“What can I do for you, Calista?”

  “Colin, there’s no nice way of saying this, but I have reason to believe that Tom was murdered.” She paused a second and inhaled sharply. “By a human being, maybe with help from a rattlesnake. Premeditation, a cognitive skill I don’t believe reptiles possess.” Calista laid out the computer printouts from the two Wyoming files, the one she and Charley had compiled based on Tom’s work before going to Rosestone and the information she had gathered from Gardiner’s lab. Colin was dutifully attentive. He asked the right questions. Because of his familiarity with Tom’s work, he knew what to show surprise over—the shift of focus from strictly dating information to that of the geomagnetic latitudes as indicated by the dips.

  Colin shuffled through several sheafs of printout. “What’s this?” There was something almost rhetorical in his tone. Colin pointed casually to the blowup of the anomalous magnetic curves.

  “We’re not sure,” Charley said. “It just looks like the noisiest part of the magnetic curves. We can’t figure out why Dad would have blowups of these, because either way they’re impossible to get an age or a latitude fix from.”

  Out of the corner of her eye Calista noticed that Colin was not even looking at the blowup but was focused on Charley. When he looked up at Calista and saw that she was observing him he quickly shifted his eyes to the printout. “I don’t know about these, Charley. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  That’s when she knew he was lying, or at least concealing something. If Colin Mercer didn’t know something, he always had an opinion. She had figured this out the first time she had ever met him. He never played the role of the naive conjecturer mucking about with frayed guesswork. He was the hard-nosed investigative journalist— always. Up until this moment he had done everything right—been attentively inquisitive, appropriately solicitous, careful to show an intellectual kind of sympathy as opposed to a purely emotional one. But despite all this, even if he knew something more than they did about these printouts, Calista knew that he was essentially dismissing her notion of murder. She sensed it. Then he said it.

  “Calista, honey . . .” Oh God, she knew it was coming. Why did they always use some half-assed term of endearment when they were about to call you a fool. “I don’t think you’ve got a lot to go on here.” She sighed loudly. “Now wait a minute, Calista. Just hold on. Let’s think about this. Supposing you’re right about Gardiner. Supposing he was planting things out there and supposing he did become suspicious of Tom’s being out there. If he knew so much about the wonders of the Time Slicer, which I sincerely doubt that he did, why didn’t he just ... uh ...” He paused.

  “What?” pressed Calista. She could tell that he was trying to figure out something short of murder Gardiner could have done to foul up Tom.

  “Put a few magnets around for instance. Maybe that accounts for those anomalous images with the crazy noise. Why wouldn’t he do that if he was worried?”

  “Why? Because he was insane, that’s why! He’d backed himself into a corner.” Calista’s voice rose. “He’d lose fifty thousand or a hundred thousand or whatever in funds—from you guys, from Harvard, from the Smithsonian, the National Endowment. What’s he going to do, go to Las Vegas and play the one-armed bandits for research money? He knew a few magnets couldn’t keep Tom away forever.”

  “So what do you think happened? Did he commit suicide?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was an accident or maybe someone killed him.”

  Colin opened his eyes wide. There was a trace of fear mixed with horror. “What do you mean, Calista?”

  “Suicide makes more sense. Maybe he felt guilty. I don’t know. But one thing I’m sure of is that neither Tom’s nor Peter’s death is a vendetta as led by the Rattlesnake Association of Greater Nevada.” “Calista.” Colin leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know how I can help you.”

  “You don’t?” She looked at him levelly like no “honey” ever looked.

  “No, I don’t. Do you?” There was a trace of annoyance in his voice.

  “I’m sorry, Colin, if I inconvenienced you in any way.”

  “Now Calista, don’t go saying stuff like that. It was no inconvenience.” They had gotten up and started to leave. “It’s never an inconvenience seeing a lovely lady.”

  “Even if it’s about murder?”

  “Come off it, Calista!”

  “It’s hard, Colin.”

  “I know.” He put his hand on the back of her neck and rubbed it in a way that was something slightly more than paternal or consoling. A fragment from an old Dylan song ran through her head— “don’t need much that ain’t no lie, love that country pie.”

  “You know, I’ve got a confession to make, Colin.”

  “What’s that dear?” He was still rubbing the back of her neck. “You know my pie?” He flushed for a second. “My pecan pie?” “Oh, yes?”

  “Well, tell your wife that the recipe isn’t original. It came off the label from a bottle of Kahlua. I wouldn’t want her to think I was excessively talented.”

  “Oh, definitely not.” He had removed his hand from the back of her neck. “But speaking of your talents, my dear. We’re thinking of a story on Hans Christian Anderson’s Denmark. How would you like to write it and do some illustrations to go along with the photographs? Nice trip to Denmark!”

  “No thanks, Colin.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just doesn’t interest me, that’s all.” The idea was actually enough to make her puke. She could just imagine the article now, written in the inimitable Geographic style. “There I was caught in the beak of a swan! I gasped and said to National Geographic photographer Sam Jordan, also caught, as we flew through an icy gale over the Baltic—‘Gee, Sam, I think a sliver of ice has pierced my heart!’ We were in the land of Hans Christian Anderson and below quaint village folk tilled the soil.”

  Colin walked her to the elevator, kissed her on the cheek, and shook hands with Charley. Calista gave him her best First Lady smile.

  She and Charley went through the exhibit in the Explorer’s Hall entitled The Discovery of Prehistoric Man. Life-sized mannequins of prehistoric peoples had been set in caves in a variety of poses depicting early life. It was a nicely conceived exhibit, beginning with eight million years ago and the Australopithecus man standing in some brush near his dwelling. She and Charley followed the ramp toward the advent of the Neanderthal man seventy thousand years ago. There was a mound of dirt with some dried flowers on it. A woman and child were shown near the grave holding another bunch of flowers. The woman had a comforting arm around the child’s shoulders. His face was buried in her fur wrap. A caption read “Pollen evidence on grave mounds indicates an early stirring of man’s spiritual as well as aesthetic awareness and his growing awareness of himself as a social creature.” In other words, Calista thought, these weren’t tree sloths, they were grieving human beings. Five million years of natural selection and what was the most precious refinement? The most elegant adaptation of man’s evolution? The upright posture? The opposable thumb? No, Calista thought, the human tear. Salt and water.

  Chapter 24

  “Valerie,” Colin said as he passed his secretary’s desk on his way back to his office, “call up Nat Butterworth and tell him I’m going to have to cancel our lunch at the Cosmos Club today. See if next week is okay for him—Tuesday.” He shut the door to his office, picked up the phone, and punched the button for an outside line. “Dial-a-Spook!” he muttered, and spun through his Rolodex. “Extension 716.” He waited till it was answered. “What the fuck are you guys doing over there? It’s Colin.” He looked at his watch. Eleven-thirty. “Kindly meet me in the park in fifteen minutes and we can tiptoe through the tulips and discuss your agency’s latest antics. And by the way, to make it easy for whoever is listening in. This is Colin Mercer, associate editor of the National Geographic. Phone number 732-6400 and under the Freedom of Information Act I can call in for a tape of this conversation and make it into toilet paper or a lead article for the Geographic if I want. Bye bye!” He grabbed his coat out of the closet and walked out the door of his office. “Be back in an hour, Val.”

  Colin Mercer walked out of the Geographic, crossed 17th Street, and headed south. He stopped at the Yummy’s in the same block with the Mayflower Hotel and went in. There were six different kinds of quiche and twenty varieties of yogurt. The menu looked like a fast- food collaboration between the Junior League and an ashram.

  He walked up to the counter. “I’ll take a peach walnut yogurt and a tomato and green pepper quiche and uh ... a bagel and coffee light.” So much for his grilled Dover sole, delicate new potatoes, and the Montrachet that would have been his lunch at the Cosmos Club. The girl put it all in a paper bag. He walked out. At 17th and K, he crossed the street to Farragut Park. He walked diagonally across the park to the southwest corner. On the bench was a man in his late thirties eating a yogurt.

  “You eat this shit too?” Colin asked, sitting down next to him.

  “Got an ulcer.”

  “I would if I worked where you do.”

  “Okay. What’s bugging you, Colin?”

  “Odd term for you to be using. All right. What the hell’s going on out in Nevada? When did you guys get on to Jacobs’ case?” “First get on to it?”

  “No. I knew, he knew you were on to it in Nevada.”

  “Fifteen months ago. That was his only trip.”

  “So what? Why were you out there bird-dogging him?”

  “You tell me.” It was a typical spook response.

  “Okay, let’s see, summer of 1980. Carter had decided to go for the comprehensive test ban. By that summer, July, the main outlines of a treaty had been worked out. There would be a number of seismic detection stations, voluntary on-site inspections.”

  “All that groundwork had been done, Colin, by 77-78. It was just reported in 80.”

  “So what are you getting at?” Mercer asked.

  “By the time the report had been issued in 80, presidential desire had cooled, so to speak.”

  “Yep, and here we are late 81 and the administration wants to defer trilateral negotiation on a comprehensive test ban.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, you’re a regular Socrates aren’t you?” Mercer had raised his eyebrow. “Because as the Post reported this morning, ‘verification problems with underground testing.’ ”

  “And whose little machine all but eliminated those problems, be they on site, off site, seismic, or other?”

  “Other. And it was Jacobs.” Mercer set down his coffee. “You bastards didn’t . . .”

  “Terminate with extreme prejudice? No, we didn’t, Colin. And nobody’s going to get hurt.”

  “So what’s happening out there? You training a reptile unit?” “We just want to know what he knew—national security.” “National security my ass! And what’s happening in Cambridge?” “We have a guy there taking care of loose ends.”

  “Mrs. Jacobs thinks that Gardiner did in her husband because he was on to some sort of archaeological forgery. The Time Slicer was going to provide the smoking gun.”

  “She’s right. It was very convenient for us.”

  Mercer clenched his fist. He hadn’t punched a guy out since he was a private training at Fort Devens in 1953. “I can imagine

  how convenient! It wasn’t very convenient for Mrs. Jacobs and her son.”

  “No.” The man colored slightly. “That desert rat from the Smithsonian, he’s out there now sniffing out the forgery theory.”

  “Arch Baldwin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, in other words, there’s a lot of dogs barking up the wrong trees.”

  “We’re barking up the right tree. We just want to know what Jacobs knew. Now that’s all I can tell you.”

  Mercer crumpled up his coffee cup. He looked at the man. “When you going to get out of the spook business and make an honest living?”

  “I didn’t come here to talk career development. Look, Colin, I try to do you a favor every now and then.”

  “Then do me this one. Make sure Calista Jacobs and her son don’t get hurt.”

  They had stood up to leave. The man looked down and then raised his eyes and looked at Mercer. “All right, Colin, I’ll try.”

  “Try!”

  Mercer went back to his office.

  “No calls, Val,” he said as he passed her desk. He shut the door, then went to his safe. He took out an unmarked file. In the folder there were some hastily written notes signed T.J., as well as some small pieces of paper with numbers on them. Across the top of one, scrawled in Jacobs’ handwriting, was the word Wyoming. Across the top of another in Mercer’s hand were the letters R.S. 8/23/80, 8/24/80. He remembered clearly the afternoon the call had come through. Jacobs had been calling from a pay phone in Reno. Had Tom Jacobs ever made it back to Cambridge he would have sent him the final printouts of the blownup magnetic noise from Rosestone. What Calista had from Wyoming was good, suggestive, but Jacobs had refined the machine so much since then. The images he would have brought back would have been conclusive. Still there was a lot to go on; a lot to get the dogs barking up the right tree.

  There was plenty to suggest that verification problems were not as great as certain people would like them to be. It really was no longer a question of “What now?” as “When?” He had known what he had to do for maybe three years, since the time Tom Jacobs first told him what he was suspecting the Time Slicer was picking up out there. Jacobs hadn’t yet seen the significance of peculiar and infinitesimally small magnetic variations that had surfaced in some of the transitional elements. Later, through refinements of the instrument, he was able to go back and zero in on that whole can of worms.

  Mercer had helped to blow a few whistles in the past. When everybody else was photographing GIs enjoying the exotic pleasures of R and R in Bangkok and touting Thailand as our secure ally in Southeast Asia, Mercer had been up in the far northeast of the country photographing the bloody battles between Communist insurgents and CIA-advised Thai troops. The Geographic had run some of his photos, upsetting a lot of people in the State Department. So what would he do now? Or, rather, how and when and what would be his first move? It would have to be quick. He didn’t want anything to happen to Calista and Charley Jacobs. If they realized the true significance of those files, a rattler might show up for them in Cambridge.

  Chapter 25

  Von Sackler worked efficiently. Before he had arrived at Calista’s house he had picked up the user’s manual of the Jacobses’ computer and read thoroughly the section about locked files. He was virtually sure that the Wyoming and Rosestone files would be locked. In short, without a somewhat intricate procedure, no information could be changed. Orders were that anything on the files damaging to security had to be erased. There was no telling, of course, if any printouts had already been made, but Calista must have taken something with her to Washington to support her salting-the-site theory. Unfortunately, she must have also taken the Time Sheer with her. He had thoroughly checked the basement workshop, Charley’s room, and the study. The agency wanted the Slicer as much as it wanted the information it produced. It had been, after all, news of the existence of a second Time Slicer that had precipitated this operation. The last thing they wanted was for this instrument to get into the hands of nuclear freeze people, or the Union of Concerned Freaks, as they called them.

  He had copied down on two pieces of paper all the original information he needed for the agency and, if his hunch were correct, what he needed for the Scroops. He was virtually sure that the odd mother and son were at the root of the fraud perpetrated by Gardiner. Tobias Scroop’s skill in reproducing stone tools was uncanny. Nor did the

  Scroops limit themselves to stone. He was fairly certain that the Huari headband with the anthropomorphic designs that he had seen when Diane Rudolf had taken him through the Cyclotron a few days before was fake and indeed the handiwork of Tobias Scroop. Together, the Scroops were more intimately familiar with the Peabody’s collections than anyone else. Jean Scroop, as he well knew through his own position at the Altertumskunde, had managed all of the Andean materials for the last fifteen years. In fact Jerrold Weiner, the field anthropologist, was rather a newcomer on the scene and his knowledge of the collection itself was probably not nearly as thorough as Jean Scroop’s, who had supervised the conservation, cataloguing, loaning, display, and storage of it. It constituted a kind of raw physical knowledge of materials’ condition rather than the purely scholarly and it was this kind of knowledge that would enable the Scroops to do their work effectively. When he remembered, as he had just that morning, the news of Bregman having sold to a Fort Worth couple a Huari headband for their pre-Columbian collection it had all clicked.

  He got up from the desk. The paper for the agency he put in his left pocket, the one for the Scroops in his right. With one he would effectively end his “chosen” career, the one that had in fact not chosen him. With the other, well, if things worked out with the Scroops, this would be his last job on his “unchosen” career. Careful investing should preclude any need for this kind of work. A few clients like the Fort Worth people and he could keep Burg Valdhof, Schloss Neuberg. He could even, by God, at last replace all the copper on the east roofs. The Scroops would not be difficult. He patted his pocket as one might pat his stomach after a large meal. He looked at the photograph of Cygnus X-l. “What the devil is that?” he muttered as he stared at the egg-shaped smear of light. One of the old boy’s objects of contemplation I suppose. Probably thought it was art too, in that rather a priori way scientists tended to look at the natural world and load it with artistic interpretations. “Well, too bad, old boy, for you. But your wife is something in bed!”

  On his way past Calista’s study he suddenly remembered the poem. He had not had time to get to the bookstore. She must have a volume of Mr. Roethke’s work. He found the book quickly, sat down in the wing chair, and turned to the index of first lines. He smiled as he looked at the poem she had claimed to forget. Of course any woman with any sense of modesty would have shied away from such exfoliations: