April 30
9:40 a.m. PST
Click-click-click-click-click.
Alred shoved her way through the glass door into Bruno’s cafe. Whether or not Porter wanted to see her, Alred would tell it all, even if she had to slap him to get his attention.
There wasn’t anymore time.
She didn’t understand the reason why, but her intuition, her female sixth-sense that something hung out of balance, raised her blood-pressure.
Tapping the old man in the thin T-shirt, she said, “Bruno, I need some help.”
Click-click-click-click.
Rubbing the ends of a mustache reaching for his beardless chin, the boxer turned and said, “My pies are the answer to everything!”
“I need to find John Porter.”
“Hasn’t been in today,” said the owner of the cafe, cleaning the table again. “Why should I be doing this stuff?!? Where’s that girl!” he said to the kitchen.
“Someone has tried twice to kill him,” said Alred. “He’s hiding out, and he’ll want to speak with me.” A little exaggeration. She meant Porter would be glad by the end of their conversation. Well, she hoped Porter would feel that way. But it was too complicated to tell Bruno.
The old man laughed a gritty chuckle, but his eyes jolted when she insinuated attempted murder.
Someone shouted, “Brussels sprouts, Brassica oleracea!”
“You’ll eat what I give ya and like it!” Bruno said to the student with the friends and about two-thousand flashcards.
They laughed.
He looked at his task of wiping down the next table. “Running from you, eh,” Bruno said to Alred. “Don’t sound like he’s that interested!”
“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.”