Tyrannosaur Canyon

by Douglas Preston

  But the highest motive of all was his own survival. If he didn't kill both of them, no one, not even Corvus, could save him.

  Chapter 8

  WITH EVERY STEP Tom could feel the intense heat of the sand coming through the soles of his Italian leather shoes. His blisters had long since broken and the raw spots rubbed with each step. But as his thirst grew, the pain seemed to lessen. They'd passed several tinajas, potholes in the rock that normally held water. All had been dry.

  He paused in a sliver of shade against an overhanging rock. "Take five?"

  "God yes."

  They sat down, trying to maneuver as much into the shade as possible. Tom took Sally's hand. "How are you doing?"

  She shook her head, shivering her long blond hair. "I'm okay, Tom. And you?"

  "Surviving."

  She fingered the silk pants of his "Mr. Kim" suit and smiled wanly. "Did it work?"

  "I should never have left you alone."

  "Tom, stop blaming yourself."

  "Do you have any idea of who that man is who kidnapped you?"

  "He bragged to me all about it. He's a hired gun, working for a curator at a museum back east. He may not be educated, but he sure isn't stupid." She leaned back, her eyes closed.

  "So he killed "Weathers to get the notebook and then came after you. Christ, I never should have gone to Tucson, I'm sorry–"

  Sally laid a hand on his shoulder. "Let's save the apologies for when we're out of here." She paused and asked, "You think we really lost him?"

  Tom didn't answer.

  "You're still worrying about him, aren't you?"

  He nodded, gazing down the canyon. "I don't like the way he just disappeared. It's just like what happened back at the ghost town."

  "It's what you said. He got lost following us."

  "He knows if he doesn't kill us, he's finished. That's a pretty good incentive."

  Sally nodded slowly. "He's not the type to give up." She laid her head back against the rock and closed her eyes.

  "I'm going higher for another look back."

  Tom scrambled up a scree slope to a bench. But there was nothing behind them, just an empty wilderness of stone. They were still at least twenty miles from the river, but he had only a vague notion of where they actually were. He cursed under his breath, wishing he had a map; he had never been this deep into the high mesa country before and he had no idea of what lay between them and the river.

  He climbed back down and stood over Sally for a moment, looking at her, before touching her. She opened her eyes.

  "We'd better keep going."

  She groaned while he helped her to her feet. They were just about to set off when a deep rumble, not unlike thunder, rolled across the badlands, echoing strangely through the canyons.

  Tom looked up. "Funny. There's not a cloud in the sky."

  Chapter 9

  FORD LAY HUDDLED in the lee of the cliff, facedown, arms wrapped around his head, as the deafening roar of the missile strike rolled away like a hundred thunderbolts reverberating down the canyons. A rain of sand and gravel continued as the echoes died away. He waited until all was silent, and then raised his head.

  He was inside a dull orange cloud. He coughed, covered his mouth with the hem of his robe, and tried to breathe, still half-stunned from the blast wave. The roar had been so powerful that it almost seemed as if the sound itself could have killed him. And yet here he was, alive and unhurt. He could hardly believe it.

  He stood up, steadying himself against the canyon wall, his head pounding and his ears ringing. He had taken refuge in the scooped-out undercut in the canyon wall, a lucky decision. Great shattered chunks of stone littered the ground all around him, but the overhang had protected him well. Slowly the dust began settling and the orange fog turned into a haze. He noticed a peculiar smell, a choking mixture of pulverized rock and cordite. The dust, trapped between the walls of the canyon, drifted slowly, taking a long time to dissipate.

  The dust... The dust was now his protection. It would hide him from the penetrating eyes of the video cameras onboard the Predator drone, which was no doubt still circling overhead doing damage assessment.

  He retreated back under the overhang as the dust finally drifted off, pushed away by an imperceptible movement of air. He crouched, remaining motionless, so thickly coated with dust himself that he figured he probably looked like just another rock. He could still hear the drone making a whispery buzz from somewhere in the sky. Ten minutes passed before the sound faded away.

  Ford staggered to his feet, coughing up mud and spitting it out, slapping the dust off his robes, shaking it out of his hair, and wiping his face. He was only now beginning to grasp the inexplicability of what had just happened: a Predator drone had deliberately fired a missile at him. Why?

  It had to be a mistake, a test gone awry. But even as the thought came into his mind, he discounted it. For one thing, he knew that a classified drone would never be tested over public land, especially not in New Mexico, which already had White Sands Missile Range, the nation's largest proving ground. Nor could the Predator have somehow escaped from WSMR and ended up there – it didn't have the range. The turn, dive, and fire maneuver the drone had executed was beyond ICCG capability: a remote human pilot had been behind that maneuver – a pilot who could see who he was and what he was doing.

  Could they be hunting someone else? Was it a case of mistaken identity? Ford supposed it was possible, but that would be a gross violation of the first rule of engagement: secure visual identification of the target. How could he, in his monk's robes and sandals, be taken for someone else? Was the CIA after him specifically for something he knew or had done? But it was inconceivable the CIA would murder one of its own – it was illegal, of course, but more to the point it was utterly contrary to CIA culture. Even if they did want to kill him, they wouldn't send a forty-million-dollar classified drone after him when it would be much simpler to assassinate him in his own bed in his cell in the unlocked monastery, and dress it up to look like the usual heart attack.

  Something else was going on here, something truly strange.

  Ford slipped off his robe, shook the rest of the dust out of it, and put it back on. He scoured the sky with his binoculars, but the drone had disappeared. He next turned his attention to the butte the missile had struck. He could see the fresh orange scar in the darker sandstone, a gouged-out hole in the rock still dribbling plumes of sand and dust. If he hadn't thrown himself under that undercut in the canyon wall, he would surely have been killed.

  Ford began walking down the canyon, his ears still ringing. What had just happened was still inconceivable, but he began to feel that the attack had something to do with the dinosaur fossil. He couldn't exactly say why; it was more a hunch than a deduction. But nothing else made sense. How did that old Sherlockian saw go? When all else has been discarded, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  For some unfathomable reason, Ford mused, a government agency was so desperate to get their hands on that dinosaur fossil and leave no witnesses that they were willing to kill a U.S. citizen to do it. But that raised the additional question: how did they know he was out hunting the dinosaur? Only Tom Broadbent knew that.

  During his CIA years, Ford had sometimes had dealings with various classified sub-agencies, special task forces, and "black detachments." The latter were small, highly classified teams of specialists formed for specific investigative or research purposes, disbanded as soon as the particular problem had been solved. In CIA lingo they called them Black Dets. The Black Dets were supposed to be under the control of the NSA, the DIA, or the Pentagon, but in actuality they didn't play by anybody's rules. Everything about the Black Dets was classified: purpose, budgets, personnel, their very existence. Some of the Black Dets were so highly classified that top CIA brass couldn't get clearance to interface with them. He recalled those few he had dealt with: they all had important sounding acronyms, the TEMP-WG (Thermonuclear Electromagnetic Pul
se Working Group; ANDD (Allied Nations Disinformation Detachment); and BDGZD (Bioweapons Defense Ground Zero Detachment).

  Ford recalled how much he and his colleagues at the CIA despised the Black Dets: rogue agencies, accountable to no one, run by cowboy types who felt the end justified the means – whatever means and whatever end.

  This situation fairly reeked of Black Det.

  PART FIVE

  THE VENUS PARTICLE

  The days came when the bull tyrannosaurs fought for her in ritualized combat. While she watched, they circled each other, roaring, and feinting, the forest shaking from their cries. Then they rushed at each other, slamming their heads together, backing off, tearing up trees, churning the very earth in their furious lust. Their roaring shivered her flanks and heated her loins. When the winning bull mounted her, trumpeting in triumph, she submitted, her synapses firing in a sustained and barely successful effort to suppress her impulse to rip her suitor open from neck to navel.

  As soon as it was over, the memory of that, too, was gone.

  To lay her eggs, she traveled westward to a chain of sandy hills in the shadow of the mountains. She scooped out and tamped down a nest in the sand. After laying, she covered the clutch with wet, rotting vegetation that supplied heat through fermentation, nosing it to check its temperature and replacing it often. She hardly ever left the nest, forgoing even food in her vigilance. She guarded her offspring with violence and raised them with gentleness. She was bigger than the males of her species, to protect her young from their mindless lust for meat. The sensations she felt as she did these things did not meet the definition of "love." She was a biological machine running a complex program, whose goal was to perpetuate copies of itself by insuring the packages of meat that carried those copies survived their turn to breed. The very sensation of "caring" was for her neurologically impossible.

  When her young reached a certain size, they began to hunt in a cohort pack, gradually extending their territory as their requirement for meat grew. That was when she abandoned them and migrated back to her old range, their existence no longer part of her consciousness.

  When she was on the move, fear ran through the forest like poison gas. Her fifteen-foot stride was silent. The ground did not shake when she walked; it did not even stir. She walked on her toes, lightly and silently, her coloring blending into the forest.

  She knew hunger, she knew satiety. She knew the choking gush of blood in the mouth. She knew light, she knew dark. She knew sleep, she knew waking.

  The biological program ran relentlessly on.

  Chapter 1

  MELODIE WATCHED THE last group of guards leave the Mineralogy lab, keys jingling, voices loud in the corridor. She closed the door after them, locked it, and leaned against it, exhaling. It was almost one o'clock. The coroner had come, signed a bunch of papers; the EMTs had carted off the body; a bored cop had made a perfunctory walk-through with a clipboard jotting notes. Everyone assumed it was a heart attack, and Melodie felt sure the postmortem would confirm it.

  Only she suspected it was murder. The killer was after the dinosaur, of that Melodie felt certain – why else would he have stolen all of their research, her research? She had to work fast.

  Melodie wondered if she had done the right thing, keeping her suspicions to herself. She had no proof, no real evidence of murder beyond the fact that Corvus wouldn't give a trilobite the time of day. If she had voiced her suspicions and gotten embroiled in the case, it would only focus the attention of the killer on her. That was the one thing she could not afford to have happen – especially not now, when the stakes were so high. She had, as they said, bigger fish to fry.

  She grabbed a heavy metal chair and carried it to the door, propping it underneath the knob, jamming it in place until she was sure no one could get in, not even with a key. If anyone asked why she had blocked the door, she could always say the death had spooked her. The fact was that few curators deigned to descend from their wood-paneled fifth-floor offices to the basement lab, especially on a Sunday.

  She would have plenty of time to work undisturbed.

  Melodie hastened into the storage area contiguous with the lab. Here, tens of thousands of mineral and fossil specimens were arranged on shelves upon metal shelves rising from floor to ceiling, numbered and categorized. The smaller specimens were in drawers, the larger ones in boxes on open shelves. A railed library ladder on wheels allowed access to the highest shelves.

  Her heart beating with anxiety, Melodie pushed the library ladder around on its rails until it was in the row she wanted. She climbed up. On the top shelf, in the dim space just below the ceiling, sat an old wooden crate with Mongolian script stamped on it. A faded label read:

  Protoceratops andrewsii egg clutch

  Flaming Cliffs

  Access No 1923-5693A

  W. Grainger, collector

  The wooden lid looked nailed shut, but it wasn't. Melodie lifted it, laid it aside, and then pulled up a layer of straw matting.

  Nestled among the eggs of a fossil dinosaur nest were the copies of the CD-ROMs Melodie had burned containing all her data and images. Next to it was a tiny plastic case containing three wafer-thin sections of the original specimen, too small to have been missed.

  Leaving the CDs in place, Melodie removed the plastic specimen case, replaced the straw matting, refitted the lid, climbed down the ladder, and rolled it back to where it was before.

  She carried the case back to the polisher, removed one sliver, and fixed it to a polishing plug. When the epoxy had dried she began to polish it, aiming for a perfect, microthin section, enough to get some really good images out of the transmission electron microscope. It was exacting work, made all the harder by the shaking of her hands. Several times she had to stop, take a few deep breaths, and tell herself that there was no reason for the killer to come back, that he had gotten what he was after, and that he could have no idea that she had made duplicates of her data. When the specimen was ready she carried it into the TEM room to turn on the machine and let it warm up. As she did so, she noticed the logbook open next to it. The last entry, written in a bold, slanting hand, leapt out at her:

  Researcher: I.Corvus

  Locality/Specimen number: High Mesas/Chama River Wilderness, N.M. T.Rex. Comments: Third examination of remarkable T. Rex. Vertebral fragment. Extraordinary! This will make history. I.C.

  Third examination? She flipped back in the book and found two other entries, both written at the bottom of the page where Corvus had obviously found some blank lines. She had suspected something like this, but not quite so blatantly. The bastard had planned to rip her off, lock, stock, and barrel. And being the nice, eager technician she was, she'd almost let him. She went into the SEM room and flipped through the logbook there, finding a similar number of phony entries. So that's what he had been doing in the lab late that night: stealing her work and doctoring the logbooks.

  She found herself breathing hard. Almost from the time she was in first grade she wanted to be a scientist, and as she got older she had cherished the idea that science was the one field of human endeavor where people were altruistic and worked not for themselves but for the advancement of human knowledge. She had always believed science was a field in which merit was awarded where due.

  How naive.

  There was only one way to insure credit and protect herself from the killer at the same time: finish up her research and beat the murderer into print. If she submitted her results to the online section of the Journal of Paleontology, they would be peer-reviewed and published electronically within three days.

  Naturally, she would give due credit to Corvus for his contribution, which was minor enough – he supplied her with the specimen. Where the fossil had come from, who it belonged to, how he had gotten his hands on it – these were questions beyond the scope of her work. Sure, there would be controversy. The specimen might be stolen, or even illegal. But none of that was germain to her work: she'd been given a sample to analyze and tha
t was what she had done. Once her research was in print, there'd no longer be any point in killing her.

  And then she could write her own ticket.

  Chapter 2

  IN POSITION BEHIND the large boulder, Maddox shifted his weight, stretched out his foot, and rotated it, trying to get the stiffness out. The sun felt like a hot anvil to his bare back. The sweat was trickling down his scalp, neck, and face, stinging his cuts. The wound in his thigh throbbed viciously – it was now definitely infected.

  He blotted his face, blinked the sweat out of his eyes. His tongue felt coated with rust, his lips cracked. Christ he was thirsty. Twenty minutes had passed and the Broadbents hadn't showed. He took a look through the scope, sweeping it up and down the empty canyon. Had they taken a detour he didn't know about, or found water? If that was the case, they might have turned and headed north toward Llaves. If he had lost them–

  And suddenly there they were.

  Fitting his eye to the scope and resting his finger on the hot curve of the trigger, he forced himself to relax, waiting until they reached the range of two hundred yards. He could see the butt of the gun in Broadbent's waistband. He wouldn't even have time to pull it out, let alone fire it. And even if he did, it would be useless at two hundred yards.

  In another minute, they were in position.

  He squeezed the trigger, firing a protracted burst, full-auto, the weapon kicking. He looked up, and saw them both sprinting back up the canyon. Both of them.

  What the hell–?

  He'd missed. He returned to the scope, tracked the woman, fired another burst, another – but the bullets were kicking up sand ahead of them, each round high as his quarry ran zigzagging toward the canyon wall. They were going to escape around the lee of the canyon bend.