Deep Past

by Eugene Linden

  “Claire, I’m deeply honored, but there’d be no discovery without you.”

  “Actually, there’d be no discovery if you hadn’t stepped up.”

  “I don’t believe that. Make no mistake—I’m deeply touched by your offer. But I’m going to decline.” Seeing the look on her face, he hurried on. “Remember when I said that if I bought ten tables I could be man of the year for organizations that hated mining? Well, the same is true about funding a dig. All I’ve provided is cover and money; you and your team have done the work …” A thought occurred to Hayden. “Actually, when you think about the situation, it might be more politic to name the species after the Kazakh president.”

  33

  Bezanov had just put down the phone when there was a knock on his office door and his wife poked her head in. “Is this a good time to talk?”

  Irritation flashed across his face before he turned around. It was never a good time to talk these days when it came to Ludmilla. It wasn’t that she was high maintenance—quite the contrary. All she wanted to do was work with rescue animals. She refused to go out on his yacht, saying the conversation was excruciating, no matter how celebrated the guests. They were always so guarded, she complained that they only talked about where they had been, where they were going, and which jet or yacht they took to get from place to place. Dinner conversation consisted of gossip rather than ideas, and wit was nowhere to be found. In fact, Bezanov largely agreed with that assessment, but he also expected Ludmilla to appreciate that in his position he had to keep up appearances.

  “Keep it short,” he said curtly.

  “OK, how about this for short?” She gave him a level, affectless look. “We’re finished. Is that short enough?”

  Bezanov’s expression did not change. This was not unwelcome, but he had planned on being the one to deliver the news. His voice was icy cold. “You can leave any time, but know this: if you walk out now, you get nothing.”

  Ludmilla barked a bitter laugh. “If you knew anything about me, you’d realize that I want nothing. There is nothing you could give me that would mean anything to me. My biggest mistake in life was choosing money over the chance of a real life. So you can be happy and cackle about all the rubles you won’t need to give me!”

  Bezanov looked at her appraisingly. She was no longer the Ludmilla who had so captivated him and whom he’d so cleverly campaigned to win. Stress had etched lines around her eyes. But, though worn down, she was not defeated. He’d won her, but he didn’t own her. Worse, it wasn’t that she didn’t know the rules, but rather that she knew the rules but didn’t care about abiding by them. And she still knew how to get his goat.

  “You mean Sergei Anachev? Yes, think about the future you might have had with him. Do you want to know where he is? He’s in Kazakhstan, doing my bidding.”

  Hearing this, Ludmilla went pale. “What have you done …” She fled the room without finishing the thought.

  Bezanov felt some satisfaction at his wife’s reaction but kicked himself mildly for being provoked into saying something about the geologist. He did not want her wondering whether he had any role in the documents that poisoned Anachev’s relations with her family. He’d never mentioned Anachev in all the years he and Ludmilla had been married, and his policy was never to say anything unless it served some purpose.

  34

  Two days passed as the team continued the delicate work of exposing the objects revealed by the scan. Dr. Tabiliev came out with two young paleontologists with expertise in geology. Claire appreciated this, as it supported Sergei’s point that the finds predated anything that might remotely be considered cultural.

  The third day, Claire awoke to find a surprise email from Adam Constantine, the Times correspondent. He began by noting that he had been to see Byron Gwynne about his new, much anticipated book on the evolutionary history of elephants and that he had asked whether he was aware of Claire’s new find in Kazakhstan. Gwynne had said yes, but that the image he saw seemed like a juvenile form of Deinotherium.

  Apparently, Gwynne had said much more, because in parenthesis, Constantine had added, “By the way, Gwynne is not your friend.” His interest piqued by Gwynne’s hostility, Constantine had contacted William Friedl at Rushmere. Claire grimaced when she read that Friedl had made some dismissive remark about her fixation on animal intelligence, but he’d then let Constantine know that she had found several more objects and that she would be continuing the dig under the distinguished aegis of Rushmere. Constantine ended by saying that in the light of these new developments, he would like to arrange a visit. He went on to suggest that if things went well, they might talk about an exclusive for the Times. What Constantine didn’t tell Claire was that the prospect of a big controversy with a big name involved was almost a sure thing for the front page—with the controversy, not the find, front and center.

  Claire considered what Constantine did tell her with both exhilaration and trepidation. An exclusive in the Times was exactly what the dig needed in some sense: it would lift the profile of the project, but even as it made her bulletproof from the type of pressure Tamerlan and other corrupt officials might bring, it would also put a target on her back in some parts of academia. On the other hand, given Constantine’s warning about Gwynne, that target was already firmly in place. He could come out, she reasoned, but the story would have to be embargoed until a credible scientific journal was given the opportunity to publish a letter announcing the discovery.

  These ruminations were cut short by a phone call from Tegev Aliyev, Sauat’s father.

  “Mr. Aliyev, thanks for calling me back.”

  “My pleasure, Dr. Knowland. How is Sauat doing?”

  “He’s been a real pleasure to work with, but that’s why I’m calling.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Not that I know of, but I’ve left the dig, and I wanted to say goodbye to him before I left, but I did not see him. I’m wondering whether you’ve heard from him?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Then, “No, I haven’t. You are no longer in charge?”

  “No, the foundation that sponsored the dig has installed someone else. I will be continuing my work at Transteppe, where there has been a significant find. I was hoping that Sauat could continue to work with me. I asked about him before I left, but the staff hadn’t seen him that afternoon—no one seemed concerned,” she added somewhat lamely.

  “I will call Tamerlan and then call you back.”

  “Good. While you’re doing that, I’ll call the camp.”

  She managed to reach Benoit, who hadn’t seen Sauat. New to the dig, he assumed that Sauat had gone off to see his family. She told Benoit that Sauat was the nephew of his liaison to the Kazakh authorities, which got his attention, and that he should immediately interview all in the encampment to determine when Sauat disappeared. “Oh, and Benoit,” she said just before hanging up, “keep this low-key. Remember where we are.”

  Tegev rang back twenty minutes later. “Tamerlan said that Sauat was your responsibility and that he holds you accountable for his well-being.”

  What was going on? Hostage taking for use as a bargaining chip was standard operating procedure in this part of the world, whether it was grabbing an American journalist in Iran or the CEO of a fertilizer company in Ukraine. But would Tamerlan endanger his own nephew to extract leverage over Claire? She doubted it, but then, she thought that if someone else had grabbed Sauat, Tamerlan would have no compunctions about turning suspicion toward her.

  “Mr. Aliyev, we will find your son. There are people here who I think can help. I will call when I have any news. And please call me if you hear from him.”

  After speaking with Tegev, Claire called Rob and asked whether she and Sergei could meet at his office. Rob knew better than to ask what it was about over the phone. Then she called Sergei and asked if he could break away and meet with Rob before heading over to headquarters. It was her first time in Rob’s office, and she felt as
if she had entered the situation room at the White House. The utilitarian space was filled with banks of video monitors with feeds from all over the concession buildings and gates. A technician manned a computer screen and communicated by walkie-talkie with various security staff as they checked in. Sergei was already there, and Rob waved Claire into a separate room. As soon as they sat down, Claire filled them in on what she knew. Sergei stared at the floor grimly. “I know this game—too well.” Rob looked at Sergei curiously, but the Russian did not elaborate.

  Rob turned to Claire. From the look on his face, she could tell that she was losing him. Once again, she felt a contraction in the pit of her stomach.

  “You gave us fair warning back on the bluff,” he said to Claire, “but I thought we were facing an academic dustup, not kidnappings and God knows what else.”

  “I never should have brought Sauat into this …”

  “Let me finish!” Rob interrupted. “As you know, I’ve been worried that this would blow back on Transteppe, and this is one of those moments where we—I—have to be very careful. We cannot pay ransom, for instance, or it puts a target on every single employee. Also, we don’t know that whoever took the kid—if someone did take him—is looking for leverage over you”—nodding at Claire—“the dig, or Transteppe. We’re the deep pockets and so I know where I’d put my odds.”

  Claire felt miserable. “I understand, Rob; Sauat’s not your problem, he’s mine.”

  Rob waved her off. “I’m not saying I won’t help; I’m just saying we’ve got to be extremely careful, and I’m going to have to spend some rainy-day money from the favor bank …” Rob thought a second. “I’ll make a couple of calls—see if anyone knows anything. I’ll ping you after I hear … and let’s keep this tight: if he’s been snatched, we’ll need all the wiggle room we can get.”

  35

  Claire went for a walk to clear her head. She felt like she was burning more bridges than a retreating army. She stopped by the commissary. Lawrence was sitting outside, possibly on mouse patrol, she hoped. It was blazing hot, but she decided to walk out toward the garden, where the staff was making a valiant effort to grow some tomatoes, squash, and lettuce—long odds given the heat. Lawrence trotted after her, making several digressions to chase bugs or investigate whatever smells cats liked to investigate. Looking at the wilting and dust-covered vegetables, her mind wandered back to the elephants. What was it like here, five and a half million years ago? What did they eat? It was an interesting question, and it prompted her to return to her room to finish that email to Keerbrock.

  She looked at her earlier draft, the body of which mentioned the discovery of a mysterious elephant bone in a place elephants had never been known to inhabit at a time of extremely rapid evolutionary change. That part was fine. What she couldn’t decide was whether to mention that they had crossed paths before, a decade earlier.

  Claire had been in her third year at Berkeley studying comparative psychology, which fell under both anthropology and psychology. She met with her thesis committee to launch the study that would be the basis of her doctorate. Claire’s idea was to formally demonstrate the notion that great apes know that when another ape points, the reference is to some object in the distance and not the end of the ape’s finger.

  After Claire had finished presenting her own formal design to test her hypothesis, there were initial murmurs of approval from the committee. Claire was something of a star in the department, and the chair had invited Keerbrock (who was spending a semester at Berkeley) to sit in. He was silent during her presentation, and after the committee had asked a few perfunctory questions, the chair had turned to Keerbrock and said that while they knew this was not an area of expertise, all of them wanted to hear his reaction.

  Keerbrock was a lanky man with tousled hair and a penetrating stare. Back then, he was about sixty-five and already a legend for developing a series of precise proxies for dating events in climate history, as well as for overturning the conventional wisdom on the speed at which climate changes. Having refined the dating of several abrupt climate changes in prehistory, he then ventured into evolutionary biology and provided rigorous data to back up the then novel argument that surviving climate change made you smarter, which set the stage for Benoit’s work in recent years. But then he’d abandoned this work, famously saying that if crises like climate change made you smarter, why didn’t we find evidence for a lot of other smart animals? This was why Claire figured he would be interested in this find.

  Keerbrock had no particular expertise in animal cognition, but that did not stop him when the department chair invited his comments. At first it wasn’t clear that he had even heard the invitation. Then he knocked the table with his knuckles and turned his stare on Claire.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen if you go ahead with this study you just described. You will spend a couple of years getting everything just so; you’ll enlist some students to help you implement the experiment, you will gather your data, and then you will come back to this committee.” He paused. It was as though no one was breathing in the room. “There will be some appreciation for your diligence, but then someone, probably one of the more quantitative types, will ask, ‘How do you know that in every case you describe that the ape is not merely remembering a previous scene in which pointing was involved?’ You will not be able to answer that question given the design you have laid out. Then someone else will ask why it is necessary to impute a mental state to this action when it might be the simple result of association or memory.” Keerbrock paused again. One of the committee members, a junior faculty member, had a look of sadistic glee as he watched Keerbrock dismantle the reputation of the department’s star.

  “You will not have an answer for that, either,” Keerbrock continued in his level tone, “given the study’s design. And even if no one asked those questions during your thesis defense, I can guarantee you that someone will bring it up later, and, well, you know what will happen. Suffice it to say that after the expenditure of so much time and energy in this futile quest, you will find your future prospects to be very dim indeed.”

  Claire’s stricken look must have reached some vestige of humanity in Keerbrock that he had not yet extirpated, because he softened his tone. “I’m telling you this now because I think the topic is well worth investigating, but only if done properly. Now is the time to fix it, not later. Take it from someone who knows—when you push the boundaries of conventional wisdom in any scientific field, you’d better be bulletproof.”

  With that, Keerbrock thanked the chairman for inviting him and took his leave. There was an awkward silence. To the chairman’s relief, Claire managed to say, “I guess it’s back to the drawing board.” There was a squeaking of chairs as people got up and left. The chairman asked Claire to come see him. Claire sat alone in that room for a long time and then quietly sobbed for some time more.

  In the days following, Claire had come close to a nervous breakdown. She went through every stage of dealing with a deep emotional wound—despair, rationalization, rage—but the worst part was that she knew that Keerbrock was right.

  Big integrative ideas sometimes attract the best and brightest, but more often dreamers, kooks, mystics, and the undisciplined. As one of the world’s most celebrated big thinkers, Keerbrock knew how easy it was to marginalize a new idea because all new ideas threaten the established order. He knew that in order to push the boundaries of science in new directions, a scientist had to have impeccable credentials in the old order. Keerbrock must have hated it every time a daring new hypothesis went down in flames because of laziness or oversight or unjustifiable assumptions, because each case made it easier for the scientific establishment to dismiss his theories as well.

  Keerbrock had survived many attempts to dismiss his ideas, and he was now—to use his term—bulletproof. Her find was his missing piece, and he was the missing piece in the letter she envisioned announcing the find. But should she avoid mentioning that previous encounter? Wou
ld he dismiss a collaboration out of hand if she was associated with the find? Or was Claire just one of scores of grad students whose lives he had ruined?

  Claire stared at the screen. “Fuck it,” she said and began typing.

  36

  After sending the email, Claire walked over to the warehouse to see how the team was progressing. They were through the taphonomy stage, in which they documented as best they could how the objects were buried. Sergei had supervised cutting the objects out of the lip, along with a cushion of surrounding rock. Now they were using rock hammers and picks to remove the remaining rock. Katie was working on the mysterious circular find.

  With the surrounding rock reduced to manageable size, Sergei had been able to do a much more finely resolved 3-D image. Katie was staring at it when Claire came in. “Well,” she said, “one mystery solved: our ancient buddies were big into curling!”

  On the screen, the object did look like a curling stone. It was circular and concave on the top, with a slight nub in the center. Claire peered at the image. “What the hell?”

  “No idea. Once we know what it’s made of, we can narrow the search.”

  Claire nodded. She was heading over to Francisco when Rob called. She listened, hung up, and turned to the group.

  “I need Sergei for a few minutes.” Sergei got up, and they both left.

  ¬

  Once they were outside, she said, “Sauat.” He nodded but seemed distracted, almost bitter.

  “You OK?”

  Sergei immediately snapped back to the present. “Uh-huh.”

  They continued in silence, with Claire stealing occasional glances at Sergei until they got to Rob’s office. Once they were seated, he wasted no time. “The president’s got him—as a ‘guest.’”

  “What does that mean?” asked Claire. “How’s he being treated?”