WEED MADDOX LAY on his belly behind a boulder, looking through the 4x scope
of his AR-15, watching Broadbent bend over and kiss his wife. His nose still ached from the kick she'd given him, his cheek was inflamed by her vicious scratch, his legs felt like rubber, and he was getting thirstier by the minute. The sons of bitches had been hiking at an almost superhuman pace, never stopping to rest. He wondered how they managed it. If it hadn't been for the rising of the moon and his flashlight he would surely have lost them. But this was good tracking country, and he had the advantage of knowing where they were headed-to the river. Where else would they go? Every source of water they'd passed had been dry as a bone.
He shifted, his foot having gone to sleep, and watched them set off down the canyon. From where he was he could probably drop Broadbent, but the shot was dicey and the bitch might escape. Now that day had come, he'd be able to cut them off with a quick burst of speed and an oblique approach. He had plenty of country to set up an ambush.
The key here was not to betray his presence. If they believed he was still following, they would be a lot harder to surprise.
With the scope of his rifle he scanned the landscape ahead, being careful to keep the lens out of direct sunlight; nothing would give him away quicker than a flash of light off ground glass. He knew the high mesa country well, both from his own exploration and from having spent hours pouring over the U.S.G.S. maps that Corvus had supplied him. He wished to hell he had one of those maps now. To the southwest he recognized the great ridge known as Navajo Rim, rising eight hundred feet above the surrounding desert. Between here and there, he recalled, lay a broken country called the Echo Badlands, riddled with deep
canyons and strange rock formations, cut by the great crack in the earth known as TyrannosaurCanyon. Perhaps fifteen miles ahead, Weed could just barely see, like a line of haze on the horizon, the termination of the Mesa of the Ancients. Cut into its flanks were a number of canyons, of which JoaquinCanyon was the biggest. That led to the Maze, where he had killed the dinosaur prospector, and from there it was a straight shot to the river.
That was the way they were headed.
It seemed like a century ago when he had capped that prospector-it was hard to believe it had only been, what, eight days? A lot had gotten screwed up since
then.
He had the journal and was close to unscrewing up the rest of it. They'd be heading for the one trail across Navajo Rim, which meant they'd be hiking southwest through the badlands, crossing near the head of TyrannosaurCanyon. That formed a kind of natural choke point where several tributary canyons came together, and they'd have to pass through it.
He could make a loop southward, skirt the base of Navajo Rim, and come back up north to ambush them at the head of that valley. He would have to move fast, but in less than an hour it would be all over.
He crept down from his vantage point, making sure he wasn't seen, and set off at a fast pace southward through the badlands toward the sandstone wall of Navajo Rim.
This time tomorrow he'd be boarding that early flight to New York.
4
AS MELODIE COOKSHANK walked east on
She turned into the service drive that led down to the employee entrance, and checked her watch. Quarter to eight. She had pulled plenty of all-nighters writing her dissertation, and she was used to it, but this time it seemed different. Her mind was unusually crisp and clear-more than lucid. She rang the buzzer at the night entrance and slotted her museum pass through the card-reader.
She walked through the central rotunda and passed through a succession of grand exhibition halls. It always thrilled her to walk through the empty museum in the early morning, before anyone had arrived, the cases dark and silent, the only sound the echoing of her heels on the marble floors.
She took her usual shortcut through the Education Department, swiped her card to call the elevator, waited while it rumbled its way to her, and used the key a second time to direct it to the basement.
The doors slid open and she stepped into a basement corridor. It was cool and silent in the bowels of the museum, as unchanging as a cave, and it always gave her the creeps. The air was dead and always seemed to carry a faint odor of old meat.
She quickened her step toward the Mineralogy lab, passing door after door of fossil storage: Triassic Dinosaurs, Jurassic Dinosaurs, Cretaceous, Oligocene Mammals, Eocene Mammals-it was like a walk through evolution. Another turn and she was in the laboratory hall, gleaming stainless-steel doors leading to
various laboratories-mammalogy, herpetology, entomology. She reached the door marked MINERALOGY, inserted her key, pushed open the door, and felt inside the wall for the light switch. The fluorescent lights stuttered on.
She stopped. Through the shelves of specimens she could see Corvus was already in-asleep over the stereozoom, his attache case at his side. What was he doing here? But the answer came as soon as she had asked the question: he had come early to check on her work himself-on a Sunday morning, no less.
She took a tentative step inside, cleared her throat. He did not stir.
'Dr. Corvus?' She stepped forward more confidently. The curator had fallen asleep on the desk, head laid on his crooked arm. She tiptoed closer. He had been looking at a specimen under the stereozoom-a trilobite.
'Dr. Corvus?' She walked over to the table. Still no response. At this, Melodic felt a faint alarm. Could he have had a heart attack? Unlikely: he was way too young. 'Dr. Corvus?' she repeated, not managing to get her voice above a whisper. She moved around to the other side of the table and leaned over to look into his face. She jerked back with an involuntary gasp, her hand over her mouth.
The curator's eyes were wide open, staring, and filmed over.
Corvus had had a heart attack. She stumbled back another step. She knew she should reach out and see if there was still a pulse in his wrist, do something, give mouth-to-mouth-but the idea of touching him was repellent. Those eyes . . . there was no question he was dead. She took a second step back, reached out, picked up the museum phone-then paused.
Something wasn't right. She stared at the dead curator, slumped over the microscope, head on his crooked arm as if he had laid it down in weariness and gone to sleep. She could feel the wrongness of the scene crawling up her spine. And then it came to her: Corvus was looking at a trilobite.
She picked up the fossil and examined it. An ordinary trilobite from the Cenozoic, of the kind you could buy for a few bucks at any rock shop. The museum had thousands of them. Corvus, who was sitting on the most spectacular paleontological discovery of the century, had chosen that very moment to examine a common trilobite?
No way.
A feeling of dread invaded her gut. She walked over to her specimen locker, spun out her combination on the lock, jerked it open.
The CDs and specimens that she had locked up there at midnight were gone.
She looked around, spied Corvus's attache case. She slipped it away from his dangling hand, laid it on the table, unlatched it, rifled the contents.
Nothing.
All record of the dinosaur was gone. All her specimens, her CDs, vanished. Like they had never existed. And then she remembered another small fact: the lights had been off when she entered the lab. If Corvus had fallen asleep over his work, who turned off the lights?
This was no heart attack.
It felt like a piece of dry ice had just formed in her stomach. Whoever had killed Corvus might come after her too. She had to handle this situation very, very carefully.
She picked up the museum phone and dialed security. A lazy voice answered.
'This is Dr. Crookshank calling from the Mineralogy lab. I've just arrived. Dr. Iain Corvus is here in the lab and he's dead.'
