that even here Melodic had performed exactly as required, recording her name and times but recording false entries under 'purpose,' listing miscellaneous work for other curators. Excellent.
In his bold, slanting hand, he added log entries under his own name. Under 'Specimen' he put High Mesas/Chama River Wilderness, N.M. T. Rex. He paused, then added under 'Comments,' Third examination of remarkable T. Rex. vertebral fragment. Extraordinary! This will make history. He signed his name, adding the date and time. He flipped back and finding some blank lines at the bottom of previous pages, he added two similar entries at appropriate dates and times. He did the same to the other high-tech equipment logbooks.
As he was about to leave the SEM room he had the sudden urge to look at the specimen himself. He opened his briefcase, removed the box holding the specimen stages, and took one of the etched wafers out. He turned it slowly, letting the light catch the surface that had been mirrored with twenty-four-karat gold. He switched the machine on, waited for it to warm up, and then slotted one of the specimen stages into the vacuum chamber at the base of the scope. A few minutes later he was gazing at an electron micrograph of the dinosaur's cancel-lous bone tissue, cells, and nuclei clearly visible. It took his breath away. Once again he had to admire Melodie's skill as a technician. The images were crisp, virtually perfect. Corvus upped the magnification to 2000x and a single cell leapt into view, filling the screen. He could see in it one of those black particles, the
ones she'd called the Venus particle. What the devil was it? A rather silly-looking thing when you got down to it, a sphere with an awkward tubular arm sticking out with a crosspiece at the end. What surprised him was how very fresh the particle looked, with none of the pitting, cracking, or damage that you might expect to see. It had weathered well those last sixty-five million years.
Corvus shook his head. He was a vertebrate paleontologist, not a microbiolo-gist. The particle was interesting, but it was only a sidebar to the main attraction: the dinosaur itself. A dinosaur that had actually died from the Chicxulub asteroid strike. The thought of it sent tingles up his spine. Once again he tried to temper his enthusiasm. He had a long way to go before the fossil was safely ensconced in the museum. Above all, he needed that bloody notebook- otherwise he might spend a lifetime wandering about those mesas and canyons. With a chill in his heart he removed the specimen stage and powered down the machine. He carefully locked the CDs and specimens in his briefcase and made one more round of the lab, checking that nothing, not the slightest trace, remained. Satisfied, he slipped his suitcoat on and left the laboratory, turning off the lights and locking the door on his way out.
The dim basement corridor stretched ahead of him, lit with a string of forty-watt bulbs and lined with sweating water pipes. Horrible place to work-he wondered how Melodic could stand it. Even the assistant curators had windows in their fifth-floor offices.
At the first dogleg in the hall, Corvus paused. He felt a tickling sensation on the back of his neck, as if someone were watching him. He turned, but the corridor stretching dimly behind him was empty. Bloody hell, he thought, he was getting as jumpy as Melodic.
He strode down the hallway, past the other laboratories, all locked up tight, turned the corner, then hesitated. He could have sworn he'd heard behind him the soft scrape of a shoe on cement. He waited for another footfall, for someone to round the corner, but nothing happened. He swore to himself; it was probably a guard making the rounds.
Clutching his briefcase, he strode on, approaching the double set of doors leading to the vast dinosaur bone storage room. He paused at the doors, thinking he had heard another sound behind him.
'Is that you, Melodic?' His voice sounded loud and unnatural in the echoing hall.
No answer.
He felt a wave of annoyance. It wouldn't be the first time that one of the graduate students or a visiting curator had been caught sneaking around, trying
to get their hands on someone's locality data. It might even be his data they were after-someone who had heard about the T. Rex. Or perhaps Melodic had talked. He was suddenly glad he had had the foresight to take charge of the specimens and data himself.
He waited, listening.
'Listen, I don't know who you are, but I'm not going to tolerate being followed,' he said sharply. He took a step forward, meaning to walk back and around the corner to confront his pursuer, but his nerve faltered. He realized he
was afraid.
This was preposterous. He looked around, saw the gleaming metal doors of the dinosaur bone vault. He stepped over to them and as quietly as possible swiped his key card in the magnetic reader. The security light blinked from red to green and the door softly unlatched. He pushed it open, stepped inside, and closed it behind him, hearing the massive electronic bolts reengage.
There was a small window in the door, with wire-mesh glass, through which he could see into the corridor beyond. Now he would be able to identify who was following him. He would lodge a strong complaint against whoever it was; this sort of intrigue was intolerable.
A minute passed and then a sudden shadow fell across the pane. A face appeared in profile, then turned with a snap and looked in the window.
Jolted, Corvus hastily stepped back into the darkness of the storage room, but the man, he knew, had seen him. He waited, wrapped in a cloak of absolute darkness, looking at the man's face. It was lit from behind and partially in shadow; but he could still see the general outline of the man's features, the skin stretched tightly over prominent cheekbones, a thatch of jet-black hair, a small, perfectly formed nose, and a pair of lips that looked like two thin coils of clay. He could not see the eyes: just two pools of shadow under the man's brow. It was not a face he recognized. This was no museum employee, no graduate student. If he was a visiting paleontologist he must be obscure indeed for Corvus not to know him-the field was small.
Corvus hardly breathed. There was something about the utter calmness in the man's expression that frightened him-that, and those gray, dead lips. The man lingered at the window, unmoving. Then there was a soft brushing noise, a scraping, a faint click. The handle on the inside of the door turned slowly a quarter turn, then slowly returned to its initial position.
Corvus couldn't believe it: the bastard was trying to get in. Fat bloody chance. With millions of dollars of specimens inside only a half-dozen people had access to Dinosaur Storage-and this man certainly wasn't one of them. Corvus knew
for a fact that the door was two layers of quarter-inch stainless steel with a titanium honeycomb core, sporting a lock that was technically unpickable.
Another soft brushing noise, a click, another click. The security light on the inside of the door continued to glow red-as Corvus knew it would. He almost felt like laughing out loud, taunting and insulting the blighter, except that the sheer persistence of the man amazed and alarmed him. What the devil did he want?
Corvus suddenly thought of the museum phone in the back of the storage room, where the study tables were. He'd call security to arrest the bugger. He turned but it was so very dark, and the room was so vast and crowded with shelves and freestanding dinosaurs, that he realized he couldn't possible get back there without turning on lights. But if he turned on the lights the man would run. He slipped his cell phone out of his suitcoat-but of course there was no coverage this far underground. The man was still working the knob, making various clicking and scraping noises as he tried to get in. It was unbelievable.
More soft sounds, a sharper click-and then Corvus stared in disbelief.
The security light on the door had just gone green.
11
AFTER PASSING THE kidnapper's car, which had pulled off the highway and shut off its lights, Tom had driven until he was out of sight, and then he made a U-turn. The road behind him remained dark. The man had evidently turned off on one of the many forest roads going up into the CanjilonMountains.
Tom accelerated southward, and in a few minutes he found the place where the man had pulled off, leaving a clear set of tracks in the sand. Just beyond that was a forest road turnoff, and he saw that the same tracks went up it.
Tom followed in the Dodge, driving slowly, keeping his headlights off. The road climbed into the Canjilon foothills above the Mesa de los Viejos, and as he gained altitude the pinon and juniper scrub gradually gave way to a dark pon-derosa forest. He resisted the impulse to turn on the lights and charge ahead; surprise was his only advantage. He knew in his gut that Sally was still alive. She couldn't be dead. He would have felt it.
