STANFORD, UNIVERSITY PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

An hour and a half after he picked his burden up in San Jose, Carl waited while a janitor let him and Danielle into the classroom that had been left vacant for the summer by the departure of Helen Zachary and almost a quarter of her students. The university’s security department, after examining Carl’s falsified identification, hadn’t hesitated to cooperate. Oh, the FBI ID card was real enough, but the bureau had no idea that the Event Group had been authorized to issue them to nonbureau personnel by the president of the United States.

“Nothing more eerie than a classroom with no students in it,” Danielle said as she looked around at the empty lab tables and displays.

“Especially one with a bunch of animal skeletons,” Carl said, half smiling. “Here’s the professor’s private office.” He tried the knob and found it locked.

Danielle stepped forward and eased Carl out of the way. She produced a small device; spreading its thin, wirelike probes, she easily slid it into the door’s lock and jiggled. There was a click. Danielle turned the knob and the door opened.

“Standard issue?” he asked.

“Every woman should have one,” she said as she stepped into the office and turned on the light.

Carl felt as though control of their small investigation had suddenly changed leadership.

Several filing cabinets had been left standing open. Danielle looked closely at one of the locks and called Carl over.

“What do you think of this?” she asked.

He could see small gouges in the chromed steel of the lock around the mechanism’s opening. “It’s been picked,” he said. “Someone has cleaned this place out.”

“I agree. Whatever your professor had here is now in the possession of another,” she stated as she perused the maps on the wall. “Her interests in South America are clear nonetheless,” she said as she traced a finger along the Amazon.

Carl opened his cell phone to call Niles but its indicator showed the signal strength was very low. He closed the phone, picked up the receiver of the office’s desk phone, and listened for the dial tone. On a hunch, he punched the number nine and a new tone told him he had an outside line. Then he placed a cup-size instrument over the earpiece of the phone. Danielle recognized it as a programmed descrambler.

“Can’t get a signal in here, so I have to be careful what I say. This won’t be a secure line, at least on our end.” It had taken Everett a few seconds to close his cell phone, enough time to allow a bad guy to track his usage number if the signal was bugged.

“You Americans, always so paranoid,” Danielle said as she lifted a champagne flute and looked at it curiously.

In the parking area outside of the sciences building, four men sat in a panel van. The vehicle was full of state-of-the-art monitoring equipment purchased through a dummy corporation. The fine print on the invoices could easily have been traced back to the Banco de Juarez, if anyone had been interested. Each man monitored an area of the office that had either been bugged or tapped into.

“I have an outside line open on the office phone,” one of the men said in Spanish.

“Contact Captain Rosolo,” another of the men said.

The side door slid open suddenly, illuminating the interior and shocking the communications men. They scrambled to stand in the presence of their commander.

“Keep your places. What is it you are monitoring?” the captain asked as he sat himself in front of a computer and started typing commands. “I take it you are wired into the classroom security cameras?”

The four men were unsettled that Rosolo had been that close to them, and their nervousness showed. The captain had a reputation for unforgiving ruthlessness.

“There are two people in the classroom office. One is a large man and the other a woman,” the supervisor said nervously. “We tagged the man’s cell phone, but he failed to get a signal out so he has utilized the office landline. But once he’s clear of the building, we’ll be able to track his cell’s movements and him also.”

The computer monitor connected with the camera feed to the professor’s area inside the building. Unfortunately it showed only the classroom, not the office. Rosolo typed in another command and the video rewound until the two people were clearly seen. He didn’t recognize the man, but the woman was another story.

“Patch in the gentleman’s conversation,” he ordered.

Carl was speaking with Jack and Virginia.

“The place is cleaned out,” Carl said.

Then instead of a voice on the other end, a series of clicks, beeps, and static filled the air around the speaker in the van.

“The other end of his conversation is scrambled,” Rosolo announced, as he picked up a set of headphones and listened more closely.

“Uh-huh, yeah, we can do that. Have you contacted the Department of the Navy? I’ll need some force behind me in New Orleans; as I said before, the master chief is definitely one bottle short of a six-pack,” Carl said.

More beeps and screeches.

“Have you informed the director?” Carl asked.

Scrambled response.

“He’s already left for Virginia?”

The noises once again.

Now, Rosolo could tell by a muffled sound that the man who was talking placed his hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone. The captain still could clearly understand what was being said to the woman in the office.

“They think they have an outside shot at recovering the map of Padilla. The director will be landing there in about three hours,” was the mumbled comment. Then Carl returned to his telephone conversation. “Yes, sir, I’ll contact you from New Orleans.”

Rosolo laid down the headphones as the connection was terminated. He looked at the frozen picture of the woman on the computer screen. Then he made a decision.

“Contact B team and have them ready the aircraft with an open flight plan ready to move at a moment’s notice,” he said without looking at his men. “Tell them we will leave within thirty minutes. We now have this man’s cell phone tapped and flagged and what he knows, we know. He is not going after the map, so he and this woman are not going to be our target at this time. We’ll wait and see what they uncover in Virginia. Inform our team at San Jose International to stand by for immediate departure when and if they discover anything worthwhile.”

The four communications men went to work as Rosolo assigned a file name to the picture of the woman on the monitor. He quickly brought up a secured e-mail address, keyboarded the picture to it as an attachment, and hit send. Then he picked up a satellite phone and punched in a number, as he slid the side door open and stepped out.

“Señor Mendez,” he said when the phone three thousand miles away was answered.

“Yes, Captain.”

“I have sent you some information that is a concern for security reasons. Check your computer when it is possible to do so. Alone.”

“Yes, I will do that,” Mendez said.

“It seems our friend’s ex-wife is on official business in Helen Zachary’s office; she is with a man who has just conversed with someone using a scrambled and encrypted phone on a secure line. Therefore, we must assume this is not to our benefit.”

“I agree; is there anything else?” Mendez asked.

“Yes, a very serious development. Whoever these people are, they may have stumbled upon a means to find the whereabouts of the Padilla map.”

“We cannot allow that map to fall into the hands of those that could harm our quest. I assume you are in the process of handling this disturbing matter?”

“The order has been given. It may take time, but if they locate the map, we’ll be there soon after.” Rosolo hung up and tossed the phone back inside the van to one of the technicians. Then he walked to the entrance to the sciences building and waited.

It was only five minutes before he heard footsteps and talking through the double doors. He straightened his tie and opened the right side door quickly.

“Oh, excuse me,” he said as he bumped into the woman and then moved out of her way.

Danielle smiled politely and she and Carl stepped through the doorway. As they did so Rosolo, still appearing to fuss with his own garments, adeptly placed a tracer bug on the woman’s suit jacket. As he held the door open for a moment, he turned and watched Danielle and the large man leave the building. When he was sure they were out of sight, he returned to the large van.

Captain Rosolo, chief of security for clandestine operations for the Banco de Juarez International Economica, would make sure there was no interference from anyone, now that Señor Mendez was on his way to Padilla’s golden site.

The trail to that same destination would end for these two people in New Orleans, if they proved to be more resourceful there.