The Bone Hunters

by Robert J. Mrazek

  “Just meeting you, Dr. Finchem, has been the greatest thrill of my life,” she said.

  He felt his resistance melting away.

  Twenty minutes after leaving the Red Sox game, he was unlocking the great steel door that led into his lair on the Long Wharf. He turned on the overhead lights in the single massive chamber.

  About fifty feet by fifty feet, it had twenty-foot-high ceilings and rough-hewn oak beams that braced the whole expanse. The windows overlooking the harbor were clad with iron shutters.

  The first section of the chamber included a fully equipped laboratory with all the assets necessary for both an archaeologist and a pathologist, including a computer lab, printers, cameras, recorders, and flat-screen television monitors.

  Astrud was nearly overcome with emotion in the second area of the chamber. It was Barnaby’s Norse library, with documents, diaries, old vellum manuscripts and rune tablets going back twelve centuries. On the wall she saw a hint of his vast collection of Viking swords, tools, shields, and knives.

  The final section was his living area, which included an expansive kitchen. Copper pots and pans hung from an iron rack above commercial appliances and granite countertops.

  “I like to cook,” he said.

  Her eyes wandered away from the kitchen to the nearby elevated sleeping loft, which was constructed from raw timbers and covered with animal pelts and sheepskin rugs.

  “A tenth-century Viking sleeping pallet,” said Astrud observantly. “I’ve always wondered if they would have been comfortable while sleeping in the nude. . . . How would you research that, Dr. Finchem?”

  They came together on the pallet. Barnaby no longer cared whether his students bedded him for his brains, his fame, his marking pen, or his ability to further their career. At sixty-nine, he still loved the feel and touch of a beautiful woman without having to pay her alimony. He had been down that road more than once.

  The only impediment to his anticipated pleasure was buried inside his upper chest. It was an implanted cardioverter defibrillator, or ICD, which he had been assured by his doctors would correct most life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias after the last heart attack.

  The ICD had never met Astrud.

  When they had finished, he turned wearily onto his back and stretched out his six-and-a-half-foot frame. It had been good, very good. He was falling into a deep sleep when the cell phone he had left on the kitchen counter began to ring.

  It was a new phone, and he had set the ring tone to the cries of a flock of seagulls, the least obnoxious tone on the list. He had not bothered to set a ring limit before it went to an answering message, and the cawing went on and on. After two minutes of the shrieking cries, the gulls sounded as if they were coming to eat him alive.

  No one except Astrud knew the new number, and she was lying insensate next to him in the Viking pallet. But what if she had shared it with someone else? That was the likeliest possibility. What had seemed like such a good decision in the cab was probably going to be a grave mistake, he decided. If she was that indiscreet, he needed to gently but firmly disengage.

  When the gulls finally stopped, he realized he was desperately hungry. He had avoided the “Green Monster dog” in the concession stand at the baseball park, and the lovemaking had added to his appetite. In his mind’s eye, he contemplated the array of superb meals he had prepared and were now frozen in the big Viking refrigerator.

  One of them was a classic Norse wine stew, savory chunks of venison and imported wild boar slow-cooked in a tureen of Swedish truffles, carrots, and onions. He had found the recipe in a rune parchment from the eleventh century. Heading down to the kitchen, he brought it out to defrost.

  When the delicious aroma began to permeate the living area, Astrud descended from the pallet wearing one of his Abercrombie & Fitch flaming red flannel shirts. It ended becomingly at her thighs and set off her naturally flaxen hair. He decided to hold off confronting her about giving out his cell phone number.

  After pouring her a glass of Castello Banfi’s 2010 Centine, he removed a loaf of shard bread from the oven and they sat down to enjoy the feast. They were finishing the second bottle of wine when Barnaby broached the noble idea that it might be a good decision for her to find a worthy man no older than her father. A moment later she was clinging to him again like a limpet mine, her sweet mouth on his.

  After another session on the sleeping pallet, he knew how a sled dog felt approaching the finish line at the Iditarod. He was finally falling asleep again when the carnivorous seagulls began to shriek again.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” she asked with that remaining echo of her native Norwegian accent.

  “No one aside from you has the number, Astrud,” he said in a less than fatherly baritone.

  “I haven’t given it to another soul,” she said, her eyes going liquid.

  The ringing stopped again and he waited in the silence for it to resume. Instead, someone began knocking on the steel entrance door. The pounding echoed through the chamber.

  “For the love of Thor,” Barnaby growled.

  Planning to verbally lash whoever it was standing in the hallway, he climbed off the sleeping pallet and stalked naked to the door. Putting his nose against the glass peephole, he looked out into the shadowy passageway and frowned.

  TWO

  5 May

  The Long Wharf

  Boston, Massachusetts

  A man with the torso of a sumo wrestler gone to seed was standing in the brick-lined corridor sweating as if he had just run a marathon. His face was drenched, along with the collar of his blue oxford shirt.

  The last time Barnaby had seen him was in a hospital room in Rockland, Maine. It was the day after his protégée Alexandra Vaughan had discovered the burial tomb of Leif Eriksson on an island off the coast of Maine. And it was after enough murder and mayhem to last Barnaby for ten lifetimes. Back then, the man in the corridor had been the deputy national security adviser to the president of the United States.

  “I know you’re in there, Dr. Finchem,” called out Ira Dusenberry. “Let me in. It’s very important.”

  Time had not been kind to him since. He had put on at least thirty pounds, and his blunt, jowly face had the patina of painter’s putty. His brown suit was stretched across his torso like a gigantic sausage casing.

  Barnaby suddenly realized that his new cell phone number hadn’t been given out by Astrud. It had been hacked by one of the intelligence minions of the all-knowing Big Brother called Washington. They could find out everything about any American they targeted. It made him angry to be on their radar again.

  Barnaby unlocked the door and swung it open. Ira Dusenberry took in the full spectacle of his nakedness and immediately averted his eyes.

  “I don’t need to ask how you found this place,” said Barnaby bitterly. “With your untrammeled domestic spying network, you know all our secrets these days, the guilty and the innocent.”

  “Not all of them,” said Dusenberry, “and it wasn’t easy. We had to use extraordinary measures.”

  He still could not force himself to look at Barnaby.

  “Is that really necessary?” he finally demanded, stepping past him into the chamber. Barnaby closed the door and locked it again.

  “Only if it irritates a dishonest excuse for a public servant like you,” said Barnaby.

  “I am not dishonest,” Dusenberry said indignantly.

  “Really . . . ? Last year we made the greatest archaeological discovery since Howard Carter blundered into Tut’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings,” said Barnaby. “We proved that Leif Eriksson got to these shores five hundred years before Columbus and you decided to sit on it in the name of national security.”

  “It was a matter of national security,” said Dusenberry, still refusing to look at him.

  Walking to the ornately carved oak hall tree nex
t to the steel entrance door, Barnaby grabbed the Moroccan jeleba from his Sahara expedition and wrapped it around himself.

  “National security as defined by the Italian-American vote in the last election,” said Barnaby.

  Dusenberry didn’t respond.

  “Now that the president has won reelection, you should have no concerns about our announcing the discovery.”

  “Perhaps that could be arranged,” said Dusenberry with a curt smile, “if you can provide assistance to us on a far more important matter.”

  He glanced around the vast expanse of the chamber.

  “Are we alone?” he asked.

  “You should know,” Barnaby responded, walking back toward the living area.

  Astrud emerged from the sleeping loft and came downstairs. She was fully dressed in her Red Sox jersey, shorts, and sneakers, looking even younger than her thirty-one years.

  “I think I’ve seen you on television,” she said to Dusenberry.

  His eyes betrayed a hint of satisfaction at her recognition of his important role in the White House.

  “You’re one of the contestants on that reality fat show, correct?” she said, smiling. “The one about how much weight you can lose without killing yourself?”

  Dusenberry didn’t know if she was serious. “If you leave now, young lady, you will probably not be indicted as a threat to the national security of the United States of America.”

  “I was leaving anyway,” she said.

  She turned and looked up at Barnaby.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said, taking her purse and closing the steel door behind her.

  “In addition to all your other sins,” said Barnaby, “you may have ruptured one of the great romantic relationships of this century.”

  “I need your help,” said Dusenberry. “The president needs your help.”

  “I don’t do mental counseling,” said Barnaby.

  Dusenberry ignored the barb and said, “Look, I’m sorry about this. I was planning to meet you at Fenway Park, but you were thrown out of the game before I could get there.”

  Barnaby had already noticed the brown mustard stains on his shirt and tie.

  “How many monster dogs did you eat?” he asked.

  Dusenberry’s face revealed the accuracy of his guess. In fact, he had consumed three of the eighteen-inchers with sauerkraut and mustard, flushing them down with drafts of ice-cold lager. Gluttony was his only sin, he kept assuring himself.

  “Can we sit down?” he asked, turning away from Barnaby to loosen his trousers while he headed for the nearest club chair in Barnaby’s library next to the open kitchen.

  Barnaby sank into the leather couch across from him.

  “Have you ever heard of Peking Man?” said Dusenberry.

  “He was once the most valuable man on earth,” said Barnaby.

  “Was?” asked Dusenberry.

  “He disappeared.”

  “Precisely. You already know about him.”

  “Every archaeologist knows about him,” said Barnaby. “His disappearance was probably the biggest disaster in the history of the fossil record of human evolution.”

  “We need to find it . . . him,” said Dusenberry. “It’s a matter of the highest national security.”

  “It always is to you,” said Barnaby.

  “He isn’t just a priceless fossil,” said Dusenberry. “Have you ever heard of Falun Gong?”

  “There are few things I haven’t heard of in this world, but that is one of them.”

  “Falun Gong is a contemporary Chinese moral philosophy in the qigong tradition. It is based on truth, compassion, and tolerance.”

  “The Tibetans tried that and look where it got them,” said Barnaby. “Good luck in China.”

  “Actually, Falun Gong was founded by a Chinese trumpet player named Li Hongzhi in 1992, and the religion took off like a comet. His followers call him the living Buddha. He now lives in Arizona.”

  “A trumpet player,” repeated Barnaby.

  “Yes, from humble origins, we might say, as was the carpenter from Galilee,” said Dusenberry. “Of course, he has to live here now or he would be rotting in a Chinese prison. Their government is bent on eradicating it. They have used every means to crush it. We have reports of thousands of atrocities, including the torture, murder, and even organ harvesting of its followers. A million of the followers have been forced into reeducation camps like the ones set up under Mao during the great purge.”

  “How does Peking Man fit into it?”

  “There is a new offshoot of the movement and it has spread like wildfire. It is predicated on the belief of its holy men that Peking Man, the first known human being to stand erect and use tools, was in truth the original man, the anointed deity who started the human race.”

  “God himself,” said Barnaby.

  “Precisely,” said Dusenberry. “And as with Falun Gong, the Chinese government is stamping this sect out wherever it gathers traction.”

  Dusenberry removed a creased photograph from his breast pocket and handed it to Barnaby. The edges were moist with sweat.

  “Meet the Chinese oligarch Zhou Shen Wui,” said Dusenberry.

  A benevolent Oriental face beamed up at Barnaby from the photograph, cherubic in its wholesome roundness. He was bald except for a fringe of hair and had thick eyebrows below his broad forehead. The man’s eyes were large and knowing, his lips curled into a beatific smile.

  “Zhou was chosen by the Chinese politburo to stop the spread of this new branch of the movement. Over the years, he has built an impressive record of chicanery, even on Chinese standards,” said Dusenberry. “When he isn’t hacking into our top secret military programs or stealing intellectual property from American corporations, he rides around the remote hinterlands of China in a fortified train with a palace guard of two hundred trained ninja warriors. I’m talking executioners and torturers. Wherever they find the faith beginning to flourish, and it is mostly in the rural hinterlands, they go there to wipe them out.”

  “They were Japanese,” said Barnaby.

  “Who?”

  “The ninja warriors or shinobi were in feudal Japan, not in China.”

  Dusenberry ignored him. “The Chinese government is now searching for the Peking Man. Their worst fear is that if he is found and introduced to the Chinese masses as a deity, the religious conversions among the lower economic classes will be uncontrollable. If the movement is embraced by the masses, especially the rural peasant class, it would only take a small percentage of them rebelling to completely overrun the Chinese military. In spite of the size of their army, the peasant population vastly outnumbers it.”

  “And what does your crack team of advisers believe?”

  “We believe it would be good to find Peking Man and present him to his followers.”

  “And give the ruling clique in China something to focus on besides destroying us.”

  “Precisely,” repeated Dusenberry. “We have had an informant in Zhou’s entourage. His malevolent son, Li, is in charge of a paramilitary team that is dedicated to finding him.”

  “This informant should give you whatever you need to know.”

  “He disappeared from sight a month ago. Presumably he is dead.”

  “So why me?” asked Barnaby as Dusenberry continued massaging his bloated stomach.

  “A number of leads about the disappearance of Peking Man have surfaced over the years,” said Dusenberry. “We set up a Washington interagency task force to explore them three years ago, but as usual, they can’t even agree on how to cooperate. We’re dead in the water.”

  “My field is Norse archaeology. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “You have extensive contacts and good relationships among the leading archaeologists in every field. You also proved your ability to deciph
er an ancient mystery in the unfortunate Valhalla saga.”

  Without confirming it, Barnaby was intrigued. He felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck. Forgetting for a moment about the bloodletting in China, Peking Man was the greatest archaeological discovery in history concerning the evolution of man.

  “I might add that the president has authorized me to say that if you are successful in this, he is prepared to remove the security restrictions on the Leif Eriksson discovery.”

  “I would need help,” said Barnaby.

  “Anything you need,” said Dusenberry. “The whole task force is available to you.”

  “It doesn’t sound like they know how to get out of their own way.”

  “A little leadership would go a long way,” cooed Dusenberry. “What about Dr. Vaughan and General Macaulay? The last time I saw them with you, they seemed bound together like Siamese twins. They could be very helpful again.”

  “They are no longer conjoined,” said Barnaby. “Leave them to me.”

  “Then we have a deal,” said Dusenberry, raising the lid on the tureen of Norse wine stew that was still sitting on the granite countertop. “This smells delicious. Do you mind if I help myself?”

  THREE

  7 May

  Kehlsteinhaus

  oder Eagle’s Nest

  Obersalzberg, Germany

  “It is not here,” said Jurgen Ritter, his eyes squinting from the snow-brilliant late-afternoon sun streaming through the big plate-glass picture windows of the Führer’s conference room. Another foot of snow had fallen during the last hours, and the piercing light glancing off the summit of the Sonntagshorn forced Jurgen to look away from the windows.

  “On what basis do you state this?” asked the Swedish archaeologist Sven Nordgren, tapping his iPad Mini to retrieve his latest text messages.

  “I vud feel it inside me if it vas here,” said the German Jurgen, the expedition team’s expert on pulse induction metal detection.

  “How very scientific,” said Nordgren with a facetious grin.