Serpent (43 page)

He nodded. "Halcon sounds like an interesting person. Would there ever be a chance of interviewing him, perhaps if I gave you advance notice?"

"You'd have a better chance of interviewing Henry Ford." The dazzling smile again. "I don't mean to be flip, but Mr. Halcon is a very private man."

"I understand."

She looked at her watch. "I'm afraid I have to go." She slid a thick folder across the desk "This is our press kit. Give it a read, and if you have any more questions, please call me. I'd be glad to put you in touch with volunteers who could give you a firsthand account of their experience."

"That would be very helpful. Maybe I could sign up for an expedition myself. They're not dangerous, are they?"

She gave him an odd look "We pride ourselves on Time-Quest's safety record. Even in the remotest locations safety is our most important consideration. You remember, I said many retired people participate in our program." She paused. "Those are the expeditions we organize. The ones we support with partial funding are on their own. But overall our record is very good You're safer on one of our adventures than you are crossing the street in San Antonio."

"I'll remember that," Zavala said, wondering if Ms. Harper were truly aware of all that went on in her organization.

"There's a calendar of events for the upcoming year in that kit. If something interests you, let me know, and I'll see what can be arranged."

She ushered him back to the lobby, shook hands, and disappeared down a corridor.

Melody smiled. "How was your interview?"

"Short and sweet." He looked after the retreating figure. "She reminds me of that old television commercial where the guy talked like a machine gun."

Melody cocked her head coquettishly. "Well, there are always the night spots."

"Thanks for the reminder. I'm looking for the really out-of-theway places where the younger, inside group goes. If you don't have other plans, maybe I can buy you lunch and we can talk about the night life in this town."

"There's a great restaurant not far from here. Eclectic and very popular. I could meet you there around noon:"

Zavala scribbled the directions and took the elevator down to the lobby He went over to the directory again and listed the subdivisions of Halcon Industries in his notebook There were eight in all. Mainly concentrated around mining and shipping, as the PR director had explained. He took the elevator up past Time-Quest and stepped out into a big lobby with a receptionist and mural-sized wall pictures of ore carriers. Halcon Shipping. He told the receptionist he must have the wrong floor and got back in the elevator.

He repeated his routine at every other company under the Halcon aegis. The offices were all pretty much the same, except for the murals. The receptionists were all young and attractive. He pressed the button for the very highest office in the Halcon tier, but the elevator sped right by it. When he got out he was in the hushed precincts of a law firm.

"Excuse me," he asked the secretary, who was plain and efficient looking. "I just pressed the button for the floor below and ended up here."

"That happens all the time. The suites below us are for Halcon executives. You need a special code to make the elevator go there."

"Well, if I ever need legal advice, I'll know where to come."

He returned to the lobby, hoping he hadn't stirred the suspicions of security staff in his on-a-gain, off-again elevator rides. After the destruction of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, it would not be wise to be seen casing an office building. He went down to ground level, caught a cab, then another to make sure he wasn't being followed, and hung around a bookstore until it was time to meet Melody.

The restaurant was called the Bomb Shelter, and it was decorated with a 1950s theme. They sat at a booth made with seats from a 1957 DeSoto convertible. Melody was a Texas girl, born and bred in Fort Worth, and had been with Time-Quest about a year.

Over lunch, Zavala said, "Ms. Harper was telling me about the big guy Mr. Halcon. Have you ever met him?"

"Not in person, but I see him every day. I stay at the office an extra hour after everybody else leaves so I can do some studying. I'm taking law courses." She smiled. "I don't intend to be a receptionist forever. Mr. Halcon stays late, too, and we leave the same time. He comes down in his private elevator, and a limo picks him up."

She'd heard Halcon lived outside the city, but beyond that Melody didn't know much about him.

"What does he look like?" Zavala said.

"Dark, thin, rich. Handsome in a creepy sort of way" She laughed. "Maybe it's just the light down there in the garage."

Melody was intelligent and witty, and Zavala felt like a cad when he took her number to set up a tour of night spots. He made a note to smooth things out with a call when he got back to Washington. After lunch he found a library and used the Internet to read about Halcon Industries holdings. His findings pretty much conformed to the brief description Ms. Harper had given him. Then he went to an auto rental place where he rented an ordinary-looking mid-sized car and picked up a tourist brochure on the Alamos. Might as well absorb some Texas history while he waited for his rendezvous with the mysterious Mr. Halcon.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

30 NINA KIROV SMILED AS SHE PLACED the telephone in its cradle, thinking how interesting her life had become since she had met Kurt Austin. When the platinum-haired man with the linebacker's physique and remarkable eyes wasn't plucking her from the Moroccan sea or running sting operations in Arizona, he was, popping up with the strangest requests. Like this one. See what she could find out about an artifact, probably made of stone, perhaps removed by Columbus from Jamaica on one of his expeditions, which may have had a navigational function and might still be in Spain.

Wait'll Doc hears this, she thought as she dialed the phone. Doc was Dr. J. Linus Orville, a Harvard professor with more letters behind his name than a can of alphabet soup. Orville made his lair behind the ivy-covered walls at Harvard's Peabody Museum. He had gained international repute as an ethnologist specializing in Meso-american culture. Among Cambridge academics he was recognized for his brilliance and his reputation as something of a nutty professor

Zooming around Harvard Square, on a chopped antique Harley Davidson was not something done by most tenured professors. A few years earlier he gained more widespread notoriety by hypnotizing UFO abductees and announcing publicly that he believed they had been kidnapped by aliens. His telephone number had gone into the card file of every freak beat newspaper reporter in the city Whenever reporters needed a quick quip on any subject in the universe, particularly the weird, they could rely on good old Doc the Harvard professor.

He carefully kept his more esoteric interests separated from his academic specialty. You would never find him claiming that Aztec temples were built by refugees from the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu. The hierarchy at Harvard would tolerate his oddities, every university has its resident fruitcakebut in his own field Doc's credentials had to remain without blemish. Some who had noticed that the gleam in Orville's eye was one not of madness but of intense amusement suggested Doc's eccentricities were well calculated so that he would meet women and be invited to all the right parties.

Doc had forsaken his UFO phase by the time Nina met him at one such gathering. Orville spied her across the room, brushed aside the attractive female grad student he was entertaining, and made a beeline in Nina's direction. She had never met him before but recognized his mop of long red hair, the style referred to by his students as "retro Einstein." Within minutes he was going on about his latest passion: past lives.

Nina listened attentively, then asked, "Why has everyone who has lived a past life been a king or a queen or other royal figure when most people were probably flea-infested farmers trying to scratch a life out of the mud?"

"Aha," he said. eyes practically g with glee." A dangerous woman. A thinker The answer is very simple. These people choose whose body they will inhabit in their new life. What do you think of that?"

"I think it's a lot of hooey, and I think I need a refill on my wine. Would you be so kind? I prefer red."

"Charmed," he said, and set off to the bar like an obedient puppy, returning with a full glass and a plateful of shrimp and caviar.

"Let's not talk about past lives," he said. "I only do that to meet fascinating women."

"You do?' Nina said, with genuine shock at his frankness.

And to get invited to parties. It works. Here I am, and here you are."

"I'm disappointed. Everyone told me you were pixilated."

"I don't even know how to spell that," he said with a sigh. "You know, we are such a dull gray stuffy bunch, we professors. We take ourselves far too seriously, harrumphing about as if we were truly wise men and not just overeducated nerds. What's wrong with being a little colorful to make oneself stand out from the crowd? There's the added advantage of being shunned by those stodgy old fussbudgets."

"The UFO abductees. That was all a sham?"

"Heavens no. I truly believe they believe they were kidnapped. Some of my colleagues do, too; they're just jealous because they weren't. But let's talk about you. I've heard good things about your work."

And talk they did. Behind the nutty professor's mad facade lurked an interesting and interested person. They did not become romantically involved, as he would have liked. Even better, they were friends and colleagues who respected. each other.

Orville," came the voice on the phone. Doc never said hello.

"Hi, Doc. It's Nina" He hated what he called banalities, so she cut right to the chase. "I need your help with an odd request."

"Odd is my middle name. What can I do for you?"

Nina relayed Austin's query.

"You know, that sounds vaguely familiar."

"You're not joking, Doc."

"Nononono. It was something in my Fortean file." Orville considered himself a modern day version of Charles Fort, the nineteenth-century journalist who collected stories about odd happenings such as red snow, unexplained lights, or frogs falling from the sky.

"Why does that not surprise me?" Nina said.

"I'm always reorganizing the file. You never can tell when someone will call arid ask a crazy question." He hung up; Orville was not known for saying goodbye, either.

Nina shrugged and went back to her work. Before long the fax hummed and a single sheet slid out. At the top was a handscrawled note: Ask and ye shall receive. Love, Doc. It was a copy of a newspaper clip from the Boston Globe dated March 1956:

MYSTERY ITALIAN ARTIFACT ON ITS WAY TO AMERICA

Genoa, Italy (AP)A mysterious stone tablet unearthed in a dusty museum basement may soon yield its ancient secrets.

The massive inscribed stela, carved with lifesized figures and strange writing, was discovered in the Museo Archeologico. Florence, in March of this year.

Preparations are being made to ship it to the United States where it will be examined by experts.

The museum was planning an exhibition entitled "Treasures from the Basement." to bring to light items from its collection that had languished in storage for decades.

The stone artifact is in the shape of a rectangular slab, giving rise to speculation that it might have been part of a wall. It is more than six feet tall, four feet wide, and a foot thick.

What have puzzled scholars who have seen it and stirred up controversy in the scientific community are the carvings on one side.

Some maintain that the figures and writing are without a doubt of Central American, probably Mayan, origin.

"This is not a great mystery," says Dr. Stephano Gallo, head curator at the museum. "Even if it is Mayan it could have been brought back from the Americas during the Spanish Conquest."