Read Tyrannosaur Canyon Online
Authors: Douglas Preston
Tyrannosaur Canyon (11 page)
Maddox could almost hear Corvus's Brit voice ringing in his head-The note book. There was only one way: he had to force Broadbent to give it up. What he needed was leverage.
What he needed was her.
"First time in Santa Fe?" the bartender asked, breaking into his thoughts.
"Yeah."
"Business?"
"What else?" Maddox grinned.
"Are you here for the laproscopic surgery conference?"
Christ, he probably did look like a doctor. A
pants
"No," said Maddox pleasantly, "I'm in human resources."
20
THE E-MAIL TOM received the next morning went:
Tom,
I "deciphered" the journal. You are not going to believe this. I repeat: you are not going to believe this. Come up to the monastery a.s.a.p. and prepare to have your mind blown.
Wyman
Tom had left the house immediately. Now that his Chevy was approaching the last mile of washboard road to the monastery, his impatience had reached a feverish pitch.
Soon the bell tower of the monastery rose above the chamisa, and Tom pulled into the parking lot, a dust cloud rolling back over him as he got out. In a moment Brother Wyman came flying down from the church, his robes flapping behind him, like a giant bat on the wing.
"How long did it take you to crack the code?" Tom asked as they climbed the hill. "Twenty minutes?"
"Twenty hours. I never did crack the code."
"I don't get it."
"That was the whole problem. It wasn't & code."
"Not a code?"
"That's what threw me. All those numbers in neat rows and columns, I kept assuming it had to be a code. Every test I ran on the numbers indicated they were not random, that they were highly patterned-but to what end? It wasn't a prime number code; it wasn't any kind of substitution and transposition code or any other cipher I could think of. I was stumped-until it occurred to me that it wasn't a code at all."
"Then what is it?"
"Data."
"Data?"
"I was a complete idiot. I should've seen it right off." Wyman broke off as they neared the refectory, putting a finger to his lips. They walked inside, down a hall, and into a small, cool whitewashed room. An Apple laptop sat on a crude wooden table underneath a disturbingly realistic crucifix. Ford peered around guiltily and carefully shut the door.
"We're not really supposed to be talking in here," he whispered. "I feel like the bad boy at school, smoking in the John."
"So what kind of data was it?"
"You'll see."
"Did it reveal the man's identity?"
"Not exactly, but it will lead you to him. I know that much."
They pulled chairs up on either side of the computer. Brother Wyman raised the screen, turned it on, and they waited while it booted up. As soon as it was running, Ford began typing rapidly. "I'm connecting to the Internet via a broadband satellite connection. Your man was using a remote sensing instrument and copying the data into his notebook."
"What kind of instrument?"
"It took me a while to figure it out. Treasure hunters and prospectors commonly use two devices. The first is a flux gradiometer proton magnetometer, which is basically an incredibly sophisticated metal detector. You walk along the ground and it measures tiny variations in the local magnetic field. But the data output, measured in milligauss, doesn't look like these numbers at all.
"The second device is a ground-penetrating radar or GPR. It's a machine that looks like a perforated dish with a cluster of bow-tie antennae. It basically fires pulses of radar at the ground and records the echo. Depending on the type of ground and how dry it is, the radar can penetrate as deeply as five meters before being reflected back up. You can get a rough 3D image of something hidden in
the ground or in certain types of rock. It lets you see voids, caves, old mines, buried treasure chests, metal-bearing veins, ancient walls or graves-that sort of thing."
He paused to catch his breath, and went on in a rapid undertone. "It turns out the numbers in your notebook were the data stream from a very sensitive, custom-built ground-penetrating radar. Luckily it had a standard output mimicking a Dallas Electronics BAND 155 Swept FM, so that the imagery could be processed by off-the-shelf software."
"This treasure hunter was serious."
"He certainly was. He knew exactly what he was doing."
"So did he find a treasure?"
"He certainly did."
Tom could hardly stand the suspense. "What was it?"
Wyman smiled, held up his finger. "You're about to see a radar image of it, mapped using the GPR. That's what all those numbers in the notebook were all about: a careful mapping of the treasure in situ in the ground."
Tom watched as Ford connected to a Website maintained by the Boston University Department of Geology. He drilled down through a series of highly technical hypertext pages dealing with radar, satellite imagery, and Landsat, before arriving at a page entitled:
BAND 155 SWEPT-FM GPR PROCESSING AND ANALYSIS WITH
TERRAPLOT®
ENTER YOUR ID AND PASSWORD
"Hacked my way in," Ford whispered with a grin, typing in an ID and password. "No harm done, just pretended to be a student at BU." "This doesn't strike me as very monkish behavior," said Tom. "I'm not a monk yet." He typed some more and a new screen popped up:
UPLOAD DATA NOW
He typed some more, then sat back with a grin, his finger poised above the ENTER key, a smile hovering on his lips. "Are you ready?" "Don't torture me any longer." He brought his finger down with a crisp rap, executing the program.
21
COWBOY COUNTRY REALTY was located in a cutsie pseudo-adobe building on the Paseo de Peralta, strings of red chiles flanking the door and a chipper secretary in a western outfit manning the reception desk. Maddox strolled in, his own boots making a satisfying clunk-clunk on the Saltillo tile floors. He raised his hand to remove the Resistol hat he had purchased that morning-16X beaver, $420- but then decided against it, seeing as how he was now in the West where real cowboys left their hats on indoors. He went over to reception, leaned on the desk.
"What can I do for you, sir?" the receptionist asked.
"You handle summer rentals, right?" Maddox gave the girl a lopsided grin.
"We sure do."
"Name's Maddox. Jim Maddox." He extended his hand and she took it. Her blue eyes met his.
"Are you here to see anyone in particular?"
"Nope, I'm what you might call a walk-in."
"Let me call an agent for you."
A moment later he was being ushered into a well-appointed office, fully loaded in Santa Fe style.
"Trina Dowling," said the agent, offering her hand and seating him down opposite herself. She was a fright-fifty something, X-ray thin, black dress, blond hair, a voice that scared you with its efficiency. A potential client, thought Maddox. Definitely a potential client.
"I understand you're interested in a summer rental."
"That's right. I'm looking for a place to finish my first novel."
"How interesting! A first novel!"
He crossed his legs. "I was in a dot com business, sold out before the crash, went through a divorce. Now I'm taking a break from making money, hoping to live my dream." He offered her a self-deprecating smile. "I'm looking for something north of Abiquiii, quiet, isolated, no neighbors for miles."
"We manage more than three hundred rental properties and I'm sure we'll be able to find you something."
"Great." Maddox shifted in the chair, recrossed his legs. "I'm not kidding about privacy. Nearest house has to be at least a mile away. Something at the end of the road, in the trees."
He paused. Trina was taking notes.
"An old mining cabin would be perfect," he said. "I've always been interested in mines. There's a mine in my novel."
Dowling finishing up her note-taking with a sharp tap of her pen. "Shall we take a look in the database? But first, Mr. Maddox, do you have a price range in mind?"
"Money is no object. And please call me Jim."
"Can you wait a moment, Jim, while I look at our database?"
"Of course."
He recrossed his legs while Trina hammered away on the keyboard.
"Well." She smiled again. "I've got several suitable properties here, but here's one that really pops out. The old CCC Camp up on Perdiz Creek, in the foothills of the
"CCC Camp?"
"That's right. The Civilian Conservation Corps put a camp up there in the thirties for the men building trails in the national forest-a dozen or so wooden cabins surrounding an old dining hall and lodge. Some years ago a gentleman from
"Sounds like there might be tourists."
"It's gated. Sits in the middle of a section of private land surrounded by national forest. It's at the end of an eight-mile dirt road, the last two miles four-wheel drive only." She glanced up. "You do have a four-wheel drive vehicle?"
"Range Rover."
She smiled. "A road like that would tend to keep away visitors." "Right."
Its got some interesting history here. Before it was a CCC Camp Perdiz Creek was an old gold-mining town. There are some old mines up there and"-
she smiled at him-"they say there's a ghost. I wouldn't mention that to everyone, but seeing as how you're a writer . . ."
"My story could use a ghost."
"It says here it's a great place for hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding. Surrounded by national forest. It's not off the grid, though: power and telephone to the site."
"It sounds ideal. Only thing is, I wouldn't want the owner dropping in unannounced."
"He's in Italy and I can tell you he's not that kind of owner. We manage the rental for him and if anyone needed to come up, it would be us-and only then for a good reason and with twenty-four-hour notice. Your privacy would be respected."
"Rent?"
"Quite reasonable. Thirty-eight hundred a month if you take it all summer."
"Sounds perfect. I'd like to see it."
"When?"
"Right now." He tapped his jacket pocket, where his checkbook was. "I'm prepared to conclude the deal today. I'm anxious to get to work on my novel. It's a murder mystery."
22
TOM STARED INTENTLY at the white screen of the PowerBook. At first nothing happened, and then an image began to crawl down the screen, a blurry first iteration.
"Takes a while to process," murmured Wyman.
The first pass was complete, but the image remained a shadow, a blob. It didn't look at all like a chest of gold or a lost mine, but maybe it was delineating the cavern itself. A second pass began, the image sharpening, line by line. Tom caught his breath as the blob became an object. An unmistakable object. He could hardly believe it, he felt it must be an optical illusion, that it was actually something other than what it seemed. On the third pass he realized it was no optical illusion.
"My God," Tom said. "It's no treasure. It's a dinosaur."
Wyman laughed, his eyes sparkling. "I told you it would blow your mind. Look at the scale bars. It's a T. Rex, and according to some research I did, it's by far the biggest ever found."
"But it's the whole thing, not just the bones."
"Correct."
Tom fell silent, staring. It certainly was a Tyrannosaurus rex-the outline was unmistakable-lying twisted and on its side. But it wasn't just a fossil skeleton- much of the skin, internal organs, and flesh appeared to have been fossilized along with the bones. "It's a mummy," said Tom, "a fossilized dinosaur mummy."
"That's right."
"This is incredible. This must be one of the greatest fossils ever found."
"Right. It's virtually complete, except for a few teeth, a claw, and the last foot of tail, anyway. You see how some of it appears to be emerging from the rock."
"So the murdered man was a dinosaur prospector."
"Exactly. This 'treasure' he was talking about may have been an attempt to mislead, or it may have simply been a manner of speaking. That is a treasure, only one of the paleontological variety."
Tom gazed at the image. He could still hardly believe it. As a child he had always wanted to be a paleontologist, but while other kids had grown out of dinosaurs, he had never managed to shake his dream. His father had pushed him into becoming a vet. And now here he was, staring at what had to be one of the most stupendous dinosaur fossils of all time.
"There's your motive," said Ford. "That dinosaur's worth a fortune. I did some poking around the Web. You heard about the dinosaur named Sue?"
"The famous tyrannosaur at the
"That's it. Discovered in 1990 by a professional fossil hunter named Sue Hendrickson in the
Tom gave a low whistle. "This one must be worth ten times that."
"At least."
"So where is it?"
Ford smiled and pointed to the screen. "You see that fuzzy outline encasing the dinosaur? That's a cross-section of the rock outcrop the fossil's imbedded in. It's a big formation, more than forty feet in diameter, and it's such an unusual shape that it should be easily recognizable. All the location information you need is right there. It's merely a question of hiking around until you find it."