13th Apostle by Richard F. Heller, Rachael F. Heller Page B

Museum to do research were always preceded by a courtesy call to DeVris, as per the Director’s request. Advance warning of the Professor’s visits gave DeVris plenty of time to remove any trace of the McCullum influence. All in all, things had been moving along quite smoothly.
    Then, two months earlier, the Professor procured a piece of antiquity that McCullum was hell-bent on acquiring. From the day that DeVris told McCullum about the diary, DeVris had been walking a tightrope, trying to maintain a balance between McCullum’s determination to obtain the diary and Ludlow’s terror of allowing the secrets that the diary held to fall into “the wrong hands.”
    Now, with Ludlow permanently out of the picture, and the diary apparently still secure within Ludlow’s safe, housed behind the oven, DeVris was finally in control.
    DeVris turned his attention back to the phone conversation. It was time for a contribution from him.
    â€œFrom what the police told me when they notified me of the incident, Ludlow must have walked in on his attackers,” DeVris explained. “The intruders must have been in the apartment for some time trying to force Ludlow’s wife to tell them where the diary was, apparently keeping her alive until Ludlow came home.”
    â€œLucky you followed my suggestion and had Ludlow get the diary to you,” McCullum concluded.
    Fear shot through DeVris’ body. McCullum was testing him, waiting for DeVris to assure him, once again, that the diary was safe in DeVris’ possession.
    The Director broke into a cold sweat. Perhaps McCullum was giving him one last chance to confess that he had been lying. If McCullum suspected that Ludlow had never given up the diary, DeVris might do better to just admit it and take his punishment like a man.
    But how could he admit he only had the bits and pieces of the diary that Ludlow had doled out to him? How could he say he had been stringing McCullum along for weeks?
    It had seemed like a foolproof scheme at the time. Ludlow, unwilling to turn over the diary, had agreed to upload a small section of the manuscript each day for DeVris to translate directly off the Internet. In exchange, DeVris had paid the small fortune demanded by the antique dealer for the diary and had agreed to provide Sabbie’s services, without whom Ludlow would not have been able to decipher the more esoteric passages of the moldy manuscript.
    Though the exchange had been more than fair, at the last minute, Ludlow had insisted on maintaining strict control. By using a special copyright protection program, the Professor had ensured that DeVris could view each day’s section of the diary on the Internet but had barred him from copying the material into a document or from printing it out.
    At least, that’s what the old guy believed. DeVris had worked his way past a similar program used by online booksellers for customers who searched the contents of books. By instructing his computer to take screen shots, DeVris had been able to photograph each page of the diary and save them as PDF files for printing, reevaluation, and compilation at his leisure. He had allowed Ludlow to believe he was in control. It made the old man happy and, most of all, kept him quiet.
    Without actually having the diary, DeVris had been able to provide McCullum with the ever-growing manuscript translation and copies of the original text for which McCullum paid extraordinarily well.
    It would have been the perfect plan if DeVris had not lived in fear that McCullum might someday demand to see the actual diary. When that day came…well, DeVris never actually allowed himself to consider what might happen.
    With notification of Ludlow’s death, DeVris had feared his pretense might be revealed but the gods had been with him. The police had indicated that Ludlow’s wall safe had been broken into but made no mention of the oven safe. Both Ludlow’s assassins and the