Tyrannosaur Canyon

by Douglas Preston

  He looked at Crookshank. Did she, too, see it? She was no fool. She was thinking the same kinds of things, imagining how her life had now changed – forever.

  "Melodie..."

  "Yeah. It's awesome. And I'm not done. Not by a long shot."

  He managed to sit down. Could there really be more?

  Crookshank rapped a key. "Let's go to the electron micrographs." A black and white image leapt into sharp focus. "Here's endoplasmic reticulum at 1,000x. You can see now the crystalline structure of the replacement mineral. True, you can't see much – we're at the limit. The structure is breaking down at this magnification – fossilization can't preserve everything. But the fact you can see anything at a thousand x is incredible. You're looking at the microbiology of a dinosaur, right there."

  It was extraordinary. Even this little sample was a paleontological discovery of the first water. And to think that there was probably a whole dinosaur like that, if his information was correct. The perfectly fossilized carcass of a T. Rex, complete – the stomach, no doubt with its last meal, the brain in all its glory, the skin, the feathers, the blood vessels, the reproductive organs, nasal cavities, liver, kidneys, spleen – the diseases it had, its wounds, its life history, all perfectly duplicated in stone. It was the closest they were going to get to Jurassic Park in the real world.

  She clicked to the next image. "Here's the bone marrow–"

  "Wait." Corvus stayed her. "What are those dark things?"

  "What dark things?"

  "Back in the last image."

  "Oh, those." She backed up to the previous picture. Corvus pointed to a small thing in the image, a small black particle.

  "What is it?"

  "Probably an artifact of the fossilization process."

  "Not a virus?"

  "It's way too big. And it's too sharply defined to be part of the original biology anyway. I'm pretty sure it's a microcrystalline growth, probably hornblende."

  "Quite right. Sorry. Keep on."

  "I could zap it with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, see what it's made of."

  "Fine."

  She clicked through another series of micrographs.

  "This is stupendous, Melodie."

  She turned to him, her face flushed, radiant. "Can I ask a question?"

  He hesitated, collecting himself. He was going to need her help, that much was clear, and doling out a few grains of glory to a female lab assistant would be a lot better than cutting another curator in on the deal. Melodie had no contacts, no power, and no future, just another underemployed Ph.D. grunt. So much the better that she was a woman and wouldn't be taken as seriously.

  He put his arm around her, leaned close. "Of course."

  "Is there any more of this out there?"

  Corvus couldn't help smiling. "I suspect, Melodie, that there's a whole dinosaur like this out there."

  Chapter 24

  SALLY FELT A lot more disturbed than elated at the computer-plotted image Tom had spread out on the kitchen table.

  "This just gets worse and worse," she said.

  "Better and better, you mean. This is exactly the kind of information I needed to identify the man and find his daughter."

  This is Tom all over, Sally thought – stubborn, operating from some kind of deep-seated moral conviction that landed him in trouble. It had nearly gotten him killed in Honduras.

  "Look, Tom – this man was illegally prospecting for fossils on public land. He was certainly involved in the fossil black market and maybe with organized crime. He was a bad guy and he got murdered. You don't want to be messing around with this. And even if you found his daughter, the fossil wouldn't belong to her. You yourself said it belongs to the feds."

  "I made a promise to a dying man and that's the beginning and the end of it."

  Sally sighed in exasperation.

  Tom circled the table like a panther prowling around a kill. "You haven't said what you think of it yet."

  "It's amazing, of course, but that's not the point."

  "That is the point. It's the most important paleontological discovery ever made."

  Despite herself, Sally was drawn to the strange image. It was blurry, indistinct, but it was clearly a lot more than just a skeleton. It was a dinosaur, complete, entombed in the rock. It lay on its side, its neck thrown back, jaws open, its two front limbs raised up as if trying to claw its way free.

  "How did it fossilize so well?"

  "It had to have been an almost unique combination of circumstances, which I don't even begin to understand."

  "Could there be any organic material left? DNA?"

  "It's at least sixty-five million years old."

  "Amazing how fresh it looks, almost as if it should stink."

  Tom chuckled. "It's not the first mummified dinosaur found. Back around the turn of the century a dinosaur hunter named Charles Sternberg found a mummified duck-billed dinosaur in Montana. I remember seeing it as a kid at the natural history museum in New York, but it isn't nearly as complete as this one."

  She picked up the plot. "Looks like he died in agony, with his neck twisted back and his jaws open like that."

  "It's a she."

  "You can tell?" She looked closely. "I don't see anything down there but a blur."

  "Female tyrannosaurs were probably bigger and more ferocious than the males. And since this is the biggest T. Rex ever found, it's a good guess it was female."

  "Big Bertha."

  "That twisting of the neck was caused by the tendons drying and contracting. Most dinosaur skeletons are found with contorted necks."

  Sally whistled. "What now? You have a plan?"

  "I sure do. Very few people realize this, but there's a thriving black market in dinosaur fossils out there. Dinosaur fossils are big business and some dinosaurs are worth millions – like this one."

  "Millions?"

  "The last T. Rex that came on the market sold for over eight million, and that was ten years ago. This one's worth at least eighty."

  "Eighty million?"

  "Ballpark."

  "Who would pay that kind of money for a dinosaur?"

  "Who would pay that kind of money for a painting? Give me T. Rex over Titian any day."

  "Point taken."

  "I've been reading up on this. There are a lot of collectors out there, especially in the Far East, who'll pay almost anything for a spectacular dinosaur fossil. So many black market fossils were being smuggled out of China that the country passed a law declaring dinosaurs to be part of their national patrimony. But it hasn't stopped the flow. Everybody wants their own dinosaur these days. The thing is, the biggest and best-preserved dinosaurs still come from the American West – and most of them are found on federal land. If you want one, you have to go steal it."

  "Which is just what this man was doing."

  "Right. He was a professional dinosaur hunter. There can't be too many of them in the world. He'll be easy to identify if I ask the right people. All I have to do is find the right people."

  Sally looked at him suspiciously. "And how do you propose to do that?"

  Tom grinned. "Meet Tom Broadbent, agent for Mr. Kim, the reclusive South Korean industrialist and billionaire. Mr. Kim is looking to buy a spectacular dinosaur, money no object."

  "Oh, no."

  He grinned, stuffing the paper into his pocket. "I've worked it out. Shane will handle the clinic on Saturday while we fly to Tucson, fossil capital of the world."

  "We?"

  "I'm not leaving you here alone with a murderer roaming around."

  "Tom, I've got a whole gymkhana planned on Saturday with the kids. I can't leave."

  "I don't care. I'm not leaving you here alone."

  "I won't be alone. I'll be surrounded by people all day long. I'll be perfectly safe."

  "Not at night."

  "At night I've got Mr. Smith & Wesson here – and you know how I handle a gun."

  "You could go to the fishing cabin for a few days."
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  "No way. It's too isolated. I'd feel a lot more nervous up there."

  "Then you should check into a hotel."

  "Tom, you know I'm not some helpless female who needs watching over. You go to Tucson and do your Mr. Kim song and dance. I'll be fine."

  "No way."

  She gave it one final push. "If you're so worried, go to Tucson for the day. Fly out early Saturday morning, return in the evening. That would give you most of the day. We're still having our usual picnic lunch on Friday, aren't we?"

  "Of course. But as for Saturday–"

  "Do you plan to stand guard over me with a shotgun? Give me a break. You go to Tucson and get back before dark. I can take care of myself."

  PART TWO

  CHICXULUB

  The Tyrannosaurus rex was a creature of the jungle. She lived in the deepest forests and swamps of North America, not long after it had broken off from the ancient continent of Laurasia. Her territory encompassed more than five hundred square miles, and it stretched from the shores of the ancient Niobrara inland sea to the foothills of the newly minted Rocky Mountains. It was a subtropical world, with immense forests of prodigious trees the likes of which have never existed since. There were monkey-puzzle trees that reached almost five hundred feet in height, giant magnolias and sycamores, metasequoias, huge palms, and giant tree ferns. The height of the canopy allowed little light to reach the forest floor, which as a result was open and clear, giving plenty of lebensraum to the huge predatory dinosaurs and their prey as they acted out the great drama of life.

  She lived during the last great flowering of the Age of the Dinosaurs. It was an age that would have gone on indefinitely had it not been abruptly terminated by the greatest natural disaster ever to befall planet Earth.

  She shared the forest with a host of other creatures, including her favorite prey, two species of duckbill dinosaurs, Edmontosaurus and Anatotitian. Occasionally she attacked a lone triceratops, but she avoided their herds, except to follow and pick off a sick or dying member. A huge type of brontosaur, Alamosaurus, roamed the land, but she rarely hunted it, preferring to consume it as a scavenger rather than risk killing it as a predator. She spent a great deal of time hunting along the shores of the ancient seaway. In this body of water lived a predator even bigger than she, the fifty-foot-long crocodilian known as Deinosuchus, the only animal capable of killing a T. Rex unwise enough to venture into the wrong body of water in pursuit of prey.

  She hunted leptoceratops, a smaller dinosaur about the size of a deer, with a parrotlike beak and a protective frill on the back of its neck. Another dinosaur she hunted, but warily, was the ankylosaurs, as well as her own cousin, the nanotyrannosaurus, a smaller, faster version of herself. Once in a while she attacked an old and feeble torosaurus, a dinosaur with a viciously horned, eight-foot-long head, the largest skull that ever evolved on a land mammal. Occasionally she killed an unwary Quezalcoatlus, a flying reptile with a wingspan about the same as an F-111.

  The ground and trees swarmed with mammals that she scarcely noticed – fruit-eating rodents, marsupials, the earliest ancestor of the cow (an animal the size of a rat) and the world's first primate – a creature named Purgatorius that ate insects. There were dinosaurs beyond her ability to hunt: the ornithomimus, an ostrich-sized dinosaur that could run more than seventy miles an hour; and the troodon, a fleet-footed carnivore about the size of a human being, with dexterous hands, keen eyesight, and a brain-to-body ratio even greater than that of T. Rex.

  She was a creature of habit. During the rainy season, when the rivers and swamps pushed out of their banks, she moved westward to the higher ground of the foothills. During the dry season, after mating, she sometimes traveled to a chain of sandy hills in the lee of an extinct volcano, to build a nest and lay eggs. When the dry season began, she moved back to her haunts in the great forests along the shores of the Niobrara seaway.

  The climate was hot, wet, and humid. There were no polar ice caps, no glaciers – the earth was in the grips of one of its hottest climate cycles in its history. The ocean levels had never been higher. Large parts of the continents lay under inland seas. Great reptiles ruled the air, the land, and the water, and had done so for two hundred million years. Dinosaurs were the most successful class of animal life that had ever evolved on planet Earth. Mammals had coexisted with the dinosaurs for almost one hundred million years, but they had never amounted to much. The largest mammal to live during the Age of Dinosaurs was about the size of a bread box. Reptiles had a hammerlock on all the higher niches.

  She occupied the highest niche of all. She ruled the top of the food chain. She was the greatest biological killing machine the earth had ever seen.

  Chapter 1

  THE MORNING SUN burned over the high mesas, cauterizing the land. Jimmie Willer halted in the shade of a juniper, easing himself down on a rock. Hernandez took a seat beside him, his plump face beaded with sweat. Willer slipped a thermos of coffee out of his rucksack, poured a cup for Hernandez and one for himself, shook out a Marlboro. Wheatley had gone on ahead with the dogs, and he watched them moving slowly across the barren mesa.

  "What a scorcher."

  "Yeah," said Hernandez.

  Willer took a deep drag, looked out over the endless landscape of red and orange canyons, domed rocks, spires, ridges, buttes, and mesas – three hundred thousand acres, frigging hopeless when you stopped to think about it. He squinted into the brilliant light. The body could be buried at the bottom in any one of a hundred canyons or in God knows how many caves and alcoves, walled up in some rock shelter, deep-sixed down some crevasse.

  "Too bad Wheatley didn't get on the trail when it was fresh," said Hernandez.

  "You can say that again."

  A small plane droned in the sky overhead – DEA, looking for marijuana.

  Wheatley appeared beyond the rise in front of them, struggling up a long incline of slickrock shimmering in the heat, four heavy canteens slung over his shoulders. His two unleashed bloodhounds tumbled along ahead of him, tongues lolling, noses to the ground.

  "Bet Wheatley's sorry now," said Willer. "He has to carry water for himself and his dogs."

  Hernandez chuckled. "So what do you think? Got any theories?"

  "At first I figured it was drugs. But now I think it's something bigger. There's something going on out here, and both Broadbent and the monk are in on it."

  Willer inhaled again, snapped the butt, and watched it bounce along the naked rock.

  "Like what?"

  "I dunno. They're looking for something. Think about it. Broadbent claims he spends a lot of time riding around here, for 'pleasure.' Well look out there at that son of a bitch. Would you ride around here for pleasure?"

  "No way."

  "Then he just happens to come across this prospector, right after he's shot. It's sunset, eight miles from the road, middle of nowhere... Coincidence? Give me a break."

  "You think he shot him himself?"

  "No. But he's involved. He's holding out on us. Anyway, two days after the shooting, he goes up to visit this monk, Wyman Ford. I've checked up on this guy and it seems he too goes hiking all over the desert, stays out for days at a time."

  "Yeah, and what are they looking for?"

  "Exactly. And here's something you don't know, Hernandez. I asked Sylvia to see if there was anything in the system about that monk. Guess what? He was CIA."

  "You're shitting me."

  "I don't know the whole story, but it seems he quit suddenly, showed up at the monastery, they took him in. Three and a half years ago."

  "What'd he do for the CIA?"

  "Can't find out, you know how it is with the CIA. His wife was in it too and she was killed in the line of duty. He's a hero." Willer took one more drag, tasted the bitter filter, threw the butt down. It gave him a curious feeling of satisfaction to litter this pristine landscape, this place that had been shouting, "You're nobody, you're nothing," into his ear all day long. Suddenly he sat up. He had spied a
black dot moving on a low ridge in the middle distance, framed against some high bluffs. He brought his binoculars to his eyes, stared.

  "Well, well. Speak of the devil."

  "Broadbent?"

  "No. That so-called monk. And he's got a pair of binoculars dangling from his neck. It's just what I said: he's looking for something. Hell yeah – and I'd give my left testicle to know what it is."

  Chapter 2

  WEED MADDOX CAME out onto the porch of his rented cabin, hitched a thumb in a belt loop, and inhaled the scent of pine needles warmed by the morning sun. He raised the mug of coffee to his lips and took a noisy sip. He'd slept late; it was almost ten o'clock. Beyond the tops of the ponderosa pines he could see the distant peaks of the Canjilon Mountains gilded with silver light. He strolled across the porch, his cowboy boots thunking hollowly on the wood, and stopped beneath a fancy sign that read saloon. He gave it a little push with his finger, sending it squeaking back and forth on rusty hinges.

  He looked down main street. There wasn't much left of the old CCC Camp; most of the buildings had collapsed into pancaked slabs of rotting wood, overgrown with bushes and small trees. He drained his coffee, set the mug on the rail, strolled down the wooden steps and onto the old main street of town. Maddox had to admit, he was really a country boy at heart. He liked being alone, away from roads, traffic, buildings, and crowds. When it was over, he might even buy a place like this. From here, he could continue to run Hard Time, living a life of peace and quiet for a change, with a couple of ladies for company and nothing else.

  He began walking down the dusty old main street, hands shoved in his pockets, whistling tunelessly. At the far end of town the road petered out into a weedy trail going up the ravine. He continued on, swishing his boots through the tall grass. He picked up a stick, beheading tall weeds as he went.

  Two minutes brought him to a sign planted in the trail that read: