Burial Ground

VIII

California Raptor Center

University of California, Davis

Davis, California

October 23^rd

6:30 a.m. PST

This was Galen Russell's favorite time of the day. He still had three hours before his first lecture began, and half an hour alone in the lab before the earliest volunteers arrived. Not that he minded the human interaction, but there was simply something magical about this time alone with his feathered friends. He enjoyed the teaching aspect of his post as chair of the Avian Sciences Department at the University of California, Davis, and liked to think he made a difference in the lives of the next generation, which would have to take up arms in the battle for conservation of the few natural resources left unexploited if there were to be any hope for the hundreds of species teetering on the brink of extinction, but this was his true passion. Birds were the link to the past as well as to the future, their behavior patterns far more complex and intriguing than most even suspected. Their evolutionary adaptations were well ahead of the biological curve, and reflected changes in their habitat more quickly than any other higher order of animal life, thus making them the perfect research subjects for the kind of revolutionary theories postulated by pioneers like Charles Darwin and Ernst Mayr. Galen's professional aspirations were far less ambitious. He merely wanted to know everything about them.

He pulled off the rubber hand-puppet designed to mimic the head and neck of a female California condor and set it in the sink for one of the volunteers to clean and sanitize. It stank of chopped mice, but at least the condor chick had eaten reasonably well this morning. She'd been getting scrawny beneath that mass of white down, and for a while he had feared they were going to lose her. When the hiker who discovered her in the Los Padres National Forest, where she had presumably fallen from her nest high up on a cliff-side, first brought her in, Galen had been sure that death was inevitable, but now she was eating, at least enough to survive, and he felt cautiously optimistic about her prognosis. Unfortunately, the Center wasn't able to rehabilitate all of the birds that were dropped off. Of the more than forty raptors they were currently treating, everything from the smallest hawks to golden eagles to the nearly extinct California condor, perhaps only twenty-some would survive. The odds were often depressing, but at least at the end of the day he could hang his hat on the fact that he had done his part to ensure the proliferation of bloodlines, if not entire species.

In addition to his obligations to the university and the Center, Galen was Executive Officer of the American Ornithologists' Union and served as Chair of the Standing Committee on Conservation for the Raptor Research Foundation. He spread himself too thin and he knew it, but if he didn't do it, who would? It wasn't so long ago that the California condor perched atop the food chain and had a range that covered the entire American Southwest. And now? The encroachment of mankind had driven it to the precipice of eradication. Only one hundred and thirty individuals remained in the wild, and most of those were due to the success of captive breeding efforts spearheaded by the San Diego Zoo. How long would it be before the species was extinct, and would anyone care when it happened? Galen passed through the incubation room, which was suffused with a red glow from the heat lamps, and the kitchen unit that reeked of worms and raw meat. At the end of a short hallway, he entered his office, a small box no larger than the standard cubicle. He slipped out of his brown corduroy jacket as he walked through the doorway and hung it on the hook behind the door. The half-length mirror affixed to it showed him what he feared it would: a somewhat doughy man in his mid-forties, sandy-blonde hair receding from his forehead and thinning on top, glasses that grew thicker with each passing year, and a slender face with crow's feet framing his sky-blue eyes. After a wasted moment of self-pity, he turned away and slid behind his desk. There were a couple of invoices he needed to check and a memo to write to the membership of the RRF, and then he could formally begin his day. He was already rolling his cuffed sleeves in anticipation when he noticed the objects on his desk, which certainly hadn't been there the night before, as it was a rare occasion when he wasn't the one to turn off the lights on his way out.

He leaned forward and inspected the objects. Three feathers had been precisely laid out on his blotter in a clover formation, the calamuses meeting to form a single point. They were remiges, the stiff contour feathers of the wing suited for flight. The base color was mud brown with an extraordinary green iridescence that shifted as it reflected the overhead light.

"Pretty impressive, aren't they?" a voice asked from the doorway.

Galen flinched at the sound and dropped the feathers to the desktop. There was never anyone in the building for at least another half-hour. He looked up to find a tall, wiry man with short, spiked black hair and an expensive suit appraising him through steel-gray eyes. The man raised an eyebrow.

"You...you shouldn't be back here," Galen stammered. He cleared his throat and tried again with more authority. "This is a restricted area. I'm going to have to ask you to leave or I'll be forced to call the police."

The man merely shrugged, and entered the office.

Galen reached for the phone, but the man's words stopped him short.

"I don't think you can tell me which species those feathers belong to, can you?"

The man was right, but Galen was loath to admit it. They were obviously from a species of raptor, of that much he had no doubt. The brown coloration was an expression of melanin, but he had no idea where the strange green iridescence might have originated. The refraction of light on yellow carotenoid pigments like parrots have, possibly? Raptors didn't showcase the flashy colors of smaller birds, even during mating season. They were predators, which meant the last thing they wanted was for their prey to see them coming. The length of the remiges placed this animal's size at that of a condor, but these definitely weren't from a condor as their feathers were nearly universally black. So what did that mean? Had these feathers been doctored in some fashion, or was he looking at some rare genetic mutation? Maybe a new species entirely?

He looked up at the man, who watched him with a curious expression. What did he know that he hadn't shared? Galen decided to play it cool and buy himself some time with the feathers to do some research. Preferably alone. This guy had no business being in here anyway. Come to think of it, how had he entered the building? Galen was certain he had locked the doors behind him when he arrived.

"I'll hold onto these feathers for a couple days and try to match them against one of our databases. Every species of raptor is catalogued in there somewhere."

"You'll find that this one isn't, but I have a hunch you already know as much."

"I can run a mass spectroscopic analysis to determine where they originated. It evaluates the ratio of stable hydrogen ions---"

"They were recovered in the Andes Mountains of Northern Peru."

"Impossible. That's the range of the Andean condor. There's only so much room in any ecological niche for predators and scavengers. And condors definitely aren't the kind to share their niche."

"That's your area of expertise, Dr. Russell. I'm only telling you what I know."

"What I know is that you're about two minutes from being manhandled by campus security." He picked up the handset and dialed.

The man casually crossed the room, sat on the edge of the desk, and depressed the button on the phone to disconnect the call before it even began to ring.

"Perhaps I should have started with an introduction." The man smiled, though he still held his finger in place. "My name is Marcus Colton. I work for Leonard Gearhardt and Advanced Exploration Associates International. These feathers were found in the Amazonas Province of Peru just under two weeks ago by Mr. Gearhardt's son. We're putting together an exploration party to locate and excavate the region where we assume the younger Mr. Gearhardt discovered the feathers." He released the button on the phone and the dial tone droned in Galen's ear. "We leave in the morning."

"What does this have to do with me?"

"We don't know precisely where the feathers of this particular species might have been found."

"Why not ask the younger Mr. Gearhardt?" Galen immediately regretted his mocking tone.

"Unfortunately, he is no longer with us. He died before he could share this knowledge with anyone."

"That still doesn't answer my question. What do you want from me?"

"Dr. Russell, from 1985 through 2001, you worked extensively in the field tracking and studying birds in the wild. Thanks in large measure to your efforts in conservation, nearly a half dozen species of raptors have been placed on the Threatened Animals List and significant portions of their natural habitats declared preserves and conservatories. You understand these creatures: their behavior patterns, their relationships to their environment, their lifecycles. Your knowledge would be invaluable in helping us find the proverbial needle in the haystack. We're looking for one specific location in the middle of a vast section high in the unexplored Peruvian Andes, and being able to identify the natural range of this species will significantly shrink the amount of ground we need cover. You will be very generously compensated for your expertise, but more importantly, when you eventually admit what we both already know, you'll be the first to classify and study this new species. You'll have the opportunity not only to publish potentially revolutionary findings, but you'll also be able to name it."

"I can't just up and leave my post. The university---"

"We've already made arrangements with the university to secure your services."

"I haven't worked in the field for close to a decade..."

"It's in your blood, Dr. Russell."

Galen felt himself waffling. The prospect of actually working in the field again was both exciting and mortifying. What if his skills had atrophied? What if he traveled halfway around the world and couldn't help them find what they were looking for? He locked eyes with the man across the desk, whose expression betrayed nothing. If there was a chance of discovering a new species that had somehow existed in complete isolation without being found for thousands of years, then he owed it to himself to take it. Even more exciting was the prospect that this could be a recent evolutionary offshoot of an existing species. If he could somehow identify the environmental factors that had triggered such a change and localize the genetic factors that facilitated it, he could advance evolutionary theories that would surpass anything Darwin had even dreamed of.

"Did I mention there will be a film crew tagging along to document our journey?" Colton asked. "Hence the necessity to involve only the leaders in their respective fields."

Galen ran his fingers through his hair.

Colton smiled like a cat that had finally cornered a mouse.

"I'm going to need time to procure the proper supplies."

"You have until tomorrow morning," Colton said. He reached into the inner breast pocket of his jacket, extracted a blue pamphlet, and tossed it down on the desk.

Galen opened it and examined the contents: roundtrip airline tickets from LAX to Lima, Peru.

"I can't possibly be ready in so little time," he said, but when he looked back up, Colton was already gone.