“That’s what I’m hopin’,” said Claire, nodding vigorously.
Hayden continued exploring the image, pausing over the other red splotch. Something seemed to catch his attention. He moved the cursor over to a green tag. “What’s this?”
Claire shrugged. “Dunno.” She turned to the Russian. “Sergei?”
Claire was surprised to see Sergei give the slightest start. “Let me see,” he said, moving toward the screen. Sergei’s reaction had been fleeting, but Claire thought that he had to know every marker instantaneously—after all, he had set them up.
Sergei took the mouse and clicked on the green tag in a box below the screen. “Phospherite,” he said, moving back.
Hayden looked straight at Sergei. “Phospherite?”
Now Sergei looked flustered. “Yeah, sedimentary rock, millions of years of deposition, perfect conditions to find phospherite. Seemed like it was worth marking.”
What was going on? Claire looked at both men.
If the explanation didn’t satisfy Hayden, he wasn’t letting on—or he wasn’t going to get into it here. He gave Sergei a quick look and returned to the screen.
After a few more seconds looking at the red splotches, Hayden swiveled to face the group.
“Well, it looks like things are going to get very exciting.” He turned to Claire. “What are your plans?”
“We know where to dig, so I’d like to get right to it. I’d also like to invite Dr. Tabiliev to come out to observe.” Hayden nodded his agreement, and Claire went on. “If in fact these are more fossil remains, I think we write up a systematic description of the find—fast—and send it as a letter to a refereed journal, basically to put a stake in the ground. Then we can try to figure out exactly what is going on.”
Again Hayden nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll OK the helicopter once Tabiliev agrees to come.” He got up and looked at Claire. “Let’s chat a sec. Can you walk me to the other building?” Before they left, he turned to the group. “It looks like we’re on the verge of something extraordinary and wonderful. Let’s make sure we do it right.”
They walked out in to the sunlight. The superheated air shimmered off the hoods of passing vehicles. Hayden waited until they were out of earshot and then said to Claire, “I know you want to see what’s in the rock, but I think we have to make sure that you have a credible institutional affiliation.”
It was said in a friendly way, but clearly this was very important to Hayden. Claire nodded; she’d been thinking the same thing. “Agreed.”
“So,” Hayden continued, “is there some sort of kabuki dance to getting that done?”
Claire thought of the department chairman at Rushmere and laughed. “At most universities, it’s more like a lap dance—money greases a lot of wheels.”
“I’m not surprised. So let’s get your university guy on Skype. Once you’ve made your pitch, I can ask him what hoops I have to jump through to get this funded.”
Claire wasn’t used to things going so well. “Thanks so much! If we try later tonight, it’ll be morning in New Hampshire.”
Hayden nodded. “Anything else you need?”
Claire thought of the one email she had not sent that first day. If ever there was a time to ask, this was it. “There is … assuming this is a new species, it is one more of a bunch of species of elephant-like animals that began to appear at the same time. One big missing piece in this puzzle is what was going on five and a half million years ago. We need the input of a credible, big-thinking polymath with an open mind, someone with the chops in geophysics, physical chemistry, and evolutionary biology who can help fit these bones into a context of what else was happening at that time.”
Hayden was amused. “Such a person actually exists?”
“Oh yes.”
“Why haven’t you contacted him—or is it a her?”
Claire smiled. “I actually wrote him—it’s a he—an email a few weeks ago but didn’t send it.”
“I see—he bites?”
Claire nodded. “You could say so. He doesn’t suffer fools—or anyone, for that matter—gladly. But now, with the new stuff, I think I’ve got enough ammunition to tempt him.”
“Is it a funding question?”
Claire shook her head. “I think he can do pretty much what he wants at this point.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
Claire squirmed. She looked at Hayden and spread her hands. “I’m scared of him.”
Hayden laughed heartily. “Well, I’ll be …” He laughed again. “I didn’t think you were scared of anyone. I suppose I should be insulted. Well, get him out here. This is someone I want to meet. Does he have a name?”
“Willem Keerbrock.”
“Oh, the MacArthur award winner, then Nobel in chemistry, too, right.”
“And many other awards, too, most of which he doesn’t show up to receive. He doesn’t care about awards. What he does care about is a well-defended big idea. Hopefully this qualifies.”
Claire thought about her own—traumatic—encounter with Keerbrock a decade earlier. It still left her feeling queasy. They walked in silence until they got to the office complex.
Before disappearing, he turned to her. “Get in touch when you get close to pulling something out of the rock. I want to be there.” He turned to go in. Then he glanced at her face. “Something else?”
Claire wasn’t sure if she should go ahead, but she was going to be working with Sergei, so it seemed OK to ask. She took a deep breath. “If this is confidential mining business, please tell me …” She paused to see his reaction, but his face gave away nothing.
“Ask. I’ll tell you if it is.”
Claire fidgeted. “OK, here goes: What’s the significance of phospherite?”
“Let’s talk inside.” Hayden led her up to the boardroom, which he had commandeered as an office. He gestured for her to take a seat. He drummed his fingers on the table and then cleared his throat. He looked weary, and Claire thought that his interest in archaeology must also be a respite from a far more complicated world.
“If you’re asking the significance of phospherite, that’s easy. Phosphorous comes from phosphate rock, which is sometimes called phospherite. It’s an essential building block for all living things.” He looked directly at Claire. “But I think you’re asking something else?”
Claire gave a quick, nervous nod.
Hayden paused a minute. He seemed to be making a decision. “OK, here are the bullet points: Only a few countries on the planet have significant deposits of phosphorous—the US, China, Morocco … and Kazakhstan. So phosphorous can be regarded as a strategic mineral. Russia, to the north, has very little. Russia is also increasingly isolated and could vastly improve its geopolitical position to the degree that it has access and control over strategic resources. You’ve probably followed how it keeps Europe in line through its control of natural gas pipelines. Now that game is ending, as Europe is rapidly developing alternative supplies, and they’re looking for new leverage. You with me?” Claire nodded. “OK, here’s a few more points: Kazakhstan was once part of the Soviet Union, but Kazakhstan’s phosphorous deposits are hundreds of miles to the south; the Russia petrochemical giant Primorskichem is a twenty percent owner of Transteppe …” He paused again. “And Sergei is Russian … so I had to wonder why he was looking for phospherite way up here … so close to the border.”
Claire’s heart pounded. “Sergei’s …” She shook her head. “Sergei’s been nothing but helpful to me … I’ve got to give him the benefit of the doubt …” She trailed off.
“I agree, and I like Sergei very much.” Hayden offered a tired smile. “Here’s a question of my own: Have you ever met an uncomplicated Russian?” He wasn’t looking for an answer. Almost as an afterthought, he added, “And it was Primorskichem that put him up for the job. And more than once he’s been overheard speaking Russian on the phone—that’s what Rob was telling me when we met for a drink.”
By this point Claire did not want
to hear any more. She had also heard Sergei speaking Russian on the phone. “I’ve got to believe in him.”
“So do I.” Hayden tapped a finger as though pondering whether he should say more. “But what if he’s being squeezed … what if they have something on him and they’re forcing him to do something? And if that’s the case, why would they be doing that—what’s the agenda?”
He paused again. “I trust Sergei, but not for a New York minute do I trust our Russian partners, and by that I don’t just mean the chemical company, but its unofficial ties to the Russian government. I knew this from the get-go, and, if I did anything good during the negotiations that set up the partnership, it was insisting on strong fraudulent conveyances language that could be used to unwind a transaction should Primorskichem try to strong-arm a takeover.” He gave a short laugh. “That should stop them in their tracks! Right,” he added bitterly.
As Claire walked back to the giant shed, she thought about Hayden’s candor. He worked in an entirely different context, one that trumped and trivialized the academic and scientific hurdles she was dealing with. It was inspiring that he devoted so much attention to the discovery. True, the scientific issues she was pursuing were momentous, and ultimately could impact the world, but the flashpoint Hayden was concerned with had the potential for great power conflict and might impact the world in a much more immediate way.
Her thoughts turned back to Sergei, and a question popped into her head, one that she should have posed to Hayden. When Sergei marked various minerals with tags, he knew that Hayden would see them, and he also knew that he would probably ask about them. If he did have a hidden agenda involving phosphates, and if Sergei was as brilliant as she thought he was, why would he do something so obvious?
The answer was also obvious. He was trying to tell them something. A conversation she had had with Sergei a few weeks back came back to her. They had been talking about what it was like, growing up in Russia.
It started off light enough. “It’s an upside world,” he had said.
“Upside down?”
“Yes, upside down. In the West you have laws to make society function better. In my country we have many more laws. In theory we should be the best-functioning society on earth! Instead Russia is one of the least functional societies in the world. A functioning society is not the purpose of our laws. They only exist to give those in control leverage. And they always get it because it is not possible to get through a day in Russia without breaking some law. And then, if you rise to the attention of those in power—in my case expressing an opinion at a rally protesting the murder of a journalist—they always have something.”
“They?”
Sergei waved a hand. “Oligarchs, organs of state, affiliates of what we used to call the nomenklatura.”
“Do they have something on you?”
He grew guarded. “Even if they don’t, they find a way to get leverage.”
Claire had been alarmed. “What do they have? What do they want?”
Sergei had cut the conversation off. “Listen to me!” he’d said back then. “I would never do anything to hurt Rob, Mr. Hayden, and most of all, you.”
32
By the time Claire returned, Sergei and the team had already run a more detailed scan of the lip that promised to hold more fossilized bone.
Katie looked at Claire. “Something wrong?”
Claire realized that she had been staring absently at Sergei. She blushed in spite of herself. “Nope, not a thing. Let’s go in.”
After two hours of careful cutting with a handheld trim saw, they were at the edge of the intriguing red rectangle. They cut it out as a block with enough margin that they were sure they were not damaging anything inside. With the help of a technician, Katie and Francisco did some more detailed imaging of the block, while Sergei and Claire started cutting toward the other red splotch. By five o’clock they had placed both blocks on stands so that they could begin the delicate task of uncovering what was within.
What had been a rectangular blotch in the first low-resolution scan was now revealed to be a near duplicate of the first array. That there were two identical arrays mooted the issue raised by Benoit about coincidence. Someone—something—had arranged those bones. Under higher-resolution scrutiny, the second blotch turned out to look very much like a cranium. They decided to expose it first, as it would tell them a lot about what sort of animal this was, if, in fact, the ulnae came from the same species. It would take some time to chip away the rock surrounding the cranium, but Claire had printed some of the high-resolution images and she was feeling fairly well armed for her conversation with William Friedl, the head of the psych department at Rushmere.
Sergei was starting to put away the saws when Katie spoke up. “Uh, boss? While we’ve got the saws out, can we cut out the elephant foot–like thingy?”
Claire, focused on the bones, had forgotten about that purple blotch. “Good idea.”
Another two hours of cutting and a third block was sitting on a stand. “This one’s your baby,” said Claire to Katie as she got ready to leave and prepare for her scheduled conversation with the department chair at Rushmere.
She had decided to divulge the discovery of the cranium but not yet mention the second array. Years of butting her head against the behavioral science establishment convinced her that it would be an easier sell to pitch a new species and hold the second array in reserve as a trump card. The rat runners were not going to greet the news of an ancient intelligence with open arms.
She was not wrong. “Let me get this straight,” said Friedl after Claire had laid out her pitch for Rushmere’s sponsorship of her work. “You go rogue on Delamain and the Kazakh government, and then you come to the chair of the psych department for sponsorship of a paleontology project and ask me to put the prestige of Rushmere behind a project studying evidence of intelligence millions of years before intelligence was invented? How am I doing so far?”
This was not really far from what Claire expected, though this time, she wasn’t coming to Friedl hat in hand. “Well, Bill,” she began, “if you put it that way, it doesn’t sound very promising at all.”
“What other way should I put it?”
“That even without the exploration of intelligence, Rushmere has the chance to get credit for the truly groundbreaking discovery that a previously unknown species of elephant ancestor lived more than five million years ago in a place never before known to have elephants.” Claire dropped her voice to a near whisper. “And the dig comes fully funded.”
There was a moment of silence. “Did I hear that right? With fifty percent overhead for the department?”
“Just a sec …” Claire turned to Hayden, who had been watching the interchange with an amused smile. She turned back to the screen. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
After Hayden and Friedl had talked for a few minutes, Hayden motioned for Claire to come back to the computer. “He’s got a few more questions for you.”
Once she was settled, Friedl got right to the point. “What about Benoit?”
“In an ideal world, he would cooperate for the good of science. In this world, he’ll cooperate because he’s got one bone, and our team has the rest, plus the ‘cranium’”—Claire made air quotes—“and who knows what else.”
Friedl either didn’t notice or didn’t care about her vagueness about the “what else.” “OK, I’m on board—but be very careful about the ancient intelligence stuff.”
After she ended the Skype conversation, she turned to Hayden. “Thanks.”
They sat for a moment in silence.
“OK if I vent a little bit?”
“Can I stop you?”
Claire stood up and started pacing. She mimicked Friedl’s voice. “Be very careful about the ancient intelligence stuff?” Claire shook her fists. “Are you kidding me? Why does he think I put my career on the line?”
Hayden said nothing, and Claire sat in silence for a few seconds. Then she s
tood up and walked to a window. “Twenty minutes on the phone with Bill … and I’m thinking Kazakhstan’s too close to New England.”
She turned to face Hayden. “That,” she said, pointing to the now blank screen, “is why any scientific progress is a miracle.”
Hayden got up and poured a scotch for her. This time it was a thirty-five-year-old Macallan. After he poured himself a shot, they clinked glasses. “Go on.”
“Friedl is a behaviorist, which means that he tends to dismiss consciousness and explain all complex behaviors as the result of stimulus and response.”
“And?”
Claire downed a slug of scotch. “Well, is it such a big step from that to acknowledge that the pressures that produced intelligence in humans might occur in other animals? Yet, he dismisses it out of hand. Worst of all, I’ve got to kiss his ring—that’s a euphemism, by the way.”
Hayden snorted. “Behaviorism! Even if your man reduces everything to mechanical monkeys, I’ll bet you a large amount of money that he still thinks he himself is something special.
“Look, it’s never fun to suffer fools, but you did the right thing,” said Hayden more seriously. “With Rushmere behind this, you’ll get a hearing.” He paused. “And, you may not want to hear this, but he also described a prudent path forward: first establish what the bones are, then explore why they were arranged and who or what arranged them. If you lay it out right, it will be obvious that an intelligence of some sort was involved. How long would it take to uncover the objects?”
Claire guessed about a week, since the sedimentary rock was easy to pick off. Hayden said that he had to get back to his other life, but to call if there was a crisis. He promised to return once the bones were uncovered. “If you need anything in the short term, Sergei can get it from Ripley.”
After she finished her drink, Claire said, “One thing you should know. I’ve talked it over with Sergei and Rob, and we all agree that if the bones are from a new species, we’re going to name it after you.”
She watched Hayden’s reaction and discovered that the man could actually blush!
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