seemingly reserving their energy for the journey ahead. They certainly weren't the graduate students with which she was accustomed to working. All four were in their late-twenties and appeared somehow hardened. In their hurry to catch the connecting flight from Lima to Chiclayo she had only been introduced in passing, but she believed she remembered their names. Nate Webber was the man on the end, shorter than the others, yet by no means small. He stood perhaps five-ten and had Hispanic dark eyes and skin, yet his shaggy hair was sun-lightened to a streaked auburn. Tad Morton sat beside him. He was taller and wirier, and reminded her of a farmboy with his sandy hair and freckles, but his brown eyes were sharp and always moving. Then there was Aaron Sorenson, a hulking, stereotypical Swede who could have passed for Dolph Lundgren from a distance, and Devin Rippeth, who immediately made her uncomfortable. His leathery skin was pock-scarred, his eyes a cold shade of blue. His head was shaved bald, but he had thick black eyebrows and a gruff goatee. What looked like the tail of a dragon curled around his neck from the tattoo beneath the collar of his T-shirt.
Knowing Leo, these men had been hired for more than their digging skills, but she wasn't about to complain. They needed to be prepared for anything. There were no hospitals or police in the unforgiving wilderness.
The final member of their party was conspicuously absent. She peered around one final time before slipping back out into the courtyard. He sat on the edge of the fountain, cold cup of coffee at his feet, his attention focused on his lap. She hadn't seen him when she originally entered, perhaps because he was sitting stone-still, the only movement his hands turning something over and over between them.
He looked up as she approached and gave her a weak smile, then returned his attention to his hands in his lap. As the only other academic here, she figured she should make an effort to get to know him. A cursory internet search had yielded a dozen articles and citations from the late-Eighties and early-Nineties. She'd been surprised to learn how similar their fields were, despite the subject matter. She had always pictured ornithologists as glorified hobbyists crouching in bushes with binoculars around their necks, but when it came right down to it, they were both scientists tracking the evolution of species over time.
'What's that?' she asked with a nod to the object in his hands. She sat down beside him on the lip of the tiled fountain.
He steadied it and held it up. It was a brown feather roughly the length of her palm with the faintest hint of green toward the end.
'I don't know. There are more than ten thousand species of birds in the world, just under a third of them in South America alone. Nearly every one of them is in one database or other, but this feather doesn't belong to any of them.' He chuckled softly to himself. 'That's the most exciting thing about it. Somewhere up there is a species that no one else has ever studied before, and I intend to be the first.'
IV
Merritt sat on the pontoon beneath the wing of his plane and dangled his bare feet into the lake. He fought the initial reflex to recoil his legs from the shock of the cold water, and finished the last of his guava juice, wishing it had been coffee. God, how he missed the stuff. Not a single day passed that he didn't question his decision to give it up, but at least he was sleeping better now, rather than lying awake for hours, a victim of his waking nightmares. It was a small sacrifice, however. Life was good again for the most part. Uncomplicated. Just how he liked it.
The military had granted him the opportunity to spread his wings. Unfortunately, it had also sharpened his talons and trained him to use them however and whenever it saw fit.
A bare-chested native rowed his dugout into the middle of the lagoon, a dark silhouette against the reflection of the rising sun on the waves. The diminutive man stood, gathered a fishing net from the heap at the back of the boat, and tossed it out onto the water. After a moment, the man sat back down and rowed farther away, the net's buoys bobbing in his wake. Merritt almost wished he could be like that man, but he did need just a little more excitement after all. For all intents and purposes, the flying provided just that. The speed. The heights. The battles against the volatile tropical elements and the rush of alighting on nothing more substantial than water. There was a part of him, the same part that had driven him to enlist in the Army and then pushed him into special ops, that longed for adventure and danger, but he still wasn't able to forgive that aspect of his persona. It had sent him careening through the gates of hell, and it had taken every last ounce of his strength to claw his way back out.
He closed his eyes and let the sun warm his face. It hadn't always been like that. He remembered all of the hours he had spent dusting crops with his father back home in Iowa, learning to fly in his old man's lap, rocketing so low over the fields that his props clipped the grain. Like his father before him, he was never happier than when he was in the sky, where nothing could touch him and he controlled his own destiny. The problem was that that life was too simple. He could see how it wore down a man in his father's eyes, like those of a dog tethered in a yard by the highway, watching all the cars speed past on the way to destinations it would never know. And it would have killed him just a little bit every day.
He heard footsteps on the pier, but paid them no mind. As far as he was concerned, his job was done. He'd unloaded every last bag and box from his cargo hold. They could sit on the end of the dock until the Second Coming for all he cared. It wasn't his responsibility to play bellboy, or pack mule for that matter. They could drag their weary asses down here and carry that stuff for themselves.
'Mr. Merritt,' a voice said from behind him.
Merritt shook his head and enjoyed the gentle roll of the waves a heartbeat longer. He really wasn't in the mood for this.
'Look,' he said, lifting his feet out of the lake. He rose, walked down the length of the pontoon, and hauled himself up onto the weathered planks to face the silver-haired man who had been sitting behind him on the flight, the one whose eyes had never left his reflection in the mirror. 'I unload the stuff as a courtesy. Beyond that, you're on your own.'
The man offered an amused smile and extended his right hand. Merritt simply looked at it for a second before matching the man's stare and shaking his hand.
'My name is Leonard Gearhardt.' The handshake lasted a beat too long, and Merritt had to slide his hand out of the older man's strong grip. 'I wanted to thank you for what you did for my son.'
Merritt should have suspected it. He was going to have to be much more careful. The lackadaisical life had dulled his instincts. Now that he knew, he could see the familial resemblance in the brows and eyes, the set of the broad jaw.
'I didn't do anything for your son, Mr. Gearhardt. There was nothing I
'You made sure that his remains reached the proper authorities, and flew across the country to hand-deliver his belongings to the American Consulate.' Gearhardt paused. 'You could easily have made what was inside that bag disappear and no one would have been the wiser.'
'And what kind of person would that make me?'
'A very wealthy one, Mr. Merritt. I can only assume you looked inside the rucksack. How easy would it have been to just slip out one little thing for yourself?'
Merritt felt his face flush with anger and his fingers automatically curled into fists. If there was one thing he'd learned in life, it was that either a man had honor or he didn't. It was a choice one had to make. There was no such thing as situational integrity. One bad choice invariably led to another, and the next thing one knew, he was sighting an innocent down the barrel of an assault rifle. Damn the consequences. He was never going down that road again.
'Are you suggesting that I stole something from a dead man? I'm not the criminal here. I wasn't the one looting the ruins, the very heritage of these people. I may be a lot of things, but I am
Gearhardt flashed a disarming smile that might have had the desired effect under other circumstances, but Merritt already had his quills up. Maybe his character and loyalty were often suspect, but never his integrity. Never.
'That isn't what I meant to imply at all, Mr. Merritt. I was simply pointing out that had any other man on the planet found that bag, he would have taken the headdress, if not all of the contents, for himself. You're an
