It was a crazy risk. As she stood there, trembling and indecisive, the flame dying at the end of the match, a small pebble came rattling out of the hole, bounced like a pinball down through the tangle of beams and rocks, and came to rest at her feet.
So that was it, then. She had two choices: she could either go back and face the kidnapper, or she could risk climbing up into a hole created by the cave-in.
The match went. She had six more. She picked two out of the box and lit them together, hoping to generate enough light to see deeper into the hole. They flared and she peered intently, but it still wasn't enough to see beyond the tangle of rocks and beams.
The matches went out.
No more time. She lit another match, stuck it between her teeth, grasped a rock in the pile, and began to climb. At the same time she heard a sound-a distant voice, echoing raucously through the tunnels of stone.
'Ready or not, bitch, here I come!'
17
CORVUS CROUCHED INSIDE the rib cage of the triceratops, blood pounding in his ears. The man was standing no more than ten feet away. He swallowed, tried to get some moisture in his mouth. He heard the brush of a hand on a bone surface, the faint scuff of a shoe on the cement floor, the ever so small crunch of fossil grit under the man's sole as he approached. How the bloody hell was the man moving around so well in the dark?
'I can see you,' came the soft voice, as if reading his mind, 'but you can't see me.'
Corvus's heart felt like a bass drum: the voice was right next to him. His throat was so dry he couldn't have spoken if he wanted to.
'You look silly, crouching there.'
Another footfall. He could actually smell the man's expensive aftershave.
'All I want is the locality data. Anything will do: GPS coordinates, name of a formation or canyon, that sort of thing. I want to know where the dinosaur is.'
Corvus swallowed, shifted. It didn't make sense hiding any longer; the man knew where he was. He was probably wearing some kind of night-vision device.
'I don't have that information,' Corvus croaked. 'I don't know where the bloody dinosaur is.' He sat up, clutching his briefcase.
'If that's the game you want to play, then I'm afraid I'll have to kill you.' The man's voice was so quiet, so gentle, that it left Corvus without the slightest doubt that the man meant what he said. He gripped the briefcase, his hands in a cold sweat.
'I don't have it. I really don't.' Corvus heard himself pleading.
'Then how did you acquire the specimen?'
'Through a third party.'
'Ah. And the name and place of residence of this third party?'
There was a silence. Corvus felt his terror mingling with something else: anger. Furious anger. His whole career, his life, hung on getting that dinosaur. He wasn't going to give up his discovery to some bastard holding him hostage at gunpoint-he'd rather die. The bloody bastard had night-vision goggles or something of the sort, and if he could get to one of the light banks it would eliminate the man's advantage. He could use the hard attache case as a club-
'The name and place of residence of this third party, please?' the man repeated, his voice as soft as ever. 'I'm coming out.' 'A wise decision.'
Corvus crawled toward the back of the skeleton and out the back. He slipped under the plastic and stood up. It was still pitch-dark and he had only a vague sense where the man was.
'The name of this third party?'
Corvus lunged at the voice in the darkness, swinging his case by the handle in an arc toward the voice, striking him somewhere; the man grunted and was thrown back in surprise. Corvus turned, groping blindly through the forest of skeletons toward where he remembered the back light switches were. He stumbled against a skeleton and fell, just as he heard a sharp pneumatic hiss followed by the sound of surgical steel striking fossil bone. The bastard was shooting at him.
He lunged sideways, collided with a skeleton, which creaked in protest, sending a few bones clattering to the ground. Another hiss of air, another metallic ricochet among the bones to his right. He groped forward, scrabbling desperately among bone forest, and then suddenly he was free of the crowd of skeletons and back in the shelves; he ran wildly down the aisle, careening once off the side, falling, and getting up. If only he could reach the lights and neutralize the man's advantage. He sprinted forward, heedless of what might lie in the way, and virtually collided with the bank of electrical switches. With another shout he clawed at the panel, the lights clicking on by the dozen, a humming and flick--flick as the aging fluorescent lights blinked on, one by one.
He spun around, at the same time grasping a petrified bone off one of the shelves, wielding it like a club, ready to fight.
The man stood there placidly, not ten feet away, legs apart, not even looking like he'd moved. He was dressed in a blue tracksuit, night-vision goggles raised up on his forehead. A shabby leather briefcase stood on the ground next to his leg. His hands were in firing position and the shiny tube of a strange-looking weapon was aimed straight at Corvus. He stared in astonishment at the ordinari-
ness of the man, the passionless bureaucratic face. He heard the snap-hiss! of compressed air, saw the flash of silver, felt the sting in his solar plexus, and looked down in astonishment; there he saw a stainless-steel syringe sticking out of his abdomen. He opened his mouth and reached down to pull it out but already a darkness unlike any other was rushing upon him like a tidal wave, burying him in its roaring undertow.
18
FORD SAT WITH his back against a rock, soaking in the warmth from a meager fire he had built from dead cactus husks. The walls of TyrannosaurCanyon rose blackly around him, giving way to a deep velvety sky dusted with stars.
Ford had just finished a dinner of lentils and rice. He took the can the lentils had come in, set it among the fire, and heated it until all trace of food had burned out of it-his method of dishwashing when water was too precious to waste. With a stick he fished the can out of the fire, let it cool off, and filled it with water from his canteen. Holding the can by its metal top, he nestled it upright among the burning husks. In a few minutes the water reached a boil. He removed the can, added a tablespoon of coffee grounds, stirred them in, and set the can back in the fire. In five minutes more his coffee was ready.
He sipped it, holding the can by the lid, savoring the bitter, smoky flavor. He smiled ruefully to himself, thinking of the crowded little cafe he and Julie used to go to around the corner from the Pantheon in Rome, where they drank perfect cups of espresso at a tiny table. What was the name of that place? The Tazza d'Oro.
He was a long way from there.
Coffee finished, he drained the last bit of moisture from the cup, rapped the grounds out into the fire, and set the can aside for making his morning coffee. He leaned back on the rock with a sigh, pulled his robe more tightly about himself, and raised his eyes to the stars. It was almost midnight and a gibbous moon was creeping over the canyon rim. He picked out some of the constellations he knew, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, the Pleiades. The glowing skein of the Milky Way stretched across the sky; following it with his eyes he located the constellation Cygnus, the Swan, frozen forever in its flight across the galactic center. He had
read there was a gigantic black hole in the center of the galaxy, called Cygnus X-1, one hundred million suns swallowed up and compressed into a mathematical point-and he wondered at the audacity of human beings to think they could understand anything at all about the true nature of God.
Ford sighed and stretched out in the sand, wondering if such musings were proper for a soon-to-be Benedictine monk. He sensed that the events of the past few days were propelling him toward some kind of spiritual crisis. The search for the T. Rex had awakened that same old hunger, that longing for the chase that he thought he had purged from his system. God knows, he had had enough adventure for one lifetime already. He spoke four languages, had lived in a dozen exotic countries, and had known many women before finding the great love of his life. He had suffered unbearably for it and still suffered. So why, then, this continued addiction to excitement and danger? Here he was, searching for a dinosaur that didn't belong to him, that would bring him no credit, money, or glory. Why? Was this crazy search the result of some fundamental defect in his character?
Unwillingly, Ford's mind traveled back to that fateful day in Siem Reap, Cambodia. His wife Julie and he had
