Tyrannosaur Canyon

by Douglas Preston

  But not completely. They were heading down toward the Chama River, on a course that would force them to cross the high mesa country, thirty brutal miles. Maddox knew how to track, he'd been at war in the desert, and he knew the high mesas. He'd find them.

  To allow them to escape would mean going back to prison for the Big Bitch – life without parole. He had to kill them or die trying.

  Chapter 25

  WILLER PUT ONE foot out of the cruiser onto the dirt parking lot of the monastery, then goosed the siren, just to let them know he was there. He didn't know what time monks went to bed but he was pretty sure that at one thirty in the morning they'd be sawing wood. The place was as dark as a tomb, not even a few outdoor lights to brighten things up. A moon had risen above the canyon rim, casting a spooky light around the place.

  Another goose of the siren. Let them come to him. After a ninety-minute drive over what had to be the worst road in the state, he was in no mood to be nice.

  "Light just went on."

  Willer followed Hernandez's gesture. A yellow rectangle suddenly floated in the sea of darkness.

  "You really think Broadbent's here? The parking lot's empty."

  Willer felt a fresh wave of irritation at the doubt he heard in Hernandez's voice. He plucked a cigarette from his pocket, stuck it between his lips, lit it. "We know Broadbent was on Highway 84, driving that stolen Dodge. He hasn't gone through any roadblocks and he's not at Ghost Ranch. Where else would he be?"

  "There are plenty of forest roads going off both sides of the highway."

  "Yeah. But there's only one road into the high mesa country and this is it. If he's not here, we'll just have to sweat that monk instead."

  He sucked in, exhaled. A flashlight was now bobbing down the trail. A hooded figure approached, face hidden in shadow. Willer remained standing at the open door of the car, boot hooked on the threshold.

  The monk arrived with his hand outstretched. "Brother Henry, abbot of Christ in the Desert."

  The man was small with brisk movements, bright eyes, and close-cropped goatee. Willer shook the monk's hand, feeling nonplussed at the friendly, confident welcome.

  "Lieutenant Willer, Santa Fe homicide," he said, removing his shield, "and this is Sergeant Hernandez."

  "Fine, fine." The monk examined the badge by the light of his flashlight, returned it. "You wouldn't mind turning off your warning lights, Lieutenant? The brothers are sleeping."

  "Right. Sure."

  Hernandez ducked into the police car, switched them off.

  Willer felt awkward and defensive talking to a monk. Maybe he shouldn't have goosed the siren like that. "We're looking for a man by the name of Thomas Broadbent," he said. "Seems he's friendly with one of your monks, Wyman Ford. We have reason to believe he might be here or along this road somewhere."

  "I don't know this Mr. Broadbent," said the abbot. "And Brother Wyman's not here."

  "Where is he?"

  "He left three days ago for a solitary prayer retreat in the desert."

  Solitary prayer retreat, my ass, thought Willer. "And when's he getting back?"

  "He was supposed to be back yesterday."

  "That so?"

  Willer looked closely at the man's face. It was about as sincere a face as you could find. He was telling the truth, at least.

  "So you don't know this Broadbent? My information is that he was up here a couple of times. Sandy hair, tall, drives a '57 Chevy pickup."

  "Oh yes, the man with the fabulous truck. I know who you mean now. He's been here twice, as far as I'm aware. The last time would have been almost a week ago."

  "He was up here four days ago, according to my information. The day before this monk of yours, Ford, went into the desert on his 'prayer retreat.'"

  "That sounds correct," said the abbot, mildly.

  Willer took out his notebook, jotted down a heading, made a note.

  "May I ask, Lieutenant, what this is all about?" asked the abbot. "We're not accustomed to getting visited by the police in the middle of the night."

  Willer snapped his notebook shut. "I've got a warrant for Broadbent's arrest."

  The abbot looked at Willer for a moment, and his gaze proved unexpectedly disconcerting. "An arrest warrant?"

  "What I said."

  "On what charge, if I may ask?"

  "With all due respect, Father, I can't go into that right now."

  A silence.

  "Is there some place we can talk?" asked Willer.

  "Yes, of course. Normally we're under a vow of silence in the monastery, but we can speak in the Disputation Chamber. If you'll follow me?"

  "Lead on," said Willer, glancing at Hernandez.

  They followed the monk up the winding path, approaching a small adobe building behind the church. The abbot paused at the door, looking at Willer with a question in his eyes. Willer stared back.

  "Excuse me, Lieutenant: your cigarette?"

  "Oh, yeah, right." Willer dropped it and ground it under his heel, aware of the monk's disapproving eye, annoyed at feeling he'd already been bested in some way. The monk turned and they followed him inside. The small building consisted of two spare, whitewashed rooms. The larger one contained benches placed up against walls, with a crucifix at the far end. The other room contained nothing but a crude wooden desk, a lamp, a laptop, and printer.

  The monk turned on a light and they sat on the hard benches. Willer shifted his ass, trying to get comfortable, taking out his notebook and pen. He was getting more annoyed by the minute, thinking of the absence of Ford and Broadbent and the time they'd wasted driving up there. Why the hell couldn't the monks have a damn phone?

  "Abbot, I have to tell you, I have reason to believe this Wyman Ford might be involved."

  The abbot had removed his hood and now his eyebrows arched in surprise. "Involved in what?"

  "We aren't sure yet – something connected to the murder up in the Maze last week. Something possibly of an illegal nature."

  "I find it utterly impossible to believe that Brother Wyman would be involved in anything illegal, let alone murder. He is a man of sterling character."

  "Has Ford been out in the mesas a lot lately?"

  "No more than usual."

  "But he spends a lot of time out there?"

  "He always has, ever since he came here, three years ago."

  "You aware he was CIA?"

  "Lieutenant, I am 'aware' of a lot of things, but that's as far as my knowledge goes. We do not inquire into the past lives of our brothers, beyond what needs to be addressed in the confessional."

  "You noticed any differences in Ford's behavior lately, any changes in routine?"

  The abbot hesitated. "He was working on the computer quite a lot recently. It seemed to involve numbers. But as I said, I am sure he would never be involved–"

  Willer interrupted. "That computer?" He nodded toward the other room.

  "It's our only one."

  Willer jotted some more notes.

  "Brother Ford is a man of God, and I can assure you–"

  Willer cut him off with an impatient gesture. "You have any idea where Ford went on this 'spiritual retreat'?"

  "No."

  "And he's late coming back?"

  "I expect he'll be back at any moment. He promised to be here yesterday. He usually keeps his promises."

  Willer swore inwardly.

  "Is there anything else?"

  "Not at the moment."

  "Then I'd like to retire. We rise at four."

  "Fine."

  The monk left.

  Willer nodded to Hernandez. "Let's go out for air."

  Once outside, he lit up again.

  "What do you think?" Hernandez asked.

  "The whole thing stinks. I'm going to sweat that monk Ford if it's the last thing I do. 'Spiritual retreat' – give me a break." Willer glanced at his watch. Almost two o'clock. He felt a growing sense of futility and wastage of time. "Go down to the car and call back to Santa Fe fo
r a chopper, and while you're at it, ask for a warrant to seize that laptop back up there."

  "A chopper?"

  "Yeah. I want it here at first light. We're going in to find those mothers. It's federal land so make sure the SFPD liaises with the BLM and anyone else who might piss and moan about not being in the loop."

  "Sure thing, Lieutenant."

  Willer watched Hernandez's flashlight bobbing down the trail toward the parking lot. A moment later the police cruiser leapt to life, and he heard the crackle and hiss of the radio. An unintelligible exchange went on for a long time.

  He had already finished one cigarette and started another by the time Hernandez rejoined him at the door.

  Hernandez paused, his plump sides heaving from the walk up the hill.

  "Yeah?"

  "They just closed the airspace from Espanola to the Colorado border."

  "Who's 'they'?"

  "The FAA. Nobody knows why, the order came from on high. No commercial aviation, no private, nothing."

  "For how long?"

  "Open-ended."

  "Beautiful. What about the warrant?"

  "No dice. They woke up the judge; he's pissed, he's Catholic, and he wants a lot more probable cause before seizing a monastery's computer."

  "I'm Catholic too, what the hell's that got to do with it?" Willer furiously sucked the last ounce of smoke from the cigarette, dropped it on the ground, stomped on it with his heel, and ground it back and forth, back and forth, until nothing was left but a shredded tuft of filter. Then he nodded toward the dark mass of canyons and bluffs rising behind the monastery. "Something big's going down in the high mesas. And we don't have the slightest frigging idea what it is."

  PART FOUR

  DEVIL'S GRAVEYARD

  The T. Rex was highly intelligent. She had one of the highest brain-to-body ratios of any reptile, living or dead, and in absolute terms her brain was one of the largest ever to evolve on a terrestrial animal, being almost the size of a human being's. But her cerebrum, the reasoning part, was virtually nonexistent. Her mind was a biological input-output machine that processed instinctual behavior. Its programming was exquisite. She didn't think about what she was doing. She just did it.

  She had no long-term memory. Memory was for the weak. There were no predators she had to recognize, no dangers to avoid, nothing that had to be learned. Instinct took care of her needs, which were simple. She needed meat. Lots of it.

  To be a creature without memory is to be free. The sand hills where she was born, her mother and siblings, the blazing sunsets of her childhood, the torrential rains that ran the rivers red and sent flash floods careening through the lowlands, the baking droughts that cracked the land – of these she had no memory. She experienced life as it happened, a single stream of sensation and reaction that lost its past like a river losing itself in the ocean.

  She watched her fifteen siblings die or be killed and she felt nothing. She knew nothing. She did not notice they were gone, except that once they were dead their carcasses became meat. That was all. After she had parted from her mother, she never recognized her again.

  She hunted, she killed, she ate, she slept, and she roamed. She was not aware that she had a "territory" – she moved following swaths of wrecked vegetation and uprooted ferns left by the great herds of duckbills, without recognition or recollection. Their habits were her habits.

  Such human emotions of love, hate, compassion, sorrow, regret, or happiness had no equivalent in her brain. She knew only pain and pleasure. She was programmed in such a way that doing what her instinct demanded gave her pleasure, and not doing it was unthinkable.

  She did not ponder the meaning of her existence. She was not aware she existed. She just was.

  Chapter 1

  THE CROSSED RUNWAYS at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, lay sleeping in the predawn light, two stripes of blacktop on gypsum flats as white as snow. A terminal building stood to one side of the runway, illuminated by yellow sodium lights, next to a row of hangars. The air had an almost crystalline stillness.

  A speck appeared against the rising brightness of the eastern sky. It slowly resolved itself into the twin-tailed, swept-wing shape of an F-14 Tomcat, coming in straight for a landing, the rumble of its engines rising to an ear-shattering roar. The fighter touched down, sending up two puffs of rubber smoke, rattling in its wake a row of dead yuccas along the verge of the runway. The F-14 reversed its thrusters, slowed to the end of the runway, turned, and taxied to a stop in front of the terminal building. A pair of ground crew busied themselves about the jet, chocking its wheels and rolling out fueling lines.

  The cockpit opened and the thin figure of a man climbed out of the copilot's seat and leapt lightly to the ground. He was dressed in a blue track suit and carried a battered leather briefcase. He strode across the tarmac to the terminal, crisply saluting a pair of soldiers guarding the door, who returned the salute, startled at the sudden formality.

  Everything about the man was cold, clean, and symmetrical, like a piece of turned steel. His hair was black and straight and lay across his forehead. His cheekbones were prominent, the two sharp knobs pushing out the smooth skin of his face. His hands were so small and so neat they looked manicured. His lips were thin and gray, the lips of a dead man. He might have been Asian if it weren't for his piercing blue eyes, which seemed to leap from his face, so strongly did they contrast with his black hair and white skin.

  J.G.MASAGO PASSED through the entryway and entered the cinder-block terminal. He paused in the middle of the room, displeased that no one was there to meet him. Masago had absolutely no time to waste.

  The pause allowed him to reflect that, so far, the operation had gone perfectly. He had solved the problem at the museum and sequestered the data. An emergency review and examination of the specimens at the NSA had produced results exceeding all expectations. This was it: the momentous event that Detachment LS480, the classified agency he headed, had been waiting for ever since the return of the Apollo 17 mission more than thirty years ago. The endgame had begun.

  Masago was sorry about what he had done to the Brit in the museum. It was always a tragedy when a human life had to be taken. Soldiers lost their lives in war, civilians in times of peace. Sacrifices had to be made. Others would take care of the laboratory assistant, Crookshank, who was a lower priority now that the data and samples had been fully secured. Another regrettable but necessary discontinuance.

  Masago was the child of a Japanese mother and an American father, conceived in the ruins of Hiroshima in the weeks after the bombing. His mother had died several years later, screaming in agony from cancer caused by the Black Rain. His father had, of course, disappeared before he was born. Masago had made his way to America when he was fifteen. Eleven years later, when he was twenty-six, the Apollo 17 landing module touched down at Taurus-Littrow on the edge of the moon's Sea of Serenity. Little did he know then that this Apollo mission had made what was arguably the greatest scientific discovery of all time – and that this secret would eventually be entrusted to him.

  By that time, Masago was already a junior officer in the CIA. From there, because of his fluency in Japanese and his brilliance in mathematics, he followed a convoluted and branching career path through various levels of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He succeeded by virtue of ultra-cautious behavior, self-effacing brilliance, and achievement cloaked in diffidence. Eventually he was given the leadership of a small classified detachment known as LS480, and the secret was revealed to him.

  The greatest of all secrets.

  It was fated, because Masago knew a simple truth that none of his colleagues had the courage to face. He knew that humanity was finished. Mankind had gained the capability of destroying itself, and therefore it would destroy itself.

  QED. It was as simple and obvious to Masago as two plus two. Was there a time, in all of human history, when humanity had failed to use the weapons at its disposal? The question was not if, but when. It was the "whe
n" part of the equation that Masago controlled. It was in his power to delay the event. If he performed his duty, he personally might be able to give the human race five years more, maybe ten – perhaps even a generation. This was the noblest of callings, but it required moral discipline. If some had to die prematurely, that was a small price. If one death could delay the event by only five minutes... what flowers might therefore bloom? We were all doomed anyway.

  For ten years he had headed LS480, keeping the lowest possible profile. They were in a holding pattern, a waiting game, an interregnum. He had always known that someday the second shoe would drop.

  And now it had.

  It had dropped in a most unlikely place and in a most unlikely way. But he had been ready. He had been waiting for this moment for ten years. And he had acted swiftly and with decision.

  Masago's sapphire eyes gave the terminal a second sweep, noting the wall of vending machines, the gray polyester carpeting, the rows of plastic chairs bolted to the floor, the counters and offices – cheerless, spare, functional, and typically Army. He had been waiting two minutes; it was close to becoming intolerable. Finally, out of an office stepped a man in rumpled desert camouflage, with two stars on his shoulder and a thatch of iron hair.

  Masago waited for the man to reach him before extending his hand. "General Miller?"

  The general took the hand in a firm, military squeeze. "And you must be Mr. Masago." He grinned and nodded out toward the Tomcat refueling on the runway. "Navy man once? We don't see many of those around here."

  Masago neither smiled nor responded to the question. He asked instead, "Everything is ready as specified, General?"

  "Of course."

  The general turned and Masago followed him into a spare office at the far end. On the metal desk lay some folders, a badge, and a small device that might have been a classified version of a military satellite phone. The general picked up the badge and phone, and handed them to Masago without a word. He picked up the first folder, which had a number of red stamps on it.