Elisha's Bones - Don Hoesel [81]
He returns the wand to his pocket and settles back in his chair. There is silence in the room for a while, broken only by the muffled sounds of activity filtering to us from other areas of the building. It takes me some time before I recognize the distasteful atmosphere as something familiar. In my younger days I hated having to prostrate myself before one grant board or another, dumbing down my research enough so that dour, unqualified people would loose the purse strings and give me enough money to dig in peace for a year. I feel the same condescension now coming from Manheim. And the problem is that, unlike those sessions before the financial gatekeepers, this time I might not be the smartest one in the room. At least I don’t have the same level of information that Manheim possesses. It puts me in the weaker position, a place where my footing isn’t as solid. It irritates me.
“Now that we’re done with the cloak-and-dagger routine, would you mind telling me why you tried to have me killed?” Directness is my only party favor at this bash.
Manheim waits a few beats before answering. As I watch his face, I’m pleased to see the same irritation I myself am feeling. He’s wondering how I found him out, how I tracked him here.
“Out of more than thirty million people in Australia, why would you pick me as this so-called assassin?”
“Out of the fifty million people in Venezuela, why would you pick me to do in?”
Manheim leans forward in his chair and crosses his arms over his knees—the posture of a confidant. “Maybe you were the only one digging somewhere you didn’t belong.”
I ignore the widening of Esperanza’s eyes, half seen in my peripheral vision. My heart, though, picks up its pace. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but thinly veiled admissions were not on the list.
I, too, lean forward. “What wasn’t I meant to find?”
He snorts and settles back in the chair. “How much is your employer paying you?”
“Who says I have an employer?”
“You’re using a Reese Industries corporate card. You might as well hand out business cards.”
He’s got me there, although it pleases me to learn he doesn’t know I’m no longer in Reese’s employ.
“I’m a consultant.”
“A treasure hunter.”
“Semantics.”
“Indeed,” Manheim says.
He pauses and seems to be considering something, then gives a half smile.
“You’re obviously resourceful, Dr. Hawthorne. I’ll grant you that. Tell me—is it that quality, or pigheadedness, which makes a man stumble blindly through a dangerous neighborhood after nightfall?”
“Interesting analogy, Victor. Am I the blind man? Or is that you? I have trouble with metaphors.” I was wrong: directness is not my only party favor. I also have false bravado. It’s like an insincere charm. And inflating beneath it all is a latent anger that I want to nurse until it is large enough to force me to kill this man with my bare hands. And I want him to know it’s for my brother that he dies.
“Don’t think I’ve come unprepared for this meeting, Dr. Hawthorne. I know a great deal about you. I know that you were born in Athens, Maine. That you graduated from Cambridge with a 3.7 GPA. You then spent three years working with Dr. Wherle in Peru, and another three with Dr. Winstead in several locations.” He pauses then, and I see what might be the hint of a smile. “Your brother died while you were excavating a site in the Valley of