Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (5 page)

MacClary was speaking as if she were alone, as if she weren’t on a slowly rocking dive boat under a blazing sun in the middle of nowhere.

“Can I move into the shade?” Merrit asked. He made himself sound exhausted, unthreatening.

MacClary gave no indication that she’d even heard him, still lost in contemplation of the artifact, so he acted. “Right. I’m sitting in the shade.” He dropped to his knees and awkwardly shifted his body until he was sitting against Renault’s body. “Okay.” He began working his hands behind his back.

Taking no apparent notice of his movement, MacClary gently replaced the artifact in the cooler, then stood to face him, answering the question she’d just asked herself. “There’s only one explanation, Merrit. You must know it as well as we, or you couldn’t be finding our sites before we do.”

Merrit kept his silence.

“You won’t tell me, will you?” MacClary fingered her pendant cross as if drawing strength from it; she seemed to make a decision. “May the gods forgive you your desecration.” She spoke with a strange mixture of pity and contempt. “Because I won’t.” She raised her hand, signaling the white catamaran to come alongside the boat.

Merrit heard the catamaran’s engine growl to life, and when MacClary’s dive boat bumped into his, he was rocked forward, away from Renault’s body. But that no longer mattered.

One of Florian’s divers jumped from the catamaran onto the deck of Merrit’s Azimut. The diver was tall and black, in a loose white linen shirt and trousers. MacClary spoke to him in French, instructing him to take the recovered artifact onto her dive boat.

The diver hefted the water-filled cooler and its contents as if they weighed nothing. He asked MacClary what they should do about
le captif.

“Rien,”
she answered. She glanced back at Krause. Merrit understood. He was not her problem anymore.

MacClary’s diver nodded, turned, and stepped up on the Azimut’s side bench, heavy cooler in both hands, timing the swell of the waves for the perfect moment to leap from boat to boat.

Merrit timed the waves as well.

Just as the diver tensed to make his move, Merrit sprang from the deck, trailing nylon rope from his wrists, Renault’s yellow-striped knife in hand. With the same sure motions he practiced every day, with the same sense of calm he felt while diving, he swept out one leg, throwing the man off balance, the attack enhanced by the sloshing water in the cooler.

“Florian!”
The cry came from MacClary’s dive boat—her second diver.

Merrit’s momentum didn’t falter as the white-clad man fell back onto the deck and Merrit slashed once, deeply, across his throat. The man’s groping hands couldn’t stem the fountain of blood that spurted with each heartbeat of his dying body.

Before Krause could even make it halfway through the forward cabin of the Azimut, Merrit had wheeled to face a startled MacClary and smoothly grabbed her and twisted so he stood with his back to the bulkhead, one arm around her chest, Renault’s knife at her throat.

MacClary instantly resisted, attempting to drive her heel into his instep, but Merrit countered swiftly, slamming the knife haft into her temple.

“Try that again, you’re dead. Understand?”

Her body shuddered with fear or shock. Merrit didn’t care which. He shouted the question again, violently shaking her as he did. “Understand?”

“Yes!”

“Then tell them!”

Krause was in the doorway to the cabin, transfixed by the sight of the knife at MacClary’s throat. The second of MacClary’s divers stood on the catamaran, struggling to keep an Uzi submachine gun trained on Merrit despite the rocking of both decks.

“Stay where you are,” MacClary called out.

“Throw the Uzi in the water,” Merrit ordered.

The gunman hesitated.

Merrit put pressure on the blade and felt MacClary stiffen as she tried to pull away. “Do it!” she cried.

The diver’s face twisted in anger, but he pitched the weapon overboard.

“Now both of you,” Merrit ordered him and Krause. “Into the water. Swim for the rocks.”

Neither one moved.

“After I’ve left, you can swim back to the cat. I only want the artifact.” He put his lips close to MacClary’s ear. “You’ve read my file. You know I can kill all three of you if I want.”

“Go!” Florian said.

Her diver leapt into the water. Merrit inched forward to see the man resurface, shake his head free of water, then strike out for the barren atoll one hundred meters distant.

In the doorway, Krause slowly shifted position.

“Don’t even think about it,” Merrit said. “Think about him.” He jerked MacClary’s head toward the body on the deck.

The dead man’s neck wound gaped like a second mouth, his white shirt sodden with blood. The meteorite gleamed on the deck beside him, a shimmering black island in a sea of red.

“Last chance,” Merrit said. “I don’t count to three.”

Krause sprinted for the side of the boat and dove into the waves.

“If you’re just in this for the money,” MacClary said, “I can pay you more than you’re getting now.”

“I doubt that.” Her diver had reached the atoll and was now standing on the rocks, shading his eyes to look back at the two dive boats. Krause was still in the water, swimming.

“One million? Two?”

Merrit pushed MacClary away. “Your turn. Into the water.” The moment Krause made it to the atoll, Merrit would set a fire on the catamaran that would reach its diesel bunkers before either diver could swim back.

MacClary stood by the meteorite, facing him, eyes strangely bright. She’d brought both hands to her cross, saying something that sounded like a prayer. It wasn’t any language Merrit recognized.

“Asking God to strike me down?” he asked.

“Something like that.” Then she flung herself at him with unexpected speed, a small silver blade flashing in her hand, sweeping toward his unprotected face.

Merrit, however, was a killer, and without the need for conscious thought he anticipated her again, driving Renault’s knife up through the soft flesh beneath her jaw, on through the roof of her mouth and into her brain. Impassive, he held MacClary’s body as she arched in spasm, then sank to the deck, dead before she reached it.

Impressed by its workmanship and by the way it had been hidden, Merrit retrieved her blade. Taking the other half of the cross from around
her neck, he slid the blade back inside, then slipped it into his open wetsuit before throwing her body overboard, followed by the first of her divers, and then Renault.

Krause and the other diver were already in the water, swimming for their dive boat.

Merrit didn’t care, knew how it would play out. The catamaran would be blazing before they reached it, and with all the blood in the water now, the sharks would soon complete his work for him.

As usual in matters such as these, he was right.

Jess MacClary zipped up her red Gore-Tex parka, snapped the high collar closed, and stepped from her flapping tent into the Arctic wind.

It streamed strands of long red hair across her face, bringing an immediate flush to pale cheeks, making her smile. The low sun was bright, the sky brilliant blue, and the gentle hills of stunted grass and peat stretched endlessly around her, broken only by the handful of other tents that made up the camp, and the far-off red and yellow jackets of the dig team, working the site a half kilometer away.

She pushed her gloved hands deep in her pockets, inhaled the freshest air on the planet, and was as happy and content as she could ever remember. Doubly so today because the word had just come from Charlie Ujarak, the Inuit elder overseeing her work: She’d been right. Again. The burial ground had been found exactly where she had told the oilmen to look for it.

By the cook’s tent, Charlie was waiting for her, a mix of the Canadian Arctic’s past and present. He wore the latest mirrored Ray-Bans, but his traditional sealskin parka had been made by one of his grandmothers from seals Charlie had harpooned himself. Its design and construction hadn’t changed for centuries, probably longer. He wore it open to reveal a red T-shirt with a faded white logo for York University. For him, August north of the Arctic Circle wasn’t cold.

“Hey, Jess, Mr. Kurtz is waiting for you.” Charlie sounded as pleased as she felt.

“I’ll bet.”

She did without her morning tea—the constant wind was a bracing enough wake-up tonic. They set out across the springy, yielding ground toward the dig.

“Did he say anything?” Jess asked.

“Nothing to say. The old settlement was right where you told them it would be. They found the first remains this morning. Article Twelve of the UN declaration takes over now.”

“The remains were a burial, right? Not just a body.”

“Definitely a burial. The skeleton’s in a fetal position, and there’re still bits of grass and deerhide wrapping it.”

“Good. It was a big village, maybe a hundred people or so. There’ll be more remains.”

Charlie took on a more serious tone. “Then it’ll take a lot of praying to keep them at rest.”

Jess understood. What was paleogeology to her, with a smattering of anthropology and archaeology mixed in, was to the Inuit elder his living culture and religion. She envied him his freedom to speak so openly of his beliefs—a freedom she didn’t have and likely never would. “Better that than seeing them dug up by machines for a pipeline, right?”

“A lot of praying,” Charlie said.

At the site, most of the workers stood around a dented metal table with steaming mugs of coffee or tea, waiting for an official verdict from their foreman. Another field table had laminated topo maps held down by heavy metal clips and a bulky gray laptop computer hooked to a GPS tracker.

Lionel Kurtz, the foreman, greeted Jess with a wry smile, his blue-black skin, close-cropped hair, and flat, midwestern speech all seriously out of place in the Barrens, yet sure signs of the twenty-first century and mass globalization. His red jacket sported the corporate patch of Haldron Oil, the energy company that was going to regret it had hired Jess to examine the planned route of its multibillion-dollar pipeline.

“You here to gloat?” Kurtz asked.

Jess knew he didn’t take what she had done personally—it wasn’t his money the company was spending here.

“Like I said,” she told him, “the land tells a story. Every hill, every hollow, every rock.” She pointed to a small rise where yellow gridlines of plastic ribbon had been strung, crisscrossing from a perimeter of thin metal stakes that marked the area for digging. “A couple of centuries ago, there was a river here, and that’s the perfect place for a village on its banks.”

There was a hint of admiration in Kurtz’s tone. “You called it, all right. Charlie says we shouldn’t rebury what we’ve found until the shaman gets here, so you want to check it out?”

Jess turned to Charlie. “Would that be all right?”

“Just don’t touch anything more.” For Kurtz, he added, “And you should tell your team not to use their knives or any cutting tools until the grave is closed.”

“Because?”

“Now that the burial ground has been disturbed, the shades of the dead could be anywhere. If your people accidentally cut one of them with a knife,
then they’ll become angry and could cause all sorts of trouble for you. Sickness, bad luck, polar bears . . . or your next seal hunt might not go too well.”

Jess could see Kurtz was trying to decide whether or not Charlie was being serious. Fortunately, he made the right choice. “No knives. I’ll let ’em know.”

“Thank you.”

The three of them walked up the rise to the gridded area. Kurtz whispered to Jess, “He knows I don’t hunt seals, right?”

“A metaphor. Maybe the shades would make it so you’d have a hard time finding a new route for your pipeline to skirt this place.”

“Fair enough.” Kurtz didn’t sound convinced. “As long as he didn’t mean it about the bears. Once was enough.”

When they stood by the open grave that revealed the skeletal remains—bones burnished dark brown by time and decay, webbed by shriveled tendons and shreds of hide—Charlie softly chanted a mournful dirge in his language. Kurtz bowed his head respectfully, and Jess realized she’d made a terrible mistake.

She waited until Charlie had finished, then said, “This isn’t Inuit.”

The grave was just over two meters deep, and Jess pointed to the exposed side of the excavation. “Look at the layers of sediment. About halfway up, see the river gravel?”

A thin layer of small, light pebbles stood out in a distinct line, sandwiched between other bands of darker soil.

“Give me more,” Kurtz said. Jess could tell she had his interest. As for Charlie, she could see his expression harden—he knew what she was about to say.

“Modern Inuit moved into this area about a thousand years ago. Any Inuit burial that took place here since that time should be above the river gravel, when the river shore had receded.” She pointed a hundred meters to the west, to the slight dip in elevation she had noted three days ago that marked the vanished river’s course five to six hundred years earlier.

“My ancestors could have dug a deep grave,” Charlie said.

“Not through permafrost. Sorry. Permanently frozen ground puts a limit on how deep a modern-era grave would be.” Jess looked around at the terrain, reading it, staring back in time. “For this area to have been low enough for the river to run over it, then rebound with the release of ice and snow . . . I’m thinking three, maybe four thousand years ago. That’s when this burial would have taken place. I’ll need to check the aerial surveys again, climate records . . .” She looked at Charlie apologetically. “The company will carbon-date the remains, and that’ll tell the story, too.”

Charlie shook his head. “My people won’t go for that. We didn’t come from anyplace else. Raven created this land and created the people in it. We’ve always been here.”

Jess could see that Kurtz was caught between trying to be respectful and doing his job. If this burial mound wasn’t Inuit, then the company’s archaeologists could dig it up in a month, send what they found to museums, and the pipeline’s path wouldn’t have to be altered.