Tyrannosaur Canyon

PART FIVE

THE VENUS PARTICLE

THE The days came when the bull tyrannosaurs fought for her in ritualized combat. While she watched, they circled each other, roaring, and feinting, the forest shaking from their cries. Then they rushed at each other, slamming their heads together, backing off, tearing up trees, churning the very earth in their furious lust. Their roaring shivered her flanks and heated her loins. When the winning bull mounted her, trumpeting in triumph, she submitted, her synapses firing in a sustained and barely successful effort to suppress her impulse to rip her suitor open from neck to naval.

As soon as it was over, the memory of that, too, was gone.

To lay her eggs, she traveled westward to a chain of sandy hills in the shadow of the mountains. She scooped out and tamped down a nest in the sand. After laying, she covered the clutch with wet, rotting vegetation that supplied heat through fermentation, nosing it to check its temperature and replacing it often. She hardly ever left the nest, forgoing even food in her vigilance. She guarded her offspring with violence and raised them with gentleness. She was bigger than the males of her species, to protect her young from their mindless lust for meat. The sensations she felt as she did these things did not meet the definition of "love." She was a biological machine running a complex program, whose goal was to perpetuate copies of itself by insuring the packages of meat that carried those copies survived their turn to breed. The very sensation of "caring" was for her neurologically impossible.

When her young reached a certain size, they began to hunt in a cohort pack, gradually extending their territory as their requirement for meat grew. That was when she abandoned them and migrated back to her old range, their existence no longer part of her consciousness.

When she was on the move, fear ran through the forest like poison gas. Her fifteen-foot stride was silent. The ground did not shake when she walked; it did not even stir. She walked on her toes, lightly and silently, her coloring blending into the forest.

She knew hunger, she knew satiety. She knew the choking gush of blood in the mouth. She knew light, she knew dark. She knew sleep, she knew waking.

The biological program ran relentlessly on.

1

MELOD1E WATCHED THE last group of guards leave the Mineralogy lab, keys jingling, voices loud in the corridor. She closed the door after them, locked it, and leaned against it, exhaling. It was almost one o'clock. The coroner had come, signed a bunch of papers; the EMTs had carted off the body; a bored cop had made a perfunctory walk-through with a clipboard jotting notes. Everyone assumed it was a heart attack, and Melodic felt sure the postmortem would confirm it.

Only she suspected it was murder. The killer was after the dinosaur, of that Melodic felt certain-why else would he have stolen all of their research, her research? She had to work fast.

Melodic wondered if she had done the right thing, keeping her suspicions to herself. She had no proof, no real evidence of murder beyond the fact that Corvus wouldn't give a trilobite the time of day. If she had voiced her suspicions and gotten embroiled in the case, it would only focus the attention of the killer on her. That was the one thing she could not afford to have happen-especially not now, when the stakes were so high. She had, as they said, bigger fish to fry.

She grabbed a heavy metal chair and carried it to the door, propping it underneath the knob, jamming it in place until she was sure no one could get in, not even with a key. If anyone asked why she had blocked the door, she could always say the death had spooked her. The fact was that few curators deigned to descend from their wood-paneled fifth-floor offices to the basement lab, especially on a Sunday.

She would have plenty of time to work undisturbed.

Melodic hastened into the storage area contiguous with the lab. Here, tens of thousands of mineral and fossil specimens were arranged on shelves upon metal shelves rising from floor to ceiling, numbered and categorized. The smaller specimens were in drawers, the larger ones in boxes on open shelves. A railed library ladder on wheels allowed access to the highest shelves.

Her heart beating with anxiety, Melodic pushed the library ladder around on its rails until it was in the row she wanted. She climbed up. On the top shelf, in the dim space just below the ceiling, sat an old wooden crate with Mongolian script stamped on it. A faded label read:

Protoceratops andrewsii egg clutch

Flaming Cliffs

Access No 1923-5693A

W. Grainger, collector

The wooden lid looked nailed shut, but it wasn't. Melodic lifted it, laid it aside, and then pulled up a layer of straw matting.

Nestled among the eggs of a fossil dinosaur nest were the copies of the CD-ROMs Melodic had burned containing all her data and images. Next to it was a tiny plastic case containing three wafer-thin sections of the original specimen, too small to have been missed.

Leaving the CDs in place, Melodic removed the plastic specimen case, replaced the straw matting, refitted the lid, climbed down the ladder, and rolled it back to where it was before.

She carried the case back to the polisher, removed one sliver, and fixed it to a polishing plug. When the epoxy had dried she began to polish it, aiming for a perfect, microthin section, enough to get some really good images out of the transmission electron microscope. It was exacting work, made all the harder by the shaking of her hands. Several times she had to stop, take a few deep breaths, and tell herself that there was no reason for the killer to come back, that he had gotten what he was after, and that he could have no idea that she had made duplicates of her data. When the specimen was ready she carried it into the TEM room to turn on the machine and let it warm up. As she did so, she noticed the logbook open next to it. The last entry, written in a bold, slanting hand, leapt out at her:

Researcher: I.Corvus

Locality/Specimen number: High Mesas/Chama River Wilderness, N.M. T.Rex. Comments: Third examination of remarkable T. Rex. Vertebral fragments. Extraordinary! This will make history. I.C.

Third examination? She flipped back in the book and found two other entries, both written at the bottom of the page where Corvus had obviously found some blank lines. She had suspected something like this, but not quite so blatantly. The bastard had planned to rip her off, lock, stock, and barrel. And being the nice, eager technician she was, she'd almost let him. She went into the SEM room and flipped through the logbook there, finding a similar number of phony entries. So that's what he had been doing in the lab late that night: stealing her work and doctoring the logbooks.

She found herself breathing hard. Almost from the time she was in first grade she wanted to be a scientist, and as she got older she had cherished the idea that science was the one field of human endeavor where people were altruistic and worked not for themselves but for the advancement of human knowledge. She had always believed science was a field in which merit was awarded where due.

How naive.

There was only one way to insure credit and protect herself from the killer at the same time: finish up her research and beat the murderer into print. If she submitted her results to the online section of the Journal of Paleontology, they would be peer-reviewed and published electronically within three days.

Naturally, she would give due credit to Corvus for his contribution, which was minor enough-he supplied her with the specimen. Where the fossil had come from, who it belonged to, how he had gotten his hands on it-these were questions beyond the scope of her work. Sure, there would be controversy. The specimen might be stolen, or even illegal. But none of that was germain to her work: she'd been given a sample to analyze and that was what she had done. Once her research was in print, there'd no longer be any point in killing her.

And then she could write her own ticket.

2

IN POSITION BEHIND the large boulder, Maddox shifted his weight, stretched out his foot, and rotated it, trying to get the stiffness out. The sun felt like a hot anvil to his bare back. The sweat was trickling down his scalp, neck, and face, stinging his cuts. The wound in his thigh throbbed viciously-it was now definitely infected.

He blotted his face, blinked the sweat out of his eyes. His tongue felt coated with rust, his lips cracked. Christ he was thirsty. Twenty minutes had passed and the Broadbents hadn't showed. He took a look through the scope, sweeping it up and down the empty canyon. Had they taken a detour he didn't know about, or found water? If that was the case, they might have turned and headed north toward Llaves. If he had lost them-

And suddenly there they were.

Fitting his eye to the scope and resting his finger on the hot curve of the trigger, he forced himself to relax, waiting until they reached the range of two hundred yards. He could see the butt of the gun in Broadbent's waistband. He wouldn't even have time to pull it out, let alone fire it. And even if he did, it would be useless at two hundred yards.

In another minute, they were in position.

He squeezed the trigger, firing a protracted burst, full-auto, the weapon kicking. He looked up, and saw them both sprinting back up the canyon. Both of them.

What the hell- ?

He'd missed. He returned to the scope, tracked the woman, fired another burst, another-but the bullets were kicking up sand ahead of them, each round high as his quarry ran zigzagging toward the canyon wall. They were going to escape around the lee of the canyon bend.

He rose with a roar of frustration, putting the gun on semi, scrambling down

the talus slope. He stopped, knelt, fired again, but it was a stupid shot-they'd already gotten into the lee of the stone wall.

How could he have missed? What was wrong with him? He stretched out his hand, unclosed the fist-and was shocked by how much it was trembling. He was exhausted, thirsty, injured, probably running a fever-but, still, how could he have missed? Then it hit him. Unaccustomed to shooting at such acutely high angles, he had overcompensated for the bullet's drop-off. He should have fired a practice round and then zeroed in. Instead, he rushed his shots.

Still, he had a chance. The canyon had sheer walls-they were trapped. He could still kill them-if he could run them down.

Slinging his rifle over his shoulder, he charged down the slope and sprinted after them. In a minute he rounded the bend. He could see them three or four hundred yards ahead, running, the man helping her along. Even at that distance he could see she was weak. Both of them were fading fast. No wonder: she hadn't eaten in thirty-six hours and they must be at least as thirsty as he was. On top of that, she was limping.

He ran after them, not fast, but keeping to a sustainable pace. The sand was soft and it made running difficult, but this worked to his advantage. He loped along, conserving his energy, sure he could wear them down in the long haul. At first, in their panic they ran fast, lengthening their lead, but as Maddox kept up his steady pace they began to falter and lag. One, two, three more bends he pursued them. When he rounded the third bend he could see her struggling, the man supporting her. Maddox had narrowed the gap to less than two hundred yards. Still, he didn't push himself, didn't speed up. He knew now he could outlast them: he would get them after all. They disappeared around another corner. When he rounded it, they were even closer. He could hear the man talking to Sally, encouraging her as he helped her along.

He dropped to one knee, aimed, fired a burst on auto. They threw themselves down, and Maddox seized the opportunity to gain significant ground. They scrambled back to their feet but he'd closed to less than a hundred yards.

She fell and he helped her up. Forty yards now. Even with his shaking hands it was a no-brainer. Broadbent tried to encourage her, but she staggered-and then they just gave up. Turned and faced him defiantly.

He aimed, thought better of it, walked closer. Twenty-five yards. Flicked off the auto, knelt, aimed, and fired. Click! Nothing. The full-auto bursts had emptied the magazine. With a roar, both

of them were sprinting at him full bore. He fumbled for his pistol and got off a shot, but the woman was on top of him like a wildcat, grabbing his pistol with both hands. They fell together, struggling over the pistol, and then he got the gun and rolled on top of her, pressing it to her head, fumbling to get his finger through the trigger guard.

He felt a gun on the back of his own head. He could see it was Broadbent's .22.

"Count of three," said Broadbent.

"I'll pop her! I will!"

"One."

"I swear, I'll blow out her brains! I'll do it!"

Knowing he couldn't get off two shots, he whipped around, going for Broad-bent first, and fired wildly but practically into his face, and the man went down; he aimed to follow up with another shot, but the bitch dealt him a stunning kick to the groin, so hard that his hand spasmed and the pistol went off, and it felt as if something had jerked his leg hard, followed by a numbness-and a gush of crimson on the sand.

"My leg!" he shrieked, dropping the gun and tearing at his pants, feeling madly for the wound. "My leg!" The blood was jetting out, his blood, and so much of it! "I'm bleeding to death!"

The woman stepped back, covering him with his own Clock. He knew immediately from the way she held the weapon she knew how to use it.

"No! Wait! Please!"

She didn't fire.

There was no need. The blood-geysering out of his severed femoral artery- inundated his pant leg.

She shoved the gun in her belt and hastened to kneel over Broadbent, shot on the ground. Maddox watched her, overwhelmed with relief that she hadn't killed him. He felt tears of gratitude running down his cheeks, but then he began to feel dizzy and the canyon walls started to move around. He tried to rise but he was so weak he couldn't even raise his head, sinking back to the sand under an irresistible weakness, almost as if someone were holding him down.

"My leg . .." he croaked. He wanted to see it but he couldn't, he was too weak, all he could see now was the flat blue sky overhead. A remoteness crept into his head, as if he had become smoke and was rising, expanding, dissipating into nothing.

And then he was nothing.

3

WYMAN FORD HALTED next to a pillar of rock and listened. He had heard the shots quite distinctly, three bursts from an automatic weapon, quite possibly an Ml6, followed by a two deeper-sounding shots from what was probably a large-caliber handgun. The sounds seemed to have come from the very far end of Devil's Graveyard, perhaps a mile to the northeast, across what looked like some hellacious country.

He waited, listening for more reports, but after those few quick bursts of shooting all was quiet.

Ford moved deeper into the shadows. Something extraordinary was going on. If there was anything his CIA training had taught him, it was that the guy with the better information survived. Forget the weapons, the commando training, the high-tech gear. Engagements were won, first and foremost, with information. And that was precisely what he lacked.

Ford hefted his canteen, sloshed the water around, uncapped it, and took a small sip. He was down to about half a liter and the nearest reliable source was twenty miles away. He had no business doing anything but going straight for water. Still, the shots had been close and it would be a matter of twenty minutes to hike to the head of the valley where they had come from.

He turned back, determined to find out what was going on. He headed across Devil's Graveyard, toward the mouth of a canyon at the northeast side, passing through an area of low sand dunes. He climbed over a series of flat rocks, crossed some ash hills, dropped down to a dry wash, and continued on.

The far end of Devil's Graveyard was even stranger than he had imagined. The canyon walls on either side stepped back as the sandstone alternated with

shale and volcanic tuff. Dead-end side canyons branched out, many containing clusters of bald domes of rock and pockets of badlands. It was a complicated and confusing country. Somewhere in this very area was the dinosaur fossil.

He shook his head. What a fool he was, still thinking about finding the dinosaur. He'd be lucky to get out of there alive.

4

TOM OPENED HIS eyes to find Sally bent over him, her blond hair spilling over his face, the smell of her hair in his nostrils. She was dabbing his head with a torn piece of cloth.

"Sally? Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. You, on the other hand, got creased by a bullet." She tried to smile but her voice was shaky. "Knocked you out for a moment."

"What about him?"

"Dead-I think."

Tom relaxed. "How long was I-?"

"Just a few seconds. God, Tom, I thought-" She stopped. "A quarter of an inch to the right and .. . never mind. You're damned lucky."

Tom tried to raise himself up and winced, his head throbbing.

Sally eased him back down. "I'm not finished. It's a crease, maybe a concussion, but it didn't crack the bone. It's that hard head of yours." She finished tying a strip of blue silk around his head. "I think Valentino ought to go into the designer bandage business. You look ravishing."

Tom tried to smile, winced.

"Too tight?"

"Not at all."

"By the way, I owe you thanks. You made good use of that unloaded pistol."

He reached out and took her hand.

"Help me sit up. My head seems to be clearing."

She raised him into a sitting position, then helped him to his feet. He staggered but the dizziness cleared quickly. "You sure you're okay?" she asked.

"I'm a lot more worried about you than me."

"I have an idea: you do my worrying, I'll do yours."

Tom steadied himself, trying to ignore his thirst. His eye fell on the man lying in the sand-the scumbag who had kidnapped, then tried to rape and murder his wife. He lay on his back shirtless, arms by his side, almost as if he'd gone to sleep. Both legs stuck straight out, but the jeans covering his right leg sported a large hole and were soaked black with blood. Underneath, a large puddle sank into the sand.

He knelt. The man had a hollow, thin face, unshaven, his black hair streaked with dust. His mouth was relaxed, almost smiling, his head tilted back, exposing an ugly Adam's apple covered with stubble. A trace of spittle had escaped from one corner of his mouth. His eyes were slits-almost closed, but not quite. His torso had the pumped-up look of a con.

Tom felt his neck for a pulse and was shocked to find it.

"Is he dead?" Sally asked.

"No."

"What do we do?"

Tom tried to tear away the soggy pant leg, but the jeans were too tough. He removed a buck knife from the man's belt, slit up the pant leg, and spread the material apart. The leg and groin were a god-awful mess and he had nothing to wipe away the excess blood to see clearly. The bullet had exited behind the knee, tearing off almost the entire back of it. Blood was still feebly pulsing out.

"Looks like the bullet hit the femoral artery."

Sally looked away.

"Help me pull him into the shade against this rock."

They propped him up. Tom cut a shirttail off and fashioned it into a loose tourniquet, tightening it just enough to stem the flow of blood. He rummaged around in the man's pockets and, extracted his wallet. He opened it, pulled out an Ohio driver's license with a photo of the man, cocky look in his eyes, arrogant, lopsided smile-a real psychopath.

"Jimson A. Maddox," he read out loud. He searched the wallet, pulling out a thick wad of cash, credit cards, and receipts. A soiled business card stopped him:

IAIN CORVUS, D. PHIL. OXON. F.R.P.S. Assistant Curator

Department of Vertebrate Paleontology American Museum of Natural History

Central Park West at Seventy-ninth Street New York, NY 10024

He turned it over. On the back, written in a strong hand, was a club address, cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses. He passed it to Sally.

"That's the guy he was working for," she said. "The guy who got him out of

prison."

"I find it hard to believe a scientist from a great museum like that would be involved in kidnapping, theft, and murder."

"When the stakes are high enough, some people will do anything."

She handed the card back and Tom stuck it in his pocket along with the driver's license. He went through the rest of the wallet and then quickly searched the other pockets. He found the notebook, pulled it out, held it up.

"Well, well, what do you know," said Sally.

He stuck it in his own pocket. In a small musette bag buckled around the man's waist he found an extra magazine for the handgun. He glanced around, saw the gun lying on the ground where Sally had dropped it. He shoved it in his belt and buckled the musette bag around his own waist.

"You really think you're going to need that sidearm?" Sally asked.

"The guy might have a partner."

"I don't think so."

"You never know."

There was nothing else of interest on the man. Tom felt his pulse again. Thready, but still there. He wished the man were dead: it would make things simpler. It vaguely shocked him how he couldn't muster even the slightest pity for the man.

The man's rifle was lying on the sand a few feet away, and Tom retrieved it, ejected the empty magazine, and flung it away. There was a second magazine in the musette bag, which he emptied, scattering the bullets in the sand and tossing the magazine.

"Let's go," he said.

"And him?"

"The only thing we can do for him is get out of here and find help. If the truth be told, he's a goner." Tom put his arm around her. "You ready?"

Arm in arm, leaning on each other, they set off limping down the wash. For ten minutes they walked in silence, and then Tom halted in surprise.

A robed figure was striding up the wash toward them, hand raised. It was the monk-Wyman Ford.

"Tom!" the figure called, breaking into a jog. "Tom!" He was gesturing frantically, now running toward them. At the same time Tom heard a faint droning noise and saw a small, windowless plane with a bulbous nose come flying over the rim of the canyon, making a slow turn toward them.

5

MELODIE STARED AT the computer screen on which was scrolling the data from the last run of the microprobe. She blinked her eyes twice, rolled them around one way, then the other, trying to get them to focus. Strange how she felt both exhausted and wired at the same time, with a buzz in her head as bad as if she'd just downed a martini. She glanced up at the big clock in the lab. Four o'clock in the afternoon. As she gazed at the clock, the minute hand jerked a single minute forward with a faint clunk. She hadn't slept in over fifty hours.

She rapped a key and stored the data. She had done all the obvious research that could be done on the specimen and she'd answered most of the major questions. The only loose end was the Venus particle. She was determined to tie that one up before submitting her paper for online publication. Otherwise some other scientist would tie it up for her-and she was so close.

She selected the last of the prepared wafers, put it on a slide, and examined it in the polarizing scope. At 500x she could just barely see them, tiny black dots clustered here and there inside the cells. She removed the wafer, slipped it into a micro-mortar, and carefully broke it up, gently grinding it with water to a fine slurry, which she poured into a plastic beaker.

She went to the locked cabinet and removed a bottle of twelve percent hydrofluoric acid. It was unwise of her to handle such a dangerous chemical-one that would actually dissolve glass-after so much stress and lack of sleep, but it was the only acid capable of doing what she wanted done: completely dissolving the replacement mineral of the fossil without attacking the carbon coating of the Venus particles. She wanted to free the particles so she could take a look at them in the round, so to speak.

She brought the bottle over to the fume hood and placed it in the area marked

HF USE ONLY. Then she put on splash goggles, nitrile gloves, a rubber apron, and sleeve protectors. She lowered the fume hood to six inches to protect her face, turned it on, and began work, unscrewing the cap and pouring a small amount of HF into the plastic test tube containing the ground fossil, acutely aware that even a small spill on her skin could be fatal. She watched as it foamed and clouded, timing it to the second. When it was done she quickly diluted it fifty to one to stop the acidic reaction, poured off the excess, and diluted it a second and third time to get rid of the acid.

She held up the result to the light, a thin layer of mineral sediment at the bottom of a test tube, in which she knew must be present at least some particles.

With a micropipette she sucked up most of the sediments, dried them, and then, using a separation funnel and a solution of sodium metatungstate, floated off the lighter sediments from the heavier grit. A further rinse, and then she took up a small quantity of particles with a micropipette to let them drift over a grid-ded slide, the particles settling into the grids. A quick count at lOOx revealed about thirty Venus particles, largely intact, cleaned of miscellaneous grit and junk.

She zeroed in on one particularly well-preserved particle and upped the magnification to 750x. The particle leapt into clarity, filling the objective. Melodic examined it with growing puzzlement. It looked even more like the Venus symbol, a spherule of carbon with a long piece sticking out of it, with a crosspiece at the end tipped with what looked like hairs. She opened her lab notebook and sketched a picture of it.

When she was done, she sat back and looked at her drawing. She was deeply surprised. The particle did not resemble any kind of inclusion that might have crystallized naturally in the rock. In fact, it looked like nothing she had ever seen before-except, perhaps, the radiolaria she had once spent a couple of days examining and drawing as part of a high school science project. It was definitely of biological origin-she was sure of that at least.

Melodic removed a half-dozen Venus particles from the gridded slide and transferred them to a SEM stage. She placed it in a vacuum prep chamber, get-tine it ready for the scanning electron microscope. She pressed the button and a faint humming rose from the machine as the chamber was evacuated.

Time take a look at this sucker in the round, she thought.

6

F. P.MASAGO STOOD in the whitewashed computer room of the monastery, now

serving as the Ground Control Station for the Predator. His eyes were fixed on a flat panel video screen displaying the DLTV feed from the Predator's main camera. The rough wooden monastery table was covered with an array of advanced electronics, manned by three operators. The central operator was a Combat Controller from the 615th Special Tactics Group Wing Command, wearing a UAV FlightSim helmet. The console he worked displayed the basic controls a normal aircraft would have: yoke, throttle, airspeed indicator, heading, and altimeter, along with an F-16 style joystick.

Masago's eyes flickered away from the screen for a moment to the two CAG/DEVGU support operators. They were working intently, aware of nothing except the electronic world in which they were immersed. One worked the pay-load console, an array of screens, switches, keyboards, and digital readouts that controlled the surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities of the Predator. This 450-pound package contained electro-optical and infrared cameras, a synthetic aperture radar for flight in bad weather; a two-color DLTV television with a variable zoom and 955mm Spotter, along with a high-resolution Forward Looking Infrared Radar with six fields of view, 19mm to 560mm.

The D-boys were back with the chopper. Their turn would come later.

Masago's eyes moved to the second controller. He worked the UAVs three Multi-Spectral Targeting Systems with laser designation, range finder, electronic support and countermeasures, and a moving target indicator. The UAV had already expended one of its two Hellfire C missiles killing the monk.

Masago's attention drifted back to the video display. Suddenly he stiffened.

"Got something." The toneless voice of one of the operators murmured in Masago's headset.

Masago could see two people, and a third, approaching the other two, a hundred yards away. A quarter mile up the canyon, a figure lay supine.

"Zoom in to 900mm on the southernmost target," said Masago.

The new image jumped on the screen. A man, lying against the canyon wall. A large stain-blood. A dead man. He had known of the monk and these two from his debriefing of the cop, Wilier. But this third man, this dead man, was an unknown.

"Back out to 240mm."

Now he could see the three figures again. The one to the north had broken into a run. He could see his white upturned face for a moment. It was the CIA meddler, the so-called monk. Masago stared in surprise.

"Looks like we missed the girl in the dress," murmured the MTS controller.

Masago leaned intently over the picture, staring at it as if to suck out its essence.

"Give me a closer look at the middle target."

The camera jumped and the figure of a man filled the screen-Broadbent. The man he was looking for, critical to the plan. Broadbent had found the dying dinosaur prospector and he was therefore the one most likely to know the exact location of the fossil. According to Wilier, both the wife and the monk were involved, although how it all fitted together wasn't clear. Nor did it need to be. His goal was simple: obtain the locality of the fossil, clear the area of unauthorized personnel, get the fossil, and get out. Let some paper pusher assemble the details for the ex post facto classified report.

"Back me out to 160mm," he said to the payload console operator.

The image on the screen jumped back. The three had joined up and were running for the shelter of the canyon walls.

"Activating MTI," said the controller.

"No," murmured Masago.

The controller cast him a puzzled glance.

"I need these targets alive."

"Yes, sir."

Masago scanned the canyon. It was eight hundred feet deep with stepped-back walls, narrowing at a bottleneck before opening up to the big valley of stone. The few side canyons all boxed up. It was almost a closed area, and it presented them with an opportunity.

"See that point where the canyon narrows? About two o'clock on your screen."

"Yes, sir."

"That's your target."

"Sir?"

"I want you to hit that canyon wall in such a way to bring down enough material to block their route forward. We've got a chance to trap them."

"Yes, sir."

"Heading one-eighty, descend to two thousand," said the pilot.

"Tracking stationary target. Ready to fire."

"Hold until my signal," Masago murmured into his head set. "Wait." He could already see the drone was going to overshoot. The canyon rim loomed up and suddenly the targets were gone, hidden behind the thousand-foot wall of stone.

"Son of a bitch," the pilot muttered.

"Come around on a one-sixty heading," said Masago. "Get the vehicle down, follow the canyon."

They’ll see-

"That's the point. Buzz them. Panic them."

The scene shifted as the drone banked.

"Back me out to 50mm."

The scene jumped back farther to a wide-angled field of view. Now Masago could see both rims of the canyon. As the Predator came around, the three targets reappeared: three black ants running along the base of the sheer canyon walls, heading for the valley.

"Target good," murmured the operator.

"Not yet," murmured Masago. On his wide angle view he could see a turn in the canyon, then a straight stretch of at least four hundred yards. It was like running wildebeest from a helicopter. He watched the figures, which from that altitude seemed to be moving as slowly and helplessly as insects. There wasn't much they could do sandwiched between eight-hundred-foot cliffs. They cleared the bend, now running in the flat, still hugging the canyon wall, hoping it would provide cover.

"At firing," Masago murmured, "switch me to video feed from the missile."

"Yes, sir. Still locked on T."

"Wait. . ."

A long silence. They were running, faltering, clearly exhausted. The woman fell, helped up by the man and the monk. They were now four hundred yards from the target. Three fifty. Three twenty-five . . .

"Fire."

The screen jumped again as the video feed switched from the Predator to the camera onboard the missile, first a stretch of empty sky, then the ground swinging up, fixing on the left canyon wall, high up. The wall rapidly grew in size as the missile zeroed in with laser tracking. As the missile made contact the feed automatically switched back to the Predator's television camera, and suddenly they were back above, looking down-at a silent cloud of dust billowing upward along with soaring chunks of rock. The figures had dived to the ground. Masago waited. He wanted them badly shaken up-but not dead.

The movement of air in the canyon began to push the dust cloud away. And then the figures reappeared-running back the way they had come.

"Look at those sons of bitches go," muttered the controller.

Masago smiled. "Bring the UAV back to ceiling and keep tracking them. I'm putting the bird up. We've got them now, three rats in a hot tin can."

7

T0M RAN JUST behind Sally, the roar of the explosion still ringing in his ears, dust from the explosion boiling down the canyon toward them. They rested for a moment in the shelter of the canyon wall. Tom paused, leaning on the rock, breathing hard, as Ford joined them.

"What the hell is going on-?" Tom gasped.

The monk shook his head.

"What was that firing at us?"

"A drone. It's still up there, watching us. It's out of missiles, however. They only carry two."

"This is surreal."

"I think the drone fired only to block the canyon. They want to trap us."

"Who's they!"

"Later, Tom. We've got to get out of here."

Tom squinted up and down the canyon, examining the walls on both sides. His eye was arrested by a broad, sloping crack, at the bottom of which stood a long pile of talus. The sloping crevasse offered plenty of handholds and footholds, where falling rocks had jammed, creating natural climbing chocks.

"There," Tom said. "We can climb that crack." He turned to Sally. "Can you do it?"

"Hell, yeah."

"You, Wyman?"

"No problem."

"There's a good climbing line up the right-hand side to that ledge."

Ford said, "You lead the way."

"You know what's beyond?"

"I've never been this far into the high mesas."

Tom looked down at his four-hundred-dollar handmade Italian shoes, battered beyond recognition but still holding up. At least he had ordered the ones with rubber soles. As he looked back up, the tail end of dust from the explosion came rolling lazily over them, casting a sulfurous-colored pall across the sky.

"Let's go."

He grabbed the first handhold and hoisted himself up. "Watch where I put my hands and feet and use the same holds. Maintain a ten-foot gap. Sally, you come next."

Tom braced his knee against the stone and worked his way up. He tried to ignore the fact that his mouth felt like it was full of grit. The agony for water had gone beyond thirst; it had become physical pain.

It was hard, vertiginous climbing, but there were plenty of handholds. Tom climbed methodically, checking every minute to see how Sally was doing. She was athletic and got the hang of it quickly. Ford climbed fearlessly, like a monkey-a true natural. As they ascended, space yawned below, vast and terrifying. They were free-climbing with no ropes, no pitons, nothing. It was what climbers euphemistically called a "no-fall pitch"-you fall, you die.

Tom focused his eyes on the rock face in front of him. He had moved beyond tiredness into unknown territory beyond. They came to a small ledge, pulled themselves up, and rested. Ford took out his canteen.

"Oh, my God, is that water?" Sally asked.

"Very little. Take two swallows."

Sally grabbed the canteen and with trembling hands drank. She passed it to Tom, who drank. The water was warm and tasted of plastic, but it seemed the most marvelous fluid Tom had ever drunk in his life and it took a supreme act of will to stop. He passed it to Ford, who put it back in his pack without taking any.

"You aren't drinking?"

"I don't need it," he said tersely.

Tom looked up. He could still hear the faint, mosquitolike buzz of the drone but he couldn't see it. He pressed himself back against the stone, still trying to wrap his mind around the attack. "What the hell is going on?"

"That thing hunting us is a forty-million-dollar Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, classified tail to wingtip."

"Why!"

Ford shook his head. "I'm not sure."

Heat radiated off the canyon wall. Tom examined the rest of the cliff above, picked out a route, and began climbing. The others followed in silence. They

were now two hundred feet up, but the pitches were getting easier. In another five minutes they had scaled the sheer part of the cliff. The rest of the climb consisted of an exhausting scramble up steep talus slopes and benches. At the top, Sally stretched herself out on the flat stone, gasping, Tom next to her. He looked up at the empty sky, which was silent, the plane apparently gone.

Ford slipped a tattered map from his pocket and opened it.

"Where are we?" Tom asked.

"Just off the map." He folded it back up.

Tom looked up, examining the landscape ahead. The mesa top was slickrock, a plateau of naked sandstone hollowed and carved by the action of wind and water. Some of the lower areas had filled with wind-blown sand, rippled by the constant wind. Here and there a wind-blasted juniper clung to a crack. The mesa ended a quarter mile away in blue sky. Tom squinted, peering ahead. "I'd like to see what's beyond that rim. We're sitting ducks up here."

"We're sitting ducks everywhere, with that eye in the sky."

"They're still watching us?" Sally asked.

"You can be sure of it. And I have little doubt they're sending a helicopter after us. I'd say we've got ten to twenty minutes."

"This is truly insane. You've really no idea what's going on?"

Ford shook his head. "The only thing I can think of is that dinosaur."

"What interest could they possibly have in a dinosaur? It seems to me a lot more likely that a bomber accidentally lost an H-bomb, or a classified satellite crashed-something like that."

Ford shook his head. "Somehow, I don't think so."

"But even if it was the dinosaur, why come after us?" Tom asked.

"To get information."

"What information? We've no idea where it is."

"They don't necessarily know that. You've got the notebook and I've got the GPR plot. With either of those, they could find it in a few days."

"And when they get what they want from us?"

"They'll kill us."

"You don't really believe that."

"I don't believe it, Tom. I know it. They already tried to kill me."

Ford climbed to his feet, Tom painfully following suit and helping Sally up. The monk set off across the stone plateau at his usual breakneck pace, his brown robes sweeping the ground with each step, heading toward the rim on the far side.

8

THE ROTORS WERE already spinning up as Masago hopped into the chopper,

shielding his face against dust and gravel. He threaded past the seven members of the CAG/DEVGU chalk that made up the operation and took a rear-facing seat near the front. The crew commander handed him a pair of headphones with a mouthpiece, plugged into the ceiling by a black cord. He fitted it over his head and adjusted the mike as the bird lifted off and peeled out, doors still open, just clearing the upper canyon rim and skimming above the buttes and mesas, once in a while passing the gaping crack of a canyon plunging down into the earth. The sun was almost directly overhead and the landscape below looked red-hot.

On the matted floor of the chopper Masago unrolled a U.S.G.S. 1:24,000 topo of the target area. He still preferred paper maps to GPS electronic maps; somehow, paper gave him a feeling for the landscape that the electronic version didn't. The images from the drone, circling invisibly at twenty-five thousand feet, showed the objectives had managed to climb out of the canyon after all and were heading toward a deep, complex valley beyond. It was a hell of a place to look for someone, but on the other hand it had the advantage of being a defined area whose perimeter could be secured.

When Masago had finished marking up the map with a red pencil he passed it to the chalk leader, Sergeant First Class Anton Hitt. Hitt examined the map in silence and began punching the way points marked on the map into his GPS unit. The men had received their final Patrol Order just before liftoff without comment or apparent difficulty, especially when Masago briefed them on the possible need to kill American civilians. Of course, he'd laid it on about how they were

bioterrorists in possession of a doomsday microbe. Most people were not equipped to deal with complex truths-better to simplify.

He watched Hitt work. The chalk leader was an African-American man of few words, in superb physical condition, with a high mahogany brow, clear pale brown eyes, and a demeanor of great calmness. He was dressed in desert multi-cam fatigues and combat boots, carrying an M4 chambered for the 6.8SPC, equipped with Aimpoint electronic sights. As a sidearm he had a Ruger .22 Magnum revolver, an eccentric choice for a special forces soldier, but one that Masago approved of. For a fixed blade he carried a Trace Rinaldi, another choice that spoke well for him. Masago had allowed Hitt to make the decisions regarding equipment: and the sergeant had decided his men should go in light and fast, carrying no extra ammo, one-liter canteens only, no grenades or extra magazines, and without the usual Kevlar body armor. No Squad Automatic Weapons either. This wasn't, after all, an op in downtown Mogadishu with heavily armed bad guys spilling out of every doorway.

When Hitt was finished, he passed the paper map back to Masago.

"The four men we're dropping in won't need to maintain radio silence. We're setting up a perimeter around our objectives and drawing it tight. It's a very simple plan. I like simple."

Masago nodded.

"Any final questions?" Masago asked.

Hitt shook his head.

"Sergeant Hitt," Masago asked slowly, "the time is coming when I will ask you to kill several unarmed American citizens. These individuals are too dangerous to entrust to the courts. Will you have a problem with that"

Hitt slowly turned his clear eyes on Masago. "I'm a soldier, sir. I follow orders."

Masago settled back, arms crossed. General Miller had been right after all: Hitt was good.

The chopper thudded on, and then Hitt, checking his GPS, pointed to one of the men. "Halber, ten-minute warning to drop point Tango."

The man, a twenty-year-old with a shaved head, nodded and began running the final checks on his weapon. They flew on, following a long, deep canyon that ran to the valley where their objectives were headed, the shadow of the bird rippling up and down directly below them. It was a hellish, corroded landscape, an open sore on the face of the earth, and Masago was looking forward to getting back to the muggy greenness of Maryland.

"Five-minute warning," Hitt said.

The Pave Hawk began to bank, coming around the side of a stone butte, and flew below the escarpment, easing down into a hover where a side canyon debouched into badlands. Halber rose, steadying himself in the netting. The rope, which was coiled neatly before the open door, was kicked out. Halber grabbed it and roped down, disappearing from view.

A moment later the rope was pulled up and the chopper lifted.

"Sullivan." Hitt pointed to another man. "Drop point Foxtrot, eight minutes."

Once again the chopper sped over red desert. To the north, Masago could see the irregular black outline of an ancient lava flow; and far to the right some forested foothills rose to meet a line of snow-covered peaks. He had the country pretty well scoped out by now.

"Sullivan, one-minute warning."

Sullivan finished his weapon check, rose, grabbed the netting as the chopper eased into a hover, the rope was kicked out again, the man was gone.

Five minutes later they had done their fourth and last drop-and then the helicopter headed off toward the landing zone in the valley at the head of the great cleft marked "TyrannosaurCanyon" on his map.

9

FORD REACHED THE rim first, and looked down into a valley. With a shock, he recognized they had circled back around and were at the far end of Devil's Graveyard. It amazed him that even with his wilderness experience and knowledge of the desert, the landscape was so complex it had turned him around. He took out his map, checked it, and saw they had just entered the area from the northwest.

He glanced around, expecting at any minute to see a black dot on the horizon and hear the familiar sound of a rotary aircraft approaching.

He had been in plenty of tough situations in his life, but nothing quite like this. What he always had before was information; now he was operating blind. He knew only that his own government had tried to kill him.

Ford paused, waiting for Tom and Sally to catch up. They were amazingly resilient, considering that both of them were injured, exhausted, and severely dehydrated. When they hit the wall, it would pretty much stop them wherever they were. It might even come in the form of heat exhaustion, hyperthermia, in which the body lost control of its ability to maintain body temperature. Ford had seen it once in the jungles of Cambodia; his man had suddenly stopped sweating; his temperature had soared to 107 degrees, he went into convulsions so severe they snapped off his teeth-and in five minutes he was dead.

He squinted into the brilliant light. The mountains were fifteen miles away on one side, the river twenty miles on the other. They had less than a pint of water left and it was over a hundred degrees. Even without pursuers, they would be in serious trouble.

Ford looked at the cliff with a growing feeling of dismay.

"Here's a possible way down," said Tom, from the edge.

Ford paused, looking down on a horrendous vertical crack. A faint throbbing sound impinged on the threshold of his hearing. He stopped, scanned the horizon, and saw the speck, two, maybe three miles away. He didn't even need to check with his binocs: he knew what it was.

"Let's go."

10

MELODIE CROOKSHANK STARED at the three-dimensional SEM image of the ve-

nus particle on the video screen with a sense of awe. It was sixty-five million years old, and yet it looked as perfect as if it had been created yesterday. The SEM image was much clearer than any obtainable with a light microscope, and it showed the particle in great detail-a perfect sphere with a tube sticking out of it, with two crosspieces at the end like spars on a ship. The crosspieces had some complicated structures at their end, bunches of tubules that resembled a dandelion seed-head.

An X-ray diffraction analysis confirmed what she'd suspected, that the sphere of carbon was what chemists call a fullerene or a "buckyball"-a hollow shell of double-bonded carbon atoms arranged like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. Buckyballs had only recently been discovered, and they were rarely found in nature. Normally they were very small; this one was gigantic. The primary feature of a buckyball was that it was almost indestructible-anything inside a buckyball was totally sealed in. Only the most powerful enzymes carefully manipulated in a laboratory setting could split open a buckyball.

Which is exactly what Melodic had done.

Inside the sphere she had found an amazing mix of minerals, including an unusual form of plagioclase feldspar, NaQ 5CaQ 5Si3AlOg doped with titanium, copper, silver, and alkali metal ions-essentially a complex mix of doped ceramics, metallic oxides, and silicates. The tube extending orthogonally from the buckyball appeared to be a giant carbon nanotube with a crosspiece on which are attached side groups containing a mixture of ceramic compounds and metallic oxides.

Very weird.

She cracked a warm Dr Pepper and leaned back, sipping meditatively. After the removal of Corvus's body it had been quiet as a tomb, even for a Sunday.

People were staying away. It reminded her once again of how few friends she had in the museum. Nobody had called to check and see how she was, nobody had invited her to lunch or for a drink later to cheer her up. It was partly her fault, holing herself up in the basement lab like a sequestered nun. But a lot of it had to do with her lowly status and the whiff of failure that clung to her, the poor post-grad who had been sending out resumes for five years.

All that was about to change.

She called up some of the earlier images of the particle she had captured on CD-ROM, looking for more evidence to support a theory that had been developing in her mind. She had noticed that the Venus particles seemed to be clustered most heavily in cell nuclei. As she examined some of the images she had taken earlier for Corvus, she noticed something significant: many of the cells in which the particles appeared were elongated. Not only that, but many of the particles seemed to inhabit pairs of cells side by side. The two observations were directly related, and Melodic quickly put them together. She felt a prickling sensation at the base of her neck. It was amazing she hadn't seen it before. The particles were mostly inside cells that were undergoing mitosis. In other words, the Venus particles had infected the dinosour's cells and were actually triggering cell division. Many modern viruses did the same thing; that was how they eventually killed their host-with viral-induced cancer.

Back in 1925, the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn of her own museum had been the first to propose that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs had been caused by a Black Plague-like epidemic sweeping across the continents. Robert Bakker in his book, The Dinosaur Heresies, had elaborated on the theory. He theorized that the mass extinction could be explained by outbreaks of foreign microbes "running amok" among the dinosaurs. These "foreign" microbes had come from the joining of Asia and North America. As species intermixed, they spread new germs. Bakker's book had been published almost twenty years ago, and as the asteroid impact theory of the mass extinction had gained acceptance, Bakker's theory was gradually forgotten.

Now, it seemed Bakker had been right after all. In a way.

The dinosaurs had been killed off by a plague, Melodic mused-and she was looking at the guilty microbe right now. But the plagues weren't caused by the slow joining of continents. They were triggered by the impact itself. The asteroid strike had caused worldwide forest fires, darkness, starvation, catastrophic loss of habitats. Calculations showed that the earth was as dark as night for months afterward, the air filled with choking soot and dust, the rain so acidic it dissolved rocks. The asteroid impact had created perfect conditions for the massive spread

of disease among the survivors-the landscape would have been littered with dead and dying animals, the rest starving, burned, injured, their immune systems in collapse. Under those conditions, a devastating epidemic wouldn't just be possible ... it would be inevitable. The asteroid killed off most of the dinosaurs; and the plagues that followed killed the rest.

There was another twist to her theory-a big twist. Melodic was still undecided if this twist was too crazy to put in her paper, if it was a product of going fifty hours without sleep. The twist was this: the Venus particle did not look like a terrestrial form of life. It looked, well, alien.

Maybe, just maybe, the Venus particle had arrived with the asteroid.

11

MASAGO HOPPED OUT of the chopper, the whistle of the rotor blades powering

down above his head. He cleared the landing area and looked around the badlands. The Predator drone indicated that the targets had descended from the rim of the plateau above them into this unnamed valley. The chopper had landed in the middle of the valley, in the center point toward which the four men in the perimeter would draw.

Hitt came up beside him, followed by the last two men in the chalk, Pfc. Gowicki and Hirsch. The terrain was difficult and complex, but their targets were more or less trapped in the valley, cut off by cliffs. The four men had been dropped at the only four exit points, and they were tightening the noose. Now all that remained was for Hitt and his two men to go in and flush them out. There was no chance-none-that they could escape.

The chalk leader with his two specialists had already offloaded and shouldered their kits and were now working their GPSs, while murmuring on the chalk frequency to the team members who were executing the pincerlike movement.

"Move out," said Masago.

Hitt nodded and on his hand signal the men moved to adopt a triangular formation, acute point trailing. Masago, as planned, stayed one hundred yards in the rear, carrying his usual sidearm, a Beretta 8000 Cougar, in a shoulder holster. Pfc. Gowicki and Sgt. Hitt took point, Hirsch the "drag," and together they moved cautiously up a dry wash toward the area to which the three had fled, according to the drone. Masago scanned the sandy floor for footprints, but could see none. It was only a matter of time.

They moved up the wash until it broadened out and divided. Here they

paused while Hitt climbed and reconnoitered. A few minutes later he came down with a short shake of his head. Another gesture, and they continued on toward a row of mushroomlike standing rocks.

Not a word was spoken. They spread out as the wash leveled and advanced toward the curious forest of standing stones, soon entering the shady confines.

"Got a print here," came the murmured voice of Gowicki. "And another."

Masago knelt. The prints were fresh, made by a man in sandals-the monk. He cast about and found the others-the woman's, a smaller size, six to seven, and the man's, size eleven and a half or twelve. They'd been moving fast. They knew they were being hunted.

Hitt led them deeper into the shadowy stones. Masago was virtually certain they would not be ambushed: it would be suicide, trying to take down a patrol of D-boys with a few handguns, if they even had any. They would go to ground . . . and they would be ferreted out. The first stage of the op would soon be over.

They came to where several enormous rocks leaned together, necessitating a crawl through a gap underneath. Hitt waited while Masago caught up. He pointed to some fresh scuff marks in the hard sand. They had come through, and not long ago at all.

Masago nodded.

Hitt went first, dropping to his hands and knees. Masago went last. As he rose, he saw how the area boxed up, with flaming cliffs mounting like staircases on all sides. He took a moment to check his map. Their quarry seemed to have walked into a box canyon, a dead end, from which not even they could climb out.

Masago murmured into his headset: "I need them alive until I get the information I need."

12

"WAIT HERE," FORD said. "I'm going up there to take a look."

Tom and Sally rested while Ford scrabbled up a boulder and reconnoitered. They were in the middle of badlands with hoodoo rocks all around. They had seen the helicopter land less than a mile away in the middle of the valley, and Ford felt sure their trail had been picked up. He also knew, from his CIA training, that they must have dropped men at potential exit points, who would be moving in to cut them off. Their only chance was to find an unexpected route out of the canyon-or a hiding place.

He looked toward the far end of the canyon. A series of ashy, barren hills gave way to yet another cluster of bald rocks, like serried ranks of cowled monks. Several miles beyond loomed a series of vermilion cliffs, like stairs leading to another plateau. If they could slip out that way, they might just make it, but it didn't look promising. He glanced down at Sally and Tom. They were both weakening fast and he didn't think they would be able to continue much longer. They had to find a place to go to ground. He climbed down. "See anything?" Tom asked.

Ford shook his head, not wanting to get into it. "Let's keep going." They continued up the wash and into the forest of standing rocks. An oppressive heat had collected in the enclosed space. They continued along, scrambling over fallen rocks and squeezing between sandstone boulders, sometimes in sun, sometimes in shade, driving as deeply into the mass of standing rocks as they could. Sometimes the rocks were leaning so close together that they had to crawl on their hands and knees to get through.

Just as suddenly, they came out against the face of a cliff, which curved back on both sides, forming a kind of coliseum. At the far end, about fifty feet above the canyon bottom, a long-gone watercourse had hollowed out a cave. Ford could see a faint series of dimples in the rock, depressions where ancient Anasazi Indians had pecked out a hand-and-toe trail up into the cave.

"Let's check that out," Ford said.

They walked to the base of the cliff, and Tom examined the ancient hand-and-toe trail. He glanced up.

"They'll find us in there, Wyman," Tom said.

"There's no other option. The cave may go somewhere. And it's possible they may miss us, if we erase our footprints down here."

Tom turned to Sally. "What do you think?"

"I'm beyond thinking."

"Let's do it."

After erasing their prints as best they could, they climbed the hand-and-toe trail. It was not a difficult climb and in a few minutes they were in the cave. Ford paused, breathing hard. He himself was getting toward the end of his own endurance, and he wondered how Sally and Tom could even walk. They both looked like hell. For better or worse, this cave was the end of the road.

The cave was shaped like a soaring cathedral dome, with a floor of smooth sand and sandstone walls that curved upward. The indirect sunlight from outside filled it with a reddish glow, and it smelled like dust and time. An enormous boulder sat at the far end of the cave, apparently having fallen from the ceiling eons ago, worn and rounded off by the action of water coming through a web of crevasses in the roof.

As they walked deeper into the cave, they disturbed a colony of nesting canyon swallows, which flitted about in the shadows above, making shrill cries.

"The cave may continue on behind that large rock," said Ford.

They walked toward the back of the cave, approaching the displaced rock.

"Look," said Tom. "Footprints."

The sand had been carefully brushed, but in the gap between the rock and the side of the cave they could see marks from a chevron-lugged hiking boot.

They squeezed through the gap and entered the back part of the cave, behind the massive boulder.

Ford turned and there it was, the great T. Rex, its jaws and forelimb, emerging from the rock. No one spoke. It was an extraordinary sight. The beast looked as if it was engaged in a fierce struggle to break out, to tear itself free from the tomb of stone. The dinosaur lay on its side, but the tilt of the fallen rock had set it almost upright, giving it a further grotesque illusion of life. Looking at it, Ford could almost feel the great beast's last raging moment of earthly consciousness.

In silence, they approached the base of the rock. Scattered on the sand underneath lay a few pieces that had weathered from the fossil-including one long, black, scimitar-shaped tooth. Tom picked it up, hefted it, ran his thumb along the viciously serrated inner edge. He gave a low whistle and handed it to Ford.

It was heavy and cool in his hand. "Incredible," he murmured, glancing once again at the great silent monster.

"Look at this," said Tom, pointing to some strange man-made objects partly buried in the sand-several ancient figurines carved in wood. He knelt down and brushed away the sand, uncovering more figurines below and a small pot filled

with arrowheads.

"Offerings," said Ford. "That explains the Indian trail up here. They were

worshiping the monster. And no wonder." "What's that?"

Tom pointed to a rim of metal that poked from the sand. He swept the sand aside to uncover a burnt tin can, which he extracted and pried up the lid. Inside was a Ziploc bag enclosing a bundle of letters, sealed in envelopes, dated, and addressed to "Robbie Weathers." The first one had written on it: For my daughter Robbie. I hope you enjoy this story. The T. Rex is all yours. Love, Daddy.

Without a word, Tom rolled up the letters and put them back in the can. Sally, standing farther toward the front of the cave, suddenly hissed. "Voices!" Ford started, as if corning out of a dream. The reality of their situation came back in a rush.

"We've got to hide. Let's see how far back the cave goes." Tom pulled the feeble flashlight he still carried and shone it into the back of the cave. They all stared in silence. The cave ended in a narrow, water-worn crack, far too narrow to admit a person. He directed the beam up, around, back and forth. "We've walked into a dead end," Ford said quietly. "So that's it?" said Sally. "What do we do now? Give up?" Ford did not answer. He moved swiftly to the mouth of the cave, flattened himself against the wall, and peered down. A moment later he was back. "They're in the canyon below, three soldiers and a civilian."

Tom moved to the opening himself and looked down in the small amphitheater. Two men with assault rifles, dressed in desert camouflage, were moving below. A third appeared, and then a forth. The men were examining the ground where they had brushed out their tracks. One was pointing up to the cave.

"That's it," said Ford quietly.

"Bullshit." Tom pulled the handgun out of the musette bag, popped out the magazine, topped it off with a couple of loose rounds, slid it back into place. He raised his head to see Ford shaking his own.

"You take a pot shot at those D-boys and you're looking at instant suicide."

"I'm not going down without a fight."

"Neither am I." Ford paused, his craggy face deep in thought. As if absent-mindedly he removed the dinosaur tooth from his pocket, hefted it. Then he slipped it back in. "Tom, do you have the notebook?"

Tom pulled it out.

"Give it to me. And the gun."

"What are you-"

"No time to explain."

13

MASAGO WATCHED FROM below as Hitt and the two other D-boys edged up the

steep sandstone slope and flattened themselves just below the lip of the cave, spreading out to cover the occupants within from three angles. It was a classic maneuver, a bit of overkill, perhaps, considering the targets were probably unarmed.

When they were in place, Hitt's voice sounded, not loud, but carrying a steely authority.

"You in the cave. You're outgunned and outnumbered. We're coming in. Don't move, and keep your hands in sight."

Masago watched, fighting an uncharacteristic feeling of tension.

Hitt rose, exposing himself to the unseen targets inside. The other two remained covering him.

"That's right. Hands above your heads. Nobody's going to get hurt. "He gestured to the other two D-boys, who rose from their cover.

It was over. The three objectives were standing in the open central area of the cave, hands raised.

Cover me.

Hitt walked over and patted them down, making sure they weren't armed. He spoke into his comm. "Sir, we've secured the cave. You may come up now."

Masago seized the first handhold, hefted himself up, and in a few minutes stood in the mouth of the cave, looking at the three sorriest bastards he'd seen in a long time: the monk, Broadbent, and his wife.

"Unarmed?"

Hitt nodded.

"Search them again. I want to see everything they have on their persons. Everything. Lay it out on the sand here in front of me."

Hitt nodded to one of his boys, who began searching the bedraggled group. Out appeared a flashlight, wallets, keys, a driver's license, all carefully lined up in the sand. The monk's pack contained an empty canteen, matches, a few empty tin cans, and other camping gear.

The last thing to come out had been hidden in the monk's robes.

"What the hell's this?" the D-boy asked, holding it up.

Without changing expression, Masago said, "Bring it to me."

The boy handed it to him. Masago gazed on the serrated tooth, flipped it over, hefted it.

"You." He pointed to the monk. "You must be Ford."

The monk gave an almost imperceptible nod.

"Step forward."

The monk took one short step forward.

He held up the great tooth. "So you found it. You know where it is."

"That's correct," said the monk.

"You will tell me where it is."

"I'm the only one who has the information you want. And I'm not talking until you answer my questions first."

Masago unholstered his Beretta, pointed the gun at Ford.

"Talk."

"Screw you."

Masago fired, the bullet singing past Ford's ear. The monk didn't even flinch.

Masago lowered the gun. The man wasn't going to be intimidated-he could see that now.

"Kill me and you'll never find the dinosaur. Never."

Masago smiled thinly. "All right then-you get one question."

"Why do you want the dinosaur?"

"It contains highly dangerous infectious particles, which could be transformed into a bioterror weapon." He could see the monk digesting this statement. He wouldn't say more: nothing that would contradict the Patrol Order that had been distributed to the men.

"The name of your detachment?"

"That's two."

"You can go to hell, then," said the monk.

Masago made a quick step forward and sank his fist in the monk's solar plexus; the man went down in the sand like a sack of cement. Masago stepped over him

while the monk coughed, rose to his knees, his hands convulsively sinking and digging into the sand in an effort to right himself.

"The dinosaur, Mr. Ford: where is it?"

"Water . . . please . . ."

Masago unhooked his canteen and shook it provocatively. "When I hear the location of the dinosaur." He unscrewed the cap and bent down toward the shaking monk, who was barely able to support himself on his hands and knees.

The monk exploded like a striking snake. His hand came out of the sand- unexpectedly holding a gun. Before Masago could react Ford's left arm had locked around his throat and wrenched him back. Masago felt the gun barrel jammed in his ear, his arms pinned back, unable to reach his Beretta.

"Now," said Ford, using Masago as a shield as he spoke to the soldiers, "this man's going to tell all of us what's really going on-or he's dead."