“I say shut up,” Greer said, folding up the map and slipping it back into his pocket; from here on in, he knew what to do.
Mounted on the front wall was a big iron bird — okay, a peacock — with its wings spread wide. “Come here, Lopez,” Greer said. “And take hold of one of these wings.”
Lopez looked confused, but he leaned his rifle up against one of the bookshelves and did as he was told. The bird was about six feet high and four feet wide, and the metal was warm in his hands. Would this thing be worth anything, he wondered, back in the States?
“When I say so,” Greer told him, “press the wing forward.”
“You want me to break it?” Now it’d be worth nothing.
“Just do it. Now.”
As Greer pressed on his side, Lopez pressed on his, and after some initial resistance, the two wings began to give way.
“Keep pushing,” Greer said.
Gradually, the two wings began to come together, and as they did so, dust began to crumble from the wall just below the peacock’s feet.
Lopez, seeing the dust, started to ease up, and Greer said, “No, that’s what’s supposed to happen.”
“The whole place is supposed to fall down?”
Donlan, though he kept his rifle loosely trained on Hasan, was rapt.
As the ends of the two wings touched, a narrow space below the peacock’s feet was partially revealed. According to his instructions, something should have opened up completely, but this was close enough for Greer. He crouched down and dug his fingers into the wall. Loose bits of brick and sand fell away, enough finally for him to reach inside — the slot was no more than ten inches high and perhaps a few feet across — and touch something. It was a metal box, covered with dust, and it was what he’d come for. When he pulled, he could hear the crunching of the sand underneath it, but moving it from this angle was tough. He pulled his hand out, brushed it clean, then reached in again and pulled the box another inch or two forward; it must weigh twenty or thirty pounds, he guessed.
“You need some help, Captain?” Lopez asked eagerly. Maybe Greer knew what he was doing, after all. Maybe this was the treasure!
Greer didn’t need any help — not now. Leaning back on his heels, he pulled the box out of the hole. It was matted with grime, and for all he knew, the damn thing was made of lead. Huge iron clasps were sealed on both sides, with antique padlocks that looked like they took a key the size of a fist.
Lopez looked at the locks gleefully and said, “We can pop those — no problem.”
Greer stood up, cradling the box in his arms. “Time to go.”
Lopez and Donlan just stood there. Hasan was afraid of what might happen.
“What do you mean, sir?” Donlan asked. “You mean, we open it back at camp?”
“I mean, we go. Now.”
Greer stepped around them, giving Hasan a shove toward the door. Donlan and Lopez traded a glance—what gives? — then slouched behind.
Outside, the shadows were lengthening. The sun had fallen to the height of the walls, and a night wind was already beginning to kick up.
Greer was marching Hasan past the rows of empty cages, then onto the wooden bridge. Hasan was only too glad to go. He didn’t know what those cages had once held, but he did not want to find out. Nor did he wish to know why the al-Kallis would have needed a fine mesh net large enough to have created an aviary a hundred feet high and ten times as wide.
As they passed the garage with the Rolls parked inside, Lopez cast a covetous glance inside. What if the thing still ran? Why couldn’t he drive it back to camp, right behind the Humvee? Wouldn’t that be something?
But then, he could swear he saw something move inside the garage. No, not that he’d actually seen something, but the light in there, the shadows, had changed. He glanced ahead at the others — was it worth calling out an alarm? He looked again, his rifle leveled at the front of the Rolls. But now there was nothing, and the others were even farther away.
He picked up his pace, his head turned to keep an eye on anything behind him. He was sorry he’d listened to all that bullshit from Hasan. Strange cries in the night, people disappearing. But he was even sorrier that he’d listened to Greer. What was all that crap about a treasure hunt? The only treasure he’d seen — and who knew what was inside that box? — was now gripped in Greer’s loving arms.
On his left, he saw what he took to be the stables — there were empty stalls and unidentifiable pieces of harness hanging from the half doors. Lopez was from Santa Fe, and he’d actually worked summers at a ranch, but he’d never seen tackle like this. Maybe the al-Kallis kept those famous Arabian stallions he’d heard so much about.
As they approached the back of the palace, he scanned the many narrow windows, wondering what lay behind them. Christ, did people really live like this? The palace reminded him of pictures he’d seen of places like the Taj Mahal. By joining the army he thought he’d see some of them. But so far, this was it.
There was a cry, a loud, prolonged cawing from somewhere in the distance. It sounded like a baby being strangled.
“Jesus,” Lopez exclaimed. “What was that?”
They’d all stopped in their tracks.
“It was a peacock,” Hasan said. “They cry for rain.”
Lopez swallowed hard — his mouth was suddenly as dry as the desert. “They ever get it?”
“Not often.”
In the colonnade, the shadows made a kind of zigzag pattern on the floor. The sun had fallen now to just below the top of the outside walls. Their footsteps echoed here, too, but Lopez knew enough to make no Ghostbuster jokes this time. He pulled the damp collar away from his neck, and as he did so, he thought he heard breathing behind him, a low rasping sound. He whipped around, his finger on the trigger of the rifle, but there was nothing but a row of stone columns, glowing like burnished gold in the dying sun.
“Hey,” he said, and the others stopped and turned toward him.
“What?” Donlan said.
“I thought I heard something.”
“Hasan already told you — it’s peacocks.”
“No. Something else.”
Greer wedged the box under one arm and took out his gun. “Let’s keep moving.’”
The back of Lopez’s neck tingled, and it wasn’t the drying sweat. He felt as though he were being watched. Tracked. He thought of the coyotes he’d shot back in New Mexico — and he felt like one of them.
“When we get around front,” Greer said, “spread out in a—”
And then it was on top of Lopez. A running shadow, a huge black stain, it lunged out from behind one of the columns and snatched him like a wolf picking off a stray lamb. Donlan panicked and sprayed a burst of automatic fire around the colonnade; Hasan flattened himself against the inside wall, but Greer suddenly felt something like a splash of hot water on his left leg. He knew he’d been hit by a ricochet, but he didn’t have time to look. He needed to get himself, and the box, out of there.
He tried to run, but his leg was barely able to hold him up.
Donlan was still firing as they fell back. Hasan was probably hiding somewhere back there. Screw it — who needed him anymore?
Greer hobbled across the marble forecourt, leaving, he knew, a trail of blood. Whatever the hell that thing had been, it would sure as hell pick up this scent. He forced himself to keep moving — the adrenaline, blissfully, was keeping the leg from exploding in pain, but that wouldn’t last much longer. He could hear Donlan reloading. Night was falling fast, the way it did here — he could just make out the gates.
Keep moving, he told himself. Keep moving.
He dragged himself into the tunnel, shouting ahead to Sadowski, “We’ve been hit!”
But he doubted his voice would carry into the closed Humvee.
Donlan was firing again — was he shooting at something, Greer wondered, or just shooting?
The headlights were on, and Greer careened into their glow, waving one arm.
Sadowski spot
ted him, and leapt out of the vehicle.
“Help me!” Greer shouted.
Sadowski tried to take the box from him, but Greer said, “Just open the damn door!”
Sadowski threw open the passenger door, and Greer tossed the box onto the floor.
There was another crackling round of shots, and then Donlan raced up to them, panting.
As Greer clambered, bleeding, into the front seat, Donlan jumped into the back as if there were a tiger on his tail.
“Where’s Lopez?” Sadowski shouted, and Greer said, “He’s gone. Let’s move.”
Sadowski slammed the door after Greer, then ran around to the driver’s seat. Lopez was gone? Dead?
He threw the Humvee into gear. “What about Hasan?”
“I said move!”
As the vehicle started to turn in a wide circle, the headlights picked up something else — a figure running toward them, arms extended as if in supplication.
Hasan, in the handcuffs.
Sadowski glanced at Greer for his orders. Surely he didn’t plan to just leave him here?
But a second later, something descended upon Hasan like a frenzied black cloud. Sadowski heard a scream, saw Hasan’s terror-stricken eyes widen in the glare of the headlights, before the thing had yanked him off his feet and into the night. All that was left in the headlight beams was that little black copy of the Koran.
Sadowski’s hands were frozen at the wheel.
“Drive,” Greer barked at him, wincing and clutching at his leg. “Can’t you see I’m bleeding?”
CHAPTER ONE
Present Day
Carter Cox didn’t have to be down in the bottom of Pit 91. As a visiting fellow to the George C. Page Museum of Natural History, and head of its paleontology field research department, he could have been sitting in his comfortable, air-conditioned office overlooking Wilshire Boulevard. Instead of wearing overalls and a Green Day T-shirt, he could have been in a suit and tie — well, maybe not a tie, not many men wore ties in L.A., Carter had noticed — and his hands could be clean and his hair combed and his shoes shined.
But then he wouldn’t have been half this happy.
Right now, at the bottom of the tar pit, the temperature hovered in the high eighties, his hair was gathered under a sweaty headband, and his hiking boots were covered with a viscous coating of warm, black tar. Asphalt, actually. Even though these were called the La Brea Tar Pits, it was asphalt, the lowest grade of crude oil, that had been bubbling up under this ground for the past thirty or forty thousand years; those were methane bubbles that still rose lazily to the surface of the pit, swelling up like bullfrogs, before popping without a sound. And those were prehistoric bones, miraculously preserved in this thick, black goo, that he was still able to excavate with a chisel, a brush, and a lot of elbow grease.
The pit itself was about fifty feet square, with wooden boards propping up the walls on all sides (in case of a cave-in or an earthquake), and rusty iron girders supporting the boards. It was open-air, about twenty-five feet deep, with a slanted plastic roof overhead to keep off the sun (or the rain, though in May in Los Angeles rain wasn’t much of a problem), and that was about it. Rows of heavy black buckets were stacked on the north wall for glopping out the bottom of the pit, and a thick red chain hung down from the pulley above.
Today, Carter had a crew of three working for him. These were all volunteers who’d been trained by the museum. Claude, a retired engineer, was working on a three-foot grid in the east quadrant; Rosalie, a middle-aged teacher taking a year off, was working beside him; and next to Carter — where he usually seemed to find her — was Miranda. Miranda had just graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, and she was trying to decide if this kind of work was what she really wanted to do.
At the moment, it didn’t look that way.
“I think,” she said, “I’m stuck again.” She was kneeling on the boards that crisscrossed the floor of the pit, just above the area she was excavating, with her hands deep into the muck. Too deep, Carter knew. When you reached down to pull out the tar — and yeah, he had to concede that he called it that, too — you had to be careful not to dig down too far or to try to take out too much at one time. The stuff had been trapping animals of all kinds — from woolly mammoths to saber-toothed cats — for thousands of years, and it wasn’t done yet.
“Just relax,” Claude called out. “Pull slowly.”
“I am,” she said nervously, glancing up at Carter, who sat back on his haunches and wiped the sweat from his brow.
“You’re pushing down with one hand while you’re trying to pull out the other,” he said. He inched along the board until he was shoulder to shoulder with her. “That means you’re getting one hand trapped after the other.” He put his hands on her forearms, then began to pull them up, slowly, with equal force. The tar was especially warm today, which made it even more resistant than ever. Their faces were just inches apart, so close he could smell that she’d recently popped a couple of Tic Tacs into her mouth.
“There’s something down there,” she said. “Something big. I can feel it.”
“There’s always something down there,” Carter said, as her arms slowly emerged from the hole. “So far, they’ve got about two million finds catalogued in the museum.”
“How many from this particular pit?”
“A lot,” he said as her hands emerged, black and glistening with goo; the stuff was too thick to drip. “That’s why we keep digging here.”
She leaned back with a sigh. “Thanks. You’re a lifesaver.”
“Not a problem,” Carter said. “I had to promise the museum I wouldn’t let any of my crew get swallowed in the pit.”
“What happens if one of us does?” Claude asked.
“There’s a ten-dollar fine,” Carter replied, “and I lose my parking privileges for a week.”
“Good thing we signed up for your shift,” Rosalie said, as she plopped a handful of wet tar into a waiting bucket, and they all laughed.
* * *
Gettlng the stuff off your hands and out of your hair always took at least half an hour. There were showers installed in a trailer parked right next to the pit, equipped with loofahs, pumice stones, sponges, long-handled brushes, shampoo, and enough skin scrub to clean a battleship.
Your work clothes you left hanging on a wooden peg. You were never going to wear them for anything else as long as you lived.
Carter got into a fresh pair of jeans, a blue Polo shirt, and white sneakers. Although he’d never been what you’d call formal, this was still a far cry from the way he’d dressed when he held the Kingsley Chair in Paleontology and Vertebrate Biology at New York University. There, he’d at least have worn a shirt with long sleeves. But everything in L.A. was more casual, and it was one of the things, he had to admit, that made the city appealing.
So did the weather. It was late afternoon now, and even though the pit tended to trap the heat, the air outside it, in the surrounding park, was mild. A breeze was stirring the tops of the palm trees, and squirrels were scampering up the trunk of a California oak. Carter hadn’t ever planned on living in L.A. — he’d always nursed the standard-issue Eastern prejudices against the glitz and superficiality of the place — but when he looked at it objectively, as the scientist he was trained to be, he had to concede that the climate was advantageous, too.
As were the job opportunities, if it came to that.
After the lab disaster at NYU, he’d become pretty much persona non grata in the department. He had tenure and an endowed chair, but he didn’t have anybody’s faith or loyalty. In fact, people hardly knew where to look when they passed him in the halls. So when his wife, Beth, got the call from the Getty art museum, inviting her to come and work for them in L.A., the two of them only had to think about it overnight before deciding she should take it.
The only question had been what Carter would do. But with his scholarly credentials still as impressive and unchallenged as they�
�d been before the accident, it hadn’t been hard for him to find a post on the West Coast himself. The tough part, in fact, had been sorting through all the offers.
But their lifestyle here couldn’t be more different. In New York, they’d lived in a cramped apartment on Washington Square Park; here they rented, from a museum trustee who was generous enough to take a loss, a fully furnished house in a private, gated community called Summit View. To get there you took a main artery, Sepulveda Boulevard, which wound along beside the San Diego Freeway. It was a looping, dipping, four-lane highway with brushy hills on one side, and the freeway up above on the other, and while most people preferred the freeway because you could move a lot faster (when it wasn’t slowed to a crawl), Carter liked the Sepulveda route because it felt more like a road to him. It wasn’t predictable, it wasn’t jammed with traffic, it had character (including a tunnel through the Santa Monica Mountains that you had to pass through to get to the San Fernando Valley). Today, for a Friday afternoon, the traffic wasn’t bad, and he’d only had time to listen to maybe forty-five minutes of a taped lecture on the Galápagos Islands before he was pulling into the Summit View drive.
The minute you hit the drive, it was like entering another world. It was a broad, empty concourse that swept up into the hills, past neatly cropped lawns and a pristine community center. Halfway up, as always, Carter spotted the private patrol car parked on the right. Carter gave the cop a wave — at this time on a weekday, it’d be Al Burns — then continued on toward the top of the rise.
Their house was on the left, with a flagstone drive in front of the garage. It was a modern house, white, with a sloping red-tile roof, and coming home to it was still a new enough experience to Carter that he felt out of place parking in its driveway.
But it wasn’t just the unfamiliarity of the place that struck him every time; it was the silence. All the houses that lined both sides of the wide, winding street were neat and orderly and silent as the grave. Not a kid playing in the street, not a lawn mower growling, not a light on in any of the windows, not a stereo blaring anywhere. And not a soul on the immaculate, new sidewalks.
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