Serpent (NUMA Files 1)

"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 h

im 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.