Timeline

ITC."

"Yes, that's correct."

"This doesn't bother you?"

"If I worked for Microsoft, Bill Gates would own the results of my research. Anything I found and discovered, Bill Gates would own."

"Yes. But this is hardly the same."

"Why not? ITC is a technical company, and Doniger set up this fund the way technical companies do such things. The arrangement doesn't bother me. We have the right to publish our findings - they even pay for publication."

"After they approve them."

"Yes. We send our reports to them first. But they have never commented."

"So you see no greater ITC plan behind all this?" she asked.

Johnston said, "Do you?"

"I don't know," she said. "That is why I am asking you. Because of course there are some extremely puzzling aspects to the behavior of ITC as a company."

"What aspects?"

"For example," she said, "they are one of the world's largest consumers of xenon."

"Xenon? You mean the gas?"

"Yes. It is used in lasers and electron tubes."

Johnston shrugged. "They can have all the xenon gas they want. I can't see how it concerns me."

"What about their interest in exotic metals? ITC recently purchased a Nigerian company to assure their supply of niobium."

"Niobium." Johnston shook his head. "What's niobium?"

"It is a metal similar to titanium."

"What's it used for?"

"Superconducting magnets, and nuclear reactors."

"And you wonder what ITC is using it for?" Johnston shook his head again. "You'd have to ask them, Miss Delvert."

"I did. They said it was for `research in advanced magnetics.' "

"There you are. Any reason not to believe them?"

"No," she said. "But as you said yourself, ITC is a research company. They employ two hundred physicists at their main facility, a place called Black Rock, in New Mexico. It is clearly and unquestionably a high-technology company."

"Yes…"

"So I wonder: Why would a high-technology company want so much land?"

"Land?"

"ITC has purchased large land parcels in remote locations around the world: the mountains of Sumatra, northern Cambodia, southeast Pakistan, the jungles of central Guatemala, the highlands of Peru."

Johnston frowned. "Are you sure?"

"Yes. They have made acquisitions in Europe, as well. West of Rome, five hundred hectares. In Germany near Heidelberg, seven hundred hectares. In France, a thousand thousand hectares in the limestone hills above the River Lot. And finally, right here."

"Here?"

"Yes. Using British and Swedish holding companies, they have very quietly acquired five hundred hectares, all around your site. It is mostly forest and farmland, at the moment."

"Holding companies?" he said.

"That makes it very difficult to trace. Whatever ITC is doing, it clearly requires secrecy. But why would this company fund your research, and also buy the land all around the site?"

"I have no idea," Johnston said. "Especially since ITC doesn't own the site itself. You'll recall they gave the entire area - Castelgard, Sainte-Mère and La Roque - to the French government last year."

"Of course. For a tax exemption."

"But still, ITC does not own the site. Why should they buy land around it?"

"I will be happy to show you everything I have."

"Perhaps," Johnston said, "you should."

"My research is just in the car."

They started together toward the Land Rover. Watching them go, Bellin clucked his tongue. "Ah, dear, dear. It is so difficult to trust these days."

Chris was about to answer in his bad French when his radio clicked. "Chris?" It was David Stern, the project technologist. "Chris, is the Professor with you? Ask him if he knows somebody named James Wauneka."

Chris pressed the button on his radio. "The Professor's busy right now. What's it about?"

"He's some guy in Gallup. He's called twice. Wants to send us a picture of our monastery that he says he found in the desert."

"What? In the desert?"

"He might be a little cracked. He claims he's a cop, and he keeps babbling on about some dead ITC employee."

"Have him send it to our e-mail address," Chris said. "You take a look at it."

He clicked the radio off. Bellin was looking at his watch, clucking again, then looking at the car, where Johnston and Delvert were standing, their heads almost touching as they pored over papers. "I have appointments," he said mournfully. "Who knows how long this will take?"

"I think," Chris said, "perhaps not long."

Twenty minutes later, Bellin was driving off with Miss Delvert at his side, and Chris was standing with the Professor, waving good-bye. "I think that went rather well," Johnston said.

"What'd she show you?"

"Some land-purchase records, for the area around here. But it's not persuasive. Four parcels were bought by a German investment group about which little is known. Two parcels were bought by a British attorney who claims he's going to retire here; another by a Dutch banker for his grown daughter; and so on."

"The British and the Dutch have been buying land in the Périgord for years," Chris said. "It's nothing new."

"Exactly. She has some idea that all the purchases could be traced to ITC. But it's pretty tenuous. You have to be a believer."

The car was gone. They turned and walked toward the river. The sun was higher in the sky now, and it was getting warm.

Cautiously, Chris said, "Charming woman."

"I think," Johnston said, "that she works too hard at her job."

They got into the rowboat tied up at the river's edge, and Chris rowed them across to Castelgard.

They left the rowboat behind, and began climbing toward the top of Castelgard hill. They saw the first sign of castle walls. On this side, all that remained of the walls were grassy embankments that ended in long scars of exposed, crumbled rock. After six hundred years, it almost looked like a natural feature. But it was in fact the remains of a wall.

"You know," the Professor said, "what she really doesn't like is corporate sponsorship. But archaeological research has always depended on outside benefactors. A hundred years ago, the benefactors were all individuals: Carnegie, Peabody, Stanford. But these days wealth is corporate, so Nippon TV finances the Sistine Chapel, British Telecom finances York, Philips Electronics finances the Toulouse castrum, and ITC finances us."

"Speak of the devil," Chris said. As they came over the hill, they saw the dark form of Diane Kramer, standing with André Marek.

The Professor sighed. "This day is completely wasted. How long is she going to be here?"

"Her plane is at Bergerac. She's scheduled to leave this afternoon at three."

"I'm sorry about that woman," Diane Kramer said, when Johnston came up to join her. "She's annoying everybody, but we've been unable to do anything about her."

"Bellin said you wanted me to talk to her."

"We want everybody to talk to her," Kramer said. "We're doing everything we can to show her there are no secrets."

"She seemed mostly concerned," Johnston said, "that ITC was making land purchases in this area."

"Land purchases? ITC?" Kramer laughed. "I haven't heard that one before. Did she ask you about niobium and nuclear reactors?"

"As a matter of fact, she did. She said you'd bought a company in Nigeria, to assure your supply."

"Nigeria," Kramer repeated, shaking her head. "Oh dear. Our niobium comes from Canada. Niobium's not exactly a rare metal, you know. It sells for seventy-five dollars a pound." She shook her head. "We offered to give her a tour of our facility, interview with our president, bring a photographer, her own experts, whatever she wants. But no. It's modern journalism: don't let the facts get in your way."

Kramer turned, and gestured to the ruins of Castelgard all around them. "Anyway," she said. "I've taken Dr. Marek's excellent tour, in the helicopter and on foot. It's evident you're doing absolutely spectacular work. Progress is good, the work's of extremely high academic quality, recordkeeping is first rate, your people are happy, the site is managed well. Just fabulous. I couldn't be happier. But Dr. Marek tells me he is going to be late for his - what is it?"

"My broadsword lesson," Marek said.

"His broadsword lesson. Yes. I think he should certainly do that. It doesn't sound like something you can change, like a piano lesson. In the meantime, shall we walk the site together?"

"Of course," Johnston said.

Chris's radio beeped. A voice said, "Chris? It's Sophie for you."

"I'll call her back."

"No, no," Kramer said. "You go ahead. I'll speak to the Professor alone."

Johnston said quickly, "I usually have Chris with me, to take notes."

"I don't think we'll need notes today."

"All right. Fine." He turned to Chris. "But give me your radio, in case."

"No problem," Chris said. He unclipped the radio from his belt and handed it to Johnston. As Johnston took it in his hand, he clearly flicked on the voice-activation switch. Then he slipped it on his belt.

"Thanks," Johnston said. "Now, you better go call Sophie. You know she doesn't like to be kept waiting."

"Right," Chris said.

As Johnston and Kramer began to walk through the ruins, he sprinted across the field toward the stone farmhouse that served as the project office.

Just beyond the crumbling walls of Castelgard town, the team had bought a dilapidated stone storehouse and had rebuilt the roof, and repaired the stonework. Here they housed all their electronics, lab equipment and archival computers. Unprocessed records and artifacts were spread out on the ground beneath a broad green tent adjacent to the farmhouse.

Chris went into the storehouse, which was one large room that they had divided into two. To the left, Elsie Kastner, the team's linguist and graphology expert, sat in her own room, hunched over parchment documents. Chris ignored her and went straight ahead to the room crammed with electronic equipment. There David Stern, the thin and bespectacled technical expert on the project, was talking on a telephone.

"Well," Stern was saying, "you'll have to scan your document at a fairly high resolution, and send it to us. Do you have a scanner there?"

Hastily, Chris rummaged through the equipment on the field table, looking for a spare radio. He didn't see one; all the charger boxes were empty.

"The police department doesn't have a scanner?" Stern was saying, surprised. "Oh, you're not at the - well, why don't you go there and use the police scanner?"

Chris tapped Stern on the shoulder. He mouthed, Radio.

Stern nodded and unclipped his own radio from his belt. "Well yes, the hospital scanner would be fine. Maybe they will have someone who can help you. We need twelve-eighty by ten-twenty-four, saved as a JPEG file. Then you transmit that to us… ."

Chris ran outside, flicking through the channels on the radio as he went.

From the storehouse door, he could look down over the entire site. He saw Johnston and Kramer walking along the edge of the plateau overlooking the monastery. She had a notebook open and was showing him something on paper.

And then he found them on channel eight.

"-ignificant acceleration in the pace of research," she was saying.

And the Professor said, "What?"

Professor Johnston looked over his wire-frame spectacles at the woman standing before him. "That's impossible," he said.

She took a deep breath. "Perhaps I haven't explained it very well. You are already doing some reconstruction. What Bob would like to do," she said, "is to enlarge that to be a full program of reconstruction."

"Yes. And that's impossible."

"Tell me why."

"Because we don't know enough, that's why," Johnston said angrily. "Look: the only reconstruction we've done so far has been for safety. We've rebuilt walls so they don't fall on our researchers. But we're not ready to actually begin rebuilding the site itself."

"But surely a part," she said. "I mean, look at the monastery over there. You could certainly rebuild the church, and the cloister beside it, and the refectory, and-"

"What?" Johnston said. "The refectory?" The refectory was the dining room where the monks took their meals. Johnston pointed down at the site, where low walls and crisscrossing trenches made a confusing pattern. "Who said the refectory was next to the cloister?"

"Well, I-"

"You see? This is exactly my point," Johnston said. "We still aren't sure where the refectory is yet. It's only just recently that we've started to think it might be next to the cloister, but we aren't sure."

She said irritably, "Professor, academic study can go on indefinitely, but in the real world of results-"

"I'm all for results," Johnston said. "But the whole point of a dig like this is that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. A hundred years ago, an architect named Viollet-le-Duc rebuilt monuments all over France. Some he did well. But when he didn't have enough information, he just made it up. The buildings were just his fantasy."

"I understand you want to be accurate-"

"If I knew ITC wanted Disneyland, I'd never have agreed."

"We don't want Disneyland."

"If you rebuild now, that's what you'll get, Ms. Kramer. You'll get a fantasy. Medieval Land."

"No," she said. "I can assure you in the strongest possible terms. We do not want a fantasy. We want an historically accurate reconstruction of the site."

"But it can't be done."

"We believe it can."

"How?"

"With all due respect, Professor, you're being overcautious. You know more than you think you do. For example, the town of Castelgard, beneath the castle itself. That could certainly be rebuilt."

"I suppose… Part of it could, yes."

"And that's all we're asking. Just to rebuild a part."

David Stern wandered out of the storehouse, to find Chris listening with the radio pressed to his ear. "Eavesdropping, Chris?"

"Shhh," Chris said. "This is important."

Stern shrugged his shoulders. He always felt a little detached from the enthusiasms of the graduate students around him. The others were historians, but Stern was trained as a physicist, and he tended to see things differently. He just couldn't get very excited about finding another medieval hearth, or a few bones from a burial site. In any case, Stern had only taken this job - which required him to run the electronic equipment, do various chemical analyses, carbon dating, and so on - to be near his girlfriend, who was attending summer school in Toulouse. He had been intrigued by the idea of quantum dating, but so far the equipment had failed to work.

On the radio, Kramer was saying, "And if you rebuild part of the town, then you could also rebuild part of the outer castle wall, where it is adjacent to the town. That section there." She was pointing to a low, ragged wall running north-south across the site.

The Professor said, "Well, I suppose we could…"

"And," Kramer continued, "you could extend the wall to the south, where it goes into the woods over there. You could clear the woods, and rebuild the tower."

Stern and Chris looked at each other.

"What's she talking about?" Stern said. "What tower?"

"Nobody's even surveyed the woods yet," Chris said. "We were going to clear it at the end of the summer, and then have it surveyed in the fall."

Over the radio, they heard the Professor say, "Your proposal is very interesting, Ms. Kramer. Let me discuss it with the others, and we'll meet again at lunch."

And then in the field below, Chris saw the Professor turn, look directly at them, and point a stabbing finger toward the woods.

Leaving the open field of ruins behind, they climbed a green embankment, and entered the woods. The trees were slender, but they grew close together, and beneath their canopy it was dark and cool. Chris Hughes followed the old outer castle wall as it diminished progressively from a waist-high wall to a low outcrop of stones, and then finally to nothing, disappearing beneath the underbrush.

From then on, he had to bend over, pushing aside the ferns and small plants with his hands in order to see the path of the wall.

The woods grew thicker around them. He felt a sense of peace here. He remembered that when he had first seen Castelgard, nearly the entire site had been within forest like this. The few standing walls were covered in moss and lichen, and seemed to emerge from the earth like organic forms. There had been a mystery to the site back then. But that had been lost once they cleared the land and began excavations.

Stern trailed along behind him. Stern didn't get out of the lab much, and he seemed to be enjoying it. "Why are all the trees so small?" he said.

"Because it's a new forest," Chris said. "Nearly all the forests in the Périgord are less than a hundred years old. All this land used to be cleared, for vineyards."

"And?"

Chris shrugged. "Disease. That blight, phylloxera, killed all the vines around the turn of the century. And the forest grew back." And he added, "The French wine industry almost vanished. They were saved by importing vines that were phylloxera-resistant, from California. Something they'd rather forget."

As he talked, he continued looking at the ground, finding a piece of stone here and there, just enough to enable him to follow the line of the old wall.

But suddenly, the wall was gone. He'd lost it entirely. Now he would have to double back, pick it up again.

"Damn."

"What?" Stern said.

"I can't find the wall. It was running right this way" - he pointed with the flat of his hand-" and now it's gone."

They were standing in an area of particularly thick undergrowth, high ferns intermixed with some kind of thorny vine that scratched at his bare legs. Stern was wearing trousers, and he walked forward, saying, "I don't know, Chris, it's got to be around here… ."

Chris knew he had to double back. He had just turned to retrace his steps when he heard Stern yell.

Chris looked back.

Stern was gone. Vanished.

Chris was standing alone in the woods.

"David?"

A groan. "Ah… damn."

"What happened?"

"I banged my knee. It hurts like a mother."

Chris couldn't see him anywhere. "Where are you?"

"In a hole," Stern said. "I fell. Be careful, if you come this way. In fact…" A grunt. Swearing. "Don't bother. I can stand. I'm okay. In fact - hey."

"What?"

"Wait a minute."

"What is it?"

"Just wait, okay?"

Chris saw the underbrush move, the ferns shifting back and forth, as Stern headed to the left. Then Stern spoke. His voice sounded odd. "Uh, Chris?"

"What is it?"

"It's a section of wall. Curved."

"What are you saying?"

"I think I'm standing at the bottom of what was once a round tower, Chris."

"No kidding," Chris said. He thought, How did Kramer know about that?

"Check the computer," the Professor said. "See if we have any helicopter survey scans - infrared or radar - that show a tower. It may already be recorded, and we just never paid attention to it."

"Late-afternoon infrared is your best bet," Stern said. He was sitting in a chair with an ice pack on his knee.

"Why late afternoon?"

"Because this limestone holds heat. That's why the cavemen liked it so much here. Even in winter, a cave in Périgord limestone was ten degrees warmer than the outside temperature."

"So in the afternoon.. ."

"The wall holds heat as the forest cools. And it'll show up on infrared."

"Even buried?"

Stern shrugged.

Chris sat at the computer console, started hitting keys. The computer made a soft beep. The image switched abruptly.

"Oops. We're in e-mail."

Chris clicked on the mailbox. There was just one message, and it took a long time to download. "What's this?"

"I bet it's that guy Wauneka," Stern said. "I told him to send a pretty big graphic. He probably didn't compress it."

Then the image popped up on the screen: a series of dots arranged in a geometric pattern. They all recognized it at once. It was unquestionably the Monastery of Sainte-Mère. Their own site.

In greater detail than their own survey.

Johnston peered at the image. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. "It's odd," he said finally, "that Bellin and Kramer would both just happen to show up here on the same day."

The graduate students looked at each other. "What's odd about it?" Chris said.

"Bellin didn't ask to meet her. And he always wants to meet sources of funding."

Chris shrugged. "He seemed very busy."

"Yes. That's the way he seemed." He turned to Stern. "Anyway, print that out," he said. "We'll see what our architect has to say."

Katherine Erickson - ash-blond, blue-eyed, and darkly tanned - hung fifty feet in the air, her face just inches below the broken Gothic ceiling of the Castelgard chapel. She lay on her back in a harness and calmly jotted down notes about the construction above her.

Erickson was the newest graduate student on the site, having joined the project just a few months before. Originally, she had gone to Yale to study architecture, but found she disliked her chosen field, and transferred to the history department. There, Johnston had sought her out, convincing her to join him the way he had convinced all the others: "Why don't you put aside these old books and do some real history? Some hands-on history?"

So, hands-on it was - hanging way up here. Not that she minded: Kate had grown up in Colorado and was an avid climber. She spent every Sunday climbing the rock cliffs all around the Dordogne. There was rarely anyone else around, which was great: at home, you had to wait in line for the good pitches.

Using her pick, she chipped off a few flakes of mortar from different areas to take back for spectroscopic analysis. She dropped each into one of the rows of plastic containers, like film containers, that she wore over her shoulders and across her chest like a bandolier.

She was labeling the containers when she heard a voice say, "How do you get down from there? I want to show you something."

She glanced over her shoulder, saw Johnston on the floor below. "Easy," she said. Kate released her lines and slid smoothly to the ground, landing lightly. She brushed strands of blond hair back from her face. Kate Erickson was not a pretty girl - as her mother, a homecoming queen at UC, had so often told her - but she had a fresh, all-American quality that men found attractive.

"I think you'd climb anything," Johnston said.

She unclipped from the harness. "It's the only way to get this data."

"If you say so."

"Seriously," she said. "If you want an architectural history of this chapel, then I have to get up there and take mortar samples. Because that ceiling's been rebuilt many times - either because it was badly made and kept falling in, or because it was broken in warfare, from siege engines."

"Surely sieges," Johnston said.

"Well, I'm not so sure," Kate said. "The main castle structures - the great hall, the inner apartments - are solid, but several of the walls aren't well constructed. In some cases, it looks like walls were added to make secret passages. This castle's got several. There's even one that goes to the kitchen! Whoever made those changes must have been pretty paranoid. And maybe they did it too quickly." She wiped her hands on her shorts. "So. What've you got to show me?"

Johnston handed her a sheet of paper. It was a computer printout, a series of dots arranged in a regular, geometric pattern. "What's this?" she said.

"You tell me."

"It looks like Sainte-Mère."

"Is it?"

"I'd say so, yes. But the thing is…"

She walked out of the chapel, and looked down on the monastery excavation, about a mile away in the flats below. It was spread out almost as clearly as the drawing she held in her hand.

"Huh."

"What?"

"There's features on this drawing that we haven't uncovered yet," she said. "An apsidal chapel appended to the church, a second cloister in the northeast quadrant, and… this looks like a garden, inside the walls… Where'd you get this picture, anyway?"

The restaurant in Marqueyssac stood on the edge of a plateau, with a view over the entire Dordogne valley. Kramer looked up from her table and was surprised to see the Professor arriving with both Marek and Chris. She frowned. She had expected to have a private lunch. She was at a table for two.

They all sat down together, Marek bringing two chairs from the next table. The Professor leaned forward and looked at her intently.

"Ms. Kramer," the Professor said, "how did you know where the rectory is?"

"The rectory?" She shrugged. "Well, I don't know.

Wasn't it in the weekly progress report? No? Then maybe Dr. Marek mentioned it to me." She looked at the solemn faces staring at her. "Gentlemen, monasteries aren't exactly my specialty. I must have heard it somewhere."

"And the tower in the woods?"

"It must be in one of the surveys. Or the old photographs."

"We checked. It's not."

The Professor slid the drawing across the table to her. "And why does an ITC employee named Joseph Traub have a drawing of the monastery that is more complete than our own?"

"I don't know… Where did you get this?"

"From a policeman in Gallup, New Mexico, who is asking some of the same questions I am."

She said nothing. She just stared at him.

"Ms. Kramer," he said finally. "I think you're holding out on us. I think you have been doing your own analysis behind our backs, and not sharing what you've found. And I think the reason is that you and Bellin have been negotiating to exploit the site in the event that I'm not cooperative. And the French government would be only too happy to throw Americans off their heritage site."

"Professor, that is absolutely not true. I can assure you-"

"No, Ms. Kramer. You can't." He looked at his watch. "What time does your plane go back to