Relic (Pendergast, #1)

by Douglas Preston

“I mean, how do you know the killer came through here?” “I suppose I was guessing,” said Pendergast, examining the next painting. “You see, when someone says ‘it’s impossible,’ I have this very bad habit, I can’t help myself, I immediately contradict that person in the most positive terms possible. A very bad habit, but one that I find hard to break. But of course, now we do know the killer came through here.”

“Please, Mr. Smith. I’ve heard they might close down the Museum at any moment. I really need these specimens.” Scenting the chance to gossip, the old man became friendlier. “Terrible business,” he said, shaking his head. “In my forty-two years here I’ve never seen anything like it. But I can’t say I’m surprised,” he added, with a significant nod.

To her, Kawakita didn’t seem the kind of scientist who’d wish to be allied with Frock. Kawakita had an instinctual sense for Museum politics, and Frock was controversial, an iconoclast. But despite his self-absorption, Kawakita was undeniably brilliant, and he was working with Frock on a model of genetic mutation that no one but the two of them seemed to fully understand. With Frock’s guidance, Kawakita was developing the Extrapolator, a program that could compare and combine genetic codes of different species.

Smith ignored him. “Some say it hatched from one of those crates of dinosaur eggs brought back from Siberia.” “I see,” said Kawakita, trying to suppress a grin. “Dinosaurs loose in the Museum.” Smith shrugged. “I only say what I hear. Others think it was something brought back from one of the graves they’ve robbed over the years. Some artifact with a curse. You know, like the King Tut curse. And if you ask me, those fellows deserve what they get. I don’t care what they call it, archaeology, anthropology, or hoodooology, it’s just plain old grave robbing to me. You don’t see them digging up their grandmother’s graves, but they sure don’t hesitate to dig up somebody else’s and take all the goodies.

“There was this curator, Morrissey, or Montana, or something. He was involved with that disastrous Amazon expedition. You know the one I mean, where everyone was killed. Anyway, one day he simply vanished. Nobody ever heard from him again. So people started to whisper about it. Apparently, a guard was overheard saying that his body had been found in the basement, horribly mutilated.”

“I see,” said Kawakita stiffly. “Of course.” All his good humor had vanished. Doesn’t like having the joke turned on him, Margo thought. He can dish it out, but he can’t take it.

Nice place, D’Agosta thought. Old money. Old New York. It has class. Not the place to smoke a two-bit cigar. He lit up.

Over lunch, he’d made a few surreptitious calls to some friends in the Bureau. Turned out they’d not only heard of Pendergast, but they’d heard several rumors about him. Graduated with honors from some English university—probably true. A special forces officer who’d been captured in Vietnam and had later walked out of the jungle, the only survivor of a Cambodian death camp—D’Agosta wasn’t sure about that one. But he was revising his opinion nevertheless.

There was a long silence while Pendergast turned pages. Wright shifted. “If you’re busy,” he said irritably, “We can come back another time.” Pendergast’s face was invisible behind the large book. “No,” he said finally. “Now is a good time.” Another page was leisurely turned. Then another. D’Agosta watched with amusement as the Director reddened.

“Dr. Wright, this is growing tiresome. Perhaps we should discuss this with the Attorney General.” Pendergast started to dial. “Just a moment,” said Wright. “Surely we can discuss this without involving other people.” “That’s up to you,” said Pendergast as he finished dialing. “For Heaven’s sake, put down that phone,” Wright said angrily. “Of course, we’ll cooperate fully—within reason.” “Very good,” Pendergast said. “And if in the future you start to feel that anything is unreasonable, we can always do this again.”

Pendergast blinked innocently at D’Agosta. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I apologize for any unseemly behavior. It’s simply that I can’t stand pompous, bureaucratic individuals. I’m afraid I can become quite short with them.” He raised the book. “It’s a bad habit, but very hard to break.”

Lewis Turow stood in the window and watched an enormous barge, piled with garbage and surrounded by countless seagulls, being pushed out to sea. Probably one minute’s worth of New York City garbage, he thought.

Turow knew that most of the sequences would be unidentified, since the only organism with a complete genetic map was E. coli.

It was pure nonsense, obviously. Lizard DNA and human DNA in the same sample? But this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. You couldn’t blame the computer, really. It was an inexact procedure, and only the smallest fractions of the DNA sequences of any given organism were known.

He started to laugh. It was a very good joke. A very, very good joke. He didn’t think old Buchholtz had it in him. Well, he had a sense of humor, too. He started his report. Sample LA-33 Summary: Sample conclusively identified as Homo Gekkopiens, common name Gecko-man

“Another thing,” he suddenly said, quite loudly. “Do you see how the claw marks draw together slightly? How they are farther apart at the top than at the bottom?” “Yes?” said Pendergast. “Like a hand clenching into a fist. That would indicate flexibility in the instrument.”

Do you see how this claw has a conical shape, a deep fully enclosed root? See how it tapers to an almost perfect tripyramidal cross section near the top? This appears in only two classes of animal: dinosaur and bird. That is one of the reasons some evolutionary biologists think birds evolved from dinosaurs. I would say it is from a bird, except that it is far too large. Thus, dinosaurian.”

Finally Cuthbert sighed. “It was a South American expedition that took place over five years ago. It was … not entirely successful.” “It was a disaster,” Frock said derisively. Oblivious to Cuthbert’s angry glance, he continued. “It caused a scandal in the Museum at the time. The expedition broke up early, due to personality conflicts. Some of the expedition members were killed by hostile tribesmen; the rest were killed in a plane crash on the way back to New York. There were the inevitable rumors of a curse, that kind of thing.”

Whittlesey and an assistant named Crocker disappeared and were probably killed by tribesmen. The rest died in the plane crash. The only thing we had any documentation on was the figurine, from Whittlesey’s journal.

“Why did the material sit in these crates for so long? Why wasn’t it unpacked and cataloged and put in the collections?” Cuthbert stirred uncomfortably. “Well,” he said defensively, “ask Frock. He’s the chairman of the department.” “Our collections are enormous,” said Frock. “We have dinosaur bones still crated up from the 1930s that have never been touched. It costs a tremendous amount of money and time to curate these things.”

“But you are,” Frock persisted. “All of you are making an assumption—that some one, or some thing, broke into the crate.” There was a sudden silence in the vault. Margo could smell the dust in the air, and the faint odor of excelsior. And then Cuthbert began to laugh raucously, the sound swelling harshly through the chamber.

Jost Von Oster ran the osteological preparation area, the Museum Laboratory in which animal carcasses were reduced to bones.

The bugs were famous. It was a process Von Oster himself had invented, but was now in use by all the large natural history museums in the country: the beetles would strip a small carcass of its flesh, leaving behind a cleaned, perfectly articulated skeleton.

Dioramas such as these, originally fashioned in the thirties and forties, could no longer be made, she knew—they had become much too expensive to produce.

small figurine, carved in such detail it took Margo’s breath away. Covered in scales, it crouched on all fours. Yet there was something—the long forearms, the angle of its head—that was disturbingly human. She shuddered. What kind of imagination gave rise to a being with both scales and hair?

This savage god, also known as He Who Walks On All Fours, was much feared by the other indigenous tribes of the area. In local myth, the Kothoga tribe was said to be able to conjure Mbwun at will, and send him on errands of destruction against neighboring tribes.

The Bones, as it was called by everyone in the Museum, was known to other local residents as the Blarney Stone Tavern.

“What I wanted to know is, what’s the story behind this Mbwun figurine?” There was a stunned silence. Smithback looked from Moriarty to Margo. “What’d I say?” “We were just talking about Mbwun,” Margo said uncertainly. “Yeah?” Smithback said. “Small world.

“It seems there was this tribe along the Upper Xingú river in the Amazon, the Kothoga. They’d apparently been a bad lot—supernatural-dabbling, human sacrifice, the whole bit. Since the old boys hadn’t left many traces around, anthropologists assumed they died out centuries ago. All that remained was a bunch of myths, circulated by local tribes.”

There was a creature—a familiar if you will—they used for vengeance killings. That was Mbwun, He Who Walks On All Fours.

The sound came again. Well, hell, he thought, it ain’t my job to check inside. Can’t let anyone into the exhibition. Never said anything about anyone coming out.

Pendergast smiled more broadly. “I’m glad you mentioned that, Dr. Buchholtz. Just send the bill to Director of Special Operations, FBI.” He wrote down the address on his business card. “And please don’t worry. Cost is no consideration whatsoever.” D’Agosta had to grin. He knew what Pendergast was doing: getting even for the lousy car. He shook his head. What a devil.

Later, the Museum switchboard would tabulate the number of creature-related calls it received that day: 107, including crank messages, bomb threats, and offers of assistance from exterminators to spiritualists.

In earlier days, physical anthropologists had spent most of their time in this laboratory measuring bones and trying to determine the relationship between the races, where humanity had originated, and similar studies. Now, much more complex biochemical and epidemiological research was being done in the Physical Anthro Lab.

When Kawakita was first hired by the Museum, he had declined the sunny fifth-floor office offered him, and instead claimed a much smaller one in the lab, saying he wanted to be closer to the action.

Any statements made or assistance given to individuals who are engaged in preparing interviews, documentaries, books, articles, etc. dealing with the Museum are to be cleared through this office. Failure to follow these guidelines will result in disciplinary action from the Director’s Office. Thank you for your cooperation in this difficult time. “Christ,” muttered Smithback. “Look at this. ‘Individuals engaged in preparing books.’”

A young man edged forward. White lab coat, slope-shouldered, Coke bottle glasses, calculator and pager dangling off the belt. Cripes, thought D’Agosta, where did they get these guys? He was perfect.

Belém; Port of New Orleans; Brooklyn. The Strella de Venezuela—Star of Venezuela. Odd, he thought. Awfully long layover in New Orleans.

“Yes, and make yourself comfortable,” Smithback said, pointedly gesturing to the chair in front of Margo’s terminal. Moriarty sat down slowly, looking at Smithback, then at Margo, then at Smithback again. “I guess you want me to check the accession records,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind,” Margo said quietly. Smithback’s presence made the whole thing seem like a setup.

GHOST FREIGHTER FOUND BEACHED NEAR NEW ORLEANS By Antony Anastasia Special to the Times-Picayune BAYOU GROVE, October 16 (AP)—A small freighter bound for New Orleans ran aground last night near this small coastal town. Details remain sketchy, but preliminary reports indicate that all crew members had been brutally slain while at sea. The Coast Guard first reported the grounding at 11:45 Monday night.

Newspaper article

God, Moriarty thought, sitting at the darkened terminal and resting his chin in his hands. If a graduate student in plant genetics actually thinks Mbwun might be loose—if even Margo Green starts seeing conspiracies behind every door—what about the rest of the Museum?

What thing, my dear Margo, is rugose?” “I don’t know,” Margo said. “Rugose, as in bumpy?” “Yes. It’s a regular pattern of ridges, wrinkles, or creases. I’ll tell you what’s rugose. Reptilian eggs are rugose. As are dinosaur eggs.” A sudden current passed through Margo as she remembered. “That’s the word—” “—that Cuthbert used to describe the seed pods missing from the crate,” Frock finished her sentence.

“Margo,” Frock said, laughing quietly, “what we have here is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

“You continue to call the claw a weapon,” he said. “I assume, then, that you continue to believe the killer is human?” Pendergast closed his briefcase. “I simply don’t see any other possibility. Do you think, Dr. Frock, an animal could decapitate a body with surgical precision, punch a hole in the skull and locate an internal organ the size of a walnut that only someone trained in human anatomy could recognize?

A certain type of organism predominates in these shales. It had powerful fins and long suction pads and oversized crushing and tearing mouth parts. Those mouth parts could saw through rock, and the fins allowed it to move at twenty miles per hour through the water. No doubt it was a highly successful and quite savage predator. It was, I believe, too successful: it hunted its prey into extinction and then quickly became extinct itself. It thus caused the minor mass extinction at the end of the Cambrian era. It, not natural selection, killed off all the other forms of life in the Transvaal Shales.”

Anomalocaris

Every sixty to seventy million years or so, life starts getting very well adapted to its environment. Too well adapted, perhaps. There is a population explosion of the successful life forms. Then, suddenly, a new species appears out of the blue. It is almost always a predatory creature, a killing machine. It tears through the host population, killing, feeding, multiplying.

“This is a set of tracks made by a creature that lived during the Upper Cretaceous,” Frock continued. “Right on the K-T boundary, to be exact. This is the only such fossil of its kind we’ve found; there is no other.” “K-T?” asked Pendergast. “Cretaceous-Tertiary. It’s the boundary that marks the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.”

“So you think,” Pendergast said, “that the killer might be the same animal that made these tracks? A dinosaur?” Margo thought she detected amusement in Pendergast’s voice. Frock looked at the agent, shaking his head vigorously. “No, Mr. Pendergast, not a dinosaur. Nothing as common as a dinosaur. We’re talking about the proof of my theory of aberrant evolution. You know my work. This is the creature I believe killed off the dinosaurs.”

I’m not saying the killer is the same creature that killed off the dinosaurs. But a similar creature … well, look at these tracks again. They look like Mbwun! We call it convergent evolution, where two creatures look alike not because they’re necessarily related, but because they evolve to do the same thing.

Margo glanced at the table next to the chair Pendergast had just vacated. “Look,” she said. “He left the DNA printout.” Frock’s eyes followed Margo’s. Then he chuckled. “I assume that’s what he meant by anything else coming to mind.” He paused. “Perhaps he isn’t like all the rest, after all.