Sergei thought about this. Being Russian, the idea of doing something by the book was a novel idea that generally surfaced only when an official was trying to extract a bribe.
“But,” Claire continued, “as we all know, given the circumstances, simply following protocol is a nonstarter. So, somehow, we’ve got to bring in the right Kazakh official without revealing where the bones are and without revealing the bones’ significance …”
Sergei’s eyes lit up with understanding. “I get it. You said the significance was in the array, yes?” Claire nodded and took a silent vow never to play chess with Sergei. “So,” said Sergei, “if one petrified bone found its way to you—in a manner that proved you didn’t know where or whom it came from—then you could innocently solicit Kazakh help because a petrified elephant ulna of what may be an entirely new species would be enough to get anyone excited. Am I close?”
“Christ”—she shook her head—“you Russians! Not just close, but on the money.”
Sergei looked confused, but Rob, now acting as official translator of American expressions, jumped in. “On the money means that you hit it on the head.”
Sergei still looked a little confused, so Claire added, “Hit it on the head means exactly.”
“Ah,” said Sergei, “I get it, the money is what you give the utility infielder after he hits the nail on the head.” Both Claire and Rob gave Sergei an exasperated look.
Rob turned back to the array. “But if you took one of the bones, wouldn’t the site then be disturbed in an obvious way, and wouldn’t the question of who took the bone come back to bite you when you went public?”
He was right. Claire deflated.
Sergei got up and peered over the edge of the bluff. He turned back to Rob and Claire. “We’re standing on a lip,” he said. The other two looked at him expectantly. “We’re standing on a lip, and I’m a geologist.” Rob’s eyes widened. Now he got it. Claire was still in the dark.
“What he’s saying,” said Rob, once again assuming the role of translator, this time for the geologist, “is that we have machines—like that Bucyrus RH400 that can hold ninety-five tons of rock in its shovel—that could break off this entire lip …”
Claire shook her head and interrupted, “We need to study this thing in place. Who knows what else is in there?”
“ … in one piece,” Rob finished his sentence.
“In one piece?”
“Yes, one piece,” seconded Sergei, “if we do it carefully.”
Sergei nodded his approval. “So that I could study the strata back at the warehouse,” he continued, “where I keep many samples. We could document the removal of the lip. Back at the warehouse, I could ‘discover’ the array and bring it to your attention. You could do some preliminary work—you’ll have a head start, yes?—and then bring it to the attention of the authorities at the same time you bring it to the attention of relevant experts and the press. If the bones are in the warehouse, they aren’t going to interfere with the dig. Do you see where this is going?”
Claire nodded slowly. “I get it—go big or go home.”
Rob started to translate when Sergei said, “I get it—I got the other sayings, too.”
Claire looked at Rob, then they both turned to Sergei. “We know,” they said in unison.
“It’s a huge risk,” she said. “Lemme think about this a sec.” She walked away and looked out toward the other mesas. As she walked, she glanced at Sergei’s back. He was rangy, his back and shoulders roped with muscles—which she wanted to touch, she thought with surprise.
“There may be other bones scattered beyond what you could transport. There’s the issue of getting other people involved …”
“That’s actually not a risk, but a plus,” said Rob, interrupting. “The more it looks like Sergei’s ordinary work, the less suspicion there will be. We just have to make sure that the bones remain covered.”
“Every option is a risk,” said Sergei, “but the biggest one is doing it by the book—as you Americans might say. Besides,” he continued, “once the significance of this find is known, it is much more likely that we can cordon off that bluff to expand the dig.”
“How long do you think it will take to get that piece of equipment out here and the lip back to the warehouse?” asked Claire.
“Given the priority of this mining concession,” said Rob, “Sergei can get what he wants when he wants it, but I’d think he’d want to collect a couple of samples from other spots so as not to call attention to this bluff …” Rob paused for a moment, doing some calculations in his head. “The actual cutting of the rock and transporting it back would take a couple of days—the Bucyrus runs on huge tractor treads that can bulldoze through anything—so figure twenty days or so.”
Claire sighed. “I don’t have a better idea. How will you get in touch with me?”
Rob thought. “Best to do this as low-key as possible. We’ll send a messenger with a picture of a single bone and an invitation to come inspect them for yourself.”
“Do you have dating equipment?”
Sergei answered, “We do. I’ve got everything. We can use stratigraphy on the surrounding rock—already did that—and maybe paleomagnetism or thermo-luminescence on the bones to show that their age matches the surrounding rock.”
“Good, then we don’t have to take the bones out of the country to do a lot of the work.”
“You’re going to have to work very fast and send out your data in real time, because all bets are off once word gets out,” said Rob.
Claire nodded with trepidation. Science could do a lot of things, but the one thing it couldn’t do was do something fast.
¬
For the next hour, the three finished measuring, filming, and photographing the bones, the site, and the surroundings. Sergei pointed out that doing so was producing evidence that would directly contradict their story, but Claire insisted that when and if they needed to produce this documentation, they could explain why they had needed to keep things under wraps. They used both a GoPro and a digital camera, and they photographed Sergei and then his hand next to the bones to give a sense of scale. Under Claire’s instruction, Rob cautiously dug a small trench near the bones to reveal the strata and also prove that the sedimentary rock in which the bones were embedded was undisturbed. Then they carefully covered the exposed bones with dirt and small rocks. Once satisfied that the landscape looked natural, the three headed back to the rendezvous point. The ride was quiet. But as Claire relaxed to the rhythm of the horse, she felt a thrill of anticipation that she hadn’t enjoyed in many years.
Once they were back at the vehicles, Claire went over their plan one last time stressing that it was vital that there be no way to connect the three of them. Then she drove off.
At camp, to Claire’s relief, no one seemed particularly curious about her absence. Waylon, her slow-moving dogsbody, came by to complain that the cook staff was siphoning off the best cuts of meat for themselves, and to gossip about a blossoming romance between two of the graduate students. One of the Kazakhs came by to ask for the following day off because of “car trouble.” Claire knew he didn’t have a car but played along—the last thing she needed right now was a Kazakh with a chip on his shoulder.
Then she settled in for the wait. Rob had said about two and a half weeks. If it was much longer than that, she was going to be desperate, given the impatience of the Delamain Foundation. As it was, she had a lot to do while she waited. First, she had to figure out how to convince the foundation that the discovery of a new five-million-year-old species in the elephant ancestral tree was a perfectly natural segue from investigating the domestication of horses. She knew that if she presented the full story she could write her own ticket, but she also knew that it was by no means certain that she would be able to present the full story—whatever that was.
7
Sergei had gone quiet after returning to Transteppe. His office in an enormous hangar-like structure was empty when he
returned, and he plunked wearily into his swivel chair and thought. His joking reference to the breakup with his fiancée brought back memories of the real story of the chain of events that had brought him to Kazakhstan. He shook his head. What he’d told Rob and Claire was true as far as it went, but it did not go very far. He hadn’t been kidding when he said that it was not a good story. It began with his greatest triumph, which he very quickly came to realize would curse him forever.
Sergei had been good at chess—very good. After he graduated from the Technical Institute in St. Petersburg, Sergei had spent some months competing in chess. At university, he had been good enough to earn a master rating, with a couple of brilliant wins that attracted enough notice that he was encouraged to try to get to the level of international competition.
During a regional tournament in the Russian Far East, he was paired against a young up-and-comer in finance and politics. As they sat down, the man gave a perfunctory handshake and introduced himself as Andrei. He was gaunt, with deep circles under his eyes. The closest he came to smiling was when they shook hands, and that slight wrinkling of the corner of one side of his mouth had all the warmth of a flickering fluorescent light in an unheated KGB interrogation room in January. Standing behind him was an auburn-haired and very beautiful young woman—Sergei had seen her floating around the room, and one of the other players had told him that her name was Ludmilla, and that her grandfather had been a famous general. She would have stood out in any context, but amid the eccentrics that disproportionately populate the chess demographic, she was in a different world. Sergei made the mistake of trying to show off.
Playing the black pieces, he had responded to white’s opening of moving the pawn in the D file to the four position, by moving his E pawn to the sixth spot. White responded by moving his knight to F-3, and after Sergei’s response, he was certain that his opponent recognized that he was offering a replay of a famous 1912 match between Edward Lasker, a player, like Sergei, a step short of grandmaster, and George Alan Thomas. In the twelfth move of that game, Lasker moved his queen to H-7, fatally tempting Thomas to take the queen with his king. By forcing continual checks, Lasker forced Thomas to embark on what came to be called “the Immortal King Walk,” in which the king was moved ever farther from his protective army on the other side of the board until a mate became inevitable. Sergei’s opponent glanced up at Sergei as if to determine whether he was sane, and then shrugged. Both knew every move of this famous match, and Sergei’s opponent, supremely confident, seemed curious to see whether Sergei had better ideas than the unfortunate George Thomas.
A murmur went through the onlookers as they realized what was happening. One of Thomas’s moves, the one that had set up the fateful sacrifice, had been to castle. When the game progressed to that point, Sergei instead took one of white’s knights with his bishop, which was then sacrificed to white’s pawn. On paper the exchange looked somewhat even, but it left white’s pawn in a weak position. That was all the advantage Sergei needed, and ten moves later, white resigned.
There was a swell of applause as Andrei stood up and took his leave. Sergei didn’t notice the malevolent glare that accompanied the terse handshake, because he was searching the crowd for the lovely Ludmilla. Sergei’s pulse quickened when he noticed that she was discreetly applauding as well. Sergei detached himself from the well-wishers to introduce himself. Would she like a drink? She would. She allowed that she was nominally attached to Andrei. By the end of the evening, she wasn’t.
There began a two-year romance. Ludmilla had a quiet confidence that suggested depths in even the simplest things she said. She had the Russian sense of the ironic and liked to shock—when Sergei first spoke to her, she had remarked, “Maybe it’s because we’re in a room full of chess players, but I find your muscles exciting”—as well as a sophistication that utterly awed Sergei. He dropped out of competitive chess shortly after the match. He recognized that for the best, chess was an obsession, and one needed the hyperfocus of autism or Asperger’s syndrome to allow chess to become your entire world. Faced with a choice of a blossoming romance or the austere demands of chess, Sergei made his choice. For a time he was happy.
Turning away from chess, Sergei also threw himself back into his studies, choosing to specialize in exploration geophysics. He became known as something of a wizard at profiling the subsurface of the earth through remote sensing, developing ingenious algorithms for sorting through overwhelming masses of data. The combination of geological and remote sensing expertise put Sergei in the crosshairs of recruiters from multinational resource companies. Then it all came apart.
Sergei winced as he remembered the brutal end. As was his custom, he called Ludmilla’s cell phone on his way back from work to talk about dinner plans. There was no answer, only a message that the number was no longer in operation. Alarmed, he sped home. Ludmilla had cleared out. She had left a note: “I’m sorry. It’s impossible. Don’t try to contact me.”
He did try to contact her, by phone, email, and by showing up at her parents’ compound in St. Petersburg. All he could show for these efforts were some bruises earned through a humiliating scuffle with security. Eventually, he pieced together that someone had poisoned the family against him through a series of slickly packaged slanders linking him, using faked photographs and faked notes, with a notorious antigovernment radical who used sex to seal alliances (Sergei actually admired the woman, though he didn’t know her). The story sold to the family suggested that Sergei had used Ludmilla to insinuate himself in order to facilitate a kidnapping/extortion plot to fund the radical movement. Her father was prepared to believe the lies. Like most thinking people in Russia who didn’t have a place at the trough, Sergei was antigovernment and had made his opinions known during heated dinner-table conversations. A sympathetic cousin later told Sergei that Ludmilla’s father had threatened to cut her off completely if she ever spoke with Sergei again.
Ultimately, Sergei came to realize that it was for the best: Ludmilla clearly felt that access to the family cash was more important than their relationship, regardless of the truth of allegations.
But who had dropped the dime? Even though it was two years after the match, Sergei had an idea. Andrei’s career in business had skyrocketed in the intervening years, and so it was not hard to track him down.
Sergei reached Andrei by phone. After Sergei accused him of launching the smear campaign, Andrei cut him off dismissively. “I’ve got better things to do than worry about nobodies.”
Frustrated, Sergei was about to hang up, when Andrei spoke again. “Life is not like chess, is it? Someone who looks like a pawn might be a king, while a queen can be turned into a pawn …” He paused again, as though in mid-thought.
Sergei said nothing, wondering where this was going.
“Yes, chess is so clean and strictly demarcated with an inviolable set of rules. In life there are rules, too, but, most often, they aren’t official rules. They have to be learned, yes?”
Sergei still said nothing.
“And if you want the skills of chess to apply to life, you have to know how to make a pawn behave like a pawn.”
Involuntarily, Sergei held his breath.
“And the first step in that process is to make sure the pawn knows that he is but a pawn …” Andrei let that sink in. “Sometimes that takes more than one lesson, but once it has sunk in, pawns can be very useful in life. They can be moved around, and, if needed, they can be sacrificed. Don’t you agree?”
Andrei abruptly ended the connection.
The message was clear: Andrei was not done with Sergei.
8
Over the next few days, Claire spent long hours poring over the evolution of elephants as well as the climate history of the plain. She realized that she was supposed to be surprised when contacted by Sergei, and anyone looking at her computer would see that she had been investigating elephants before the surprise delivery of the bone. On the other hand, it was well-known that her primary res
earch involved elephants. She thought about this. Operating clandestinely involved skills she had never developed. She cleared her search history, which left her feeling as though she’d done something illicit.
There was always a beginning to the slippery slope of corruption, and the first step would be easy to justify—e.g., a corrupt official in the Cultural Ministry sells artifacts on the black market because he needs to pay for the wedding of a destitute cousin. The next time would be easier.
Claire knew the “proper” way to pursue this discovery would have been to notify the Kazakh government and then start negotiating the bureaucratic maze to get permission to dig in the mining concession. She would then need to inform the Delamain Foundation and Rushmere University, to which she still was nominally attached.
The mere recitation of the proper protocol reassured her a bit, as she knew no sane gambler would bet that she would get past stage one, given that the Kazakh president had made an all-in bet on the mining concession. Nor did the governments of the region have a spotless record in terms of preserving the past. She thought of the Taliban’s use of artillery to destroy the enormous seventeen-hundred-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas. The more than 150-foot-tall statues carved into cliffs were blown up, notwithstanding a concerted campaign by the United Nations to convince the government otherwise, and all because the religious fanatics who guided the Taliban considered them an affront to Allah. International opinion offered little protection when governments decided to act.
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