Ford looked at him for a while and then dropped his eyes. "Tom-the other day you asked me a question. I'd like to answer it."
"I was out of line. I really don't want to know."
"You weren't out of line and I'm going to answer your question. I've bottled it all up, I've used silence as a kind of crutch, a way to avoid the issue." He paused.
Tom said nothing.
"I was an undercover operative. I studied cryptology but I ended up working undercover as a Systems Analyst for a large computer firm. I was, in reality, a CIA hacker."
Tom listened.
"Let's say-theoretically speaking, of course-that the government of, say, Cambodia buys servers and software from, say, a large American firm with a three-letter acronym which I shall not mention. Unbeknownst to the Cambodians, a small logic bomb has been hidden in the software code. The bomb goes off two years later, and the system starts acting funny. The government of Cambodia calls the American company for help. I get sent in as Systems Analyst. Let's say I bring my wife-which helps the cover and she's also a Company employee. I fix the problem, while at the same time burning onto CD-ROMs the entire contents of the Cambodian government's classified personnel files. The CD-ROMs are tarted up to look like bootlegged copies of Verdi's Requiem, music and all. You can even play them. Again I'm speaking theoretically. None of this may have actually happened."
He paused, exhaled.
"Sounds like fun," said Tom.
"Yeah, it was fun-until they car-bombed my wife, who happened to be pregnant with our first child."
"Oh, my God-"
"It's all right, Tom," he said quickly. "I've got to tell you. When that happened, I just walked out of that life and into this one. All I had were the clothes on my back, my car
keys and wallet. First chance, I dropped the wallet and keys into a bottomless crack up there in Chavez Canyon. My bank accounts, house, stock portfolio-I don't even know what's happened to them. One of these days, like any good monk I'll get around to giving them to the poor."
"No one knows you're here?"
"Everyone knows I'm here. The CIA understood. Believe it or not, Tom, the CIA wasn't a bad place to work. Good people for the most part. Julie-my wife-and I knew the risks.
We were recruited together out of MIT. Those personnel files I scooped up exposed a lot of former Khmer Rouge torturers and
murderers. That was good work. But for me . . ." His voice trailed off. "The sacrifice was too great."
"My God."
Ford held up a finger. "No taking the Lord's name in vain. Now I've told
» you.
"I hardly know what to say, Wyman. I'm sorry-I'm really sorry." "No need to say anything. I'm not the only hurt person in the world. It's a good life here. When you deny your own needs by fasting, poverty, celibacy, and silence, you get closer to something eternal. Call it God, call it whatever you like. I'm a fortunate man."
There was a long silence. Tom finally asked, "And how does this connect to your idea that we should find the dinosaur? I promised to give the notebook to the man's daughter, Robbie-and that's it. As far as I'm concerned the dinosaur's hers."
Ford tapped the table. "I hate to tell you this, Tom, but all that land out there, the high mesas and all the badlands and mountains beyond, belong to the Bureau of Land Management. In other words, it's all federal land. Our land. The American people own that land and everything on it and in it, including the dinosaur. You see, Tom, your man wasn't just a dinosaur prospector. He was a dinosaur thief,"
23
DR. IAIN CORVUS softly turned the handle of the metal door labeled mineralogy lab and stepped quietly into the room. Melodic Crookshank was sitting at a workstation, her back turned, typing. Her short brown hair bobbed as she worked.
He crept up to her, laid his hand softly on her shoulder. She gave a muffled gasp and jumped.
"You didn't forget our little appointment, did you?" asked Corvus.
"No, it's just that you snuck up on me like a cat."
Corvus laughed softly, gave her shoulder a little squeeze, and left his hand there. He could feel her heat through her labcoat. "I'm grateful you were willing to stay late." He was glad to see she was wearing the bracelet. She was pretty but in that athletic and unglamorous American way, as if one of the prerequisites of being a serious woman in science was to wear no makeup and avoid the hairdresser. But she had two important qualities: she was discreet and she was alone. He had quietly inquired into her background; she was a product of the Columbia degree mill that turned out far more Ph.D.s than were actually employable; her parents were both dead, she had no siblings, few friends, no boyfriend, and almost no social life. On top of that, she was competent and so eager to please.
His eyes returned to her face, glad to see she was blushing. He wondered if perhaps they might not take their relationship a step or two beyond the professional-but no, that path was always unpredictable.
He dazzled her with his finest smile, and took her hand, which was hot in his. 'Melodic, I'm delighted you've made such splendid progress."
"Yes, Dr. Corvus. It's-well, it's incredible. I've burned it all onto CDs."
He lowered himself into a chair before the big flat-panel screen of the Power Mac G5.
"Let the show begin," he murmured.
Melodic seated herself next to him, picked up the top CD in a stack, opened the plastic holder, and slid it into the drive bay. She pulled over the keyboard and rapped out a command.
"First, what we've got here," she began, switching into professional speech, "is a piece of the vertebra and fossilized soft tissue and skin of a large tyrannosaurid, probably a T.
Rex or maybe a freakishly large Albertosaurus. It's fantastically well preserved."
An image appeared on the screen.
"Look at that. It's an imprint of skin." She paused. "Here it is closer up. You see those fine parallel lines? Here they are again at 30x."
Corvus felt a momentary shiver. This was even better than he had imagined, much better. He felt suspended, light in his chair. "It's the impression of a feather," he managed to say.
"Exactly. There it is: proof that T. Rex was feathered."
It was a theory that had been advanced a few years ago by a group of young paleontologists at the museum. Corvus had derided the theory in the Journal of Paleontology, referring to it as a "peculiar American fantasy," which had occasioned much sneering and anti-British comment from his colleagues in the museum. And now, here it was, in his very hands: proof that they were right, and he was wrong. The unpleasant sensation of being proven wrong quickly gave way to more complex feelings. Here was an opportunity... In fact, a rare opportunity. He could steal their theory from them, while standing up to the world and admitting he had been mistaken.
Utter, total preemption-wrapped in a cloak of humility.
That was exactly how he would do it.
With this in hand, they would have to give him tenure. But then he wouldn't really need it, would he? He could get a job anywhere-even at the British Museum. Especially at the British Museum.
Corvus found he had been holding his breath, and released it. "Yes, indeed," he murmured. "So the old gentleman was feathered after all."
"It gets better."
Corvus raised his eyebrows.
She rapped a key and another image appeared. "Here's a polarized image at lOOx of the fossilized muscle tissue. It's totally petrified, of course, but it has to be the most perfect fossilization on record-you see how fine-grained silicon dioxide has replaced the cell tissue, even the organelles, capturing the image of everything. What we're looking at is an actual image of the muscle cell of a dinosaur."
Corvus found he could not speak.
"Yeah." She rapped again. "Here it is at 500x . . . Look-you can see the nucleus."