His mother would not approve, but he rode against traffic to cut his trip time, dodging cars and trucks with pitch-changing horns blaring behind him. Señor Moreno would not pay him if he was late. He might not even pay him if he was on time, Fernando reminded himself. His family needed the money; since his father had died, Fernando was the man of the house. So he pedaled fast and did not think about dangers.
He climbed a hill, panting, sweat glistening on his face, arms, and legs. The road leveled off as he crossed through a nice strip of Caracas. Fancier shops, cars, and people lined the sides of the street. Taller buildings, skyscrapers of glass and metal rose around him. This was a place of importance and power. A place of money and oil. Fernando did not know much about the world, but he knew his country was powerful. It had oil, and the sheikh princes from across the seas visited often. His country could talk back to the United States like an equal. He was proud of this, proud of his country's strength to look the bully in the eye.
Ahead were the embassies and banks of the foreign nations that did business with Venezuela and its oil. Fernando liked riding by their protected gates, seeing their guards and security cameras. It was like an American movie. There were embassies and banks from Europe and Asia and the Middle East. He had ridden past them countless times. China and India, and up ahead, the other oil countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Fernando screamed. The explosions were enormous.
A blast of heated air picked him up together with his bike and sent them sprawling on the sidewalk next to an upscale clothing store. The store's glass-front window was shattered inward. Screams and wailing car alarms filled the air around him. The boy lay for several moments on the sidewalk, stunned, his left arm and leg badly skinned and bleeding from being dragged across the asphalt. He felt a small trickle of blood from his scalp. He shook his head, trying to focus and clear the blood from his eyes. Slowly, he raised himself to his feet. Swiping again at the blood, he stared down the road. Smoke and dust billowed toward him. Fires burned in several places. Ahead, he thought he could make out the remains of two buildings, now wreckages on either side of the road.
Sirens grew louder from several directions. Police. Frightened, he found his bike several feet from him. It was damaged — the handlebars bent awkwardly, the baskets with the food wrecked. He did not care. He was going home. Señor Moreno could keep his money today. As he turned and rode down the street toward the growing sounds of police and fire sirens, he heard voices behind him. Screams and cries for help.
19
It was a long ride to Philosophy Hall at the corner of 116th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Traffic was snarled along the West Side Highway from a seven-car pileup, and the driver was forced to cut through Midtown. John Savas glanced outside his tinted windows at the shoppers crowding and crossing the streets at Fifty-Seventh and Madison. The crowds were definitely thinner than normal this time of year, ruining summer tourism and sending more than one business under — one of many repercussions of an urban bombing.
The car lurched forward and shook him out of his reverie. It was challenging to keep his eyes focused outside the car, thanks to the mid-thigh-length skirt Rebecca Cohen was wearing. He knew that if he let himself look for even a moment, he would certainly linger too long to pass anything off as a casual glance.
Her hair was pulled up and fastened Japanese style with two things that actually looked like chopsticks. Do women use chopsticks in their hair? he wondered to himself. She wore a white shirt that looked to be standard 1950s FBI, and, sure enough, as if to prevent him from getting any useful thinking done during the ride, she had left the first two buttons open. Well, it's a hot day. One hundred and two degrees. She was writing in her characteristically broad script, large, flowing letters that would have taken him hours to form and that she spat out like a typewriter. Savas preferred typing.
He turned his mind back to the case. Rideout and King had compiled information on the professor at Columbia. Fred Styer, PhD in Philology from Harvard, expert in proto-Germanic languages and Germanic literature, Alfred L. Hutchinson Chair of Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University — the titles ran on. A prolific scholar in the 1970s with more than two hundred journal articles and ten books, he was now “mostly” retired, serving as professor emeritus and haunting the hallways of Philosophy Hall at Columbia. He was once considered the greatest scholar on the East Coast in the ancient languages and literature of the Germanic family. Savas just hoped he had a key to unlock this mystery.
After what seemed like an eternity slogging through traffic, the driver finally pulled them up to the building at Columbia University. The entrance to Philosophy Hall was shaded by a plaza built directly over Amsterdam Avenue. Above was a small green park; below, it seemed that the street plunged into a short, dim tunnel right after 116th Street, to emerge in light again half a block later at 117th, right in front of the university's Casa Italiana. Instead of pulling up to the entrance of the building, they followed the old professor's instructions to avoid the construction at the main door and turned the corner in front of the Kent building. They were not sure how they would recognize the old man (photos they had on file were certainly outdated), but it became clear that both he and they were easy marks.
The professor did indeed resemble the photo they had in their files, only older and slightly wider in the waist. He still possessed an enormous beard that spilled over his chest, now much whiter than in the photograph, and, if Savas could bring himself to believe it, perhaps even longer. His bald head and thick glasses were also the same, but today he sported a pipe that gave him the air of an awkward Oxford don. To prove the point, when they stepped out of the car, he waved to them like he was trying to flag down a 737 at Kennedy Airport. Savas waved back, and Cohen stifled a laugh, looking radiant in her amusement. At that point, Savas realized that they looked as ridiculous as the professor did. In the middle of this casual and unconstrained academic campus, their appearance had FEDS written all over it.
“Hello, hello, Agent Savas. Welcome, welcome!” Styer repeated, almost gleefully, shaking Savas's hand in a hyper fashion. The old man looked over to Cohen, and his eyes grew large. He smiled and motioned toward her with his head. “Please, and you must be that lovely young woman I spoke with on the phone yesterday…Agent Cohen?”
Cohen seemed positively taken. “Rebecca, please, Professor Styer.” Savas suppressed an initial desire to not like the man.
“Please, both of you, we'll go to my office. Not straightaway, mind you. They're tearing up the Hall these days, and it's easier to come in through this other building. Follow me.”
He led them into Kent, through that building and into a charming green garden abutting Kent and Philosophy Hall. Using a back entrance to the Hall, he took them up a flight of stairs and down a corridor to his office in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. By the time they had all sat down, the old professor was winded and coughing.