Tyrannosaur Canyon

by Douglas Preston

  "What exactly is it that you do, Harry?"

  "I'm a dinosaur broker." Dearborn leaned back into his chair with a smile, waiting.

  Tom gathered his wits. "I'm an investment banker with clients in the Far East, and one of them–"

  The fat hand rose up yet again, halting Tom's prepared speech. "That may work with Beezon but it won't wash with me. Tell me what it's really about."

  Tom thought for a moment. The shrewd, cynical glitter in Dearborn's eye convinced him that he would be better off telling the truth.

  "Perhaps you read about the murder in New Mexico, in the high mesas north of Abiquiú?"

  "I did."

  "I was the man who found the body. I happened to come across him as he was dying."

  "Go on," said Dearborn, in a neutral tone.

  "The man pressed a journal into my hand and made me promise to give it to his daughter, named Robbie. I'm trying to keep that promise. The problem is, the police haven't identified him or as far as I know even found his body."

  "Did the man tell you anything else before he died?"

  "He was lucid for only a moment," Tom said evasively.

  "And this journal? What does it say?"

  "It's just numbers. Lists of numbers."

  "What kind of numbers?"

  "Data to a GPR survey."

  "Yes, yes, of course, that's how he did it. May I ask what your interest is in this, Mr. Broadbent?"

  "Mr. Dearborn, I made a promise to a dying man. I keep my promises. That's my interest – no more, no less."

  Harry Dearborn seemed amused by the answer. "I do believe, Mr. Broadbent, that if I were Diogenes, I would have to put out my lantern. You are that rarest of things, an honest man. Or you are a consummate liar."

  "My wife thinks I'm merely stubborn."

  He gave a flabby sigh. "I did indeed follow that murder up in Abiquiú. I wondered if it wasn't a certain dinosaur hunter of my acquaintance. I was aware that the fellow had been prospecting up there and there was a rumor he was on to something big. It seems my worst fears have been realized."

  "You know his name?"

  The fat man shifted, the chair creaking under the massive redistribution of weight. "Marston Weathers."

  "Who's he?"

  "Nothing less than the top dinosaur hunter in the country." The fat man gathered his hands together and squeezed. "His friends called him Stem, because he was tall and kind of stringy. Tell me one thing, Mr. Broadbent: did old Stem find what he was looking for?"

  Tom hesitated. Somehow, he felt he could trust this man. "Yes."

  Another long, sad sigh. "Poor Stem. He died like he lived: ironically."

  "What can you tell me about him?"

  "A great deal. And in return, Mr. Broadbent, you will tell me about what he found. Agreed?"

  "Agreed."

  Chapter 14

  WYMAN FORD COULD see the tapering point of Navajo Rim a few hundred yards ahead, where the mesa ended in a small, thumb-shaped butte. The sun hung low in the sky, a disc of red-hot gold. Ford felt exhilarated. He now understood why the Indians of old went off into the wilderness and fasted in search of a vision quest. He had been on half rations for two days, eating only a slice of bread drizzled with a little olive oil for breakfast, and then for dinner half a cupful of cooked lentils and rice. Hunger did strange and wonderful things to the mind; it gave him a feeling of euphoria and boundless energy. He found it curious that a mere physiological effect could produce such a profoundly spiritual feeling.

  He skirted the sandstone butte, looking for a way up. The view was incredible, but from the top he would be able to see even more. He edged along a sandstone ledge no more than three feet wide, plunging a thousand feet down into the blue depths of a canyon. He had never been this deep into the high mesa country before, and he felt like an explorer, a John "Wesley Powell. This was, without a doubt, some of the remotest country that existed in the lower forty-eight.

  He came around the edge and stopped in surprise and delighted astonishment. There, wedged into the side of the bluff, was a tiny but almost perfect Anasazi cliff dwelling – four small rooms constructed from stacked pieces of sandstone and mortared with mud. He edged around the precipice with great care – how in the world had they raised children here? – and knelt down, peering in the doorway. The tiny room inside was empty, save for a scattering of burned corn cobs and a few potsherds. A single shaft of sunlight penetrating through a broken part of the wall, splashing a brilliant splotch of light on the ground. There were recent footprints in the dust of the floor made by someone wearing hiking boots with chevron-shaped lugs, and Ford wondered if these belonged to the prospector. It seemed likely; if you were going to search this corner of the high mesas, you couldn't find a better lookout.

  He stood up and continued along the ledge past the ruin, where he encountered an ancient hand-and-foot trail pecked into the sloping sandstone, going to the top of the butte.

  The summit afforded a dazzling vista across the Echo Badlands, almost, it seemed, to the very curve of the earth itself. To his left, the enormous profile of Mesa de los Viejos loomed up, level after level like a great stone staircase, rising to the foothills of the Canjilon Mountains. It was one of the most awesome views it had ever been his privilege to see, as if the Great Creator had blown up and burned the landscape, leaving it an utter wreck.

  Ford sorted through his maps and removed one. He traced the quadrants of the map with his eye and then mentally drew those same lines on the badlands in front of him. Having sectioned and numbered the landscape to his satisfaction, he took out his binoculars and began searching the first quadrant, the one farthest to the east. When that was done he moved on to the next one and the next, methodically working his way across the landscape, looking for the peculiar rock formation outlined in the computer plot.

  His first sweep yielded too many candidates. Similar formations were often found in groups, having been carved from the same layers of stone by the same action of wind and water. Ford had a growing conviction that he was on the right track, that the T. Rex was somewhere in the Echo Badlands. He just needed to get closer.

  He spent the next fifteen minutes examining each quadrant a second time, but while many rock formations looked similar to the one he was after, none were a perfect match. There was always the possibility, of course, that he was looking at the right formation from the wrong angle, or that the formation might be hidden in one of the deep canyons at the far end of the badlands. As his eyes roved about, one canyon in particular captured his attention. Tyrannosaur Canyon. It was the longest canyon in the high mesas, deep and tortuous, cutting more than twenty miles across the Echo Badlands, with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of side canyons and tributaries. He identified the great basalt monolith that marked its opening, and he followed its sinuous length with his binoculars. Deep in the badlands, the canyon petered out in a distant valley jammed with queer, domelike rocks. Some of the domes looked uncannily like the image in the computer plot – broader on top, with narrower necks. They were jumbled together like a crowd of bald men knocking their heads together.

  Ford measured the distance from the sun to the horizon with his fingers at arm's length, and decided it was about four o'clock. Being June, the sun wouldn't set until well past eight. If he hustled, he could reach the cluster of sandstone domes before dark. It didn't look like there would be any water down there, but he had recently filled his two canteens at a fast-evaporating pothole left from the recent heavy rain, giving him four liters in reserve. He would camp somewhere down in that impressive canyon, commence his exploration at the crack of dawn tomorrow. Sunday. The day of the Lord.

  He pushed that thought out of his mind.

  Ford took one last look through his binoculars at the deep, mysterious canyon. Something twisted in his gut. He knew the T. Rex. was down there – in Tyrannosaur Canyon.

  The irony of it made Ford smile.

  Chapter 15

  HARRY DEARBORN DREW in a lon
g breath of air, his face hidden in shadow. "My goodness, it's four-thirty already. Would you care for tea?"

  "If it isn't too much trouble," Tom said, wondering how the enormously fat man would get out of his chair, let alone make tea.

  "Not at all." Dearborn moved his foot slightly and pressed a small bump in the floor; a moment later the dim presence of a servant materialized out of the back of the house.

  "Tea."

  The man withdrew.

  "Now where were we? Ah, yes, Stem Weathers's daughter. Roberta's her name."

  "Robbie."

  "Robbie, that's what her father called her. Unfortunately, she and her father were somewhat estranged. Last I heard she was trying to make it as an artist in Texas – Marfa, I believe. Down there by the Big Bend. A small town – she should be easy to find."

  "How did you know Weathers? Did he collect dinosaurs for you?"

  A fat finger tapped on the arm of his chair. "Nobody collects for me, Thomas, although I might pass on suggestions from some of my clients. I have nothing to do with the collecting – beyond requiring documentary proof that the fossil came from private land." Here, Dearborn paused long enough for an ironic smile to stretch across the lower part of his face. Then he continued.

  "Most of the fossil hunters out there are looking for small stuff. I call them the ferns and fishes crowd, like our Mr. Beezon. Crap by the truckload. Once in a while they stumble over something important and that's when they come to me.

  I have clients who are looking for something quite particular: businessmen, foreign museums, collectors. I match buyers and sellers and take a twenty percent commission. I never see or touch the specimens. I am not a field man."

  Tom stifled a smile.

  The servant appeared with an enormous silver tray carrying a pot of tea covered in a quilted cozy, plates heaped with scones, cream puffs, small éclairs, and miniature brioches, jars of marmalade, butter, clotted cream, and honey. He placed the tray on a table to the side of Dearborn and vanished as silently as he had come.

  "Excellent!" Dearborn pulled the cozy off the pot, filled two china cups, added milk and sugar.

  "Your tea." He handed the cup and saucer to Tom.

  Tom took his cup, sipped.

  "I insist on my tea being prepared English style, not as the barbaric Americans make it." He chuckled and drained his cup in a single smooth motion, placed it down empty, and then reached out with a plump hand and plucked a brioche from the tray, opened it steaming, slathered it in clotted cream, and popped it in his mouth. He next took a hot crumpet, placed a soft dollop of butter on top, and waited for it to melt before eating it.

  "Please, help yourself," he said in a muffled voice.

  Tom took an éclair and bit into it. Thick whipped cream squirted out the back and dribbled down his hand. He ate it, licking up the cream and wiping off his hand.

  Dearborn smacked his lips, dabbed them with a napkin, and went on. "Stem Weathers wasn't a ferns and fishes man. He was after unique specimens. He spent his whole life looking for that one big strike. Big-time dinosaur hunters are all of a type. They're not in it for money. They're obsessed. It's the excitement of the hunt, the thrill of the strike, an obsession with finding something of enormous rarity and value – that's what keeps them going."

  He poured a second cup of tea, raised the cup and saucer to his lips, drained it halfway in a single loud sip.

  "I handled Stem's finds but otherwise left him alone. He rarely told me what he was doing or where he was looking. This time, however, word got out that he was on to something big in that high mesa country. He talked to too damn many people looking for information – geophysicists, cosmochemists, curators of paleontology at various museums. It was very unwise of him. He was too well known. The rumors were flying thick and fast. Everyone knew how he operated – his homemade GPR and that notebook were both legendary – so it doesn't surprise me someone went in there after him. On top of that, the high mesas is all federal land – overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. He wasn't supposed to be in there. Anything taken off BLM land without a proper federal permit is grand theft – pure and simple. And they only issue permits to a select few museums and universities anyway."

  "Why would he take the risk?"

  "It's not much of a risk. He's not the only one doing it. Most BLM land is so remote the chances of getting caught are almost nonexistent."

  "What kind of finds did he bring you?"

  Dearborn smiled. "I never kiss and tell. Suffice to say, he never bothered me with mediocre stuff. They say he could smell dead dinosaurs even though they'd been buried millions of years."

  He expelled an elegiac sigh, prematurely cut off by a marmaladed scone entering his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, and went on.

  "His problem wasn't finding the dinosaurs; it was what to do after he found them. The financial side always tripped him up. I tried to help but he was always getting himself into trouble. He was a difficult man, a loner, prickly, easy to take offense. Sure, he might find a dinosaur he could sell for half a million dollars, but just to get that fossil out of the ground and ship it to a lab cost him a hundred grand. It takes about thirty thousand man-hours to clean and prepare a large dinosaur – and that doesn't include mounting it. Weathers cared too much about his dinosaurs and as a result he was always broke. But he sure could find them."

  "Do you have any idea who murdered him?"

  "No. But it isn't hard to guess what might have happened. Some of the lesser folks had taken to following him around. As I said, word got out. He asked too many questions of too many geologists, especially those studying the K-T mass extinction. Everyone knew Stem was on the prowl, sniffing up something big. My guess is he was murdered by a claim jumper."

  Tom leaned forward. "Anyone in particular?"

  Dearborn shook his head, picked up an éclair, and swallowed it. "I know everyone in this business. Black market dinosaur hunters are a rough lot. They get in fistfights at meetings, they rob each other's quarries, they lie, cheat, steal. But murder? I can't see it. I would guess the killer is a newcomer, or perhaps a hired hand who takes his work a little too seriously."

  He drained his cup, poured another.

  "These rumors you spoke about?"

  "For a couple of years Weathers had been trying to trace a layer of sandstone known as the Hell Creek Formation down into New Mexico."

  "Hell Creek?"

  "Almost all the T. Rexes in existence have come out of this immense sedimentary formation which crops out in various places across the Rocky Mountains, but which has never been found in New Mexico. The layer was first discovered by a paleontologist named Barnum Brown, in Hell Creek, Montana, about a hundred years ago, when he found the world's first T. Rex. But Weathers was in search of more than just Hell Creek rocks. He had an obsession with the K-T boundary itself."

  "The Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary?"

  "That's right. You see, the Hell Creek Formation is topped by the K-T boundary layer. That layer, which is only half an inch thick, records the event that killed off the dinosaurs – the asteroid strike. There aren't many places in the world where there's an interrupted sequence of rocks at the K-T boundary. I think that's what brought him to the high mesa country of Abiquiú-looking for the K-T boundary layer."

  "Why was he looking for the K-T boundary specifically?"

  "I'm not sure. In general terms, the K-T boundary is about the most interesting layer of rock ever found. It contains the debris from the asteroid impact along with ash from the burning of the earth's forests. There's a spectacularly clear sequence of K-T boundary layer rocks in the Raton Basin in Colorado. They tell quite a story. The asteroid struck where the Yucatln Peninsula of Mexico is now, coming in at an angle that sprayed molten debris across much of North America. They've named the asteroid Chicxulub, a Mayan word meaning 'The Tail of the Devil' – cute, eh?"

  He chuckled and used the opportunity to eat another crumpet.

  "Chicxulub struck the earth moving
at a speed of Mach forty. It was so large that when the bottom of it was contacting the ground the top was higher than Mount Everest. It vaporized a major chunk of the earth's crust on contact, blasting up a plume of material more than a hundred kilometers wide that punched through the earth's atmosphere and went into orbit, some of it rising halfway to the moon before plunging back at speeds of more than twenty-five thousand miles an hour. The falling material superheated much of the atmosphere, igniting gigantic wildfires that swept the continents, releasing a hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide, a hundred billion tons of methane, and seventy billion tons of soot. The smoke and dust was so thick that the earth became as dark as the darkest cave, all photosynthesis stopped, and food chains collapsed. A kind of nuclear winter set in and the earth froze for months; that was immediately followed by a galloping greenhouse effect caused by the sudden release of carbon dioxide and methane. It took 130,000 years for the earth's atmosphere to cool down and return to normal."

  Dearborn smacked his lips, licking off a dribble of crème fraîche with a large pink tongue.

  "All this is beautifully recorded in the K-T rocks in the Raton Basin. First you see a layer of debris from the impact itself. This layer is grayish and high in the rare element iridium, found in meteorites. Under a microscope, you see it's packed with tiny spherules, frozen droplets of molten rock. Above that layer is a second layer, dead black, which one geologist described as 'the ashes of the Cretaceous world.' Geologists are the most poetic of scientists, don't you think?"

  "I'm still puzzled why Weathers would be interested in the K-T boundary if he was just after dinosaur fossils."

  "That's a mystery. Maybe he was using that layer as a way to locate T. Rex fossils. The late Cretaceous, just before the extinction, was when tyrannosaurs ruled the earth."

  "What's a good T. Rex worth these days?"

  "Someone once said that all the people who have ever found a T. Rex wouldn't even be enough to field a baseball team. They're the rarest of the rare. I've got two dozen customers waiting to bid on the next T. Rex that comes on the private market, and I'd guess some of them would be willing to pay a hundred million or more."