The Dig (10 page)

“Good bloody answer, Enzi. Don’t you forget that.”

“No, sah. That is all.”

“Bloody right it is. Don’t think for a second that I would choose your existence over my objectives. It would take very little money for you to simply vanish—much easier than burying an elephant.”

Enzi lowered his head level with Rheese’s gaze. His jaw clenched, and his eyelids dropped to half-moons. “That not necessary to say, Professor,” he replied with a subtle growl, containing his rage.

Rheese leaned back and smiled, looking off in the distance once again. “Of course not, my friend! We’re all in this together, are we not?” He chuckled heartily and clasped his hands behind his head.

Enzi stood there for a moment, glaring at him. He had judged the
mkundu
aright in the beginning. The man had a steel trap of greed in place of a heart. Enzi fantasized about what he could do to the professor with the shovel leaning against the equipment trailer behind him.

“Well, don’t just stand there, lad,” said Rheese cheerily. “Back to work, then!”

Enzi cleared the images from his head and returned to the men.

Rheese wondered, had he taken it a notch too far? It was important to keep Enzi on his toes. What if he was asked a question that caught him off guard and his natural honesty took the upper hand? There was something in his foreman that Rheese admired: whatever that was that had made him go straight to the broken elephant and lay it to rest. But then, that same impulse might one day turn into a liability, and he suspected that Enzi did not know there was a time and place for doing the right thing.

His teapot whistled him back into the motor home for elevenses. He might have waited for the museum’s expert to join him for cakes and tea, but it would likely be some pencil-necked thirty-something, interested only in getting the artifact into his hot little uncallused hands.

Tuni’s forehead pressed against the window as she watched the land below them change from tree-dotted savanna to forested hill country. The plastic earmuffs did little more than mute the whine of the turbine engine and the beat of the rotor to a bearable level. She glanced over at Matt, who sat upright in the seat, clearly uncomfortable, with his gloved fingers in his ears. He turned to her when he realized she was looking at him.

“No one said anything about a helicopter, either,” he mouthed. She shrugged and spoke an inaudible “Sorry! Fastest way!”

Thirty minutes later, one of their Kenyan pilots pointed ahead, and the other began pressing buttons and flipping switches. In a moment, the helicopter turned and circled a clearing in the woods. Matt and Tuni looked out his window to see a clearing in the middle of the jungle. The majority of the space was taken up by a large pit with a ramp leading up one side from the middle of the floor. The pilots discussed something as the chopper hovered over a flat spot marked only by a pair of muddy tire tracks.

The helicopter descended, rotating slowly. Matt could see some men closing the back of a white trailer while others stood at the walls of the pit, shielding their eyes as they gazed upward.

“Is that a dead elephant?” Matt asked.

Tuni’s face twisted and she leaned over to his side and craned her neck to look down through his window.

“Good God! I think it bloody well is!”

Matt got another good whiff of her perfume before she settled back into her seat.

One skid and then the other touched down, and the pilots began flicking more switches before one of them removed his headset and exited through his hatch. He came around and slid open the door on Matt’s side. Tuni removed her earmuffs, unfastened her harness, and reached behind the seats to fetch their bags.

As he swung his backpack over his shoulder and climbed down onto the footstep, Matt spotted an older white man in khakis and a pith helmet. The man was walking toward them and waving.

Tuni’s lips hovered at Matt’s ear. “That must be Dr. Rheese,” she said. “Go greet him and I’ll grab your other bag.”

Matt complied and walked, hunched over, away from the chopper. With the distance between them closing, he saw the man’s smile freeze as he gazed past Matt, then back at his face.

“Hi, Matthew Turner,” Matt yelled over the helicopter noise. “You must be Dr. Rheese.”

Rheese shook the gloved hand halfheartedly.

“Is one of you the potassium-argon expert?”

Matt replied with an extended “Uh-h…” as Tuni and a pilot arrived at his side with the suitcase and duffel bag.

“Dr. Rheese, I am Tuni St. James, with the New York Metropolitan Museum.”

He shook her hand, appearing no more pleased to make her acquaintance than Matt’s.

“A pleasure. Which one of you is the expert I’ve awaited all this time?”

The helicopter grew louder as it lifted off and flew away.

Tuni deadpanned and made a theatric gesture toward Matt.

“You must be bloody joking,” he muttered, and walked away.

Tuni and Matt looked at each other doubtfully, as a Kenyan man approached them from out of the big ditch and greeted them warmly.

“Hello, hello, friends. I am Enzi Wata, the site foreman. Welcome to Narok… sort of.” He gave a slight bow and held out his hand to Tuni.

She shook it, and he dipped his head a little deeper in respect.

“I’m Tuni, and this is the expert you have been waiting for, Matthew Turner.”

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Turner,” he said, pumping the younger man’s hand while subtly wondering about the gloves and watch cap on such a warm tropical day.

“Thanks,” Matt replied. “So can you take us to the artifact?”

Enzi peered past Matt’s shoulder to the motor home and listened for a moment to Dr. Rheese, shouting at someone on the satellite phone.

“Perhaps you like to rest for a bit? We have fresh water and chips at the food tent, if you like—”

Matt interrupted. “Look, I don’t really need a snack. I was actually hoping to get to examine this thing and have the helicopter back before dark.”

Tuni touched his arm as if to say, “Easy…”

“You will not be sleeping the night?” Enzi asked, confused.

“Well, we
can,
sure, but the sooner we get this done, the better.”

Obviously relieved, Enzi said, “Good, because helicopter not return today.”

“What?”

“They do not fly here at night.”

“So, Mr. Wata… ,” Tuni interjected before Matt could speak.

“Enzi, please, Miss.”

“Enzi,” she said, “I think I
would
like to sit down and have a small snack. Matthew, would you like to join me?”

“Sure.”

In his RV, Rheese hung up on the “cheeky little tart” at the other end—Maggie something. Why she wouldn’t tell him where Sharma had gotten to, he couldn’t say. Clearly, those folks at the museum were not really interested in determining the fabric’s age. He sat down at the breakfast table and sighed. He had wasted how much time cleaning the little swatch so that a respectable scientist could take a look at it?

Perhaps if he simply humored the young man and that towering amazon of a woman, they’d leave quickly and he could move to the next site on his map. Bingo! That was it: he would apologize for his earlier behavior and welcome them wholeheartedly into his mobile laboratory. That was the ticket—get it done and get them gone. He stopped at the sink on his way out and splashed water on his face.

“So,” Matt said to Enzi, “did you know you have a dead elephant in that hole over there?”

“Here he comes,” Tuni warned.

Enzi stood, and Matt turned around. Dr. Rheese had put on his best smile and was shaking his head foolishly as if to say, “I’m just a silly old man!” as he walked to the food tent.

“Apologies, apologies, my fellow slaves to science… er, no offense.” He directed this last to Tuni, who blinked as if she had received a slap. Her eyes met Enzi’s, which, by their expression, again appeared to be apologizing for the doctor. “I’m terrible with names—what were they again?”

“I’m Matt Turner, and this is Tuni.”

“Of course, Matt and Tuni. Very well, if you’d like to gather your equipment, we can adjourn to our research vehicle and get down to matters of consequence.”

Matt grabbed his duffel and followed Rheese to the motor home, where he held the door open for Tuni. On entering, they both looked around the interior.

“If you need to use the loo, it’s right there—no need to join the workers in the bushes.”

“Lovely,” Tuni said drily.

Opening a cabinet, Rheese pulled out a transparent case the size of a shoe box and placed it on the breakfast table. Inside it, several cobble-size rocks sat atop a mix of gravel and dirt. Matt slid onto one of the bench seats and shoved his duffel to the corner, where he opened it and dug for his armband timer. Rheese donned latex gloves, took the largest chunk from the box, and placed it on a white tray in front of Matt. Matt frowned at it and peered into the box and then at Tuni and Rheese.

“Where is your equipment?” asked Dr. Rheese, trying to see into the dark recesses of the duffel.

“Where is the object?” Matt returned.

“This is the sediment in which the object was embedded.” Rheese tried to remain pleasant but felt his face beginning to heat. “There, see the pattern, son?”

Matt turned the rock over in his hands and could indeed see the imprint.

“Right,” interjected Tuni. “Mr. Turner will be requiring the artifact itself.”

“No offense… ,” Rheese began.

“Of course not,” Tuni murmured under her breath.

“. . .but the bloody artifact has not a trace of relevant radioactivity. You’ll need to measure from this sample here.”

“Understood,” Matt said as, for perhaps the first time ever, he found himself wishing Dr. Meier were present. “The museum has contracted me to determine the actual age of the artifact itself, not the surrounding rocks. It’s my understanding that the museum is already satisfied with those results.”

“Well, if you don’t mind my asking, how do you plan to determine said age of
my
find, young man?”

Seeing that Matt was about to become unruly, Tuni recalled Meier’s instructions. She opened her leather organizer and quickly scanned her notes.

“Dr. Rheese, if I may, Dr. Meier and Peter Sharma have used Matthew’s expertise on many high-profile investigations, including A-L two-eighty-eight-dash-one. If you could simply humor us for a few minutes, I think we could make some good progress.”

“Lucy, huh?” he replied with apparent interest. “And what did
you
find out about little old Lucy?”

Matt tried to remember the estimation they had given, now that Tuni had put him on the spot. He knew that it was around three to four million years, so he decided to be creative.

“The sample I examined was three-point-seven-two-two million years old.”

“Impressive. How could it possibly be so precise? What technology are you using?”

Tuni spoke again, “It’s rather difficult to explain, Dr. Rheese. Perhaps if he could simply examine the artifact for a moment?”

Rheese snorted, sighed, and gave a little huff, as if pulling the key from his trouser pocket required considerable exertion, then knelt to open the safe at Matt’s feet.
Just get it over with, Garrett,
he said to himself. He took out the container and stood back up, his knees cracking audibly. Tuni and Matt held their breath in anticipation as it appeared. Placing the container on the end of the table, Rheese unscrewed the four screws holding the two plastic sides together, then slid the bottom sheet of plastic in front of Matt. There sat the artifact, fully exposed.

Matt stared at it as Tuni slid onto the bench across from him and looked from Matt’s face to the fabric and back again.

Matt thought it looked smaller than in the picture, but somehow much more
real
. Now that it was in front of him, for the first time he actually started to worry about what he might experience. There very well might be nothing—after all, he had never been able to read anything but imprints from other humans, and apparently there weren’t any around back when this came into existence. He looked closely at the uneven edges and figured it must have been damaged in some violent act. That would be an imprint right there—if it was the act of a person. He moved it around with his forefinger, marveling at its flexibility. It wasn’t quite as fine as window screen; the metal threads were a bit thicker, and woven in such a way that it all moved quite freely.

Rheese cleared his throat. “Is this how you determine your precise dates? Staring and prodding?”

Matt took a deep breath and turned to the professor. “I’m sure you’ll find this a little suspect, Doctor,” he began. “But I’m going to have to ask you to step outside for about ten minutes.”

“Certainly,” Rheese replied nonchalantly. “When the hair on my head reappears.”

Matt looked at Tuni in a silent plea for help.

“Professor,” she said, “perhaps if I could speak with you outside and explain the situation.”