Dr. Graham Bradley waited for the rooster tail of dust that had followed them for the last twenty miles to pass over the forest-green Cherokee before he finally opened the door and stepped down onto the sun-baked earth. His chief of security, Roland Pike, remained rigid behind the wheel, staring fixedly through the dirty windshield. The setting sun bled the sandstone escarpments crimson and cast long shadows from the sparse pockets of sage and creosote that spotted the sandy valley. A faint breeze ruffled Bradley's ebon hair and returned the dust, forcing him to shield his azure eyes. His custom-tailored Caraceni slacks and calfskin shoes were already gray with accumulation. At least he'd had enough foresight to shed his jacket in the car, just not enough to have packed a change of clothes in his hurry to reach the site. When the call came from Dr. Brendan Reaves eight hours ago, Bradley had been in the middle of a board meeting. The anthropologist had refused to divulge the nature of his discovery over the phone and had insisted that Bradley needed to see what he had found in person. Considering the scope of Reaves's research, Bradley couldn't imagine why he would be summoned in such a fashion, which only served to heighten his curiosity. The corporate jet had been fueled and waiting at Sea-Tac when he arrived. Four hours in the air and three more wending through the New Mexico desert in the rental Jeep, and here he was, parched and irritated, and tingling with anticipation.
'This had better be good,' he said, and struck off toward the cluster of khaki tents at the edge of the Pueblo Bonito ruins.
The rubble formed a D-shape, straight in front and rounded where it abutted the sheer cliff. Walls composed of stacked layers of flat rocks climbed three stories up the sandstone face to where petroglyphs had been carved by long-dead hands nearly a thousand years prior. Where once more than six hundred rooms and thirty-nine ceremonial kivas had surrounded a broad central courtyard, now only the framework remained. Some walls still stood thirty feet high, while others had crumbled to the ground. A large portion was buried under tons of sandstone where 'Threatening Rock' had broken away from the embankment.
For nearly two hundred years, this had been the capital of the thriving Anasazi culture and could have housed as many as five thousand people. Until, abruptly, they abandoned the entire canyon and embarked upon a northwestward migration that would prove to be the end of this once flourishing society.
And no one knew why.
A ring of halogen lights blossomed to life just beyond the tents, turning half a dozen men and women to silhouettes. One of them raised an arm to hail him and broke away from the group. Dr. Brendan Reaves, Regent's Professor of Cultural and Evolutionary Anthropology at Washington State University, strode directly toward him. He wore a dusty ball cap over his unkempt, sun-bleached hair. The bill hid his face in shadows. He extended a dirty hand, then thought better of it and swiped it on his filthy shorts. Instead, he tipped up his chin and offered a beaming smile, which made his sharp hazel eyes positively sparkle. He barely looked out of his teens.
'Thank you for getting down here so quickly,' Reaves said. 'I honestly didn't think you'd be willing to make the trip in person.'
Bradley gave his best boardroom smile to hide his annoyance. GeNext Biosystems was his baby and he was intimately involved on every level from research and development through marketing and distribution. He wasn't the kind of COO who pandered to shareholders or spent his days swilling martinis on tropical shores. His vision was of a forward-thinking, revolutionary company that remained on the cutting edge of biotechnology through a non- traditional approach to research all over the globe, which meant that even he needed to roll up his sleeves from time to time.
'So, Dr. Reaves. Right to business. What could possibly be important enough to drag me across the country on a moment's notice?'
'You wouldn't believe me if I told you.' Reaves turned and guided Bradley toward an old pickup painted tan by the desert. 'Like I said, you have to see it with your own eyes.'
Pike eased out of the Cherokee and stood at attention, but Bradley dismissed him with a subtle wave. He climbed up into the passenger seat of the professor's truck and kicked aside a pile of garbage to make room for his feet. The truck reeked of body odor and dust, and shook when Reaves started the engine.
'Where are we going?' Bradley asked.
He watched the ill-defined dirt road in the bouncing headlights.
'Not far. Just across the wash to Casa Rinconada. It's the largest, and only freestanding kiva in the Pueblo Bonito complex.'
'You found more remains?'
'You could say that.'
Reaves glanced over and gave a cryptic smile.
Bradley was in no mood for games. He was tired and famished, and had reached the end of his patience. Reaves must have recognized as much from his expression and started talking to fill the tense silence.
'Okay. Let me set the stage. In case you don't remember, I'm an evolutionary anthropologist. I study the changes---both cultural and physiological---in a society over time. My primary focus is the tribes of the American Southwest, specifically the Anasazi, who inhabited this amazing primitive mecca here in Chaco Canyon from about 800 to 1150 C.E.. We're talking about more than four hundred separate villages clustered around a dozen or so major pueblos like Bonito back there, all within a twenty-five thousand square-mile territory, the majority between these very canyon walls. They mastered agriculture, even in this hostile terrain, and set up a system of commerce that was beyond advanced for the time. And then, one day, they just up and abandon this community that took hundreds of years to build, by hand, stone by stone.'
The tires grumbled over a bridge that shuddered under the truck's weight. The creek bed below them didn't appear as though it had ever held water. Ahead, a low mesa crowned by a tall stone ring resolved from the cliffs behind it.
'Next thing we know,' Reaves said, 'the Anasazi reappear in the Four Corners area, only their entire architectural style has changed. Instead of building at the bottom of valleys like this one, they're erecting fortresses hundreds of feet up on the cliffs. We're talking about the kinds of places that someone can only enter if a ladder is lowered down from the village or if they can scale the sandstone like Spider-Man. Places like Mesa Verde in Colorado and the White House in Arizona. We speculated that the mass exodus was caused by a prolonged period of drought in the middle of the twelfth century, which killed all of their crops and drove the wild game from the area, but that didn't explain the necessity for the fortified villages carved into niches that only birds could reach. It was almost as though they feared something, as though they were preparing to defend themselves against some kind of invading force.'
'I know all of this, Dr. Reaves. I'm the one underwriting your research. Tell me how all of this pertains to the project I'm funding.'
The plateau rose above them to their right as the road wound around it. From their vantage point, the circular walls of the kiva appeared remarkably well preserved.
'Right. We know that the Anasazi had an absurdly high incidence of anemia. Nearly forty percent of the remains exhumed here in Chaco exhibit
'What GeNext is paying you for, Dr. Reaves, is to determine if the Anasazi had a genetic predilection toward anemia or if it was truly dietary. We need detailed physical assays of the structural and physiological damage in order to understand how to counteract it. And considering the prevalence of anemia diminished significantly within this same population over the next two hundred years as it migrated away from this canyon and into Colorado, we need to identify the mechanism by which it decreased, be it genetic or environmental. Nearly three percent of the
