Tyrannosaur Canyon (12 page)
Read Tyrannosaur Canyon Online
Authors: Douglas Preston
"Starting with
"That would be a charming coincidence. The fact is, Tom, it could be anywhere in the high mesas."
"It could take forever to find it."
"I don't think so. I've spent a lot of time hiking around back there and I believe I could find it in less than a week. Not only do you have the shape of the formation, but you can see that part of the dinosaur's head and upper body are exposed along the side. That must be quite a sight, the dinosaur's jaws emerging from the rock like that."
"Like that black monolith that gave
"I know that monolith-it's got nothing to do with the fossil. With this plot, now we know just what to look for-eh, Tom?"
"Wait a minute. Who says we're going to look for it?"
"I do."
Tom shook his head. "I thought you were studying to be a monk. I thought you'd left this sort of thing behind."
Ford looked at him for a while and then dropped his eyes. "Tom-the other day you asked me a question. I'd like to answer it."
"I was out of line. I really don't want to know."
"You weren't out of line and I'm going to answer your question. I've bottled it all up, I've used silence as a kind of crutch, a way to avoid the issue." He paused.
Tom said nothing.
"I was an undercover operative. I studied cryptology but I ended up working undercover as a Systems Analyst for a large computer firm. I was, in reality, a CIA hacker."
Tom listened.
"Let's say-theoretically speaking, of course-that the government of, say, Cambodia buys servers and software from, say, a large American firm with a three-letter acronym which I shall not mention. Unbeknownst to the Cambodians, a small logic bomb has been hidden in the software code. The bomb goes off two years later, and the system starts acting funny. The government of Cambodia calls the American company for help. I get sent in as Systems Analyst. Let's say I bring my wife-which helps the cover and she's also a Company employee. I fix the problem, while at the same time burning onto CD-ROMs the entire contents of the Cambodian government's classified personnel files. The CD-ROMs are tarted up to look like bootlegged copies of Verdi's Requiem, music and all. You can even play them. Again I'm speaking theoretically. None of this may have actually happened."
He paused, exhaled.
"Sounds like fun," said Tom.
"Yeah, it was fun-until they car-bombed my wife, who happened to be pregnant with our first child."
"Oh, my God-"
"It's all right, Tom," he said quickly. "I've got to tell you. When that happened, I just walked out of that life and into this one. All I had were the clothes on my back, my car keys and wallet. First chance, I dropped the wallet and keys into a bottomless crack up there in
"No one knows you're here?"
"Everyone knows I'm here. The CIA understood. Believe it or not, Tom, the CIA wasn't a bad place to work. Good people for the most part. Julie-my wife-and I knew the risks. We were recruited together out of MIT. Those personnel files I scooped up exposed a lot of former Khmer Rouge torturers and
murderers. That was good work. But for me . . ." His voice trailed off. "The sacrifice was too great."
"My God."
Ford held up a finger. "No taking the Lord's name in vain. Now I've told you.
"I hardly know what to say, Wyman. I'm sorry-I'm really sorry." "No need to say anything. I'm not the only hurt person in the world. It's a good life here. When you deny your own needs by fasting, poverty, celibacy, and silence, you get closer to something eternal. Call it God, call it whatever you like. I'm a fortunate man."
There was a long silence. Tom finally asked, "And how does this connect to your idea that we should find the dinosaur? I promised to give the notebook to the man's daughter, Robbie-and that's it. As far as I'm concerned the dinosaur's
hers."
Ford tapped the table. "I hate to tell you this, Tom, but all that land out there, the high mesas and all the badlands and mountains beyond, belong to the Bureau of Land Management. In other words, it's all federal land. Our land. The American people own that land and everything on it and in it, including the dinosaur. You see, Tom, your man wasn't just a dinosaur prospector. He was a dinosaur
thief
."
23
DR. IAIN CORVUS softly turned the handle of the metal door labeled MINERALOGY LAB and stepped quietly into the room. Melodic Crookshank was sitting at a workstation, her back turned, typing. Her short brown hair bobbed as she worked.
He crept up to her, laid his hand softly on her shoulder. She gave a muffled gasp and jumped.
"You didn't forget our little appointment, did you?" asked Corvus.
"No, it's just that you snuck up on me like a cat."
Corvus laughed softly, gave her shoulder a little squeeze, and left his hand there. He could feel her heat through her labcoat. "I'm grateful you were willing to stay late." He was glad to see she was wearing the bracelet. She was pretty but in that athletic and unglamorous American way, as if one of the prerequisites of being a serious woman in science was to wear no makeup and avoid the hairdresser. But she had two important qualities: she was discreet and she was alone. He had quietly inquired into her background; she was a product of the Columbia degree mill that turned out far more Ph.D.s than were actually employable; her parents were both dead, she had no siblings, few friends, no boyfriend, and almost no social life. On top of that, she was competent and so eager to please.
His eyes returned to her face, glad to see she was blushing. He wondered if perhaps they might not take their relationship a step or two beyond the professional-but no, that path was always unpredictable.
He dazzled her with his finest smile, and took her hand, which was hot in his. 'Melodic, I'm delighted you've made such splendid progress."
"Yes, Dr. Corvus. It's-well, it's incredible. I've burned it all onto CDs."
He lowered himself into a chair before the big flat-panel screen of the Power Mac G5. "Let the show begin," he murmured.
Melodic seated herself next to him, picked up the top CD in a stack, opened the plastic holder, and slid it into the drive bay. She pulled over the keyboard and rapped out a command.
"First, what we've got here," she began, switching into professional speech, "is a piece of the vertebra and fossilized soft tissue and skin of a large tyrannosaurid, probably a T. Rex or maybe a freakishly large Albertosaurus. It's fantastically well preserved."
An image appeared on the screen.
"Look at that. It's an imprint of skin." She paused. "Here it is closer up. You see those fine parallel lines? Here they are again at 30x."
Corvus felt a momentary shiver. This was even better than he had imagined, much better. He felt suspended, light in his chair. "It's the impression of a feather," he managed to say.
"Exactly. There it is: proof that T. Rex was feathered."
It was a theory that had been advanced a few years ago by a group of young paleontologists at the museum. Corvus had derided the theory in the Journal of Paleontology, referring to it as a "peculiar American fantasy," which had occasioned much sneering and anti-British comment from his colleagues in the museum. And now, here it was, in his very hands: proof that they were right, and he was wrong. The unpleasant sensation of being proven wrong quickly gave way to more complex feelings. Here was an opportunity... In fact, a rare opportunity. He could steal their theory from them, while standing up to the world and admitting he had been mistaken. Utter, total preemption-wrapped in a cloak of humility.
That was exactly how he would do it.
With this in hand, they would have to give him tenure. But then he wouldn't really need it, would he? He could get a job anywhere-even at the
Corvus found he had been holding his breath, and released it. "Yes, indeed," he murmured. "So the old gentleman was feathered after all."
"It gets better."
Corvus raised his eyebrows.
She rapped a key and another image appeared. "Here's a polarized image at lOOx of the fossilized muscle tissue. It's totally petrified, of course, but it has to be the most perfect fossilization on record-you see how fine-grained silicon
dioxide has replaced the cell tissue, even the organelles, capturing the image of everything. What we're looking at is an actual image of the muscle cell of a dinosaur."
Corvus found he could not speak.
"Yeah." She rapped again. "Here it is at 500x . . . Look-you can see the nucleus."
Click.
"Mitochondria."
Click.
"And these-Golgi complex."
Click.
"Ribosomes-"
Corvus put out his hand. "Stop. Stop a moment." He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. He opened them. "Wait a moment, please."
He stood up, steadied himself with a hand on the back of the chair, and took a deep breath. The moment of dizziness passed, leaving him strangely hyperalert. He looked around the lab. It was as silent as a tomb, with only the faint hiss of air, the hum of the fan in the computer, the smell of epoxy, plastic, and heated electronics. Everything was as it was before-and yet the world had just changed. The future flashed through his mind-the awards, the best-selling book, the lectures, the money, the prestige. Tenure was only the beginning.
He looked at Crookshank. Did she, too, see it? She was no fool. She was thinking the same kinds of things, imagining how her life had now changed- forever.
"Melodie . . ."
"Yeah. It's awesome. And I'm not done. Not by a long shot."
He managed to sit down. Could there really be more?
Crookshank rapped a key. "Let's go to the electron micrographs." A black and white image leapt into sharp focus. "Here's endoplasmic reticulum at l.OOOx. You can see now the crystalline structure of the replacement mineral. True, you can't see much-we're at the limit. The structure is breaking down at this magnification-fossilization can't preserve everything. But the fact you can see anything at a thousand x is incredible. You're looking at the microbiology of a dinosaur, right there."
It was extraordinary. Even this little sample was a paleontological discovery of the first water. And to think that there was probably a whole dinosaur like that, if his information was correct. The perfectly fossilized carcass of a T. Rex, complete-the stomach, no doubt with its last meal, the brain in all its glory, the
skin, the feathers, the blood vessels, the reproductive organs, nasal cavities, liver, kidneys, spleen-the diseases it had, its wounds, its life history, all perfectly duplicated in stone. It was the closest they were going to get to
She clicked to the next image. "Here's the bone marrow-"
"Wait." Corvus stayed her. "What are those dark things?"
"What dark things?"
"Back in the last image."
"Oh, those." She backed up to the previous picture. Corvus pointed to a small thing in the image, a small black particle.
"What is it?"
"Probably an artifact of the fossilization process."
"Not a virus?"
"It's way too big. And it's too sharply defined to be part of the original biology anyway. I'm pretty sure it's a microcrystalline growth, probably hornblende."
"Quite right. Sorry. Keep on."
"I could zap it with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, see what it's made of."
"Fine."
She clicked through another series of micrographs.
"This is stupendous, Melodie."
She turned to him, her face flushed, radiant. "Can I ask a question?"
He hesitated, collecting himself. He was going to need her help, that much was clear, and doling out a few grains of glory to a female lab assistant would be a lot better than cutting another curator in on the deal. Melodie had no contacts, no power, and no future, just another underemployed Ph.D. grunt. So much the better that she was a woman and wouldn't be taken as seriously.
He put his arm around her, leaned close. "Of course."
"Is there any more of this out there?"
Corvus couldn't help smiling. "I suspect, Melodie, that there's a whole dinosaur like this out there."
24
SALLY FELT A lot more disturbed than elated at the computer-plotted image Tom had spread out on the kitchen table.
"This just gets worse and worse," she said.
"Better and better, you mean. This is exactly the kind of information I needed to identify the man and find his daughter."
This is Tom all over, Sally thought-stubborn, operating from some kind of deep-seated moral conviction that landed him in trouble. It had nearly gotten him killed in Honduras.
"Look, Tom-this man was illegally prospecting for fossils on public land. He was certainly involved in the fossil black market and maybe with organized crime. He was a bad guy and he got murdered. You don't want to be messing around with this. And even if you found his daughter, the fossil wouldn't belong to her. You yourself said it belongs to the feds."
"I made a promise to a dying man and that's the beginning and the end of it."
Sally sighed in exasperation.
Tom circled the table like a panther prowling around a kill. "You haven't said what you think of it yet."
"It's amazing, of course, but that's not the point."
"That is the point. It's the most important paleontological discovery ever made."
Despite herself, Sally was drawn to the strange image. It was blurry, indistinct, but it was clearly a lot more than just a skeleton. It was a dinosaur, complete, entombed in the rock. It lay on its side, its neck thrown back, jaws open, its two front limbs raised up as if trying to claw its way free.