“Where will you find God next, Kaye?” Jackson asked. “In your cunning viruses, shuffling around like holy ratchets, obeying rules only you can understand, explaining everything you can't? If God was my mentor, I'd be thrilled, it would all be so easy, but I am less fortunate. I have to rely on reason. Still, it is an honor to work with someone who can simply ask a higher authority where truth waits to be discovered.”

“Astonishing,” Nilson said. In the corner, Herskovitz sat up. His smile appeared cut in plaster.

“It is not like that,” Kaye said.

“That's enough, Robert,” Cross said.

Jackson had not moved since beginning his accusation. He sat half-slumped in his chair. “None of us can afford to give up our scientific principles,” he said. “Especially not now.”

Cross stood abruptly. Nilson and Morgenstern looked at Jackson, then at Cross, and got to their feet, pushing back their chairs.

“I have what I need,” Cross said.

“Dr. Rafelson, is God behind evolution?” Jackson called out. “Does he hold all the answers, does he jerk us around like puppets on a string?”

“No,” Kaye said, eyes unfocused.

“Are you really sure, now, in a way none of the rest of us can be, with your special knowledge?”

“Robert, that is enough!” Cross roared. Seldom had any of them heard Cross when she was angry, and her voice was painful in its crackling intensity. She let the stack of papers in her hands slip back to the table and spill onto the floor. She glared at Jackson, then shook her fists at the ceiling. “Absolutely unbelievable!”

“Astonishing,” Nilson repeated, much quieter.

“I apologize,” Jackson said, not at all chastened. His color had returned. He looked vigorous and healthy.

“This is over,” Cross declared. “Everyone go home. Now.”

Liz helped Kaye from the room. Jackson did not deign to look at them as they left.

“What in hell is going on?” Liz asked Kaye in an undertone as they walked toward the elevator.

“I'm fine,” Kaye said.

“What in hell was La Robert on about?”

Kaye did not know where to begin.

22

OREGON

Eileen escorted Mitch down the slope on a crude stairway made of boards hammered into the dirt. As they walked through a copse of pines and up a short embankment, gaining a closer view of the camp, Mitch saw that a large excavation of about ten thousand square feet, L-shaped and covered by two joined Quonset huts, had been hidden by brush arranged over netting. From the air, the entire site would be little more than a smudge in the landscape.

“This looks like a terrorist base, Eileen. How do you conceal the heat signature?” he asked half-seriously.

“It's going to terrorize North American anthropology,” Eileen said. “That's for sure.”

“Now you're scaring me,” Mitch said. “Do I have to sign an NDA or something?”

“I trust you,” Eileen said. She rested a hand on his shoulder.

“Show me now, Eileen, or just let me go home.”

“Where ishome?” she asked.

“My truck,” Mitch said.

“That heap?”

Mitch mockingly implored forgiveness with his broad-fingered hands.

Eileen asked, “Do you believe in providence?”

“No,” Mitch said. “I believe in what I see with my eyes.”

“That may take a while. We're into high-tech survey for now. We haven't actually pulled up the specimens. We have a benefactor. He's spending lots of money to help us. I think you've heard of him. Here's his point man now.”

Mitch saw a tent flap open about fifty feet away. A lean, red-headed figure poked out, stood, and brushed dust from his hands. He shaded his eyes and looked around, then spotted the pair on the bluff and lifted his chin in greeting. Eileen waved.

Oliver Merton jogged toward them across the pale, rugged ground.

Merton was the science journalist who had dogged Kaye's career and footsteps during the SHEVA discoveries. Mitch had never been sure whether to look on Merton as a friend or an opportunist or just a damned fine journalist. He was probably all three.

“Mitch!” Merton called. “How grand to see you again!”

Merton stuck out his hand. Mitch shook it firmly. The writer's hand was warm and dry and confident. “My god, all Eileen told me was she was going to fetch someone with experience. How absolutely, bloody appropriate. Mr. Daney will be delighted.”

“You always seem to get there ahead of me,” Mitch said.

Merton shaded his eyes against the sun. “They're having a kind of mid-afternoon powwow, if that's the right word, back in the tents. Bit of a knockdown, really. Eileen, I think they're going to decide to uncover one of the girls and take a direct look. You have perfect timing, Mitch. I've had to wait days to see anything but videos.”

“It's a committee decision?” Mitch asked, turning to Eileen.

“I couldn't stand having all of this on my shoulders,” Eileen confessed. “We have a fine team. Very argumentative. And Daney's money works wonders. Good beer at night.”

“Is Daney here?” Mitch asked Merton.

“Not yet,” Merton said. “He's shy and he hates discomfort.” They hunkered their shoulders against a gritty swirl blowing up the gully. Merton wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. “Not his kind of place at all.”

The wide, bush-studded net flapped in the afternoon breeze, dropping bits of dry branch and leaf on them as they stooped to enter the pit. The excavation stretched about forty feet north, then branched east to form an L. Mottled sunlight filtered through the net. They descended four meters on a metal ladder to the floor of the pit.

Aluminum beams crossed the pit at two-meter intervals. Rises in the pit, like little mesas, were topped with wire grids. Over the mesas, some of the beams supported white boxes with lenses and other apparatus jutting from the bottoms. As Mitch watched, the closest box slowly railed right a few centimeters and resumed humming.

“Side scanner?” he asked.

Eileen nodded. “We've scraped off most of the mud and we're peeking through the final layer of tephra. We can see about sixty centimeters into the hard pack.” She walked ahead.

The Quonset structure—arched wooden beams covered by sheets of stamped, ribbed steel and a few milky sheets of fiberglass—sheltered the long stroke of the L. Sunlight poured through the fiberglass sheeting. They walked over flat, hard dirt and haphazard cobbles of river rock between the high, irregular walls. Eileen let Mitch go first, ascending a dirt staircase to the left of a flat-topped rise being surveyed by two more white boxes.

“I don't dare walk under these damned things,” Eileen said. “I have enough skin blotches as is.”

Mitch knelt beside the mesa to look at alternating layers of mud and tephra, capped by sand and silt. He saw an ash fall—tephra—followed by a lahar, a fast-moving slurry of hot mud made of ash, dirt, and glacier melt. The sand and silt had arrived over time. At the bottom of the mesa, he saw more alternating layers of ash, mud, and river deposits: A deep book going back far longer than recorded history.

“Computers do some really big math and show us a picture of what's down there,” Eileen said. “We actually debated whether to dig any deeper or just cover it over again and submit the videos and sensor readings. But I guess the committee is going for a traditional invasion.”

Mitch moved his hand in a sweeping motion. “Ash came down for several days,” he said. “Then a lahar swept down the river basin. Up here, it slopped over but didn't carry off the bodies.”

“Very good,” Merton said, genuinely impressed.

“Want to see our etchings?” Eileen asked.

Eileen unrolled a display sheet in the conference tent and tuned it to her wrist computer. “Still getting used to all this tech,” she murmured. “It's wonderful, when it works.”

Merton watched over Mitch's shoulder. Two women in their thirties, dressed in jeans and short-sleeved khaki shirts, stood at the rear of the long, narrow tent, debating in soft but angry voices. Eileen did not see fit to introduce them, which clued Mitch that she was not the only high-powered anthropologist working the dig.