Reaching the entrance to his tent, he drew the canvas flap to one side and stepped into the musty darkness. Having hooked up the large generator, a single bare light bulb now hung suspended over the field desk. He fumbled for the switch and managed to turn it on, flooding the confined space with light. Turning to the stacked cases beside the desk, he opened the larger one then unlocked the secret compartment, removing his laptop. Placing the computer on the desk, he plugged it in and pressed the power button waiting for it to boot up. After thirty seconds, a message flashed on the screen: NO SIGNAL. TRY AGAIN?
Cursing, he shut off the computer and moved to his cot. With no other option, he decided to rest his eyes and try again in a little while. Reaching up, he shut off the bare bulb and closed his eyes. Before he realized it, he was asleep.
SEVENTEEN
I t was still dark when Ella awoke. Completely out of sync with her circadian rhythm, she could feel her body rebel at the thought of running in the cool pre-dawn. Yet she knew from years of habit that once she got going, she would start to feel better. Rising, she pulled on a sports bra and her sweats then slipped into her cross-trainers. On the far side of the tent, the two German girls continued to sleep, their light, steady breathing almost imperceptible. Quietly exiting the tent, Ella moved to the open space where the vehicles were parked and began to stretch. A dozen exercises designed to loosen her muscles, limber her joints and prevent serious damage, they had been part of her routine since high school.
The sky in the east was just beginning to lighten as she finished stretching and started to jog. The base camp had been pitched roughly an eighth of a mile below the entrance to the cave, all uphill. Glancing in the other direction, down the mountain toward the main road a couple of miles below, she was momentarily tempted to take the downhill course since it offered the least initial resistance. However, she knew from bitter experience that running down a steep incline would be punishing to her knees, ankles and lower back. Then of course, she would still have to run back up. And so instead, she turned and began her run by heading up the somewhat lesser incline toward the mouth of the cave.
Aware of the dangers of running over uneven terrain, she stuck to the path barely discernible in the early morning half-light. Almost immediately she felt the stiffness in her calves and quads and cursed herself for allowing so many days to pass since her last workout. Moving at a steady pace, she began to focus, controlling her breathing. In through her nostrils, out through her mouth, the rhythmic repetition helped her to gain control as she climbed. At the same time, she could feel a familiar ache begin in her lungs. What was the old bromide? No pain, no gain. Continuing to run, by the time she reached the entrance to the cave, she had begun to push beyond her initial discomfort.
Circling the large level staging area in front of the opening, she started back down while simultaneously beginning to cut back and forth across the path. Straight up and slalom down. She could still hear her high school cross-country coach repeating the words over and over like a mantra. The only way to lessen the impact of running downhill was to traverse back and forth as you descended. And while it lengthened the time it took, the point was, in training, you needed to save your knees.
By the time she had completed her first full lap and started back up, she could feel the endorphins begin to kick in freeing her mind to refocus on something other than the stiffness and pain. She thought of the cave and the Neanderthals who once had perhaps sought shelter there. She wondered how a species could survive more than 400,000 years and then, in a blink of time, just disappear. Perhaps this cave had been their final refuge before extinction. And what of the extraordinary paintings she had seen during yesterday’s descent into the darkness? Were these primitive drawings simply a last desperate record of a world they feared would soon be lost? Or an existential declaration intended to deny the transitory nature of life itself? Confronted by such thoughts, she began to feel a certain kinship to the artist who had worked so painstakingly more than 30,000 years ago attempting to capture the life she had known. Indeed, would not the act of photographing these paintings make Ella herself a kind of accessory after the fact? Preserving primal images for posterity in ways their creator could not possibly have imagined. The thought of it excited her and made her anxious to begin her work.
Without warning, Michael Corbett abruptly found his way into her thoughts. What was it about him? Perhaps the disarming way he looked at her? Or the unexpected tension she experienced whenever they spoke? From their first meeting in Asurias’ office, she had felt these unsettling sensations. Dismissing them almost immediately as just some momentary schoolgirl crush, a kind of lingering infatuation that had begun after first seeing him lecture back when she was an undergrad, she had expected it to pass. But when the feelings didn’t go away, she found herself wondering if perhaps there might be something more.
Whatever it was, she felt certain these sensations were not hers alone. The way she caught him looking at her in unguarded moments. The casual flirting. His slightly off-color joke the night before. Something was going on. And yet for some reason he seemed reluctant
