Esau

One

The ice ridge, its delicate formations cut deep into the face of Machhapuchhare like dozens of giant bridal veils from a celestial wedding ceremony, soared above his throbbing head in the dazzling, late afternoon sunshine. Beneath his cramponed feet, his toes barely gripping the vertical ice wall, stretched the yawning gap that was the Annapurna South Glacier. Some twelve kilometres behind his back, which ached from the weight of a heavy rucksack, the distinctive peak of Annapurna rose from the ground like a huge octopus. Not that he was looking. Cutting hand- and footholds with an ice axe at six thousand metres meant there was no time to relax on the rope and enjoy the view. Scenery counted for nothing when there was a summit to be reached. Especially when it was a summit that was officially forbidden.

Western climbers called it Fish Tail Peak, which underlined how the sinuous twisting mountain might elude a man’s grasp. At the suggestion of some sentimental Brit gone native, who had himself failed to reach the summit in 1957, the Nepalese government had declared that Machhapuchhare, three times as big as the Matterhorn, should forever remain pure and inviolate. As a result, it was now impossible to get a permit to climb one of the most beautiful and challenging of all the peaks surrounding the Annapurna Sanctuary.

Most climbers might have let it go there, for fear of the consequences. Jail sentences and fines could be imposed. Future expedition permits could be denied. Sherpas could be withheld. But Jack had come to regard this mountain, Machhapuchhare, as an affront, a mockery of his publicly declared intention to conquer all the major Himalayan peaks. And as soon as he and his partner had successfully completed their officially sanctioned ascent of Annapurna’s southwest face, they decided to climb without a permit. A lightning assault that had seemed like a good idea until the bad weather hit.

He pushed himself up on one of the footholds he had cut earlier, reached up with his axe, and hacked another handhold out of the ice face.

Bad enough, he thought, that mountaineers were obliged to stop climbing Kangchenjunga just a few metres short of the summit to keep from defiling its holy peak. But that there should be a mountain that you were actually forbidden to climb was unthinkable. One of the reasons you went climbing in the first place was to get away from terrestrial rules and regulations. Jack was quite used to people advising him that this mountain or that wall was unclimbable. Mostly he had proved them wrong. But a mountain you were forbidden to climb, and by a government too — that was something else. As far as their liaison officer in Khatmandu was concerned, they were still on Annapurna; their Sherpas had been bribed to keep silent. Nobody was going to tell him where he could and could not climb.

The very thought of it was enough to make Jack wield the axe with greater ferocity, sending a shower of ice chips and water spray into his weather-beaten face, until a crumbling step beneath his boot made him stop to adjust his balance and fumble to insert another ice screw.

Not easy, wearing Dachstein woollen mitts.

‘How’re you doing?’ shouted his climbing partner from about fifteen metres below.

Jack said nothing. Muscles aching from his ice climb, he clung to the wall with one hand as he tried to turn the screw with fingers that were numb with cold. If he didn’t get off this wall soon he would risk frostbite. There was no time for a report of his progress. Or lack of it. If they didn’t make the top soon, they were in serious trouble. Days spent in a hanging tent had cost them valuable fuel. There was only enough for another day or two at the most, and without fuel they could not melt snow for their coffee.

At last the screw was tight and he was able to take the weight off his arm. He drew deep breaths of the thin mountain air and tried to steady the alarming pulse in his temple.

Jack could not recall a more demanding piece of ice climbing. Even the Annapurna had not seemed so hard. Near the top, Machhapuchhare looked not so much like a fish tail as a spear point driven up through the earth by some giant subterranean warrior. There was no doubt about it: High-altitude wall climbing remained the real challenge for any modern Alpinist, and Machhapuchhare’s Gothic heights, as sheer as any New York skyscraper, were perhaps the ultimate test of all. What a fool he was. Let him finish the climb before he worried about the authorities discovering what he had done.

The throbbing in his head seemed to diminish.

Except that now he was aware of a strange whistling in his ears. Like tinnitus at first, it grew louder, until the whistling had become a roaring, like the sound of an artillery shell fired from a warship in a distant bay, until the noise filled his ears and he wondered if he was experiencing some dreadful effect of high altitude, a pulmonary oedema or even a cerebral hemorrhage.

For a brief and nauseous moment Jack heard the screws that held him on to the rock face grinding in the ice as the whole mountain shook, and he closed his eyes.

A moment or two passed. The noise ended on the glacier somewhere to the north of him. He remained aloft. The breath he had been unconsciously holding escaped from his chapped lips in an exclamation of gratitude and relief as he opened his eves again.

‘What the hell was it?’ shouted Didier, at the bottom of the ice wall.

‘I’m glad you heard it too,’ said Jack.

‘Sounded like it was over the other side of the mountain. What was it?’

‘Somewhere nearer the north, I reckon.’

‘Maybe an avalanche.’

‘Must have been a hell of a big one,’ said Jack.

‘Up here they’re all big ones.’

‘Could even have been a meteorite.’

Jack heard Didier laugh.

‘Shit,’ said Didier. ‘As if this wasn’t already dangerous enough. The Almighty has to throw rocks down on us as well.’

Jack pushed himself away from the wall and, leaning back on the rope, he looked up at the huge overhang of ice above his head.

‘I think it looks okay,’ he shouted.

In his mind was a picture of the avalanche debris that he and Didier had seen scattered at the foot of the ridge they were on, an unpleasant reminder of the risks he and his French Canadian partner were taking.

‘Well, I guess we’ll know all about it soon enough,’ he added quietly.

The week before they had arrived in the Annapurna Sanctuary to mount their lightweight, two-man assault on the tenth highest mountain in the world — and then its forbidden sister peak — a German expedition, much larger than their own, had been wiped out by a big avalanche on the south wall of Lhotse, the great black peak that was linked to Everest by the famous south col. Six men had died. According to one of the Sherpas who had witnessed the accident, a whole serac, several hundred tons of solid ice, had collapsed on top of them.

To avoid any similar falls of ice. Jack had been following a course to the side of the ridge, but now he was right under the danger area, an enormous boulder of hard ice attached to the rock by nothing more than frost.

If this lot were to go, he told himself, they would really be in for it. To take his mind off the danger, he began to divert himself by trying to remember the name of the Greek hero condemned by Zeus to an eternity of pushing a huge stone up a hill. As it constantly rolled down again, his task was everlasting. What was his name?

But even as the question passed through Jack’s mind, a long, ghostly finger of loose powder snow blew off the crest of the overhang and joined the faintest trace of cloud that rolled across the flawless, bright blue sky. Some of it showered Jack’s face, refreshing him like a burst of spray from a bottle of eau-de-cologne. He licked the cool moisture from his cracked lips, lifted his ice axe and started to cut another handhold on the perilous route he had mentally marked out. It would take him to the corner of the ridge, away from the threat of icy obliteration.

He paused as hundreds of shards of snow and ice came scampering off the crest of the ridge like tiny, suicidal white lemmings, and when at last they stopped, he realized that the throbbing in his head had started again.

‘Sisyphus,’ Jack muttered, remembering the Greek’s name as he quickly finished the handhold. ‘It was Sisyphus, the Crafty.’ An eternity of second chances. That’s what it looked like. The boulder above Jack’s head would come down only once. And that would be it. The terminal descent of man. He tugged a length of rope through the piton runners and moved up the ice arête.

‘Sooner I get out from under this bastard the better.’

His ears had started to play tricks on him again. This time it was as if he had gone deaf. Jack stopped where he was and repeated his last sentence, but it was as though the sound had been sucked away from the mountain. He felt the words vibrate in his mouth but heard nothing. There seemed to be some kind of vacuum into which all the sound on the ice ridge was emptying and, like the dead calm before a storm at sea, the sense of menace was overpowering.

He looked down and called out to Didier, but once again his shout was snatched away, and the sound merged into thunderous rumble. A second later, the mountain shrugged off several thousand tons of snow and ice, shutting out the blue sky behind the frozen black curtain of an enormous avalanche.

Enveloped in a huge cumulus cloud of stifling snow and drowning vapour. Jack felt himself carried off the rocky, mountainous altar.

For what seemed like an eternity he fell.

Trapped inside the belly of the white whale of the avalanche, with nothing to inform his battered senses of the world outside it, he had no impression of speed or acceleration, nor even of danger. Just of overwhelming, elemental power. It was as if he were in the very grip of winter. Kept together by the cold, he would melt and disappear as soon as he hit the ground. Jack. Jack Frost.

Almost as suddenly as it had started, the direction of the avalanche seemed to change, and feeling an increasing pressure about his body. Jack instinctively started to swim. He kicked his legs, thrust out his arms, and struggled to reach some imaginary surface.

Then everything stopped and all was dark and silent.

His legs were free. But his whole upper body was covered in snow. Struggling backward. Jack collapsed onto a hard rocky floor. For several minutes he lay there, stunned and blinded with snow. He found he could move his arms, and gently he cleared his nose, mouth, ears, and eyes of snow. He looked around and realized that he was in a kind of bergschrund — a big, horizontal crevasse in the rock face. The entrance to the bergschrund was stopped up with snow, but the light shining through seemed to suggest that he was not blocked in too deeply.

The rope, still tight around Jack’s waist, led through the snow blockage. Struggling to his knees he gave the rope a hard pull. But even as he crawled through the snow and hauled at the rope, he knew that Didier must be dead. That he himself was alive seemed improbable enough.

After several frantic pulls, the frayed end of the rope appeared. Dragging himself to the mouth of the bergschrund, he managed to peer out. One look at the obliterated slope below seemed to confirm the worst. The avalanche had been a huge one. It had swept the whole lower glacier, from six thousand metres right down to Camp One on top of the Rognon at about five thousand. Like Didier, the Sherpas there would have had little chance of survival.

Somehow the avalanche had dumped him on the very lip of the bergschrund. At a different angle a collision with its hard lower lip would have killed him. Instead the bergschrund had protected him from the lethal icy debris that now rendered the route back down the north face to the Rognon and Camp One unrecognizable.

Sick to his stomach and yet somehow elated that he had survived unscathed. Jack sat down and began to remove the snow and ice from inside his jacket and trousers, pondering his next move. He estimated it was about four hundred and fifty metres back down to Camp Two at the foot of the rock face. At just above five thousand two hundred, the camp was located where the rock wall overhung the glacier, and there was just a chance that this might have protected the two Sherpas there from the worst of the avalanche, although they were almost certainly buried much deeper than he was.

Even so, he knew that he could not climb down before dark. His radio was gone, and the route down was too difficult to attempt in his condition with the sun already setting. Besides, he had a rucksack of stores still strapped to his back and he was aware that his best chance was to spend the night in the bergschrund and climb down first thing in the morning.

Jack shrugged off the rucksack and stood up painfully to inspect what would be his sleeping quarters for the night, almost impaling himself on one of the long icicles that hung from the vaulting ceiling, jabbing the darkness like the teeth of some forgotten prehistoric animal. The icicle, as long as a javelin, broke off and smashed on the floor.

He opened his rucksack and took out his Maglite.

‘Not exactly the Stein Eriksen Lodge,’ said Jack, at the same time reminding himself that it might just as easily have been his grave.

If only they had left it at the southwest face of Annapurna. That would have been enough for most people. It was their own good luck that had defeated them, for their lightweight ascent of Annapurna had been blessed with such fine weather that they had completed it in half the allotted time. But for his own vaulting ambition Didier Lauren and the Sherpas on the glacier below might now still be alive.

He sat down again and flashed the light around him.

The bergschrund was shaped like a funnel lying on its side, about nine metres wide and six metres high at the entrance, narrowing at the rear to a tunnel about one and a half metres square.

With hours to kill he decided he might as well see how far the tunnel bored into the mountainside. Advancing to the rear of the cave, he squatted down and shone the powerful halogen beam along the tunnel.

Jack knew that the Himalayas were home to bear and langur, even to leopard, but he thought it unlikely they would have made their home in such an inaccessible place so far above the tree line.

Bunched down on his haunches, he started to make his way along the tunnel.

About a hundred metres in, the tunnel sloped upward, reminding him of the long and narrow passageway that led to the Queen’s Burial Chamber in Egypt’s Great Pyramid — a journey that was not for the fainthearted, the claustrophobic, or the orthopedically afflicted. After only a short hesitation. Jack decided to push on, determined to find out how deep the cave was.

Mostly the mountains were the original Pre-Cambrian continental crust of the Indian subcontinent’s northern margin and consisted of schists and crystalline rocks. But here in the bergschrund and nearer the summit, the rock was limestone, from a time when the world’s highest range of mountains was the floor of the shallow Tethys Sea. These early Paleozoic sediments had lifted almost twelve kilometres since the onset of the Himalayan mountain building around fifty-five million years ago. Jack had even heard it said that there were parts of the range that were still rising at the rate of nearly half an inch a year. The Everest that he and Didier had conquered, without oxygen, was almost half a metre higher than the Everest scaled by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing back in 1953.

The tunnel slope levelled off, with the roof becoming simultaneously higher so that he was able to stand straight again. Pointing the almost solid beam of the flashlight above his head. Jack found he was in an enormous cavern, and certain only that the ceiling was beyond even the range of his Maglite, he decided that it must be at least thirty metres high.

He shouted out and heard his own voice bounce back off the invisible walls and ceiling, reinforced and prolonged by reflection in a cold, dark resonating chamber that had already left him feeling chilled to the bone. By this sound he might have judged himself to be standing not inside a cavern underneath Machhapuchhare Himal but in the soaring vault of a ruined and forgotten Gothic cathedral that was now the hidden hall of a malevolent mountain king. Designed to carry the human voice upward in praise and prayer, to God in heaven, the vault was filled instead with the silence of the tomb.

How long had this silence prevailed before being desecrated by his presence? Was he the first human to have entered the cavern since the creation of the Himalayas some one and a half million years ago?

At first he thought it was a rock he saw in the artificial beam of his Maglite. It was a moment or two before his untrained eye perceived that, staring back at him from the moist, earthen floor of the cave, and about the size of a melon, was the bony face of a nearly complete skull.

He dropped to his knees and immediately began to brush away the dirt and gravel from the find with his gloved fingers. Jack was well aware that the Himalayas contained an abundance of fossils. Only a few kilometres away, on the northern slopes of Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest mountain in the world, he had once found an ammonite — a spiral-shaped mollusk dating from 150–200 million years ago. Muktinath was famous for its Upper Jurassic fossils. To the west, the Churen Himal in Nepal, and the Siwalik Hills of Northern Pakistan, had yielded many significant hominid fossils. But this was the first time Jack had discovered anything himself.

He Lifted the skull clear of the dirt and examined it carefully in the beam of his flashlight. The lower jaw was missing but otherwise it looked to be in remarkably good condition, with a near perfect upper jaw and an unbroken cranium. It was larger than it had looked on the ground, and for a brief moment he thought it might have belonged to a bear until he noted the absence of any large canine teeth. It seemed to be hominid, and after a couple of minutes’ further scrutiny he felt quite sure of it, but he had no idea if what he was looking at was related to any of the other fossil hominids for which the Himalayas were known, or even if it was a fossil at all.

He thought of the one person who would be able to tell him everything there was to know about the skull. The woman who had once been his lover and who had consistently refused to marry him, but who was rather better known as a doctor of paleoanthropology at the University of California in Berkeley. He knew her simply as Swift. Maybe he would present his find to her as a gift. There could be no doubt that she would appreciate having the skull more than any of the other souvenirs he had promised to bring her back from Nepal, like a rug or a thangka.

He could almost hear the unprincipled advice that Didier would have offered him.

‘Trust you, Didier,’ Jack said sadly. ‘Besides, there’s still the small problem of getting down from this mountain to consider.’

Jack returned to the bergschrund entrance carrying the skull in his hands. He looked inside his tightly packed rucksack and decided that something would have to be left behind if he was to get the skull down the mountain. But what? Not the sleeping bag. Not the first-aid box. Not the socks, the advance base rations, the Nikon F4 camera.

He started to unpack the rucksack.

A half-full bottle of Macallan malt whisky came to hand. Quite apart from the fact that he and Didier enjoyed drinking it, whisky was a more effective treatment for frostbite than vasodilator drugs such as Ronicol. High-altitude rock climbing was one of the rare occasions when the medicinal properties of alcohol really could be justified. And this was an emergency.

Jack sat down on the floor of the bergschrund and uncorked the bottle. Then he toasted his friend and prepared to finish the bottle.

Two

India.

The telephone rang.

Pakistan.

The telephone rang again. The man stirred in his bed.

In recent weeks when the phone rang during the night, it had usually been something to do with the worsening situation between these two ancient enemies.

The man wriggled his way up the bed, switched on the bedside light, collected the receiver, and then leaned back against the padded headboard. A quick glance at his watch revealed that the time in Washington, D.C., was 4:15 a.m. But his thoughts were sixteen thousand kilometres away. He was thinking that on the Indian subcontinent it would be mid-afternoon on a hot day made warmer by the posturings of the Indian and Pakistani leaders and the dreadful possibility that one of them might decide that a preemptive nuclear strike against the other was the best way of winning an as yet undeclared war.

‘Perrins,’ yawned the man, although he was wide awake. A bad attack of indigestion, the result of a supper cruise down the Potomac aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia, had seen to that.

He listened carefully to the somber-sounding voice on the other end of the secured line and then groaned.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’ He replaced the receiver and cursed quietly.

His wife was awake and looking at him with a worried expression.

‘It’s not—’

‘No, thank God,’ he said, swinging his legs out of bed. ‘Not yet anyway. But I have to go to the office all the same. Something that “requires my urgent presence.” ’

She threw back the quilt.

‘No need for you to get up,’ he said. ‘Stay in bed.’

She stood up and slipped on a bathrobe.

‘I wish I could, dear,’ she said. ‘But that dinner. I feel like I’m pregnant again. Pregnant and overdue.’ She headed toward the kitchen. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’

Perrins shuffled into the bathroom and held himself under an ice-cold shower. Cold water and coffee might be the only stimulation his heart would get for the rest of the coming day — just like the day before.

Fifteen minutes later, he was dressed and standing on the porch of the red-brick colonial. Kissing his wife goodbye, he stepped into the back of a black Cadillac sedan that the office had dispatched to collect him.

Neither the driver nor the armed guard alongside him in the front said anything during the drive north up the Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway. They were both the speak-when-spoken-to types, servicemen who had driven and protected Perrins for the last year. They knew that a man attending a dawn meeting at the Pentagon might have other things on his mind than the unusually severe cold weather and the way the Redskins had been playing.

Just south of Arlington National Cemetery, the highway deviated to the east and the familiar concrete shape that was the biggest office building in the world came into view. To Perrins it seemed only appropriate that the U.S. Department of Defence should be headquartered within sight of those Americans who had died in wars.

The Cadillac deposited him in front of one of the Pentagon’s many entrances, and he made his way into the building. Sometimes he thought that there must be five of everything at the Pentagon: five sides, five stories, five concentric hallways, and a five-acre courtyard in the centre. For all he knew, there might even have been as many as five thousand of the Pentagon’s twenty-five-thousand-strong workforce already at their desks by the time he arrived, even though it was five o’clock in the morning. Certainly the place looked busy enough.

The NRO was headquartered in Department 4C956, and although it did not officially exist at all, the Office of Space Systems, as it was sometimes also known, was easy enough to find; 4 indicated the fourth floor, C indicated Ring C — Ring A faced the courtyard, and Ring C was in the middle — 9 was corridor nine; and 56 was the number of the suite of offices.

Perrins went straight to the conference room, where he found several men and women, some of them wearing the uniform of their respective service but all of them grim-faced and awaiting the arrival of the director of NRO, Bill Reichhardt, who entered the room only a few seconds behind Perrins.

Reichhardt, a tall, thin, grey-haired man in a dark suit, took his place at the head of the table, smiled thinly at Perrins, and nodded at a bespectacled man whose round shoulders, shiny bald head, and reverentially clasped hands gave him the look of a devout and supplicatory priest about to ask that the Lord bless their gathering.

‘All right, Griff,’ Reichhardt said hoarsely, and lifted his collar from his Adam’s apple, as if there was something in his throat other than anger at having been roused from his bed. ‘Get on with it.’

The priestly man cleared his throat and started to speak.

‘I’m sure everyone in this room is now aware of the situation that was reported by the tracking complex at Cheyenne Mountain earlier this evening,’ he said. ‘Full details are available in the reports in front of you. Ladies and gentlemen, I have to tell you that the situation has now been confirmed by both Norwegian Mission Control Centre at Tromso and the French MCC at Toulouse.’

‘Jesus,’ said someone. ‘Do we know why?’

‘So far we’ve been unable to surface any further intelligence on that.’

‘Griff,’ one of the naval uniforms asked, ‘what’s the grade of sensitivity on this material?’

‘We’re talking SCI.’

SCI was the most secret of all U.S. Government classifications. Affecting matters of truly Olympian secrecy, it stood for ‘sensitive compartmental intelligence’.

‘So what’s the beverage of choice?’ said an army man.

Reichhardt looked up from his notepad and raised his eyebrows.

‘What do you say, Griff? Any bright ideas?’

‘I’d suggest a lower level reconnaissance, sir. We ought to put some U2Rs in the air over that area. Round the clock over flights.’

‘Alvin?’ Reichhardt was now looking at one of the air force uniforms.

‘Well, sir, I’d be concerned about the conservation of the asset. By which I mean the aircraft. The trouble with the U2R is that it’s not a particularly sturdy aircraft. It’s designed for one purpose — long flights at low altitudes and low speeds. It was easy enough to shoot down back in the early sixties, when the Russians nailed Gary Powers.’ He shrugged. ‘Now more than ever. However...’

Perrins had been nodding his agreement.

‘My reading,’ he said, interrupting, ‘is that both sides are likely to take a dim view of any perceived American military interference in the region. The Indians see us as Pakistan’s natural ally. Trouble is, since this whole thing got going, it’s the Chinese who have been backing the Pakistanis, not us. If one of those U2s gets itself shot down, it might just jeopardize our ability to honestly broker a peace.’

‘Is that what we want to do?’ asked Reichhardt. ‘Honestly broker a peace?’

‘There’s no strategic advantage to be gained by letting a war go ahead. Bill.’

Reichhardt nodded slowly and studied the cover of the report in front of him, tapping at it with the point of his mechanical pencil, until the dots began to add up to a whole constellation.

‘Alvin? You were about to add a however, I think,’ he prompted the air force man.

‘However, when it comes to high-quality photography, there’s nothing else that can do the job quite as well as the U2. If we were to make sure that we only launched a few missions, when the weather was at its very best, say when the recon area was less than twenty-five percent overcast, then I’d be a lot more confident of getting an early result.’

‘They’ll get a better shot of the ground,’ grumbled Perrins. ‘But so will the local surface-to-air missile batteries.’

‘Can’t be helped,’ snapped Reichhardt. Glancing over at Perrins, he added, ‘I hear what you say, Brian, but in the short term I really don’t see we have any choice but to take the risk.’

‘It’s your call. Bill,’ shrugged Perrins.

‘Alvin? I want those U2s launched right away.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Codename—’ Reichhardt bounced the pencil against his teeth. ‘Anyone? I’d rather not have to have a computer-generated codename. They’re so damned nonsensical that I can never remember them.’

‘How about Icarus?’ said Perrins.

‘I think not,’ laughed Reichhardt. ‘I mean, wouldn’t that just be tempting fate?’

Perrins smiled back, affecting innocence.

‘We don’t want our wings to melt. No, we’ll call it Bellerophon. That’s B-E-L–L-E-R-O-P-H-O-N.’ He chuckled again and then added: ‘Look it up if you don’t know what it means, Bryan. Bellerophon flew to heaven on Pegasus.’ He laughed again, with smug satisfaction. ‘Benefits of a Harvard education.’

Perrins, who was a Yale man, nodded silently and was about to point out that Zeus had sent a gadfly to sting the horse and Bellerophon was thrown, but he checked himself, deciding that it could wait until the next meeting. If the U2s did succeed in uncovering something, then no one would care about the codename anyway. But if the U2s drew a blank, then he could remind Reichhardt of the story behind the name, as if he had only just remembered it. Childish, but enjoyable. In the intelligence game, you had your fun where you could. Especially where the Pentagon was concerned.

Three

Across the Bay Bridge, on Interstate 80 out of San Francisco, the East Bay area comprised Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, with Oakland and Berkeley the two most likely destinations for a traveller. Although the two cities were virtually contiguous, something less tangible than a line of foothills separated blue-collar Oakland, a busy port, from its wealthier and more northerly neighbour. Berkeley was a student town, its hills dominated by the University of California. A few more enlightened people regarded Berkeley as the most intellectually important place west of Chicago, and the Athens of the Pacific Coast. But for most Americans — certainly those who remembered the peace movements of the late sixties and early seventies — Berkeley was still a byword for die-hard radicalism. Drugs, sit-ins, and tear gas over People’s Park.

The reality was different. Almost three decades after the university had witnessed the largest mass arrest in California’s history, Berkeley had a more conservative tilt. There were still plenty of activists and pamphleteers abroad on Sproul Plaza, just outside Sather Gate, which marked the entrance to the oldest part of the campus. But in the eyes of Dr. Stella Swift, Berkeley was a small college town with all the vices and virtues of a small college town. And there was little of what was considered radical in Berkeley that would have impressed the really left-wing types she had mixed with as the only child of two of socialism’s leading lights, first in Australia and later in England. Swift’s father, Tom, professor of philosophy at Melbourne University, Australia, and then at Cambridge, was a highly influential writer and thinker, while her mother, Judith, a successful artist, was the daughter of Max Bergmann, one of the founders of the so-called Frankfurt School of Libertarian Marxism. Before going up to Oxford to take a degree in human biology. Swift had met everyone who was anyone in international socialism and, finding herself bored by her parents’ world, rejected it, just as one of the young pamphleteers she could now see on Sproul Plaza protesting American foreign policy in the Middle East might have rejected the conservative values of his own parents.

Crossing Sproul Plaza, Swift reflected that being a foreigner and, therefore, someone who was unable to vote meant that she could more easily ignore politics and concentrate on her research and teaching. It was one of the reasons she had elected to do her Ph.D. in paleoanthropology at Berkeley in the first place.

Swift spent most of her working life in the southeastern corner of the campus, in Kroeber Hall. Entering the building, she made her way up to the first floor and along to one of the lecture theatres where several dozen freshman students were already awaiting her arrival.

Placing her briefcase on the table, she regarded one of her students, an outsized jock called Todd who was making a show of reading a copy of Penthouse, with disdain.

‘What’s that you’re reading, Todd?’ said Swift, coming around the table. ‘Catching up on a little human biology? Good idea, because from what I hear, it’s your weakest subject by far.’

One of Todd’s male friends guffawed loudly and elbowed him in the ribs. Taking advantage of his momentary distraction. Swift snatched the magazine out of Todd’s banana-sized fingers and turned the pages thoughtfully.

Todd’s friend elbowed him again, almost as if he was egging him on to do something.

‘Actually,’ grinned Todd, ‘there was someone in there who reminded me of you. Dr. Swift.’

‘Is that so?’ Swift said coolly. ‘Which page?’

‘Page thirty-two.’

‘Ill say one thing for you, Todd,’ she remarked, turning the pages. ‘You’re a brave man bringing Penthouse onto this campus. I hope someone’s read you your Miranda.’

‘My what?’

‘After the U.S. Supreme Court Case that established guidelines for the protection of the arrested individual.’

‘He’s certainly arrested,’ chuckled Todd’s elbowing neighbour.

Swift found the page and gave her supposed look-alike her candid attention.

‘So?’ said Todd. ‘What do you think?’

The girl in the photo spread was tall and green-eyed with a big head of red hair. Her nose was long but distinguished, and her mouth wide and sensual. She had the same generously proportioned figure, although Swift thought her own legs were better. In spite of the pose. Swift perceived an undeniable resemblance.

‘So she reminds you of me, does she, Todd?’

‘Some.’

Swift tossed the magazine back at him and, turning back to the blackboard, found a stick of chalk and started to write in large capital letters. When she had finished, she pointed at the word on the board and said, ‘That’s what you remind me of, Todd.’

Frowning, Todd read the word aloud with some difficulty.

‘Ancathocephalus,’ he said. ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘I’m glad you asked me, Todd,’ smiled Swift. ‘Ancathocephalus is a common parasite found in fish. A spiny-headed worm with which you happen to share one unusual physical characteristic.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Its reproductive organs are much bigger than its brain.’

Todd smiled uneasily as the rest of the class started to laugh.

Swift waited for their laughter to deliver their attention. There were times when teaching was quite tribal. When, to maintain your contractual dominance, you had to accept a challenge and defeat your rival in front of the whole social group. She rather enjoyed these occasional trials of strength with young males like Todd. Confident that she had their full attention now. Swift decided to adapt the beginning of her lecture to improvise a segue from her joke about ancathocephalus.

‘Despite what Todd might believe,’ she said, ‘human sex organs do not exist in isolation. Their evolution is inextricably mixed up with the way human females give birth, the size of human brains, and our tool-making skills. And our idiosyncratic reproductive behaviour — even when it’s as unusual as the kind of sexual behaviour exhibited by Todd, which reduces less dominant males to the status of mere spectators in the whole reproductive process — is as important as our larger brains in attempting to explain the different evolutionary fate of man and apes.

‘Now, I say, ‘attempting to explain’ because the origin of modern humans. Homo sapiens, people like you and me, is a vexed question among paleoanthropologists like myself, and the evidence is, quite literally, fragmentary. These fragments might be likened to the pieces of a jigsaw, except that it’s not even as if there is only one puzzle. There are many puzzles and lots of jigsaw pieces and they’re all muddled up.

‘For instance, we don’t really have an answer to why our brains should be as big as they are, any more than we know why the human penis should be bigger than a gorilla’s. Yes, even your penis, Todd. And if the human penis is larger than a gorilla’s, why should human testes be smaller than those of a chimpanzee? Did this come about simply as a corollary of the chimpanzee’s greater reproductive activity? Or did man develop his smaller testes in order to facilitate bipedalism?’

Swift sat down on the edge of her table and shrugged.

‘There are plenty of theories, but the honest answer is that we just don’t know. No more do we really know which came first: the bipedal ape or the brainy ape. What was it about that early environment that demanded that a certain kind of ape should have a significantly expanded brain? Remember, brain size is not necessarily related to intelligence. For example, take the brain weights of two famous poets. Walt Whitman’s brain weighed just one and quarter kilos, while Byron’s brain weighed two and one-third kilos, almost twice as much. But does this mean that Byron was twice as good a poet as Whitman? Of course not.

‘And yet there would be no point in us having a brain that’s about four times as large as that of a chimpanzee if there were not significant benefits to be enjoyed from it. After all, the brain requires a great deal of energy from your body to maintain it. Despite the fact that it constitutes only two percent of your body bulk, the human brain needs an incredible twenty percent of your body’s available energy. Man’s extra brain power evolved for a reason, but quite what the reason was is frankly anyone’s guess.

‘It’s not as if the great apes were a particularly successful group of primates when you compare them with their closest relatives, the Cercopithecoids, or Old World Monkeys. Because in comparison with them, the story of apes is really one of declining diversity. The fossil record suggests that apes were already in decline by the middle Miocene period, some ten to fifteen million years ago, with monkeys more prevalent and many times more diverse.

‘If we were able to put aside the knowledge of our simian status and, at the same time, we were able to rent Michael J. Fox’s Delorean-shaped time machine and travel back in time some five or six million years, to the middle Pliocene epoch, we would discover that monkeys were the planet’s dominant primate. After all, there were so many of them. We might even think that they were the better bet as far as inheriting the earth was concerned, and that their larger, slower, knuckle-walking, brachiating cousins represented a bit of an evolutionary dead-end.

‘But then, if we could return to our time-travelling Delorean and go forward by another few hundred thousand years — just how far we would have to go is also a matter of considerable disagreement among paleoanthropologists — we should notice how one particular bipedal ape seemed to be showing considerable evolutionary promise and might be worthy of careful monitoring.

‘The question why this one small branch of a numerically unsuccessful species should suddenly develop in such a spectacular way is something that continues to puzzle scientists, and surely, there is no subject of greater interest to us. But the question assumes even greater pertinence the more one comes to appreciate just how much of an ape we really are. Not just Todd. But all of us.

‘Some of you will perhaps recall that in 1540, Copernicus published the results of his astronomical observations that overthrew forever the traditional Ptolemaic view of the universe, in which the sun and the stars revolved around planet Earth. With good reason, you might think it strange that it was another four hundred years before paleoanthropology was similarly able to overthrow the prevailing orthodoxy that saw man as the inevitable and ultimate product of evolution on Earth. We now know that it is wrong to see evolution as a constant progression, like some inexorable assembly line that results in the Ultimate Being — man himself. Nature is not so clear-cut. And the sooner you are all able to empty your minds of this myth of evolutionary progress that sees the ape as an inferior being left behind by a pushy cousin striving toward its own Nietzschean destiny, the sooner you can call yourselves proper paleoanthropologists. To this end, I want to spend the rest of our time considering our ape status.

‘Back in 1962, Tarzan was being played not by Johnny Weissmuller but by Jock Mahoney. I’m not sure who took the part of Cheetah, his faithful chimpanzee friend, but suffice it to say that there was not a lot to choose between them when it came to acting. Either way, one was still able to suspend belief and accept the continued validity of the Edgar Rice Burroughs story line, that man and ape were so close that a man might be brought up among apes and indeed, upon growing to manhood, come to dominate them.

‘Now around the same time, a scientist named Morris Goodman picked up on something that people had more or less forgotten: the discovery by George Nuttall, a professor of biology at the University of Cambridge, that the chemistry of blood proteins might be used to determine the genetic relatedness between higher primates. Using Nuttall’s approach on blood-serum proteins, Goodman discovered that the antigens of man and chimp are practically identical. At the time, everyone — with the possible exceptions of Tarzan and Cheetah — believed that a chimp had more in common with a gorilla than with a man. But Goodman proved that this was simply not the case.

‘Since then, using techniques vastly superior to those of Goodman, molecular anthropologists — most notably Vince Sarich and Allan Wilson of this university — have been able to attach numerical values to Goodman’s astounding discovery.’

Swift sipped a glass of water and then explained how, using albumin, one of the proteins commonly found in blood, it was possible to measure differences of as little as one amino acid in a hundred and, in effect, how it was possible to establish a precise difference in terms of DNA between one species and another.

‘The numbers are quite impressive,’ she said. ‘And in a way, they’re also quite shocking. Whereas the DNA between two species of frog can differ by as much as eight percent, the DNA difference between a man and a chimp is only one-point-six percent. One-point-six percent!’

She wrote the number on the blackboard and then paused in order to allow the statistic to sink into her students’ minds. She shook her head as if she was still impressed by it herself. She was.

‘You know, that is less than the DNA difference between two species of gibbon, between a horse and a zebra, between a dog and a fox and, most important of all, between a chimpanzee and a gorilla. In other words we have more in common with a chimp than he does with a gorilla.

‘One-point-six percent is not much of a difference to account for Aristotle, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart, Wagner, Picasso, and Einstein. But what they achieved is perhaps even more remarkable when you look at it the other way. Maybe you remember Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s suggestion that if an infinite number of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum. But the fact is that every one of those books in the British Museum was written by a man who shares ninety-eight-point-four percent of his genetic makeup with a chimpanzee.

‘Jared Diamond, who is a professor of physiology at this university, has argued the case for man as the third chimpanzee. Founding his thesis on a school of taxonomy called cladistics, which says that the classification of living things should be objective and uniform and based on genetic distance or lines of divergence. Diamond argues that chimps, gorillas, and man all belong within the same genus. And he says, because our genus name Homo came first, that this should take zoological priority. This has the anthropocentric result that we must now think of not one but four species of the genus Homo on earth today: the common chimpanzee, the pygmy chimpanzee, man himself, and — slightly more distinct — the gorilla.

‘Now that’s not a bad idea at all, especially when you consider how the first specimens of ape got their names. It’s said that the word chimpanzee was taken from a Portuguese-Angolan word meaning ‘mock man’. Orangutan is Malay for ‘man of the woods’. Also, while the word gorilla is Greek, it may in turn also derive from another African word meaning ‘wild man’. Maybe it’s only these Latin handles that have made us forget who and what these creatures are. Think about it.

‘Four different kinds of man, when previously we thought there was only one. So much for the question, asked by astronomers and cosmologists everywhere: Are we alone? Clearly the answer must be, no — we’re not alone. We never have been.

‘It’s possible that some of you will be aware of how, in an effort to protect the dwindling populations of gorillas and chimpanzees from poachers, a number of African countries have taken Professor Diamond’s arguments on board, and are changing their laws on homicide so as to include these new species of the genus Homo. In these countries, killing a gorilla will soon be classed as murder and the perpetrator punished with the full severity of the law. Highly commendable, yes. But it’s worth bearing in mind that Homo sapiens is not the only species of Homo that engages in mass murder of its own kind. Jane Goodall has described how, over a period of years, she observed one group of chimpanzees being systematically exterminated by another. Goodall ascribed the fact that the extermination took so long due only to the lack of efficient killing tools of the kind that Homo sapiens excels in manufacturing. Dian Fossey’s work with gorillas goes a long way to support the suggestion that the average ape — especially infant apes — stands as good a chance of being murdered by another of its kind as the average American.

‘As I just said, it’s tools that make man the most efficient killer on the planet. But which came first, brain size or tools? Now, you might think that brain size would be a prerequisite for the manufacture of efficient tools. However, the fossil record shows that there is no such clear corollary. It might surprise you to know that forty thousand years ago. Neanderthal man possessed a brain that was larger than that of a modem human, and yet his tools show no great sophistication. Even so, I feel that Neanderthal’s larger brain size — about three percent larger than our own brains — ought to scotch any prejudices that because he had a recessive cranium. Neanderthal was somehow stupid. But quite what all his extra brain power was for, nobody really knows.

‘Whatever caused the conventionally held split between man and ape — what we like to term the Great Leap Forward — be it brain power or tool making, the reason must have occurred in only one-point-six percent of our genes. Perhaps you’d like to consider what that reason might be. Certainly whatever theories you come up with, they will have no more or less validity than what anyone else has devised so far. As you’ll all soon discover for yourselves, I hope, there’s little certainty in the world of paleoanthropology. Indeed, although we call it one of the natural sciences, there’s very little that’s scientific about it. Empirical method plays very little part in what we do...’

Swift glanced at her watch as a sixty-one-bell carillon rang out from the Campanile on Sproul Plaza. Three times a day it was the scene of a hand-played, ten-minute concert. This one marked midday and the end of her lecture. Her students were already standing up and putting away their notebooks and pens. ‘Okay,’ she said, raising her voice above the growing din, ‘we’d better leave it there. Just remember what Matt Cartmill of Duke University once said. He said that all sciences are odd in some way, but paleoanthropology is one of the oddest.’

‘That’s for sure,’ grumbled Todd. ‘Man, I was just getting used to the idea of being an ape.’

‘I can’t imagine that would take very long,’ said one of the female students pointedly. ‘I’ve seen you eat, Todd.’

Todd grinned good-naturedly.

‘But four different kinds of men?’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I can see how that might be good news for one of you. Maybe now you can get yourselves laid. But if you ask me, it’s kind of worrying. Think about it. All those chimps and gorillas and zoos? I mean, suppose they find out they’re not animals at all? Suppose they read the Constitution? Then we’ll really be in trouble.’

‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.’

Almost as soon as she had read them, as a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, Alexander Pope’s lines became Swift’s motto and her whole philosophy of life. It seemed to her that she had always been interested in human origins, and a precociously early interest in sex and the facts of human reproduction was soon replaced by a rather more fundamental quest — to discover her own genetic heritage.

Yet there had occurred one particular moment of revelation when she had realized that she wanted to devote her life to ‘the proper study of mankind.’ It was perhaps appropriate that the moment should itself have been connected to a scene of symbolic revelation. When, with exquisite caution, the ape touched the monolith in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey and was infected with the tool/weapon-making facility, he also touched Swift’s youthful imagination. This was the moment when, with a tumultuous fanfare of Nietzschean trumpets. Swift had perceived her way forward in life.

Now, years after the start of her own intellectual odyssey, the riddle of man’s Great Leap Forward — the genetic gift that had made Homo sapiens so special — was no less adamantine a mystery than Kubrick’s black and brooding monolith. And fundamentally, the mystery remained exactly that.

The divergent period between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had occurred only two hundred thousand years before — one-thirtieth of the time taken to separate apes and humans — with less than one-half of a percentage difference in their respective genomes, and yet Neanderthals had failed where Homo sapiens had succeeded.

Why?

There was not the least clue to chip the hard and ebony granite of this mystery.

The prevailing explanation of the Neanderthal/Homo sapiens split — that modern man had developed the evolutionary advantage of language (paleoanthropology no longer placed emphasis on man the tool-making killer ape that had so appealed to Stanley Kubrick) — led to an even greater mystery.

What was the peculiar anatomical development that Neanderthals had failed to produce that had resulted in modern man’s capacity for meaningful speech?

It was a steep walk home up Euclid Avenue.

Like many of the homes in the Northside area of Berkeley, a quiet leafy neighbourhood popular with professionals and academics. Swift’s house was a half-timbered chalet that seemed to have been sculpted from the wooden landscape. The house was expensive, and it was her mother’s great bronzes, fetching big prices in the London and Manhattan salesrooms, that had paid for it.

Back in her airy, plant-filled study, with its book-lined gallery and her baby-grand piano. Swift unplugged the telephone and stretched out on the sofa to smoke a soothing cigarette. She was an infrequent smoker, using tobacco almost medicinally, seeking a tranquilizing effect. She took only a couple of deep drags from the Marlboro she held between fingers so heavily ringed with gold they looked like the keys on a saxophone and then stubbed it out. She was still considering how to spend what remained of the afternoon when she dozed off...

Awakening with a start. Swift glanced at her watch.

It was five o’clock.

So much for the afternoon.

The doorbell buzzed several times, like an angry wasp, as if someone had been pressing for a while. Who could it be? One of her students? One of her colleagues, perhaps? Her neighbour come to complain about her late-night piano playing?

‘Shit.’

Swift swung her long legs off the sofa and crossed the polished ash floor to press the intercom button.

‘Who is it?’ she sighed, scowling.

‘Jack,’ said the voice.

‘Jack,’ she repeated dumbly. ‘Jack who?’

‘Jesus, Swift. How many Jacks do you know? Jack Furness, of course.’

‘Jack?’

Swift screamed with delight and stabbed the button to open the front door. Pausing only to check her appearance in the heavy gilt mirror that hung in the hallway, she ran downstairs two steps at a time and flung open the door.

Jack stood on the doorstep, almost at attention, with a large wooden box under his thickly muscled arm, wearing a navy blue polo shirt, a brown tweed sportscoat, and a grin as big and shiny as his watch. He was thinner than she remembered, even a little drawn. It was plain from his weather-beaten face that he had endured considerable hardship on his Himalayan expedition. But she knew very little of the tragedy that had befallen him, beyond a couple of lines on CNN Online and in the San Francisco Chronicle the week before about how the two-man expedition to climb all the major peaks of the Himalayas in one year had ended in disaster when Didier Lauren was killed in an avalanche.

Swift flew into Jack’s arms and hugged him tightly before drawing back to fix him with an accusing eye.

‘Jack,’ she scolded. ‘What if I had been out? Why didn’t you call?’

‘I did. Your phone is unplugged.’

‘I mean, why didn’t you call from Nepal? Or write me a letter? Or, for that matter, an e-mail?’

He shrugged. ‘For a while I didn’t really have much to say to anyone. I guess you heard what happened?’

‘It made the Chronicle,’ she said. ‘But it didn’t say much more than was on the wire. The report just said that Didier was killed in an avalanche and that you had survived.’ She hugged him again and then pulled him into the hallway.

‘Not just Didier,’ he said. ‘There were five Sherpas killed as well.’

‘God, how terrible for you.’

‘That’s what it was — terrible.’

‘I’m glad you’re all right. Jack,’ she said, closing the door.

She led him into her living room, pushed him onto a large, deep sofa, and then fetched him a drink. His favourite — the Macallan.

‘When did you get back?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘Yesterday? And you waited all this time to come and see me?’

‘Actually, it was more like last night. Late last night. And I was beat.’

Jack drained his glass and took a long look at her. She was even better-looking than he had remembered. Her legs were tanned and very shapely. These she crossed as she sat down opposite him on a hard little chair.

‘There’s no one on the scene?’ he said. ‘I mean tonight.’

‘Not tonight, no.’

‘Good. Mind if I get myself a refill?’

‘Help yourself.’

He stood up, wandered over to the drink tray, where he poured himself a larger malt, and then returned to a different position on the sofa, one that seemed to offer a better vantage point from which to enjoy a view of her legs.

‘What, no one at all? I can’t believe that. C’mon, it’s seven or eight months since I saw you last. There must have been someone.’

‘I didn’t say there hadn’t been.’

‘Now I’m getting jealous.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Who, for instance?’

Swift shrugged negligently.

‘If one is discreet — very discreet — there are always the students.’

‘You’re bullshitting me.’

‘Maybe,’ she said and uncrossed her legs, allowing him a brief glimpse of her thighs before tugging at the hem of her skirt.

‘Anyone can see that you’ve been celibate while you’ve been in Nepal,’ she said. ‘Cut it out, will you. Jack? Sharon Stone I am not.’

‘Okay, okay,’ he grinned. ‘Just fooling around.’

‘Don’t. By the way, what’s in the box?’

‘A present.’

‘For me?’

‘Maybe.’

Swift wriggled with excitement.

‘What is it? Something I’ll like?’

Jack shook his head. He knew her too well to tell her about the fossil in the box. He was looking forward to dinner — the first really good dinner he would have eaten in months — to her undivided attention. He had no intention of eating alone while Swift stayed in her laboratory and played Richard Leakey with the skull he had discovered in the Machhapuchhare bergschrund.

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ he said. ‘But dinner first, okay?’

‘Well,’ he said when they finished the dinner she made. ‘That was almost worth the wait. Best damn dinner I’ve eaten in months.’

‘Is the food so bad in Nepal?’ Swift asked.

‘Usually it’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘But because we were a lightweight team and the feasible payloads were critically small, we had to make do with a lot of the same food all the time. Mostly we relied on lightweight assault rations. When we were at base camps the food was better. Buffalo meat. Eggs, dal, goat, and rice. But even then — well, let’s just say it’s the kind of food where only a brave man farts.’

Swift pulled a face.

‘I still can’t understand why you do it,’ she said, ‘why you go climbing at all. What do you get out of it? Some kind of cheap thrill, I guess.’

‘It’s hardly cheap,’ he objected. ‘Considering what can happen. Considering what did happen.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.’

‘No problem. Disapproval sounds flattering coming from you. Swift. Like maybe you actually care what happens to me.’

‘Whatever gave you that idea? Seriously though. Jack. Why do you do it?’

‘Why do I leave home and go see all the wonders of the world? I might just as easily ask you why you stay here in this off-the-wall little city.’

‘I go places,’ she said, bridling. ‘Field trips. Fossil hunting. Last year I went to East Africa. But with you, it’s not just travel, is it? You go there to risk your life. Jack, you’re like a grown man with a new motorcycle. You’re forty, for God’s sake.’

‘You make forty sound old.’

‘Don’t you think it’s time you settled down?’

‘I guess I never found a reason to, yet. Are you making me an offer?’

‘No, of course I’m not,’ she laughed.

‘Then I don’t think it’s time I settled down at all.’

‘So, it’s all my fault, is it?’

‘Sure it is.’

‘You bastard,’ she said, punching him playfully on the shoulder. ‘Maybe you like to climb because of the ape in you?’ she suggested.

‘Maybe. But to answer your question properly, I climb mountains because it’s a passion with a capital P. Suffering, defeat, justice. There’s something almost religious about it. Like your own personal Oberammergau.’ He laughed out loud. ‘Jesus, can you believe the crap I’m coming out with tonight? I’ve had too much to drink.’

But Swift felt he had let something slip that wasn’t just the result of alcohol. Something rare and very personal.

‘No, I really want to know.’

Pausing for a moment. Jack took a deep breath and then spoke again.

‘The Sherpas believe that the Himalayas are holy. The mountains aren’t just named after local heroes or after a supposed similarity with some kind of animal. They mean something religious. For instance, Chomo Lungma, the Tibetan name for Everest, means Land of the Goddess, Mother of the Earth. And Annapurna means Goddess of Bountiful Harvests. These people believe that the mountains are sacred and there are some peaks they actually consider to be inviolable — that it would be blasphemous to climb them. Well, this is how it is for me. The fact of the matter is, I almost believe that myself. You see, it’s the very blasphemy of it, the confrontation with God, the thrown-down challenge to Him that makes me want to do it. To keep doing it. Even to climb the ones I’m not supposed to climb.

‘Maybe, I don’t know... maybe there’s some Freudian explanation for all of that...’ He laughed again. ‘Jesus, stop me, for Pete’s sake. I’m just full of shit tonight. I must sound like I’m back at Oxford.’

‘You never sounded like that when you were at Oxford,’ said Swift. ‘You were very practical and American and you made a secret of your intellectual abilities. You were bright without being pretentious. That was what attracted me.’

He and Swift had always shared an understanding about sex: If there was nobody else on the scene, they slept together. Still, it was best to take nothing for granted. If he could only get her into bed before she saw the fossil.

Swift made coffee and carried it into the lounge on a brass-bound Indian tray Jack had brought her after climbing Dunagiri, a seven-thousand-metre high mountain, in northern India. That had been his first Himalayan peak. Didier’s too. They had climbed it in preparation for their ascent of Changabang the following year. Jack realized with a sense of shock that it was exactly ten years since that. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was getting too old to go mountaineering.

After a long silence Swift leaned across the sofa and touched his cheek with the back of her heavily ringed hand.

‘What are you thinking?’

Jack told her about the tray.

‘I was just wondering who I’m going to partner now that Didier’s gone,’ he added.

Swift moved closer and Jack put his arms around her waist, squeezed her gently, and put his mouth on hers as if he wanted her to breathe life back into him.

Minutes passed. Then Swift drew back and looked closely at him as if reminding herself of what it was she liked about his face.

She hardly hesitated. She stood up, unzipped her skirt, and then dropped it to the floor to reveal, with what Jack considered an impressive lack of panties, the upturned golden divot at the nadir of her belly.

‘I thought you said you weren’t Sharon Stone,’ he said and pressed his face close to her body.

She brushed his hair with her fingers, pleased that he still found her so desirable.

He followed her into the hallway, his eyes fixed on the perfect curves of her bare behind. She mounted the stairs to the bedroom, glancing back teasingly to make sure he was coming after her. It was then she caught sight of the wooden box he had brought with him.

She stopped dead in her tracks.

‘Hey,’ she said. ‘What about my present?’

Turning on the step, she sat down and let him push his head between her legs before gathering his hair in her hands and pulling him away.

‘After,’ he said, bringing a hand up between her legs.

Laughing, she mounted another step to escape his clumsy caresses. ‘Oh no. Tribute first. Then reward.’

‘Can’t it wait?’ groaned Jack.

‘What? So you can change your mind about giving it to me?’ She was delighting in her own childishness. ‘No way. Besides, you do want my full attention in bed, don’t you? I can hardly make love to you properly if my mind is on something else all the time.’

‘You don’t understand. Swift. That’s just the point. That’s exactly what I’m worried about — having your full attention.’

Swift pushed him gently back toward the hallway.

‘You’ve got a lot to learn about female psychology,’ she told him, amused by his obvious discomfiture. ‘You should have left your present in the car.’

‘Damn right,’ he said and shook his head ruefully. ‘But look here. The thing is... this is not the kind of present... it’s not like some Indian tea tray. Or a rug.’

‘That much I can see for myself.’

‘What I mean to say is that it’s something scientific and, as such, well, perhaps now is not the right time.’

‘Now you’ve really got me intrigued,’ she laughed. ‘What is it?’

‘Shit.’ Jack conceded defeat.

He retreated toward the door and collected the wooden box off the floor.

‘You have absolutely no idea how much trouble I had getting this through customs,’ he grumbled.

‘It’s a fossil, isn’t it? Oh, Jack, you’ve brought me a fossil.’

She followed him into the kitchen, where he laid the box on the table and then found a knife with which to pry off the lid. Lifting it off he removed a handful of straw to reveal what she immediately recognized as the cranium of a hominoidean skull.

Swift shivered with excitement.

‘Oh God,’ she said breathlessly. ‘It’s a skull.’

‘Go ahead,’ he urged. ‘Take it out. It won’t break. It’s really quite sturdy.’

‘Wait, wait, wait.’

She ran out of the kitchen and when she came back she was wearing her skirt again.

Jack tried not to look disappointed, and soon her excitement began to feel infectious, and he was keen to see exactly what she would make of his discovery.

Carefully, like a mother picking up her baby for the first time. Swift lifted the skull out of its packing case and stared at it. After a moment or two, she said, ‘Jack, it’s beautiful.’

‘You really think so? There’s a piece of lower jawbone in the box. I found that later. And I also brought you a sample of dirt and rock. To help you date it.’

‘How did you know about that?’ Swift’s eyes never left the skull. ‘About geochronology?’

Jack shrugged. ‘It shouldn’t surprise you. Twenty-five years crawling over rocks. I’ve picked up some geology along the way.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said absently.

He folded his arms and leaned against the plain wooden worktop, enjoying her fascination. After a protracted silence, he grinned and said, ‘You look like Hamlet.’

‘You stare at it long enough and it speaks to you,’ she murmured. ‘Just like poor Yorick.’

‘So what’s the verdict?’

‘The verdict?’

‘Is it interesting?’

‘You spend most of your fossil-hunting life straining your eyes, looking for odd-shaped fragments. You could go round-shouldered and then blind looking for small pieces of petrified bone. Shattered bits of anatomy. A jigsaw puzzle strewn on the ground. Maybe two or three jigsaw puzzles. A few zygomatics. A piece of jawbone. Half a maxilla if you’re really lucky. But this? This is fantastic. Jack. Nearly a whole skull. And virtually undamaged. It’s the sort of find that people like me dream about.’

‘You really think it might be important?’

‘Jack, I’ve never seen a find that’s in as good condition as this is.’

She shook her head as she tried to communicate her excitement, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

‘It’s fabulous. Where did you find it?’

He told her about the avalanche, how it had killed Didier Lauren, and how he had fallen into the bergschrund and found the skull on the floor of a cavern deep inside the mountain. He did not tell her that it had been on Machhapuchhare, not Annapurna, where he had found it. As far as the Nepalese authorities were concerned, the accident had taken place on Annapurna, and the fewer people who knew the truth about what had really happened, the better.

‘Just lying on the floor, you say?’

Jack nodded.

‘Just like the Neanderthal discovery,’ she breathed. ‘That was back in 1856. Quarry workers found a skull on the floor of a cave.’

‘Is this one Neanderthal too?’

‘This? Nothing Like. This is much more interesting. Tell me, how far up the mountain was this cave?’

‘ ’Bout six thousand metres,’ he said evasively. ‘I was damn near entombed there myself. Now are you going to tell me what it is, or am I going to have to wait for your paper in Nature?’

‘Paper?’ Swift’s tone was scathing. ‘I might get a whole book out of this. A whole career, maybe. You know this couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m facing a tenure review.’

She turned the skull in her hands as if it were a crystal ball, but one designed not to foretell the future but to illuminate the past.

‘To start with it’s big, like some kind of giant primate. Do you see these temporal and occipital crests on the front and rear of the cranium? They’re quite reminiscent of Paranthropus robustus — the South African australopithecines. Only this is strange. The sagittal crest is much higher than one would have expected.’

She paused, raising the skull to the strip light on the ceiling to look at its bony interior.

‘As is the cranial cavity. That might suggest a larger brain size. Larger than a gorilla’s, at any rate. But not as large as a man’s.’

She faced the front of the skull, smoothing the thin brow ridge over the eyes with her thumb like a sculptor.

‘The face is short and not at all apelike. While the teeth — again these teeth are not particularly apelike, except for the size.’

Turning the skull upside down, she examined the underside of the exposed upper jaw.

‘Also the dental arcade is parabolic and not U-shaped. Then there’s the enamel on these molars. It looks quite thick. Those two factors alone would persuade me that this is not an ape. Apart from the huge size of the teeth — honestly. Jack, I’ve never seen a specimen with teeth quite as large as these — I might have placed another tick in the box beside Paranthropus robustus. The teeth are certainly similar in shape to those of a robustus: the cheek teeth larger and flatter, while the front teeth, especially these canines, are proportionally smaller. But no robustus had teeth quite so big.’

She paused, frowning as she laid the skull next to the packing box, and squatting down, stared at it along the tabletop.

‘The one set of candidates I can think of is the ramapithecines. One of the best areas for finding ramapithecine fossils is in the Himalayan foothills.’

‘The Siwalik Hills,’ prompted Jack.

‘So far, three sizes of ramapithecines have been found,’ said Swift. ‘My guess would be — and this is just a guess, of course, I’m going to have to do a lot of detective work with this guy before I’m sure — that the teeth would be characteristic of the largest of the ramapithecines. Come to that, the largest ever known hominoid, the Gigantopithecus.’

She fished in the box, took out the piece of jawbone, and then nodded.

‘It’s like I said. The size of these jaws suggests a gigantopithecine, while the position of the cranial crests seems to indicate an australopithecine.’

‘A hybrid of the two perhaps,’ suggested Jack.

Swift was shaking her head.

‘But there’s something I really don’t understand about this skull.’

‘What? What’s the problem?’

‘I don’t know.’ She paused and then added, ‘I guess I’m just a little concerned that this specimen is in extraordinarily good condition for something that must have been around for such a long time.’

‘That’s cause for concern?’ Jack laughed. ‘You are hard to please.’

‘It’s my job to be sceptical. What were the atmospheric conditions like inside this cave?’

Jack shrugged as he transported his mind back to the bergschrund.

‘Well, dry, I guess. The cave — actually it was more of a cavern — well, it was made of limestone and about a hundred metres inside the mountain, at the end of a narrow corridor. Like the entrance to an Egyptian mummy’s tomb. Earth floor.’

‘Any stalagmites? Stalactites?’

‘Not that I could see. But then I’m not sure I really explored the whole cavern. A few icicles out front.’

‘Then would you say that it was quite a sheltered spot?’

‘Very. I spent a comfortable night there. Thanks in no small part to half a bottle of good scotch.’

‘The thing is, you’d expect more petrification.’

‘You would, huh?’

‘Especially around Limestone. Although you say the floor was earthen, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Even so,’ Swift said thoughtfully, ‘I’d have expected the skull to be more stonelike and less like the original bone. Fossilization is a slow metamorphosis and one we still don’t fully understand, but even so, this find should show more obvious signs of mineral invasion.’

Swift shook her head and started to gnaw at her Up.

‘But for my own preliminary observations—’

‘Gigantopithecine with a dash of australopithecine, right?’

‘Right. But for that, I might even go so far as to say—’

She scowled.

‘No, that’s simply impossible.’

‘You’re tired,’ said Jack. ‘You’re tired and you’ve had a good dinner and things will look different in the morning. It’ll make more sense in daylight. You’ll see.’

Jack put his arm around her waist.

‘C’mon. Let’s go to bed.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said, yawning loudly. ‘I have drunk a bit too much.’

She followed him to the kitchen door. Before she switched out the light, she glanced at the skull one more time and laughed at the absurdity of what she had just been thinking.

The absurdity of thinking that possibly the best gigantopithecine fossil ever found didn’t look like a fossil at all.

Four

Swift hardly slept, although this had less to do with Jack than with the skull. Highly regarded by her colleagues and popular with the students, she knew she was an excellent teacher, but she was thirty-six years old and had published little. Within the faculty of paleoanthropology she faced tenure review, and in order to pass — to have her teaching contract renewed — she would have to write a paper of substance. Better yet, a book. Jack’s fossil seemed to provide her with something worth writing about.

At six o’clock, she slipped quietly out of bed, dressed quickly, and went downstairs with one thought on her mind. Leaving a note for Jack, who was still sleeping, she returned the skull to its box, carried it out to her car, and then drove straight to the university.

Things were quiet on campus. It was too early for the prophets, musicians, craft sellers, pushers, radicals, artists, and assorted academics who were normally found along Telegraph Avenue.

As soon as she was in her laboratory she closed the door and locked it. Only then did she remove the skull and the jaw fragment from the box and lay them carefully on a lab table that was specially padded to protect the sometimes fragile fossils that were examined upon it.

She measured the skull carefully with callipers and micrometer, then, laying some rulers on the table as a guide to size, she set up a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 5 with a hundred-millimeter lens, a bounce Speedlite flash, and a ten-metre remote switch cable. When the camera was loaded with Fuji Reala, she started to take her photographs, shooting two rolls of thirty exposures each just to be on the safe side.

Only when she was satisfied that she had a good record of the basic dimensions and appearance of the skull did Swift proceed to the next stage of her working plan, the devising of which had kept her awake for most of the night.

She painted the skull with Bedacryl, a kind of glue that was usually used to harden fragile fossils before removing them from the ground. The skull was as solid an artifact as she had ever handled, but Swift preferred to err on the side of extreme caution. Even solid bone would break, if dropped from the height of a table or a workbench.

While the Bedacryl dried she set about heating gypsum to make a plaster of Paris cast. More sophisticated resin and stereolithographic casts could be made later on, but right now Swift wanted a working copy she could handle and carry around the campus in complete safety. As soon as the cast was made. Swift placed the original skull and jawbone in her laboratory safe. She planned to transfer them later to the university vault where other valuable specimens were stored.

Swift had also devoted some thought to the securing of her intellectual property in the specimen. If, as she suspected it would, the skull proved to be an important find, it was essential that she maintain complete confidentiality in her work until she was good and ready to publish. But it was also obvious that she could not work in a vacuum and that she would need the help of her colleagues on campus if she was going to classify it properly.

This was her main area of concern.

The paleoanthropological world was a contentious one, in which the discovery of a new fossil often made one person’s reputation at the expense of someone else’s. Lacking a properly empirical method and populated by people who frequently lacked objectivity, it was a jealous science driven not by experiment but by theory. And there were plenty of theories. Sometimes it seemed to Swift that the public’s appetite for popular science meant that there was a new theory about Man and his origins every week. But fossils were at a premium, and it was generally accepted that it was upon these that the greatest paleoanthropological reputations had been built. People remembered Dart, Johanson, Leakey, because they made tangible discoveries. Hardly anyone remembered the theorists like Le Gros Clark, or Clark Howell.

Sometimes the fossils were made to fit the theories instead of the other way around and it was not uncommon for people to buy fossils from a competitor’s sources with the express purpose of demolishing a contradictory theory. Theft was less common but not unknown. And the world of paleoanthropology as a whole was still recovering from the revelation in 1955 that the Piltdown skull discovered in 1912 at a gravel pit in southern England had been a blatant forgery.

In 1912 Charles Dawson, an amateur archaeologist, had discovered an apelike skull in a gravel pit near the village of Piltdown, in Sussex. His discovery appeared to indicate a being of considerable antiquity that also conveniently dovetailed with the prevailing view of a human ancestor equipped with considerable intellectual powers. But in reality Piltdown Man had been a neat combination of human cranium and an orangutan’s jaw.

The one absolute certainty in this uncertain, riven science was that any significant new find would probably occasion another bitter rivalry.

It was perhaps hardly surprising that the first person Swift telephoned to discuss her find was a lawyer.

Harztmark, Fry, and Palmer were her mother’s lawyers in London, administering a trust set up in Swift’s name and paying her a generous annual income through their San Francisco office. Swift had met Gil McLellan, the partner handling her money, only once, but it was always Gil she called on the rare occasions that she needed legal advice.

‘Stella,’ said McLellan when his secretary had put Swift through. ‘Kind of early in the day for a citizen of Bezerkeley. It’s not even nine o’clock. I had no idea that anthropology demanded such regular office hours.’

His hollow laughter sounded as if he could just as easily have been coughing.

That was one of the irritating things about lawyers: They always assumed that everyone else was a stranger to early office hours and hard work.

‘Listen, Gil,’ she said, quickly getting down to business before he could get around to asking her out to dinner, as he usually did. ‘I need your help.’

‘That’s what I’m here for.’

‘I want you to draw up a confidentiality contract. You know the kind of thing: The signatory agrees not to discuss or write about something, nor to claim any intellectual property in it, without my written agreement; and if anyone is proved to have used the same confidential information directly or indirectly obtained from me, without my consent, express or implied, he or she will be guilty of an infringement of my rights that is actionable in a court of law.’

Gil chuckled.

‘Are you sure you need my help? Sounds like you’ve got it pretty well covered there. You know, maybe you should have read law instead of anthropology, Stella.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘Sure. But let me ask you a couple of questions. First of all, what exactly is it we’re talking about here?’

‘A fossil. An important fossil.’ She paused for a moment. ‘We’d better call it a skull so that there’s no confusion.’

‘My second question relates to the quality of confidence,’ said Gil. ‘Information cannot be confidential if it is public knowledge, okay?’

‘Nobody knows about this fossil except me and the person who discovered it. This is not public knowledge.’

‘Okay, no problem. I’ll draw something up and fax you a draft in half an hour. That’ll keep you going until I can get you something on letterhead. That always scares the shit out of people.’

‘Gil, you’re a star.’

‘Give me your fax number so I won’t have to look it up. Call me back if there’s a problem. Call me back anyway. Instead of charging you for this, I’ll let you take me to lunch.’

As soon as the motorcycle courier delivered the final copy of the legal document that Gil McLellan had drafted. Swift went to see Byron Cody.

The earth sciences building was home to the university’s faculty of zoology, among others, and retained some scintilla of the Hellenic ideal with its mock colonnades. But with its fortress shape, square keep-style towers, and central courtyard, the building reminded her more of a central bank or some federal government institution.

She found Berkeley’s world-famous primatologist in a different office from the one he normally occupied. It was a room of pleasing solidity that ran almost half the length of the building and housed a collection of immaculate, leather-bound books that appeared to be rarely read.

‘My own office is being redecorated,’ Cody explained after he had kissed her on both cheeks. ‘I believe this belongs to some botanist who’s up the Amazon right now.’

She sat down and declined the offer of coffee from the machine in the hall.

‘The reviews of your new book have been good,’ she said. ‘I’m looking forward to reading it.’

‘I never believe my good reviews,’ he told her. ‘It’s only the bad ones I take any notice of. I find I can discount any amount of praise, even when it’s wholly accurate. Criticism is like air travel: When things are going well, you pay it little attention, but when you crash you just have to take it seriously.’

Swift smiled. Cody was one of her favourite people.

‘You’re lucky you caught me. I’m supposed to go and do a signing at Moe’s,’ he said. ‘Although I can’t see why my signature should make a difference to anything except a check. Really it’s not for another hour. I thought I’d do some book shopping first. But I’d much rather sit and talk with you. Swift.’

‘Actually, there’s something of mine I’d like you to read and sign,’ she said.

‘Grant proposal, is it? It’ll be a pleasure,’ he said, tossing McLellan’s letter on top of a precarious-looking pile of other papers.

‘I was hoping you might glance over it right now,’ she said. ‘It’s not a grant application. It’s more of a legal document.’

‘Now I’m really intrigued.’

Byron Cody read her document with a mixture of hurt and amusement. When he had read it once, Cody, a slow, careful man with a suitably Darwin-sized beard, read the confidentiality contract again and then sighed loudly.

‘What’s this all about. Swift?’ he asked, removing his half-moon reading glasses and cleaning them nervously with the end of his blue woollen tie.

‘As I said,’ she explained, ‘it’s a standard confidentiality agreement. It just makes what I want to tell you a privileged communication. Like a client and her lawyer, that’s all.’

‘And you’re the client?’

Swift nodded.

‘I’ll say one thing for you, Swift. You’re nothing if not thorough. This is the first time someone ever asked me to do this. For most people, intelligence is merely a blessing. But with you it’s a moral duty.’

‘Then let me come straight to the point. I’ve found something that might turn out to be really significant. If it is, I want to keep the lid on it for as long as possible. The last thing I want is for someone at IHO to put out a paper before I do.’

‘Is that a possibility?’

Swift shrugged.

‘Don Johanson based his new species, Australopithecus afarensis, on trashing some of Mary Leakey’s Kenyan fossils before she’d had a chance to talk about them herself.’

‘But he did discover Lucy.’

Lucy was the name Johanson had originally given to those afarensis fossils he had discovered himself, in Tanzania.

‘Yes, but he still had to demote her fossils in order to promote his own.’

‘Point taken.’ Cody took out his pen but still hesitated to sign the document.

‘Look, Byron, fossils are data. And the naming of a fossil is everything in this business.’

‘Business? Now we’re getting to it. I thought you people were supposed to be scientists.’

‘Science is just business wearing a white coat,’ argued Swift. ‘Trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truths include covering your ass. If Galileo had been a little slower to take up a definite position on the Copernican theory—’

‘Or if he’d had the advice of a good attorney,’ grinned Cody. ‘Okay, okay. I’m convinced. Hurt, but convinced.’ He dashed off his signature and launched the document back across the desktop. ‘Now what’s the big deal?’

‘I want your opinion, as the country’s leading primatologist—’

‘I can resist any amount of flattery except the truth.’

‘—of a hominoid skull that has recently come into my possession.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser.’

Swift opened the wooden packing box, removed the cast of the skull, and waited for Cody to clear a space before placing it on the desk. Then she took a laptop computer out of her shoulder bag and switched it on, ready to note his first impressions.

Cody replaced the half-moons on the end of his nose, then picked up the skull, turning it expertly in both hands like a melon he was testing for ripeness.

‘Nice cast,’ he murmured. ‘Make it yourself?’

‘This morning.’

‘Where’s the original?’

‘Safe enough.’

‘Oops.’ Cody uttered a malicious little laugh. ‘Information only on a need-to-know basis, huh? Not so much James Bond as James Bone. A big fellow, wasn’t he? Look at the size of this cranium.’

Swift started to type.

‘And these enormous jaws. Only my wife has bigger jaws than these. But that’s just exercise rather than anything hereditary. Talking and eating, mainly. Wow, I’ve never seen teeth as big as this on a fossil. They’re much larger than a gorilla’s. And I should know. I still have the bite radius to prove it.’

‘How much larger, Byron?’

‘Maybe twice as large? Yeah. Why not? And look at these cranial crests. They’re very unusual. The occipital crest — now that’s smaller than a gorilla’s. However, the size of these teeth would seem to require extremely powerful masticatory muscles, in which case most of them would surely have to be attached to the top of the head, to the sagittal crest. And that would of course increase the height of the head. Quite a bit, come to think of it. Maybe one and a half times the height of a gorilla’s head, at the very least? This is really something quite extraordinary, isn’t it? You know, from the size and position of this occipital crest, one might almost assume that the owner of this skull kept its head rather more upright than a gorilla. That might even suggest bipedalism. An apelike creature that walked on two legs instead of a conventional knuckle-walker. I’m beginning to see the need for your legal acquaintance. Jesus, Swift. Where did you get this?’

‘At the moment, I can’t tell you that, Byron. All I can say is that this is not an Old World fossil.’

‘You surprise me. I was just about to suggest it might be australopithecine. Except of course no South African fossil primate was ever so large as this dude. Not even Paranthropus crassidens.’

Swift looked up from the screen of her laptop as Cody stopped speaking.

‘How about a Miocene ape?’ she suggested. ‘One of the ramapithecines, perhaps.’

‘Yes, that’s possible,’ he mused. ‘Gigantopithecus, maybe. The biggest primate ever known. Of course I’ve never seen an actual complete fossil. No one has. There are just those three teeth that von Koenigswald found in a Hong Kong drugstore. The so-called Dragon’s teeth. This could be Gigantopithecus. Goddammit, wouldn’t that be something?’

‘That was my first thought,’ she admitted. ‘But I wanted someone better qualified to come through the same line of reasoning.’

She started to underline some of the observations that Cody had made on her laptop’s screen.

‘The height of the head,’ she said. ‘You thought one point five as high as a gorilla’s.’

‘At least. Maybe fifteen centimetres above the ear. You know, I can imagine a scalp that might look something like a Viking’s helmet. Rather pointy-headed, same as a big silverback gorilla’s, only more so. Much more. And if this is consistent with what we already know about body-size dimorphism in primates and fossil primates, I should say what we have here was almost certainly a male of the species.’

Swift typed Male and then said:

‘Body-size dimorphism in primates is nearly always a corollary of males competing for access to a pool of females, right?’

‘Right. And also of polygamy.’ He weighed the cast in his hands and smiled broadly. ‘Yup. This lucky bastard probably had a whole harem of willing females.’

‘So that’s what turns you on, Byron. And here’s me thinking you were a happily monogamous man.’

‘Me, monogamous? Whatever gave you that idea? I should best describe my own sexuality as Neo-Confucian. Which is to say that I prefer the kind of heterosexual relationship where there exists a benevolent superior, namely myself, and an obedient subordinate to do my every bidding.’

‘Sounds like one of your gorillas,’ she remarked, laughing.

Cody grinned back at her through his patriarchal growth of facial hair. ‘The ape will out, I guess,’ he said. ‘But socially, you know? I think we have much more in common with baboons. The latest research shows that high-ranking females have their pick of the best males, although only at the price of an increased risk of miscarriage. There’s evidence of a similar effect among human females too. Successful career women often find it quite difficult to conceive.’

Wondering if she would ever have a child herself. Swift forced a smile.

‘But,’ she objected, ‘do we get to choose the best males?’

‘I don’t know about the best,’ said Cody. ‘But it has been my experience that a good-looking, intelligent, high-achieving woman like yourself can more or less get whatever the hell she wants.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Swift.

Cody shrugged and then smiled.

‘Signed your damn stupid paper, didn’t I?’

Sometimes it bothered Swift that she belonged to a university that had effectively built every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal.

A quarter of a century before Vincent Sarich and Allan Wilson helped to establish Berkeley at the forefront of paleoanthropology, the university physics department at Le Conte Hall had already guaranteed Berkeley’s place in history when a team of scientists, including the distinguished Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence, met to discuss plans for a new type of bomb.

Lawrence had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1939 for inventing the Cyclotron — a device for accelerating nuclear particles inside a circular magnetic field, a sort of nuclear pump. He had built his machine on a hill above the Berkeley campus, a site now occupied by the Lawrence Hall of Science. Experiments in the Cyclotron had resulted in the discovery of plutonium in 1941; since then, Berkeley scientists had developed other bombs and discovered thirteen other synthetic elements, including berkelium and californium, the antiproton, the antineutron, and Carbon-14.

Developed by Berkeley chemist Willard F. Libby in 1946, Carbon-14 is created in the earth’s upper atmosphere by the bombardment of cosmic particles from outer space that pass into the bodies of animals and plants through the food chain. Since it begins to decay as soon as it is formed, radiocarbon, as it is sometimes known, has proved to be a useful technique for dating the remains of once-living things. It marked the beginning of accurate geochronometry, a specialized field that now includes many even more sophisticated techniques and for which a department at Berkeley was also to be found in the Earth Sciences building.

Professor Stewart Ray Sacher was Berkeley’s outstanding geochronologist. The author of the standard textbook, Stratigraphic Geology and Relative Age Measurement, Sacher was also a highly respected paleontologist and had published several best-selling popular science books to do with the Paleozoic era, most notably Future World: Walcott’s Quarry and the Cambrian Explosion, his Pulitzer Prize-winning analysis of a famous Cambrian biota and its significance in the history of life on earth.

A bulky man, with a shock of untidy brown hair and a soup-strainer of a moustache, Sacher was working in his vast laboratory, surrounded by various configurations of spectrometer and assisted by an attractive-looking female postgraduate student, when Swift caught up with him.

As always, Sacher had a piece of choral music playing on his lab’s powerful sound system, and from time to time he would stop and conduct a phrase or movement he particularly enjoyed. He was in the middle of just such a moment when he caught sight of her in the doorway. Quite unabashed, he said in his strong Brooklyn accent, ‘True hope is swift, and flies with swallow wings.’

He grinned as if pleased with the dexterity of his capacity for quotation and then hugged her warmly. ‘How are you doin’, sweetheart?’

Swift kissed him on both cheeks and, noticing his trousers and vest, remarked on his continuing fondness for wearing leather.

‘I’m a biker, what do you expect?’

‘Sometimes I think it’s rather more fetishistic than that,’ she said, teasing him.

‘I would like to present an alternative explanation of what these so-called fetishisms mean,’ he declared. ‘If all our efforts, intellectual and sexual, represent a striving for godhead, then God has surely given all of us our sexual quirks and kinks to frustrate our efforts in this respect. But for panties and shoes and stinking primeval ooze, we would all of us be gods ourselves. What can I do for you, honey?’

‘I’d like to talk to you about a dating problem.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought a good-lookin’ gal like you would have much of a problem.’ He grinned and shook his head. ‘I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve made that lousy joke. Take a seat. Swift, and I’ll be with you in two shakes of a lead isotope.’

He pointed toward a leather swivel positioned in front of a rolltop desk and next to a trolley supporting several stories of stereo equipment.

Swift sat down and glanced over Sacher’s cluttered desktop, searching for the CD case. She recognized the music playing as Haydn’s Creation, only the recording was much better than the one she herself owned — the full-price choice as opposed to the budget. Unable to find it, she leaned back in the chair and, trying to ignore the baseball paraphernalia that covered the wall above and around the desk — Sacher was a dedicated fan of the Oakland Athletics — she let the music wash over her.

There was, she thought, an extra pleasure to be found in classical music when and where you were not expecting to hear it. At the same time, she wondered what a composer who had once remarked that whenever he thought of God it made him feel cheerful would have made of someone like Stewart Ray Sacher. Or, for that matter, herself. Whenever Swift thought of God she tried to imagine a biological predisposition in man to be religious that was like Chomsky’s theory of an innate capacity in human beings to learn language. Her own experience of God had been that He was merely a name to be invoked when you needed something urgently, like an all-night supermarket.

‘You like this?’

Swift opened her emerald green eyes.

‘Haydn? Yes. Of course.’

‘What’s your favourite part?’

She thought for a moment and then said, ‘The Representation of Chaos.’

‘Ooh, that’s dark. Says a lot about you, honey. Me, I like the bit when the worm finally shows up on the scene, but only after the tigers and the sheep have already put in an appearance. In langen Zügen kriecht am Boden das Gewürm. How’s about that for an evolutionary ladder?’

He laughed a heavy smoker’s laugh. Cigarettes were the principal reason his voice seemed to have no more range of modulation than the cawing of a bad-tempered crow — a dry, catarrhal rasp made him sound all the more like Al Pacino. His sentences were not so much spoken as expectorated.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘somehow I don’t think Franz Joseph Haydn would have accepted the idea that we’re all descended from a few simple land invertebrates.’

‘I was thinking the same thing.’

‘So what brings you to my time machine? Got something interesting for me to date?’

Swift opened her shoulder bag and handed him another copy of the confidentiality contract.

‘I’m sorry about this, Ray,’ she said. ‘Really I am. But I think you’ll understand the need for caution when you see what I’ve got. You can’t be too careful these days.’

‘This must mean you’ve found something important,’ he said, interrupting her, and without another word he signed the paper and returned it.

‘Well? Come on. Don’t keep me in suspense, honey. Where is it? Where’s the material?’

Swift glanced around the laboratory for Sacher’s lab assistant.

‘Helen?’ Sacher called to her. ‘D’you wanna take those books back to the Bancroft?’

‘Sure,’ she said, and having collected a pile of library books off the floor, went out the door, smiling a wry smile at her boss. ‘No problem.’

‘Ooh, did ya see that smile?’ said Sacher when Helen had gone. ‘I bet she thinks that you and I have a thing goin’. You know, this is going to be very good for my reputation.’ He laughed and took out a packet of Winston Select. ‘Thank God she’s gone. Now I can have a cigarette.’

‘You shouldn’t smoke so much,’ said Swift.

‘Et tu Brute.’

‘I worry about you.’

‘Hey, these must be safe. They advertise in Omni.’

Swift put her hand in her bag. First she took out a small plastic bag containing Furness’s rock and soil samples. Then she unwrapped a length of lint and laid the piece of lower jawbone on the desk.

‘It sure doesn’t look very old,’ Sacher grumbled, picking up the bone in his sepia-coloured fingers.

‘It does and it doesn’t. You’re right. It’s hardly fossilized at all, and yet it ought to be. According to the existing phylogenetic classification, this piece of jawbone ought to be over a million years old. Even if one discounts the possibility of intrusive burial, this mandible ought to look more obviously rocklike.’

‘Why discount it?’ said Sacher. ‘How did you come by this specimen?’

‘It came from a reliable source.’

‘How reliable? Has this person ever provided you with fossils before?’

‘Never. But he’s not the kind who would work some elaborate hoax, like Charles Dawson and his Piltdown man. Or could work one, for that matter. Dawson went to the trouble of treating the pieces of skull and jawbone to give them a suitable patina of age. If someone really wanted to put one over on me, they would surely have done the same.’ She paused, waiting for him to agree with her. ‘Wouldn’t you think so?’

‘I guess so,’ he admitted. ‘But always let the fossil speak for itself. For the purposes of isotopic dating, what we’re really concerned with is this piece of jawbone. The rock sample is probably more or less irrelevant.’

‘That’s right.’

‘It could be that there are some unusual atmospheric conditions that have prevented any petrification.’

Swift described how Furness had found the specimen in a limestone cave high in the Himalayas.

‘In which case,’ said Sacher, ‘it’s quite possible that for many thousands of years your find was encased in ice.’

‘You mean Like a glacier corpse?’

‘Exactly. We now know that a body is not always crushed by the shearing force of a glacier. Do you remember that glacier corpse they picked out of the ice in the Austrian Alps a few years ago? I believe it was in 1991.’

‘Yes. The Iceman. I remember.’

‘Turned out he was a Neolithic hunter who had died over five thousand years ago. His body tissues, his skin tattoos, even his Reeboks were all perfectly preserved.’

Sacher turned away from Swift to blow out a cloud of smoke.

‘Now as I recall, the Iceman was found at a height of around three thousand metres. Your specimen was found at what kind of height?’

‘Six thousand metres.’

‘Okay, that’s twice as high. So here’s a very early hypothesis. And that’s all it is. Like I say, we’ll let the fossil speak for itself. But suppose the Iceman could have remained preserved for another five thousand years. Suppose also that at twice the height, your specimen could have stayed preserved two or three times as long. Maybe thirty thousand years. Suppose he could have stayed in the ice all that time. Only when the ice melted and the body was finally released did it start to decay, but very slowly. It seems to me that it’s quite possible that your specimen could be at least fifty thousand years old.’

‘That still leaves us about nine hundred fifty thousand years short,’ she objected.

Sacher shrugged.

‘You know my methods, Watson. Data first. Attain the knowledge required and the precision necessary with the least number of analyses. Then we’ll reexamine the theories in the light of what the fossil tells us. That’s the proper scientific method.’

He extinguished his cigarette in an iron pyrite rock sample that served as his ashtray.

‘And what particular method will you choose?’ she asked.

‘Ordinarily I might suggest a cosmogenic method. With the accelerator mass spectrometer we can get a precise age on as little as one milligram of carbon. However, the tooth enamel on this piece of mandible is so good that I think I’ll try ESR.’

‘Electron spin resonance,’ Swift nodded. ‘Where you measure the energy of the electrons trapped in the dental enamel.’

‘Yeah. You obtain a date for the material from the ratio between that and the trapping rate.’

Sacher thought for a moment and then turned off the CD player as he began to wrestle with the choice of dating techniques available to him.

‘On the other hand, in this lab we now have uranium series, or thorium series. I used thorium to date some new Neanderthal specimens they found in Israel last year. Did you know that there were Neanderthals living in Israel as recently as fifty thousand years ago?’

‘And if this does turn out to be older than that?’

‘Anything over one thousand years and we’re stuck with using the rock. But from what you’ve told me I think that it’s going to be of limited use. I’ve never really subscribed to using pieces of rock to date pieces of bone unless they’re actually discovered within a geological stratum.’

‘Whatever you think is best, Ray.’

‘Of course, this is going to take a while.’

‘How long?’

‘I’ll call you when I have something.’

‘As soon as, okay?’

Sacher lit another cigarette.

‘God knows how long we’ve already had to wait. A little longer shouldn’t make a hell of a difference.’

Swift raised an eyebrow.

‘Ray, that’s the third time you’ve mentioned God. What does God have to do with it?’

He shrugged and looked vaguely sheepish.

‘I used to think, nothing at all.’

‘Ray.’ For a moment Swift was too surprised to do anything but open and close her mouth. ‘You’re an atheist.’

Sacher ran a pudgy hand through his thick hair. There was more grey than she remembered. He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively.

‘You’re not going soft on this, are you?’ She frowned.

‘You know, it’s said that amputees commonly experience a phenomenon called phantasmagoria, in which they encounter the feeling that an arm or a leg, even a female breast, is still present following its severing. The presence of this phantom limb, especially the hand or the foot at its periphery, may be most strongly felt for several years after an amputation. It may even itch.

‘Swift? It’s like this. I guess that after a long period of atheism, I’m beginning to find that I have much the same feeling about God. And I’ve more or less come to the conclusion that this is the best evidence of His existence that I’m ever likely to find. Religious experience may indeed represent the only way of verifying this itch, although I rather doubt that there exists any one religion that could accommodate my kind of heterodoxy. You know what I’m saying?’

Swift stood up, kissed him on the cheek once again, and then headed toward the laboratory door.

‘Hey, Swift?’ he said, laughing uncomfortably. ‘Have you got a problem with that?’

She turned on her heel.

‘Only this, Ray. Atheism is like standing up to the Mafia. There’s safety in numbers.’

He made a gun with his forefinger and pointed it at her.

‘Wiseguy,’ he laughed.

‘Call me when you’ve got something.’

‘I’ll call you anyway.’

Five

From his home outside Danville, Jack Furness tried calling Swift a few times at her home, and then at her laboratory on campus, but all he ever heard was the sound of her voice-mail service. Over the course of two or three days he left several messages, and when still she did not return his calls. Jack put her out of his mind and set about preparing for meetings he had arranged with the National Geographic Society and the White Fang Sports Equipment Company, who had jointly sponsored his expedition to the Himalayas.

He was not much bothered by her neglect. He knew Swift too well to take it personally. In a way, he was even glad that she had not called. Not seeing her meant that he was able to devote all of his energies to writing up reports, preparing the expedition accounts, and best of all, developing and printing the many rolls of film he had taken during his six months in Nepal.

Her silence pleased him in another way too. It seemed to suggest that she herself was busy and that the fossil might indeed turn out to have been an important find.

And if it did turn out to be important? What then?

As time passed he began to think that perhaps he had acted a little impulsively in giving the fossil away. It wasn’t that he wanted the thing back. Far from it. Rather, he began to worry about the legalities of what he had done. Having no wish to become embroiled in any legal arguments with his sponsors as to whether the fossil had been his to give away in the first place, he called his lawyer and was reassured to learn that while the Nepalese government might take a dim view of the removal of the artifact without proper permissions, there was nothing in Jack’s sponsorship contract that interfered with his ownership rights in any scientific or archaeological discoveries made during the expedition.

Jack told his lawyer that he had paid American dollars for the only export paperwork there was to be had in Nepal. But at the same time, he decided it would be better simply not to mention the fossil to the people at the National Geographic Society, at least until Swift had a better idea of what the fossil was.

Whenever that would be.

Arriving at Washington’s National Airport with only one bag. Jack could see no reason not to take the metro into town instead of a taxi, and thirty minutes after boarding a blue line train to Metro Center, where he changed onto a red line bound for Dupont Circle, he was checking into the Jefferson Hotel on 16th Street, just around the corner from the Society’s headquarters.

Located on a busy intersection, the Jefferson was a small but elegant hotel and a favourite with politicians and senior public servants. The interior was reminiscent of an early-nineteenth-century house, and many of the rooms were furnished with antiques. Jack had often stayed there and would have chosen the Jefferson even if National Geographic had not agreed to pick up the bill.

It was too late to go anywhere except the mini-bar. So he sat in front of the TV, drinking not one but several whisky miniatures, draining each tiny bottle’s contents as if it had been nothing more potent than antiseptic mouthwash. There was something so ersatz about spirit miniatures, like something you might find in an outsized doll’s house, that he found it hard to take them seriously as containers of real alcohol, almost as if he expected the effect of the spirits to be somehow in proportion to the size of the bottles. It wasn’t and he awoke the following morning with a very adult-size hangover.

Jack met the sponsorship director of White Fang, Chuck Farrell, over a breakfast for which he had no appetite.

‘Good to see you. Jack,’ said Farrell when their breakfast meeting was at last over. ‘Next time you’re coming to town, give me a call. I’ve got some new sticky climbing boots I want you to try. They’re made of a really remarkable new rubber compound that we think is really going to change the face of big-wall climbing in this country. We call it the Brundle Shoe.’ He chuckled. ‘Think about it. Look, take care of yourself, okay? You’re not looking so good right now.’

Jack didn’t doubt it, and when Farrell had gone he decided that with a couple of hours to kill before his meeting with the National Geographic Society, what he needed most was some fresh air. So he went back up to his room, collected his overcoat, and went out to brave a typically cold Washington winter morning.

His footsteps took him south, past the White House, and then east along the Mall. Gradually he began to feel better. But he also began to feel cold. In search of warmth he ducked into the Smithsonian, where it was the very last day of an exhibition entitled ‘Science in America.’ Designed to show the impact of science on the United States, a substantial part of the exhibition was devoted to the Manhattan Project and the development of the first nuclear bomb. This was the most interesting part of the exhibition. Jack had never before seen some of the photographs they had of post-detonation Hiroshima. He wondered how keen the governments of India and Pakistan would be to blow each other up if they could see those pictures.

The news was not good. Several Arab countries appeared to be preparing forces for deployment to Pakistan as an act of Muslim solidarity, while the Indian prime minister had called an emergency meeting with his military leaders, in an ongoing effort to defuse the crisis, the U.S. secretary of state was flying to Islamabad and then New Delhi for the fourth time in as many weeks.

Jack hoped the secretary had a better understanding of the reasons underlying the crisis than he had. Like most Americans he had little idea of why the Indians and Pakistanis should be at each other’s throats again.

Leaving the Smithsonian, Jack took a cab back to his hotel and then walked around the corner to the tall, international modernist building that housed the National Geographic Society.

Back in 1888, when the Society and its famous yellow-bordered magazine were founded, it had been intended that proceeds from the periodical should help to support the Society’s expeditions. But by the late twentieth century, and with almost eleven million readers, most of the Society’s activities were supported by its annual membership dues.

Among scientific organizations, the National Geographic Society was one of the richest and most benevolent. Yet while the creed of the magazine may have been ‘Only what is of a kindly nature is printed about any country or people’, Jack knew better than to assume that the same kindliness would automatically extend to himself in the shape of generous sponsorship. He was well aware that there was stiff competition for the Society’s patronage and that he could not afford to minimize the disaster on Machhapuchhare. Even if he was still sticking to the line that it had taken place on Annapurna.

During his meeting with the representatives of the Society and the magazine, however, he spoke with a degree of candour and self-criticism that surprised even himself. He knew that what had happened had been an accident. He was equally certain that there had been no negligence beyond the obvious risk inherent in any lightweight, Alpine-style ascent of the Himalayan big walls — particularly those, like his own, that scorned the use of oxygen. But in his heart of hearts Jack still held himself responsible for what happened, for no other reason than that the attempt to climb all the major peaks in this hazardous way had been his idea.

When Jack had completed his account of the expedition, the director of sponsorship. Brad Schaffer, nodded solemnly and said’

‘I want to thank you. Jack, for a very full and frank explanation of what happened. I’m sure I speak for us all when I say that we appreciate your coming here so soon after this tragedy and giving us the complete picture. I’m sure that it will greatly accelerate the payment of compensation to the family of Didier Lauren. Is that not so. Miss Harman?’

Miss Harman, an attractive, soberly suited brunette from the insurance company, looked up from Jack’s accident report and cleared her throat.

‘Yes,’ she said vaguely, as if still troubled by something. ‘I expect you’re right.’ Glancing back at the report, she added, ‘However, I do have just a couple of questions relating to what happened.’

‘Oh?’ Jack tried to sound unperturbed in the face of her cool scrutiny.

‘Relating to funeral expenses and compensations already paid out to your Sherpas and their families, Mister Furness.’

‘Is that right?’

In order to keep his illegal ascent of Machhapuchhare a secret. Jack had been obliged to handle the costs of five Sherpa funerals.

‘Yes.’

Jack rolled the trackball of his laptop computer and found the items in the accounts to which she was referring.

‘Fire away,’ he said.

‘You paid ten thousand dollars in compensation to the families of your Sherpas, at two thousand dollars each. And you also paid for the cost of five funerals, at five hundred dollars each. Is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘However, you just told us that you only recovered three bodies.’

‘That’s correct. Didier and two of the Sherpas are still up there somewhere.’

Miss Harman’s sharp little face took on an exasperated demeanour.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘How can you have funerals without bodies? And why is a funeral so expensive in comparison with what you paid out in compensation? Five hundred dollars represents twenty-five percent of the compensation.’

Jack glanced over at Brad Schaffer, looking for support. But Schaffer shifted awkwardly in his seat and said nothing. Smiling nervously Jack took out a chunk of Exer-Flex silicone exercise putty and, looking back at Miss Harman, started to work it with his fingers.

‘All ceremonies in Nepal cost a lot of money,’ he said. ‘Comparatively. Particularly the death ceremony. Sometimes they save for years to pay for it. Even if there’s no body, and even if they can’t afford it, this is still a traditional obligation and one that Western climbing expeditions always take upon themselves. If we didn’t. Miss Harman, then Sherpas would hardly be likely to risk their lives along with the rest of us.’

‘I see,’ she said coldly. ‘But surely in the circumstances a contribution toward these death ceremonies would have been more appropriate. Say fifty percent.’

‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ he started to say.

‘No, I don’t think I do, Mister Furness. You said yourself, these people save for years to pay for their death ceremonies. But, well, what about the Sherpas who died? What I’m merely trying to determine is what happened to their funeral expense savings.’

It was a good question. Even so. Jack felt himself squirm with distaste. For a moment he imagined that the Exer-Flex was her windpipe and gave it an extra hard squeeze for good measure.

‘Or were your Sherpas just not the prudent kind?’

‘If this Society was concerned with prudence, Miss Harman,’ said Jack, ‘then I doubt it would ever have got started.’

‘Amen,’ said Schaffer.

But Jack was just starting. He threw the chunk of Exer-Flex onto the mahogany table, hoping it would make a mark on the highly polished surface.

‘Death’s a considerable expense in the Himalayas, Miss Harman,’ he said. ‘People get killed in the most awkward of areas. Why don’t you look at these accounts from the upside? We didn’t find Didier Lauren’s body so we saved your company the cost of chartering a helicopter to fly his body down to Khatmandu, the cost of a special casket to meet the requirements of international airfreight, not to mention the flight home to Canada.’

‘Jack,’ said Schaffer, ‘I think you made your point. No one’s disagreeing with your accounts. Miss Harman’s just trying to determine precisely what they mean. Is that so. Miss Harman?’

Miss Harman smiled thinly. ‘Yes.’

She was about to add something when Schaffer cut her off.

‘But we’ll leave it there, I think,’ he said firmly, and collecting the Exer-Flex, stared quizzically at it for a moment.

‘What is this shit, anyway?’ he said, leaning toward Jack.

‘It develops wrist and finger flexibility, strengthens forearms, improves grip.’ Jack shrugged. ‘All kinds of stuff.’

‘Does that mean you’re planning to go back and finish what you started? To climb all the big Himalayan peaks, without oxygen? Didn’t you say you wanted to do the Trango Tower next?’

‘Sure,’ he said, without much enthusiasm — still angry with the way the meeting had gone, with himself most of all. ‘I always finish what I start.’

But even as he spoke. Jack knew that before he could go back to the Himalayas he had to prove to himself that he still had the nerve for the big walls. Never having fallen before — certainly there were few climbers who had fallen so far and survived — he had yet to discover if the avalanche had taken more than just a friend and climbing partner from him. Jack had to find out if he could still put gravity to the back of his mind and climb with all of his former élan and disregard for danger.

Yosemite Valley was Jack Furness’s spiritual home. It was here, high up the western slope of California’s Sierra Nevada, in a granite abyss eleven kilometres long, one and a half kilometres wide, and three-quarters of kilometre deep, that Jack had perfected his climbing technique. With its unrelentingly sheer walls, the valley was the centre of American rock climbing and the kind of place where reputations got made or became permanently stalled. In the twenty-five years he’d been coming to the valley, six of Jack’s friends had been killed there.

Six friends and one elder brother.

In theory, rappelling, or what the Europeans called abseiling, is one of the safest and most exhilarating parts of climbing. The buzz of bouncing down a sheer face in long graceful curves through space, of descending with the acceleration of a free fall and then stopping smoothly on the karabiner under full control.

His brother, Gary, had been rappelling down the six-hundred-metre-high Washington Monument when his anchor sling, frayed by numerous rope pull-downs, broke just a metre or so short of Lunch Ledge, a nondescript platform about three hundred metres up. It was nineteen years since Gary had been killed. But hardly a week passed when Jack did not think of him. When he was climbing he thought of him more often.

These days, Washington Column was considered a warm-up climb for the big vertical walls of the Yosemite, and among them there was none bigger, none more vertiginous, and none more daunting than the famous El Capitan.

Leaving Danville in the late afternoon, the drive had taken him around six hours and he checked into the Ahwahnee Hotel at just before ten o’clock. The Yosemite Lodge would have been slightly nearer El Capitan, but the Ahwahnee was better, if more expensive. There he ate a big, high-protein dinner, went straight to bed, and was up again the following morning just after five.

December, with its cold weather and short days, was not the best time to climb the El Cap. Except that the valley was almost empty of tourists, and Jack, who had made several other winter ascents in Yosemite, was more or less certain that he would have the rock to himself. Besides, the day had dawned as bright and sunny as the weather forecasters had promised, and up on the wall, too hot could be as bad as too cold. In summer the temperatures could make the rock as hot as a frying pan. This looked like an excellent day for climbing.

Before going to El Cap Jack found a hard boulder and got himself properly limbered. There were dozens of well-established routes up El Cap, but you never knew when you were going to have to do some wide stem or something even more bizarre. It paid to be stretched and ready for anything.

Every year the warm-ups got harder. In his twenties he had been so supple he had seemed almost double-jointed. These days, he was putting a lot more trust in his upper body strength than in his overall agility. Maybe Swift had been right. Maybe forty was too old for this kind of thing.

Walking back to the wall, he strapped his fingers with adhesive tape, to help improve their rigid tendon support. Free climbing was hardest on the fingers’ ends, a manicurist’s nightmare. There were climbs Jack had done that left his cuticles so badly broken that the blood was oozing from his tips.

Standing at the foot of El Cap’s clean brown-and-white granite face, it was easy to underestimate its height. Looking up at the ninety-degree wall, you might be fooled into thinking that the one solitary pine growing on the cliff face was no bigger than a Christmas tree and the rock itself no more than one hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighty metres. But the tree, a Ponderosa Pine, was twenty-four metres high while the top of El Cap was a heart-stopping nine hundred metres at right angles to the valley floor.

Unclimbed before the mid-1950s, El Capitan, and the Salathé Wall route — rated 5.13 on the Yosemite decimal system of climbing difficulty — that Jack had chosen, looked less of a sporting challenge than a circus feat. Yet there were an increasing number of mountaineers. Jack among them, who had free-climbed the Salathé Wall. Using spring-loaded camming devices known as ‘friends’ for jamming into cracks, climbing shoes of sticky rubber, and only natural holds for upward progress, scorning the use of stirrups and karabiners. Jack had made a free solo ascent of the wall as late as 1994.

In the cold bright dawn, he covered his bare hands with chalk, and then checked the friends, wire nuts and curlers, and chalk bag that were hanging off the bandolier on his sit harness. The only karabiners he was carrying were the ones he would use to hook on when he needed to take a rest.

Reaching high above his head, he found a handhold and drew himself a metre up onto the wall with one arm. Like an ape. In an hour or two, the winter sun would have warmed the rock, making it easier for the Boreal rock boots he was wearing — Jack didn’t much care for the White Fang stickers he was paid to wear by his sponsor — to get a grip. It would be the early part of the climb, on cold and sometimes icy rock, that would be more difficult and dangerous. Nine hundred and eleven metres to go.

After his trip to Washington he had been eager for this moment. Quickly he tried to find his rhythm.

The fall on Machhapuchhare had no real bearing on his climbing ability. He had not made a mistake. Surely he was the same crag rat who had climbed El Cap in record-breaking time. But as he progressed up the first pitch he sensed that this particular ascent would be more than just a climb, more than an exercise in self-discovery. He would have to reach deeper into himself than ever before. Where once he had climbed for fun, now he was climbing with an extra piece of luggage. It hung on him like a heavy haul bag. The fall. The death of Didier. His own thoughts and emotions, the smallest hesitation, the least hint of fear, all of them would fascinate him, scare him, intimidate him as never before. And all leading up to the great question set by his own personal Torquemada: Was he climbing El Cap with the abandon, the total self-confidence that had marked each of his four earlier ascents?

For two hours he climbed as efficiently as he had ever done, moving quickly up the steep rock in the early morning sunshine and relishing the silence and his sense of insignificance on the hard grey face. Sometimes he was hanging by only three fingers, or lifting a leg to the height of his own shoulder to find a foothold. This wasn’t fun. This was a lot of work. Already his fingertips were feeling as if he’d used them to sand a wooden floor.

He’d seen himself climb on video many times, and from a distance he was surprised how much like a scorpion or a lizard he had looked scrambling up a wall. Something not human anyway. Swift might have liked to believe that he went climbing because of the ape in him, but he would have liked to have seen the chimpanzee that had the patience to do a speed solo on a wall like the Salathé. It felt like a marathon. Hundreds of moves over hundreds of metres. Like running a marathon in a day. Except that it was rather more hazardous.

There was very little to recommend the Salathé Wall beyond its sheer difficulty. He’d been just twenty years old when he’d first succeeded in climbing it, with the dumb luck of youth. Certainly it was not a particularly aesthetic climb. It wasn’t much of a view behind him. Or below him. Just thin air, pulling at him with the nagging force of gravity. Like Galileo’s famous experiment. The law of uniform acceleration for falling bodies. And in front of him just rock, and more rock, monotonously, implacably, forever in his face.

Wind teased his hair. He never wore a helmet. If any object falling from something this high managed to hit you, you tended to stay hit, helmet or no helmet. Once, jumaring up the rope on another El Cap route known as the Dawn Wall, Jack had dislodged a flake of rock that narrowly missed hitting him. The flake had been as big as a set of radiator pipes. Another time the rope on a haul bag had broken and the bag — heavy with pitons, karabiners, nuts, and hammers — had come whistling past his ear. Another reason why he preferred a free climb. Weirdest of all, while Jack had been climbing the exterior of the Transamerica building in San Francisco for a TV commercial, one of the cameramen had accidentally smashed a window and a two-metre sword of glass had come within a few centimetres of his head. No helmet would have protected him from that.

The rock was getting warmer.

Maybe he just got bored with looking at it, but one hundred an fifty metres up on the wall. Jack did something that he had never done before on a free solo ascent.

Something you never did.

He looked down.

Suddenly his whole mind was in travail. Memory flung up in him the exact recollection of how it had felt to fall off Machhapuchhare’s north face. This time there was not even a rope to break. And certainly no snowdrift-filled bergschrund to cushion his fall.

Jack’s heart leaped in his chest, and for a moment all he could think of was himself in bed with Swift, her own mind on something else, the fossil, as he pumped in and out of her body like a mad thing.

Then memory played its ace trump card.

He remembered that it was not nineteen years since his brother had been killed. It was twenty. Twenty years. He tried to put it out of his mind, but already he felt his guts collapsing inside him, as if he was about to experience a diarrhoeic cramp.

Killed in this valley. Almost twenty years, to the month. It was just a coincidence, but courage slips on such small coincidences and, winded, lies helpless on the ground. By the time Jack had helped it onto its feet again and supported it long enough to get its breath back, he had already started to doubt that he could make it all the way to the top.

Gloved in white chalk, his own hand — the fingers raw and red with blood — appeared from underneath him, jammed a quad-camming friend into a crack, and then hooked him onto the sit harness.

‘Take a rest. You’ll be okay in a couple of minutes.’

Held firmly to the one spot like the Ponderosa tree growing on the cliff face high above his head. Jack shook his head, paralyzed with fear.

‘What the hell am I doing here?’ he said, pressing his face into the wall. ‘I can’t do this. Goddammit, this is crazy.’

He sat there in the harness, checking the view, waiting for his legs and stomach to steady a Little before he could try to go on. He closed his eyes and tried to persuade himself that he had freaked out before. The king of the big walls was not forced to abdicate so easily. The idea of a ranger rescue never entered his head. Not that he really had any choice in the matter. It was unlikely that any rangers would be looking out for climbers at this time of year.

He could climb up. Or he could climb down. Or he could jump. End of story.

‘Come on, you chickenshit arsehole,’ he yelled. ‘You’ve got to move.’

Minutes passed but still he stayed put, and Jack began to think that for the first time in his life he had come up against a very different kind of wall. Perhaps the highest barrier of them all. Himself.

Six

The University of California Medical Center occupied a half-mile-square site on the thickly wooded slopes of Mount Sutro, midway between the red roofs of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and Golden Gate Park. It was a pleasant neighbourhood, and Swift seldom visited the medical centre without also browsing in a few of the Haight’s famously radical bookstores. But on this occasion she went straight to the hospital’s radiology department, where she had arranged to meet an old friend.

Joanna Giardino was a diminutive Italian American beauty with abundant dark hair and the kind of come-hither look that made men fall for her like dumb animals. Swift knew her from a time when, as members of the university women’s ski team, they had briefly been rivals for the affections of one particular guy on the men’s team, a handsome hunk who was later killed in a motorcycle accident. Somehow the two women had subsequently become firm friends, and from time to time they would meet at the Edinburgh Castle, an English pub on Geary Street (Swift’s choice), or Capp’s Corner, an Italian restaurant (Joanna’s choice) in North Beach.

As well as being Swift’s good friend, Joanna was also one of UCSf’s most promising research neurologists, with several papers to her name, including one that she had coauthored with Swift on the paleoneurological border between hominid and hominoid.

The two women embraced warmly under the eye of a good-looking Indian man wearing a white coat and a necktie featuring a selection of DC comic book characters.

‘This is Manareet,’ Joanna said, introducing the Indian.

The Indian gave a slight bow.

‘He’s our senior neuro-radiologist. If there’s an intercranial abnormality, Manareet will find it. Manareet, this is Swift. It’s not that she doesn’t have a Christian name, just that she’s rather touchy about the one she’s got.’

‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,’ said Manareet, taking Swift’s outstretched hand.

His pronunciation was so clear and his manners so impeccable that Swift thought that he must have been educated in England. She had known a few Indians like him at Oxford, most of them fabulously rich Old Etonians with cut-glass accents and better breeding than the British royal family.

‘I think Swift is a very nice name,’ said Manareet. ‘Like a bird, or a thought, or a small planet.’

Uncomfortable with any kind of compliment. Swift bit her lower lip as she tried to check the inane smile that threatened to linger on her face.

‘Ignore him,’ advised Joanna. ‘He’s too smooth by half.’

‘Are you English?’ he asked Swift.

‘Australian,’ she confessed. ‘But I was educated in England.’

‘Me too. I was at Winchester and after that, at Stanford,’ he explained.

Manareet glanced at his watch and then nodded at the box Swift was carrying.

‘Is that our patient you have there?’

Swift set the box containing the original skull down on Joanna’s desk and lightly tapped the lid.

‘In here,’ said Swift.

‘After your letter, I can hardly wait,’ said Joanna.

Joanna had already signed the confidentiality contract, but Swift had decided not to ask Manareet to do so. It wasn’t as if he was working in any related field. Besides, he was giving her his time and the CAT scan for nothing.

‘Okay, the machine’s ready to roll. If you’ll come this way?’

Manareet led the way down a corridor and into a large room where the huge, black CAT scanner was located.

‘Five or six years ago,’ he was saying, ‘this machine, the Picher 1200, was state-of-the-art. But these days we hardly ever use it. Nearly every patient we see now undergoes a different diagnostic process. Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging.’

Despite its reduced status, the CAT scanner looked impressive enough to Swift. Sleek, black, and with a business end shaped like a two-metre-high lifebelt, the Picher 1200 reminded her of an expensive stereo. The kind you might have to lie down inside to really appreciate.

Manareet removed the skull from the box, commented on its size, and then laid it on the padded leather headrest of a bed that extended inside the life belt where the X-ray emitter and detectors were housed. In computerized axial tomography, or CAT scanning, a laser beam rotates around the patient’s head and is itself surrounded by several hundred X-ray photon detectors to measure the strength of the penetrating photons from a whole host of different angles. The X-ray datum is then analyzed, integrated, and reconstructed by a computer to produce the intercranial images on a television monitor. Once they had a picture of the inside of the skull, they could construct an image of the brain that had once filled it.

Manareet made a few adjustments to the controls and then another engineer turned on the laser before retiring behind the protective lead screen with Swift and the two neuro-specialists.

Seconds later a thin laser beam like a strip of red candy began to fire intermittently at the skull.

‘All right,’ said a businesslike Joanna. ‘Let’s get the computer to generate a digital image of the brain that used to be inside that skull.’

‘No problem.’

Manareet sat down at the computer keyboard and began to type out a series of transactions.

‘Do you want 3-D or VR?’

‘Virtual reality,’ said Joanna. ‘Let’s get the real Spielberg look for this one. And 3-D for the hard copy.’

‘Are you planning to have this skull morphed, at some stage?’

‘Yes.’

Morphing involved the university’s biomedical visualization lab metamorphosing faces and sometimes even whole bodies to fit skulls and human skeletons, using algorithmic warp and dissolve software originally designed by Hollywood for movies like Terminator 2. Swift hoped they could graft an image of a living creature onto her specimen.

‘Then I might as well give you stereolithographic data as well,’ he said. ‘Save them doing it.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ said Swift. ‘If it’s no trouble, I’d appreciate it.’

‘It’s no trouble at all.’

In stereolithography a computer-guided laser hardens layers of plastic resin in the shape of the skull’s cross sections. A hard replica can later be used by the university’s biomedical visualization laboratory’s computer analysts to reconstruct a face on the skull. Computers had almost entirely replaced plaster of Paris and Bedacryl as the tools of choice for rebuilding and copying fossils.

‘This will take a little while,’ said Manareet. Leaning back on his chair, he collected a can of Pepsi off the desk.

The computer screen went black for a moment and Manareet sat forward on his chair.

A minute or two later the computer re-created the precise intercranial contours and dimensions of the skull, and they were viewing a high-resolution colour VR copy that the Picher 1200 had scanned onto the twenty-inch Trinitron screen.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s do a little caving, shall we?’

He pushed the mouse forward on its pad, entering the skull through an eye socket and searching the interior of the cranium as if he were a real estate agent showing someone around the image of an empty house.

‘Looking good,’ nodded Joanna. ‘But let’s see the brain that would fit this, shall we?’

‘No easier said than done,’ declared Manareet, and hitting the return on the keyboard, he replaced the VR image of the skull with one of a brain.

To Swift the image looked real enough for her to lift the brain out of the computer monitor and place it in a tank of formaldehyde, like Frankenstein preparing to bring a cadaver to life.

‘That’s great,’ she said. ‘You can see nearly every lobe.’

‘There’s no nearly about it,’ said Manareet, turning the mouse one way to turn the image around, and clicking once to magnify a specific part, and once again to magnify it even further. ‘You can see every lobe.’

As if to prove it, he positioned the cursor over the occipital area and clicked the mouse several times until there was a clear view of a visual cortex.

‘How’s that?’ he said proudly.

‘Excellent,’ said Joanna.

Manareet clicked the mouse again and several seconds later handed Swift a CD containing all the images and digital information the CAT scan had recorded on the computer.

‘A gift.’

‘Thanks, Manareet.’ She fanned herself with the CD case.

‘No problem.’

‘Let’s take the CD to my office,’ said Joanna. ‘We can rim it through the neurological contour analysis program.’

Swift collected the skull off the scanner bed and returned it safely to the carrying box. On her way out of the scanning room, she smiled sweetly at Manareet.

‘Nice meeting you.’

‘The pleasure was all mine,’ he said. ‘You must let me cook you a meal sometime.’

‘Oh yes, you must,’ said Joanna. ‘Manareet makes the best barium meal in this hospital. Only he calls it a curry. I swear, the one I ate was so hot you could have photographed a perfect outline of my stomach.’

Swift laughed and kept on smiling at Manareet.

‘Ignore her,’ she said. ‘I’d love a curry.’

Joanna inserted the CD in the drawer of her computer, made a choice from the list of browse options on screen, and then waited for the selected VR data to load.

‘Is he cute, or is he cute?’ she said.

‘He’s nice.’

‘It can’t be easy for him right now,’ added Joanna. ‘Given what’s happening in the Punjab. Manareet’s a Sikh. He’s got family there. But if he’s worried about them he doesn’t let on.’

Swift nodded gravely.

‘Does he think there’s going to be a war?’ she asked.

‘He doesn’t refer to it at all. And neither do I. I mean what I said about the curry, though,’ Joanna said, more brightly. ‘Like it was molten magma.’

‘I had a lot of curries when I was at university in England,’ Swift admitted. ‘And some of them were pretty hot.’

‘Maybe that’s why the English are so tight-assed. You picked it up when you had your empire in India. The stiff upper Up. It was just too many hot curries.’

Swift let the assumption that she was English go. Life was too short for her to be forever insisting that she was an Australian. Especially as it was so long since she had been back there.

Joanna’s screen flickered, and the VR image of the pink brain on a bright blue background reappeared, floating inside the monitor like a strange undersea creature.

At first glance the brain did not seem to be very different from that of a human being. It was divided vertically from front to back into left and right hemispheres, and both were separated into four lobes, each of them responsible for different sets of functions, and Swift thought the virtually real brain looked prototypically hominid.

‘Okay,’ said Joanna. ‘Let’s see if we can get a size estimate.’ She tapped a couple of keys and then read out the result. ‘One thousand millilitres. At the extreme lower limit for humans.’

‘But more than twice as large as a gorilla’s.’

‘I guess if you tie that in with the dentition you’ll be able to work out a few life history variables, won’t you?’

‘I already spoke to a dental anthropologist,’ said Swift. ‘A specialist on fossil hominid teeth.’

‘Did she sign your confidentiality thing too?’

‘Of course. She thought these third molars were just erupting when the creature died.’

‘I still don’t know why you’re being so paranoid about this.’

‘Not paranoid. Just careful, that’s all. Now if you were to assume a growth trajectory about halfway between a man and a gorilla, that would mean the owner of the skull was about fifteen years old when he died. That means a first molar at around four or four and a half years old, and a probable life span of about fifty years.’

Swift tapped the VR image on screen with a fingernail, one of the few she had not bitten away with excitement since receiving the skull from Jack.

‘This brain, Joanna. Any left hemispheric dominance there, do you think?’

‘Some,’ allowed the other woman. ‘But not as pronounced as in humans.’ Holding the button down on her mouse she rotated the brain to view it from the other side.

‘Let’s see now. The occipital lobe is larger than a human’s,’ she added. ‘Whereas the temporal and parietal lobes are smaller.’

‘That’s also typically apelike,’ said Swift.

Joanna clicked the mouse and enhanced the frontal lobes on the VR brain.

‘This is quite interesting. These large olfactory bulbs would seem to suggest that the specimen enjoyed a highly developed sense of smell.’

‘Well, that’s something we haven’t found before.’

Joanna viewed the underside of the brain.

‘Now this could be something. The position of the foramen magnum would be unusual in an ape,’ she murmured, becoming more absorbed in the analysis. The foramen magnum was the point at which the spinal cord passed from the brain case into the torso.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Swift. ‘It’s much farther forward than a gorilla’s.’

‘That would mean the head was carried much higher up on the shoulders.’

‘And indicate an upright-walking creature rather than a knuckle-walking ape.’

‘Exactly. I’m beginning to see why you were so excited about this skull. Swift.’

Joanna turned the image of the brain to view the left side in close-up.

‘Oh, wait just a moment.’

Her keen eyes had spotted something. She clicked the mouse, magnifying an almost featureless area of the brain, and then pushed the mouse forward across the pad so that the close-up surface image swooped toward the viewer.

Joanna pointed to a small lump, just above a fold in the brain architecture that Swift recognized as the Sylvian fissure.

‘That looks to me like a small but distinct Broca’s area,’ stated Joanna.

Human linguistic ability was usually assumed by neurologists to have something to do with Broca’s area, although it was impossible to say for sure whether or not the faculty of speech was located in or under this insignificant-looking lump.

Swift looked closely at the screen as Joanna tried to gain maximum magnification of this possible language centre in the unknown hominid’s brain organization.

‘There’s something there all right,’ she agreed cautiously.

Joanna altered the angle of magnification so that the lobe appeared very distinctly in profile.

‘Yup. There it is,’ she said.

‘Of course it doesn’t mean the hominid could speak,’ said Swift. ‘But maybe the creature had some extended local abilities. A sophisticated mimic, perhaps.’

‘C’mon, Swift,’ said Joanna. ‘Why the sudden caution? Nobody ever found Broca’s area in a fossilized brain organization before. Am I right?’

Swift nodded.

‘But we’re only dealing with surface features here. There’s no telling for sure where basic linguistic abilities might be hidden in hominid brain organization.’

Joanna turned in her chair and pulled a weary face.

‘In neurology nothing’s for sure. Even with humans. The more I know, the less I know. Come on. Swift. Admit it. Maybe we really found something here. Evidence of language as an early development in human evolution. Wouldn’t that be something?’

Swift was smiling now. But at the same time she remained acutely aware that she could expound no theories regarding the specimen’s place in evolutionary history until Stewart Ray Sacher had come back to her with the results of his geochronological tests. She hardly dared to think what the evidence of her own eyes was beginning to suggest. And before she constructed the theory that was already beckoning to her like some silent phantom, she would have to be as certain of her facts as the most sceptical of sceptics would permit.

Whenever Swift tried to deflect her mind from some preoccupation, she sat down at her baby-grand piano and, with considerable difficulty, strove to play her self-taught way through one of the pieces from Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. The first prelude, in C-major, with its arpeggiated chords, was her favourite, and she played it well until a fugue took up the theme, as if stating it in another more confident voice. She wondered if she might reach a stage in her own work when uncertainty gave way to such resolution. The minute she thought of the analogy, the fugue collapsed beneath her fingers like snowflakes to the human touch.

Getting up from the piano, she found a packet of Marlboro Lites and lit one carefully, holding the cigarette loosely between her bitten lips as if it had been an empty balloon. She flicked the spent match at a bin under the piano, failing to notice it land several feet short on the polished wooden floor.

Swift went outside to smoke. For once the sky above Berkeley was dark enough for her to be reminded of her own insignificance. The stars, seemingly fixed, were actually light in motion, travelling from a point in time when ancient man had first walked upon the earth. Probably even earlier. She shivered, uncomfortable with this reminder of her own apparent irrelevance in the general scheme of things. All those generations, ancestors, precursors — previous, long-forgotten, hardly recognizable. Looking up at the terrible grandeur of that great basilica roof, she almost wished that the Catholic Church had been more successful in stamping out astronomy’s Great Revolution and that they had burned Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler alongside Tycho Brahe.

The telephone rang. She ground out the cigarette and went inside to answer it. As soon as she heard the urgency and excitement in Stewart Ray Sacher’s gravelly voice, she felt her heart leap forward in her chest. Even before he told her the results of his geochronological tests, she knew that life would never be the same again.

Warren Fitzgerald, director of the Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Studies and dean of the Faculty of Paleoanthropology at Berkeley, rubbed his poorly shaven chin ruminatively. A smile flickered on and off his well-chiseled face which, with the old man’s white hair and wire-framed glasses, looked to Swift almost beatifically wise. One of the world’s preeminent authorities on human evolution, Fitzgerald was best known to a wider audience as the host of the award-winning PBS science series Changes. A Boston man, Fitzgerald spoke with such an overabundance of vowels that he always reminded Swift of John F. Kennedy.

‘Well, if you and Sacher are even half right, Stella, I do believe that this might alter our understanding of the whole timeline of hominid evolution. At the very least it seems to restore the importance of Ramapithecus in the search for human origins. But I can certainly appreciate your caution, considering the proximity of our friends over at IHO.

‘Re-establishing the phyletic position of Ramapithecus is going to play havoc with the biochemists and their work in molecular phylogeny. They’ll spare no effort to discredit your data the minute you break cover. For years they had to withstand accusations that their biochemistry was wrong because it didn’t agree with the fossils. Now you’re saying that the fossils were right all along.’

‘I don’t think that’s exactly what I’m saying,’ said Swift. ‘At least not yet, anyway.’ She pushed her mane of red hair away from her face and looked thoughtful.

‘Look, all that the biochemical approach says is that the immunological dates for a divergence between man and the African great apes provide a separation date of four to six million years ago. Because hominids of the genus Ramapithecus date back to the late Miocene about fourteen million years ago, and because Sivapithecus — closely related to Rama — seems to be more closely related to the orangutan than to the African apes, it has been generally assumed that Ramapithecus is therefore disqualified from being a hominid.

‘But here we have a fossil that seems to have characteristics of both Rama’s ape and of Paranthropus robustus. A skull that appears to be a halfway stage between Ramapithecus and Australopithecus. Moreover, a skull that gives every indication of being considerably more recent in its apparent origins than any previously discovered ramapithecine.’

Swift stood up excitedly and stalked around Fitzgerald’s book-lined office as her theory began to be articulated.

‘All right,’ she continued. ‘We’ve always believed that Ramapithecus was around as late as fourteen million years ago. All this skull suggests is that the genus could have survived until much more recently than we had ever suspected before. Until only fifty thousand years ago.’

‘This is what I’m not at all comfortable with, Stella,’ grumbled Fitzgerald. ‘This idea of Sacher’s. The glacier corpse. His fifty thousand years is pure assumption. Why not assume a hundred? Or a hundred and fifty? But even then it’s a very long way short of fourteen million. Do you really think that some kind of ramapithecine could have survived for the best part of fourteen million years?’

Swift shrugged.

‘The dinosaurs survived for sixty-five million years. And that’s as nothing beside the coelacanth. The coelacanth was abundant in the world’s oceans as long as three hundred and fifty million years ago. We thought they had died out some sixty million years ago. And then a fisherman caught a living specimen as recently as 1938. Now why shouldn’t a ramapithecine have survived for a mere fourteen million years?’

‘Just how many assays did Sacher make, Stella?’

‘Several. And all with different results. He’s saying that there may be a number of reasons why there’s more natural radiation in the dental material than we expected. He’s tried carbon dating but that hasn’t been any more accurate.’

‘I see. And the rock sample you provided?’

‘According to Sacher, the rock sample shows that the specimen’s environment must have originally been deficient in Carbon-14.’

Fitzgerald sighed and shook his head.

‘All that money we waste on all that goddamn machinery of his and he says that there’s something wrong with the lousy samples. For the life of me, Stella, I’ve never seen why we should accept that the amount of radiocarbon produced in the atmosphere has always been constant. Did you know that Sacher once analyzed the amount of radiocarbon in a living snail and came out with the result that the creature had been dead for three thousand years?’

‘I’d heard that story,’ she admitted.

‘Anyway, you’d like a temporary release from your teaching obligations to do some fieldwork on this, right?’

‘That’s right. At this moment I’m preparing a grant proposal for the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society with the aim of going back to the Himalayas to study the site where the skull was found.’

‘I suppose you know I’m on the peer review committee for the National Science Foundation?’

In the world of academic scientific research, applications for grants were put up to the scrutiny of relevant experts in order that the merits of an application could be judged.

‘I know.’

‘Money’s generally a bit tight right now. So if I were you I’d try the people at National Geographic first. But if your grant proposal makes it, it could make your name, Stella.’

She nodded.

‘The thought had crossed my mind.’

‘I bet it has,’ he grinned. ‘Yessir, it could make you as famous as Mary Leakey. This science could sure do with another woman making her reputation. Not to mention the kudos it could bring to Berkeley.’

Fitzgerald thumped his desk enthusiastically.

‘Might be the most important piece of anthropology done here since Vince Sarich’s time. Lord, I really hope so, Stella. I never did like those chemists much. I’m a fossil man, myself. Always have been, always will be. All the biochemistry in the world won’t change the fact that it’s bones, Stella. It’s bones that count.’

Swift came away from Fitzgerald’s office feeling that things were beginning to shape up quite nicely.

It was bones that counted. Too damn right. In the field of paleoanthropology, there were many more scientists than there would ever be fossils. But fossils were everything. Of course the trick was in getting hold of them. Until then all you had were theories and nearly all of them based on other people’s finds.

Not that theories couldn’t be rewarding too.

In search of some theories of her own she had spent the previous winter working with Byron Cody, helping him elaborate some of his ideas for his now best-selling book about gorillas. It was an experience she still remembered with pleasure.

There had been one particular moment that Swift believed she would always treasure, when she had been sitting in a cage with a young mountain gorilla. She had found herself looking deep into the animal’s eyes and instead of looking away, as normally happened, the gorilla had held her stare, leaving her with the most profound, albeit ineffable sensation. She had felt both question and assent, and the nearest comparison she could ever make was that it had been like meeting the unflinching gaze of a small child. Even now she could hardly recall ever feeling a greater sense of empathy for any other living creature.

A gorilla was also capable, like a child, of shedding tears. And Swift had come to the conclusion that man was not about emotion so much as language. It was certainly true that there were plenty of animals that could communicate at a rudimentary, symbolic level. Like Chomsky however. Swift believed that what made man uniquely human was his limitless capacity for self-expression and, as a corollary, his limitless capacity for imagining and thought.

She was fond of asking her students the following question; If you had a dog that could talk — a dog that was every bit as articulate and funny as Robin Williams — would you continue to treat it like a dog, or would you treat it like a human?

Sometimes, to underline the importance of human speech or signing in defining what it really meant to be human, she also reminded her class of cases involving feral or wolf children — wild boys who had never learned to speak and who could only communicate within a finite number of symbols. And then she would ask the class whether it would treat a wolf boy more like a human or more like a dog?

Consciousness, she argued, must surely have evolved as a direct corollary of language, and language was merely the most portable means available to ancient man of transferring a culture from one place to another as the climate changed and the hominid population exploded out of the African heartland during the late Pleistocene period, from 70,000 BC to 8000 BC.

It had been Swift’s greatest ambition to find a fossil that would provide some indication of early linguistic ability and, hence, of an emerging human consciousness.

The Dawn of Man.

Except that now she wondered if perhaps she was in possession of something better than just a bone. Bones were always a matter of contention. She had a feeling that this might just turn out to be something of the past that was not gone, something lost that was not irrecoverable.

Seven

The Campanile clock had struck six o’clock when Swift climbed into her Chevy Camaro. Feeling that she was probably wasting her time and that the reason his phone was off the hook was because Jack was with some girl he had picked up while climbing in the valley, she drove inland, heading east along the interstate toward Mount Diablo State Park and Danville, and hoping that she could see Jack and then be back in Berkeley before lunchtime.

The smoothness of the highway contrasted with the intolerance of Northern California drivers, for although it was early morning and there were only a few trucks on the road, their drivers seemed to regard a woman at the wheel of a bright red, two-seventy-five horsepower coupe as some kind of challenge to their masculinity. On several occasions she found herself involved in a bitter war of middle digits.

It was at times like this that Swift thought men were little better than apes, capable of fighting about the least important thing. She wondered how it was that the human species was not as rare as that great reproductive dud, the giant panda.

Danville was a small town surrounded by rolling ranch land and campsites and a short ride on the Contra Costa County bus from Mount Diablo. Sixty years before, the town’s most famous resident had been the playwright Eugene O’Neill. But O’Neill was largely forgotten by the locals and now Danville’s most famous resident was America’s number one mountaineer. Jack Shackleton Furness.

Like O’Neill, Jack lived several miles outside of town, in a small ranch situated on the lower slopes of Mount Diablo. Twice, Swift drove past the anonymous-looking road that led to Jack’s house before seeing where it diverged obliquely from the main highway and dropped down a steep slope into a short ravine wherein a small creek meandered its way back to the East Bay and, beyond, the ocean.

Mounting the other slope on the far side of the creek, the track suddenly levelled out and Swift caught sight of Jack’s house and the black Grand Cherokee parked on a gentle slope facing the Devil’s Mountain to the west.

Swift got out of the car and looked around. There was not a soul in sight, not even the signposted ‘Mean Dog.’

She walked up the front steps, knocked at the door, and waited a minute or so. Then she tried the handle. The door was not locked.

‘Jack?’ she called, leaning inside. ‘Are you there? It’s me. Swift.’

Advancing toward the bedrooms at the rear, her glance took in the empty bottle of Macallan on the floor and the overflowing ashtray and half-eaten dinner that lay next to it. She heard the sound of something hitting the floor in the next room and then a man coughing with resolve.

‘Jack? Is this a good time? Am I interrupting something here?’

He arrived in the bedroom doorway, puffing a cigarette and naked but for the Rolex GMT Master he still advertised in pages of National Geographic, and a pair of battered docksiders on his feet.

Perhaps it was because he hadn’t shaved in several days, but somehow he was even hairier than she remembered. And he had also put on some weight.

‘God, you look awful.’

Jack snorted loudly, scratched his balls absently, chewed over the bad taste in his mouth, and then glanced at his watch.

‘Swift. What the hell are you doing here so early?’ he yawned. ‘Comes to that, what are you doing here at all?’

‘The phone. You left it off the hook.’

‘Is that so?’

‘I’ve been trying to reach you for days.’

‘You’re not so easy to get hold of yourself,’ he sniffed. ‘Tried calling you a couple of times after you disappeared that morning. Left voice mail and other shit all over the place.’

He went over to the empty bottle and retrieved it from the floor.

‘I was worried about you.’

‘Like hell you were,’ he said, inspecting the empty. He grinned and shook his head. ‘I know you, remember? You want something. That’s why you’ve driven all the way out here. I can tell. Why else would you look so sexy?’ He nodded at her clothes as if this was obvious. ‘Honey, you be stylin’.’

Underneath her long wool coat Swift was wearing a pink miniskirt, a plain white shirt, and a red-and-gold-coloured toile de jouy waistcoat featuring scenes from the frieze in some Pompeiian villa of mysteries.

‘Jack, that’s not true.’

‘I mean, that waistcoat. If I could see straight I’d bet there’d be a guy with a hard-on somewhere thereabouts. And you’re wearing a miniskirt.’ He licked his lips feverishly. ‘You only ever wear a miniskirt when you want something.’

‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’

‘Something usually does.’

‘Something not very nice.’

‘Call it delayed grief then,’ he shrugged. ‘Didier was a pretty good friend of mine.’

Swift considered this for a moment and then nodded.

‘Why don’t you let me make you some breakfast?’

Jack’s eyes narrowed. ‘I haven’t figured out what it is yet, but I will.’

‘I’m just offering to cook your breakfast, that’s all.’

He tugged at the end of his penis, almost unconsciously. She thought he looked like a little boy trying to comfort himself.

‘I am kind of hungry,’ he admitted.

‘While I’m doing that, you can take a shower,’ she said. ‘And then put some clothes on. And when you’ve eaten, we’ll talk.’

‘Don’t suppose you brought something to drink,’ he said vaguely. ‘You know. Hair of the dog?’

She shook her head.

He shrugged. ‘Breakfast would be nice,’ he allowed. ‘But on one condition: That you don’t read my beads. If I want to go and get myself cocktailed, that’s my business, okay? Doesn’t mean I’m a drunk. This is my crib and I’ll do it my own way, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Just as long as we understand each other, right?’

‘Right.’

‘’Cause I’m not in the mood.’ His penis had thickened and he started to grin at her. ‘I don’t suppose you’d care to doggylock before breakfast?’

‘I think you should have that shower,’ she said. ‘And you’d better make it a cold one.’

Jack finished his ham and eggs, drained his coffee cup noisily, and eyed the laptop poking out of her shoulder bag with continuing suspicion. But showered and shaved, and wearing a clean shirt and jeans, he already looked like a different man. Now he sounded like one, too.

‘I feel a lot better for that. Thank you for a delicious breakfast. And I appreciate your coming over here. I’ve kind of let myself go these past few days.’

‘How much did you have?’

‘Whisky? Just the one bottle.’ He gave a sheepish sort of shrug. ‘Never did have much stamina as a drinker.’

She nodded, awaiting the right moment to broach the subject that now concerned her. She sat back in her chair and lit one of his cigarettes. For a moment she pretended to be distracted by the sound of a couple of jays squabbling in a tree outside the kitchen window. Then she said:

‘So how were the people at National Geographic?’

‘Oh you know.’ He shrugged. ‘Bureaucratic. Chiseling about a few thousand bucks I paid out in compensation to the families of the Sherpas who were killed. Can you believe that?’ He shook his head and sighed sadly. ‘Lousy bean counters.’

‘You didn’t fall out with them, I hope?’

‘No, I didn’t fall out with them.’

She had spoken too quickly.

‘Why?’ he added, frowning. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘Jack. Don’t be so defensive. They’re your principal sponsors, aren’t they?’ She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘I just don’t think that you should alienate them for no good reason. It’s the bean counters who run everything these days. You might as well get used to the idea.’

‘If you say so.’

Swift folded her arms and went over to the window, feeling it was still too soon for her to come to the main object of her mission. ‘I love it here,’ she said quietly.

‘If you say so.’

‘And now what are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to have another cup of coffee.’

‘I meant, what are your plans. Jack?’

‘Rest up a while. Then I dunno. I guess go back and finish the peaks. Solo, I suppose. Trango Tower looks tough enough.’

‘You don’t sound very sure.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ His eyes narrowed again. ‘That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Whatever it is you’re up to.’

‘Jack. What are you talking about?’

‘The real reason you came.’

Swift stamped her foot angrily. ‘Can’t I just do something for you without you thinking I’ve got some ulterior motive? Jack? Why do you have to be so bloody suspicious?’

‘Because I know you. Mother Teresa you are not. It has something to do with that damned fossil, doesn’t it?’

Swift said nothing, pretending to sulk. This was not going the way she had expected.

‘Well, doesn’t it?’

‘All right, yes it does,’ she snapped.

Jack grinned. ‘That’s my girl.’

He leaned forward on his chair, took her by the hand, and pulled her back to the kitchen table.

‘Now, why don’t you sit yourself down and I’ll try not to look up that abbreviated skirt you’re almost wearing while you tell me exactly what it is that you want?’

She sat down, facing him, knees pressed tight together, and smiled. Then quickly she opened and closed her legs as if teasing him and laughed.

‘I think it’s a new type specimen,’ she said excitedly.

‘That’s good, huh?’

‘It’s wonderful.’

She collected her Toshiba from her bag, set it on the table, flipped up the screen, and switched it on. The laptop whirred like a tiny vacuum cleaner and began to emit a quiet scraping noise as it started up a CD.

‘A type specimen is a kind of flagship for a new species, a fossil against which any similar fossil material will have to be compared. It’s what every paleoanthropologist dreams of. Jack. Eventually, I hope, there will be a formal citation that will include the species name or number, and the associated author — me. But everyone will know the fossil by its popular name. I mean no one ever talks of skull 1470, everyone talks of Lucy.’

Jack nodded. ‘I’ve heard of Lucy.’

‘I’m going to name this one after you. Jack. With your permission.’

‘Jack? Doesn’t sound right somehow.’

‘No. That’s not what I meant. Do you remember what some people called you at Oxford, because you’re so hairy?’

‘Sure. They called me Esau.’ He nodded. ‘Esau. I kind of like that. Sounds much more appropriate for an ape-man.’ He shrugged. ‘That wasn’t so difficult, now was it? Hell, you ought to have known I’d say yes. Why should I object? I’m honoured.’

Swift shook her head. ‘There’s more.’

‘Oh?’

‘I want you to help me work on a grant proposal for the National Geographic Society. To put together an outline for a plan to survey the Annapurna Sanctuary and explore some of the caves in search of paratypes and referred material. In short, I want you to be the official leader of an expedition to look for fossils that might be related to Esau.’

‘Me? I’m no anthropologist.’

‘True. But you do know the Himalayas and the Sanctuary better than any other American.’ She paused. ‘Besides, that shit’s only for the grant proposal. In reality I want us to take an expedition to go and look for something rather better than a few bones.’

‘Like what for instance?’

‘According to Stewart Ray Sacher — he’s in charge of geochronometry at Berkeley — the skull doesn’t carbon date. In other words, it’s less than a thousand years old. He says that the reason for this is that the corpse must first have been in a glacier for at least fifty thousand years, and that only when the glacier melted did Carbon-14 decay begin. Warren Fitzgerald thinks it must have been a lot longer. Maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand years.

‘But the question I’ve been asking myself is why assume it’s older when vow can just as easily assume that it’s younger. Let the fossil speak for itself, that’s what Sacher says. Except that he won’t. But what I reckon is this: Why not consider the possibility that it is less than a thousand years old? I say, why not consider the possibility that the skull may indeed be exactly what it seems to be? Something that may not be a fossil at all.’

Jack frowned. ‘Wait a minute. I’m confused. Let the fossil speak for itself, you said. But now you’re saying that this may not be a fossil at all?’ He shrugged. ‘Well, which is it?’

‘Okay, now the prefix Palaeo comes from a Greek word meaning ancient. I think that’s the part that may be irrelevant here.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess that’s all I’m saying really. We dump the ancient part.’

‘Of course, you mean more than you say. And you know it. So how about you stop bullshitting me and come to the point?’

‘Okay. Here’s my idea. Jack. What if this skull is recent? So recent that we could go to the Himalayas and find not some bones but an actual living fossil?’

‘You mean like a dodo?’

‘Not exactly. The dodo is extinct. I mean we should go and find something we never knew existed in the first place. A new species.’

‘A new species.’ Jack frowned as he considered the idea. ‘At that kind of height? You have to be kidding. The only new species you might find up there is a mutant strain of cold virus.’

Swift waited for a moment before playing her next card. There was something almost comic, something absurd about all the old names that were the stuff of myth, legend, and cheap B-movies. And she thought that in Esau she had another way of saving it.

‘Jack, I want us to go to the Himalayas and find one of Esau’s living relatives. Not a fossil-hunting expedition at all. But a zoological one. I want us to go back there with the purpose of capturing a new kind of animal.’

Jack frowned as he thought about what she had said. About what he thought she was saying. And then realized what she was driving at.

He leaned back in his chair, ran both hands through his hair, and let out a loud guffaw.

‘Oh, wait a minute. Esau nothin’.’ He smiled bitterly, wagging an accusative finger at her. ‘You’re very clever, I’ll give you that, Swift. You’re clever. All that bullshit about a living fossil. You must think I’m stupid. I know what you’re talking about and it’s — frankly, it’s ridiculous.’

‘You didn’t always think so,’ she said pointedly.

He stood up and turned away.

‘Let me tell you, it’s as ridiculous as the Loch Ness monster,’ he insisted.

‘That’s not what you said ten years ago, when you saw it yourself, on Mount Everest,’ she said, accessing the pages from Jack’s book she had scanned onto the compact disc in her Toshiba. ‘Want me to remind you of what you wrote in your book Mountain Mantras?’

‘Not particularly.’

He stood by the window and lit a cigarette. For a couple of minutes neither of them spoke. Then, quietly at first. Swift began to read.

‘I know what I wrote,’ he murmured.

‘I know what I wrote,’ he repeated loudly. ‘I don’t need to be reminded of it. Maybe it’s you who needs reminding of what happened when the book was published. Some of the reviewers suggested I’d made up the sighting in order to sensationalize what they considered was an otherwise dull book. Cryptozoology, they called it. Then some arsehole wrote a story in Scientific American about how, like many other climbers before me, I’d suffered a delusion born of high-altitude sickness.’ He shook his head grimly. ‘Jesus, I even reached the twin status of becoming a joke on the Carson Show and the subject of a sketch on Saturday Night Live.’

‘And what about you? Is that all you think it was? Just high-altitude sickness?’

‘Yes,’ he said, without much conviction.

‘And what about all those other climbers who’ve seen it too?’

‘What about them?’

She turned her attention back to the Toshiba and started to scroll down through a long list she had compiled on CD of other sightings.

‘Five years ago, Hidetaka Atoda reportedly saw a large unidentified creature on the slopes of Machhapuchhare, within the Annapurna Sanctuary. He even took a picture. Machhapuchhare is a holy mountain. No permits are issued to climb it.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Jack laughed scornfully.

‘Apparently he was unable to track the creature for fear of losing his license to climb in the area.’

‘Instead of which he lost his life,’ said Jack. ‘The Toad was a good friend of mine. He was killed climbing the southwest face of Annapurna only three weeks later. Just like Didier. Avalanche got him and his camera.’ Jack grinned at her aggressively. ‘So that famous photograph was never seen. And here’s another thing. As a mountaineer the Toad was notoriously in a hurry. Never knew him to get himself fully acclimatized. Always rushing ahead. Probably what got him killed.’

‘Okay,’ Swift said patiently. ‘Well, what about Chris Bonington?’

‘What about Chris Bonington?’

‘He saw it too, on an expedition to climb Annapurna back in 1970. According to his account, he wasn’t much higher than the entrance to the Sanctuary itself, near the Hinko Cave, at about three thousand six hundred metres. That’s quite close to Machhapuchhare, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe,’ allowed Jack.

‘What’s more, he was fully acclimatized.’

‘He’s a good climber,’ Jack allowed. ‘The best.’

‘In his book Annapurna South Face, he describes seeing an ape or apelike creature running quickly across the snow toward the shelter of some cliffs. It was, he says, a reasonably powerful animal that left obvious tracks but which his Sherpas later pretended not to see. Bonington was convinced that he had seen the yeti.’

She smiled, almost apologetically.

‘There now, I’ve said it, haven’t I? Yeti.’

‘Congratulations. You win a furry toy.’

‘In 1982 Greg Topham saw the creature while climbing Annapurna HI.’

‘Topham.’ Jack snorted with derision. ‘That hippy dopehead arsehole.’

‘He reported seeing a bearlike animal moving south along the ridge, toward Machhapuchhare.’

‘Probably what it was. A bear. Look, what’s this thing with Machhapuchhare, anyway?’

‘Just that it’s three sightings in and around the one mountain. And what’s more, a mountain forbidden to climbers and tourists.’

‘There’s nothing magical about Machhapuchhare, if that’s what you’re implying,’ Jack said uncomfortably.

‘I didn’t say there was. And you’re right, there have been yeti sightings all over the Himalayas.’ She glanced back at the laptop.

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Before Bonington, in 1955, Tony Streather, on an expedition to climb Kangchenjunga, reported hearing a loud whistling noise. The same sound that had been heard two years earlier by Wilfred Noyce on Sir John Hunt’s expedition to climb Everest. His Sherpas said the whistle was the sound of a yeti.’ Swift looked up from the screen. ‘Do you remember how last winter I helped out Byron Cody with his book on gorillas?’

Jack shrugged.

‘You know, what interests me about what this man Noyce says is that a gorilla’s alarm call is a shrill and prolonged scream that sounds and indeed spectrographically looks like a piercing whistle.’

‘It’s a small world.’ He shook his head. ‘Could have been anything. An eagle. A lemur... Have you finished?’

‘Jack, I’ve hardly started. In 1951, Sir Eric Shipton photographed and took casts of a series of footprints that he and others observed in the snow of the Menlung Glacier, near Everest, at about five thousand five hundred metres. Shipton and Sherpa Tenzing, who later reached the summit of Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary, followed the tracks until they lost them. Tenzing himself had seen a yeti back in 1949. He described it as being well above man-height, covered in reddish hair, but barefaced.’

‘Is that barefaced as in barefaced lie?’ laughed Jack. ‘And footprints.’ He snorted. ‘Footprints can be caused by all sorts of atmospheric phenomena. I read about it somewhere. A warm current of air intruding in the colder atmosphere causing tiny patches of moisture that turn to water and, when they fall, become blobs in the snow that look to all appearances like footprints.’

‘In a regular formation? A metre or so apart?’ It was Swift’s turn to look amused. ‘That explanation’s more fantastic than the one I’m proposing. But even if you could dismiss Shipton and Tenzing, which I don’t think you do, can you also dismiss Sir John Hunt, who found not one but two sets of strange tracks near the Zemu Glacier in 1937? He said that the tracks were definitely not those of a bear and he had no explanation for them. Subsequently he stated his belief in the existence of some indigenous higher anthropoid unknown to science.’

Jack looked up at the ceiling as if he wished she would finish.

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘There are still dozens of other sightings of the animal. Montgomery McGovern in 1924, Colonel Howard-Bury in 1924, Henry Elwes in 1921, Major L. A. Waddell in 1899, W. Rockhill in 1884, and Lieutenant George White in 1838. Jack, the legend goes back as far as 1820, in J. B. Frazer’s Journal of a Tour through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himalayan Mountains. You can hardly dismiss them all as mad, or liars, or hippies, or mistaken. This creature and its footprints have been reported in areas as distinct from one another as Nepal, Tibet, Sikkim, Garwhal, the Karakoram, the Upper Sahween area, and Bhutan.’

Jack grunted stubbornly and pressed his forehead against the cool windowpane. Outside, the sun was burning its way through cool clouds and a buzzard was slowly drifting in the blue beyond like some passenger jet full of human souls.

‘You’ve seen it. Jack,’ she persisted. ‘You know you have. What’s the point of pretending you haven’t?’

‘I don’t know what I saw,’ he said irritably. ‘Like I said, it was probably the effects of the altitude. Lack of oxygen causes all sorts of physical problems. Pulmonary oedema, insomnia, loss of appetite, weight loss, and fluid retention. Take fluid retention, for instance. It causes the brain to swell and, pressing against the inside of your skull, it can cause you to hallucinate. If that wasn’t enough you’re also susceptible to conjunctivitis caused by excessive ultraviolet light. Your eyes feel gritty, then painful, until it’s impossible to open them properly.’

Swift nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said patiently. ‘It’s understandable that anyone would want better evidence than the sight of some very sore eyes.’ She paused. ‘So I faxed the Natural History Museum in London, and they FedExed me some photographs of a plaster cast made by a Russian zoologist, Vladimir Tschernezky, using Shipton’s photographs.’

She rolled the Toshiba’s trackball with her thumb and pulled down an image of the cast that she had scanned onto the CD.

‘The foot is about one and a half times as large as a male gorilla’s,’ she said. ‘But about the same overall length. And check the size of that big toe.’

Jack continued looking out the window.

‘It’s exceptionally thick. I’m no mountaineer but I’d say it was the kind of foot that was ideal for grasping rocks on a steep incline.’

Jack glanced casually at the screen. He pursed his lips critically and said, ‘Yeah. It could be.’

‘Moreover, the heel size would seem to indicate a creature that was altogether larger and heavier than a gorilla.’

Noticing that she now had his attention, she accessed a drawing of some comparative footprints.

‘That’s the gorilla’s footprint on the left there,’ she explained. ‘The one in the middle was found by Shipton as low as five thousand five hundred metres. Some of them even led over a crevasse — a leap of some four and a half to six metres. And there were no claw marks. You can see the difference.’

‘What’s the one on the right?’ he asked.

‘This was a print reconstructed using Neanderthal type skeletal remains that were discovered in the Crimea,’ she explained. ‘As you can see, the breadth of all three feet — almost half as wide as they are long — is quite consistent. But only Shipton’s prints show such a deviated hallux. Big toe. And such an unusually long second toe as well.’

‘I had the people in the biomedical visualization lab digitize an image of the skull you found, in conjunction with the footprints that Shipton found. Using cranial landmarks and tissue depths from the anatomical data of gorillas, they were able to effect a full fossil reconstruction of the kind of anthropoid that we’re interested in.’

‘That you’re interested in,’ he said without looking away from the screen.

Swift smiled to herself and pulled down a short animated sequence that illustrated the reconstruction of the creature from the feet up. Hairiness, impossible to deduce from the fossil and the footprint, was not enhanced. But watching it. Jack felt his heart skip a beat, for the computer animation finished to reveal a 3-D colour illustration of a bipedal anthropoid he half recognized.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered. ‘How’d you do that?’

‘The computer,’ she said coolly.

Jack turned away for a moment as if he needed somehow to gather himself.

She paused, waiting for him to look back, and when he did she thumbed the trackball up to the creature’s head for a close-up.

‘I think the interesting thing about this sequence,’ she said, ‘is how the predicted skull shape exactly tallies with the skull you found in the Annapurna Sanctuary.’

She dragged down a small icon from the corner of her screen and dropped it on top of the creature’s head. As she did so, the icon exploded, becoming one of the colour photographs Swift had taken of the skull in her own laboratory.

Nodding with appreciation. Jack allowed that it was a good match.

‘I’m glad you of all people think so.’

‘You know, it might be nice at that,’ he murmured. ‘To go back and prove some of those bastards wrong.’

‘Wouldn’t it just?’

‘Besides, seems like I left more than just a good friend back in the Sanctuary.’

‘Oh? What was that?’

Jack shook his head. ‘Amazing,’ he said quietly.

‘Anatomically speaking,’ she said, ‘Esau occupies an approximately intermediate position between a gorilla and the fossil form Paranthropus crassidens, also known as Australopithecus afarensis.’

Jack was still shaking his head with wonder at what she had shown him.

‘That’s the creature I saw on Everest. Swift, that’s a yeti.’

Swift nodded. ‘At last,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you agree.’

‘You really think we could do it?’ he asked. ‘You know, the Himalaya is a big place. It won’t be easy.’

‘Not the Himalayas, Jack. The Sanctuary. And more especially, Machhapuchhare. You may have found the skull on Annapurna but all the most recent sightings of the yeti have been on Machhapuchhare.’

Jack winced.

‘There’s something I haven’t told you,’ he admitted. ‘The skull wasn’t found on Annapurna.’

He explained how he and Didier had been climbing Machhapuchhare illegally when the accident occurred.

‘You know, you could be right,’ he concluded thoughtfully. ‘Maybe there is another reason no one’s allowed to climb Machhapuchhare. Maybe the locals know something we don’t. Maybe that’s why no one’s ever found the yeti. Maybe no one’s been allowed to find it.’

‘In which case it’ll be like I said,’ agreed Swift. ‘Officially, for the purposes of the grant proposal and the Nepali Government, we’ll be in the Sanctuary on a fossil-hunting expedition. But the reality will be that we’re in and around Machhapuchhare and searching for the Abominable Snowman.’

Jack shook his head.

‘To hell with that,’ he said. ‘Abominable Snowman, bullshit. That stuff’s for the comics. This, this is science. We’re going there to find Esau.’

Eight

The Pentagon’s guided tour was free and given every half hour on weekdays between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m., except on public holidays. Even non-U.S. citizens were permitted to take it, provided they brought their passports. In the so-called Commander in Chief’s corridor you could see a model of a Stealth SR-71, an aircraft that technically at least was still a secret. It was this willingness on the part of the military to open its headquarters to the public and to brag about its toys that made Bryan Perrins dislike the Pentagon and its DoD personnel. Either you had secrets or you didn’t. Whenever he had a meeting there he always half expected the door to open and the uniformed tour guide to back in — he always walked backward in order to keep an eye on his flock of visitors — followed by a group of Okies, their wide-eyed faces still full of hot dogs bought from the stand in the middle of the Pentagon’s courtyard.

In his late forties, Perrins looked more like some upmarket clothing designer than the Deputy Director of Intelligence. He wore a sharp suit and a dark, designer-stubble beard and sat well back from the boardroom table, almost as if he was attending the meeting of the Committee on Overhead Reconnaissance in the role of observer.

There were a lot of uniformed experts, all of them saying the same thing. Operation Bellerophon, organizing U2 overflights in the Indian subcontinent, had drawn a blank. One of the experts, a USAF general, was still droning on with his excuses.

‘Because of the need to husband our resources, and to ensure that the highest quality photography was obtained from each overflight, it was the practice not to launch a mission unless weather over the area was predicted to be less than twenty-five percent. Unfortunately the weather has been stacked against us. Several flights yielded no usable photography at all. Nevertheless we still managed to acquire a moderately complete mosaic of the region, but with zero result.

‘Attached to your reports, gentlemen, is a summary of weather forecasts in the area. As you can see, we are now firmly in the grip of winter, and despite the obvious urgency of the situation I would not recommend resumption of U2 overflights until at least the end of February.’

When at last the air force general sat down, Reichhardt sighed, took off his lightly tinted glasses, patted his bald head almost as if he had just had his hair cut, and thanked him.

‘I had hoped that this meeting would surface some intelligence that might be of use,’ he said quietly. ‘I must confess that I’m a little disappointed by this lack of progress. However I guess we all knew that whatever we did or did not find, the ultimate responsibility for dealing with this Bellerophon situation would devolve to the CIA.’

Perrins smiled and drew himself closer to the table.

‘Bellerophon,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I looked it up, just as you suggested, Bill, and since this whole responsibility is about to devolve to intelligence anyway, I think maybe we ought to change that codename. Did you know that a letter of Bellerophon means a document that is either dangerous or prejudicial to the bearer? On account of how Bellerophon was thrown off Pegasus when it got stung by a horsefly. We’ll let you know whatever name the computer generates.’

Perrins smiled thinly, enjoying Reichhardt’s chagrin. The NRO director looked as if he had found something unpleasant on the soles of both of his shoes.

‘Naturally we’re already exploring a number of lines of action involving field personnel,’ continued Perrins. ‘Given the background noise in the area, it’s always been our view that any action taken would of necessity be covert. You can rest assured that whatever new action program is decided, we will execute it aggressively and I’m confident that we’ll find what we’re looking for.’

Aware that the game belonged to Perrins now, Reichhardt nodded. His own department had failed. There was nothing more to be done except to eat the shit that Perrins was offering to him. But even so, he had learned to be pessimistic where the optimism of the CIA was concerned. Perhaps he might still manage to keep a foot in the CIa’s door.

‘Let’s hope so,’ he said. ‘Let’s see now. Our next scheduled COMOR get-together is tomorrow. Perhaps you might lay out some of those lines of action then.’

‘Bill, why don’t I call you?’ said Perrins. ‘When we’re ready to read you the menu.’

‘Yes,’ said Reichhardt, squirming with irritation. He could see that Perrins was enjoying himself. ‘Why don’t you do that?’

‘Fat chance,’ Perrins said to himself as soon as he was sitting in his car on the way back to Langley.

The headquarters of the CIA was a very different proposition from the Pentagon. An uncomplicated, modem, white, seven-story building in a pastoral setting of woods and lawns, the nearest Langley got to tourists was the occasional pleasure boat sailing north up the Potomac, the odd demonstration on the CIA exit off the George Washington Parkway, and maybe the Bubble.

The Bubble was a dome-shaped auditorium that seemingly stood alone but was in fact connected to headquarters by an underground tunnel. It was where people without security clearances were allowed to come into contact with agency personnel. It was in the Bubble that Perrins’s boss had been sworn in as DCI by a justice of the Supreme Court. And back in the seventies, it was in the Bubble that TV had been brought into the Agency for the first time, with 60 Minutes and Good Morning America.

There were very few journalists allowed through that secret corridor and into the heart of the CIa’s headquarters. Perrins was about to have a meeting with one of the few who was.

Having worked as a foreign correspondent for a number of newspapers and television networks prior to his joining National Geographic, Brindley had always enjoyed a close relationship with the CIA. At first the relationship had been informal and restricted to the odd conversation on a subject of mutual interest. But over the years the relationship had developed to the point where Brindley agreed to seek specific information or other personnel needed by the Agency.

As a journalist, Brindley had always been something of an action man, the kind of reporter who got into remote and inaccessible parts of the world, often at no small risk to himself. He was the type who joined expeditions to climb unclimbed mountains or penetrate impenetrable jungles, and when he first joined the staff of National Geographic, it had been as the magazine’s senior editor in charge of expeditions.

A fit-looking man in his late forties, but still suffering from the constant glaucoma that had forced an end to his once incessant globetrotting, Brindley saw his former Yale classmate first in the Bubble and then in the latter’s seventh-floor office, on the executive row of the CIA. With its view of the river, the old team photographs of the Orioles on the walls, and piles of computer printouts on the carpeted floor, Perrins’s office was only slightly less shabby than the rest of the building.

The two men exchanged pleasantries while Brindley opened an English leather briefcase and took out a copy of the familiar yellow-bordered magazine. On the cover was a blurred photograph of a gondola.

‘Are you interested in Venice?’ Brindley asked and then tossed his latest issue across the desk.

‘Not professionally,’ smiled Perrins.

‘Me, I don’t care for it at all. There’s something claustrophobic about the place, something corrupt and infective.’

‘What was it Henry James said about it? Originality of attitude is utterly impossible.’ Perceiving that Brindley had felt the point, he smiled sadistically. ‘But keep trying. Maybe you’ll think of something.’

‘Bastard. Beats me what people want to read about. National parks mostly.’

‘Well, Dunham, I’ll say one thing for you: You usually know what I want to read about. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

Brindley nodded at the magazine lying on the blotter in front of Perrins.

‘ “Behind the Scenes”. About six or seven pages in from the front cover. That’s a new feature. The editor’s idea. Amusing, sometimes amazing stories from staff members and freelancers about their experiences in the field. Piece of shit if you ask me.’

Perrins turned the pages.

‘Rock Jock’s Himalayan Tragedy,’ Brindley prompted.

The DDI glanced at a photograph of two mountain climbers and then started to read aloud from the short piece of copy printed underneath.

‘ “America’s leading ‘rock jock,’ Jack Furness, abandoned his attempt to climb all fourteen of the highest Himalayan peaks and returned home to California early, following the tragic death of his climbing partner, the Canadian Alpinist Didier Lauren. Lauren and Furness had forged an internationally famous climbing partnership with an unparalleled record of lightweight first ascents that has been the inspiration for a whole new generation of Alpine-style climbing in America. Furness and Lauren, two NGS research grant recipients, were climbing the southwest face of Annapurna when disaster struck.” ’

Perrins sighed and looked up.

‘Does this have a point, Dunham?’

‘Don’t stop,’ Brindley insisted.

Perrins looked back at the magazine and read the rest of the story in silence. When he finished, he nodded slowly.

‘Could be,’ he allowed.

‘He’s staying right here in Washington. At the Jefferson.’

‘The Jefferson, huh?’ Perrins sounded impressed. ‘I’d have thought an outdoors type like him would be more comfortable at a Howard Johnson.’

Brindley shook his head firmly. ‘Furness is a celebrity.’

‘That’s why I’ve never heard of him.’

‘People write books about him. Movie people use him. Stallone had him do all the stunts in one. He’s made a lot of money. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University.’

‘That doesn’t mean shit, Dunham. Clinton was a Rhodes scholar.’

‘I’m just trying to turn you on to the fact that this is no hard-hat-for-a-brain kid who stinks of campfire smoke.’

‘Okay, okay, he’s Gore Vidal. What’s he doing in Washington?’

‘Presenting a grant proposal. He and an anthropologist, a woman called Stella Swift, want to return to the Annapurna Sanctuary to look for fossils.’

‘Jesus, don’t they read the newspapers? There might be a war in the Punjab.’

‘That’s tree or four hundred kilometres away.’

‘Near enough if it goes nuclear down there.’

‘Which ought to make them all the more valuable to you, Bryan. Right now there are not many people asking for money to go to a potential theatre of conflict.’

‘Point taken. A scientific expedition to the area would be good cover for us.’

‘Copies of the grant proposal are given to the Research and Exploration Committee. That’s about sixteen people. Each of them writes a critique of the grant, summarizing his or her evaluations in a rating, ranging from excellent to poor. After all the reviews come in, the ratings are averaged and a grant is or is not awarded accordingly. On paper, there’s nothing wrong with the proposal. Which reminds me.’

Brindley picked up his briefcase and took out a thermal-bound document that was as thick as a movie screenplay. He tossed it onto the desk on top of the magazine and leaned back in his chair.

‘I brought you a copy. I’m not on the committee myself. And here’s the problem. From what I hear, they didn’t get funded.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘It’s just that money’s a little short right now in this particular field. Belt tightening, I’m afraid.’

Perrins’s intelligent eyes noted the expensive leather belt that was holding up the pants of the journalist’s Brooks Brothers suit, and he smiled thinly. To the right of the belt’s brass buckle the leather showed a dark band that seemed to indicate a belt that had been let out a notch or two to accommodate Brindley’s ample stomach.

‘I can see that,’ Perrins said dryly, and picked up his pen. ‘So who’s on the committee? Maybe we can influence the decision the other way.’

‘Brad Schaffer. He’s a friend. You’ve met him before. I think if we levelled with him he might help.’

‘Do you mean level with him, or bring him to a certain level, clearance-wise? ’

‘Bring him up.’

‘Maybe. What about the rest of the committee?’

‘You’ll find a list of their names in the magazine. It’s an International Who’s Who. Basically the trustees find the money. Often from their own pockets.’

Perrins turned the pages of his copy of National Geographic until he found one that was completely filled with the names of those who had anything to do with the magazine or the Society. Many of the names that appeared on the Board of Trustees and the companies they represented were familiar to him. One name in particular caught his eye.

‘Joel Beinart, chairman and CEO of the Semath Corporation.’

‘The electronic conglomerate. Yeah, I’ve met him.’

‘So have I,’ said Perrins. ‘He used to be secretary of commerce. We did quite a bit of work together. Commerce would often pick a country or a field of business endeavour and then ask us to deliver briefings to the appropriate businesspeople. Beinart’s always been sympathetic to the aims of this agency. Maybe he could front something for us. Organize what the Russians call a joint venture. With an injection of government money via Semath, Schaffer might persuade your Research and Exploration Committee to change their minds.’

‘All the years I’ve known you, it still surprises me when I hear my own ideas coming back to me as if they were yours.’

‘Shut up,’ smiled Perrins. ‘What does this kind of trip cost, anyway?’

‘It’s in the grant proposal,’ said Brindley. ‘But if memory serves, I think they were looking for something in the region of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Less the cost of any private sponsorship deals.’

‘They won’t have time to get any sponsors,’ said Perrins. ‘Three quarters of a mill, huh? You know how much that is out of the 1996 defence budget?’

Brindley shrugged.

‘I’ll tell you.’ Grinning like a schoolboy, Perrins was already tapping out numbers on the keyboard of his PC. ‘About two minutes’ worth.’

‘I figured it must be something trivial.’

‘What about this Furness character?’ Perrins asked. ‘Do you think we might recruit him?’

‘Possible, I suppose. He did a TV commercial for junk bonds once, so he can’t be too highly principled.’

‘What about her?’

‘That I couldn’t say. She’s Australian or English or something.’

Perrins leaned across the desk and pressed a switch on his intercom.

‘Connie. Would you get me the files on—?’ He glanced down at the grant proposal and read the two names on the cover. ‘On a Jack Furness. F-U-R-N-E-S-S. And a Dr. Stella Swift, as in the bird, of the University of California in Berkeley. Oh, and ask Chaz Mustilli if he’d like to come and see me in my office. Thanks, Connie.’

Releasing the switch, he turned the pages of the grant proposal and perused the mission statement.

‘Human fossils, huh?’

‘Paleoanthropology,’ nodded Brindley. ‘Haven’t you heard? It’s the new religion.’

‘People have got to believe in something,’ shrugged Perrins. ‘But speaking for myself I can’t imagine a God who would prefer going to church to seeing a movie.’

‘Let’s stay in tonight,’ said Swift. ‘Let’s have dinner in the hotel.’

She was watching the television news.

‘But we had dinner here last night,’ objected Jack. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to go somewhere different?’

‘I’m not in the mood for different. I’m in the mood for staying in and feeling sorry for myself.’

‘Okay, if that’s what you want.’

‘Shit. Wouldn’t you just believe it?’

‘What?’

Swift pointed at the television.

‘The news,’ she said dully. ‘The secretary of state has managed to persuade the Indians and Pakistanis to agree to a three-month cooling-off period.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ demanded Jack.

‘Nothing,’ shrugged Swift. ‘It’s just that three months would have been a very convenient window for us to have gotten safely in and out of Nepal.’

‘Most expeditions, it takes at least three months to put them together,’ said Jack.

‘This isn’t most expeditions. At least not anymore.’

She kissed him on the cheek.

‘I’m going to take a bath. Jack.’

‘Can’t I stay and watch?’

Swift laughed a silent, embarrassed laugh. There were times when he came on like a high school kid. But since starting to sleep with him again, she had begun to realize how much she had missed him in the first place.

‘Why don’t I join you in the bar?’

‘I could use a drink,’ he admitted. ‘I hate committees.’ He shook his head angrily. ‘I still can’t believe they turned us down.’

‘You’re just saying that. You warned me it might be tough.’ Swift shrugged bravely. ‘Anyway, it’s me they turned down. Me and my idea. They didn’t turn you down. They said you can go back and finish climbing the rest of the peaks, if you want.’

‘That’s not what I want. Not anymore.’

‘Well then, there’s still the National Science Foundation. Warren Fitzgerald’s on the peer review committee. He’s dean of paleoanthropology at Berkeley.’

‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, huh?’

‘Actually, it’s who you sleep with.’

‘You’re kidding.’

She laughed. ‘Just a bit. Unfortunately I think the National Science people are just as tight for cash right now. So Fitzgerald told me anyway.’

‘We’ll find the money somehow. We have to. Maybe a newspaper or a television network. There must be many people who would want to get involved with something like this. Maybe if we levelled with them and told them what the expedition was really all about...?’

‘No way,’ Swift said firmly. ‘The last thing we want is a lot of media interest before we get started. We have to stick to the original plan and keep the idea of a living Esau under wraps. Okay?’

‘Yeah. You’re right.’

Swift nodded and then headed toward the bathroom.

‘I’ll see you downstairs.’

The Jefferson’s lounge looked like the drawing room of an eighteenth-century house. Above a green-and-white marble fireplace, where a large log was burning noisily, was a portrait of Thomas Jefferson and his racing dog, a white whippet, sniffing at its master’s declamatory hand.

Jack sat down in a large armchair, ordered a whisky from the waiter, and settled back to enjoy the fire. The windows rattled against the howling wind, and for a moment he thought he could have been back in the Himalayas. On such a cold night he was glad after all to be staying indoors. The widely praised Virginian cooking of the hotel chef was exactly what he wanted. When his drink arrived, he nursed it for a while, drank it, and then ordered another, wishing he’d brought something to read. Swift had a habit of staying in the bath too long. Most women did.

‘Mister Furness?’

‘Hmm?’

Jack looked up from his study of the firelight. The man standing over him was tall and dressed in a conservative-looking blazer that seemed slightly too big for him, although he appeared in excellent shape.

‘I hope you’ll pardon the interruption, sir,’ said the man, and pointed to the other armchair. ‘May I?’

Jack nodded and then read the proffered business card.

‘ “Jon Boyd, senior director, Alpine and Arctic Research Institute.” What can I do for you, Mister Boyd?’

The waiter returned with Jack’s drink. Boyd handed him his credit card, ordered a daiquiri, and told the waiter to put both drinks on his tab. Then he stretched his hands toward the fire. Jack caught sight of an impressive-looking tattoo. With his buzz haircut, square jaw, and short moustache Boyd reminded Jack of the gay clones you could still see in San Francisco’s Castro district. Apart from the blazer. That looked like off-duty military.

‘The trouble with wood is that there’s not much heat in it,’ he grumbled, then abruptly changed gears. ‘Frankly, I was hoping that you might be able to help me.’

‘Oh? And how might I do that?’

‘I’m a geologist,’ explained Boyd. ‘But for a while now, climatology’s been my thing. Do you know anything about climatology, Mister Furness?’

‘In my line of work, it can save your life if you know something about weather,’ said Jack. ‘It’s a constantly recurring theme in the conversation of most mountaineers, I’m afraid. You learn to blend a little theoretical knowledge with a lot of real-life situation. But mostly it’s a question of listening to weather reports on the radio. I’m an expert on listening to those.’

‘Is the term “katabatic” wind familiar to you?’

‘It’s a wind that develops when air cooled on high ground becomes dense enough to flow downhill, right?’

‘Exactly so.’

‘I know enough about them to avoid camping in valley bottoms and hollows if I want a comfortable night,’ said Jack.

‘On the Antarctic plateau, these winds can reach tremendous speeds,’ said Boyd. ‘As a result they often remove recently fallen snow. Which is where I come in. Snow and ice. You see, my special field of inquiry is the climatic factors that affect the preservation of snow.’

The waiter returned bearing their drinks, and there was a moment’s pause as each man contemplated his glass.

‘Snow?’ Jack tried to sound interested, but he was beginning to regret his tolerance of this stranger. He was beginning to feel a little imposed upon. ‘Why would anyone want to preserve snow?’

‘Snow and ice. In particular, the effect of global warming on the great ice sheets.’

Jack groaned inwardly. An ecology freak. Just his luck. Where the hell was Swift?

‘Most of our work has been done on the Antarctic peninsula and islands. We hope to understand the outcome of the threatened runaway greenhouse effect. Frankly, there’s a lot of conflicting information. The Greenland ice sheet is thickening. And there have been increases in the amount of snow at the poles. Yet the climate continues to indicate that the melting of ice is accelerating.’

Jack glanced at his watch.

‘Somewhere between five and ten thousand years ago the sea rose rapidly, in response to the disappearance of global ice sheets. Then it slowed considerably. Currently we estimate that the sea level is rising by as much as two millimetres per annum.’

‘Well this is fascinating, Mister Boyd,’ said Jack, stifling a yawn. ‘But I don’t see what it has to do with me.’

‘It has everything to do with all of us,’ said Boyd.

‘What I mean to say is—’

Boyd held up his hand and added quickly, ‘It’s likely that the melting of mountain glaciers may account for some of this.’

Jack’s ears pricked up. Mountains. Now the man was making sense.

‘The question is, how much? How much of the increase in sea level relates to melting mountain glaciers, and how much to floating ice sheets. And that’s why I want to go to the highest mountain range in the world. To undertake some urgent research on the Himalayan glaciers.’

‘At last,’ said Jack. ‘We connect.’

‘Washington’s a small place, Mister Furness. When I heard you had applied for a grant to fund an expedition to the Himalayas, I had hoped that I might persuade you to take me along as a paving guest. Share some expenses, y’know? Not to climb. No sir, I have no head for heights. No, it’s so that I might conduct my own geological experiments. Specifically, drilling holes in the ice, taking core samples from the glacier, that kind of thing. Frankly the political situation in the Indian subcontinent means that there are not many people Like yourself going to that part of the world.’

Jack tried to cut in with his own news, but Boyd was not to be interrupted.

‘There’s certainly no one who knows the Himalayas as well as you, Mister Furness. No one knows how to put an outfit like this together. That’s why—’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mister Boyd, but I’m afraid our grant proposal got turned down.’ He shrugged. ‘We just heard.’

‘No.’ Boyd sounded genuinely outraged. ‘I don’t believe it. Why would they turn you down? You’re the country’s leading mountaineer.’

‘It’s kind of you to say so. But this time it’s not exactly a climbing expedition I’m putting together. We’re going to look for some fossils. Either way, it doesn’t really seem to matter right now.’

‘What can I say? I guess I’ll be going on my own then. I’m really sorry. I felt sure—’

‘Forget it. And good luck with your work.’

The two men stood and shook hands as Swift appeared in the Jefferson lounge. She looked excited about something. Jack glanced irritably at his watch.

‘You’ll never guess what’s happened,’ she said, ignoring Boyd.

‘I figured something must have, the time you’ve been.’ He started to introduce Boyd, but Swift was too high on her news to listen.

‘The phone rang just as I was leaving the room. It was Brad Schaffer. From the Research and Exploration Committee? He was calling from the National Geographic offices.’

‘They’re still there? At this time of night?’

‘In view of the three-month cooling-off period agreed by the Indians and Pakistanis, some of them wanted to reconsider their earlier decision. And guess what? It looks like they’ve decided to give us a grant after all.’

‘That’s great.’

He grinned awkwardly and then glanced at Boyd.

‘Swift, this is Jon Boyd. Mister Boyd, this is Dr. Stella Swift. Only don’t ever call her Stella.’

Boyd handed her another business card.

‘Mister Boyd is a geologist and climatologist. He had hoped to be a paying guest on our expedition.’

While Jack was speaking. Swift read Boyd’s card, turned it over in her fingers as if threatening to make it disappear, and then tossed it onto the table like so much wastepaper. Easily attracting the eye of the waiter, she ordered a bottle of champagne.

‘I’m in a mood to celebrate,’ she said simply, and sat down.

Jack nodded. ‘What changed their minds? Did they say?’

‘They found some more money. One of the committee members, Joel Beinart, was more impressed with our grant proposal than he’d felt able to say at the meeting. And when this cooling-off period was negotiated, he felt that it must be some kind of sign. Anyway, he’s found the money himself, from his own company. The Semath Corporation. Oh, yes, there’s one tiny condition. Something to do with the tax year? It’s a condition of the grant that the money has to be used sooner rather than later so his company can treat the grant money as part of this year’s deductible charities and donations.’

‘How much sooner?’ said Jack.

‘End of the month.’

‘The end of the month?’ Jack guffawed. ‘That’s less than two weeks, Swift. It takes time to put an expedition like this together. A lot of time. Two weeks? It simply can’t be done.’

‘Oh, come on. Jack. Where there’s a will?’

Jack looked around the room with bewilderment and caught sight of Thomas Jefferson’s portrait.

‘Like the man said,’ he sighed. ‘Delay is preferable to error. What’s the goddamn hurry anyway?’

Swift shrugged.

‘The bean counters have their financial year to consider. They’re even prepared to give us more money than we’ve asked for. A million dollars, Jack. Not to mention a lot of new equipment they want us to test. Besides, there’s the diplomatic window to think of now. It would be a lot easier persuading other scientists to come with us if we could take full advantage of what’s been negotiated between India and Pakistan.’

The waiter arrived with champagne. Swift toasted the good news.

‘Speaking for myself,’ Boyd said cautiously. ‘If, that is, you decided that you were able to take me along. And I’d be paying my way. Not to mention bringing along a lot of new equipment that we’ve already tested in the Antarctic. well, sooner would also suit me better too. You see there’s an Intergovernmental Summit on Climate Control in London, in twelve weeks. Now, I don’t know how you people feel about fossil fuels, but my company opposes any moves on the part of the international community to force through more reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases. At least until people like me have had a chance to predict how much CO₂ the atmosphere can absorb before it triggers catastrophic climate change.’

‘And you can do that in the Himalayas?’ asked Swift.

Boyd described his interest in taking core samples from mountain glaciers.

‘It’s vital that we have as clear a set of data as possible, otherwise we may end up committing ourselves to unnecessary targets that will almost certainly have an effect on American economic development.’

‘What if your data doesn’t support your institute’s point of view?’ asked Jack. ‘Then what?’

‘To be honest with you, that’s not for me to say. I’m just a scientist. Jack. Governments will have to call a halt to CO₂ emissions sometime. It’s bound to be unpopular when it does happen. Very unpopular. No politician wants to make an unpopular decision until the last possible moment.’

‘I guess so,’ said Jack. ‘But two weeks? Have either of you any idea what the weather out there is like right now?’

He drained his champagne glass at the thought of it.

‘Quite apart from the effects of high altitude, we’ll have to cope with very high winds, temperatures so low they’re almost off the scale, and less than seven hours of light per day. These are hardly ideal conditions for any scientific expedition.’

Boyd shrugged.

‘I apologize if this sounds like mine’s bigger than yours, but Antarctica wasn’t exactly a Sunday school picnic. And like I say, my institute will be sending some of the latest equipment. Some of the gear we used at the pole was developed by NASA. I mean state of the art.’

Swift nodded. ‘It all sounds fine to me, Mister Boyd. Jack? What do you say?’

Jack examined his now empty glass and then nodded grimly.

‘Whatever equipment you take, it’s never enough. Things go wrong. The unforeseen happens. It’s that kind of place. State-of-the-art equipment from NASA, huh? You can bet your last dollar we’ll be needing it. Because in winter, the Himalaya is as cold and hostile an environment as... as the surface of Pluto.’

Jack drummed his fingers on the table.

After Boyd finally left the hotel, he and Swift settled in with a good dinner. He might have enjoyed it more if he hadn’t been a little preoccupied with trying to fathom the reason for the committee’s sudden turnaround. It was nagging at him like a persistent toothache.

‘You’re being very perverse about this,’ she told him. ‘We’ve got the money. We’ve even got a breathing space.’

He grunted with puzzlement.

‘I mean, the cooling-off period. What more do you want? The car comes gift-wrapped in pink ribbon, and still you want to inspect the tires.’

‘Someone has to if we’re all going to ride safely.’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘Companies don’t just find a million dollars lying around like that. Like so much backyard lumber.’

‘But it’s just as I told you. They liked the grant proposal.’

‘My guess is that you’d take the grant no matter what. Jimmy Hoffa could show up and give you a suitcase full of money and you wouldn’t ask any questions. Am I right?’

Swift let herself be amused by him.

‘Maybe.’

‘So, who’s being perverse now? I mean isn’t there any part of you that wants to know more about this? That wants to be just a tad cautious?’

‘Okay then, tell me. What should I suspect? That someone has figured out the real purpose of the expedition is to find a yeti? If anything, I think that would make people less inclined to hand over a million bucks, don’t you? What is there that should make us suspicious? Please, Jack, I would like to know.’

‘It feels wrong, that’s all. I can’t explain why.’

‘Well, you’re certainly not trying very hard. I’m a scientist. I need a little more to go on than what’s happening in your gut. Jack.’

She stood up.

‘I’m going back to the room,’ she said. ‘Are you coming?’

‘No, I thought I would get some air. Clear my head.’

‘Good idea,’ she said. ‘Too much wine makes you paranoid.’

They parted stiffly in the lobby. As Jack headed toward the front door, the concierge called to him.

‘Mister Furness. There’s a parcel here for you, sir.’

‘A parcel? For me? I’m not expecting any parcel.’

‘Your name is on the label, sir.’

‘Thanks, Harvey.’

Puzzled, Jack came over to the desk to inspect the parcel, immediately recognizing its White Fang address label. It was from his sponsor. Inside was a note from Chuck Farrell and several pairs of new compound sticky rock boots, all in Jack’s size. The concierge watched as Jack picked one pair of shoes out of the box. With their Velcro fastenings, bright colours, and Navajo Indian designs, they looked more like moccasins than climbing shoes.

Reading the name on the shoebox, the concierge said, ‘The Brundle shoe. What’s a Brundle shoe?’

‘Do you go to the movies, Harvey?’

‘Some.’

‘Ever see a movie called The Fly? After Dr. Martin Brundle. The Jeff Goldblum character.’

‘Right,’ said Harvey. ‘But I still don’t get it.’

‘They’re climbing shoes.’

‘Climbing shoes. Well, they look comfortable.’

‘Not on me,’ said Jack. ‘Not anymore. You keep ’em. Christmas present.’

‘Thanks, Mister Furness. But where can you climb around here?’

‘You could try the Washington Monument.’

He went out onto 16th Street, braced himself against the cold, and walked south, heading past the ornate mansion that housed the Russian Embassy and chuckling quietly. The Washington Monument. Now that really would be a climb. A one-hundred-and-forty-metre obelisk of New England granite. The wonder was he hadn’t tried it before. There had been a time when just thinking about it would have made him want to go and do it.

On the corner of M Street he turned right, his footsteps carrying him automatically in the direction of the National Geographic building. He could see a couple of lights still burning on the penultimate floor, where the executive decisions were made. Even the ones you couldn’t account for. Why had they changed their minds, and so quickly? Was it really anything to do with the cooling-off period negotiated by the secretary of state?

It didn’t make any sense. It just wasn’t the way they did things. Was there some other reason? But what could that be? Swift was right. He had to give her more than just his gut feeling. He had a good mind to go up there and see if he couldn’t find some answers. Jack tried the front door, but it was locked. What was the point, anyway? Even if there had been someone around, they would probably just have given him the same story that they had already given to Swift about the Semath Corporation bean counters and their financial year.

He walked on, staring up at the top of the building and the lights still burning there, and rounding the next corner, he saw that someone had carelessly left a corner window open on the top floor. The light was off but he could clearly see a net curtain billowing out into the night air, like the sail of a ship that had slipped its rope.

Perhaps he had only to climb up and through the open window to find out why the decision had been changed. Look around someone’s office. Someone like Brad Schaffer, on the Research and Exploration Committee. Turn on his computer. Locate a file. It sounded simple enough when he considered the idea. Just climb up there and nose around. It wasn’t as if it was a particularly tall building. There was a height limit on all buildings in Washington — roughly the elevation of the Capitol dome and the Washington Monument, so that you could always see the sky and the Capitol downtown. About thirteen stories. The Transamerica Pyramid he’d climbed for the junk-bond commercial had been several times higher. In comparison, this one looked positively squat.

Jack walked quickly back to the hotel, his heart racing in anticipation. Perhaps it was as well that he’d had so much to drink. Dutch courage: In hell of any other kind, it would have to suffice. If he was ever going to climb the big walls again, this might just be a quick way to recover his nerve. Either that or it would be an easy way of killing himself.

The concierge was sitting behind the desk, reading a copy of the Post.

‘Give me a pair of those shoes, will ya?’ said Jack.

‘Sure thing, Mister Furness.’

Jack threw off his coat. He was wearing a cashmere turtleneck sweater and a pair of jeans. He sat down behind the desk and pulled off his loafers and socks.

‘Kinda late to be going climbing, isn’t it, Mister Furness?’

‘It’s never too late to go climbing, Harvey.’

He laced the Brundle shoes up tightly on his bare feet and stood up, flexing his insteps. Chuck’s new shoes felt good. He laid one foot flat on the marble floor and pushed hard. The sole hardly moved.

‘Not bad,’ he murmured. ‘Not bad at all, Chuck.’ He looked around the inside of the reception desk. ‘You got any Band-Aids there?’

The concierge produced a first-aid box and let Jack help himself.

‘How about chalk powder?’

‘Chalk powder?’ He looked thoughtful. ‘No sir. Can’t say we do. But there’s some resin in the health dub. Guys use it on the rings. Would that do?’

Jack nodded.

‘I’ll go fetch it.’

Jack started to tape up his fingers, trying to make each finger’s tendon as rigid as possible without cutting off any circulation. He had rejected the idea of wearing gloves. It was cold enough, only he was worried about not getting sufficient grip on the fabric of the building. He just hoped he could get up quickly enough before his fingers started to get numb.

The concierge arrived back with a small bag of resin and handed it over.

Jack turned and jogged gently toward the hotel front door.

‘You ain’t gonna try the Monument, are you, sir?’

‘Not tonight,’ said Jack, and ran out into the night air.

Somewhere inside his head a still small voice of sense and reason tried to tell him that what he was planning to do was crazy. Even if he did make it up to the open window, what exactly was he hoping to find? And where would he look for it? But by now Jack’s late-night expedition had become more than just a bit of innocent cat burglary. The climb was now carrying the extra load of another chance at the rest of his mountaineering career.

As calmly as he could, he walked past the front door of the National Geographic offices. The last thing anyone would be expecting was someone entering the building through an open window on the top floor. Jack kept on walking. Climbing the Transamerica, he had chosen a route up the corner of the building. It was just good luck that the open window was on the corner of the National Geographic.

Jack looked around, and seeing M Street deserted, he jumped up and caught the first window ledge with one hand. It was about eight centimetres deep. The hardest bit was always pulling yourself up onto the pitch with one arm. Grunting so loudly he thought that someone would hear him, he got another handhold and then swung a foot up, scrambling at the ledge, sliding his face up against the cold pane of the window until he was standing about three metres above the ground. Breathing heavily from this first exertion, he inched his way to the corner.

The building was the standard glass box, clean lines and brutal simplicity, with a steel frame that left a suitable handhold all the way up on both sides of the corner. It was the rock-climbing equivalent of an even-width crack. A 5.9 layback, like the Crack of Doom on Yosemite’s Leaning Tower. Or Lightning Dream at Tahoe. Better. There was at least an inch of crack between the frame and the glass. And it was a crack unscarred by the jamcracks, pitons, nuts, and cams that had ruined many good routes in Yosemite all the way to the top. Just a matter of sliding two sets of fingers under each side of the frame and, with arms at full stretch, concentrating the weight there, pushing up with your toes.

The grip of the new compound rubber was astonishingly sure, and Jack made good progress up the corner of the building. The Brundle shoes really did let him climb like a fly. It was good, he thought, that his vision was not similarly enhanced. Seeing less left little room for his imagination to go to work.

Nearer the top it grew windier. Now he had a good view of Capitol Hill and the Washington Monument: Two airplane warning lights blinking on either side of the obelisk made it look like some kind of fiery-eyed dinosaur. He was going to make it. The window was now just a metre or so above his head.

Jack lifted his foot, reached for the next toehold, slid his fingers up the crack, and touched something alive that was suddenly leaping in his face. His heart seemed to take off into the night sky, flapping madly, like the wings of the pigeon he had disturbed. He moved instinctively backward to avoid its emergency flight path — just a little too far — and missed the toehold he had been going for, as well as the one he had been resting on. For a long, vertiginous moment, he hung there by only his fingertips, his feet thrashing around like those of a hanged man, desperately trying to find another toehold. Seconds passed and his toes seemed foreign to him as they refused to do his mind’s bidding. Finally, they connected with the building again and he clung there, like a koala, perspiring freely although it was cold enough for snow.

He took a deep breath, steadied himself, felt the alcohol in his blood, and climbed on, reaching the corner window in a matter of a few seconds, and stepping into the empty office with the sense of having conquered more than just an averagely tall glass monolith. He felt a new raw life force. Perhaps he really had overcome his fear.

He could see why the window had been left open. The room was being decorated and smelled strongly of paint. He opened the door and peered into the dimly lit corridor. No one about. He crept along the corridor and down the stairs to the floor below where the offices of the Research and Exploration Committee were situated. The lights were still on, but it looked as if everyone had gone home.

Brad Schaffer’s office was easy to find. It even had his nameplate on the door. It was not locked and Jack opened it and went inside, closing the door behind him and turning the T-lock just in case anyone from security came along. Jack glanced at Brad’s desktop PC and wondered if he was being a fool to think that he might be able to work out how to use the operating system. He switched it on anyway and while the machine was warming up, noisily initializing and testing its own memory and reading its own operating files. Jack turned his attention to the polished wooden filing cabinets ranged along one wall. He searched among the drawer fronts and their title panels and almost immediately located the one labelled ‘GRANT PROPOSALS.’ A few seconds later he was sitting in Schaffer’s own desk chair and reading the notes that had been attached to the research proposal Swift had carefully prepared with duplicitous understatement of the real aims of their expedition. Alongside the grant proposal were the reports of the members of the peer review committee, generally favourable, and a note from the accounts committee to the effect that money was too tight for the awarding of any new grants before the end of the next calendar year. The next page in the file was a letter formally confirming that the grant proposal had been accepted.

Jack groaned quietly and turned his attention to Schaffer’s computer screen. It was a standard Microsoft Windows setup, the same as the one he had on his PC back home in Danville. But trying to access Schaffer’s files from the File Manager, he discovered that they were all protected by a code word. He stared hard at the Program Manager and its many coloured icons resembling objects in a doll’s house, hoping that one of them might provoke an idea about what to do next. One of them did. The CompuServe icon. Jack wondered if Schaffer had bothered to protect his e-mail files. If Brad was anything like himself, the messages just piled up until he could be bothered to delete them.

He clicked on the CompuServe icon and checked the In Box for recent messages. Right away he realized that one of these was exactly what he had been looking for. The message was from someone named Bryan Perrins, and there was even an e-mail address for any reply. Jack made a note of it for later investigation.

Reading the message. Jack smiled grimly.

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ he whispered, and headed back upstairs, toward his exit window.

Back at the hotel, the concierge was nowhere to be seen. Jack reclaimed his jacket, shoes, and socks and went straight up to the room where Swift greeted his appearance with horror.

‘What the hell happened to you? You look like you’ve been crawling along the street.’

Jack looked at himself. It was true. He was filthy.

‘I had a bit of an accident,’ he said vaguely. ‘I slipped on the sidewalk.’ He went into the bathroom and pulled off his turtleneck. ‘It’s getting icy out there.’

‘Too much to drink, more like,’ she said, coming up behind and hugging him warmly.

‘I’m sorry we quarrelled. But don’t you see? This expedition means everything to me. It’s the chance of a lifetime. The chance to give my professional life some meaning. You can see that, can’t you?’

‘Yeah. I can see that it’s important to you.’

‘But you’re the boss. Jack. The expedition leader. You know the logistics of going somewhere like this.’

Swift squeezed him affectionately and tried to convey an impression of having to struggle to say what she was about to say. She had been preparing her little speech while he was gone and hoped it would convey the right combination of acquiescence and seductiveness.

‘If you think there’s some reason we should delay,’ she said, kissing his bare shoulder, ‘some reason we should tell Mister Beinart, and Semath, and the National Geographic people that we’ll find the grant money from somewhere else, then that’s fine with me. Okay?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason at all.’ Perhaps it wasn’t necessary that she knew what he knew. Besides, he only half understood it himself. He would just have to be on the lookout — but for what, he wasn’t sure.