CRO-MAGNON (43 page)

“
I agree. Evgenii told me nothing of the true situation, which I am certain he knows.” Fitrat dropped the cigarillo. “We will leave out Mr. Delyanov until I talk to my superiors.”

“
Gulnaz, I still think you should plan to get out of here. We could take you overland with us.”

She drew up her squat body. “I will speak to Mr. Teague.”

Calder used his most sincere voice: “I don’t think that’s wise.”

“
If I suspect he is a danger to anyone, I will order him to leave on the next helicopter.”

“
Listen to me, Gulnaz. Teague is some kind of corporate hit man. And I don’t mean job-wise.”

“
Teague probably isn’t even his real name,” Blaine said.

She puffed. “No one would dare to harm an official of the government of Tajikistan.”

“
You don’t know this man. Caitlin says—”

“
He must realize that he would not get out of the country alive.” Fitrat dropped the cigarillo butt, her fur-lined boot stubbing it into the snow. “I will deal with Mr. Teague.”

#

The door to Zinchenko’s trailer opened again. Teague stepped down and stalked toward the group, his opened parka flapping about his blocky chest.

Uh-oh,
Blaine thought
,
taking in the man’s dead gray eyes.
Something else has happened.

Without breaking stride, Teague jerked his chin at Fitrat. “I need to speak to these two.”

She stiffened. “I am in charge—”

“
Company business.” Something in his hard-bitten visage brooked no interference, and Fitrat must have recognized it. After taking a moment to preserve her dignity, she turned away and walked toward Zinchenko’s trailer.

Teague halted close enough to Blaine and Calder to invade their personal space. On the left side of his belt, Blaine could see the edge of the knife sheath that Calder had mentioned after they had first met him. It looked too substantial for some pipe-scraping tool an executive might carry. She wondered how he had gotten it into the country. Then she realized he’d probably flown on Salomon’s private jet. She wondered what else he might have brought. She remembered the lump she had noticed under the man’s parka on the second morning at the lake.

“
Mr. Salomon radioed me,” Teague said in his clipped fashion.

“
He wants to talk to us?” Blaine said, hoping to get some idea of what was afoot.

The factotum’s dead gaze stayed on her as he shook his head. “The signal faded.”

“
As you know, that’s not unusual in these mountains,” she said, mainly to delay what she sensed would be a confrontation. When Teague continued to stare, she said, “Did he have more news about Dr.—”

“
He said the cell samples you gave him were degraded.”

Crunch time.

“
That’s because he’s rushing us.” She met his eyes, perceived nothing. “I need time to run more tests, find DNA that hasn’t—”

“
Salomon’s scientists believe you let the samples thaw.”

Blaine put on her most ingenuous look. “That’s absurd! Why would I—”

“
That’s what we want to know.” In a lightning move Teague’s hand grabbed her elbow, and Blaine felt her arm turn numb. Calder pressed forward, and Blaine saw Teague’s other hand slip beneath his parka.

Calder reached for Teague’s hand. “Let go of her, you can’t—” He stopped as the facilitator’s hand appeared holding a long-barreled semiautomatic pistol.

Blaine realized that Calder intended to close with Teague, and she turned her hip to block him. It was her fault they were in this predicament, and now she’d put her colleague—more than a colleague now, she belatedly realized—in danger.

Teague released her elbow and stepped back enough to keep them both under the arc of the complicated-looking gun. Even in her duress, Blaine noted that it had been specially fitted. A small pink lens had been affixed in front of the trigger guard, two more stubby green lenses rode atop the barrel, and a long magazine stuck out of the grip like a swollen tongue.

Some kind of custom weapon, she thought. Not a good sign in the hands of a man who had represented himself as an administrator.

Teague broke the brief silence, his tone matching his now venomous look. “I will do whatever is necessary to protect my employer’s interest.”

Blaine mustered her resolve. “Ian and I are scientists under contract. You can’t just—”

Teague waggled the gun between them, the blued snout a malevolent presence in the pristine setting. “You two will make one more dive, this afternoon. You will cut off the testicles of the two males and excise the female’s ovaries. You will bring them to me along with good samples of flesh, bone, and brain. All correctly labeled.”

Searching for time, Blaine said, “Bone will only yield mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear.”

“
Don’t patronize me,” Dr. Blaine. “You have your job. I have mine.”

“
But if the DNA has thawed in the past . . .”

“
You better hope it hasn’t. Salomon and Delyanov will send a military helicopter for the samples during morning calm tomorrow.” Teague jerked his head at the work trailer. “You two will stay until the samples are tested.”

“
But what if they do prove to be degraded, like the last ones?”

Teague stepped back and waggled the pistol. “Then you two will be ‘degraded’ also.”

All right, everybody,
Blaine thought.
Masks off.

Glancing at Calder, she recognized his stunned look and shook her head to keep him quiet. Better to have a woman carry the ball in potentially violent circumstances. It was clear now that Salomon and Delyanov had conspired.

And the rumors she had heard about an unknown enforcer were obviously true. She and Ian were prisoners—perhaps more. She almost felt relieved to have the situation in the open.

She tilted her chin and faced the gunman. “And if the samples prove viable?”

“
Then the helicopter will come back, and you two will go.”

Go where?
she wondered.
To the bottom of the lake
?

She met Teague’s unblinking gaze. “We will do our part. You keep your end of the agreement.”

With a curt nod, Teague turned away and stalked toward Zinchenko’s trailer.

Some agreement,
Blaine thought. All on one side.

She turned to Calder and tried for a chirpy tone: “That was fun, didn’t you think?”

His face retained some of his shock. “You were right. Salomon is ruthless and Teague’s a hit man.”

“
Now we really do have to get the heads out of the cave tonight,” she said, fearing that Calder would think it too risky in the face of the enforcer’s unequivocal warning that he would kill them both if he deemed it appropriate. She knew that Ian thought she was blinded by determination to expand her regeneration project to include the prehistoric people. He’d probably want to vacate while they could.

But Calder fooled her. “Assuming we can manage to salvage the heads without the tunnel collapsing or Teague catching us red-handed, we’ll have to start overland tonight.” He nodded toward the closed door of the Zinchenko’s trailer. “Because if we stay here, I think we’re finished.”

“
Welcome to the back room of Salomon Industries.” She met Calder’s brown eyes in the late-morning light and noticed, not for the first time, that they showed flecks of gold.

With an effort, she broke contact. This was no time to be having personal thoughts. They needed to stick to business if they were to complete the mission on their own terms—her terms, really—and survive.

“
We’ll need Ayni’s help to get through the mountains,” she said.

“
He won’t be back from patrol until late tomorrow afternoon, if then.”

“
Could we start south, meet him on the trail tomorrow?”

Calder shook his head. “He had to go south to get out of the valley. But then his route was west.”

“
Then we’d better go in that direction.”

“
The border is south. And we wouldn’t know what route to take to meet up with him.”

She gazed across the lake at the snow-covered mountain rearing out of the cobalt water. She shook her head. This was getting too complicated.

“
By ourselves, we’ll never get through,” she said.

“
I know one thing we could try.”

At this point, she was open to anything. “Like what?”

“
It would mean a one-day delay. More, if Ayni gets held up.”

Her spirits sank. “Salomon will be looking for us. And with a constricted route, we can’t afford to delay.”

“
Maybe we can’t afford not to,” Ian said. “Let me think about it.”

#

Later, lying in her sleeping bag on the work-trailer floor after a meager but tasty lunch of dried goat cheese, wheat-and-chickpea
non
crusted with something nutty,
and bitter black tea, Blaine began to visualize the new pictures they had seen that morning.

Previous panels had shown that they ran chronologically from the front of the cave toward the rear, beginning with the left wall proceeding around to the right, with some too-rough areas omitted. The order of each group of four paintings was also clear: left to right and top to bottom. Ian’s interpretation of the two hunting methods—namely, that the Neanderthals were out-competed and out-populated rather than being wiped out, began to make sense. She focused on the image of the first new painting, the Cro-Magnon woman spying on a ritual perhaps intended to capture the spirits of the prey. Obviously, as shown in the third picture, of the woman being chastised after an unsuccessful hunt, her zeal to penetrate the shaman’s methods had brought down the wrath of the tribe’s chief.

As Blaine’s consciousness waned, she wondered why the mother had not dissuaded her daughter from such a risky undertaking. Or was the young woman, now with a baby to provide for, just too independent? . . .

Chapter 18

“
Mungo has been pressing me,” Leya said.

“
He no longer desires you as a proper mate,” Alys said, nibbling at her baked raccoon. The last part of winter had arrived, the tribe’s frost pits were depleted, and they were down to less desirable fare. “He only wants to do the thing, bend you to his will.”

“
I know.” Despite the gravity of the subject, Leya smiled at her
mator’s
euphemism. Although somewhat of a language buff, Alys never voiced the term
tegu,
perhaps believing it unseemly. “That makes it even worse.”

Nola took her eating knife and cut a piece of scrawny fox haunch. Jarv was in the river bottoms with the others to see what they could scare up, and his mate had come over with her toddler Vonn and stepdaughter Yali.

“
What can you do?” she said.

Leya shrugged. “If my skills were recognized, I could be an acolyte to Sugn. Then I would not have to submit.”

Nola swallowed the morsel, cut another, and poised her eating-sticks. “You’re still playing with that idea? Sugn and Bor told you before you ran away that no woman can be shaman.”

“
That is only a custom.” Leya took a bite of delicious ptarmigan. She had brought it down the previous week with a bola while pulling dormant cattails for their starchy roots. But even if someone else had downed it she could have still chosen the bird. As a lactating
mator,
even of a half-Flathead child, she had a claim to the best food, and Sugn had ruled fowl more healthful than four-legged animals because they were more spirit-like.

“
A ‘custom’ that has always existed,” Alys said. “You need to think of more practical ways to blend in.”

“
What other way is there? Besides being some man’s possession.” Leya, having her own speaking standard, deigned to use Alys’s word
chattl
because it seemed to make the concept even uglier.

Nola said, “I think the men-only rule exists because the shaman is responsible for ensuring a successful hunt, and hunting is done mostly by men.”

“
That is only part of a shaman’s work.” Leya took a bite of drumstick and savored the tender meat, washing it down with wintergreen tea. “The least important part.”

“
The men don’t see it that way,” Alys said. “They will not go on a hunt until the shaman has given his sanction. And when they’re successful, the shaman is at the center of the celebration.”

“
And when it isn’t, he attributes the failure to some transgression the tribe has committed,” Leya said. “He’s just taking advantage of whatever happens.”

“
The men place great store in Sugn’s rituals,” Nola said.

Leya snorted.
“
Mis
place you mean. The most important duties of a shaman should be to see that people eat the right foods and receive effective care when sick.”