clearance, no outcome study: the risk was enormous! How could he have run the calculations? It took us nine months to get good numbers on the Shakespeare drop.”

“Well, you can get a pretty good bead on spatial coordinates without even using an Arion system. As for the temporal numbers—”

“Where? Where did he go, Kelly?” Maeve seized on that now, and it was clear that she was very concerned about contamination.

“Like I said, I could only retrieve the base code, and there wasn’t enough data to work that out.”

“Then we’ve got to get over there and keep digging. I want to know what he did, and I want to know it tonight.” She folded her arms, as if trying to set some boundary of civility on her anger. But Kelly had seen Maeve like this before. He knew that they were in for a long night in the lab.

“Do you really want to do this now? I mean, Robert is in Jordan for the next ten days. What’s the rush?”

“What’s the rush? Don’t you realize what this means? He used the Arch! The last time we tried that we changed everything and you nearly got killed!” She sat down. Very flustered. “Damn him,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. I was reading Dickinson last night, and now…”

“Emily Dickinson? What has that got to do with any of this?”

“Oh nothing—at least I hope as much. But the thought that the poem I read last night wasn’t the one she wrote –“ She came up short, her anger choking off her voice. “If there’s one line of that poetry changed—one word—I’m going to roast Nordhausen over a slow fire!” She fixed Kelly with that determined stare that said she would do exactly that.

“We better get started,” he sighed. “Bring the coffee. We’ll need it.”

6

Nordhausen stumbled his way back through the winding cave, struggling to remember which way they had turned when they explored earlier. He made a left when he should have taken a right, but the false corridor soon reached a dead end and the error self-corrected. He reached the upper level of the subterranean formation a moment later, and was pleased to see the rosy red light of the setting sun framed in the irregular opening of the outermost crevasse. But, to his surprise, the picture was not an empty landscape! Two men appeared silhouetted in the opening, and he came up short, caught unawares.

A moment’s hesitation passed when he realized that they could easily be one of the touring groups he had told Paul about earlier. His start was soon colored with the elation of discovery and good luck as he realized that they would certainly have transportation nearby—possibly a bus or landrover. He hastened forward, rushing toward the mouth of the cave with a greeting on his lips, only to find the men had quickly unshouldered firearms and leveled them at him in a gesture that was clearly hostile.

“Don’t shoot!” he said instinctively. “I mean you no harm. Lord, am I ever glad to see you. We thought we would have to hike all the way to Akaba from here. Thank God!” He extended his open palms to indicate his friendly intent, but the men just stared at him with dark, surly glances. Nordhausen saw that they were clearly Arabic, both dressed in loose fitting robes and head dress, with weathered olive faces colored by the usual facial hair. One wore a full beard, and the other sported a trimmed goatee. “English?” he asked gingerly, realizing that the men probably did not understand a word of his greeting. He began to have flashbacks of his brief sojourn in the desert with the two Arab guides he had encountered. Then he recognized a checkered scarf at the throat of the bearded man, and he suddenly knew that these were the same men he had sought to pull into his ruse when the helicopter made its forced landing to escape the authorities! Could we have caught up to that little caravan, he wondered? Perhaps they meant to shelter here as well.

When the third man appeared in the cave opening, all doubt was removed. The white pith helmet and khaki overcoat were impossible to mistake. Before Nordhausen could say another word the apparent Westerner made a terse gesture, his fingers snapping to accent his command and the two Arabs rushed forward to seize the professor by the arms, dragging him rudely back to the cave opening in spite of his flustered protests.

“English?” The Westerner grinned at him. “What are you doing here? And do not say you are lost! We have been watching you for some time.”

“Thank god,” Nordhausen began, relieved that he could at least communicate with the man. The stranger’s thick accent made Nordhausen realize this man was Arabic as well. The notion that they were Bedouin brigands emerged in his mind as he winced with the hard grip of his assailants. “Is this necessary? You can see I mean you no harm.” He gave his captors a wan smile, but they glared at him just the same.