CHAPTER 75
Watanabe’s office was in the Yamanashi Archaeological Institute, a low-slung concrete affair with a brown pebble-dash finish and a slab roof that might have passed for architecturally intriguing in the sixties but now looked merely shabby and a little squat: a blockish toad crouched on the edge of the town as if unwelcome. He had university-loaned spaces in Tokyo and Osaka for when he was doing fieldwork close by, but this was where he spent most of his time, in easy striking distance of the Kofun sites that had become the center of his career.
Thomas got out of the car a couple of blocks before the facility and walked the rest of the way, a baseball cap pulled low. Yamanashi was no Tokyo, and foreigners still stood out.
“Get back to Kumi,” he said to Jim. “If anything happens to her . . .”
“Go,” said Jim, handing him a flashlight from the glove compartment. “Classes will be finishing up. It’s the perfect time for you to get in.”
He walked through a park where the cherry blossoms were just opening and waited there for three long minutes before students began to emerge from the building. He pushed through the glass doors, head lowered, walking fast.
There were no more than eight faculty on staff judging by the office listings, two of whom were part time. Two of the other six were away on digs, one was on sabbatical, one more away at a conference. Watanabe, the school’s celebrity, was elsewhere, which meant that only one full-time teacher was working at the moment. He located the classroom on the second floor and waited.
Within a minute, the last of the students began filing out. Thomas got a look at the teacher—a small, middle-aged woman with a hawkish look and outlandish horn rims—and then stooped to his backpack so that she wouldn’t notice him as she walked by en route to her office. Thomas tailed her carefully, slipping into a bathroom down the hallway from her room. When he heard the door open and close a second time he glanced out in time to see the teacher taking her coat and bag, fishing in her pocket for keys as she left for the day.
A janitor would be making the rounds at some point, and maybe a graduate student or two using the labs to complete research, but he hadn’t seen sign of any so far, and was fairly sure he had the place to himself. So far as he could tell there were no security cameras or any surveillance devices except a motion-activated security lamp in the parking lot. It was clear.
Watanabe’s office was on the same hall. He tried the handle, but the door didn’t move. It was the only door in the building with two locks, one in the handle and a deadbolt above it. Thomas had no secret skill with such things, no knack with hairpins, no magical electronic devices that would send the deadbolt snapping back, but he knew what was studied in this building and, after a brief consideration of the door’s strength, he started trying every other door he could find.
A janitor’s closet was unlocked, but he found nothing useful there. Next was a disused office full of old furniture and overstuffed filing cabinets. Then he found the storeroom he was looking for, made his selections, and returned to Watanabe’s office.
Kumi pulled back, putting a single finger on his advancing lips and pushing him playfully away.
“Patience,” she said. “Things are always better when you have to wait.”
“Depends on how long you have to wait,” said Watanabe. It was grudging, but he sat back, even managed a smile.
“You must travel a lot in your line of work,” she said. “Tell me about it.”
She offered the subject as another stage of the game, one that would seduce him still further.
“I spend a lot of time in Korea,” he said.
She grunted dismissively.
“Nowhere more exotic?” she said. “Europe? France? Italy?”
His eyes narrowed, hardened, and he seemed to shed his drunken clumsiness. Kumi backpedaled.
“I’ve never been,” she cooed. “Prague. I hear Prague is beautiful. I’d love to go there. Or Vienna.”
“I’ve been to Italy,” he said, relaxing. “It’s dirty. Ugly. Naples especially.”
Kumi tried to keep the flicker of excitement out of her face. He was watching closely.
It wasn’t going to be subtle, and it wasn’t going to be quiet, but Thomas was going to get in. He slid the bit of the mattock he had found in the closet into the crack of the doorjamb and used the long handle as a lever. The wood of the frame began to splinter immediately. He adjusted the position of the bit and tried the same movement again. The entire frame rippled and bucked, tearing half an inch away from the wall. With the flat edge of the mattock he pushed, prized, wrenched, until there was a pile of wooden fragments at his feet, and the door finally yielded to a jolt from his shoulder.
It juddered open, revealing a spacious, utilitarian office containing a metal desk with a computer, phone, fax, and a series of heavy steel filing cabinets. There was also a long table arrayed with boxes, tubs of chemicals, a pair of microscopes, and assorted other equipment that Thomas could not name.
The window blind was down. Thomas closed the slats, shut the door as best he could, and switched on first the flashlight, then the computer. While it warmed up he searched the room quickly, unsure what exactly he was looking for. The filing cabinets were all locked, and he doubted he would get into them with the mattock. A stack of packing cases stood in the corner behind the door, two of them large and wooden, containing only wood shavings, the shipping labels carefully stripped off.
One of the desk drawers was unlocked. It contained a series of folders each holding stacks of paper covered in numbers and formulas, and in Japanese far too technical for Thomas to decipher. One folder, however, contained numbers keyed, it seemed, to three different samples, identified by the number and letter combinations 4F, 12A, and 21A, the first page of each beginning with the equation:
D2 i, j = (xi-xj)2 Pw-1 (xi-xj)
xi=vector of values for individual i,
xj=mean vector for population j,
Pw=pooled within-sample covariance matrix
Thomas stared at the numbers and the formula, but could make nothing of them beyond the fact that the numbers looked like measurements in millimeters.
But measurements of what?
The next folder contained graphs, and numbers, apparently for a larger set of samples, only some of which reappeared in the other folder. With these there was a cover letter, in English, dated March 10, from a company called Beta Analytics in Miami, Florida. The pertinent information seemed to be a column of data keyed to sample numbers: 250±75 BP (BETA-895) [Sample 1A], 1000±75 BP (BETA-896) [Sample 1B], right through to 200±75 BP (BETA-909) [Sample 25D].
Thomas read over the numbers twice, looking for a pattern, or something, anything, that would make some kind of sense to him, but it was hopeless. The symbol in the middle of each data cluster resembled a cross, but it was surely a margin-of-error marker. 250 plus or minus 75. But 250 what?
Years?
Perhaps. But what did “BP” mean?
He just didn’t have the knowledge or skills. For what seemed like the hundredth time since Ed died, he felt completely out of his depth.