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.