None of this mattered anymore.
Staring at the walls of Kinnard’s silent office, she rubbed the tip of her tongue between the molars on the right side of her mouth. She closed her eyes and waited, but no one walked up the echoey hallway. Her jade eyes looked at the partly open door. Then they turned to the uncovered window, letting in the twilight darkness. It was the gaping hole she’d seen Porter glancing at as if it hid a beast about to spring. But there was something…the feeling she was being examined from afar by unseen eyes. She imagined Kinnard, Masterson, and the other backstabbing professors standing in a building across the way, watching her with a telescope and binoculars, laughing as she waited for advisors who wouldn’t come.
Rubbing her moist palms against the navy skirt wrapping her legs, she looked again at her nearly completed doctoral thesis. Yes, they said she couldn’t turn this in. KM-2 was gone.
There was nothing in her notes about KM-3 or Dr. Ulman’s paper. Ever wary of the thought police, Alred didn’t dare reveal the existence of the new codex. But surely she could still petition to present a version of the paper in her hands, omitting the illegally procured codex. Albright and Peterson had already published their thoughts on the matter. Why couldn’t she adjust her work to counter theirs? Porter would still publish something, no doubt. He was a froth-mouthed dog gone mad long ago.
What was she thinking?!?
Alred just couldn’t see this semester go completely to rot. All the time she’d spent tearing through ancient documents. All the stress working with John D(etermined) Porter. Listening to his moanings and constant arguments for why the codex had to be valid and why everyone was trying to kill him…
And what were her convictions about the project? What did she really believe?
She’d toss it all. It was the only conclusion.
Kinnard hadn’t asked her here to discuss anything more about her dissertation anyway. In fact, Alred had the peculiar sensation that she wasn’t supposed to be waiting in his office at all, that she should stand and sneak out of the building immediately.
A secretary had left the professor’s message on her answering machine. But what if the secretary had called the wrong person…no, that was silly.
So why had she brought her dissertation?
She refused to answer the thought.
Standing, she went to the window and stared at the parking lot smashed between the buildings below. She saw shadows move among the Datsuns, mini-vans, Ford trucks, and cars with the letter Z hidden somewhere in the shadows on their bodies.
From the voice inside her head, she heard new words: What if someone else had asked her to the office?
One of the shapes in the blue light below stepped away from a red Ford van.
Alred’s breath went solid in her lungs.
His hair had grown longer than she remembered it. He walked a little more hunched over than she recalled. His large nose and balding brow, and the way he looked in every direction as best he could, like a textbook paranoid case-it all gave him away with a scream: It was Dr. Ulman, striding quickly toward the office structure’s rear entrance, three floors beneath Alred’s feet.
She pressed her hands, her nose, her forehead against the glass as her heart doubled its pulsing pace. Ulman looked so small, standing far below in a woolen coat made of varying green threads.
The professor moved with determination, leaning slightly forward, driving his toes ahead of him as sensors while his eyes looked behind, to the left, the other side, forward, and back again…
Alred rapped on the window pane four times. She swallowed back the urge to shout his name, a useless gesture considering their distance and the obstacles between them. The window was locked permanently in place.
But there he was in the twilight. And he was alive! And no doubt he had called her! The secrets he could tell! The answers!
Her eyes touched quickly on the horizon, where the sun was now gone but firing yellow beams which the dark blue abyss overhead absorbed.
An almost black Crown Victoria stopped between Ulman and the office building. The rear doors opened on either side of the car.
What was this?
The man closest to the professor looked directly at Ulman, who froze like a rabbit weary of predators.
Alred watched words pass between Ulman and the stranger, though neither of them moved. She felt ice moving through her arteries. Both of the men who had exited the car stood within a footfall of the door that sprouted them. They wore dark suits, it seemed.
FBI? she thought, considering their possible involvement with Mrs. Ulman. Had they tracked him here?
Ulman had to get away from those men. Alred hit the window with the flat of her hand before remembering to control her emotions. The glass was cold.
Ulman waved a finger at the man nearest him, his body shaking as he spoke. He moved to turn away, speaking quickly words Alred could never possibly discern.
She watched the man nearest him nod once, twist his head away, and then duck back into the car.
Alred wasn’t paying attention to the other man in black, who stood with the car between himself and the other two, until the first flash.
Her forehead hit the glass pane as her eyes blew wide.
The second blast of light also wasn’t followed by a sound. Had Alred not seen the outstretched arms aiming the tightly held gun over the roof of the Crown Victoria, she wouldn’t have realized a silencer was in use.
Such man-killing paraphernalia were against the law in this country.
These weren’t agents of the FBI.
And Ulman was on the ground, torquing his body painfully.
Alred banged her shoulder against the window as she spun and shot out of the office toward the stairs. The elevator would take too long, she figured, and Ulman might be in critical condition…perhaps taking his last breaths.
She rammed Goldstien in the hallway.
“Whoa!” he said, but Alred heard no more before she hit her destination.
The door to the stairs slammed into the wall as she pulled on it and threw herself down the cement chasm. Down, her feet slapped the hard floor until she came to the landing, leaning her body and hanging onto the railing in order to whip around back the other direction, and down the steps, down, only to swing around again, and down…
On the first floor, Alred thumped the door like a battering ram. The door exploded aside as she sprinted to the rear entrance. She pushed the glass door out of her way and skidded her heels on the asphalt only when she came to the spot where Dr. Ulman had dropped.
But there was no body.
The Crown Victoria had vanished.
Her lungs burning, Alred looked up and scanned the parking lot.
Oaks waved and glowed in the dim yellow lamplight. The darkening blue sky growled.
She heard lost dogs barking and howling and chasing one another somewhere under the cloudy sky.
She squatted and touched the ground where she thought Ulman had landed. It was cold, with no memory of a shooting.