Professor Simons had spent the rest of the day trying to secure a meeting with the UC Berkeley Administration, both to halt the security breach in his research and to try and determine who on the Board of Regents might have leaked their preliminary excavation at Bixby. There was no one else, the professor surmised, who knew the particulars of their work. No one else who could have allowed the information to fall into the hands of Cal's most historical rival institution across the San Francisco Bay, Stanford University. He was finding this was not an easy task.

The Vice Chancellor's Office in charge of research with whom he had worked in the past was not being cooperative. He was reminded that his project was earmarked "Urgent and Confidential" and was being funded through the President's Office of the University's Board of Regents. Due to the discovery's possible incendiary nature and its immediate need for funding, Simons' knowledge of the UC infrastructure advised him to go directly through the Board of Regents President's Office. It was this coordinating center which was equipped and ultimately designated for such requests from any of the state's nine premiere universities in the UC system.

Upon inquiring to the Office of the President, where he had made direct and confidential contact with Dr. Derek Williamson several weeks earlier, where funding was granted, he was informed that the Board President was now currently on a speaking engagement in Boston and would not be back in his office for three days. However, when he inquired as to which of the Board of Regent members had been assigned to the ad hoc steering committee regarding the project for immediate funds, he found the President's secretary at the other end of the line surprisingly cooperative. To learn their names and titles, she told him, he would only have to appear in person at the UC Administrative offices of the President in Oakland, sometime during their office hours and verify his own title and relation to the project as its primary supervisor. By mid-morning the following day Professor Simons was on his way to Oakland, a half-hour's drive to the south of Berkeley's campus.

"Good morning, Dr. Simons, and thank you for calling ahead with your inquiry." It was a well-dressed and attractive receptionist, looking a bit like a student who quietly escorted him through a lobby with polished floors, into a secondary series of offices and meeting rooms. Seated at a larger desk in front of him was a middle-aged woman with carrot-colored hair. She officiously asked the professor for his identification and proof of his affiliation with the Berkeley campus, both of which she photocopied. He was also asked to sign a document verifying his request which was stamped and dated. Following these directions, the secretary placed the release form in a file and spoke unaffectedly. "I will now get you the information you requested, professor."

The stout woman left her desk and approached a wall of file cabinets. She opened an appropriate drawer and perused the files. Within several minutes she was again at the copy machine making him a facsimile of a page.

"It seems your project was given a high priority by a three member committee of the Board three weeks ago," she said. "And that was with the President's participation. This document delineates the installments of funds over the next three months, and lists the names of those Board members which approved the amount and is inclusive of the dates of your preliminary study, professor."

Professor Simons took the photocopy and looked at it. He could see his name mentioned as coordinating advisor, and indeed there were three names below the President's with titles and signatures. Two of these Board members were women's names, as he had hoped, yet also feared.

"I see there is mention of a 'strict confidentiality' clause on that form," the secretary added in a cautionary tone. "I'm sure you are aware of that?"

"Yes." The professor was still looking over the document as she spoke. More specifically at Dr. Williamson's final endorsement.

"This is a formality which is usually . . . yes . . . I see that you requested that yourself, Dr. Simons. It ensures that during the time of the preliminary grant of funding, the members you see here, assigned. . ." she pointed at the paper with the top of her pen, "along with the President, of course, are not allowed to discuss or share any details of this study . . . either within the UC system or outside of it. Isn't that what you had specified, professor?"

She smiled at him politely, seeming to study his face. He noticed as she pointed again at the paper that her fingernails were the same shade of orange as her hair.

"Yes . . . thank you. That's indeed what I had specified."

He was trying to remember if he had ever seen any of these three board member's names before.

"So . . . will there be anything else today, Professor Simons?"

The woman took the paper, placed it in an official envelope for his transportation and security and then handed it to him.

"No. I think that will be all for now. And thank you for your trouble."

"No trouble, professor. Glad to be of assistance. You have a great afternoon."

* * *

Returning home from Oakland at mid-day, the professor took out a stack of notebooks from a filing cabinet beside his bookshelves. They had dates hand-written neatly onto each cover. He went about making a list of all possible Cal colleagues and former graduate students with whom he had worked over the past twenty years—specifically females.

He was looking particularly for any past or current affiliation they might have with StanfordUniversity. The women he sought out were those who might have been intrinsically interested in such a find, as it pertained to their area of research. He struggled hard with such memories, and soon resigned himself that too much time had passed over his lengthy career for such a survey. His attempts to locate any possible suspects for the leak using this means would be futile. The fact further depressed him that his list for suspects would only grow exponentially if he considered the possibility of researchers crossing over into other departments or interdepartmental groupings at Berkeley.

Up to this point in the investigation at Bixby, he had been totally reluctant to contact any such colleagues for consultation. There were, however, several departments and research consortiums at Cal he eventually intended to bring in, once the discovery was declassified and made available for collaboration. Those would logically be the Classics Department; the Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology Department (which consisted collectively of faculty from seven different academic disciplines); the Department of Anthropology (linking several professors specializing in Mediterranean and Anatolian Prehistory); and the UC Berkeley Archaeological Resource Facility—which involved some forty faculty members from ten broad disciplines. All of these resources, he now believed, had to be delayed until the leak in initial security was discovered. The whole scenario of a clandestine breach, he worried, could only have evolved from persons at the highest level, emanating originally from the four specified on the ad hoc committee—the names he now had in his possession.

It was obvious, the professor sadly accepted, that there were already people privy to the security breach, and at least one who was connected with the Stanford faculty. And though they also would keep details of the find away from the press and public initially, anyone working in the capacity of research would have a passionate interest in the compelling knowledge the discovery suggested. Considering this was only the tip of the research iceberg in California institutions alone, Dr. Simons knew full well what the ramifications of the discovery would mean on the international scene when either Berkeley or Stanford published anything substantial on the tholos.

At this point the professor only wanted to find out how and why the Stanford woman who visited the site was aware of his and Nicasio's preliminary work. How long she had been privy to it was also important. Until that previous day, Professor Simons believed he and Nicasio were still the 'gatekeepers' against the flurry of interest, publicly and academically of what would transpire upon any media leakage.

At least for now it seemed, the find was still unknown to the rest of the world as it quietly slept on the foggy headlands down the coast some one-hundred sixty miles south of the City. The professor's primary concern, as he took out the document given him by the Board of Regents secretary that morning, was to trace and locate the mysterious woman. He knew there would be much to discuss with her.

Reflecting upon this new challenge, the professor temporarily sat stooped over his cluttered desk, eyes closed with his head in his hands as his computer booted up. It was a meditative posture he had used over the years when trying to remember minute details or construct hypothetical assumptions in history. The pervasive thought he could not escape was that the intruder might also be someone who possibly had known all along of the tholos' existence. Perhaps it could be even a perpetrator of the tomb's relatively recent break-in.

Once again he estimated that event to be sometime during the past ten to twenty years, if the broken marble stone analysis was valid. He could not help but think the woman the police chief had spoken of the day before was someone who had already learned much more than he and Nicasio would ever know. Perhaps they knew exact origins about the Amazonian mystery—knowledge which so far had only alluded he and Nicasio's efforts.

As the computer monitor lit up he began searching for information about the ad hoc committee members through biographies, CVs or social network pages he could locate online. If the find was proven not to be a hoax, and it had the historical validity he surmised it had, these four, along with the entire Board of Regents, would be designated to open the media floodgates to the eventual impact the discovery was sure to have.

Naturally, the seasoned professor thought, it would be Cal, and his preliminary work which would be indelibly associated with that first wave of academic notoriety. But he knew too well that the find already held much greater implications and could in all probability take on a life of its own. As the research was sure to expand into other fields and onto other continents, it might even influence changes in the way ancient civilizations, mythology, and social anthropology were currently viewed. Particular to this event in his own academic domain, was how the west coast of the North American continent might be newly perceived as the frontier of European exploration.

For the time being, the professor easily eliminated Dr. Williamson, the UC Board of Reagents President, whom he had known for the better part of twenty-five years. He had known him to be a man of solid academic respect in the field of electrical engineering, and an effective administrator, first as chancellor of UC Irvine and later as President of the UC San Diego campuses. It was only after those professional tenures that he took the post of UC Regency Board President in his semi-retirement. He would never, in the mind of the professor, have colluded in any malfeasance, and certainly not involving the perennial rival to Cal, StanfordUniversity. The man had simply devoted his life to the continued prominence of the UC system.

The sole male Board member of the ad hoc committee of three was Robert Yu, Vice President of a teachers' credit union, prominent in the greater Bay Area. His curriculum vitae showed him to be close to the financial sector in banking over the past eighteen years, with specialization in land development investment. He was a graduate of the University of Southern California in economics and held an MBA from UC Berkeley. The professor temporarily put a light pencil line of elimination through his name.

Rita Stekkar, as one of the two female committee members, showed on her Facebook page a life-long affiliation with the California State Park System. She currently was also in her fifteenth year working as a senior health inspector for an agricultural firm, and was active in the state's Green Ecology Initiative. Her undergraduate degree was from UC Santa Cruz, and she had received a PhD in Horticultural Science from CaliforniaStateUniversity, San Luis Obispo. She had been teaching there the past nine years, part-time. An unenthusiastic question mark was put next to her name.

The last of the ad hoc committee members sparked the professor's interest immediately. Clarice Davis held duel Masters Degrees in Classical Studies and Archaeology from StanfordUniversity. She was currently working in the City as a divorce attorney, specializing in women's rights, and she had received honors from the City of San Francisco as one of America's most outstanding African-Americans. Her CV, on another site, went on to specify that she had graduated magnum cum laude in History from Yale as an undergraduate, and while a graduate student at Stanford had been active with several archaeological projects abroad in Greece and Turkey. Her research included a fellowship for two summers at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. While feeling his pulse quicken, the professor indicated a bold circle around her name.

For the moment Professor Simons wholeheartedly declared Ms Davis his 'person of interest' in his search for a breakdown in the Board of Regents security protocol. A phone call to the Monterey Sheriff's Department officer in charge of the security detail, and the person who personally had spoken to the woman claiming affiliation with Stanford that night, shocked the professor with the relevation that the woman he spoke to was definitely not of African-American persuasion.

There was, apparently at least one other female haling from that prestigious university across the Bay who knew of Professor Jack Simon's preliminary investigation. And in addition, she had exact knowledge of the remote whereabouts of the tholos site. This curious fact opened up a myriad of new possibilities, as the professor whimsically smiled at the challenge. He was keenly aware that in the entire Western world, women had over the decades steadily taken the lead as graduates and graduate students of higher education. It was by a factor of almost one-third. At least in this arena of the battle of the sexes, the professor had to concede, females were presently and soundly victorious over men.

* * *