Gruber was getting to his real point.
“You just sit and settle in. Spread out so no one joins you. Discourage any eye contact by not having any, yet see everything.”
Kavanaugh tried. He stayed too long on a woman pushing a stroller and a young boy watching a squirrel climb a tree.
“Ah, it’s not so easy, is it? You’re lingering. You have to appear like you’re taking in a wide view. However, you’re actually recording every detail. It takes practice. Soon it will become natural and when that happens you are ready to do your work.”
Gruber casually removed his pocket watch. It was 16:52 hours.
“Like now.”
At precisely that moment a man sat down on the bench behind them.
“And then you wait for the proper things to be said.”
“Peanuts?” the man said.
Still talking only to Kavanaugh, Gruber said, “He’ll always start with a food reference. Alphabetical. A-Z. Then you start all over again. We’re up to ‘P’. Thankfully peanuts are easy. By agreement, we skip Q, X, Y and Z.
“Your reply is always the same. ‘No thank you.’”
The man continued. “Are you sure? They come from a great place.”
“Now,” Gruber continued, “the second level of a security check. The correct response always is a reference to a location in the most recent issue of Voyages.”
Gruber leaned back and said to the stranger, “Oh? Pray tell, where?”
“A little stand in Boston’s Quincy Market.”
“This is how we make contact. And this is where. No other acknowledgement is needed. No other confirmation. No glances. No pleasantries. You spend two more minutes. Maybe three. No more. It is the same whomever you meet. And whomever you meet will always act in the same manner. I invented a name for our contacts. My personal homage. Perhaps you’ll figure it out one day.
“Mr. Marvin.” The man pushed back in his bench. “Meet Mr. Kavanaugh. Soon he will be your contact.”
“I wish you an easy passing,” the man said. “Should it not be so and you require my assistance, I will take care of your needs.”
“Thank you, Mr. Marvin. I’m prepared to let nature take its course.”
Gruber checked his watch again. 16:54. “Two minutes. Time to go, my boy.”
The young man rose first. He helped Gruber to his feet. Gruber recovered his umbrella and used it to point the way out, a different direction. “This is the way you will always return. Routine.”
It wasn’t until they were out of the park that Kavanaugh realized that Gruber had left his newspaper on the park bench. When he brought it up, he learned why. It contained information from the field.
“Dr. McCauley. Dr. McCauley.”
He thought he heard his name in a dream. It had to be a dream because McCauley had treated himself to a night in the lap of luxury — by Glendive standards. After a few hours of friendly, but exhausting golf with Jim Kaplan, he checked into the GuestHouse Inn and Suites on North Merrill Avenue, soaked in a bathtub for the first time in months, and fell asleep on the bed only half dry. It was just as he wanted. Seclusion. No calls, no conversations. Restful sleep.
Restful until…
He heard a knock in his dream. Then scenes later, which amounted to barely seconds, another knock accompanied by, “Dr. Quinn McCauley?”
He stirred, but remained asleep until a louder knock.
“Dr. McCauley, I’m sorry to bother you, but please let me in.”
It was a woman’s voice. He rubbed his eyes and checked the clock display on the nightstand. 11:30 P.M. “Go away. I don’t need housekeeping.”
“It’s not housekeeping, Dr. McCauley. Open the door.”
“I’m sleeping.”
“No you’re not. You’re talking to me.”
McCauley detected an accent. British and distinctly out of place in Glendive.
“Really, go away. Whoever you are, we can talk in the morning.”
“I think not,” came the reply.
McCauley sat up. “And why’s that?” he asked without an ounce of courtesy.
“Because I’m here.”
“And I’m supposed to care?” He was now sitting upright on his bed.
“Yes you are. We have an appointment. Dr. Alpert. Do you recall?”
McCauley’s mind raced. “Appointment?”
“Yes, your university cleared it. You did get word. Right?”
Oh shit, he said to himself.
McCauley turned on the light. “Give me a second.” He reached for his jeans and shirt, which he’d thrown over the back of a chair. “You sure this can’t wait until tomorrow. I did want to get a good night’s sleep.”
“So I heard when I went to your base camp where I thought you’d be.”
“Aren’t you a day early?”
“Yes, but if you don’t open the door soon, I’ll be on time,” she said with all proper authority.
McCauley stumbled over his golf clubs which were leaning against the foot of the bed. “Shit!” he yelled.
“Excuse me?” the woman said.
“Nothing. Nothing.”
He picked up the clubs, set them aside, unlatched the lock and opened the door to reveal a beautiful brunette with hazel eyes, striking dark eyebrows and a beguiling smile.
“There, that wasn’t so difficult, was it?” she said.
He stood quite awkwardly, three inches taller than her.
“Two things. First, aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“Ah, well…” He looked around at the mess in his room he’d managed to create in a short time. “Yes. And second?”
“You might want to button your shirt and zip up.”
In his haste, he was two buttons off and just a little bit exposed.
“Sorry.”
The tenured Cambridge professor breezed into the room. He caught a whiff of her perfume; a smoky fragrance that brought him fully to his senses.
“And about the room. This is as good as it gets on my salary.” He was referring to the décor. The mess was something else entirely: computer printouts in piles, maps on the floor, and dirty shoes on the corner of the bed.
She glanced at the only chair available and moaned. “Mind if I…?”
“Here, I can do that.”
It was too late. With two fingers, she gingerly removed his underpants from the only chair in the room and put them over the door knob. Next, the uninvited guest sat down as if she owned the room.
McCauley was plainly embarrassed. If he was supposed to make a good, professional first impression, he was surely failing.
“How about we go out?” he said.
“Good idea. I’m famished.”
“There’s a restaurant down South Kendrick.”
“The Melting Pot,” she volunteered.
“Yes, how do you?”
“Research, Dr. McCauley. You know what that is.”
He didn’t like how this was going.
“Wait. What did you say your name was?”
“Still is. Dr. Alpert. Dr. Katrina Alpert.”
“Dr. Alpert,” he replied. “Dr. Katrina Alpert.”
“Yes. Still the same one from a second ago.”
It came to him: The Cambridge professor from the Invertebrate Paleontology Department whose crowning achievement was Leonardo, he thought. And definitely not DiCaprio.
Alpert’s Leonardo was a bit older, and Jurassic Park would have been his only starring movie, though he didn’t make the cut for accuracy’s sake. Leonardo was a Brachylophosaurus who walked the earth seventy-six million years ago during the Cretaceous period, some one hundred million years later. Now, Leonardo — Dr. Alpert’s Leonardo — was considered by the Guinness Book as the best-preserved dinosaur ever found. And for Dr. Alpert, she was just returning to his — Leonardo’s — and her stomping grounds: Montana.