He hung up the phone with George suspended in mid apology. Leaning back in his chair, he put his feet on the stack of boxes beside his desk. Everyone always had such noble motivations, but none of them ever actually understood Matt’s objections—not at nine years old and, apparently, not now at twenty-five.
The soldiers had already entered the house. They probably shot that guy on sight. Matt shook out his face and tried to clear his head.
The Porsche!
Leaping up from the chair, he went to the master bedroom and flipped through the stack of long-sleeved shirts draped over a box labeled “Bathroom” in purple marker. He selected a black turtleneck and swapped it for the paint-stained T-shirt. He ran his fingers over the paint on his jeans and decided to keep them on—it had already dried. Socks on, shoes on, he stopped at the mirrored closet door. He looked at himself up and down and decided he would buy a weight set—his arms were way too thin. People would continue to wonder about him, he decided, until he appeared more like a man and less like a teenager. He raised his chin and rubbed the recalcitrant goatee that had refused to grow in over the past week.
He grabbed a knit cap and a pair of black gloves from the closet shelf and headed out. As the front door to his new house shut behind him, the cell phone on his desk began to buzz, followed by that annoying ring tone.
“Beautiful vehicle you’ve just bought, Mr. Turner,” the sales manager smarmed.
Matt turned the key a single click and checked that the odometer read zero.
“Thank you, sir. I’ll be sure to put it to good use.” He looked at the manager through his sunglasses, admired the sheen of the silver slacks and jacket. “You mind me asking what kind of suit that is?”
“Uh, sure, it’s Zegna. Would you like one? My brother-in-law manages the Saks near RTP.”
“Hmmm… maybe. It’s very nice. I’ll give you a call if I ever have occasion to wear one.”
Matt took a deep breath and removed his gloves. His bare hands glided over the steering wheel and then felt about him—seats, dash, headliner… He breathed in the smell of the leather, reveling in the newness. He stepped out and ran his hand over the shining black body. All new.
“Well, if there’s nothing else, Mister Turner,” the manager said, extending his hand. Matt faked a smile and tilted his head to the side to examine the man’s fingers. Nothing on the right hand, wedding ring visible on the left. Was this the kind of guy who did the two-handed “I genuinely like you” clutch? Matt determined he probably was, and quickly slipped his gloves back on. He put out his hand, and the manager gave a single, not-too-tight squeeze—quick shake, just the one hand. Matt slid back into his car, feeling ensconced in the intoxicating cloud of newness. He watched the manager return to the showroom to greet another customer, this time with a double-handed shake. Ah, but he didn’t have their money yet.
Driving home, Matt decided to call his sister, Iris, to see if she wanted to stop by to see the new ride. Then he remembered that he’d left the cell phone on his desk. And then he remembered the reading on the piece of stained wood earlier, and his good mood faded for an instant. The 911 GT2 hugged an S-turn, and Matt smiled again. He knew that he couldn’t keep spending like this much longer, so he recommitted himself to ending the shopping spree… after fully furnishing the house, and one nice tropical vacation. Reminding himself how easy it was to make more money, he began listing what he would buy next should he hit the jackpot again.
Merging onto Highway 440, he pushed the turbo to 110 mph. He slowed a bit after the third car honked at him for weaving in and out of lanes. What was he supposed to do? At 95, it felt like the Jetta at 40, and begging to go faster.
In his absence, his cell phone had accumulated six missed calls and four new voice messages, vibrating itself off the desk and onto the floor. He found it and scrolled through the missed calls. 440205553836? Way too many numbers, he mused. Forty-four… wasn’t that UK? He listened to his first message. A woman with one of those oddly attractive English accents spoke.
“Hello, Mister Turner, this is Danielle Sloo from the Museum of—”
The call-waiting tone interrupted before Matt could finish rolling his eyes. Dr. Meier just wasn’t going to leave him alone, was he? He pulled the phone away from his ear to see the caller ID. A New York area code… his parents’ number. Gotta get my contacts entered into this thing.
“Hey, Mom, what’s up?”
His mother’s ever-concerned voice replied, “Hello, dear, how are you doing?”
“I have to say I’m doing well, Mom. How about you?”
“Oh, you know, just work, work, work. I spoke with Iris this morning, you know. I hope you’re not just spending all that money, dear.”
“Oh, I’m not, Mom, don’t worry.” He pulled the window blinds to look lovingly out at the gleaming black Porsche in the driveway. “I’m making some pretty good investments.”
“Well, I know you’ll be responsible, honey. Anyway, so there’s someone here who would like to talk to you.”
Matt went rigid in his chair.
“Mom, it better not be Dad. You know—”
His father’s familiar gruff baritone interrupted. “Hey there, son.”
Matt covered the mic with his thumb and breathed a shaky sigh. Why the hell would she do this to him?
“Yes?” he replied, his fury evident.
“Now, son, let’s not start this off on the wrong tone, you hear me?”
“I could end this off with the right tone, Dad. How’d that be?”
“Well, that wouldn’t be appreciated much, Matthew.”
His father got a few more syllables off, but Matt had already hit end.
Standing up, he muttered aloud, “Why is everyone screwing with my head today?”
He decided to play some Xbox to zone out. The last thing he wanted to think about was his “detective” days with Dad. Working in homicide, his father had been unable to stop himself from taking advantage of his son’s talent during investigations. At age nine, it had been a flood of attention and approval from a usually absent parent. In the beginning, no one understood exactly what Matt experienced. When he held the evidence—a piece of clothing or a cigarette butt, or sometimes an actual weapon—he simply sat quietly for a few minutes until someone pulled it away from him. Of course, he would be pretty upset afterward, but the information he provided was a gold mine of leads for the department to follow. It wasn’t until he turned twelve that he told his father he wanted to stop. And he had been wheedled or coerced into working over a hundred more cases after that, his last at age fourteen.
3
“JON, THE TOUR WILL BE COMING through here in just a few,” Tuni St. James announced through the partly open office door.
“Uh-huh,” Dr. Meier grunted as he squinted at the computer monitor.
She took a step into the room. “So I’ll just be showing them in then,” she persisted, and he glanced up at her over his bifocals.
“Yes, good,” he said, and couldn’t stop himself from a quick pan up those long legs. She turned and left, and he shook his head. He’d never found himself attracted to tall women in the past, but something about Tuni’s smooth, café au lait skin and elegant yet revealing wardrobe compelled his gaze to linger. Also, he had never been much for accents, but hers, a mix of London English with a drop of South African… ah, well, a quick twist of his ring and long look at the desktop photo of his wife, and his guilt would be relieved.
What was wrong with a lunchtime visit to Macy’s? Granted, the shopping trip had been inspired by Tuni’s glance at his red and graypatterned sweater vest and her comment, “Well, don’t you look dashing today, Jon!” He couldn’t recall the last time he had felt dashing, and decided he could use a few more sweater vests of varying pattern and color.
He squeezed his eyes and reread the e-mail for the third time, glancing between sentences at the attached photo. Peter Sharma, his former assistant, had sent it late last night. Meier thought the signat
ure on the e-mail was quite impressive. His protégé had earned a promotion to director at the revered Cambridge Museum of Natural History.
Dear Dr. Meier,
Attached hereto you will find a photograph of an artifact excavated from a sub-Jurassic dig in southeastern Kenya three weeks ago. The object itself was recovered from strata estimated to be between 150200 million years old. As you can imagine from the photo, this discovery has caused quite a stir in the organization.
Potassium-argon dating equipment was shipped to the site (the Kenyan government has prohibited removal of the object from the country), and repeated tests have verified the initial estimate of the artifact’s age. Needless to say, the nature of the object has resulted in doubts about the accuracy of these tests.
I am aware that your facility has no staffed metallurgy expert, but I do recall your occasional use of a more precise “dating technology,” which I am hoping can be lent to the CMNH. I have not discussed details of your methodology but have only expressed to the board that you have an expert who, with your express approval, might be able to bring himself and his equipment to the site with some urgency. Obviously, the board has approved release of funds for such a trip, as well as compensation to your establishment during said expert’s absence from regular duties at home.
I eagerly await your response and can discuss further details of the artifact via telephone, as I am certain you have questions unanswered by this brief note.
Warmest regards,
Peter Sharma
Director, Mesozoic Research
Cambridge Museum of Natural History
Cambridge, UK
Dr. Meier removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. At first glance, the object appeared to be a simple piece of torn fabric with a wide, sewn-in belt loop in the middle. But Pete’s e-mail mentioned metallurgy, which inspired a closer look at the photo.
Someone had laid the piece flat on a white surface beside a metric ruler. It was about sixteen centimeters in width and height, though it was straight on only one side, where the fabric appeared to have been folded over and restitched to itself to create a seam. The belt loop suggested this would be the waistband of a pair of slacks, or perhaps a sort of fine chain mail worn over one’s inner clothing. Or maybe it wasn’t clothing at all but a piece of a satchel, stitched from metal to increase its weight-bearing capacity. Alternatives flew through his mind.
It would be extraordinary enough to find a piece of woven fabric in so deep a sediment, due to (a) the obvious lack of any species present on Earth at the time with the necessary intelligence to create such an item, and (b) the fact that it hadn’t deteriorated out of existence millions of years ago. That it was crafted of metal fibers removed some of the shock over its longevity. But it remained outright inconceivable that an intelligent being possessed not only the weaving skills but all the considerable array of technology that would be required to mine and isolate the raw minerals, create the alloy, and spin or extrude the threads. There were just too many aspects to consider, and none of it made a damned bit of sense.
He tugged at his neat gray beard and sighed.
The object was simply an OOPArt—an out-of-place artifact—he decided, like the zinc-silver alloy vase found in the 1850s near Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 100,000-year-old rock. Or the rusty screw recovered from a piece of 20-million-year-old feldspar. There were long lists of mysterious out-of-place artifacts that no one could explain, though many professionals had invested years of research to no satisfactory end. If this one couldn’t be debunked, it would likely be added to the bottom of the lists.
It was an easily dismissible unknown, but Meier could not just shelve it so blithely—especially considering that Pete, a solid scientist with a healthy sense of skepticism, seemed fairly well convinced. He picked up the phone and dialed George Miller’s extension.
“Yes, Dr. Meier,” George answered between indelicate slurping sounds—obviously, he was eating.
“George, I need to speak with Matthew Turner.”
A choking sound replied.
“George… ?”
“Yeah—yes sir, um… after the, uh… I don’t know how easy that’s going to be.”
“I don’t care—make it happen.”
He hung up the phone.
Dr. Meier’s door swung open, and in walked Tuni, followed by a stream of people with notepads in hand and name tags pinned to their shirts.
“What the hell is this!” he spluttered.
Tuni’s eyes narrowed as she crossed her arms.
“The tour that was scheduled two weeks ago for this very moment, Doctor,” she replied through her teeth, “of which I reminded you but a few short minutes ago. Please, ladies and gentlemen, file in around the director’s desk—and feel free to touch anything you like.”
4
THE MONSOON IRRITATED DR. RHEESE TO no end. As he sat protected by the canopy jutting from the top of his RV, the back legs of his lawn chair began to sink in the mud.
“Blasted bloody useless piece of… !” he muttered, and stood up. He had sent home all but a few of his laborers. Across the trench in front of him, Enzi and the other two men he kept on-site were wrestling with the tarps in the wind. It wasn’t as though Rheese really cared what happened to that corner of the excavation now, but in the interest of appearances, he would make his best effort to feign appropriate concern for its preservation.
As Enzi gestured for one of the men to anchor the tarp’s corner with a rock, Dr. Rheese surveyed the encircling forest around them. It was thick in this area. They had chopped down quite a few trees to clear this particular patch (with appropriate permission from the government, of course). The pack of thieves had demanded 60 percent of the proceeds from the logging company, leaving Rheese with a piddling eight thousand pounds sterling for himself.
Now he wished he had cut down three times as many trees, if for no other reason than the uneasiness he felt at night. Who knew what could be on the other side of that black wall? He almost didn’t mind walking it in the daylight—it would actually serve as a rather nice escape from the flies drawn to the dig site, if it weren’t for the snakes. He’d seen two already: a mamba, eight lithe feet of gray-green terror moving along the forest floor faster than he could trot; and—perhaps even scarier—a puff adder, the length and thickness of his leg, lying camouflaged almost to invisibility right where he had been about to sit.
He glanced to the other side of the pit, where the light tower sat on its four-wheeled carriage. He always hated turning off the generator before bed, knowing that the few hours of light from his laptop screen was all that would remain between him and the primal darkness.
The satellite phone in the trailer began to ring, and Rheese skidded, nearly sprawling in the mud, in his haste to reach it.
“Rheese here,” he said into the large handset.
“Doctor, this is Peter Sharma. How are you today?”
“Glorious. What do you have to tell me, Mr. Sharma?”
“We’re trying to get you some new equipment and an expert to certify the results, but it may be another couple of weeks.”
Rheese’s biceps tensed as he restrained himself from throwing his one communication link to the civilized world through the window and into the mud and rain.
“Listen to me, Sharma, I’m not staying out in the bloody rain and flies, twiddling my thumbs for two more blasted weeks! At the very least, I’m bringing back the crew to get digging again.”
“Very well, Professor,” Sharma replied, his voice taking on a soothing diplomatic tone. “As long as you keep the work away from the discovery location. Also, it would be a good idea to get more photographs of that corner, from various angles and distances, in case anything should happen. We only have those few you e-mailed.”
“Yes, yes,” he replied and hung up. Finally, he could get back to some real work!
Rheese had given up on any chance of the artifact paying off in the near future. Still, he was well aware that if the
thing proved authentic, his name would forever be tied to its discovery. That was something, anyway. But would it get him out of his “nice” Mayfair house and into a Kensington castle? Not likely. And so, unbeknownst to Peter Sharma, Rheese now had authorization to resume his private plans.
He had no intention of continuing digging in this place. The artifact recovered from the soon-to-be famous northeast corner of dig site 00876-B223KY had actually revealed for him the site’s lack of value.
Rheese unrolled his satellite maps to the red circle around the current site. He could see why he had identified its potential from the geologic markers in the area, but realized now why it was illogical. He slid his finger to a different circle, also marked in red pencil, several centimeters to the left. After an unsatisfying sip of cold tea, he found a metal ruler and calculated the distance: four kilometers west.
Garrett Rheese had gone through this process enough times in the past that he had the steps down to a routine. A childlike excitement came over him as he prepared for the coming month.
First, identify site: done! Second, identify intermittent “finds” to keep the museum interested and the money rolling in. He moved over to the laptop and opened his personal catalog spreadsheet. In his career, Rheese had worked all aspects of an excavation, and he knew that finding missing bones from nearly complete dinosaurs was a heady thrill for legitimate paleontologists. Over the years he had accrued a healthy sum of “missing bones,” for which he kept a well-maintained catalog. The world’s only intact #4 left metacarpal from a Saurophaganax? Easy—sealed in a box in his basement, on a shelf with hundreds of other rare or unique bones. After a couple of weeks’ digging, call up the lab and let them know you’ve found something they’ll like. Have Jimmy ship the package to the site, repack it with some native minerals it was “found with,” and send it off to the lab. They’re all happy, and better yet, the project checking account gets refreshed.
The Dig Page 2