'Then you won't mind running the show today, too.'
'Things go a lot better when you're not here-cold cerveza, mariachis, bare-assed women.'
'Don't burn the place down.'
'You still looking for that gal whose daddy was killed in the Maze?'
'I'm not having much luck. The police can't find the body.'
'It ain't no surprise to me they can't find the body. That's a big damn country back up there.'
Tom nodded. 'If I could figure out what he'd written in that journal of his, it would probably tell me who he was.'
'It probably would.'
Tom had told Shane everything. They had that kind of relationship. And Shane, despite his garrulousness, was implicitly discreet.
'You got it on you?'
Tom pulled the notebook out of his pocket.
'Lemme see.' He took it, flipped through it. 'What's this? Code?'
'Yes.'
He shut it, examined the cover. 'That blood?'
Tom nodded.
'Jesus. The poor guy.' Shane handed him back the notebook. 'If the cops learn you held out on 'em, they'll weld the cell door shut.'
'I'll remember that.'
Tom walked around behind the clinic to check the horses in the stalls; he went down the line, patting each one, murmuring soothing words, checking them out. He finished up at his desk and sorted through the bills, noting that some were overdue. He hadn't paid them, not through lack of money but through sheer laziness; both he and Shane hated the paperwork end of the business. He dumped them back into the in-box without opening any. He really needed to hire a bookkeeper to handle all this paperwork, except that the extra expense would put them back into the red, after a year of hard work getting themselves to the breakeven point. The fact that he had a hundred million dollars in escrow didn't matter. He wasn't his father. He needed to turn a profit for himself.
He shoved the papers aside and pulled out the notebook, opening it and laying it on the table. The numbers beckoned-in there, he felt sure, was the secret to the man's identity. And of the treasure he found.
Shane poked his head in.
'How's that O Bar O gelding?' Tom asked.
'Doctored and in his stall.' Shane hesitated in the door.
'What is it?'
'You remember last year, when that monastery up the ChamaRiver had a sick ewe?'
Tom nodded.
'When we were up there, remember hearing about a monk up there who used to be a code breaker for the CIA, gave it all up to become a monk?'
'Yeah. I remember something like that.'
'Why don't you ask him to take a crack at the notebook?'
Tom stared at Shane. 'Now that's the best idea you've had all week.'
11
MELODY CROOKSHANK ADJUSTED the angle on the diamond wafering blade and
upped the rpm. It was a beautiful piece of precision machinery-you could hear it in the clear singing noise it made. She set the sample in the cutting bed, tightening it in place, then turned on the laminar water flow. A gurgling noise rose above the whine of the blade as the water bathed the specimen, bringing out flecks of color in it, yellow, red, deep purple. She made some final adjustments, set the automatic guide speed, and let it rip.
As the specimen encountered the diamond blade there was a note of pure music. In a moment the specimen had been cut in half, the treasure of its interior exposed to view. With the deft experience of years she washed and dried it, flipped it, embedding the other side in epoxy resin on a steel manipulator.
As she waited for the epoxy to harden she examined her sapphire bracelet. She'd told her friends that it was a cheap bit of costume jewelry and they believed her. Why wouldn't they? Who would have thought, she, Melodic Crookshank, Technical Assistant First Grade, making all of twenty-one thousand dollars a year, living in an airshaft apartment on upper
The sample had hardened. She placed it back in the cutting bed and sliced again on the other side. In a moment she had a slender wafer of stone, about half
a millimeter thick, perfectly cut with nary a crack or chip. She quickly dissolved the resin, freed the wafer, and cut it into a dozen smaller pieces, each one destined for a different kind of test. Taking one of the chips, she fixed it in epoxy on another manipulator and used the lap wheel and polisher to thin it further, until it was beautifully transparent and about twice the thickness of a human hair. She mounted it on a slide and placed it on the stage of the Meiji polarizing scope, switched it on, and put her eyes to the oculars.
With a rapid adjustment of the focusing knobs a rainbow of color leapt into her vision, a whole world of crystalline beauty. The sheer splendor of the polarizing scope always took her breath away. Even the dullest rock bared its inner soul. She set the magnification at 30x and began stepping through the polarization angle thirty degrees at a time, each change producing a new shower of color in the specimen. This first run was purely for aesthetics; it was like gazing into a stained-glass window more beautiful than the Rosette in Chartres Cathedral.
As she moved through 360 degrees of polarization, Crookshank felt her heart accelerating with every new angle. This was truly an incredible specimen. After a complete series she upped the magnification to 120x. The structure was so fine, so perfect-astonishing. She could now understand the secrecy. If there were more of this in situ-and there probably was-it would be of the utmost importance to keep it secret. This would be a stunning coup, even for a man as distinguished as Corvus.
She leaned back from the eyepieces, a new thought entering her head. This might be just the thing she needed to leverage a tenure-track position for herself, if she played her cards right.
12
CHRIST IN THE Desert Monastery lay fifteen miles up the Chama River, deep in the Chama wilderness and hard alongside the enormous cliff-walled bulk of Mesa de los Viejos, the Mesa of the Ancients, which marked the beginning of the high mesa country. Tom drove up the monastery road with excruciating slowness, hating to subject his precious Chevy to one of the most notorious roads in New Mexico. The road had so many potholes it looked bombed, and there were sections of washboard that threatened to shake loose every bolt in the vehicle and chip his teeth down to stubs. The monks, it was said, liked it that way.
After what seemed like a journey to the very ends of the earth, Tom spied the adobe church tower rising above the junipers and chamisa. Gradually the rest of the Benedictine monastery came into view-a cluster of brown adobe buildings scattered helter-skelter on a bench of land above the floodplain of the river, just below where Rio Gallina joined the Rio Chama. It was said to be one of the most remote Christian monasteries in the world.
Tom parked his truck in the dirt lot and walked up the trail to the monastery's shop. He felt awkward, wondering just how he would go about asking for the monk's help. He could hear the faint sound of singing drifting down from the church, mingling with the raucous cries of a flock of pinon jays.
The shop was empty, but the door had tinkled a bell when Tom had opened it, and a young monk came in from the back. 'Hello,' said Tom.
'Welcome.' The monk took a seat on a high wooden stool behind the shop's counter. Tom stood there indecisively, looking at the humble products of the monastery: honey, dried flowers, handprinted cards, wood carvings. 'I'm Tom Broadbent,' he said, offering his hand.
The monk took it. He was small and slight and wore thick glasses. 'Pleased to meet you.'
Tom cleared his throat. This was damned awkward. 'I'm a veterinarian, and last year I doctored a sick ewe up here.'
