“You are not being asked to leave,” Gonzales said. “That would be almost as ruinous a political act as if someone attempted to kill you.”
Bartenev felt blood drain from his face.
Gonzales said, “But we must be extremely careful. Cautious. We are asking you not to go out in public in the city. Your hotel will be guarded. We will transport you to Tikal as quickly as possible. And then we request that after a prudent length of time-a day, or at the most two-you feign illness and return to your home.”
“A day?” Bartenev had difficulty breathing. “Perhaps two? So little time after so many years of waiting for. .”
“Professor Bartenev, we have to deal with political realities.”
Politics, Bartenev thought, and wanted to curse. But like Gonzales, he was accustomed to dealing with such obscene realities, and he analyzed the problem with desperate speed. He was out of Russia, free to go anywhere-that was the important factor. There were numerous other major Mayan ruins. Palenque in Mexico, for example. He’d always been fond of photographs of it. It wasn’t Tikal. It didn’t have the emotional and professional attraction that Tikal had for him, but it was accessible. His wife could accompany him there. They would be safe there. If the Guatemalan government refused to pay for further expenses, that wouldn’t matter-because Bartenev had a secret source of funds about which he hadn’t told even his wife.
Indeed, secrecy had been part of the business arrangement when the well-dressed, fair-haired American had arrived at Bartenev’s office at St. Petersburg State University. The American had shown him several photographs of Mayan glyphs. He had asked in perfect Russian how much Bartenev would charge to translate the glyphs and keep the assignment confidential. “If the glyphs are interesting, I won’t charge anything,” Bartenev had answered, impressed by the foreigner’s command of the language. But the American had insisted on paying. In fact, his fee had been astonishingly generous: fifty thousand dollars. “To ensure your silence,” the American had said. “I’ve converted some of it to rubles.” He gave Bartenev the equivalent of ten thousand dollars in Russian currency. The remainder, he explained, would be placed in a Swiss bank account. Perhaps one day Bartenev would be free to travel, in which case the money could easily be obtained. Failing that, couriers could be arranged to transport prudent amounts into St. Petersburg for him, amounts that wouldn’t be so large that the authorities would ask questions about their source. Since that visit, the American had come two more times, in each case with more photographs of Mayan glyphs and with the same fee. Until now, the money had not been as important to Bartenev as the fascinating, although puzzling, message (like a riddle within a code) that the glyphs revealed.
But now the money was very important, and Bartenev bitterly meant to get full value from it.
“Yes,” he told Gonzales. “Political realities. I will leave whenever you want, whenever I have served your purpose.”
Gonzales seemed to relax. But only for a moment. Abruptly the limousine arrived at a hotel, the steel-and-glass modern design of which was jarringly un-Hispanic. The soldiers escorted Bartenev and his wife quickly through the lobby, into an elevator, and to the twelfth floor. Gonzales came with them while a government official spoke to a clerk at the check-in desk.
The phone was ringing as Gonzales unlocked the door, turned on a light, and guided Bartenev and his wife into the suite. Actually, there were two phones, one on a table next to a sofa, the other on a bar.
Gonzales locked the door behind them. The phone kept ringing. As Bartenev stepped toward the one by the sofa, Gonzales said, “No, let me answer it.” He chose the closer phone, the one on the bar. “Hello.” He turned on a lamp. “Why do you wish to speak with him?” He stared at Bartenev. “Just a moment.” He placed a hand over the telephone’s mouthpiece. “It’s a man who claims to be a journalist. Perhaps it would be wise to give an interview. Good public relations. I’ll listen on this phone while you use that one.”
Bartenev pivoted toward the phone on the table beside the sofa. “Hello,” he said, casting a shadow against the window.
“Go to hell, you goddamned Russian.”
As the window shattered inward, Bartenev’s wife screamed. Bartenev did not. The bullet that struck his skull and mushroomed within it killed him instantly. The bullet burst out the back of his head, spraying blood across the flying glass.
3
HOUSTON, TEXAS
The space shuttle Atlantis was on the second day of its current mission-a no-problem launch, an all-systems-go performance so far-and Albert Delaney felt bored. He wished that something would happen, anything to break his tedious routine. Not that he wanted excitement exactly, because he associated that word with a crisis. The last thing NASA needed was more foul-ups and bad publicity, and at all costs, another Challenger disaster had to be avoided. One more like that and NASA would probably be out of business, which meant that Albert Delaney would be out of a job, and Albert Delaney preferred boredom any day to being unemployed. Still, if anybody had told him when he’d been accepted by NASA that his enthusiasm for what he assumed would be a glamorous career would all too quickly change to tedium, he’d have been incredulous. The trouble was that NASA prechecked the details of a mission so often, testing and retesting, going over every variable, trying to anticipate every contingency, that by the time the mission occurred, it was anticlimactic. No, Albert Delaney didn’t want excitement, but he certainly wouldn’t have minded an occasional positive surprise.
A man of medium height and weight, with average features, in that cusp of life where he’d stopped being young but wasn’t yet middle-aged, he’d noticed that more and more he’d been feeling dissatisfied, unfulfilled. His existence was ordinary. Predictable. He hadn’t yet reached the stage of his syndrome where he was tempted to cheat on his wife. Nonetheless, he was afraid that what Thoreau had called “quiet desperation” might drive him to do something stupid and he’d get more excitement than he’d bargained for by ruining his marriage. Still, if he didn’t find some purpose, something to interest him, he didn’t know if he could rely on his common sense.
Part of his problem, Albert Delaney decided, was that his office was at the periphery of NASA headquarters. Away from the mission-control center, he didn’t have the sense of accomplishment and nervous energy that he imagined everyone felt there. Plus, even he had to admit that being an expert in cartography, geography, and meteorology (maps, land, and weather, as he sometimes put it bluntly) seemed awfully dull compared to space exploration. It wasn’t as if he got the chance to examine photographs of newly discovered rings around Saturn or moons near Jupiter or active volcanoes on Venus. No, what he got to do was look at photographs of areas on earth, sections that he’d looked at dozens of times before.
It didn’t help that the conclusions of the research he was doing had already been determined. Did photographs from space show that the alarming haze around the earth was becoming worse? Did high-altitude images indicate that the South American rain forest continued to dwindle due to slash-and-burn farming practices? Were the oceans becoming so polluted that evidence of the damage could be seen from three hundred miles up? Yes. Yes. Yes. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to come up with those conclusions. But NASA wanted more than conclusions. It wanted specifics, and even though the photographs that Albert Delaney examined would eventually be sent to other government agencies, it was his job to make the preliminary examination, just in case there was something unique in them, so that NASA could get the publicity.