Alred stared at him. “Of many things. We all are. Plato quoted Socrates as saying everyone breaks the law just shy of the degree at which they might get caught.”
“I didn’t realize you read the classics?” said Porter with a grin. “What happens when these laws we’re supposed to follow are set by God?”
“You’re the faithful one. Why do I sound like the optimist?” said Alred.
Porter scratched the back of his head. “It can’t get much worse than this.”
“They could nuke the building,” said Alred.
Smiling, Porter said, “And I’d turn around and find myself in a happier place.”
Alred let her head fall to the right. Her red hair fell in quick waves from behind her ear. “You don’t think you’re headed for Hades?”
Leaning back in his chair, Porter rubbed his eyes with one hand. He sighed at the white ceiling and coughed into his left fist. “Have you come to discuss my beliefs? We have missionaries outside of prison walls who are more than happy to tell you about the afterlife.”
“I came…because…I knew you were alone,” said Alred. “You’re hurting.”
The light in Porter’s face faded and red pain took its place. “You know me so well?”
“You’d love it, you know,” she said, insinuating the new codex.
Porter lowered his chin to his chest. “I was on top of the world before I met you.”
“Tell me one thing, Porter.” Alred leaded close to the microphone, looked him hard in the eyes, and whispered with sincerity on her face like a painting of a lonely girl. “How can someone with your intelligence… honestly believe that a god exists?”
Porter focused on her pupils. “Alred, how is it that someone with your investigative capabilities and strategic learning skills does not put two and two together and realize that all I’ve been saying is accurate?”
“I really don’t see your church as much different than any other,” said Alred, pushing the soft auburn behind her ears. “I went weekly to Catholic mass long ago, and all I saw were formulas filling in blanks when answers weren’t present.”
“You would bring all this up when I’m at my weakest,” Porter said. He sighed and sniffed, rubbing his nose with the back of one finger. “Do you know why Mormons are called Mormons?”
“Porter, I think I know why you’ve been hunted,” said Alred.
“Would you be offended if I-”
“And I think it has nothing to do with religion.”
“Pardon?”
Alred studied him for a moment before opening her mouth again. What was she seeing? “I was attacked twice…by armed men insisting I give them-”
Porter lurched forward but kept his voice down. “You were what?!?”
“Porter,” said Alred with solid smoke in her eyes, “I know for a fact now that Ulman…is…dead. I’ve seen-” Alred looked at the microphone, “-terrible things.”
Sitting with his mouth hanging loose, Porter put the picture together in his mind. She’s seen…what. Ulman? Dead? Alred was attacked? After Porter was shot and charged with illegal possession of foreign artifacts? All while she’s been hiding KM-3? “And this has nothing to do with my church?”
“I did some checking,” she said, reaching into her black bag. “This kind of activity is not unheard of.”
“You’re suggesting…what?” said Porter.
“Remember Dr. Peterson at Ohio State? He publicly revoked his statements connecting Ulman’s find and the Old World-”
“When!” said Porter, leaning upward.
“There was no date,” she said, sliding the pages face-up toward the glass.
Pressing his fingers against the transparent wall as if it helped him speed-read, Porter hummed the growl of a faraway muscle car.
“I pulled it off the Internet. Peterson reminds his associates that many scholars have made the same mistake with past archaeological finds. He even cites a stela which members of the LDS church reportedly associate with the Book of Mormon. Here, on this page.”
“I see it,” said Porter with a heavy weight in the back of his throat, but he didn’t need to focus on the image and writing, for he knew it well. “Stela number five from Izapa.” He looked sharply into Alred’s green eyes. “That ‘tree of life’ stone has more than one hundred and fifteen arbitrary connections to an extremely detailed scene described in the first and second parts of the Book of Mormon. Peterson can’t use that as proof of-”
“Nevertheless, he has,” said Alred with a sigh. “My point is Dr. Peterson refuses to note any more correlations with the Middle East. He has completely changed his testimony on the subject.”
Porter slapped the tabletop, looked to his right, then back at her. He felt the pressure in his veins but tried to relax, fearing his excitement would draw the officer who’d led him into the room.
“Peterson even suggests that he’d been fooled by Professors Ulman and Albright into thinking the site in Guatemala to be much more than it actually was.”
Shaking his head, Porter laughed without humor.
With her eyebrows high, Alred put the papers back into her portfolio. “Think now,” she said with a voice as controlled as it had been on the day they’d first met. “We know Albright died of a heart attack.”
Porter opened his mouth.
But Alred raised her voice. “The authorities are unified with that decision. We know Dr. Wilkinson was murdered, but there is no direct evidence to link him to Ulman’s find. And Ulman…only recently-”
“I know,” Porter said, covering the microphone as if it stopped his thoughts.
Staring at him in silence while he banged the logical facts against his predisposed brain, Alred pushed her lips into the tight red ball she often made. “They want the codex all right,” she said, relaxed. “But they are little more than modern-day grave robbers.”
With a grin, but still no light in his eyes, Porter said, “You’ve seen too much Indiana Jones. Nobody steals ancient artifacts anymore.”
Alred squinted at him. They both knew he was wrong and only lying to himself…and the microphone.
Porter rubbed his forehead. “Did you know St. Basil pointed out long ago that with all the importance of the sacraments, the exact instruction and liturgy were never recorded by the original apostles?”
Folding her arms, Alred said, “Never thought about it.” Her face shouted, Who even cares?!?
“Why do you suppose that is? While the word for word blessing of the bread and wine are given in the Book of Mormon?” said Porter.
Alred clenched her teeth together. What was this? Another desperate attempt by Porter to claim reason for this semester’s insanity? He’d made the greatest mistakes of his life, to her knowledge. He’d never attain the positions for which he had worked so hard and so well. He had nothing left but his religion, that which has throughout history been sought by poor souls when hope was feared to be lost. She had to listen. To humor him. To give him this last moment before the blade met the chopping block, publicly ending his existence forever.
“There’s only one other place I know of where the words of the bread and wine sacrament have been written down, and that’s on an ancient Egyptian Coptic Christian manuscript called the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles discovered in 1904. Funny thing: it’s exactly the same prayer. That means archaeological evidence suggests Joseph Smith had an English copy of a sacred invocation, which he then placed in the Book of Mormon, a hundred years before the rest of the modern world possessed it.
“I never said it before, but the Popol Vuh tells some specific stories that are found only in the Book of Mormon. Nowhere else that I know of can you find those stories. But the Popol Vuh wasn’t converted from Mayan into Spanish and published in a common tongue until 1857, about thirty years after the Book of Mormon was translated into English. Now anyone can pick up a copy of the Popol Vuh in English for under twenty bucks.”
“I’m sorry Porter,” said Alred, attempting to be as sincere and open as possible. “I won’t fill your head with delusions. I have to be honest. You’re just not convincing me of anything. I need proof that what you are talking about is real. Why aren’t there any more solid, undeniable texts? If the Book of Mormon really is an account of some of the ancient inhabitants of the Americas, why are there no more books confirming the idea? What happened to them all?”
“Alred,” Porter whispered, “you know better than I do. All the Spaniards-Father Diego de Landa was a Franciscan friar who tore down Mayan temples, destroyed sacred shrines, and tortured the natives when he caught
