Tyrannosaur Canyon

by Douglas Preston

  He got out, shoved his hands in his pockets, leaned on the car, drew in a deep breath of cool desert air, closed his eyes, murmured his mantra, and managed to get his heart rate down to something a little more normal. He opened his eyes. The highway was still dark. Nine twenty-two. He had passed Broadbent in his '57 Chevy eleven minutes ago, and if the man followed directions, turned around quickly, and maintained his speed, his headlights should appear in the north in just over six minutes.

  He walked into the convenience store, bought a slice of ten-hour-old pizza and a giant cup of burnt coffee, paid with exact change. He went back out to his car, hooked a boot on the fender, glanced up the dark highway. Two more minutes. Another glance into the store told him the kid was absorbed in a comic. He poured the coffee out on the tarmac and slung the piece of pizza into a cholla cactus already festooned with trash. He checked his watch, checked his cell – good signal.

  He got in his car, started the engine, and waited.

  Nine twenty-six.

  Nine twenty-seven.

  Nine twenty-eight.

  Bingo: a pair of headlights emerged from the sea of blackness in the north. The headlights slowly grew in size and brightness as the car approached on the undivided, single-lane highway-and then the truck passed in a flash of turquoise, the red taillights receding into the blackness to the south. Nine-thirty and forty seconds.

  He waited, his eyes on the watch, counting out one minute exactly, then he pressed the speed-dial button on his cell.

  "Yes?" The voice answered immediately.

  "Listen carefully. Maintain your speed. Do not slow down or speed up. Roll down the right-hand window."

  "What about my wife?"

  "You'll get her in a moment. Do as I say."

  "I've got the window down."

  Maddox watched the second hand on his watch. "When I tell you, take your cell phone, hang up but leave it on. Put it in the Ziploc bag with the notebook and throw them all out the window. Wait until I give you the signal. After you toss it, don't stop, keep driving."

  "Listen, you son of a bitch, I'm not doing anything until you tell me where my wife is."

  "Do what I say or she's dead."

  "Then you'll never see this notebook."

  Maddox checked his watch. Already three and a half minutes had passed. With one hand on the wheel, he pressed the accelerator and turned out on the highway, leaving a line of smoking rubber in the parking lot. "She's in the old campground at Madera Creek, you know the place? Forty miles south of here on the Rio Grande. The bitch resisted me, she got herself hurt, she's bleeding, she's with my partner, if you don't do what I say I'm going to call him and he'll kill her and split. Now put the cell in the bag and toss it, now."

  "Know this: if she dies you're a dead man. I'll follow you to the ends of the earth and kill you."

  "Stop the grandstanding and do what I say!"

  "I'm doing it."

  Maddox heard a rustling sound and the line went dead. He released his breath in a big rush. He checked his watch, noted the time to the second, looked at his speedometer. The notebook would be at a point about 4.1 miles south of the mart. He shut his cell phone and maintained speed. He had already scouted the highway, timed the distances, and noted the milestones. He knew within a quarter-mile stretch where the notebook must be.

  Maddox passed the mile marker and slowed way down, unrolled his windows, and called Broadbent's number. A second later he could hear the faint answering ring: and there it was, lying by the side of the road, a plastic Ziploc bag. He cruised past, at the same time switching on a mounted lamp on his Range Rover and shining it around, to make sure Broadbent wasn't waiting in ambush. But the prairie stretched out empty on all sides. He had little doubt that Broadbent was heading south at high speed toward the Madera Campground. He would probably stop in Abiquiú to call the cops and an ambulance. Maddox didn't have much time to get the notebook and get the hell out.

  He pulled a U-turn, drove back to the bag, hopped out, and scooped it up. As he accelerated back onto the highway he ripped the bag open with his right hand and groped through trash for the notebook.

  There it was. He pulled it out, looked at it. It was bound in old leather and there was even a smudge of blood on the back cover. He opened it. Rows of eight-digit numbers, just as Corvus said. This was it. He'd done it.

  He wondered how Broadbent would react when he found the Madera Campground empty. Ends of the earth.

  He had the notebook. Now it was time to get rid of the woman.

  Chapter 5

  ABOUT A HALF mile south of where he had tossed the journal, Tom shut his lights off and veered off the highway, bounced over a ditch, and busted through a barbed-wire fence. He drove into the dark prairie until he felt he was far enough away from the road. He shut off the engine and waited, his heart pounding.

  When the man had said Sally was in the Madera Campground, Tom knew he was lying. The campground was overrun with small children at that time of year, and the screened-in cabins were too public, too exposed. The Madera Campground story was designed to draw him south.

  A few minutes later he saw the headlights of a car far behind him. He had passed a Range Rover earlier and had seen the same car in the liquor mart, and he had no doubt this was the kidnapper's car now, as he saw it slowing down along the stretch of highway where he had thrown the notebook. A side lamp went on, scouring the prairie. Tom had a sudden fear of being seen, but the lamp searched only the immediate area. The car pulled a U-turn, came back; a man jumped out and picked up the notebook – he was tall and lanky but too far away to be identifiable. A moment later the man had hopped back in and the car headed north in a screech of rubber.

  Tom waited until the car was well ahead on the highway, then, keeping his headlights off, he started his car and drove back to the road. He had to drive blind: if he turned his headlights on the man would know he was being followed – the Chevy with its round, old-fashioned headlights was too identifiable.

  Once on the highway he sped up as much as he dared without lights, his eyes on the receding glow of the taillights, but the car ahead was moving fast, and he realized he had no hope of keeping up without turning on his lights. He had to chance it.

  At that moment, he was approaching the liquor mart, and he saw that a pickup truck had pulled in for gas. He braked hard, swerved into the station, pulled up on the opposite side of the pumps. The truck, a shabby Dodge Dakota, was sitting next to the pumps with the keys dangling from the ignition while the driver paid inside. He could just see, in the door pocket, the handle of a gun.

  Tom jumped out of his truck, climbed into the Dodge, started the engine, and peeled out with a squeal of rubber. He floored it, heading northward into the darkness where the pair of taillights had vanished.

  Chapter 6

  THE CALL CAME in at 11:00 p.m. Even though Melodie had been waiting for it, she jumped when the phone trilled in the silent, empty lab.

  "Melodie? How's the research going?"

  "Great, Dr. Corvus, just great." She swallowed, realizing she was breathing hard into the mouthpiece.

  "Still working?"

  "Yes, yes, I am."

  "Those results come in?"

  "Yes. They're – incredible."

  "Tell me everything."

  "The specimen is riddled with iridium – exactly the type of iridium enrichment you find at the K-T boundary, only more so. I mean, this specimen is saturated with iridium."

  "What type of iridium and how many parts per billion?"

  "It's bound up in various isometric hexoctahedral forms in a concentration of over 430 ppb. That, as you know, is the exact type identified with the Chicxulub asteroid strike."

  Melodie waited for a response but it didn't come.

  "This fossil," she ventured, "it wouldn't happen to be located at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary... would it?"

  "It could be."

  Another long silence, and Melodie continued.

  "In the outer m
atrix surrounding the specimen, I found a tremendous abundance of microparticles of soot, of the kind you get from forest fires. According to a recent article in the Journal of Geophysical Research, more than a third of the earth's forests burned up following the Chicxulub asteroid strike."

  "I'm aware of the article," came the quiet voice of Corvus.

  "Then you know that the K-T boundary consists of two layers, first the iridium-enriched debris from the strike itself, and then a layer of soot laid down by worldwide forest fires." She stopped, waiting yet again for a reaction, but there was another long silence on the other end of the phone. Corvus didn't seem to get it – or did he?

  "It seems to me..." She paused, almost afraid to say it. "Or rather, my conclusion is that this dinosaur was actually killed by the asteroid strike – or it died in the ecological collapse that followed."

  This dynamite conclusion fell into the void. Corvus remained silent.

  "I would guess that this would also account for the fossil's extraordinary state of preservation."

  "How so?" came the guarded response.

  "While reading that article, it struck me that the asteroid impact, the fires, and the heating of the atmosphere created unique conditions for fossilization. For one thing, there'd be no scavengers to tear apart the body and scatter the bones. The strike actually heated up the whole earth, making the atmosphere as hot as the Sahara Desert, and in many areas the air temperature reached two, even three hundred degrees – perfect for flash-drying a carcass. On top of that, all the dust would trigger gigantic weather systems. Immense flash floods would have quickly buried the remains."

  Melodie took a deep breath, waited for a reaction – excitement, astonishment, skepticism. Still nothing.

  "Anything more?" asked Corvus.

  "Well, then they're the Venus particles."

  "Venus particles?"

  "That's what I call those black particles you noticed, because under a microscope they look sort of like the symbol for Venus – a circle with a cross coming out of it. You know, the feminist symbol."

  "The feminist symbol," Corvus repeated.

  "I did some tests on them. They're not a microcrystalline formation or an artifact of fossilization. The particle is a sphere of inorganic carbon with a projecting arm; inside are a bunch of trace elements I haven't yet analyzed."

  "I see."

  "They're all the same size and shape, which would imply a biological origin. They seem to have been present in the dinosaur when it died and just remained in place, unchanged, for sixty-five million years. They're... very strange. I need to do a lot more work to figure out what they are, but I wonder if they aren't some kind of infectious particle."

  There was that strange silence on the other end of the telephone. When Corvus finally spoke, his voice was low. He sounded disturbed. "Anything else, Melodie?"

  "That's all." As if that wasn't enough. What was wrong with Corvus? Didn't he believe her?

  The Curator's voice was so calm it was almost spooky. "Melodie, this is fine work you've done. I commend you. Now listen carefully: here is what I want you to do. I want you to gather up all your CDs, the pieces of specimen, everything in the lab connected with this work, and I want you to lock it all up securely in your specimen cabinet. If there is by chance anything left in the computer, delete it using the utility program that completely wipes files off the hard disk. Then I want you to go home and get some sleep."

  She felt incredulous. Was that all he could say, that she needed sleep?

  "Can you do that, Melodie?" came the soft voice. "Lock it all up, clean the computer, go home, get some sleep, eat a nourishing meal. We'll talk again in the morning."

  "All right."

  "Good." A pause. "See you tomorrow."

  AFTER HANGING UP the telephone, Melodie sat in the laboratory, feeling stunned. After all her work, her extraordinary discoveries, Corvus acted as if he hardly cared – or didn't even believe her. I commend you. Here she'd made one of the most important paleontological discoveries in history, and all he could do was commend her? And tell her to get some sleep?

  She looked up at the clock. Clunk went the minute hand. Eleven-fifteen. She looked down at her arm, at the bracelet winking on her wrist, her miserably small breasts, her thin hands, her bitten nails, her ugly freckled arms. Here she was, Melodie Crookshank, thirty-three years old, still an assistant without a tenure-track job, a scientific nobody. She felt a growing burn of resentment. Her thoughts flashed back to her stern university-professor father whose oft-stated goal was that she not grow up to be "just another dumb broad." She thought of how much she had tried to please him. And she thought of her mother, who resented having a career as a homemaker and wanted to live vicariously through her daughter's success. Melodie had tried to please her too. She thought about all the teachers she'd tried to please, the professors, her dissertation adviser.

  And now Corvus.

  And where had all this agreeableness and pleasing gotten her? Her eye roved about the oppressive basement lab.

  She wondered, for the first time, just how Corvus planned to handle their discovery. And it was their discovery – he couldn't have done it on his own. He didn't know how to work the equipment well, he was practically a computer illiterate, and he was a lousy mineralogist. She had done the analysis, asked the right questions of the specimen, teased out the answers. She had made the connections, extrapolated from the data, developed the theories.

  It began to dawn on her why Corvus wanted to keep it all so very secret. A spectacular discovery like this would set off a furor of competition, intrigue, and a rush to get the rest of the fossil. Corvus might easily lose control of the discovery – and with it lose credit. He understood the value of that concept, credit. It was the cold cash of the scientific world.

  Credit. A slippery concept, when you really thought about it.

  Her mind felt clearer than it had in months – maybe years. Maybe it was because she was so tired – tired of pleasing, tired of working for others, tired of this tomblike lab. Her eye fell on the sapphire bracelet. She took it off and let it dangle in front of her eyes, the gems winking seductively. Corvus had driven one of the best bargains of his career, giving her that piece of jewelry, thinking it would buy her silence and a mousy, feminine agreeableness. She shoved it in her pocket in disgust.

  Melodie now began to understand why Corvus had reacted the way he had, why he had been so unforthcoming – even disturbed – on the telephone. She had done too well with her assignment. He was worried that she had found out too much, that she might claim the discoveries as her own.

  Like a revelation, Melodie Crookshank knew what she had to do.

  Chapter 7

  THE M-LOGOS 455 Massively Parallel Processing Object Unit System was the most powerful computer yet constructed by the human race. It sat in a perpetually air-conditioned, dust-free, static-free basement deep beneath the National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Mead, Maryland. It had not been built to predict the weather, simulate a fifteen-megaton thermonuclear explosion, or find the quadrillionth digit of pi. It has been created for a far more mundane purpose: to listen.

  Countless nodes distributed across the globe collected a gargantuan stream of digital information. It intercepted more than forty percent of all traffic on the World Wide Web, more than ninety percent of all cellular telephone conversations, virtually all radio and television broadcasts, many land-line telephone conversations, and a large portion of the data flows from governmental and corporate LANs and private networks.

  This digital torrent was fed in real time into the M455MPP at the rate of sixteen terabits per second.

  The computer merely listened.

  It listened with almost every known language on earth, every dialect, every protocol, almost every computer algorithm ever written to analyze language. But that was not all: the M455MPP was the first computer to employ a new, highly classified form of data analysis known as Stutterlogic. Stutterlogic had been developed
by advanced cybernetic theorists and programmers at the Defense Intelligence Agency as a way of sailing around the great reef of Artificial Intelligence, which had ship-wrecked the hopes of so many computer programmers over the last decades. Stutterlogic was a whole new way of looking at information. Instead of trying to simulate human intelligence, as AI had sought unsuccessfully to do, Stutterlogic operated under a wholly new kind of logic, which was neither machine intelligence nor AI-based.

  Even with Stutterlogic, it could not be said that the computer "understood" what it heard. Its role was merely to identify a "communication of interest," or a CI in the jargon of its operators, and forward it to a human for review.

  Most of the CIs that emerged from the M455MPP were e-mails and cellular telephone conversations. The latter were parceled out among one hundred and twenty-five human listeners. Their job required an enormous knowledge base, fluency in the language or dialect in question, and an almost magical sense of intuition. Being a good "listener" was an art, not a science.

  At 11:04.34.98 EDT, four minutes into an eleven-minute cellular telephone call, module 3656070 of the M455MPP identified the conversation under way as a potential CI. The computer, having captured the conversation from the beginning, rewound it and began analyzing it, even while it was still in progress. When the CI concluded at 11:16.04.58 it had already passed through a series of algorithmic filters that had parsed it linguistically and conceptually, scrutinizing the voice inflections for dozens of psychological markers, including stress, excitement, anger, confidence, and fear. Object programs identified the caller and the receiver and then went out to examine thousands of databases to retrieve every particle of personal information about the two interlocutors that existed in networked electronic form anywhere in the world.