Tyrannosaur Canyon (42 page)

There was no air and the acrid smoke felt like broken glass in his lungs.

"Climb, damn you!"

The man started climbing, almost like a zombie, the blood running down his arms. Tom followed alongside, screaming at him, dizziness filling his head. He was going to pass out, it was too late. It was over. He felt his grip weakening . . .

And then arms reached down, pulling him up and throwing him off the side of the chopper. He fell heavily in the sand, and a moment later Hitt landed heavily next to him, with a groan. Sally jumped down beside them-she had climbed back up on the chopper to haul them out.

They stumbled and crawled, trying to get as far away from the burning chopper as possible. Tom finally collapsed, gasping and coughing, able to go no more. Half crawling, half lying in the sand, he heard a dull thud and felt the sudden heat as the last of the chopper's tanks blew, engulfing the wreck in flame.

Suddenly a bizarre sight appeared: a man emerged from the fire, sheeted in flame, his arm raised with a gun in his burning fist. With strange deliberation he stopped, aimed, fired a single wild shot-and then the figure slowly toppled like a statue back into the burning inferno and was gone.

Tom passed out.

4

NIGHT HAD FALLEN on the
Museum
of
Natural History
in Manhattan. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the old sycamores in
Museum
Park
, and the stone gargoyles that haunted the rooftops squatted silently against the darkening sky. Deep in the museum's basement a light burned in the Mineralogy laboratory, where Melodic Crookshank sat hunched over the stereozoom microscope, watching a lump of cells divide.

It had been going on for three and a half hours. The Venus particles had triggered an amazing spurt of growth-triggering an orgy of cell division. At first Melodic thought the particles might have somehow set off a cancerous growth, an undifferentiated bunch of malignant cells. But it wasn't long before she realized that these cells were not dividing like cancerous cells, or even normal cells in a culture.

No-these cells were differentiating.

The group of cells had begun to take on the characteristics of a blastocyst, the ball of cells that form from a fertilized embryo. As the cells had continued to divide, Melodic had seen a dark streak develop down the middle of the blastocyst. It had begun to look exactly like the so-called primitive streak that developed in all chordate embryos-which would eventually form the spinal cord and backbone of the developing creature.

Creature.

Melodic, at the limit of exhaustion, raised her head. It hadn't occurred to her exactly what this thing that was growing might be, whether a lizard or something else, and it was too early in the ontological process to know.

She shivered. What the hell was she doing? It would be insane to wait around and find out. What she was doing now was not only foolish, it was extremely

dangerous. These particles needed to be studied under biosafety level four conditions, not in an open lab like hers.

She glanced toward the clock, hardly able to focus on the dial. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, rolled them to the left and the right. She was so tired she was almost hallucinating.

Melodic had no idea what these particles were, what they did, how they worked. They were an alien life-form that had hitched a ride to Earth on the Chicxulub asteroid. This was over her head-way over her head.

Melodic shoved back the chair and stood up, a little unsteady on her feet, gripping the side of the table for support, her hands trembling. She began to consider what she had to do. She cast around and her eyes lit on a bottle of 80 percent hydrochloric acid in the chemical stores. She unlocked the cabinet, took down the bottle, brought it to under the fume hood, broke the seal, and poured a few ounces of it into a shallow glass tray. With infinite care she removed the slide from the microscope stage, carried it to the fume hood, and slipped it into the hydrochloric acid. There was a faint foaming and hissing noise as the acid instantly destroyed and dissolved the hideous growing blob of cells until nothing was left.

She breathed a deep sigh of relief. That was the first step, to destroy the organism growing on the slide. Now to destroy the loose Venus particles themselves.

She added a strong base to the acid, neutralizing it and causing the precipitation of a layer of salt at the bottom of the dish. Setting up a Bunsen burner under the hood, she put the glass dish on the burner and began boiling away the solution. In a few minutes all the liquid had evaporated, leaving behind a crust of salt. She now turned up the burner as high as it would go. Five minutes passed, then ten minutes, and the salt began to crust up, glowing red-hot as the temperature approached the melting point of glass. No form of carbon, not even a buckyball, could survive that kind of heat. For five minutes she kept the Pyrex dish over the burner while it glowed cherry-red and then she turned off the gas and let it cool down.

She still had one more thing to do: the most important thing of all. And that was to finish the article, adding what she had just discovered. She spent ten minutes writing up two final paragraphs, describing in the driest scientific language she could muster what she had just observed. She saved it, read it over one final time, and was satisfied.

Melodic silently criticized her own lack of caution. Whatever the particles

were, she now believed they might be very dangerous. They was no telling what they might do to a live organism, to a human being. She felt a chill, wondering if she was infected. But that was impossible-the particles were too big to become airborne and besides, aside from those she had painstakingly freed from the rock, the rest were securely encased in stone, sixty-five million years old but still functional.

Functional.

That was really the crux of the matter. What was their function? But even as she asked herself the question, she knew the answer would take months, if not years, to answer.

She attached the article to an e-mail and readied it for sending, her finger poised on the ENTER key.

She hit ENTER.

Melodic leaned back in her chair with a great sigh, feeling suddenly drained. With that keystroke her life was changed. Forever.

5

TOM OPENED HIS eyes. The sun lay in stripes across his bed, a monitor beeping softly somewhere in the background, a clock on the wall. Through a haze of pain, he managed to locate Sally sitting in a chair opposite.

"You're awake!" She jumped up, taking his hand.

Tom didn't even consider raising his pounding head. "What-?"

"You're in the hospital."

It all came rushing back; the pursuit in the canyons, the helicopter crash, the fire. "Sally, how are you?"

"A lot better than you."

Tom looked around at himself, shocked to see himself so bandaged up. "So what's wrong with me?"

"Nothing more than a nasty burn, a broken wrist, cracked ribs, concussion, bruised kidney, and a seared lung. That's all."

"How long have I been out?"

"Two days."

"Ford? How's he?"

"He should be coming up to see you at any moment. He had a broken arm and a few cuts, that's all. He's a tough bird. You were hurt worst."

Tom grunted, his head still pounding. As clarity returned, he noticed a heavy presence sitting in the corner. Lieutenant Detective Wilier.

"What's he doing here?"

Wilier rose, touched his forehead in a greeting before settling down. "Glad to see you awake, Broadbent. Don't worry, you're not in any trouble-although you should be."

Tom didn't quite know what to say.

"I just dropped in to see how you were getting along."

"That's kind of you."

"I figured you'd probably have a few questions you'd want answered. Like what we found out about the killer of Marston Weathers, the same man who abducted your wife."

"I would."

"And in return, when you're ready, I'd like a complete debriefing from you." He raised his eyebrows in query.

"Fair enough."

"Good. The man's name was Maddox, Jimson Alvin Maddox, a convicted murderer who appears to have been working for a fellow named Iain Corvus, a curator at the
American
Museum
of Natural History in
New York
. He got Maddox an early release from prison. Corvus himself died the same night Sally here was kidnapped, apparently of a heart attack. Given the timing the FBI is looking into it."

Tom nodded. Damn, his head hurt. "So how did this Corvus know about the dinosaur?"

"He heard rumors that Weathers was on to something big, sent Maddox down to follow him. Maddox killed the guy and, it seems, took a sample off him which Corvus had analyzed at the museum. Something just went up on the Web about it and there's been a hullabaloo like nothing you've ever seen before. It's in all the papers." Wilier shook his head. "A dinosaur fossil. . . Christ, I considered just about everything, from cocaine to buried gold, but I never would've guessed a T. Rex."

"What's happening to the fossil?"

Sally answered. "The government's sealed off the high mesas and are taking it out. They're talking about building some kind of special lab to study it, maybe right here in
New Mexico
."

"And Maddox? He's really dead?"

Wilier said, "We found his body where you left it, or at least what was left of it after the coyotes worked it over."

"What about the Predator drone, all that business?"

Wilier eased back in his chair. "We're still untangling that one. Looks like some kind of rogue government agency."

"Ford will tell you about that when he comes," said Sally.

As if on cue the nurse came in and Tom could see Ford's craggy face behind her, one side of his jaw bandaged, his arm in a cast and sling. He was wearing a checked shirt and jeans.

"Tom! Glad to see you awake." He came and leaned on the footrest of the bed. "How the heck are you?"

"Been better."

He cautiously settled his huge frame down in a cheap plastic hospital chair. "I've been in touch with some of my old pals in the Company. Apparently heads have rolled over the way this whole thing was handled, the callous disregard for human life, not to mention the bungled op. The classified agency that ran the op's been disbanded. A government panel's looking into the whole business, but you know how it is . . ."

"Right."

"There's something else, something incredible. A scientist at the
Museum
of
Natural History
in
New York
got hold of the piece of the dinosaur, studied it, and has released a paper about it. It's explosive stuff. The T. Rex died of an infection-brought in on the asteroid that caused the mass extinction. No kidding-the dinosaur died of an alien infection. At least that's what they say." Ford told him how Apollo 17 brought back some of the particles on a moon rock. "When they saw the rock was impregnated with an alien microbe, they diverted it to the Defense Intelligence Agency, which in turn set up a black detachment to study it. The DIA named the black agency LS480, short for Lunar Sample 480. They've been studying these particles for the last thirty years, all the while keeping their antennae out in case any more showed up."

"But it still doesn't explain how they found out about the dinosaur."

"The NSA has a ferocious eavesdropping capability. We'll never know the details-seems they intercepted a phone call. They jumped on it immediately. They'd been waiting thirty years and they were ready."

Tom nodded. "How's Hitt?"

"Still in bed upstairs. He's doing fine. Pilot and copilot are both dead, though. Along with Masago and several soldiers. A real tragedy."

"And the notebook?"

Wilier stood up, took it out of his pocket, laid it on the bed. "This is for you. Sally tells me you always keep your promises."

6

MELODIE HAD NEVER been inside the office of Cushman Peale, the museum's president, and she felt oppressed by its atmosphere of old
New York
privilege and exclusion. The man behind the antique rosewood desk added to the effect, dressed in Brooks Brothers gray, with a gleaming mane of white hair brushed back. His elaborate courtesies and self-deprecating phraseology did a poor job of concealing an unshakable assumption of superiority.

Peale guided her to a wooden Shaker chair placed to one side of a marble fireplace and seated himself opposite. From the interior of his suit he removed a copy of her article and laid it on the table, carefully spreading it with a heavy veined hand.

"Well, well, Melodic. This is a fine piece of work."

"Thank you, Dr. Peale."

"Please call me Cushman."

"All right. Cushman."

Melodic leaned back in the chair. She could never be comfortable in this chair that would make a Puritan squirm, but at least she could fake it. She had a bad case of imposter syndrome-but she figured she'd get over it, eventually.

"Now let's see . . ." Peale consulted some notes he had jotted on the first page of the article. "You joined the museum five years ago, am I right?"

"That's right."

"With a Ph.D. from Columbia . . . And you've been doing a bang-up job in the Mineralogy lab every since as a... Technical Specialist First Grade?" He seemed almost surprised by the lowliness of her position.

Melodic remained silent.

"Well, it certainly seems time for a promotion." Peale leaned back and crossed

his legs. "This paper shows great promise, Melodic. Of course, it's controversial, that's to be expected, but the Committee on Science has gone over it carefully and it seems likely the results will withstand scrutiny."

"They will."