Earthcore

Chapter Ten

Randy Wright sat in the backseat, sweating like a pig. Despite the air conditioner's valiant efforts, a slimy film covered him from head to toe. He could almost hear the Land Rover's paint bubbling under the angry sun. They would be stopping soon, and they'd have to get out, an act his mind ranked as slightly more fun than having a wisdom tooth extracted.

He looked out the back window. Dust billowed up as if the Land Rover were a bi-wing crop duster, swooping in low over the ground to drop clouds of noxious pesticide. The view out the front wasn't much better — an endless vista of brown and yellow, dotted every now and then with scrub and other vegetation so tough it looked as if it would flourish on the surface of the moon.

He pushed his glasses into place for the hundredth time; the rough, catapulting ride had the frames constantly sliding down his sweat-slick nose. He didn't mind the constant bouncing in the seats, but this heat could suck the fun out of a clown.

The bumpy ride bounced Randy in all directions, but it didn't seem to bother the Rover's other occupants. The driver, a stocky, serious woman named Bertha Lybrand, seemed to take the bumps without notice. The big, blue-uniformed man on Randy's right was having no problems, but that was probably due to his size — it would take a wrecking ball to move Patrick O'Doyle.

Lybrand was also dressed in the blue EarthCore security uniform. She was a big brunette, a strong woman, probably a bodybuilder by the looks of it. Angus referred to her as a “linebacker factory” and a “gorilla with tits.” He said these things very quietly, of course, and only when Lybrand was not around.

O'Doyle kept staring at her, turning away quickly every time she flashed a glance at the rearview mirror. Randy wasn't sure, but he thought O'Doyle blushed once when she caught him staring.

O'Doyle was supposed to be security. He was more like a prison guard. Nobody had been able to leave the lab even to take a piss without first clearing it with O'Doyle, and now he was in charge of camp security. O'Doyle had an aura of confidence and lethality that gave Randy the creeps (of course, the missing ear and accompanying scar tissue added to that feeling). Rumor was that O'Doyle had served in some secret Marine infiltration unit. Rumor also had it he'd once killed five men with his bare hands. Looking at the big man, it was easy to understand why no one in the lab dared voice a complaint about the extra security measures.

It wasn't just the temperature that had Randy chafing at the trip, it was also Angus. His best friend leaned forward in the front passenger seat, oblivious to the heat and the jarring ride. Angus seemed to vibrate with energy, eyes wide and drinking in the bland landscape that stretched out before the Land Rover. Randy would have felt better if Angus had been just a little bit miserable, but nothing seemed to faze the man.

Randy longed for a beer, but there were certainly no bars around. They'd been driving for over thirty minutes with this knotted two-track the only excuse for a road. They'd passed tiny Milford — the last town they'd seen — over an hour ago, and they still had fifteen minutes to go to reach the EarthCore camp.

Aside from the heat, two thoughts dominated his mind: the sprawling, virgin cave system, and the stunning amount of raw treasure it likely contained. The rough, low-end estimate was over one million tons of ore, with a probable yield of twelve ounces platinum to the ton. Over $10 billion at a price of $850 per ounce. And that was the low-end figure. High-end? Optimistic figures held well more than twelve ounces per ton of ore — more like sixty ounces per ton, and the find was better estimated at around five million tons. High-end estimates teetered around $255 billion.

Those numbers would rock the worldwide platinum market. Connell had worked overtime to keep the mine a secret and ascertain its worth as soon as possible-the last thing he wanted was the competition trying some underhanded trick to sabotage the mine. Connell had officially registered the Wah Wah site as a coal mine.

Randy didn't care that much about the money, although his profit-sharing plan would probably make him a millionaire. The tunnels were the exciting part. The largest complex known to man, and he and Angus would be the first people to set foot in it. That promised an adrenaline rush that would put a bungee jump to shame.

Once Angus had mapped the tunnels, he spent his time organizing equipment and drawing up schematics for vital new inventions. Putting those inventions together was left to Randy, who had scrambled to procure everything before they had flown out of Detroit Metro earlier that morning. The inventions — some conceived in a matter of hours — boggled Randy's imagination. Angus's short-but-brilliant scientific career had earned him a sizable fortune, huge gobs of which Randy used like a baited hook to make various technical firms put the equipment together on two days’ notice.

All the little gadgets were packed into U.S. Marine combat webbing barely a half-inch deep. There wasn't a single piece of equipment that weighed over eight ounces. The whole rig weighed in at just over ten pounds. Tiny motion detectors, miniature floodlights, oxygen supplies, first-aid materials, vacuum-packed flotation devices, carbon-titanium alloy climbing gear, ultralight graphite-strand rope — it was more akin to Batman's utility belt than a spelunker's standard rig. How Angus planned on slipping away from Connell's watchful eye, Randy didn't know. If they did slip away, however, they'd be ready to explore like no one in history.

They would be the first. They would know the feelings of Columbus, Magellan, Armstrong, Lief Erickson. They would know what it was like to discover something no one had ever seen, something that essentially wasn't there before they found it.

There was power in discovery, a form of immortality. In this case, his immorality would be on a map — part of that subterranean maze would be forever known as Wright Cavern. That thought brought a smile to Randy's lips.

Chapter Eleven

Despite her position as team leader of a National Geographic Society expedition and her doctorate in archaeology, Dr. Veronica Reeves couldn't help squealing like a little girl when she heard his voice on the phone.

"Sanji! My God, it's good to hear you.” She beamed with joy. She hadn't seen him in over a year, this man who'd raised her like his own daughter.

"Roni, my little darling!” Sanji said in his thick, singsong accent. “It has been so long since I have spoken to you. My goodness, it is hard to reach you in those mountains; I have been trying for days. Is the dig going well?"

She could almost see his smiling face — jovial under plump cheeks that less charitable people might call jowls — his black eyes, his skin the color of pale chocolate and his increasingly frost-speckled black hair.

"There aren't any phones up there,” she said. “They had to call me down by radio. We're getting very deep into the caves, but we have to find a way to deal with the high temperatures down there. What was so urgent that you needed to talk to me about? I left the dig and spent an hour in a Jeep to reach a phone. Is something wrong?"

"I guess that depends on how you look at it. Things are very wrong if you are particularly fond of your current theory regarding the lost mountain city of Cerro Chaltel."

"What are you talking about?"

"They found a knife in Utah."

Veronica's jaw dropped. In the past seven years, the word knife had lost its conventional meaning; now she associated it only with the double-crescent weapons found scattered in and around Cerro Chaltel. The knives were evidence of a unique culture that possibly dominated the southern tip of the Andes around 5000 b.c.

"That's impossible,” Veronica said.

"Come now, my little darling. I am sure I taught you a better scientific attitude than that."

"Are you sure it's the same?” She could scarcely believe her ears. The Cerro Chaltel knives were completely unique in all the world's history — a highly crafted platinum blade made at a time when humanity still struggled to master flint arrowheads. To hear one had popped up in Utah seemed unfathomable.

"I am holding it right now,” Sanji said.

Her mind tried to deny the significance of such a find, to protect her from inevitable disappointment, and yet her excitement grew with each second. “It's got to be a fake, or one from here."

"Well, they would have had to fake it in 1942. It has been in the BYU archives all this time."

"Oh my God,” Veronica said in a whisper.

Sanji laughed. “I thought that would be your reaction."

"Has anyone seen any glyphs?"

"I don't know,” Sanji said. “All I know is that the knife came to our attention because of a prospector. We think someone may be preparing to mine the area."

Veronica's blood simultaneously chilled and boiled. Miners. She hated that word, hated what those people could do to invaluable archaeological sites, not to mention the irreparable damage they inflicted on the environment.

"I'll be on the next flight out,” she said. “I'll call with the details. I love you."

"I love you too, Roni,” Sanji said, and hung up.

In conjunction with her own research, Sanji's knife had suddenly become — quite possibly — the archaeological find of the century. And some money-grubbing mining slime might ruin it all.

We'll see about that, Veronica thought. We'll just see about that.

Chapter Twelve

Connell arrived by helicopter. The landing pad was a small natural mesa almost a quarter-mile from the camp. The mesa stuck well out from the mountain, giving pilots plenty of error room.

The EarthCore camp sat on a plateau notched into the mountain, a natural formation that had been enlarged and leveled to create more room. Slanting walls of green limestone rose up on either side and behind. From the air, the camp looked like a tiny cork bobbing amid a frozen brown-green tidal wave.

It had been years since he'd actually been on-site at a dig. Since Cori's death, he'd run things from his Renaissance Center office. But this one was too big, just too damn big, to leave to chance. He'd hired the best in Mack Hendricks. Mack could run thing as he saw fit, but Connell had to be there, watching, monitoring, ready to solve any problem that might jeopardize this impossible find.

The rotor blades kicked up huge clouds of dust and sand as the helicopter touched down. Connell stepped off the chopper into this man-made windstorm, a handkerchief covering his mouth, his eyes squinting against the flying particles of dirt. A Jeep waited for him at the edge of the pad.

The chopper flew off, leaving expanding clouds of dust to swirl and stretch across the arid landscape. Mack waited for him in the open-top Jeep.

It somehow surprised Connell that Mack Hendricks fit every American's stereotype of Australian men — blond, square jaw, solid shoulders, the skin around his eyes wrinkled from constant laughter and too much time in the sun. He had a genuine smile and looked like he could quickly acclimate himself to any social situation, whether it called for black-tie or biker jackets.

"G'day, Mr. Kirkland,” Mack said cheerfully, the sun reflecting off his damp, smiling face. His tenor voice and Aussie accent rang through the now-quiet desert. “How was the flight in?"

Connell grimaced as he tried to work some dust out of his mouth. “I made it, that's how it was.” He threw his briefcase and duffel bag into the back as he plunked down in the passenger seat. Out of the helicopter's air conditioning, the desert felt blowtorch-hot.

Mack gunned the engine; the Jeep shot down the narrow but well-constructed road connecting the landing pad and camp. Connell peeked over the open side; an almost straight vertical face of green rock fell away less than five feet to his left. He tried not to think about the jostling bumps caused by Mack's speedy and casual driving.

"How far have you got in the past week, Mr. Hendricks?"

"We're a hair over thirty-six hundred feet in the first three days of actual digging, but we're moving incredibly fast now that it's underway,” Hendricks said. “Angus's laser drill head design is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. We're frigging vaporizing solid rock. I've never seen a shaft progress this fast. We're running three shifts and we're capable of more than two thousand feet a day."

"How far to the ore body?"

"We're eighty-four hundred feet from what Angus says should be the first large tunnel, which leads to a huge cavern. We have to do a small amount of blasting to reach that tunnel. After that first cavern, there's another tunnel branch that leads to the ore body. It's about fifty-two hundred vertical feet from the planned shaft bottom, but we'll be following horizontal tunnels so it's more like ten miles of rough walking and some crawling. I figure with all the switchbacks in the caverns it's at least a day's hike from the shaft bottom to the Dense Mass. We'll be under for quite a while."

A day there and a day back. Two days underground just to see the Dense Mass. The time estimate gave Connell a true appreciation for the size of the cavern complex.

Even though the camp was a good half-mile southwest of the dig, mining noise reached Connell's ears clearly as the Jeep pulled to a stop. The camp's efficient, secure appearance pleased him. Head-high rolls of razor wire surrounded the perimeter, leaving one gate pointed downslope toward the desert, and another upslope pointed toward the mine. Four small Quonset huts housed camp staff: one for the mining crew, one for security, one for male staff and one for female staff. Large canvas tents were pitched over the Quonsets to keep sunlight off the corrugated metal. A larger Quonset hut, the size of a small airplane hangar, housed vehicles and large equipment. A sixth hut served as the mess hall.

The lab was the only building with real walls. It glared a blinding white in the late afternoon sun. A typical construction-site trailer near the lab served as the administrative shack. Sweaty people bustled through the sandy camp. The air was filled with pulsating sounds from the large diesel generator that powered the pump pushing fresh air into the shaft and provided the camp with electricity. Opposite the hangar/garage sat a 10,000-gallon diesel fuel tank, its long, round body oddly calling to mind a plastic submarine marooned in the desert.

"Very nice, Mr. Hendricks, very efficient,” Connell said as he exited the Jeep and headed straight for the lab.

The lab's interior seemed as icy cold as the desert was scalding hot. The sudden temperature change made his head hurt almost instantly. The lab was a tiny maze of expensive, humming equipment. Connell recognized some of the equipment, although he couldn't begin to guess the purpose of most of it. Angus's wild, red-haired head popped up from underneath a machine. A smile broke over his small face. He hustled to his feet and over to greet Connell.

"Mr. Kirkland! I'm glad you made it out all right."

Connell stared at the smaller man for a second, surprised by the reaction. Angus seemed genuinely happy. The little spelunker is already planning on traversing the caves, Connell thought. Got to keep a close eye on him. Connell wasn't about to let anyone go near the caves until safety had been assured. Especially not Angus Kool.

"You seem in good spirits, Mr. Kool,” Connell said, shaking the hand that was offered. “I assume we've got good news regarding the core sample?"

"It's amazing,” Angus said. “It's even better than what we expected."

Angus reached into his pocket and produced a sealed foil envelope. It resembled a small condom wrapper. He opened it and pulled out a thin dot of metal the size of a watch battery.

"If you could turn around, Mr. Kirkland, I need to attach this."

"What is it?"

"It's a homing device I invented. I call it the Marco/Polo System. Mack asked me to set something up so we wouldn't lose anyone in the tunnels. I programmed this microtranceiver with your name. The finder unit — I call it a ‘Marco'—sends out a signal. Your unit receives the signal and responds with a message containing your name. Your unit is the ‘Polo.’ That way if you're lost or get injured or knocked out, search parties can locate you. The Marco unit detects body temperature, pulse, and Alpha waves along with distance and altitude."

"What's the range on it?"

"In open air it's a couple of miles,” Angus said as he pressed the dot against the base of Connell's skull. “Underground, it depends on how much rock comes between you and the Marco unit. As long as no one tries to go off on his own, it's impossible to become completely lost. Everyone in camp has one, just in case.” Angus removed his hand. Connell turned his head from side to side, but felt nothing.

"Did it fall off?"

"Nope, it's still there. It's attached with artificial skin that breathes just like the real thing. It will stay on until it's removed. Now take a look at this.” Angus turned to a monitor, on which a spiky line showed a mass-spectrometer analysis.

"This whole line is a breakdown of the core sample's mass spec results,” Angus said. “We took periodic samples every hundred feet down to sixteen thousand feet. That distance is, by the way, deeper than anyone has ever drilled in one shot, which gives me yet another world's record. Just thought you'd like to know."

"I'll be sure to call the Guinness people in the morning,” Connell said.

"Now, you'll see the normal spikes for a very bland mineral content in this overall chart, but notice these three spikes here.” Angus pointed to the three highest peaks, one that towered above the rest of the small points and dips, and another that reared almost as high. Connell noted a slew of peaks, under which he read compound names like KFe3(SO4)2(OH)6 and CUs(AsO4)(OH). The only compound he recognized, CaCO3—limestone — sat under the biggest peak. The second-highest peak read only Pt, and the third read Pt60Ir12(?).

"The whole mountain is basically Cretaceous-period limestone and limestone compounds. The second spike is a control sample of pure platinum, highly refined. This third spike—” Angus paused, smiled, and looked directly at Connell “—this third spike is a flake of what we found at 16,340 feet, the absolute bottom range of the drill sample."

Connell leaned in toward the screen, comparing the numbers on the second and third spikes. They looked nearly identical. “Mr. Kool,” Connell said, managing to keep his voice and face neutral despite his smoldering excitement. “Are you telling me that your core sample came back with almost solid platinum?"

"Platinum-iridium."

"And where does this match up with your data on the Dense Mass inside the mountain?"

Angus turned to the keyboard and brought up the now-familiar schematic of the green solid mass and surrounding yellow tunnels. A dozen vertical red lines appeared surrounding the green mass. “We ran drilling and bulk sampling where you see all of the red lines. Eleven of the samples turned up nothing but worthless rock. Not a trace of platinum. Only one drill sample gave us the results I just showed you."

He tapped the mouse and another red line appeared, glowing bright orange where it intersected with the green mass. “Our baby is everything we thought it would be and then some,” he said quietly, staring at the screen. “It's solid platinum. Solid as a fucking rock. I'm convinced the entire Dense Mass is of the same composition as our drill sample. It's a four-mile long, half-mile wide chunk of solid platinum."

Angus leaned back in his chair, his happy smile gone, the more familiar arrogant grin again at home on his face. “Sometimes,” he said through the smile, “I amaze even myself."

"What's with the question mark?” Connell asked, pointing to the Pt60Ir12(?) symbol on the screen.

"Nothing to worry about,” Angus said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The platinum/iridium compound appears to be something uncalibrated on the SIMS."

"English, please,” Connell said.

"Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry. We bombard the target material with positively charged ions. The bombardment transfers that positive charge to the target material, which in this case is the material brought up by the core sample. That positive charge causes an atom to break free, causing fragmentation. Because fragmentation patterns are distinct and reproducible, we can precisely identify the trace elements of any solid material."

"If it's so precise, then why the question mark?"

"Because the platinum/iridium alloy is something nobody has ever seen before. In effect, the computer is taking an educated guess. The ion bombardment produces platinum and iridium atoms, and it's guessing at how those elements combine to form the compound. It's just an unusual compound, that's all."

"You're sure it's platinum, though, correct?” Connell was glad he'd made the trip out, elated that he was here as everything unfolded. “You're sure it's platinum?"

"As sure as I'm a flat-out genius,” Angus said.

Connell's eyes remained fixed on the screen. Platinum never occurred naturally in a large solid mass, and yet there it was. A find so big, so massive, that EarthCore could dictate supply for at least the next thirty years, if not the entire twenty-first century. Billions of dollars. Trillions of dollars.

"Mr. Kool, I want two more drill samples at areas that will intersect your Dense Mass projections."

"No can do,” Angus said. “Our drill bit was destroyed when we tried to core deeper into the Dense Mass."

"I thought that diamond bit could slice through anything."

"It can, but this platinum-iridium alloy is really hard, perhaps almost as hard as the diamond itself. We got a decent-sized sample, but the compound just ground the diamond bit down to nothing. There may be some serious commercial applications for this compound. It's very unusual. I wouldn't worry about it; we've gotten plenty of data and the shaft is already under way."

A multimillion-dollar piece of equipment destroyed, and Angus didn't bat an eye. It didn't surprise Connell in the least. But if Angus was satisfied that the Dense Mass was platinum, Connell also found it hard to care about the destroyed core sampler.

Connell walked into the administration shed and wearily shut the door behind him. Even his short time in the heat had drained his body. He needed a drink and a nap. He went to the desk that would be his home for at least the next two weeks. He pulled a framed picture from his briefcase.

He held the picture of his wife in his hands, staring down at her smiling face, feeling the familiar hurt worm its way through his insides. He set the picture on his desk so Cori's image could see everything he did.

From his duffel bag, he pulled out the blocky cellular phone provided by Kayla Meyers. It was black and heavy, with deep scratches on the side from a filed-down serial number. Kayla “acquired” this little toy as surplus from the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia, or so she said. Connell didn't really care, as long as it was secure.

The receiver was a twin of the one that Barbara Yakely had back in Detroit. Hers was the only phone that could decipher the scrambled signal sent out by Connell's, and vice-versa. He punched the connect button; Barbara answered almost immediately. Connell talked quietly and calmly, but had no way of knowing that his boss wasn't the only person to hear the conversation.

Kayla Meyers gently tweaked the controls of the Harris JM-251 receiver, specially modified for the NSA's SIGINT needs. She'd watched Connell ever since his arrival at camp, following his every move through high-powered binoculars as she lay practically invisible in the sand. Once he'd headed for the administration shed, she knew he'd call Barbara Yakely.

The air conditioners peeking from every building in the camp made her want to laugh with contempt. She'd grown up in southern Texas; the scorching sun was an old, dear friend, and growing up dirt poor and isolated she'd had few friends.

Her father saw to that. Kayla and her two older sisters all suffered his abuse, his beatings, his touch. Mary and Shelly suffered the most, succumbing to his will, stepping and fetching whenever he walked in the room. They did anything to avoid a beating — or worse, the loving. When Kayla turned eight, or maybe nine, she couldn't remember, Cyrus Meyers came for her, too. Their tiny ranch perched in a solitary strand of barely arable farmland. No one ever heard the cries.

She could still hear his slurred words, his binge-drunk voice screaming at the top of his lungs as he lurched out of the rust-eaten Dodge longbed truck, bar smoke clinging to him like stink on road kill.

"Wake up, girls!” Cyrus would scream as his daughters cowered in terror. “Get your fingers out of the tuna bowl and come give yer daddy some biscuits ‘n gravy!” He'd stumble into the house, barely able to walk, but somehow managing to find their beds. Cyrus didn't like to hear any noise when he visited them at night. The girls would choke back cries as tears trickled down their faces onto threadbare pillowcases bought by a mother Kayla had never known.

Mary and Shelly wordlessly suffered his touch, succumbing to his perverse will. But Kayla was different. She'd always been different, preferring the boys’ roughhouse schoolyard games over dolls and tea parties. Girls were weak. The boys were tougher.

For the five years that Cyrus molested her, sodomized her, beat her for reasons Kayla could never quite fathom, a quiet rage burned inside her. Fear and guilt dominated her sisters, which seemed to be exactly the emotions Cyrus wanted, but only seething anger mulled in Kayla's growing body. Cyrus knew it, too. Somehow he sensed it, sensed the rebellion in her soul. He tried again and again to beat that rebellion out of her, to break her spirit. She finally put a stop to Cyrus Meyers's twisted ways one god-awful hot July evening.

Cyrus had finished up with Mary and Shelly, knocking off a bottle of Night Train with each girl. As he popped open his third bottle, he came for Kayla. He had no way of knowing that while he molested his older daughters, his youngest had stolen into the kitchen and grabbed a rust-speckled butcher knife.

Cyrus came into her room, stinking, staggering, bragging. He was so drunk he could barely walk. She buried that rusty knife in his heart.

She was thirteen — it was her first murder. It sure as hell wasn't her last. As their father lay dead on the worn, yellow shag carpeting of Kayla's bedroom, Mary and Shelly didn't know what to do. The older sisters seemed caught between the violent horror of a murdered father and the unfathomable relief and freedom brought on by Kayla's brutal act. They didn't know what to think, so Kayla did their thinking for them. They spent an hour arranging things. Even then, at thirteen, Kayla possessed an uncanny knack in accounting for every detail.

The police came and all three girls gave a convincingly hysterical report of a burglary gone wrong. Kayla knew the cops saw right through her story — the Meyers family didn't have anything worth stealing.

Even the most stolid, diehard, live-by-the-law cops didn't pry into the matter. If Cyrus's constant, sickening treatment of his daughters finally got him killed by their hand, well, no one was going to miss him. If it was murder, it was something all four of the town policemen had thought of doing to Cyrus more than once when they saw the Meyers girls bandaged, bruised, and laid out in a bed at County General.

The murder faded away. Kayla lived with her sisters for five more years, graduated from high school, then joined the marines. There she excelled; her killer instinct was encouraged and honed. Ironically, she never got the chance to kill while in the Corps.

Killing came in spades after she was recruited by the NSA. Kayla was a marine with a spotless record, high recommendations from her superior officers, and an IQ of 130. She was exactly what they wanted: a brilliant, beautiful woman who showed no compulsions about killing for her country. Kayla's willingness to volunteer for any mission endeared her to superiors and moved her quickly up the field-agent ladder. No matter what the obstacles, she simply found a way to get the job done.

But that was back in her NSA days, back when she had a purpose in life, a reason for being other than just collecting a paycheck. It had all been about God & Country back then. She'd been damn good, perhaps even the best in the world. Too good, that was how she figured it. No boss, especially a political animal like NSA director André Vogel, liked having a clearly superior underling.

Vogel had fired her, humiliated her, humiliated a woman who had more honor than all the men in all the intelligence agencies combined. All because of one little “incident."

Like those piece of shit children would have ever amounted to anything anyway.

Kayla shook off the thoughts, she had more important things to worry about than her old glory days. She had to worry about a payday, and a great big payday it would be if she could get just a little more information out of Connell.

Kayla knew he would use the COMSEC equipment to talk to Detroit. The compact but heavy JM-251 Harris SIGINT pack was a bitch to haul on the ten-mile desert hike from her hidden Land Rover to her current hideaway, but with it she could pick off any communication coming in or going out of the camp.

Kayla had the handset's encryption key preprogrammed into the Harris unit's memory. Eavesdropping was a cakewalk.

Connell's voice sounded thin through the handset. “It's much bigger than we thought,” he said.

"It better be, sweetie,” a gravelly woman's voice answered. “This is the most expensive test site in the company's history."

"The core samples checked out better than we'd estimated."

"Better? Are you shitting me, honey?"

"No ma'am,” Connell said. “And the deposit is far larger than we'd hoped."

"How big?"

"I can't say over this line."

Kayla growled low in her throat. She'd sold Connell this equipment — it was top of the line in security. He should feel completely safe using it, the paranoid bastard.

"Honey,” the woman said quietly. “It's that big?"

"Yes ma'am, it is. I'll keep you updated."

"I'll be looking forward to it, sweetie.” They both hung up.

Kayla felt her anger rise. Connell didn't trust the equipment. Did he think she was a fucking amateur? His paranoia — and his lack of trust in the state-of-the-art equipment — was nothing less than a personal insult.

She already knew of the mine's potential yield. The night after the workers finished assembling the administration trailer, she'd slipped in and bugged it. It was the camp's nerve center and in it she could hear every word spoken. She hadn't been able to bug the lab; security had been impenetrable around that building, even during construction.

O'Doyle's security measures were very good. She never thought he would turn out to haunt her like this. A little more than a year ago, Connell had come to her asking for a first-class security man, someone with military experience, the real deal. She'd hacked into Defense Department black files and discovered Patrick O'Doyle, a governmental assassin and killing machine who had recently been “retired” from service. She gave the info to Connell. He hired O'Doyle shortly after that.

The rest of the security staff wasn't up to his caliber, but they weren't pushovers, either. The guards, around twenty of them, carried M9 Berettas—9 x 19mm, fifteen-round magazine, semiautomatic. Dangerous weapons in the right hands.

The guards also had a dozen Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifles stashed away. Knowing O'Doyle's record the way she did, the H&Ks were probably rigged for full automatic. You didn't even have to be remotely skilled to kill with a weapon like that — you just pointed and pulled the trigger. The weaponry didn't stop her from making nighttime forays into camp, but it did make her very, very cautious.

Powerful halogen lamps illuminated the large open spaces between camp buildings. That made it difficult to move unseen. She'd managed, spending as long as twenty-five minutes in one hiding place, watching the habits and patterns of the guards. They changed over every four hours — three hours into each shift was the best time to move. Kayla had already slipped in and out of camp each of the last two nights, careful to avoid moving during O'Doyle's shifts.

For the most part Kayla slept from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with a few hours snatched here and there during the night. She had enough water and K-rations for two more days. After that, things would get a little dry up in her perch. She'd either have to hike back to her camouflaged Jeep and lose a day of observation, or steal supplies from the camp.

This was her ticket. This was it, the biggest platinum vein ever found. She'd already set her price tag at $2 million, and that was just for information. If someone wanted to contract her to take some form of action, to sabotage the EarthCore mine, well, that would bring an additional hefty fee. Kayla knew the South African platinum consortium would fork over $2 million in a heartbeat to learn of such a potential addition to platinum supply, and probably so would those underhanded bastards at Montana's Stillwater Mine. The Russians would balk at such a price tag for mere information. But while the South Africans probably just wanted the info, the ruthless Russians had no compunction about playing dirty pool.

She still needed additional information. She had to make sure that if she dangled this carrot in front of potential customers, they would take it right away. She had to create a sense of panic about their business, without giving any hints to the location of the EarthCore mine, or even that EarthCore was involved. She had to deliver a complete information package, so they would be too afraid of waiting another two or three months to gather the information on their own.

Depending on how Connell wanted to play it, EarthCore could potentially try and grab immediate profits by flooding the market with platinum. That large of an increase in supply might drive down platinum's price from over $850 an ounce to maybe $450, possibly even less. That would mean hundreds of millions in lost profits to the other players in the platinum market. If she could get some info, even an inkling, of how Connell planned to play this hand, her information-selling price could go even higher.

Kayla was no master of economics, but she didn't have to be — all she had to do was gather the information and sell it to the highest bidder.

Besides, there was something about the situation that intrigued her. Much of that something was a deliciously dark feeling that seemed to pulse from the mountain. She'd never felt anything close to it.

And she liked it.

Chapter Thirteen

Instead of shades of green and a wet, sauna-like atmosphere, the landscape revealed sharply cut browns and almost zero humidity. Heat was heat, however, and Dr. Veronica Reeves felt right at home. She ought to feel at home, she thought, seeing as she'd grown up rather close to this barren place. She endured the jostling of the so-called road as it wound its way toward the EarthCore mining camp.

A sweaty, dirty, wide-brimmed straw hat perched tightly on top of her severe ponytail. She always wore her hair that way, and yet she could never control the wispy blond tufts that pulled free seemingly of their own accord.

Pure excitement had her squirming in the seat of Sanji's beat-up Toyota Rav4. She'd seen the knife only minutes after Sanji greeted her with a big, crushing hug. It was the same hug he gave her every time she returned to BYU to visit him (which, she reminded herself sternly, was far too rare an occurrence). It was a hug that made everything right, a hug that said I'm always here for you. The first time she'd felt that hug, felt that unspoken promise of infinite support, had been at the age of five when her parents died.

Both of her parents, like her, had been only children. When a plane crash took them away from her, she had no aunts, no uncles, and no grandparents. She did, however, have Sanji.

Her father, also a biologist, had worked closely with Sanji for years. Both were faculty members at BYU, and as far back as she could remember Sanji had been a part of the family in all but name. Her parents’ will named Sanji as her legal guardian, a responsibility he honored. It was a debt of friendship he treasured more than his own life. She often wished she could have known her parents, known what kind of people they were to instill that level of loyalty in their friends.

Sanji proved as good a father as any little girl could ask for. With no family of his own, he doted on her. She grew up deeply loved and cared for, encouraged in everything she did, every dream she chased. He urged her to pursue a doctorate at the University of Michigan. On a professor's salary, he found money to send her anywhere her research demanded: the Yucatan Peninsula, the Kirghiz Steppe, Toros Daglari. Even when she wanted to travel to Argentina to hunt platinum knives on the steep, jungle slopes of the Andes, he'd wholeheartedly urged her to go. He encouraged her knowing full well he would see her rarely, if at all.

And now he was by her side again, helping her chase those same knives in his own backyard. She'd barely believed his call. When she arrived at BYU, exhausted from the trip, she held the Utah knife and knew, instantly, that it was no hoax, no ruse, no mistake.

Cerro Chaltel's culture held a unique place in man's history. Unique up until they found the Utah knife, she reminded herself. A lost civilization more than nine thousand years old. A hidden city built inside a mountain, a city that she estimated had housed perhaps ten thousand people at the zenith of its power.

She'd discovered the culture while examining evidence of an ancient settlement, the remains of which told the story of a brutal massacre. Men, women, and children alike had been butchered and then buried along with most of their belongings.

Clothes, tools, pottery, even food — everything they owned, it seemed, buried right alongside them, as if the attackers despised every last trace of their victims. That part of the mystery had helped hook her, captivate her imagination. What could motivate an enemy to be so brutal, so thorough? Religion, most likely, but she still couldn't say for sure.

The burial preserved the essence of the site for millennia, until shifting erosion exposed the village. Veronica and her team excavated the site, gradually piecing together clues from the 7,500-year-old massacre.

The tools of this destruction were obvious — platinum knives of magnificent craftsmanship. At first they found only two tiny blade tips, broken off in the ancient victims’ bones. Even from the small fragments, Veronica knew the knives were something very unusual. The pieces presented a technological mystery, a culture that had developed a high degree of metallurgy while the rest of South America's tribes were using flint and sharpened sticks. From the moment she saw the blade tips, Veronica was hooked. Careers were made on such tiny discoveries. Legendary careers.

She spent two years acclimating herself to the surrounding culture of the sparsely populated Cerro Chaltel, studying the mountain people, hunting for clues. Those people gradually accepted her presence. After some twenty-five months, a local man presented her with a gift — an unbroken crescent-shaped knife. That's when the mystery really got interesting.

A few scraps of rope tied through the knife's center ring were carbon dated at eight thousand years old. The pieces showed metalworking ability unheard of around 6000 b.c. The craftsmanship rivaled that of master weaponsmiths from Europe or feudal Japan. But those cultures flourished four thousand years after the estimated date of the massacred village. The crescent-shaped knives indicated a people vastly ahead of their time.

A series of caves sat only a mile from the massacre site, far up the slope of Cerro Chaltel, also known as Mt. Fitzroy. The crescent-shaped knife had been found inside that mountain's caves. The locals told her the mountain was cursed, and that only the bravest, most reckless youths visited the steamy slopes. Veronica, of course, paid little attention to such myths, other than to carefully document them for future reference. Alone, she sallied up the mountainside, into the caves, and into history. At the age of twenty-five, she had uncovered an ancient mystery that catapulted her to fame.

The caves turned out to be outlying branches of a massive subterranean complex that sprawled out for miles, both outward and downward. The complex ran deep. So deep, in fact, that the temperature in the lower regions made exploring nearly impossible. She'd been treated for heatstroke twice so far. Much of the complex had yet to be traversed.

While she and her subsequent staff (funded by a well-deserved grant) found no human remains and very few artifacts, evidence of an organized culture abounded. Specific caves within the complex held a few unique, crude glyphs and cave drawings, perfectly preserved through the centuries by the dry, windless caverns.

She had made significant progress on the glyph language. Many of the glyphs were recognizable: tribesmen with spears, many versions of the sun, insects and various animals, most notably bats. Most of the glyphs, however, were a language she had yet to crack. She knew that the pictures of the sun, suns of many colors, all with six rays radiating outward, were the most important part of the ancient language, and probably the entire culture as well.

One unique factor set the Cerro Chaltel language apart from any other ancient language she knew of — the use of color. Colors seemed to be as significant as the glyphs themselves; in fact they were part of the glyphs. It wasn't just a few browns and reds, but a full spectrum of colors with subtle shades and hues. The glyphs without color would be like written English without punctuation or spaces between words. She knew she'd crack the language, but had yet to find her Rosetta stone or anything that gave her a base from which to learn the language's rudimentary elements.

Carbon dating pegged the most recent cave artifacts at thirty-five hundred years old. She surmised the inhabitants had abandoned the city around that time, about 1450 b.c. and thought that they were possibly forced out by another culture. There wasn't enough evidence, however, to form a decent hypothesis about why the residents evacuated. There were no bodies, no burned remains, no bones of any kind.

Now, however, a clue had appeared, seven thousand miles away in the Utah badlands. The knife was unmistakable; there was no doubt of a close relation between Cerro Chaltel and Utah. She knew this because she'd never revealed the Argentinean knife's platinum composition.

Based on the metal alone, just one of the fifteen-pound knives was worth over $200,000. Such figures would draw treasure seekers and grave robbers like flies to a rotting corpse. The caves would be defiled, priceless artifacts stolen or destroyed by ignorant, greedy hands. And even worse would be the mining companies, lobbying the Argentina government for mineral rights, tearing into the mountain with their explosives and strip mines and leaching compounds, turning the area into a wasteland. As far as the world knew, Cerro Chaltel's knives were a very early example of steel. Outside of herself, her staff, Sanji, and a handful of trusted scientists, no one knew the truth.

The possibility that her lost culture had reappeared in Southwest America astounded her. No, not reappeared; that wasn't quite right. Carbon-dating the few organic scraps remaining on the Utah knife showed it to be 6,500 years old. The knife, and therefore the culture, existed in Utah while the Cerro Chaltel site was probably at the peak of its power over the Tierra Del Fuego area.

The obvious possibility numbed her imagination — the two sites weren't independent; they were part of an empire, a culture that controlled an area from Tierra Del Fuego through Central America into the southern United States — an area that dwarfed the amount of land controlled during the height of the Roman Empire.

The words Nobel Prize rang loudly in her brain.

Veronica had no idea of how she would stop the mining outfit, but she wasn't going to sit around and figure out a plan while the company drilled away at history. She'd figure something out when she got there. The anxiety of the wait and the jolting ride didn't help. She knew one thing — she wouldn't want to be the man in charge when Dr. Veronica Reeves arrived, already pissed off and ready to pick a fight.

Connell sat in the air-conditioned office shack and listened to Mack finish up the day's progress report.

"Let me get this straight,” Connell said. “You've done fifty-eight hundred feet in two days, and now you're telling me the last sixty-two hundred feet will take a week, maybe more? Bullshit, Mack. Unacceptable."

Mack glared at Connell. “The men are working overtime as it is, Mr. Kirkland. If they start to get careless, we're going to have accidents. I don't have accidents at my sites."

"It's not your site, it's mine,” Connell said, pounding a fist on the desk. “A week is unacceptable. I want it done in three days. This operation is running way over budget, and we need to know what's down there."

"Somebody's going to get hurt!” Mack said, suddenly standing and leaning forward, fists on the desk. His head bobbed wildly with each word. “You know damn well this is dangerous work."

"I know it, you know it, and so do they,” Connell said, gesturing in the direction of the mine. “They know what they're doing, that's why we're paying them double scale. If they can't handle the job, if they get hurt, that's not my fucking problem. Now I want that tunnel reached in three days. I advise you to shake your ass on out to the mine and get those men working harder."

Mack stood up straight and rigid. Cuts, scrapes, and scars covered his balled fists. Rage boiled off his face like a steam engine.

"People are right about you,” Mack said quietly. “You are a heartless prick.” He turned and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind him as loudly as he could.

Connell sat quietly in the sudden silence, feeling the weight of Mack's words. Maybe he was pushing too hard.

Maybe.

Connell wearily rubbed his eyes. He managed only about three hours of sleep a night. He slept on a cot in his office, away from the barracks, away from everyone else in the camp. He even ate his meals in the office, separate from the mess-tent laughter. Alone, he stumbled to his cot around two or three a.m. Sometimes he dreamed about Cori. Sometimes he didn't. Either way, good sleep was hard to come by.

The phone rang.

"Kirkland here."

"Mr. Kirkland, this is O'Doyle. I'm at the front gate. We need you out here immediately, sir."

"What's going on?"

"I'm afraid we have visitors."

Connell slammed down the phone. He seethed with annoyance as he left his air-conditioned office and ventured out into the frying-pan Utah afternoon and promptly began sweating like a whore in church. He saw the green Jeep and the security guards on the other side of the camp, just outside the main gate. Blinding flashes of sunlight glinted off the rolls of razor wire surrounding the camp's perimeter. A small group of staffers gathered around, watching the scene. He hurried across the compound.

Bertha Lybrand gripped a squirming woman in a tight hammerlock. A beat-up straw hat lay in the sand. The woman wore a ponytail, but that didn't stop clumps of her blond hair from sticking out in all directions.

The other trespasser, an overweight man, lay facedown on the hood of a RAV4, his hands cuffed behind him. He was almost as big as O'Doyle, but fat and out of shape. O'Doyle stood silent witness, smiling bemusedly, his pistol casually pointed to the ground.

"What's going on here, Mr. O'Doyle?” Connell said.

Lybrand answered the question. “These people tried to trespass, Mr. Kirkland. I told ‘em to wait, but they insisted on coming in. I detained ‘em until you could be notified."

"Are you in charge here?” the blond woman shouted. Connell looked at her face; beautiful but furrowed with fury.

"Yes ma'am. I'm Connell Kirkland."

"Then you tell this bitch to let us go, now! You're facing one hell of a lawsuit."

Lybrand tightened her grip. “Just calm down, ma'am. We'll get everything worked out."

Connell looked at the captive blond woman, staring at her for a few seconds before speaking.

"If Miss. Lybrand lets you go, you and your associate will behave as proper guests and will go nowhere without our permission,” Connell said. “Is this acceptable?"

The woman glared at him with hatred and frustration. She was obviously used to getting her way, used to people meeting her demands. “Yes,” she said, calming her voice, grimacing at the concession to Connell's authority. “We will respect your property. I only wanted to see the person who was in charge."

"Let them go,” Connell said. Lybrand freed the woman, then carefully unlocked the man's handcuffs and helped him to a standing position. Connell noted a trickle of blood at the corner of the man's mouth. O'Doyle quietly holstered his Beretta, then handed Connell the keys to Sanji's RAV4.

"I do apologize for this treatment,” Connell said, keeping his face blank. “But I'm sure Ms. Lybrand was very clear in her requests for you to stop. This is private property. Now, may I ask your business here?"

"I'm Dr. Veronica Reeves and this is my associate, Dr. Sanji Haak,” Veronica said coolly as she straightened up her clothes and stooped to pick up her hat. “I'm from the University of Michigan, and Dr. Haak is from Brigham Young."

The credentials surprised Connell, but he didn't believe them just yet. If other mining companies knew how much money EarthCore was putting into this operation, they would do anything to find out what was going on. Connell had twice used Kayla in such an underhanded fashion, sending her to a rival company's site to get as much info as she could (the second time, unfortunately, had put the Crittenden Mines employee in a wheelchair.)

Reeves and Haak might indeed be professors, but until they proved it they remained spies in Connell's eyes.

"I'm here because you are mining at a site of great archaeological importance,” Veronica said. “I want you to stop drilling until we can find out what's here."

Her bluntness surprised Connell. “I'm afraid that can't be done, Doctor. We have a very tight schedule to keep."

"You don't understand,” Veronica said, urgency filling her words. “There's an underground city here somewhere, probably a large tunnel complex. It could be one of the earliest examples of human civilization."

How could she have known about the tunnels? Was there a leak? If so, Connell faced a brand-spanking-new set of major problems. He felt his anger rising. Outwardly, he showed no signs of his temper, but it dictated his actions.

"Dr. Reeves, I have already told you this is private property.” Connell said. “You and your friend will leave immediately. If I have to, I will have Mr. O'Doyle detain you until police can arrive, but I warn you that may take the better part of the day."

"Listen, Kirkland,” Veronica said calmly, eyes narrowing to angry slits. “I'm a member of the National Geographic Society, and I have resources to draw on that will make your little corporate head spin. In six hours, I can have the governor of Utah on the phone. I'll tell him that you are knowingly despoiling a national treasure. Then I'll let the press know about this big-business land rape. Once the governor hears the press is on this, he'll be in your shorts like the sweat that's pouring down your back. Then I'll get the National Geographic Society's lawyers to throw every injunction and blocking measure they can think of your way. They've dealt with your kind a thousand times. In ten hours the press will be swarming over this place and your cozy little hideaway will be national news. You do realize the governor can delay your operations immediately, don't you? Of course you do, it's your business to know such things. In fourteen hours—"

"Enough,” Connell said, interrupting her. This woman was more than he'd bargained for. If she could do half the things she claimed, she could delay the operation for weeks. Connell didn't have weeks. If word got out about the operation, the complications would be endless. He smiled, not for effect this time, but as a reaction. He rarely found people who could back him down.

"That's quite enough, Dr. Reeves,” Connell said. “If you and Dr. Haak would be so kind as to come to my office, we can discuss the situation further."

Veronica, suddenly grateful for Connell's hospitality, gave him a winning smile.

"Well, thank you, Mr. Kirkland,” she said. “That's all I wanted in the first place."

Once he had his guests inside his office, Connell immediately checked their credentials. He called the EarthCore offices in Detroit and had people contact the various universities, then hung up and waited for confirmation.

"Don't trust us, Kirkland?” Veronica asked.

"No, I don't. Don't take it personally; I don't trust anyone."

Veronica leaned forward, elbows on the desk, staring at him with piercing eyes. Connell noticed that Dr. Haak simply sat back in his chair, his big body relaxing in the air-conditioned comfort. He dabbed at his cut lip with a handkerchief, but made no complaint. He seemed quite content to let Dr. Reeves handle the conversation.

"You must be onto something very big to be this paranoid,” Veronica said. “I think that one guard was prepared to shoot us."

"He was,” Connell said. “And he still is. What's going on here is private business, Dr. Reeves—"

She cut him off with a wave. “I don't want to know and I don't care, Kirkland.” Her curt use of his last name annoyed him. “What I do care about is that this area could be vital to human history. Your mining might destroy artifacts that could rewrite the way we look at ourselves."

She pulled a flat leather bundle from inside her pant leg. She set it on his desk and unwrapped it, revealing a long, wicked, crescent-shaped knife. Connell would have to talk to O'Doyle — allowing guests to bring fourteen-inch knives into his office didn't speak well for security measures.

"This was found on that peak,” Veronica said, gesturing to the mountain that surrounded the camp. He carefully held it, surprised by its considerable weight. It was far too heavy for steel. The weight — and the mere fact that she was trying to stop him from digging — told him instantly that the knife was platinum. He looked it over, fingering the strange central ring, testing the blade's edge with his thumb. It was incredibly sharp. A sinking feeling seeped into his chest when he recognized it as an example of the knife Sonny had written about in the Wah Wah research reports.

Connell looked Veronica in the eye. “We haven't found anything like this."

Sanji finally spoke up in a thick Indian accent. “Sonny McGuiness discovered it in the Brigham Young University archives,” he said, his jowls jiggling with every syllable. “He brought it to Hector Rodriguez, who is a professor at BYU. Professor Rodriguez contacted me, and I contacted Dr. Reeves, who is the premier expert in this field."

Connell fumed inwardly. That little bastard Sonny should have never gone outside the company. It was exactly the kind of fuckup Connell had desperately tried to avoid by sending Cho.

"There's a great deal of importance attached to that knife,” Veronica said, pulling a second leather-wrapped knife from her other pant leg. “And to this one as well."

A pair of fourteen-inch knives. He was going to kill O'Doyle. Reeves might as well have had a Howitzer stuffed in her sock, for all the care his people took to frisk for weapons. Connell set the knives side by side. They looked identical.

"I found the second knife on Cerro Chaltel, a mountain in the Andes range in Argentina. I've worked there for the past seven years on an archaeological dig. The knife comes from a lost city that may have dominated the Tierra Del Fuego area some nine thousand years ago. You see the similarity of the knives. There are only two logical conclusions.

"The first is that seventy-five hundred years ago, someone carried a knife from Cerro Chaltel to this distant peak in Utah, a trip of some seven thousand linear miles, where it lay in a tunnel for several millennia, waiting for some geology student to find it.

"The other conclusion makes more sense and also is harder to believe. There is an underground city in this mountain belonging to the same culture as we found at Cerro Chaltel. Probably, judging from the carbon dating of these two knives and their identical workmanship, the cities are part of the same culture. A kingdom that spanned two continents and constitutes the largest pre-modern empire in history."

Veronica's eyes flashed with unbridled excitement, her voice an open book to her emotions. Connell felt a pang of attraction, one that he quickly put in its proper place by glancing at the picture of his wife.

"If there's a city here, there will be tunnels in that mountain,” Veronica continued. “A lot of tunnels. You haven't found any tunnels, have you Kirkland?"

"Please, call me Connell, I—"

The phone beeped. Connell smiled apologetically as he answered.

"Kirkland here."

"Hello, honey,” Barbara Yakely said. The fact that she'd taken the time to call him meant it was serious. “Good news and bad news. Good news is they check out fine with their respective universities."

Connell breathed a sigh of relief. Veronica and Sanji were for real, which hopefully meant the platinum remained a secret. At least for the moment.

"The bad news?"

"Reeves is a big name. I don't suppose you read National Geographic, but her work was on the cover three years ago. She's been on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and in just about every major scientific magazine. The woman can bring loads of heat down on us if she thinks you're disturbing an important area. She shut down a mine in the Tierra Del Fuego region through political pressure."

Connell's mind whirred with possibilities. Reeves could make good on her threats. That changed everything. He simply couldn't have her talking to the press. “Thanks, Barbara,” Connell said quickly, then hung up. He looked at Reeves, who beamed at him with a haughty, victorious smile.

"Good news from home, I hope?"

Connell grew increasingly annoyed by her attitude. He hated to lose. But the fact remained that she held the upper hand. He needed to keep her in camp. There were only two ways to do that, and kidnapping was one dirty trick to which even he wouldn't stoop.

What's your button, Dr. Reeves? What will make you play along?

"Doctors,” Connell said, switching to a smile and a warm voice. “I'm in a bit of a predicament here. EarthCore doesn't want to disturb a site of this importance, but we have certain financial obligations to the stockholders, not to mention the amount of time and money we've already invested here."

Veronica's smile turned into a sneer. She'd obviously heard all this before, and heart-wrenching tales of financial despair from a Fortune 500 company weren't going to win her over. Sanji continued to lean back in his chair, watching the mental tennis match. Connell opted for the direct approach.

"We can't stop mining, but to be honest, we don't want the kind of bad publicity you can bring down on us. I know you might be able to shut us down, at least for a while. I won't kid you — I don't really give a rat's ass about your lost culture or your lost city. All I care about is the mine.” Connell saw her expression change. She appeared surprised by his overtness.

"So,” he continued, “I'm going to bribe you. EarthCore will cover all expenses for your research here and provide you with whatever equipment you need. In addition, anything unusual we find while mining will be immediately brought to your attention. I offer this, because as part of the deal, you can't bring in any outside people."

Veronica stood up angrily, ready to lay into Connell. He cut off her outburst with a pleading look.

"Please, Doctor Reeves, hear me out. I'm sure that a dig of this nature requires a large staff, but I have matters of secrecy to attend to. I'll make sure you have as many people as you need, but we can't have any outsiders in here. We've reported this as a coal mine test site when we're actually looking for platinum. We can't afford attention. In order to avoid that attention and keep you quiet, you'll have full access to our research. Not only will that make your job easier, but you'll know what we know. There's no way we'll be able to hide anything from you.

"In addition, we've developed several advances in technology that put us far ahead of current academic standards. All I'm asking is that you take a look at the facilities and tools I'm offering."

Veronica looked skeptical, but he had piqued her interest. He knew most archaeologists worked with paltry budgets and were often years behind the technology of the private sector. He was offering her state-of-the-art technology and an open checkbook.

"The last condition of this deal is that neither one of you may leave the camp for at least seven days. You're not a prisoner, but you can't leave during that time, and we'll have to monitor all outside calls. After the seven days, we can renegotiate your need to leave the camp."

Veronica looked at Sanji. He shrugged. She turned back to Connell.

"We'll take a look at your equipment, but I'm not promising anything. And if we do go for your little deal, which I doubt, you'll have to put it all in writing."

"Of course, Doctor Reeves."

"Call me Veronica."

"Not yet,” Connell said. “We keep all vehicle keys locked up in the garage, and if you decide to take me up on my offer, that's where they will stay. No one leaves without my permission."

Thirty minutes later, after a trip to the lab and examination of Angus's mobile GPR equipment, Veronica eagerly accepted the deal. Internally, Connell relaxed. He'd bought himself at least seven more days of privacy. Mack was pushing everyone with triple shifts. Hopefully they'd hit the tunnels within three days and reach the Dense Mass within four.

He was close. He wasn't going to let anyone stop him.

Bertha Lybrand sat in the cafeteria Quonset's air-conditioned comfort, poking at her can of Pepsi. O'Doyle sat across from her, staring at the table, toying with his own can. Their shift had just ended, and besides two other guards, they had the mess hut to themselves. She wasn't going to take any shit for this, no way, not when that blond bitch had it coming.

Lybrand spoke, her animated New Jersey accent betraying her annoyance. “If you wanted to reprimand me for how I handled the trespassers, you could have done it out there. You don't need to coddle me, sir."

"No! That's not it,” O'Doyle said. “I… I wanted to compliment you on that. I liked the way you took the fat man out first and then detained the woman. You negated the obvious primary source of danger. Really nice work."

"Thanks,” she said guardedly, staring at the faded eagle tattoos on O'Doyle's left forearm. Another tattoo, a brighter one, graced the bulging biceps of his right arm. It was mostly obscured by his blue uniform sleeve. Lybrand thought it looked like a blue flag with a horizontal white stripe — possibly the Argentinean flag, but she wasn't sure.

"So if you're not pissed, then what's this about?"

O'Doyle cleared his throat. “I… uh… I don't know. You've only been with the company a couple of months. I thought we could talk. You know, swap war stories."

"War stories? I'm not too hip on those, you know? I'm not too good at that soldier-to-soldier stuff."

O'Doyle shifted in his seat and wouldn't look her in the eye.

She didn't know him well, but she'd seen enough of his take-charge attitude to recognize a change in behavior. She'd hired on with EarthCore back in March, working security for a northern California mine. Shit wages, but it was all she could get. Just over a month after she started, her boss told her to pack a bag. Singular—a bag. Some EarthCore employee computer scan turned up her desert military experience and days later she was helping set up base camp in the Wah Wah Mountains. That desert experience was hard earned in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Although she had been under O'Doyle's command for only two weeks, she'd never seen him act like this, all nervous and fidgety. Rumor had it that he'd served in some secret unit, that he'd won the Bronze Star. She'd never seen him act like anything other than a professional solider and all-around badass. Now he was sitting at the table, fidgeting like a shy high school boy trying to ask a girl on a date.

"Not really like one soldier to another,” O'Doyle mumbled. “Maybe more — you know — like man to woman."

It was a question rather than a statement. Lybrand's eyes widened with surprise and understanding. She felt blood rush to her face. Patrick O'Doyle was interested in her. No one had been interested in her in that way since high school, and she hadn't been interested in anyone since she had killed those men in Afghanistan. But she was interested now. Very interested.

"That sounds cool,” she said, her face hot and flushed.

"It's very unprofessional of me to discuss this with you,” O'Doyle said, still staring at the table as if he couldn't look her in the eyes. “Just so you know I'm not one of those guys who expects you to be interested. I don't want to create any kind of sexual-harassment situation, considering I'm your boss and all."

Lybrand shook her head. “No, that's okay. I mean, don't worry about that. That's not my style. Just so long as whatever happens doesn't affect our working relationship. I've never asked anyone for favors, and I don't expect to start now."

O'Doyle nodded. “I understand."

Still red-faced, she smiled. She smiled despite her self-consciousness about her poorly spaced teeth, sweaty blue uniform, and muscle-bound body. Patrick didn't seem to notice those things.

He finally looked her in the eyes — and smiled back.

Chapter Fourteen

Angus relished the relief brought by the night breeze. The moon hung in full splendor, turning a desolate, brown terrain into a silvery landscape of beauty and mystery. His soul felt at peace among the clean air and smooth winds.

He turned his attention back to the task at hand and activated his newest invention. The foot-tall, pyramid-shaped device contained a ten-pound rod that slammed into the dusty soil with an irregular rhythm. Dubbed a “thumper,” the unit sent small seismic waves into the earth.

Angus checked the satellite feed to his laptop, read the location, and programmed it into the thumper. The thumper's small, green screen showed the input — 11375'22"lo, 3823'15"la, 1821m. He unplugged the cable connecting the thumper to the computer and tiny satellite dish.

He pulled another small machine from his pocket. It resembled a calculator with a spike protruding from the bottom. He called it a “locator.” The sensitive receiver picked up the rhythms from the various thumpers, calculated the time difference between the signals, and used the differences to triangulate location. Angus pushed the locator's spike into the sand and waited. The locator's black display numbers showed clearly against the LCD screen's eerie green background.

The thumper unit he'd just programmed constituted one point of a large hexagon. Thumpers had already been placed at the other five points of the ten-mile-wide hex. He'd programmed the thumpers to go off at 3:00 a.m., 3:05 a.m., and at 3:10 a.m. in order to calibrate and test the entire system. He checked his watch; at exactly 3:00 a.m., the thumper's rod pounded a complex rhythm into the ground. The message was a simple binary language code — the same language used by computers — announcing the thumper's ID number and location coordinates. Binary translated easily to seismic signals; each thump was a tenth of a second long: one thump stood for a one, two thumps stood for a zero. Angus eagerly checked the receiver's screen, waiting for it to receive and process seismic signals from the six thumpers.

The locator's display flashed numbers;—11375'22"lo, 3823'15"la, 1821m.

He pulled the receiver from the sand and sprinted away from the thumper. He ran hard, heading south and down the mountain slope, slowing four minutes later to push the locator spike back into the ground. He was too far from the thumper to hear it go off at 3:05 a.m., but the receiver picked up the tiny seismic vibrations. Angus smiled as the locator display read—11375'21"lo, 3823'15"la, 1784m.

It worked perfectly, giving longitude, latitude, and elevation in meters. Not really sensitive enough for close distance measuring, but then again, the area he and Randy were going to explore was over five miles in diameter and possibly three or more miles deep. With those distances, the new navigational system would prove to be very useful indeed.

Angus pulled a walkie-talkie from his webbing and checked his homemade scrambler. The scrambler changed the encryption sequence every ten seconds. Randy's walkie-talkie, fitted with an identical encryption pattern, was the only thing that could read the signal. The shifting encryption pattern was impossible to break, providing totally secure communication. Sometimes Angus amazed even himself.

"Woodstock, this is Snoopy, do you read?” Angus said quietly into the walkie-talkie. He couldn't help feeling a bit like James Bond.

The walkie-talkie squawked with Randy's mild voice. “Snoopy, this is Woodstock, I read you."

"What's your locator reading?"

"It reads minus-113 degrees, 75 minutes, 72 seconds longitude, 38 degrees, 29 minutes, 91 seconds latitude, 2,034 meters horizon."

Randy was reporting from his perch 250 feet up the mountain and over a mile away. Angus smiled; the system proved even more accurate than he'd hoped.

Each thumper was theoretically capable of sending signals through several miles of solid rock, more than enough to fix a location inside the deepest part of the Wah Wah caves. As long as the locator read signals from at least two thumpers, it could calculate distance and give a coordinate.

Angus planned on being underground a long time. He wasn't taking any chances on getting lost. He needed accurate measurements to fully map the tunnel system.

He'd even accounted for EarthCore's seismometer, which recorded any seismic activity in the area. The staff would be in for a surprise when the machine cut out every six hours: a time conveniently coordinated with the automated thumper cycles. He couldn't have them picking up the thumper signals and coming out to investigate. Angus went so far as to reprogram the seismometer computer's boot-blocks with the precisely timed shutdown. By the time the staff brought the machine back up, the thumpers’ noisy task would be finished.

"Woodstock, get back to the Dog House, Lucy's time is up soon."

"Got it Snoopy, on my way.” Angus turned off the walkie-talkie and put it back in his belt. He threw the laptop in his backpack and headed for camp. They'd paid a guard to look the other way while they slipped in and out of camp, but the guard's shift would soon be over. Angus checked his watch — if Randy hurried, they'd be back in the lab with a few minutes to spare.

Angus's grin couldn't stop grinning. That idiot Kirkland had no idea what was going on under his nose. No idea at all. Angus had already stashed all their equipment and supplies inside the second entrance, the entrance he left off the maps and kept hidden from Connell. Now they had the thumper system working like a champ. The only thing left to do was sneak away and start the greatest spelunk in history.

Only one more piece remained in the master plan. The whole thing was proving laughably easy. They'd already finished the hard part of the plan; sneaking away every night for the last week, stashing supplies, and calibrating the thumper system.

The last part of the plan, however, had some serious style to it. Angus could hardly wait.

Kayla sat staring at the Harris JM-251 SIGINT unit, her fingers drumming a pattern on its rough, black casing.

"What the hell are you faggots up to?” She said quietly. For the fifth night in a row she'd picked off the walkie-talkie signals of Angus Kool and Randy Wright. Angus's little encryption pattern was cute, and actually pretty good for an amateur. But the key word was amateur. Kayla had broken the code within the first twenty minutes.

Snoopy and Woodstock? Oh please. They had little spy code names, for God's sakes. She wondered how Angus would act if she took the pliers to him and showed him some real spy techniques.

While their digitized code was easy enough to break, she still didn't know what, exactly, they were up to. They were testing underground mapping equipment, that much was clear. She figured they hoped to sneak away and start exploring the caves. But why were they skulking around so far up the mountain? What did they have up there? What were they looking for?

At first she'd pegged them for fags, out for a midnight hole-poke away from prying eyes and perky ears. Now she knew they were up to something secretive, something Connell wouldn't like.

Following them up the mountain would be a risk. Not that she couldn't track them effortlessly, but she didn't know the men and didn't know how they'd react if they heard some strange, small noise if she made a mistake. Odds were they'd never hear or see a thing, but she wasn't taking any chances that they'd run off and tell Patrick O'Doyle they thought someone was out there, out in the dark, watching them. All O'Doyle needed was an excuse to come looking, and he'd probably find some trace of her. After that, it would only be a matter of time until she'd have to leave.

But she grew more and more confident of the camp's daily schedule. Tomorrow, just after the mining crew came down from the shaft, she would go out to Angus and Randy's last known location and follow their path. She hoped to find their secret, then be back in her perch before the pair ventured out in the wee hours of the morning.

Sonny McGuiness sat cross-legged in the lab building's shadow, peacefully drinking in the night's splendor. He knew Angus and Randy would soon return.

He figured those boys were out to get a little piece of their own. They probably hoped to find a decent load of ore, then stash away the nuggets in the lab like squirrels preparing for winter.

But they still had to find a way to smuggle the ore out of camp. Sonny didn't have that problem. All he had to do was collect twenty or thirty pounds of the best ore he could get his hands on, hike a mile or two, then bury it. He could always come back in a year and dig it up again. Repeat that process as many times as he could, and he'd clear maybe three hundred pounds. From the amount of money EarthCore was throwing into the project, not to mention Connell's slave-driver pace, the ore must be high-grade indeed. Three-hundred pounds of ore might net Sonny an extra ten ounces of platinum, if he was lucky. At most, it would mean an extra $85,000. Certainly worth losing a few hours sleep, and who knew how much more he could find?

Movement caught his eye. Through the silvery haze of moonlight, he saw Angus and Randy quietly slip by Cho Takachi. Sonny watched them approach the lab. They walked within ten feet of where he sat motionless in the shadows. They were quiet as mice, but once inside the lab he could hear them stifling giggles. They'd found something tonight, that was for damn sure.

Tomorrow night Sonny would find out what it was they had found. He stood and walked to Cho without a sound, moving across the sand like a desert whisper.

"What's your game, kiddo?"

Cho whipped around, eyes wide and pistol drawn.

"Sonny!” Cho said, lowering his gun. “You scared the piss out of me. How the hell did you get so close without me hearing you?"

"Old prospector's trick, kid. Maybe I'll teach you sometime.” Sonny thumbed toward the lab. “What's your game with Huey and Dewey in there?"

"What game?” Cho said with an innocent face.

"Cut the act. I've been watchin’ you for three nights, watchin’ you let those two out of camp and back in again like you was a revolvin’ door. Don't worry, I'm not gonna tell anyone."

Cho regarded Sonny for a moment, realizing he'd been caught red-handed. He holstered his gun and wiped his long black hair from his eyes. “All right,” Cho said with a tone of defeat. “It's no big deal, they just pay me to look the other way when they sneak out during my shift. They always get back before my shift is over."

"You know where they're goin'?"

"Not a clue, old man. You can't blame a guy for making a little extra on the side, can you?” Cho flashed his most charming grin.

"Can't blame ya at all,” Sonny said, strangely proud of Cho's capitalistic nature. “But tomorrow night I'm sneakin’ out behind ‘em. And I ain't payin’ ya shit. That's the cost for keepin’ my clam-taster shut about your little game. Deal?"

"Of course,” Cho said, obviously relieved. “You think they're up to something?"

"Yep."

"Think I might cut in on the action with you?"

Cho seemed to care about little more than money. How he got it didn't seem to matter. Sonny had to admire that quality.

"Could be, rabbit,” Sonny smiled. “Could be. I might have use for a strong back before all this is finished. See you tomorrow night.” Sonny turned and walked to the Quonset hut, leaving Cho with visions of dollar signs dancing in his head.

Four hours after Angus and Randy returned to the lab, Veronica Reeves stared out at a sprawling view of the sun-baked desert. Her eyes only half registered the morning's stunning beauty. She was over a thousand feet up the mountain. The dry landscape spread out for miles before her, but all she could think about was the opportunity presented by the knife and EarthCore's endless arsenal of technology.

She'd simply died and gone to heaven. The University of Michigan ranked as one of the world's leading archaeological research centers. Technology-wise, she was usually blessed with the latest equipment. At least, she'd thought it was the latest equipment. The truth was that she'd been using stone-age garbage.

The best ground-penetrating radar equipment she'd ever heard of measured to depths of five hundred feet, and only then if the ground conditions were just right. Angus's portable GPR array penetrated over three miles down, regardless of the ground makeup. It was also more accurate than anything she'd ever seen, especially inside three hundred feet.

Angus's full-scale map of the area told her where to start. On it she found an area speckled with abnormalities. Dense objects starkly stood out against the backdrop of rock and dirt. That area on the map turned out to be a small natural plateau.

EarthCore guards hauled the GPR suite 4,450 feet up the mountain with little difficulty, setting up the equipment on the plateau. Connell insisted on providing physical labor — she and Sanji carried little more than personal items. The mountain towered over the Wah Wah valley, but the slope was gentle enough that they didn't need climbing gear.

"Roni,” Sanji said. “Come here and take a look at this.” She turned away from the stunning view back to the small plateau. Sanji crouched in front of a Sony monitor that displayed data from the GPR array. They'd swept the area only five minutes ago, and he watched as Angus's program compiled the data.

Sanji, who'd spent his career as a brilliant laboratory and field biologist, was digging in the dirt and obviously having the time of his life. The climb had taxed him (she needed to nag him about getting into shape), but the concept of digging up artifacts had him thoroughly excited.

She stepped around the equipment to stand behind him and look over his shoulder. The portable screen sat on a boulder. Sanji moved a mouse on a green EarthCore mousepad, which looked horribly out of place among the rocks and dirt. The image on the screen mirrored his movements. Veronica saw many bright, sharp-edged objects on the screen, set against a backdrop of brown.

"The computer takes common readings and cancels them out,” Sanji said. His brilliant white teeth flashed in the desert sun. “Those signals are displayed as shades of brown. The yellow marks are anomalies. Angus programmed it to pay close attention to anything linear."

Veronica could scarcely believe her eyes. Hundreds of two-dimensional images appeared. Most were nothing more than a splotch of yellow, and yet she could clearly make out some objects: a human hip bone, a pan, a broken pickax, possibly half a crescent-shaped knife, even an old gun. The GPR screen created a road map of where to dig.

"This is amazing.” She felt her pulse race. The edge of the GPR image showed a deep black that contrasted with the lighter brown surrounding the yellow artifacts. She pointed to the black edge. “What's that?"

"That is how this program displays undisturbed earth,” Sanji said. “The brown represents disturbed earth, which is less dense than the black, undisturbed areas."

Black graced only the plateau's perimeter — most of what they now stood on showed signs of disturbance. She frowned, thinking of that first Cerro Chaltel site where she'd discovered the massacre's long-buried remains. She had a bad feeling that they had found something similar.

"Well it won't dig itself up,” Veronica said. “Let's get started.” Everyone in the party moved with purpose. The thrill of discovery poured from Veronica and Sanji like water from a fountain, infecting the EarthCore workers.

Fifteen minutes of digging confirmed her suspicions.

Chapter Fifteen

Connell followed Mack around the mine, carefully echoing the Aussie's footsteps, ever conscious that a million tons of limestone hung over their heads. The poor lighting made walking difficult. The place amazed him. It had been a long time since he'd actually been inside a mine, and he'd forgotten how detailed the process was.

Connell knew his job was little more than to find a site, find people, and fund the mine, sort of putting all those pieces together in a mixer and hitting purée. He was a paper pusher and a people manipulator. Although he excelled at those tasks, Connell held true admiration for the people who really made a mine happen; people like Mack.

Mack moved through the safe areas of the shaft, constantly turning to make sure Connell stayed close. Connell marveled at Mack's ease within the stone cavern's confines. It was little things, mostly; like how Mack didn't watch the ground, yet never stumbled on loose rock, or how Mack's hard hat stayed naturally plastered to his head while Connell's continually bobbled no matter how many times he adjusted it.

"Watch your step, Mr. Kirkland,” Mack said, his voice echoing slightly off the rough stone walls. “We've got some poor footing here. The vertical shaft is just ahead."

Smells of oil and diesel fumes filled the long tunnel. A long horizontal shaft — known as an adit — separated the tunnel entrance and the vertical shaft. The adit sat about seventy-five yards from the camp, and about forty feet higher in elevation, making for a fairly demanding incline to reach the mine.

Squat diesel tractors, designed for mines and less than four feet tall from ground to the cab top, hauled loose rock, equipment, and supplies to and from the vertical shaft. Mack had planned the shaft to come very close to a natural tunnel. Once at that level, another short horizontal dig would let the miners enter the massive subterranean complex that started over two miles below the surface.

The cavern surrounding the vertical shaft spread out before them. The cavern was big, but obviously crafted by a master. Everywhere Connell looked the walls allowed just enough room for the machinery installed within. There was little extra space. It reminded him of opening a walnut and seeing how the inside of the shell perfectly mirrored the contours of the nut.

"How deep is it?” Connell asked, his voice quiet and reverent.

"We've reached ten thousand feet; almost two miles,” Mack said. “We'll be able to break into the tunnel system in one more day."

Connell peeked over the edge. Powerful lights burned every hundred feet down the shaft's length, a glowing line of giant pearls reaching farther than he could see. The shaft was just wide enough for the massive 17-foot by 17-foot freight elevator. The elevator's giant winch mechanism perched black and spiderlike over the mouth. Connell looked up at it, amazed at impossibly thick spools of inch-thick steel cable, spools that were bigger than a semi truck. They had to be that big to lower the 300-square-foot platform to the shaft bottom. A large swivel crane could swing the elevator platform clear, allowing the laser drill head to descend on the same cable.

Angus's invention utilized a pulsed plasma laser array to drill a perfect twelve-foot diameter ring. The array looked like a giant lawnmower blade, twenty-four feet long with a huge rotor in the middle. The twelve-foot-long “blades” held 144 laser heads, each with a beam radius of one inch. Behind the blades sat a long, liquid-ring vacuum pump (yet another of Angus's creations). The rotor spun the blade, the lasers fired in a computer-controlled sequence that vaporized the rock in a perfectly level pattern, and the vacuum instantly sucked up the vaporized limestone before it could damage the laser array.

The end result? A perfectly round shaft with sides as smooth as poured concrete.

Mack's walkie-talkie squawked harshly, speaking a garbled version of his name between bursts of white noise. He pulled it out of his belt and thumbed the send button.

"Hendricks here."

"Mack, is Mr. Kirkland with you?” the voice squawked

"Yes he is, Jerry. What's up?"

"You'd both better get back to camp fast,” said the static-laden voice. “There's been an accident at the lab. Mr. Kool is hurt; so is Mr. Wright."

It was different this time. And not just from the bodies. It was this mountain. It had a feeling, perhaps an emotion all its own. A dark emotion, one that draped over the sprawling rocks and sand as a shroud drapes over the face of a corpse. Veronica had felt it right off the bat, but mentally drowned it out in favor of the feverish excitement of exploration. Now, however, the sweet taste of discovery soured in light of their recent find, allowing the dark, creeping, tickling emotion to crawl to the forefront.

Mass graves were nothing new to her. They dotted Cerro Chaltel like a giant case of measles. Five times Veronica had excavated such sites of violence and death. Many were far worse in scope than the Wah Wah — but this time it affected her in a way she'd never expected.

She was furious.

The Cerro Chaltel massacres were of a distant, exotic, ancient people. Primitive people who were dead thousands of years before modern civilization even began.

The remains of the destroyed camp she had just unearthed belonged to Americans. Her people. She now saw the Chaltelians in a different light — they were a violent, savage, ruthless tribe bent on murdering anything that crossed their path.

Once word of the mass grave filtered back to camp, Sonny McGuiness came on the run. Sonny helped examined the artifacts: a rusted pistol, a mining pan, and the termite-ridden remains of what he said was a sluice, used to wash valuable metal from plain old dirt. Sonny determined in all probability that the mass grave belonged to the Jebadaiah Jessup mining camp, a camp that had disappeared in 1865. Just 150 years ago.

The thought that descendants of her Cerro Chaltel culture roamed the plains and mountains of the Southwestern U.S. should have thrilled her beyond imagination. Instead, it bothered her. It even scared her a little. It all hit a bit too close to home. According to her findings, the Cerro Chaltel civilization had ended around 1500 b.c. If it was indeed descendants of the same culture that massacred Jessup's mining camp, then the Utah version of the Cerro Chaltel culture had existed right up through the turn of the century.

They were modern.

Or at least part of a modern age. By no stretch of the imagination could she call such an incredible display of savagery “modern.” Just as at the Argentinean sites, Chaltelians had cut the Jessup party to pieces. The longest human remain discovered thus far was a piece of femur just over eighteen inches. Veronica even found thin scraps of fabric around some of the bones. One tough leather shoe still surrounded a mummified foot.

They hadn't even been able to count the number of people murdered, although Sonny figured it to be eight, based on newspaper reports he'd studied earlier in the month. Sanji had struck on the idea of counting feet (they couldn't use heads — skulls were smashed into hundreds of pieces). So far they had twelve feet, seven left and five right. Body parts lay scattered everywhere. It was almost as if the attackers had carved up the bodies and made sport of their remains, tossing them back and forth until the plateau was covered with blood and bits of bone and savaged body parts.

Just like the massacres at Cerro Chaltel, all traces of the mining camp were buried a good six to ten feet underground. Sonny found the discovery mesmerizing.

"Sonofabitch,” he'd said with awe and visible excitement. “Jessup didn't lie. The mine is right where he said it was. It was just buried. Sonofabitch.” Veronica didn't share Sonny's elation over the discovery.

"Roni,” Sanji called out, breaking her daze. “I found another foot. A right one, I think."

Veronica shuddered quietly, suddenly wishing — for the first time in her career — that she wasn't digging up the secrets of those long-dead and forgotten.

She wondered if perhaps forgotten is where the dead should stay.

Connell held on for dear life as Mack whipped the Jeep through the camp, shot up the trail to the landing pad, and skidded to a dusty halt only three feet from the cliff's edge. They both hopped out of the Jeep and sprinted to the helicopter, its long blades already spinning up to full speed and kicking up clouds of annoying dirt and grit.

O'Doyle and Cho finished loading Randy into the chopper, Angus was already inside. Both men had bloodstained white gauze wrapped around their heads and a few other places on their bodies. Angus had a huge, bruised goose-egg under his left eye. Neither man was conscious.

"What happened?” Connell shouted over the helicopter's roar.

"One of the lab machines blew up,” Cho shouted back. “Rotary separator or something, it came off its axle and tore itself apart, they were both standing in front of it."

"Are they okay?"

Cho nodded. “They should be fine, but they both had head-wounds, and you don't screw with those. I'm sending them to Milford Valley Memorial Hospital for observation."

Connell hated to lose Angus and Randy for even a day, but Cho had been a doctor, and Connell wasn't about to argue with his expertise. They ran to the edge of the landing pad as the helicopter lifted off and headed west.

"Check out the accident, O'Doyle,” Connell said. “See what you can find.” He found it a bit too coincidental that a lab accident took out his top two scientists. Maybe a rival company was on to them, trying to sabotage the camp and get to the Dense Mass from another entrance somewhere on the mountain.

And if that was the case, he was running out of time.

Kayla Meyers focused her binoculars, watching the helicopter head south. This place grew more interesting every second. A small blast had rocked the lab, followed by thin black smoke that seeped out the roof. The oriental guard rushed in immediately after the explosion. Lybrand was there seconds later.

Kayla slipped back into her tiny, camouflaged dugout and returned to cleaning her weapons. A cloth lay spread out on the sand, her Steyr GB-80 pistol on top of it, loaded and ready to go. She loved the weapon, mostly because it held eighteen rounds in the mag and one in the chamber for nineteen shots of 9 x 19mm stopping power. Her Israeli-made Galil ARM submachine gun lay in spotless, well-loved pieces on top of the cloth. She, like many others, considered it the best submachine gun in the world. Like the Steyr, she loved the Galil mostly for its ammo capacity — a fifty-round magazine of 45mm shells.

Her hands knew each of the weapon's pieces intimately. She paid close attention to the process, guarding against tiny grains of windblown sand. Couldn't take any chances on weapon reliability out here. She had a growing feeling the weapons would come into play before this little desert soap opera was over. She wouldn't mind using the weapons, not one bit.

She smiled as she finished assembling the spotless Galil ARM and popped in a fresh magazine. Her hands caressed the worn grip like a hand tenderly smoothing the small of an old lover's back. Her smile widened.

Nope. Wouldn't mind at all.

The setting sun dangled just above the horizon. Its molten orange color shrouded the mountain range with a thick, smoldering glow. After two hours of hunting, Sonny McGuiness finally found his prey. Angus and Randy knew nothing about covering their tracks. Sonny had found the secret spots, the hiding places, the hidden treasures of men who had mastered the desert (and who'd been dead a hundred years). Uncovering the footsteps of a pair of corncob-up-the-ass lab rats was a comparative cakewalk.

He stared in amazement at their secret. He had to hand it to the two little weasels. They'd found another way in. While the financial might of EarthCore struggled to sink a multimillion-dollar shaft, Angus Kool already had a way in — a way he kept to himself.

Like the loose fist of some stone giant, a small projection of greenish limestone camouflaged a clearing. Little more than a flat slab of rock, the small clearing protruded from the mountain, ending in a fifty-foot drop straight to a jagged outcropping below. Surrounded on three sides by large, weather-worn boulders, the tiny mesa offered a stunning view of the sprawling desert. At the back edge of the mesa sat a small, irregular, dark opening no more than two feet high and three feet wide. Above the entrance, Sonny spotted writing chiseled into the limestone. He read the small letters, and his blood ran cold.

This was the place Anderson wrote about in his last report. This was his tunnel. This was where he'd found the platinum knife, probably where the three boys disappeared. A thin film of sweat beaded across Sonny's forehead, sweat not caused by the blistering heat.

The tiny tunnel entrance beckoned, taunting Sonny's curiosity like a grade-school bully. Come on, it seemed to chant. Don't be a chicken. Don't you want to know what's in here, you cowardly sonofabitch? Sonny wanted to know — perhaps had to know — what lay inside that tunnel.

Slithering into the tiny opening appeared mandatory. The black space squatted dark and foreboding. But he had to know. He turned on his flashlight, stroked his Hopi charm once for good luck, and crawled in on his belly.

At first he had plenty of room to crawl and lift his head, but the tunnel rapidly bottlenecked to a space no more than fifteen inches from floor to ceiling. Creeping fear gripped his chest. Sonny forced himself to breathe slowly, to calm down. The thought of turning back filled his head, but he knew that once in the sunlight he'd never enter this tunnel again. Not for any price. If he wanted to see where it went, he had to continue now.

The tunnel narrowed even further. Sonny had to turn his head sideways to fit through. Twice he bumped his head on unforgiving rock overhangs, but he ignored the pain. Soft, flourlike sand lay under his chest, leftovers from an ancient river that once flowed through the passage, carving the tunnel from solid limestone and leaving the powdery sediment behind. Jagged walls closed in on either side of him like a limestone coffin. There was no sound other than his breathing. His flashlight clumsily played down the tunnel, and he thought he saw an opening in front of him. He pushed forward, ignoring the panic that lurked in his belly.

After another twenty feet, the ceiling suddenly slanted up, almost high enough for Sonny to stand up straight. The tunnel continued on. He wiped sweat from his face, leaving a smear of cave silt. He moved down the tunnel, one hand clutching the flashlight, the other gripping the Hopi charm.

Sonny played his flashlight around the cave, knowing the BYU students had traveled this same path over a half-century ago. Evil-looking white spiders sat motionless in their webs. Small crickets with long legs and even longer antennae moved slowly along the walls and ceiling.

The confining space made him nervous. The dark, foreboding feeling he'd experienced his first day on this mountain returned, only stronger, more intense… thicker.

He came to a massive pile of boulders, obviously the site of an ancient cave-in. A small, dark hole rested at the bottom.

This is where you boys stopped the first time, Sonny thought. And when you came back here the second time, no one heard from you ever again. Sonny stood, shivering, his flashlight beam frozen on the opening. He couldn't go in. He had to go in. Maybe the evil that was this mountain lay just beyond this jumbled pile of huge boulders. Maybe Jessup's demons waited for him just past the opening, waiting for him to poke his too-damn-curious head through, waiting to grab him and drag him off to some unknown horror.

Sonny pinched himself hard. Get ahold of yourself, you cowardly old You've got to see what's past here or it's all you'll think about for the rest of your days.

Without giving himself time to reconsider, Sonny flopped to the ground. He moved past a pumpkin-shaped boulder and wormed his way through the opening. He stood up, shaking, the cold feeling of terror rippling up and down his body in endless waves.

His flashlight beam traced across the tunnel walls, then came to rest on a small charcoal drawing. It was the only drawing he'd seen in the tunnel. It captivated him. It looked like a primitive sun. Six curving sunbeams reached out from a central circle, representing the sun's heat, presumably. The drawing was simple enough, but there was something odd about it. Very odd. Sonny couldn't place it, and at the moment he didn't give a shit — he suddenly suffered the unmistakable feeling that he was not alone.

Panic engulfed him like a snake swallowing a bird's egg. He scrambled back through the cave-in opening, and once through sprinted up the tunnel slope, bending at the waist to keep his head from scraping against rock.

Just like on the way in, the tunnel narrowed. He dove to the ground, crawling toward the outside. He fought back creeping, gnarled fingers of primal fear, fought back the feeling that there was something behind him, something moving effortlessly through this tiny stone coffin.

Stinking with the sweat of panic, Sonny grunted his way out of the cave and back onto the mesa. He finally stood up straight in the fading sunlight, his breath ragged. He'd cut his knuckles in his haste to get out. Blood fell in small droplets against the sun-heated rocks.

He sat perfectly still, save for his heaving chest. Nothing came out after him. He heard nothing moving inside the tunnel. Back in the open air, the feeling of panic evaporated. He'd imagined it, that was all there was to it. Just claustrophobia brought on ‘cause that cave reminds you of the coffin you'll be wearin’ before too long, old-timer.

But somewhere inside him, inside the part that had taken to the land, the part that embraced the desert like a lost love, he knew it was a lie. Sonny sat down on the edge of the cliff, his feet dangling above the fatal drop, his eyes staring out into the sunset. The mountain was death. A war raged inside Sonny McGuiness's mind. His emotions and his intellect battled for dominance. To stay was to get rich. Rich enough to retire forever. To leave? To leave, his instincts told him, might not make him rich.

But it would let him live.

Katerina Hayes snagged a quick peek inside her silver locket. On one side was a picture of herself with her husband, Harry. It was an excellent picture, although a little small, of them on vacation in Puerto Rico. The faces were tiny, but she could make out their matching blue floral shirts. He had black hair, just like her. This was the only picture that made her agree with her friends’ constant observation — Harry and she did look like brother and sister. Their daughter, Kelly, smiled out of the locket's other side. The tiny three-year-old simply beamed, seeming to have a light all her own.

Katerina hadn't seen either of them for over a month, not since this whole Wah Wah situation erupted. First, she'd worked incessantly in the lab with that bastard Angus, who never seemed to get tired and was never satisfied no matter how many hours the staff put in. Then straight from the lab to a plane, to Salt Lake City, to a Jeep that took her straight to this infernal desert. She'd only managed a quick phone call to Harry before she left, telling him that she was going to be on-site. No, she didn't know how long. No, she couldn't tell him where. No, she wouldn't be able to call him. No, she didn't know when she'd be able to call at all.

Yes, it did mean big things for her career.

That was all Harry needed to hear. He was so damn supportive of her career. She often had to work late (as did everyone on Angus's staff), yet Harry never complained. Not once. Inside the fridge she always found a meal waiting to be microwaved. Outside the fridge she always found a new crayon drawing from her daughter.

She knew Harry coached his daughter with the messages. He never let his daughter write things like “I miss you,” or “come play with me,” things that would have drowned her with guilt. Even after two years of Angus's unending demands, there was nothing but support from her wonderful husband and her growing daughter.

That's why she peeked at the locket before she went in to see Mr. Kirkland, to remind her of the reasons why, despite her “genius,” she worked for a man who treated her like an imbecile. She was doing it for Harry and Kelly. Harry had always told her someday it would pay off.

It looked as if today was going to be that day.

With Angus and Randy gone, someone had to take charge of the lab's enormous workload. Someone had to take control and make sure everything continued at a flawless level.

Within an hour after the accident, Connell Kirkland had sent for her. O'Doyle gave her the order. She didn't like the big security guard. In fact, he scared the hell out of her. He'd killed people, or so the story went. Rumor had it he served in an Israeli commando unit, and had once single-handedly slain eight terrorists using nothing but a combat knife.

She knew her summons could only mean one thing. She took one last look at the locket, shut it, tucked it inside her shirt, and knocked on the door to his office.

"Come in,” Connell called. She walked into the trailer, trying to look confident, but knowing she didn't.

"Sit down, Dr. Hayes,” Connell said, gesturing to the single folding chair that sat in front of his cheap metal desk. She sat and looked into his cold, gray, penetrating eyes.

"As you know,” Connell said, “Mr. Kool and Mr. Wright have been injured and will not be able to handle their duties for at least a few days. I've decided to put you in charge of the lab while they are gone. I know there are people in front of you with more experience and more seniority, but Mr. Kool's reviews of you are very flattering."

Katerina's eyes widened with surprise.

Connell turned to a manila folder. “Angus rates you as the top member of his staff next to Mr. Wright. I'll quote him to say, ‘Dr. Hayes has an impeccable work ethic and never complains when I assign her extra duties. I know that when others on my staff are past the point of breaking, she will get the job done. Because of this, I give her far too much work, and yet she completes every task I assign. I can only compliment her by saying that in five or six years, she could be almost as good as I am now.” Connell set the folder down and stared at her.

Katerina suddenly realized her jaw was hanging open. She clamped it shut. “I'm… very flattered. I didn't know he thought so highly of me."

"Well he does,” Connell said. “And, from reading these reports, so do I. You're now in charge of the lab. Inform the rest of the staff of my decision. This will upset them, but I don't care. I'll expect you to handle it and get that lab running again at full capacity by tomorrow morning. I don't want to hear from them and I don't want to hear from you unless you've found something very interesting. Now, if you don't mind, I have a great deal of work to do.” Connell looked down at the paperwork on his desk and started writing.

Katerina blinked a few times, amazed at the conversation. Just like that, she was in charge of the entire lab. She rose from her chair and walked out. Connell's head never lifted as she shut the door behind her.

On-site at the biggest test dig in the company's history, and she was in charge. She wanted to rush to a phone and call Harry, but phone calls remained off-limits. Well, he'd find out soon enough; more immediate things demanded her attention. This was her chance to move up the ladder, her chance to be noticed.

If her coworkers in the lab thought Angus was a hard boss, they didn't know anything yet. She might only have a few days; a week tops, to make the most of this opportunity. She wasn't about to let it slip away.

Chapter Sixteen

The excitement had returned in a big way, but it couldn't entirely eclipse Veronica's smoldering disgust. Massive was the only word she could apply to the discovery — the find was simply unmatched in depth and impact.

So why did she feel like a transgressor? Like… a grave robber? She'd dug at dozens of sites, unearthed the remains of literally hundreds of human beings. So why was this plateau any different? Veronica couldn't answer that nagging question, but she wasn't going to let that stop her.

This find would make her famous.

The fact that a 9000-year-old culture from Tierra Del Fuego had migrated to North America (or perhaps the other way around, she didn't know) was stunning in itself. The fact that the mysterious culture remained alive in the late nineteenth century absolutely astonished her. But at this point she had little doubt. The burial of the Jessup camp was so similar to the Cerro Chaltel massacres that Veronica knew they had been wrought from the same culture.

With Sonny's help, she'd pieced together the story of the Jessup camp massacre. Jessup's crew had spent months blasting, hauling out rock, then blasting some more. The Chaltelians must have decided the miners were attacking, or perhaps had offended some aspect of their religion. Whatever the cause, the mining sparked an all-out assault. The Chaltelians even destroyed the mine, causing a cave-in that filled the shaft with tons of rock. To the outside world, no trace of the mine remained.

She and Sanji excavated pickaxes, dishes, tools, guns, and a dozen other common implements of the Old West. They'd even found two horses. At least they thought there were two — the dismembered remains made it difficult to be sure.

They'd moved down from the plateau, following an old, worn trail toward the desert, using the GPR suite to scan huge areas of ground without having to dig an ounce of dirt. Just less than two hundred yards from the massacre site they found another victim — and his horse — butchered and buried, presumably where they'd fallen while trying to escape. Without the GPR she would have passed over the area; the surface betrayed no indication of its buried secret.

Veronica brushed dirt off a human skull, careful not to disturb bits of mummified skin and hair. The skull had been split open, probably with a rock. Large linear scratch marks filled the interior of the brain case. It looked as if someone had jammed a knife in the open wound and violently stirred the brain. She sighed with amazement and disbelief at the violence of this lost culture.

She heard a commotion farther down the trail. She looked up from her brush and skull toward Sanji, who lightly slapped at the GPR monitor. He looked confused, as did two EarthCore men who shrugged their shoulders as they tweaked the controls.

Setting the skull down gently, she made her way down the rocky trail to the men.

Sanji looked up, perplexed. “The machine appears to not be working,” he said, a tinge of disappointment in his voice.

"No sir, it's working just fine,” one of the technicians said. Sanji shook his head no.

Veronica stared at the screen. Sanji's mouse danced along the portable unit, making the screen image flash back and forth. She frowned, seeing the reason for his confusion. Brown indicated disturbed earth, but it was a vertical line with black on either side. It went straight down.

"What's the scale on this, Sanji?"

"That is why I am saying it is not working right,” he said with disgust. “One inch on the screen equals a half mile. According to this, the brown line goes down at least three miles, even past the bottom edge of this machine's range."

"It says there's a shaft running straight down for three miles?"

"No, not a shaft, a line. The line apparently runs straight out from us in either direction as far as we can see."

Veronica contemplated the data. If it was correct, there was a line just over two feet wide that went over three miles deep. It looked as if someone had dug a narrow trench and then filled everything back in. She looked at the mountain, her eyes following the path of the supposed line.

It hit her as if she'd walked blindly into a glass door.

She wondered how she couldn't have noticed it before. Straight out from where they stood, she could see a line. Not on the ground, but in the rocks that straddled that line. Big boulders looked like halves of the same rock, as if the line itself split them in two, letting the halves fall back on either side. In some places massive boulders simply stood tall with space between them, like giant limestone bookends.

She looked behind her, down the mountain along the same line. From this vantage point she could see several miles. There were places where solid boulders remained unbroken, but for the most part, all the way down to the flats, she could see a straight and razor-true line. Much of the line was obscured by the remnants of landslides and erosion, but landslides couldn't cover up all of it. It was simply too big.

She looked down at Sanji, who also stared numbly along the length of the line. He saw the same thing. They stood there, two highly trained scientific minds, trying to come up with a single idea of what it all meant.

Leaving his office, Connell walked past the mess Quonset, past the noise of music and laughter inside. After a week of seeing the miners pull double shifts and the lab rats go without sleep for days on end, he simply decided to stop being such an asshole. A quick call had brought in a helicopter loaded with beer, booze, and a boom box. It was time for the staff to celebrate.

The shaft was complete.

Being with them in camp and seeing the effects of stress and lack of sleep wasn't the same as calling the shots from far away. On paper, people were statistics. In person, they were… well… people. It was beginning to dawn on Connell just what a mega-prick he'd become since his wife's death.

AC/DC's “Highway to Hell” blasted from the boom box as light spilled from the mess building windows and onto the sand. Shadows bobbed as people moved about, making the light that hit the ground shimmer as if alive. Connell walked through the patches and into the shadows of the camp without slowing down or looking inside.

He'd instructed Mack to give the crew the alcohol and the boom box and throw a party (something that Mack apparently didn't need to hear twice). Success of a difficult job merited a reward. For the first night since the camp's construction, the crew had a chance to relax. The following morning they would dig the short horizontal adit to the tunnel complex. Barring any unforeseen problems like underground water or poison gas — neither of which they'd seen traces of during the shaft's construction — they would reach the Dense Mass in one more day. Maybe two.

The music and the laughter spilled into the night as he reached the Porta Johns outside the mess Quonset. He'd been in his office for six straight hours, going over reports, making plans, breaking the news to Barbara. He hadn't even left for dinner. It didn't matter; it wasn't as if he'd never skipped a meal before.

Just as Connell reached for the Porta John door, it opened from the inside. Veronica Reeves stepped out. She gave an “oh” of surprise and automatically put a hand on Connell's chest to keep from bumping into him. She removed the hand as if he were somehow repulsive to the touch. The Porta John's door swung shut behind her.

"Good evening, Connell,” she said in a professional tone.

He nodded. “Dr. Reeves."

"Call me Veronica, remember?"

"Is the GPR equipment working out for you, Veronica?"

She looked off in the distance, toward the plateau that held her discovery, then nodded. “Yes, it's exceptional,” she said. “Very impressive."

"Good,” Connell said. “EarthCore wants to take care of your needs."

She looked him in the eye, briefly, before her gaze wandered back up to the plateau. It had been so long since he'd talked to a woman about anything other than business, but Veronica seemed troubled.

"Is everything okay? All these bodies getting to you or something? I know that would get to me."

She looked at him again, and nodded. “Yes, everything's fine. I'm just a little distracted, that's all. The discovery and everything.” She forced a smile.

He returned her forced smile with one of his own. “Well, if you'll excuse me…” he gestured to the Porta John door. She gave a quick look back, then laughed and scooted out of the way.

"Sorry about that,” she said, this time with a genuine smile. “Next time we talk we'll have to do it in less awkward surroundings. You going to join the party?"

"No,” Connell said a little too abruptly. “I've got work to do."

She gave a quick nod, then walked off toward the party. He watched her go for a few seconds. Her smile — the real one — stuck in his mind. Connell shook his head, as if to chase away abstract thoughts.

He relieved himself, then headed back to his office. A little more work to do, then he'd crash on the couch. Even at night the desert was too hot for his tastes. He genuinely hated Utah. His office felt comfortable, and the sound of the constantly running air-conditioner would drown out the music and the laughter.