would ever know? But how was he supposed to contact potential buyers? Surely there was some sort of broker who dealt in merchandise of questionable provenance. Such a person would demand a significant cut, but even if he cleared three-quarters of a million dollars, he could still take a great leap toward making his dreams come true.
He just needed to figure out how to contact a broker and start---
His office door opened inward and he nearly had a heart attack. Eldon scrambled to return the headdress to the crate, but in his earlier hurry had unknowingly knocked it to the floor.
'Relax and have a seat, Mr. Monahan.'
Eldon realized he needed to play it cool. Thus far he had done nothing wrong. For all anyone knew, he was readying the headdress for return at this very moment. He could easily justify the delay since so much red tape still needed to be cut.
Straightening his tie, Eldon righted his chair, calmly sat down, and laced his fingers on the desk in front of him beside the golden relic. He faced his visitor with a practiced smile.
'Going to have to get someone to come up and take care of this mess for you,' a uniformed Marine said, taking one of the seats on the opposite side of the desk without invitation. He raised a piece of Styrofoam between his pinched fingers and blew it into the air.
Eldon recognized the man as the head of the Consulate's security contingent, though he had never bothered to learn his name. The man wore his crisp dress blues, but had already removed his white cap, which now rested in his lap. He just sat there with a smug expression of secret knowledge on his hard face, and stared impassively through unreadable brown eyes. His dark hair had been shorn to the scalp, and had only begun to stubble. Eldon placed him somewhere in his mid- to late-thirties.
'It's customary to knock,' Eldon said. 'As Consul-general, I---'
'Should have sent that fancy golden mask to the proper authorities several days ago,' the man interrupted. 'You don't think we allow just anybody to walk in off the street wanting to drop off a backpack without thoroughly searching it first, do you? Since then, let's just say I've made it a priority to follow through on my commitment to your welfare.'
Eldon balked.
The Marine simply smirked and inclined his head toward the clock on the wall. Eldon had completely forgotten about the security camera, especially after repeated assurances that no one would be monitoring his personal space without cause or consent.
'I wanted to do a little research on the object before blindly consigning it to such a corrupt entity,' Eldon said. 'Until this very moment, I couldn't even be sure it was of Peruvian origin.'
The Marine made him nervous, but he still held the power here.
'I would imagine you encountered the same information that I did then.'
'And what information is that?'
The man smiled and leaned back in the chair.
'What exactly can I do for you, Corporal...?' Eldon asked.
'First Sergeant. First Sergeant Kelvin Tasker.'
'State your business and be on your way, First Sergeant Tasker.'
'I just wanted to drop by and share some of my thoughts. You see, I've been thinking about a couple of things over the past few days. Like...where exactly did this headdress come from, and more importantly, if one were to chance upon this location, what else might one find?' Eldon's stomach turned sour. 'I also just happened to notice that a gentleman by the name of Gearhardt registered travel plans for ten individuals with our Embassy. I'm thinking he might have grown a wild hair to see if he can do a little searching for himself.'
'What do you want from me?'
'Nothing.' Tasker rose and pinned his cap under his left arm. 'I just wanted to swing by and formally introduce myself.' He extended his right hand across the desk.
Eldon eased tentatively out of his chair and grasped the proffered hand. Tasker's palm was coarse, his grip uncomfortably firm.
'Nice to officially meet you, Mr. Monahan,' Tasker said. 'I trust you'll find that I make a splendid partner.'
VIII
This was Galen Russell's favorite time of the day. He still had three hours before his first lecture began, and half an hour alone in the lab before the earliest volunteers arrived. Not that he minded the human interaction, but there was simply something magical about this time alone with his feathered friends. He enjoyed the teaching aspect of his post as chair of the Avian Sciences Department at the University of California, Davis, and liked to think he made a difference in the lives of the next generation, which would have to take up arms in the battle for conservation of the few natural resources left unexploited if there were to be any hope for the hundreds of species teetering on the brink of extinction, but this was his true passion. Birds were the link to the past as well as to the future, their behavior patterns far more complex and intriguing than most even suspected. Their evolutionary adaptations were well ahead of the biological curve, and reflected changes in their habitat more quickly than any other higher order of animal life, thus making them the perfect research subjects for the kind of revolutionary theories postulated by pioneers like Charles Darwin and Ernst Mayr. Galen's professional aspirations were far less ambitious. He merely wanted to know everything about them.
He pulled off the rubber hand-puppet designed to mimic the head and neck of a female California condor and set it in the sink for one of the volunteers to clean and sanitize. It stank of chopped mice, but at least the condor chick had eaten reasonably well this morning. She'd been getting scrawny beneath that mass of white down, and for a while he had feared they were going to lose her. When the hiker who discovered her in the Los Padres National Forest, where she had presumably fallen from her nest high up on a cliff-side, first brought her in, Galen had been sure that death was inevitable, but now she was eating, at least enough to survive, and he felt cautiously optimistic about her prognosis. Unfortunately, the Center wasn't able to rehabilitate all of the birds that were dropped off. Of the more than forty raptors they were currently treating, everything from the smallest hawks to golden eagles to the nearly extinct California condor, perhaps only twenty-some would survive. The odds were often depressing, but at least at the end of the day he could hang his hat on the fact that he had done his part to ensure the proliferation of bloodlines, if not entire species.
In addition to his obligations to the university and the Center, Galen was Executive Officer of the American Ornithologists' Union and served as Chair of the Standing Committee on Conservation for the Raptor Research Foundation. He spread himself too thin and he knew it, but if he didn't do it, who would? It wasn't so long ago that the California condor perched atop the food chain and had a range that covered the entire American Southwest. And now? The encroachment of mankind had driven it to the precipice of eradication. Only one hundred and thirty individuals remained in the wild, and most of those were due to the success of captive breeding efforts spearheaded by the San Diego Zoo. How long would it be before the species was extinct, and would anyone care when it happened? Galen passed through the incubation room, which was suffused with a red glow from the heat lamps, and the kitchen unit that reeked of worms and raw meat. At the end of a short hallway, he entered his office, a small box no larger than the standard cubicle. He slipped out of his brown corduroy jacket as he walked through the doorway and hung it on the hook behind the door. The half-length mirror affixed to it showed him what he feared it would: a somewhat doughy man in his mid-forties, sandy-blonde hair receding from his forehead and thinning on top, glasses that grew thicker with each passing year, and a slender face with crow's feet framing his sky-blue eyes. After a wasted moment of self-pity, he turned away and slid behind his desk. There were a couple of invoices he needed to check and a memo to write to the membership of the RRF, and then he could formally begin his day.
