The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (9 page)

People were starting to trickle in as Oscar and I wheeled in drinks and snacks on a trolley. We parked it just inside the door, to one side of the podium, so that people could serve themselves as they entered. Xavier and Helen lingered by the side of the room while we were setting up.

“I’m surprised to see you here, Helen. I didn’t know you had an interest in Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon interactions,” I heard Xavier say.

“Neanderthal speech is something every linguist wonders about,” Helen said calmly. Any questions she or the rest of the audience had for Kamal would have to wait until the end of his presentation, after which the room would clear out, and the committee would decide whether to give his work a thumbs up or a thumbs down as PhD-worthy material. “I don’t see why we’ve concluded that they didn’t have the ability to speak based on their more robust anatomy.”

“It’s not a conclusion,” Xavier countered. “More like an assumption.”

“Assumptions have no place in research.”

“You won’t get an argument from me there, but you have to start somewhere.”

“I would prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. Really, a five-minute recording ought to do it,” Helen said. “Language should be easier to address than the question of why they went extinct.”

“True enough, I suppose. Dinner at Ingrid’s?”

“How about Panda Palace instead? Eight o’clock?”

“How about seven? Should I pick you up?”

“Let’s meet there,” Helen said, turning to the food trolley.

Their strong personalities had always grated on each other, but they had at last realized that it wasn’t a sign that they shouldn’t be together, merely that they shouldn’t take disagreements personally. Helen had told me in confidence that she and Xavier were talking about moving back in together.

Oscar headed back to his post to point newcomers to the right classroom, and Dr. Mooney took a seat in the front row. I followed Helen up the auditorium stairs—I didn’t stick around for every thesis defense, but would have for Kamal’s even if I wasn’t hiding from Quinn. The auditorium was the larger of the two TTE classrooms; the seating was stadium-style, with half desks attached to each seat. Although the Neanderthal story had yet to break widely (a press conference was planned for next week if Kamal passed his defense), rumors of lurid Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon footage had spread throughout campus, and people were steadily streaming into the room. Judging by what I had seen of Kamal’s slides, unless anyone was fascinated by the technical issues regarding safe landing zones in the Neander Valley, most of the audience was going to be very disappointed.

Kamal stood fidgeting by the large Smart Board as he waited for the proceedings to begin. Dr. Mooney and Dr. Little were in the front row, level with the speaker’s stand. Dr. Mooney was doodling on a napkin—many great scientific ideas sprang from idle thinking—while Dr. Little, clean-shaven and dressed in his trademark button-down vest, sat hunched over his laptop, his fingers moving furiously. Dr. Payne had yet to show. I hoped he hadn’t forgotten about the defense—a faux pas not unheard of in the over-scheduled world of academia. I sent a small wave of encouragement in Kamal’s direction, but he didn’t notice. I muted my cell phone, which was just about the only thing I could do to help besides providing the food.

Dr. Payne hurried in at last, extinguishing his cigarette on his way in and flicking it into a wastebasket (I hoped it wouldn’t cause a flare-up). He took a seat next to Dr. Mooney, who, as the chairing member, nodded at Kamal to begin. Dr. Little continued typing furiously for a bit, then closed his laptop and settled back into his seat.

His nervousness dissipating after a few minutes, Kamal slipped into what came naturally to him, speaking about a subject he loved. His nervousness had not sprung from a fear of public speaking, but from the fact that the three people seated closest to the podium would decide whether he would receive his PhD at the end of the semester. Most thesis defenses went well. Occasionally, a committee member would recommend additional research, and the student’s graduation date and near-term job prospects would have to be adjusted accordingly. Rarely—I had only seen it once—a committee or audience member would spot a significant flaw in the work, something that made both the student and the mentoring professor, who in this case was Dr. Mooney, look bad. Dr. Little was already familiar with Kamal’s work, so Dr. Payne was the only one likely to throw a wrench into the proceedings.

Kamal had started by explaining that stepping out of STEWie’s basket into the land of our closest prehistoric relatives (and their chunkier cousins) presented its own set of risks, beyond the usual perils inherent to time travel like ghost zones and exposure to now-eradicated diseases. If you got time-stuck, the list of threats was long: hunger, thirst, the elements, wildlife, cannibalistic tribes—of both Neanderthals and early humans—and so on. Dr. B and Abigail, who were next door readying for their run to eighteenth-century France, could be reasonably sure they wouldn’t be murdered by a thieving local or struck by lightning in a storm. There was a simple reason for that. Either scenario would expose the strangeness of the visitors from the future, from the manufactured undergarments under their period clothes to their unusually white teeth to the camera equipment and notebooks hidden in their satchels. But when you jumped thirty thousand years into the past and got hit by lightning, the most likely fate for your charred, injured body was that it would be consumed by an animal. Your hiking boots and clothes would decompose to nothing over the millennia, changing History not one bit.

All of which made Kamal sound like he was the wiry, hardy sort, when in fact he was, like I said before, what might be charitably described as slightly overweight and more fond of mental exercise than the physical variety. My guess was that he’d been attracted to research in extreme far-time because he wasn’t expected to go near any of the locals, thus minimizing his chances of catching some exotic disease.

Helen sat up at one point when Kamal brought up one of the big questions—namely,
Did Neanderthals speak?
His team had heard shouts here and there as they took photos from afar, but whether these sounds could be classified as language or were mere grunts alerting others to danger or the presence of game, he couldn’t say, nor was it his job to do so. That was Helen’s specialty. I expected a request to land on my desk as early as the next morning for a STEWie run to one of Kamal’s landing zones.

After a good twenty minutes of slides crammed with equations, during which I may or may not have dozed off for a bit, Kamal tossed up a couple of slides that sent a chuckle through the audience and I sat up. They were the ones I had seen when I previewed the presentation at his desk. He had used software which mimicked pencil drawing to sketch out some of the stills from his footage, giving the more salacious photos the feel of a cartoon—and protecting the privacy, even thirty thousand years into the future, of the individuals involved. I saw the corner of Xavier Mooney’s mouth twitch as he turned back to glance at the audience, but he kept on his official committee member expression. It did seem like he was finally back to his normal self, and I was pretty sure Helen deserved much of the credit for that.

As Kamal neared the end of his presentation I leaned down to dig up my cell phone out of my shoulder bag to see if Dr. Holm had responded to my request for a second meeting—or if Quinn had been in touch. I flicked on the phone. There was a text message from Dr. Holm, but not the one I had expected. All it said was,

HELP

Before I could do more than raise a puzzled eyebrow, the auditorium door flew open. It was Dr. Baumgartner, Abigail’s advising professor, and the clatter of her wooden clogs was amplified in the silence that suddenly descended on the room as Kamal stopped mid-sentence. A white bonnet covered the professor’s blonde hair above her mushroom-colored bodice and drab, green ankle-length skirt. She struggled to get the words out. “STEWie’s basket—they’re gone—”

Dr. Mooney pushed himself to his feet. “Who’s gone?”

The professor jerked the bonnet off her head. “Someone has hijacked STEWie.”

Dammit, I thought. Quinn.

9

Drs. Mooney and Little hurried out of the classroom after Dr. B, leaving the thesis committee two short and Kamal openmouthed at the unexpected interruption to his defense. I scrambled down the auditorium stairs, following the three professors as they raced down the hallway to the double doors of STEWie’s lab, where Oscar was standing, concern writ large on his usually tranquil features.

“I’ve called campus security,” he said, stepping aside to let us pass. “They’re on their way.”

A single glance told us that all was not well at the lab. Abigail, dressed in period clothes similar to Dr. B’s, was at a workstation frantically tapping keys. Nearby, a computer monitor and several lab notebooks had been knocked to the floor, as if someone had passed by in a hurry. The monitor had landed against a chair leg, its cable still plugged into the floor socket, its screen cracked. On the whiteboards behind the workstations, STEWie destination ideas and taped-up photos from past runs remained undisturbed. Beyond the whiteboards was STEWie’s heart—a labyrinth of lasers and highly polished mirrors, some as small as a file folder and
others
almost grazing the lofty balloon roof of the building. Our view of the platform in the middle was concealed by one of the larger mirrors but residual heat from the STEWie send-off radiated from within.

I took in all of this as I registered snatches of conversation between the three professors and Abigail:

“They went in blind and didn’t calibrate!”

“What’s to be done?”

“We can’t just follow them, can we?”

Then I heard Dr. Baumgartner’s voice rise above the rest: “Why does stuff like this always happen just before
my
runs?”

How had Quinn done it?

One of the disturbed lab notebooks had fallen open to a page covered in spidery equations. A horseshoe-shaped object peeked out from underneath, sky blue and thin. I pushed the notebook off it with my foot and bent down to pick up the headband. It was Dr. Holm’s.

“In here.” It was Oscar, with Nate behind him and Officer Van Underberg bringing up the rear. The three professors turned to Nate and began to speak simultaneously.

“Unauthorized use of STEWie has occurred—”

“The basket is gone—”

“Someone who’s not on the roster has taken off in STEWie’s basket—”

Nate held up a hand. “Somebody fill me in,” he said in his security chief voice, the one that got people listening. “Who is it and where have they gone?”

Abigail pushed through between the professors. Her
outfit was a smaller version of the period-appropriate attire Dr. Baumgartner was wearing, down to the bonnet. Rather inappropriately under the circumstances, I wondered what color her hair was under her bonnet. I had gone to work before she and Sabina made an appearance for breakfast.

“Dr. B and I were in the travel apparel closet across the hall getting ready for our run to eighteenth-century France, the usual stuff, right? With us were two STEWie newbies who were coming along. Dr. B had to give them a rundown of History’s rules, so I came into the lab to get everything ready. I found it like this.” She shrugged at the mess on the floor as the cracked monitor let out a brief electrical buzz before dying for good. “I checked the log and saw that someone had just left on a run.”

“Who was it? And where did they go?” Nate asked, his arms crossed over his campus security uniform. Next to him, Officer Lars Van Underberg was busy scribbling notes. Where Nate was lanky and reserved, his officer was short, stocky, and affable. He was partial to stroking his caramel-colored mustache nervously when in deep thought. The pencil and sharpener he’d used to carry to avoid getting ink stains on his uniform had long been replaced with the ballpoint pen he was scribbling with now.

Dr. B impatiently shuffled her clogs. “Where did they go? No idea. It’s not like STEWie here has a large display with the time and date on it. Who was it? Two people is all we can tell you at the moment.”

“Did the…uh, newbies, see anything?” Nate asked.

“They were still with me in the classroom when Abigail called. I’ve sent them to the grad student office to wait.”

As Officer Van Underberg jotted all this down, I asked Oscar, “Did you see anyone suspicious enter the building?” I didn’t want to bring Quinn into it if there was a chance that someone else—say, Dr. Holm herself—had hijacked STEWie. It was unlikely that she had done so, given the message she’d sent me, but I held on to the slim hope.

Oscar turned his palms upward. “You saw what it was like, Julia. All of those people came in for Kamal Ahmad’s defense. They seemed like a normal school crowd.” He was clearly distraught that this had happened on his watch. A wiry
ex-Ma
rine with a heart of gold, he spent more time at his post than off it. “None of them seemed out of place.” He reconsidered for a moment, then added, “Except perhaps for a blond man who came in with a large backpack. But he said he knew Julia—called you Jules—so I figured it was okay.”

Nate turned his square jaw in my direction. I went on talking to Oscar. “Did he have a tan?”

“Uh—yes. And a dark blue Hawaiian shirt, I think.”

“Really?” This surprised me. The third rule of time travel was
Blend in
. A Hawaiian shirt, though a staple in Quinn’s wardrobe, was surely the wrong thing to wear to either the finding or the carving of the runestone. Even Quinn should have known that. Maybe it wasn’t him after all.

“Julia? Is he describing who I think he is?” Nate asked.

I sighed. There was no way around it. By now everyone in the room was looking in my direction, even Dr. Little, and it took a lot to wrest his attention away from a computer. After a quick glance at his superior, Officer Van Underberg cleared his throat and asked, “Ms. Olsen, you say you know the man in the Hawaiian shirt?”

“I’m pretty sure that it’s my ex—that is, my husband. Quinn.” I went on. “He has this crazy plan to prove that his grandfather told the truth when he said he witnessed the discovery of the Kensington Runestone as a boy. Have you all heard of it? I can tell you more about it later…Anyway, he thinks the stone is real.”

As Nate opened his mouth to speak, I brought up the only reason left why this might
not
be Quinn’s doing. “Wait, he wouldn’t have had the door code to the TTE lab.”

With Oscar around to keep an eye on things, the doors to the building were kept unlocked during the day, but the TTE lab itself was always secured. Only the TTE staff and students had the door code, along with researchers from other departments who were on the roster for the month. As soon as I said it, I realized that a door code would not have stopped Quinn. There were ways around that, from snooping around in my office to charming someone into letting him in. “There’s more. I received a message from Dagmar Holm a few minutes ago. Here, take a look.”

Nate raised two dark eyebrows at my cell phone. “She’s the runic specialist you mentioned yesterday?”

“What does it say?” Abigail crowded in to look. “
Help
. What does that mean?”

“Also—this is Dr. Holm’s headband. I found it on the floor.” The headband had somehow found its way into my pocket.

Officer Van Underberg accepted the headband and placed it into a Ziploc bag he pulled from one of his uniform pockets. “Has anything else been disturbed, Ms. Olsen?” he asked quietly.

“Sorry. I should have left it in place. It’s just—I can’t figure out what happened.”

Still in the same quiet voice, Van Underberg asked, “You think Mr. Olsen forced Dr. Holm to take him into—what year would it be?”

“1898, I imagine, the year the runestone was found. Or 1362, when it was supposedly carved. But this isn’t how he operates.”

“Does Mr. Olsen own a gun or a hunting rifle?”

“Does he own a
what
? Not to my knowledge. I don’t understand,” I said. “This makes no sense. If you told me Quinn had charmed Dagmar into an off-the books run, I’d believe it. But this…” I looked at the overturned monitor, lifeless and silent on the floor.

I saw Officer Van Underberg hunt around in his uniform for a second Ziploc bag and reached to take my phone back from Nate before the officer could bag it. I needed my phone. There was a seminar-scheduling conflict I had to resolve, not to mention several other office-related issues. Also, perhaps Quinn would call to tell me he was on his way back to Phoenix. Meaning that some other tanned, blond, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing individual with an interest in the runestone and a reality TV show would turn out to be the culprit.

Nate put his hand on his sidearm. “Van Underberg is right. We have to treat this as a possible kidnapping. We need to go after them and get them back. Van Underberg, let’s go.”

The pair headed toward STEWie’s platform in the center of the mirror-laser array.