Changeling Read Free Page B

outing her as a skeptic would definitely not be a good thing.
    Aside from Professor, the only other person to hear her was an intern, Rafi Massoud, and he was part of her team, not the production crew.
    “You’re not going to rat me out, are you Rafi?”
    The young man, a second-generation Arab-American and a student at UCLA, raised his hands in an exaggerated display of innocence. “I’m with you, Dr. Ihara. That guy’s a kook. No way am I putting any of this on my CV.”
    “Oh, don’t be so Old School,” said Professor. He cocked his felt Explorer fedora forward in a near perfect imitation of Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones. “Everyone craves the spotlight, even the Ivy League guys. Trust me, no one is going to think less of you—academically speaking—for doing your job on camera, even if they edit it to make it look like you’re saying something you aren’t.”
    “I know,” Jade sighed. “But…” She nodded toward the front of the museum where Stillman was holding up an unusually shaped human skull, which he claimed to have found while roaming the dunes, and gesticulating emphatically. In her best approximation of his voice, she said: “Aliens!”
    Professor grinned. “It sells. Better, it gets the kids interested. Admit it, you’re secretly hoping that we do find something not of this world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have taken the job.”
    “Not true. I took the job for the money. That’s why it’s called a job.”
    He was not completely wrong, though. While she had spent the last eight months doing very little that could be described as archaeology—long distance guest lecturing via telepresence and researching possible future projects—Jade had passed up several opportunities to get back in the field simply because the invitations were even less interesting than being cooped up in a library with a stack of dusty old books.
    There were other reasons for her professional hiatus, however. To borrow a cliché from criminal parlance, Jade Ihara had been laying low.
    Several years earlier, her search for the legendary pre-Columbian city of Cibola had put her in the cross-hairs of the notorious international quasi-religious criminal conspiracy known as the Dominion. She had subsequently tangled with them on numerous occasions, and in so doing, had painted a target on her back. The Dominion, in all its many forms, was obsessed with ancient symbols of power—artifacts that might be used to solidify their grip on the world, and which might, as she had seen more than once, actually possess supernatural attributes. As even more recent events had demonstrated, the Dominion was not the only enemy who might want to do her harm, which was how Professor had come to be her constant companion.
    A former Navy SEAL and a genius in his own right—he came by his nickname honestly, with two post-graduate degrees—Professor was now working, in a semi-official capacity, for a division of the Central Intelligence Agency, acting as both a bodyguard for Jade and a sort of watchman, on the lookout for anything that might hint at some new threat, while at the same time, using his own not inconsiderable body of knowledge to buttress his cover as her research assistant. It was not the cush assignment that some of his peers might have imagined. The threats Jade faced were real, and all the more ominous since there was no way of knowing from where the next attack would come. And, if she was honest with herself, Jade knew that she could be a bit… prickly.
    She liked Professor, liked him enough to entertain the possibility that their relationship might someday extend beyond the professional, beyond friendship, but she also knew that was a bad idea. He was now her closest friend and confidant, and if they took things to the next level and it went horribly wrong—something that seemed to happen whenever she led with her heart—it would ruin the perfectly acceptable status quo.
    On Professor’s advice, she had spent the