Tyrannosaur Canyon (33 page)

That was the way they were headed.

It seemed like a century ago when he had capped that prospector-it was hard to believe it had only been, what, eight days? A lot had gotten screwed up since

then.

He had the journal and was close to unscrewing up the rest of it. They'd be heading for the one trail across Navajo Rim, which meant they'd be hiking southwest through the badlands, crossing near the head of
Tyrannosaur
Canyon
. That formed a kind of natural choke point where several tributary canyons came together, and they'd have to pass through it.

He could make a loop southward, skirt the base of Navajo Rim, and come back up north to ambush them at the head of that valley. He would have to move fast, but in less than an hour it would be all over.

He crept down from his vantage point, making sure he wasn't seen, and set off at a fast pace southward through the badlands toward the sandstone wall of Navajo Rim.

This time tomorrow he'd be boarding that early flight to
New York
.

4

AS MELODIE COOKSHANK walked east on

She turned into the service drive that led down to the employee entrance, and checked her watch.
Quarter to eight
. She had pulled plenty of all-nighters writing her dissertation, and she was used to it, but this time it seemed different. Her mind was unusually crisp and clear-more than lucid. She rang the buzzer at the night entrance and slotted her museum pass through the card-reader.

She walked through the central rotunda and passed through a succession of grand exhibition halls. It always thrilled her to walk through the empty museum in the early morning, before anyone had arrived, the cases dark and silent, the only sound the echoing of her heels on the marble floors.

She took her usual shortcut through the Education Department, swiped her card to call the elevator, waited while it rumbled its way to her, and used the key a second time to direct it to the basement.

The doors slid open and she stepped into a basement corridor. It was cool and silent in the bowels of the museum, as unchanging as a cave, and it always gave her the creeps. The air was dead and always seemed to carry a faint odor of old meat.

She quickened her step toward the Mineralogy lab, passing door after door of fossil storage: Triassic Dinosaurs, Jurassic Dinosaurs, Cretaceous, Oligocene Mammals, Eocene Mammals-it was like a walk through evolution. Another turn and she was in the laboratory hall, gleaming stainless-steel doors leading to

various laboratories-mammalogy, herpetology, entomology. She reached the door marked MINERALOGY, inserted her key, pushed open the door, and felt inside the wall for the light switch. The fluorescent lights stuttered on.

She stopped. Through the shelves of specimens she could see Corvus was already in-asleep over the stereozoom, his attache case at his side. What was he doing here? But the answer came as soon as she had asked the question: he had come early to check on her work himself-on a Sunday morning, no less.

She took a tentative step inside, cleared her throat. He did not stir.

"Dr. Corvus?" She stepped forward more confidently. The curator had fallen asleep on the desk, head laid on his crooked arm. She tiptoed closer. He had been looking at a specimen under the stereozoom-a trilobite.

"Dr. Corvus?" She walked over to the table. Still no response. At this, Melodic felt a faint alarm. Could he have had a heart attack? Unlikely: he was way too young. "Dr. Corvus?" she repeated, not managing to get her voice above a whisper. She moved around to the other side of the table and leaned over to look into his face. She jerked back with an involuntary gasp, her hand over her mouth.

The curator's eyes were wide open, staring, and filmed over.

Corvus had had a heart attack. She stumbled back another step. She knew she should reach out and see if there was still a pulse in his wrist, do something, give mouth-to-mouth-but the idea of touching him was repellent. Those eyes . . . there was no question he was dead. She took a second step back, reached out, picked up the museum phone-then paused.

Something wasn't right. She stared at the dead curator, slumped over the microscope, head on his crooked arm as if he had laid it down in weariness and gone to sleep. She could feel the wrongness of the scene crawling up her spine. And then it came to her: Corvus was looking at a trilobite.

She picked up the fossil and examined it. An ordinary trilobite from the Cenozoic, of the kind you could buy for a few bucks at any rock shop. The museum had thousands of them. Corvus, who was sitting on the most spectacular paleontological discovery of the century, had chosen that very moment to examine a common trilobite?

No way.

A feeling of dread invaded her gut. She walked over to her specimen locker, spun out her combination on the lock, jerked it open.

The CDs and specimens that she had locked up there at
midnight
were gone.

She looked around, spied Corvus's attache case. She slipped it away from his dangling hand, laid it on the table, unlatched it, rifled the contents.

Nothing.

All record of the dinosaur was gone. All her specimens, her CDs, vanished. Like they had never existed. And then she remembered another small fact: the lights had been off when she entered the lab. If Corvus had fallen asleep over his work, who turned off the lights?

This was no heart attack.

It felt like a piece of dry ice had just formed in her stomach. Whoever had killed Corvus might come after her too. She had to handle this situation very, very carefully.

She picked up the museum phone and dialed security. A lazy voice answered.

"This is Dr. Crookshank calling from the Mineralogy lab. I've just arrived. Dr. Iain Corvus is here in the lab and he's dead."

After a moment, in answer to the inevitable question, she said, with great deliberation: "Heart attack, by the looks of it."

5

LIEUTENANT WILIER STOOD in the doorway of the Disputation Chamber and watched the sun rise over the buttes above the river. The sound of chanting drifted down from the church behind him, rising and falling in the desert air.

He dropped the butt of his second-to-last cigarette, stomped it out, hawked up a gobbet of phlegm, and shot it to one side. Ford hadn't returned and there'd been no sign of Broadbent. Hernandez was down at the cruiser, making one last call. Santa Fe already had a chopper standing by at the police heliport, flown up from Albuquerque and ready to go-and still the airspace was closed with no word on when it would reopen.

He saw Hernandez duck out of the cruiser, heard the door slam. A few minutes later the deputy came toiling up the trail. He caught Willer's eye, shook his head. "No go."

"Any word on Broadbent or the vehicle?"

"None. Seem to have vanished into thin air."

Wilier swore. "We're doing nothing here. Let's start searching the Forest Service roads off 84."

"Yeah."

Wilier took a last glance up at the church. What a waste of time. When Ford got back, he'd haul that so-called monk downtown by the short hairs and find out just what the hell he'd been doing out there in the high mesas. And when Broad-bent surfaced, well, he'd get a kick out of seeing how that millionaire vet liked sharing a basement cell with a crackhead and eating corn dogs for dinner.

Wilier headed down the trail, his nightstick and cuffs jangling, Hernandez following. They'd grab some breakfast burritos and a couple of gallons of coffee at

Bode's. And a fresh carton of Marlboros. He hated the feeling of being down to his last smoke.

He seized the door handle of the cruiser and was about to jerk it open when he became aware of a distant throbbing in the air. He looked up and saw a black dot materialize in the dawn sky.

"Hey," said Hernandez, squinting, "isn't that a chopper?"

"It sure as hell is."

"Not five minutes ago they told me it was still on the tarmac."

"Idiots."

Wilier slid out his last butt and lit it up-Freddie the pilot always carried a couple of packs.

"Now we can get this show on the road."

He watched the helicopter approach, his feeling of frustration evaporating. They'd crash the canyonlands party of those bastards. There was a lot of country out there, but Wilier felt pretty sure the action was up in the Maze, and that's where he'd direct the chopper first.

The black speck was beginning to resolve into something larger, and Wilier stared with growing puzzlement. This was no police chopper, at least none that he'd ever seen. It was black and a lot bigger, with two pods hanging off either side like pontoons. With a sickening lurch it suddenly occurred to Wilier what this was really about. The closing of the airspace, the black helicopter. He turned to Hernandez.

"You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"FBI."

"Exactly."

Wilier swore softly. It was just like the feds to say nothing, let local law enforcement stumble along like blind idiots and then arrive just in time for the bust and the press conference.

The chopper banked slightly as it approached, slowed, and hovered for a landing in the parking lot. It leaned back as it settled down, the backwash from its rotors lashing up a blast of stinging dust. With the rotors still whapping, the side slid open, and a man in desert fatigues, holding an M4 carbine and sporting a backpack, hopped out.

"What the hell is this?" Wilier said.

Nine more soldiers hopped down, several loaded with packs of electronic and communications gear. Last to jump was a tall man, thin, with black hair and a bony face, wearing a tracksuit. Eight of the men disappeared up the trail toward

the church, jogging single file, while the other two stayed with the man in the tracksuit.

Wilier sucked on the last of his butt, chucked it on the ground, exhaled, and waited. These weren't even feds-or at least any feds he knew.

The man in the tracksuit strode over, stopped in front of him. "May I ask you to identify yourself, Officer?" he said in the neutral voice of authority.

Wilier let a beat pass. "Lieutenant Wilier, Santa Fe Police. And this is Sergeant Hernandez." He didn't move.

"May I ask you to please step away from the cruiser?"

Again Wilier waited. Then he said, "If you've got a shield, mister, now's the time to show it."

The man's eyes nickered, barely, toward one of the soldiers. The soldier moved forward-a brawny kid in a crew cut, face painted, all puffed up with a sense of duty. Wilier had seen the type before in the Army and he didn't like it.

"Sir, please step away from the vehicle," the soldier said.

"Who the hell are you to tell me that?" He wasn't going to stand for this shit, at least not until he saw some gold. "I'm a detective lieutenant homicide in the Santa Fe Police Department and I'm here on official business, with a warrant, pursuing a fugitive. Who the hell gave you jurisdiction here?"

The man in the tracksuit spoke calmly. "I am Mr. Masago with the National Security Agency of the Government of the United States of America. This area has been declared a special operations zone, closed under a state of military emergency. These men are part of a combined Delta Force commando team here on a mission involving national security. Now, final warning: step away from the vehicle."

"Until I see-"

The next thing Wilier knew, he was on the ground, doubled up, desperately trying to suck some air into his lungs, while the soldier deftly relieved him of his service weapon. Finally, with a great gasp, he got some air in, drinking it greedily. He rolled over, managed to get up on his hands and knees, coughed and spat, trying to keep from puking, the muscles in his stomach jumping and cramping like he'd swallowed a jackrabbit. He rode it out, got to his feet, and straightened himself up.

Hernandez was still standing there, dumbfounded. They'd pulled his weapon too.

Wilier watched in disbelief as one of the soldiers went into his cruiser-his cruiser-with a screwdriver. He emerged a moment later with the radio in one hand, wires dangling. In the other he had the cruiser's keys.

"Surrender your portable radio, Officer," said the man in the tracksuit.

Wilier sucked in another lungful of air, unsnapped the keeper, handed over the radio.

"Surrender your nightstick, cuffs, pepper spray, and all other weapons and communication devices. As well as any other keys to the vehicle."

Wilier obeyed. He could see Hernandez being put through the same drill.

"Now we will walk up to the church. You and Officer Hernandez will go first."

Wilier and Hernandez walked up the trail toward the church. As they passed the Disputation Chamber, Wilier noticed the monastery's laptop lying in the dirt outside the door, smashed to pieces; lying near it was a broken satellite dish, trailing wires. Wilier got a glimpse of soldiers busy inside, setting up racks of electronics. One was on the roof erecting a much larger dish.

They went into the church. The singing had stopped and all was silent. The monks were huddled at one end in a group, guarded by two of the commandos. One of the soldiers gestured for Wilier and Hernandez to join them.

The man in the tracksuit stepped forward in front of the silent group of monks. "I am Mr. Masago from the National Security Agency of the Government of the United States of America. We are conducting a special operation in this area. For your own safety, you will be required to remain here, in this room, with no communication to the outside world, until it is over. Two soldiers will remain here to serve your needs. The operation will take between twelve and twenty-four hours. All the facilities you need are here: bathroom, water, a small kitchenette with food in the refrigerator. I apologize for the inconvenience."