# Darwin’s Radio

Greg Bear

A terrifying disease, or the next step in human evolution? Three scientists must battle to find the truth in this heart-stopping technothriller.Mitch Rafelson makes a major discovery high in the Alps – the preserved bodies of a Neanderthal family with a human child.Kaye Lang investigates a mass grave in the Caucasus – the bodies are mutated.Christopher Dicken tracks a mysterious flu-like disease that causes pregnant women to miscarry.Together, these three scientists discover that so-called junk genes, dormant in our DNA for millions of years, are waking up. A signal from Darwin’s radio has triggered the next step in human evolution.The women who miscarry become inexplicably pregnant again. However, this time they are carriers of Homo sapiens novus. But there is mass panic, official denial, draconian measures against the terrible ‘disease’. Only Mitch, Kaye and Dicken can solve the evolutionary puzzle that will determine the future of the human race, if a future exists at all.

## DARWIN’S RADIO

Greg Bear


## COPYRIGHT

HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1999

Copyright © Greg Bear 1999

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006511380

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007369256

Version: 2014–08–05

## DEDICATION

For My Mother,

WILMA MERRIMAN BEAR

1915–1997

## CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: Herod’s Winter

Chapter One: The Alps, near the Austrian Border with Italy August

Chapter Two: Republic of Georgia

Chapter Three

Chapter Four: Gordi

Chapter Five: Innsbruck, Austria

Chapter Six: Eliava Phage Institute, Tbilisi

Chapter Seven: New York

Chapter Eight: Long Island, New York

Chapter Nine: Manhattan

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve: Atlanta, 1600 Clifton Road: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention September

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen: Atlanta, Georgia October

Chapter Fifteen: Boston

Chapter Sixteen: Innsbruck, Austria

Chapter Seventeen: Long Island

Chapter Eighteen: Atlanta, the CDC

Chapter Nineteen: Long Island

Chapter Twenty: London

Chapter Twenty-One: Washington, DC

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three: Atlanta, the CDC

Chapter Twenty-Four: Long Island

Chapter Twenty-Five: Washington, DC

Chapter Twenty-Six: Seattle December

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Atlanta, the CDC Late January

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Long Island

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Taskforce Primate Lab, Baltimore, Maryland February

Chapter Thirty: University of Washington, Seattle

Chapter Thirty-One: Bethesda, the National Institutes of Health Campus

Chapter Thirty-Two: University of Washington, Seattle

Chapter Thirty-Three: Bethesda, the NIH Campus, the Magnuson Clinical Center, Building 10

Chapter Thirty-Four: Seattle

Chapter Thirty-Five Bethesda, the NIH Campus

Part Two: Sheva Spring

Chapter Thirty-Six: Eastern Washington State

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Baltimore, Maryland

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Baltimore, Americol Headquarters February 28

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Bethesda March

Chapter Forty: Baltimore

Chapter Forty-One: Seattle

Chapter Forty-Two: Atlanta

Chapter Forty-Three: San Diego, California March 28

Chapter Forty-Four: April 1

Chapter Forty-Five: Baltimore

Chapter Forty-Six: Atlanta

Chapter Forty-Seven: Bethesda, the NIH Campus

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine: Baltimore

Chapter Fifty: Baltimore April 15

Chapter Fifty-One: Richmond, Virginia

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three: Washington, DC

Chapter Fifty-Four: Baltimore

Chapter Fifty-Five: Washington, DC

Chapter Fifty-Six: New York

Chapter Fifty-Seven: Baltimore

Chapter Fifty-Eight: Beresford, New York

Chapter Fifty-Nine: Bethesda, the NIH, Building 10

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two: Albany, State University of New York

Chapter Sixty-Three: Baltimore

Chapter Sixty-Four: Atlanta

Chapter Sixty-Five: Baltimore April 28

Chapter Sixty-Six: Approaching Washington, DC

Chapter Sixty-Seven: Leaving Baltimore

Chapter Sixty-Eight: West Virginia and Ohio

Chapter Sixty-Nine: Athens, Ohio May 1

Chapter Seventy: Bethesda May 5

Chapter Seventy-One: Oregon May 10

Chapter Seventy-Two: Seattle, Washington/Washington, DC May 14

Chapter Seventy-Three

Part Three: Stella Nova

Chapter Seventy-Four: Seattle June

Chapter Seventy-Five: Bethesda, the NIH, Building 10 July

Chapter Seventy-Six: August 10

Chapter Seventy-Seven: August 12

Chapter Seventy-Eight: Bethesda, the NIH, Building 52 October

Chapter Seventy-Nine: Seattle December

Chapter Eighty: Bethesda, the NIH, Building 52 January

Chapter Eighty-One: Seattle February

Chapter Eighty-Two: Bethesda, the NIH, Building 52

Chapter Eighty-Three: Snohomish County

Chapter Eighty-Four: Kumash County, Eastern Washington May

Chapter Eighty-Five

Chapter Eighty-Six

Chapter Eighty-Seven: May 18

Chapter Eighty-Eight: Arlington, Virginia

Chapter Eighty-Nine: Kumash, Washington

Chapter Ninety: June

Chapter Ninety-One

Chapter Ninety-Two: Northeastern Oregon

Epilogue: Tucson, Arizona Three Years Later

Keep Reading

Afterword

A Short Biological Primer

Short Glossary of Scientific Terms

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE Herod’s Winter

## CHAPTER ONE The Alps, near the Austrian Border with Italy August

The flat afternoon sky spread over the black and gray mountains like a stage backdrop, the color of a dog’s pale crazy eye.

His ankles aching and back burning from a misplaced loop of nylon rope, Mitch Rafelson followed Tilde’s quick female form along the margin between the white firn and a dust of new snow on the field. Mingled with the ice boulders of the fall, crenels and spikes of old ice had been sculpted by summer heat into milky, flint-edged knives.

To Mitch’s left, the mountains rose over the jumble of black boulders flanking the broken slope of the ice fall. On the right, in the full glare of the sun, the ice rose in blinding brilliance to the perfect catenary of the cirque.

Franco was about twenty yards to the south, hidden by the rim of Mitch’s goggles. Mitch could hear him but not see him. Some kilometers behind, also out of sight now, was the brilliant orange, rounded fiberglass and aluminum bivouac where they had made their last rest stop. He did not know how many kilometers they were from the last hutte, whose name he had forgotten; but the memory of bright sun and warm tea in the sitting room, the Gaststube, gave him some strength. When this ordeal was over, he would get another cup of strong tea and sit in the Gaststube and thank god he was warm and alive.

They were approaching the wall of rock and a bridge of snow lying over a chasm dug by melt water. These now-frozen streams formed during the spring and summer and eroded the edge of the glacier. Beyond the bridge, depending from a U-shaped depression in the wall, rose what looked like a gnome’s upside-down castle, or a pipe organ carved from ice: a frozen waterfall spread out in many thick columns. Chunks of dislodged ice and drifts of snow gathered around the dirty white of the base; sun burnished the cream and white at the top.

Franco came into view as if out of a fog and joined up with Tilde. So far they had been on relatively level glacier. Now it seemed that Tilde and Franco were going to scale the pipe organ.

Mitch stopped for a moment and reached behind to pull out his ice ax. He pushed up his goggles, crouched, then fell back on his butt with a grunt to check his crampons. Ice balls between the spikes yielded to his knife. Tilde walked back a few yards to speak to him. He looked up at her, his thick dark eyebrows forming a bridge over a pushed-up nose, round green eyes blinking at the cold.

‘This saves us an hour,’ Tilde said, pointing at the pipe organ. ‘It’s late. You’ve slowed us down.’ Her English came precise from thin lips, with a seductive Austrian accent. She had a slight but well-proportioned figure, white blond hair tucked under a dark blue Polartech cap, an elfin face with cold clear gray eyes. Attractive, but not Mitch’s type; still, they had been lovers of the moment before Franco arrived.

‘I told you I haven’t climbed in eight years,’ Mitch said. Franco was showing him up handily. The Italian leaned on his ax near the pipe organ.

Tilde weighed and measured everything, took only the best, discarded the second best, yet never cut ties in case her past connections should prove useful. Franco had a square jaw and white teeth and a square head with thick black hair shaved at the sides, an eagle nose, Mediterranean olive skin, broad shoulders and arms knotted with muscles, fine hands, very strong. He was not too smart for Tilde, but no dummy, either. Mitch could imagine Tilde pulled from her thick Austrian forest by the prospect of bedding Franco, light against dark, like layers in a coffee and vanilla torte. He felt curiously detached from this image. Tilde made love with a mechanical rigor that had deceived Mitch for a time, until he realized she was merely going through the moves, one after the other, as a kind of intellectual exercise. She ate the same way. Nothing moved her deeply, yet she had real wit at times, and a lovely smile that drew lines on the corners of those thin, precise lips.

‘We must go down the mountain before sunset,’ Tilde said. ‘I don’t know what the weather will do. It’s two hours to the cave. Not very far, but a hard climb. If we’re lucky, you’ll have an hour to look at what we’ve found.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Mitch said. ‘How far are we from the tourist trails? I haven’t seen any red paint in hours.’

Tilde pulled away her goggles to wipe them, gave him a flash smile with no warmth. ‘No tourists up here. Most good climbers stay away, too. But I know my way.’

‘Snow goddess,’ Mitch said.

‘What do you expect?’ she said, taking it as a compliment. ‘I’ve climbed here since I was a girl.’

‘You’re still a girl,’ Mitch said. ‘Twenty-five, twenty-six?’

She had never revealed her age to Mitch. Now she appraised him as if he were a gemstone she might reconsider purchasing. ‘I am thirty-two. Franco is forty but he’s faster than you.’

‘To hell with Franco,’ Mitch said without anger.

Tilde curled her lip in amusement. ‘We are all weird today,’ she said, turning away. ‘Even Franco feels it. But another Iceman … what would that be worth?’

The very thought shortened Mitch’s breath, and he did not need that now. His excitement curled back in on itself, mixing with his exhaustion. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

They had opened their mercenary little hearts to him back in Salzburg. They were ambitious but not stupid; Tilde was absolutely certain that their find was not just another climber’s body. She should know. At fourteen, she had helped carry out two bodies spit loose out from the tongues of glaciers. One had been over a hundred years old.

Mitch wondered what would happen if they had found a true Iceman. Tilde, he was sure, would in the long run not know how to handle fame and success. Franco was stolid enough to make do, but Tilde was in her own way fragile. Like a diamond, she could cut steel, but strike her from the wrong angle and she would come to pieces.

Franco might survive fame, but would he survive Tilde? Mitch, despite everything, found he liked Franco.

‘It’s another three kilometers,’ Tilde told him. ‘Let’s go.’

Together, she and Franco showed him how to climb the frozen waterfall. ‘This flows only during mid-summer,’ Franco said. ‘It is ice for a month now. Understand how it freezes. It is strong down here.’ He struck the pale gray ice of the pipe organ’s massive base with his ax. The ice tinked, spun off a few chips. ‘But it is verglas, lots of bubbles, higher up – mushy. Big chunks fall if you hit it wrong. Hurt somebody. Tilde could cut some steps there, not you. You climb between Tilde and me.’

Tilde would go first, an honest acknowledgement by Franco that she was the stronger and better climber. Franco slung the ropes and Mitch showed them he remembered the loops and knots from climbing in the Cascades, in Washington state. Tilde made a face and retied the loop Alpine style around his waist and shoulders. ‘You can front most of the way. Remember, I will chisel steps if you need them,’ Tilde said. ‘I don’t want you sending ice down on Franco.’

She took the lead.

Halfway up the pillar, digging in with the front points of his crampons, Mitch passed a threshold and his exhaustion seemed to leak away in spurts, through his feet, leaving him nauseated for a moment. Then his body felt clean, as if flushed with fresh water, and his breath came easy. He followed Tilde, chunking his crampons into the ice and leaning in very close, grabbing at whatever holds were available. He used his ax sparingly. The air was actually warmer near the ice.

It took them fifteen minutes to climb past the mid point, onto the cream-colored ice. The sun came from behind low gray clouds and lit up the frozen waterfall at a sharp angle, pinning him on a wall of translucent gold.

He waited for Tilde to tell them she was over the top and secure. Franco gave his laconic reply. Mitch wedged his way between two columns. The ice was indeed unpredictable here. He dug in with side points, sending a cloud of chips down on Franco. Franco cursed, but not once did Mitch break free and simply hang, and that was a blessing.

He fronted and crawled up the bumpy rounded lip of the waterfall. His gloves slipped alarmingly on runnels of ice. He flailed with his boots, caught a ridge of rock with his right boot, dug in, found purchase on more rock, waited for a moment to catch his breath, and humped up beside Tilde like a walrus.

Dusty gray boulders on each side defined the bed of the frozen creek. He looked up the narrow rocky valley, half in shadow, where a small glacier had once flowed down from the east, carving its characteristic U-shaped notch. There had not been much snow for the last few years and the glacier had flowed on, vanishing from the notch, which now lay several dozen yards above the main body of the glacier.

Mitch rolled on his stomach and helped Franco over the top. Tilde stood to one side, perched on the edge as if she knew no fear, perfectly balanced, slender, gorgeous.

She frowned down on Mitch. ‘We are getting later,’ she said. ‘What can you learn in half an hour?’

Mitch shrugged.

‘We must start back no later than sunset,’ Franco said to Tilde, then grinned at Mitch. ‘Not so tough son of a bitch ice, no?’

‘Not bad,’ Mitch said.

‘He learns okay,’ Franco said to Tilde, who lifted her eyes. ‘You climb ice before?’

‘Not like that,’ Mitch said.

They walked over the frozen creek for a few dozen yards. ‘Two more climbs,’ Tilde said. ‘Franco, you lead.’

Mitch looked up through crystalline air over the rim of the notch at the saw-tooth horns of higher mountains. He still could not tell where he was. Franco and Tilde preferred him ignorant. They had come at least twenty kilometers since their stay in the big stone Gaststube, with the tea.

Turning, he spotted the orange bivouac, about four kilometers away and hundreds of meters below. It sat just behind a saddle, now in shadow.

The snow on the mountains seemed very thin. The mountains had just passed through the warmest summer in modern Alpine history, with reduced snow pack, increased glacier melt, short-term floods in the valleys from heavy rain, and only light snow from past seasons. Global warming was a media cliché now; from where he sat, to his inexpert eye, it seemed all too real. The Alps might be naked in a few decades.

The relative heat and dryness had opened up a route to the old cave, allowing Franco and Tilde to discover a secret tragedy.

Franco announced he was secure, and Mitch inched his way up the last rock face, feeling the gneiss chip and skitter beneath his boots. The stone here was flaky, powdery soft in places; snow had lain over this area for a long time, easily thousands of years.

Franco lent him a hand and together they belayed the rope as Tilde scrambled up behind. She stood on the rim, shielded her eyes against the direct sun, now barely a hand-span above the ragged horizon. ‘Do you know where you are?’ she asked Mitch.

Mitch shook his head. ‘I’ve never been this high.’

‘A valley boy,’ Franco said with a grin.

Mitch squinted.

They stared over a rounded and slick field of ice, the thin finger of a glacier that had once flowed nearly seven miles in several spectacular cascades. Now, along this branch, the flow was lagging. Little new snow fed the glacier’s head, higher up. The sun-blazed rock wall above the icy rip of the bergschrund rose several thousand feet straight up, the peak higher than Mitch cared to look.

‘There,’ Tilde said, and pointed to the opposite rocks below an arête. With some effort, Mitch made out a tiny red dot against the shadowed black and gray: a cloth banner Franco had planted on their last trip. They set off over the ice.

The cave, a natural crevice, had a small opening, three feet in diameter, artificially concealed by a low wall of head-sized boulders. Tilde took out her digital camera and photographed the opening from several angles, backing up and walking around while Franco pulled down the wall and Mitch surveyed the entrance.

‘How far back?’ Mitch asked when Tilde rejoined them.

‘Ten meters,’ Franco said. ‘Very cold back there, better than a freezer.’

‘But not for long,’ Tilde said. ‘I think this is the first year this area has been so open. Next summer, it could get above freezing. A warm wind could get back in there.’ She made a face and pinched her nose.

Mitch unslung his pack and rummaged for the electric torches, the pack of hobby knives, vinyl gloves, all he could find in the stores down in the town. He dropped these into a small plastic bag, sealed the bag, slipped it into his coat pocket, and looked between Franco and Tilde.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Go,’ Tilde said, making a pushing motion with her hands. She smiled generously.

He stooped, got on his hands and knees, and entered the cave first. Franco came a few seconds later, and Tilde just behind him.

Mitch held the strap of the small torch in his teeth, pushing and squeezing forward six or eight inches at a time. Ice and fine powdered snow formed a thin blanket on the floor of the cave. The walls were smooth and rose to a tight wedge near the ceiling. He would not be able to even crouch here. Franco called forward, ‘It will get wider.’

‘A cozy little hole,’ Tilde said, her voice hollow.

The air smelled neutral, empty. Cold, well below zero. The rock sucked away his heat even through the insulated jacket and snow pants. He passed over a vein of ice, milky against the black rock, and scraped it with his fingers. Solid. The snow and ice must have packed in at least this far when the cave was covered. Just beyond the ice vein, the cave began to slant upward, and he felt a faint puff of air, coming from an opening, another wedge in the rock, recently clear of ice.

Mitch felt a little queasy, not at the thought of what he was about to see, but at the unorthodox and even criminal character of this investigation. The slightest wrong move, any breath of this getting out, news of his not going through the proper channels and making sure everything was legitimate …

Mitch had gotten in trouble with institutions before. He had lost his job at the Hayer Museum in Seattle less than six months before, but that had been a political thing, ridiculous and unfair.

Until now, he had never slighted Dame Science herself.

He had argued with Franco and Tilde back in the hotel in Salzburg for hours, but they had refused to budge. If he had not decided to go with them, they would have taken somebody else – Tilde had suggested perhaps an unemployed medical student she had once dated. Tilde had a wide selection of ex-boyfriends, it seemed, all of them much less qualified and far less scrupulous than Mitch.

Whatever Tilde’s motives or moral character, Mitch was not the type to turn her down, then turn them in; everybody has his limits, his boundary in the social wilderness. Mitch’s boundary began at the prospect of getting ex-girlfriends in trouble with the Austrian police.

Franco plucked a crampon on the sole of Mitch’s boot. ‘Problem?’ he asked.

‘No problem,’ Mitch replied, and grunted forward another six inches.

A sudden oblong of light formed in one eye, like a large out-of-focus moon. His body seemed to balloon in size. He swallowed hard. ‘Shit,’ he muttered, hoping that didn’t mean what he thought it meant. The oblong faded. His body returned to normal.

Here, the cave constricted to a narrow throat, less than a foot high and twenty-one or twenty-two inches wide. Angling his head sideways, he grabbed hold of a crack just beyond the throat and shinnied through. His coat caught and he heard a tearing sound as he strained to unhook and slip past.

‘That’s the bad part,’ Franco said. ‘I can barely make it.’

‘Why did you go this far?’ Mitch asked, gathering his courage in the broader but still dark and cramped space beyond.

‘Because it was here, no?’ Tilde said, voice like the call of a distant bird, ‘I dared Franco. He dared me.’ She laughed and the tinkling echoed in the gloom beyond. Mitch’s neck hair rose. The new Iceman was laughing with them, perhaps at them. He was dead already. He had nothing to worry about, plenty to be amused about, that so many people would make themselves miserable to see his mortal remains.

‘How long since you last came here?’ Mitch asked. He wondered why he hadn’t asked before. Perhaps until now he hadn’t really believed. They had come this far, no sign of pulling a joke on him, something he doubted Tilde was constitutionally capable of anyway.

‘A week, eight days,’ Franco said. The passage was wide enough that Franco could push himself up beside Mitch’s legs, and Mitch could shine the torch back into his face. Franco gave him a toothy Mediterranean smile.

Mitch looked forward. He could see something ahead, dark, like a small pile of ashes.

‘We are close?’ Tilde asked. ‘Mitch, first it is just a foot.’

Mitch tried to parse this sentence. But Tilde spoke pure metric. A ‘foot,’ he realized, was not distance, it was an appendage. ‘I don’t see it yet.’

‘No, there are ashes first,’ Franco said. ‘That may be it.’ He pointed to the small black pile. Mitch could feel the air falling slowly just in front of him, flowing along his sides, leaving the rear of the cave undisturbed.

He moved forward with reverent slowness, inspecting everything with the torch. Any slightest bit of evidence that might have survived an earlier entry – chips of stone, pieces of twig or wood, markings on the walls …

Nothing. He got on his hands and knees with a great sense of relief and crawled forward. Franco became impatient.

‘It is right ahead,’ Franco said, tapping his crampon again.

‘Damn it, I’m taking this real slow, not to miss anything, you know?’ Mitch said. He restrained an urge to kick out like a mule.

‘All right,’ Franco said amiably.

Mitch could see around the curve. The floor flattened slightly. He smelled something grassy, salty, like fresh fish. His neck hair rose again, and a mist formed over his eyes. Ancient sympathies.

‘I see it,’ he said. A foot pushed out beyond a ledge, curled up on itself, small, really, like a child’s, very wrinkled and dark brown, almost black. The cave opened up at that point and there were scraps of dried and blackened fiber spread on the floor – grass perhaps. Reeds. Ötzi, the original Iceman, had worn a reed cape over his head.

‘My god,’ Mitch said. Another white oblong in his eye, slowly fading, and a whisper of pain in his temple.

‘It’s bigger up there,’ Tilde called. ‘We can all fit and not disturb them.’

‘Them?’ Mitch asked, shining his light back between his legs.

Franco smiled, framed by Mitch’s knees.

‘The real surprise,’ Franco said. ‘There are two.’

## CHAPTER TWO Republic of Georgia

Kaye curled up in the passenger seat of the whining little Fiat as Lado guided it along the alarming twists and turns of the Georgia Military Highway. Though sunburned and exhausted, she could not sleep. Her long legs twitched with every curve. At a piggish squeal of the nearly bald tires, she pushed her hands back through short-cut brown hair and yawned deliberately.

Lado sensed the silence had gone on too long. He glanced at Kaye with soft brown eyes in a finely wrinkled and sun-browned face, lifted his cigarette over the steering wheel, and jutted out his chin. ‘In shit is our salvation, yes?’ he asked.

Kaye smiled despite herself. ‘Please don’t try to cheer me up,’ she said.

Lado ignored that. ‘Good on us. Georgia has something to offer the world. We have great sewage.’ He rolled his r’s elegantly, and ‘sewage’ came out see-yu-edge.

‘Sewage,’ she murmured. ‘Seee-yu-age.’

‘I say it right?’ Lado asked.

‘Perfectly,’ Kaye said.

Lado Jakeli was chief scientist at the Eliava Phage Institute in Tbilisi, where they extracted phage – viruses that attack only bacteria – from local city and hospital sewage and farm waste, and from specimens gathered around the world. Now, the West, including Kaye, had come hat in hand to learn more from the Georgians about the curative properties of phage.

She had hit it off with the Eliava staff. After a week of conferences and lab tours, some of the younger scientists had invited her to accompany them to the rolling hills and brilliant green sheep fields at the base of Mount Kazbeg.

Things had changed so quickly. Just this morning, Lado had driven all the way from Tbilisi to their base camp near the old and solitary Gergeti Orthodox church. In an envelope he had carried a fax from UN Peacekeeping headquarters in Tbilisi, the capital.

Lado had downed a pot of coffee at the camp, then, ever the gentleman, and her sponsor besides, had offered to take her to Gordi, a small town seventy-five miles southwest of Kazbeg.

Kaye had had no choice. Unexpectedly, and at the worst possible time, her past had caught up with her.

The UN team had gone through entry records to find non-Georgian medical experts with a certain expertise. Hers was the only name that had come up: Kaye Lang, thirty-four, partner with her husband, Saul Madsen, in EcoBacter Research. In the early nineties, she had studied forensic medicine at the State University of New York with an eye to going into criminal investigation. She had changed her perspective within a year, switching to microbiology, with emphasis on genetic engineering; but she was the only foreigner in Georgia with even the slightest degree of training the UN needed.

Lado was driving her through some of the most beautiful countryside she had ever seen. In the shadows of the Central Caucasus they had passed terraced mountain fields, small stone farmhouses, stone silos and churches, small towns with wood and stone buildings, houses with friendly and beautifully carved porches opening onto narrow brick or cobble or dirt roads, towns dotted loosely on broad rumpled blankets of sheep- and goat-grazed meadow and thick forest.

Here, even the seemingly empty expanses had been swarmed over and fought for across the centuries, like every place she had seen in Western and now Eastern Europe. Sometimes she felt suffocated by the sheer closeness of her fellow humans, by the gap-toothed smiles of old men and women standing by the side of the road watching traffic come and go from new and unfamiliar worlds. Wrinkled friendly faces, gnarled hands waving at the little car.

All the young people were in the cities, leaving the old to tend the countryside, except in the mountain resorts. Georgia was planning to turn itself into a nation of resorts. Her economy was growing in double digits each year; her currency, the lari, was strengthening as well, and had long since replaced rubles; soon would replace Western dollars. They were opening oil pipelines from the Caspian to the Black Sea; and in the land where wine got its name, it was becoming a major export.

In the next few years, Georgia would export a new and very different wine: solutions of phage to heal a world losing the war against bacterial diseases.

The Fiat swung into the inside lane as they rounded a blind curve. Kaye swallowed hard but said nothing. Lado had been very solicitous toward her at the institute. At times in the past week, Kaye had caught him looking at her with an expression of gnarled, old world speculation, eyes drawn to wrinkled slits, like a satyr carved out of olive wood and stained brown. He had a reputation among the women who worked at Eliava, that he could not be trusted all the time, particularly with the young ones. But he had always treated Kaye with the utmost civility, even, as now, with concern. He did not want her to be sad, yet he could not think of any reason she should be cheerful.

Despite its beauty, Georgia had many blemishes: civil war, assassinations, and now, mass graves.

They lurched into a wall of rain. The windshield wipers flapped black tails and cleaned about a third of Lado’s view. ‘Good on Ioseb Stalin, he left us sewage,’ he mused. ‘Good son of Georgia. Our most famous export, better than wine.’ Lado grinned falsely at her. He seemed both ashamed and defensive. Kaye could not help but draw him out. ‘He killed millions,’ she murmured. ‘He killed Dr Eliava.’

Lado stared grimly through the streaks to see what lay beyond the short hood. He geared down and braked, then careened around a ditch big enough to hide a cow. Kaye made a small squeak and grabbed the side of her seat. There were no guard rails on this stretch, and below the highway yawned a steep drop of at least three hundred meters to a glacial melt river. ‘It was Beria declared Dr Eliava a People’s Enemy,’ Lado said matter-of-factly, as if relating old family history. ‘Beria was head of Georgian KGB then, local child-abusing sonabitch, not mad wolf of all Russia.’

‘He was Stalin’s man,’ Kaye said, trying to keep her mind off the road. She could not understand any pride the Georgians took in Stalin.

‘They were all Stalin’s men or they died,’ Lado said.

He shrugged. ‘There was a big stink here when Khrushchev said Stalin was bad. What do we know? He screwed us so many ways for so many years we thought he must be a husband.’

This Kaye found amusing. Lado took encouragement from her grin.

‘Some still want to return to prosperity under Communism. Or we have prosperity in shit.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘I’ll take the shit.’

They descended in the next hour into less fearsome foothills and plateaux. Road signs in curling Georgian script showed the rusted pocks of dozens of bullet holes. ‘Half an hour, no more,’ Lado said.

The thick rain made the border between day and night difficult to judge. Lado switched on the Fiat’s dim little headlights as they approached a crossroad and the turn-off to the small town of Gordi.

Two armored personnel carriers flanked the highway just before the crossroads. Five Russian peacekeepers dressed in slickers and rounded piss-bucket helmets wearily flagged them down.

Lado braked the Fiat to a stop, canted slightly on the shoulder. Kaye could see another ditch just yards ahead, right in the crotch of the crossroad. They would have to drive on the shoulder to go around it.

Lado rolled down his window. A Russian soldier of nineteen or twenty, with rosy choirboy cheeks, peered in. His helmet dribbled rain on Lado’s sleeve. Lado spoke to him in Russian.

‘American?’ the young Russian asked Kaye. She showed him her passport, her EU and CIS business licenses, and the fax requesting – practically ordering – her presence in Gordi. The soldier took the fax and frowned as he tried to read it, getting it thoroughly wet. He stepped back to consult with an officer squatting in the rear hatch of the nearest carrier.

‘They do not want to be here,’ Lado muttered to Kaye. ‘And we do not want them. But we asked for their help … Who do we blame?’

The rain stopped. Kaye stared into the misting gloom ahead. She heard crickets and birdsong above the engine whine.

‘Go down, go left,’ the soldier told Lado, proud of his English. He smiled for Kaye’s benefit and waved them on to another soldier standing like a fence post in the gray gloom beside the ditch. Lado engaged the clutch and the little car bucked around the ditch, past the third peacekeeper, and onto the side road.

Lado opened the window all the way. Cool moist evening air swirled through the car, lifted the short hair over Kaye’s neck. The roadsides were covered with tight-packed birch. Briefly the air smelled foul. They were near people. Then Kaye thought maybe it was not the town’s sewage that smelled so. Her nose wrinkled and her stomach knotted. But that was not likely. Their destination was a mile or so outside the town, and Gordi was still at least two miles off the highway.

Lado came to a streamlet and slowly forded the quick-rushing shallow water. The wheels sank to their hubcaps, but the car emerged safely and continued on for another hundred meters. Stars peeked through swift-gliding clouds. Mountains drew jagged dark blanks against the sky. The forest came up and fell back and then they saw Gordi, stone buildings, some newer two-story square wooden houses with tiny windows, a single concrete municipal cube without decoration, roads of rutted asphalt and old cobble. No lights. Black, sightless windows. The electricity was out again.

‘I don’t know this town,’ Lado muttered. He slammed on the brakes, jolting Kaye from a reverie. The car idled noisily in the small town square, surrounded by two-story buildings. Kaye could make out a faded Intourist sign over an inn named the Rustaveli Tiger.

Lado switched on the tiny overhead light and pulled out the faxed map. He flung the map aside in disgust and heaved open the Fiat’s door. The hinges made a loud metal groan. He leaned out and yelled in Georgian, ‘Where is the grave?’

Darkness was its own excuse.

‘Beautiful,’ Lado said. He slammed the door twice to make it catch. Kaye pressed her lips together firmly as the car lurched forward. They descended with a high-pitched gnash of gears through a small street of shops, dark and shuttered with corrugated steel, and out the backside of the village, past two abandoned shacks, heaps of gravel and scattered bales of straw.

After a few minutes, they spotted lights and the glow of torches and a single small campfire, then heard the racketing burr of a portable generator and voices loud in the hollow of the night.

The grave was closer than the map had showed, less than a mile from the town. She wondered if the villagers had heard the screams, or indeed if there had been any screams. The fun was over.

The UN team wore gas masks equipped with industrial aerosol filters. Nervous Georgian Republic Security soldiers had to resort to bandannas tied around their faces. They looked sinister, comically so under the circumstances. Their officers wore white cloth surgical masks.

The head of the sakrebulo, the local council, a short big-fisted man with a tall shock of wiry black hair and a prominent nose, stood with a doggishly unhappy face beside the security officers.

The UN team leader, a US army colonel from South Carolina named Nicholas Beck, made quick introductions and passed Kaye one of the UN masks. She felt self-conscious but put it on. Beck’s aide, a black female corporal named Hunter, passed her a pair of white latex surgical gloves. They gave familiar slaps against her wrists as she put them on.

Beck and Hunter led Kaye and Lado away from the campfire and the white jeeps down a small path through ragged forest and scrub to the graves.

‘The council chief out there has his enemies. Some locals from the opposition dug the trenches and then called UN headquarters in Tbilisi,’ Beck told her. ‘I don’t think the Republic Security folks want us here. We can’t get any cooperation in Tbilisi. On short notice, you were the only one we could find with any expertise.’

Three parallel trenches had been re-opened and marked by electric lights on tall poles, staked into the sandy soil and powered by a portable generator. Between the stakes lengths of red and yellow plastic tape hung lifeless in the still air.

Kaye walked around the first trench and lifted her mask. Wrinkling her nose in anticipation, she sniffed. There was no distinct smell other than dirt and mud.

‘They’re more than two years old,’ she said. She gave Beck the mask. Lado stopped about ten paces behind them, reluctant to go near the graves.

‘We need to be sure of that,’ Beck said.

Kaye walked to the second trench, stooped, and played the beam of her flashlight over the heaps of fabric and dark bones and dry dirt. The soil was sandy and dry, possibly part of the bed of an old melt stream from the mountains. The bodies were almost unrecognizable, pale brown bone encrusted with dirt, wrinkled brown and black flesh. Clothing had faded to the color of the soil, but these patches and shreds were not army uniforms: they were dresses, pants, coats. Woolens and cottons had not completely decayed. Kaye looked for synthetics; they could establish a maximum age for the grave. She could not immediately see any.

She moved the beam up to the walls of the trench. The thickest roots visible, cut through by spades, were about half an inch in diameter. The nearest trees stood like tall thin ghosts ten yards away.

A middle-aged Republic Security officer with the formidable name of Vakhtang Chikurishivili, handsome in a burly way, with heavy shoulders and a thick, often-broken nose, stepped forward. He was not wearing a mask. He held up something dark. It took Kaye a few seconds to recognize it as a boot. Chikurishivili addressed Lado in consonant-laden Georgian.

‘He says the shoes are old,’ Lado translated. ‘He says these people died fifty years ago. Maybe more.’

Chikurishivili angrily swung his arm around and shot a quick stream of words, mixed Georgian and Russian, at Lado and Beck.

Lado translated. ‘He says the Georgians who dug this up are stupid. This is not for the UN. This was from long before the civil war. He says these are not Ossetians.’

‘Who mentioned Ossetians?’ Beck asked dryly.

Kaye examined the boot. It had a thick leather sole and leather uppers, and its hanging strings were rotted and encrusted with powdery clods. The leather was hard as a rock. She peered into the interior. Dirt, but no socks or tissue – the boot had not been pulled from a decayed foot. Chikurishivili met her querulous look defiantly, then whipped out a match and lit up a cigarette.

Staged, Kaye thought. She remembered the classes she had taken in the Bronx, classes that had eventually driven her from criminal medicine. The field visits to real homicide scenes. The putrescence protection masks.

Beck spoke to the officer soothingly in broken Georgian and better Russian. Lado gently re-translated his attempts. Beck then took Kaye’s elbow and moved her to a long canvas canopy that had been erected a few yards from the trenches. Under the canopy, two battered folding card tables supported pieces of bodies. Completely amateur, Kaye thought. Perhaps the enemies of the head of the sakrebulo had laid out the bodies and taken pictures to prove their point.

She circled the table: two torsos and a skull. There was a fair amount of mummified flesh left on the torsos, and some unfamiliar ligaments on the skull around the forehead, eyes and cheeks, like dark straps, quite dry. She looked for signs of insect casings and found dead blowfly larvae on one withered throat, but not many. The bodies had been buried within a few hours of death. She surmised they had not been buried in the dead of winter, when blowflies were not about. Of course, winters at this altitude were mild in Georgia.

She picked up a small pocket knife lying next to the closest torso and lifted a shred of fabric, what had once been white cotton, then pried up a stiff, concave flap of skin over the abdomen. There were bullet entry holes in the fabric and abdominal skin overlying the pelvis. ‘God,’ she said.

Within the pelvis, cradled in dirt and stiff wraps of dried tissue, lay a smaller body, curled, little more than a heap of tiny bones, its skull collapsed.

‘Colonel.’ She showed Beck. His face turned stony.

The bodies could conceivably have been fifty years old, but if so, they were in remarkably good condition. Some wool and cotton remained. Everything was very dry. Drainage swept around this area now. The trenches were deep. But the roots –

Chikurishivili spoke again. His tone seemed more cooperative, even guilty. There was a lot of guilt to go around over the centuries.

‘He says they are both female,’ Lado whispered to Kaye.

‘I see that,’ she muttered.

She walked around the table to examine the second torso. This one had no skin over the abdomen. She scraped the dirt aside, making the torso rock with a sound like a dried gourd. Another small skull lay within the pelvis, a fetus about six months along, same as the other. The torso’s limbs were missing; Kaye could not tell if the legs had been held together in the grave.

Neither of the fetuses had been expelled by pressure of abdominal gases.

‘Both pregnant,’ she said. Lado translated this into Georgian.

Beck said in a low voice, ‘We count about sixty individuals. The women seem to have been shot. It looks as if the men were shot or clubbed to death.’

Chikurishivili pointed to Beck, and then back to the camp, and shouted, his face ruddy in the backwash of flashlight glow. Jugashvili, Stalin. The officer said the graves had been dug a few years before the Great People’s War, during the purges. The late 1930s. That would make them almost seventy years old, ancient news, nothing for the UN to become involved in. Lado said, ‘He wants the UN and the Russians out of here. He says this is an internal matter, not for peacekeepers.’

Beck spoke again, less soothingly, to the Georgian officer. Lado decided he did not want to be in the middle of this exchange and walked around to where Kaye was leaning over the second torso. ‘Nasty business,’ he said.

‘Too long,’ Kaye spoke softly.

‘What?’ Lado asked.

‘Seventy years is much too long,’ she said. ‘Tell me what they’re arguing about.’ She prodded the unfamiliar straps of tissue or leather around the eye sockets with the pocket knife. They seemed to form a kind of mask. Had they been hooded before being executed? She did not think so. The attachments were dark and stringy and persistent.

‘The UN man is saying there is no limit on war crimes,’ Lado told her. ‘No statue – what is it – statute of limitations.’

‘He’s right,’ Kaye said. She rolled the skull over gently. The occipital had been fractured laterally and pushed in to a depth of three centimeters.

She returned her attention to the tiny skeleton cradled within the pelvis of the second torso. She had taken some courses in embryology in her second year in med school. The fetus’s bone structure seemed a little odd, but she did not want to damage the skull by pulling it loose from the caked soil and dried tissue. She had intruded enough already.

Kaye felt queasy, sickened not by the shriveled and dried remains, but by what her imagination was already reconstructing. She straightened and waved to get Beck’s attention.

‘These women were shot in the stomach,’ she said. Kill all the firstborn children. Furious monsters. ‘Murdered.’ She clamped her teeth.

‘How long ago?’

‘He may be right about the age of the boot, if it came from this grave, but that doesn’t look right to me. The roots around the edge of the trenches are too small. My guess is the victims died as recently as two or three years ago. The dirt here looks dry, but the soil is probably acid, and that would dissolve any bones over a few years old. Then there’s the fabric; it looks like wool and cotton, and that means the grave is just a few years old. If it’s synthetic, it could be older, but that gives us a date after Stalin, too.’

Beck approached her and lifted his mask. ‘Can you help us until the others get here?’ he asked in a whisper.

‘How long?’ Kaye asked.

‘Four, five days,’ Beck said. Several paces distant, Chikurishivili shifted his gaze between them, jaw clenched, resentful, as if cops had interrupted a domestic quarrel.

Kaye caught herself holding her breath. She turned away, stepped back, sucked in some air, then asked, ‘You’re going to start a war crimes investigation?’

‘The Russians think we should,’ Beck said. ‘They’re hot to discredit the new Communists back home. A few old atrocities could supply them with fresh ammunition. If you could give us a best guess – two years, five, thirty, whatever?’

‘Less than ten. Probably less than five. I’m very rusty,’ she said. ‘I can only do a few things. Take samples, some tissue specimens. Not a full autopsy, of course.’

‘You’re a thousand times better than letting the locals muck around,’ Beck said. ‘I don’t trust any of them. I’m not sure the Russians can be trusted, either. They all have axes to grind, one way or the other.’

Lado kept a stiff face and did not comment, nor did he translate for Chikurishivili.

Kaye felt what she had known would come, had dreaded: the old dark mood creep over her. She had thought that by being away from Saul and traveling, she might shake the bad times, the bad feelings. She had felt liberated watching the doctors and technicians working at the Eliava Institute, doing so much good with so few resources, literally pulling health out of sewage. The grand and beautiful side of the Republic of Georgia. Now … Flip the coin. Papa Ioseb Stalin or ethnic cleansers, Georgians trying to move out Armenians and Ossetians, Abkhazis trying to move out Georgians, Russians sending in troops, Chechens becoming involved.

Dirty little wars between ancient neighbors with ancient grievances.

This was not going to be good for her, but she could not refuse.

Lado wrinkled his face and stared up at Beck. ‘They were going to be mothers?’

‘Most of them,’ Beck said. ‘And maybe some were going to be fathers.’

## CHAPTER THREE

The end of the cave was very cramped. Tilde lay under a low shelf of rock, knees drawn up, and watched Mitch as he kneeled before the ones they had come here to see. Franco squatted behind Mitch.

Mitch’s mouth hung half open, like a surprised little boy’s. He could not speak for a time. The end of the cave was utterly still and quiet. Only the beam of light moved as he played the torch up and down the two forms.

‘We touched nothing,’ Franco said.

The blackened ashes, ancient fragments of wood, grass and reed, looked as if a breath would scatter them but still formed the remains of a fire. The skin of the bodies had fared much better. Mitch had never seen more startling examples of deep freeze mummification. The tissues were hard and dry, the moisture sucked from them by the dry deep cold air. Near the heads, where they lay facing each other, the skin and muscle had hardly shrunk at all before being fixed. The features were almost natural, though the eyelids had withdrawn and the eyes beneath were shrunken, dark, unutterably sleepy. The bodies as well were full; only near the legs did the flesh seem to shrivel and darken, perhaps because of the intermittent breeze from farther up the shaft. The feet were wizened, black as little dried mushrooms.

Mitch could not believe what he was seeing. Perhaps there was nothing so extraordinary about their pose – lying on their sides, a man and a woman facing each other in death, freezing finally as the ashes of their last fire cooled. Nothing unexpected about the hands of the man reaching toward the face of the woman, the woman’s arms low in front of her as if she had clasped her stomach. Nothing extraordinary about the animal skin beneath them, or another skin rumpled beside the male, as if it had been tossed aside.

In the end, with the fire out, freezing to death, the man had felt too warm and had thrown off his covering.

Mitch looked down at the woman’s curled fingers and swallowed a rising lump of emotion he could not easily define or explain.

‘How old?’ Tilde asked, interrupting his focus. Her voice sounded crisp and clear and rational, like the ring of a struck knife.

Mitch jerked. ‘Very old,’ he said quietly.

‘Yes, but like the Iceman?’

‘Not like the Iceman,’ Mitch said. His voice almost broke.

The female had been injured. A hole had been punched in her side, at hip level. Blood stains surrounded the hole and he thought he could make out stains on the rock beneath her. Perhaps it had been the cause of her death.

There were no weapons in the cave.

He rubbed his eyes to force aside the little jagged white moon that rose into his field of vision and threatened to distract him, then looked at the faces again, short broad noses pointing up at an angle. The woman’s jaw hung slack, the man’s was closed. The woman had died gasping for air. Mitch could not know this for sure, but he did not question the observation. It fit.

Only now did he carefully maneuver around the figures, crouched low, moving so slowly, keeping his bent knees an inch above the man’s hip.

‘They look old,’ Franco said, just to make a sound in the cave. His eyes glittered. Mitch glanced at him, then down at the male’s profile.

Thick brow ridge, broad flattened nose, no chin. Powerful shoulders, narrowing to a comparatively slender waist. Thick arms. The faces were smooth, almost hairless. All the skin below the neck, however, was covered with a fine dark downy fur, visible only on close examination. Around their temples, the short-trimmed hair seemed to have been shaved in patterns, expertly barbered.

So much for shaggy museum reconstructions.

Mitch bent closer, the cold air heavy in his nostrils, and propped his hand against the top of the cave. Something like a mask lay between the bodies, actually two masks, one beside and bunched under the man, the other beneath the woman. The edges of the masks appeared torn. Each had eye holes, nostrils, the appearance of an upper lip, all lightly covered with fine hair, and below that, an even hairier flap that might have once wrapped around the neck and lower jaw. They might have been lifted from the faces, flayed away, yet there was no skin missing from the heads.

The mask nearest the woman seemed attached to her forehead and temple by thin fibers like the beard of a mussel.

Mitch realized he was focusing on little mysteries to get past one big impossibility.

‘How old are they?’ Tilde asked again. ‘Can you tell yet?’

‘I don’t think there have been people like this for tens of thousands of years,’ Mitch said.

Tilde seemed to miss this statement of deep time. ‘They are European, like the Iceman?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mitch said, but shook his head and held up his hand. He did not want to talk; he wanted to think. This was an extremely dangerous place, professionally, mentally, from any angle of approach. Dangerous and dreamlike and impossible.

‘Tell me, Mitch,’ Tilde pleaded with surprising gentleness. ‘Tell me what you see.’ She reached out to stroke his knee. Franco observed this caress with maturity.

Mitch began, ‘They are male and female, each about a hundred and sixty centimeters in height.’

‘Short people,’ Franco said, but Mitch talked right over him.

‘They appear to be genus Homo, species sapiens. Not like us, though. They might have suffered from some kind of dwarfism, distortion of the features …’ He stopped himself and looked again at the heads, saw no signs of dwarfism, though the masks bothered him.

The classic features. ‘They’re not dwarfs,’ he said. ‘They’re Neanderthals.’

Tilde coughed. The dry air parched their throats. ‘Pardon?’

‘Cave men?’ Franco said.

‘Neanderthals,’ Mitch said again, as much to convince himself as to correct Franco.

‘That is bullshit,’ Tilde said, her voice crackling with anger. ‘We are not children.’

‘No bullshit. You have found two well-preserved Neanderthals, a man and a woman. The first Neanderthal mummies … anywhere. Ever.’

Tilde and Franco thought about that for a few seconds. Outside, wind hooted past the cave entrance.

‘How old?’ Franco asked.

‘Everyone thinks the Neanderthals died out between a hundred thousand and forty thousand years ago,’ Mitch said. ‘Maybe everyone is wrong. But I doubt they could have stayed in this cave, in this state of preservation, for forty thousand years.’

‘Maybe they were the last,’ Franco said, and crossed himself reverently.

‘Incredible,’ Tilde said, her face flushed. ‘How much would they be worth?’

Mitch’s leg cramped and he moved back to squat beside Franco. He rubbed his eyes with a gloved knuckle. So cold. He was shivering. The moon of light blurred and shifted. ‘They’re not worth anything,’ he said.

‘Don’t joke,’ Tilde said. ‘They are rare – nothing like them, right?’

‘Even if we – if you, I mean – could get them out of this cave safely, intact, and down the mountain, where would you sell them?’

‘There are people who collect such things,’ Franco said. ‘People with lots of money. We have talked to some about an Iceman already. Surely an Iceman and Woman –’

‘Maybe I should be more blunt,’ Mitch said. ‘If these aren’t handled in a proper scientific fashion, I will go to the authorities in Switzerland, Italy, wherever the hell we are. I will tell them.’

Another silence. Mitch could almost hear Tilde’s thoughts, like a little Austrian clockwork.

Franco slapped the floor of the cave with his gloved hand and glared at Mitch. ‘Why fuck us up?’

‘Because these people don’t belong to you,’ Mitch said. ‘They don’t belong to anybody.’

‘They are dead!’ Franco shouted. ‘They do not belong to themselves, do they, any more?’

Tilde’s lips formed a straight, grim line. ‘Mitch is right. We are not going to sell them.’

A little scared now, Mitch’s next words rushed out. ‘I don’t know what else you might plan to do with them, but I don’t think you’re going to control them, or sell the rights, make Cave Man Barbie dolls or whatever.’ He took a deep breath.

‘No, again, I say Mitch is right,’ Tilde stated slowly. Franco regarded her with a speculative squint. ‘This is very huge. We will be good citizens. They are everybody’s ancestors. Mama and Papa to the world.’

Mitch could definitely feel the headache creeping up on him. The earlier oblong of light had been a familiar warning: oncoming head-crushing train approaching. Climbing back down the mountain would be difficult or even impossible if he was going to fall under the spell of a migraine, a real brain-splitter. He hadn’t brought any medicine. ‘Are you planning to kill me up here?’ he asked Tilde.

Franco shot a glance at him, then rolled to look at Tilde, waiting for an answer.

Tilde grinned and tapped her chin. ‘I am thinking,’ she said. ‘What rogues we would be. Famous stories. Pirates of the prehistoric. Yo ho ho and a bottle of Schnapps.’

‘What we need to do,’ Mitch said, assuming that she had answered in the negative, ‘is to take a tissue sample from each body, with minimal intrusion. Then –’

He reached for the torch, which he had placed near his feet, and lifted it, shining the light beyond the close, sleepy-eyed heads of the male and female to the far recesses, about three yards farther back in the cave. Something small lay there, bundled in fur.

‘What’s that?’ he and Franco asked simultaneously.

Mitch considered. He could hunker and sidle his way around the female without disturbing anything except the dust. On the other hand, it would be best to leave everything completely untouched, to retreat from the cave now and bring back the real experts. The tissue samples would be enough evidence, he thought. Enough was known about Neanderthal DNA from bone studies. A confirmation could be made and the cave could be kept sealed until –

He pressed his temples and closed his eyes.

Tilde tapped his shoulder and gently pushed him out of the way. ‘I am smaller,’ she said. She crawled beside the female toward the rear of the cave.

Mitch watched and said nothing. This was what it felt like to truly sin – the sin of overwhelming curiosity. He would never forgive himself, but, he rationalized, how could he stop her without harming the bodies? Besides, she was being careful.

Tilde squeezed so low her face was on the floor beside the bundle. She gripped one end of the fur with two fingers and slowly turned it around. Mitch’s throat seized with anguish. ‘Shine a light,’ she demanded. Mitch did so.

Franco aimed his torch as well.

‘It’s a doll,’ Tilde said.

From the top of the bundle peered a small face, like a dark and wrinkled apple, with two tiny sunken black eyes.

‘No,’ Mitch said. ‘It’s a baby.’

Tilde pushed back a few inches and made a small surprised hmm!

Mitch’s headache rolled over him like thunder.

Franco held Mitch’s arm near the cave entrance. Tilde was still inside. Mitch’s migraine had progressed to a real Force 9, with visuals and all, and it was an effort to keep from curling up and screaming. He had already experienced dry heaves, by the side of the cave, and he was now shivering violently.

He knew with absolute certainty that he was going to die up here, on the threshold of the most extraordinary anthropological discovery of all time, leaving it in the hands of Tilde and Franco, who were little better than thieves.

‘What is she doing in there?’ Mitch moaned, head bowed. Even the twilight seemed too bright. It was getting dark quickly, however.

‘Not your worry,’ Franco said, and gripped his arm more tightly.

Mitch pulled back and felt blindly in his pocket for the vials containing the samples. He had managed to take two small plugs from the upper thighs of the man and the woman before the pain had advanced; now, he could hardly see straight.

Forcing his eyes open, he looked out upon a heavenly sapphire blueness precisely painting the mountain, the ice, the snow, overlain by flashes in the corners of his eyes like tiny bolts of lightning.

Tilde emerged from the cave, camera in one hand, pack in the other. ‘We have enough to prove everything,’ she said. She spoke Italian to Franco, rapidly and in a low voice. Mitch did not understand, nor did he care to.

He simply wanted to get down the mountain and climb into a warm bed and sleep, to wait for the extraordinary pain, all too familiar but ever fresh and new, to subside.

Dying was another option, not without its attractions.

Franco roped him up deftly. ‘Come, old friend,’ the Italian said with a kindly jerk on the rope. Mitch lurched forward, clenching his fists by his sides to keep from pounding his head. ‘The ax,’ Tilde said, and Franco slipped Mitch’s ice ax out of his belt, where it tangled with his legs, and into his pack. ‘You are in bad shape,’ Franco said. Mitch clenched his eyes shut; the twilight was filled with lightning, and the thunder was pain, a silent crushing of his head with every step. Tilde took the lead and Franco followed close behind. ‘Different way,’ Tilde said. ‘It’s icing badly here and the bridge is rotten.’

Mitch opened his eyes. The arête was a rusty knife edge of carbon blackness against the purest ultramarine sky, fading to starry black. Each breath was colder and harder to take. He sweated profusely.

He plodded automatically, tried to descend a rock slope dotted with patches of crunchy snow, slipped and caught on the rope, dragging Franco a couple of yards down the slope. The Italian did not protest, instead rearranged the rope around Mitch and soothed him like a child. ‘Okay, old friend. This is better. This is better. Watch the step.’ ‘I can’t stand it much more, Franco,’ Mitch whispered. ‘I haven’t had a migraine for over two years. I didn’t even bring pills.’ ‘Never mind. Just watch your feet and do what I say.’ Franco shouted ahead to Tilde. Mitch felt her near and squinted up at her. Her face was framed with clouds and his own lights and sparks. ‘Snow coming,’ she said. ‘We have to hurry.’ They spoke in Italian and German and Mitch thought they were talking about leaving him here on the ice. ‘I can go,’ he said. ‘I can walk.’ So they began walking again on the glacier slope, accompanied by the sound of the ice fall as the slow ancient river flowed on, splitting and booming, rattling and cracking on its descent. Somewhere giant hands seemed to applaud. The wind picked up and Mitch turned away from it. Franco turned him around again and pushed less gently. ‘No time for stupidity, old friend. Walk.’ ‘I’m trying.’ ‘Just walk.’ The wind became a fist pressed against his skin. He leaned into it. Ice crystals stung his cheeks and he tried to pull up his hood and his fingers were like sausages in his gloves. ‘He can’t do this,’ Tilde said, and Mitch saw her walk around him, wrapped in swirling snow. The snow straightened suddenly and they all jerked as the wind grabbed them. Franco’s torch illuminated millions of flakes whipping past in horizontal streaks. They discussed building a snow cave, but the ice was too hard, it would take too long to dig out. ‘Go! Just head down!’ Franco shouted at Tilde, and she mutely complied. Mitch did not know where they were going, did not much care. Franco cursed steadily in Italian but the wind drowned him out and Mitch, as he dragged forward, pulling up and putting down his boots, digging in his crampons, trying to stay upright, Mitch knew that Franco was there only by his pressure on the ropes. ‘The gods are angry!’ Tilde yelled, and that was the last he heard from her, a cry half triumphant, half jesting, with a yelp of excitement and even exaltation. Franco must have fallen, because Mitch found himself being tugged hard from the rear. He had somehow come to be holding his ax and as he went over, he fell on his stomach and had the clarity of will to dig the ax into the ice and stop his descent. Franco seemed to dangle for a moment, a few yards down slope. Mitch looked in that direction. The lights were gone from his vision. Somehow he was freezing, really freezing, and that was allaying the pain of his migraine. Franco was not visible in the straight parallel bands of snow. The wind whistled and then shrieked and Mitch pulled his face close to the ice. His ax slipped from its hole and he slid two or three yards. With the pain fading, he wondered how he might get out of this alive. He dug his crampons into the ice and pulled himself back up the slope, by main force dragging Franco with him. Tilde helped Franco get to his feet. His nose was bloody and he seemed stunned. He must have hit his head on the ice. Tilde glanced at Mitch. She smiled and touched his shoulder. So friendly. Nobody said anything. Sharing the pain and the creeping evil warmth made them very close. Franco made a sobbings, sucking sound, licked at his bloody lip, pulled their ropes closer. They were so exposed. The fall cracked above the shrieking wind, boomed, snapped, made a sound like a tractor on a gravel road. Mitch felt the ice beneath him shudder. They were too close to the fall and it was really active, making a lot of noise. He pulled on the ropes to Tilde and they came back loose, cut. He pulled on the ropes behind him. Franco stumped out of the wind and snow, his face covered with blood, his eyes glaring behind his goggles. Franco knelt beside Mitch and then leaned over on his gloved hands, rolled to one side. Mitch grabbed his shoulder but Franco refused to budge. Mitch got up and faced down slope. The wind blew from up the slope and he keeled forward. He tried it again, leaning backward awkwardly, and fell. Crawling was the only option. He dragged Franco behind him, but that was impossible after a few feet. He crawled back to Franco and began to push him. The ice was rough, not slick, and did not help. Mitch did not know what to do. They had to get out of the wind, but he could not see well enough where they were to choose any particular direction. He was glad Tilde had abandoned them. She could get away now and maybe someone would make babies with her, neither of them of course; they were now out of the old evolutionary loop. All responsibility shed. He felt sorry that Franco was so banged up. ‘Hey, old friend,’ he shouted into the man’s ear. ‘Wake up and give me some help or we’re going to die.’ Franco did not respond. It was possible he was dead already but Mitch did not think a simple fall could kill someone. Franco was still breathing. Mitch found the torch around Franco’s wrist, removed it, switched it on, peered into Franco’s eyes as he tried to open them with his gloved fingers, not easy, but the pupils were small and uneven. Yup. He had pranged himself hard on the ice, causing concussion and flattening his nose. That was where all the new blood was coming from. The blood and snow made a red messy slush on Franco’s face. Mitch gave up talking to him. He thought about cutting himself loose, but couldn’t bring himself to do that. Franco had treated him well. Rivals united on the ice by death. Mitch doubted any woman would really feel a romantic pang, hearing about this. In his experience, women did not much care about such things. Dying, yes, but not the camaraderie of men. So confusing now and warming rapidly. His coat was very warm, and his snow pants. Topping it off was that he had to pee. Death with dignity was apparently out of the question. Franco groaned. No, it wasn’t Franco. The ice beneath them vibrated, then jumped, and they tumbled and slid to one side. Mitch caught sight of the torch beam illuminating a big block of ice rising, or they were falling. Yes indeed and he closed his eyes in anticipation. But he did not hit his head, though all the breath was slammed out of him. They landed in snow and the wind stopped. Clumped snow fell on them, and a couple of heavy chunks of ice pinned Mitch’s leg. It got quiet and still. Mitch tried to lift his leg but soft warmth resisted and the other leg was stiff. It was decided.

In no time at all, he opened his eyes wide to the sky-spanning glare of a blinding blue sun.

## CHAPTER FOUR Gordi

Lado, shaking his head in sad embarrassment, left Kaye in Beck’s care to return to Tbilisi. He could not be away from the Eliava Institute for long.

The UN took over the small Rustaveli Tiger in Gordi, renting all of the rooms. The Russians pitched more tents and were slept between the village and the graves.

Under the pained but smiling attention of the innkeeper, a stout black-haired woman named Lika, the UN peacekeepers ate a late supper of bread and tripe soup, served with big glasses of vodka. Everyone retired to bed shortly after, except for Kaye and Beck.

Beck pulled a chair up to the wooden table and placed a glass of white wine in front of her. She had not touched the vodka.

‘This is Manavi. Best they have here – for us, at any rate.’ Beck sat and directed a belch into his fist. ‘Excuse me. What do you know about Georgian history?’

‘Not a lot,’ Kaye said. ‘Recent politics. Science.’

Beck nodded and folded his arms. ‘Our dead mothers,’ he said, ‘could conceivably have been murdered during the troubles – the civil war. But I don’t know of any actions in or around Gordi.’ He made a dubious face. ‘They could be victims from the 1930s, the forties, or the 1950s. But you say no. Good point about the roots.’ He rubbed his nose and then scratched his chin. ‘For such a beautiful country, there’s a fair amount of grim history.’

Beck reminded Kaye of Saul. Most men his age somehow reminded Kaye of Saul, twelve years her senior, back on Long Island, far away in more than just distance. Saul the brilliant, Saul the weak, Saul whose mind creaked more every month. She sat up and stretched her arms, scraping the legs of her chair against the tile floor.

‘I’m more interested in her future,’ Kaye said. ‘Half the pharmaceutical and medical companies in the United States are making pilgrimages here. Georgia’s expertise could save millions.’

‘Helpful viruses.’

‘Right,’ Kaye said. ‘Phage.’

‘Attack only bacteria.’

Kaye nodded.

‘I read that Georgian troops carried little vials filled with phage during the troubles,’ Beck said. ‘They swallowed them if they were going into battle, or sprayed them on wounds or burns before they could get to hospital.’

Kaye nodded. ‘They’ve been using phage therapy since the twenties, when Felix d’Herelle came here to work with George Eliava. D’Herelle was sloppy; the results were mixed back then, and soon we had sulfa and then penicillin. We’ve pretty much ignored phage until now. So we end up with deadly bacteria resistant to all known antibiotics. But not to phage.’

Through the window of the small lobby, over the roofs of the low houses across the street, she could see the mountains gleaming in the moonlight. She wanted to go to sleep but she knew she would lie awake in the small hard bed for hours.

‘Here’s to the prettier future,’ Beck said. He lifted his glass and drained it. Kaye took a sip. The wine’s sweetness and acidity made a lovely balance, like tart apricots.

‘Dr Jakeli told me you were climbing Kazbeg,’ Beck said. ‘Taller than Montblanc. I’m from Kansas. No mountains at all. Hardly any rocks.’ He smiled down at the table, as if embarrassed to meet her gaze. ‘I love mountains. I apologize for dragging you away from your business … and your pleasure.’

‘I wasn’t climbing,’ she said. ‘Just hiking.’

‘I’ll try to have you out of here in a few days,’ Beck said. ‘Geneva has records of missing persons and possible massacres. If there’s a match and we can date it to the thirties, we’ll hand it over to the Georgians and the Russians.’ Beck wanted the graves to be old, and she could hardly blame him.

‘What if it’s recent?’ Kaye asked.

‘We’ll bring in a full investigation team from Vienna.’

Kaye gave him a clear, no-nonsense look. ‘It’s recent,’ she said.

Beck finished off his glass, stood, and clutched the back of his chair with his hands. ‘I agree,’ he said with a sigh. ‘What made you give up criminology? If I’m not intruding … ’

‘I learned too much about people,’ Kaye said. Cruel, rotten, dirty, desperately stupid people. She told Beck about the Brooklyn homicide lieutenant who had taught her class. He had been a devout Christian. Showing them pictures of a particularly horrendous crime scene, with two dead men, three dead women and a dead child, he had told the students, ‘The souls of these victims are no longer in their bodies. Don’t sympathize with them. Sympathize with the ones left behind. Get over it. Get to work. And remember: you work for God.’

‘His beliefs kept him sane,’ Kaye said.

Beck nodded, flexed his hands on the back of the chair. ‘No armor. Well, do your best. You’re all we’ve got for the time being.’ He said good night and walked to the narrow stairs, climbing with a fast, light tread.

Kaye sat at the table for several minutes, then stepped through the inn’s front door. She stood on the granite flagstone step beside the narrow cobbled street and inhaled the night air, with its faint odor of town sewage. Over the rooftop of the house opposite the inn she could see the snow-capped crest of a mountain, so clear she could almost reach out and touch it.

In the morning, she came awake wrapped in warm sheets and a blanket that hadn’t been laundered in some time. She stared at a few stray hairs, not her own, trapped in the thick gray wool near her face. The small wooden bed with carved and red-painted posts occupied a plaster-walled room about eight feet wide and ten feet long, with a single window behind the bed, a single wooden chair, and a plain oak table bearing a washstand. Tbilisi had modern hotels, but Gordi was away from the new tourist trails, too far off the Military Highway.

She slipped out of bed, splashed water on her face, and pulled on her denims and blouse and coat. She was reaching for the iron latch when she heard a heavy knock. Beck called her name. She opened the door and blinked at him owlishly.

‘They’re running us out of town,’ he said, his face hard. ‘They want all of us back in Tbilisi by tomorrow.’

‘Why?’

‘We’re not wanted. Regular army soldiers are here to escort us. I’ve told them you’re a civilian advisor and not a member of the team. They don’t care.’

‘Jesus,’ Kaye said. ‘Why the turnaround?’

Beck made a disgusted face. ‘The sakrebulo, the council, I presume. Nervous about their nice little community. Or maybe it comes from higher-up.’

‘Doesn’t sound like the new Georgia,’ Kaye said. She was concerned how this might affect her work with the institute.

‘I’m surprised, too,’ Beck said. ‘We’ve stepped on somebody’s toes. Please pack your case and join us downstairs.’

He turned to go but Kaye took his arm. ‘Are the phones working?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’re welcome to use one of our satellite phones.’

‘Thanks. And – Dr Jakeli is back in Tbilisi by now. I’d hate to make him drive out here again.’

‘We’ll take you to Tbilisi,’ Beck said. ‘If that’s where you want to go.’

Kaye said, ‘That’ll be fine.’

The white UN Cherokees gleamed in the bright sun outside the inn. Kaye peered at them through the window panes of the lobby and waited for the innkeeper to bring out an antiquated black dial phone and plug it into the jack by the front desk. She picked up the receiver, listened to it, then handed it to Kaye: dead. In a few more years, Georgia would catch up with the twenty-first century. For now, there were less than a hundred lines to the outside world, and with all calls routed through Tbilisi, service was sporadic.

The innkeeper smiled nervously. She had been nervous since they arrived.

Kaye carried her bag outside. The UN team had assembled, six men and three women. Kaye stood beside a Canadian woman named Doyle, while Hunter brought out the satellite phone.

First Kaye made a call to Tbilisi to speak with Tamara Mirianishvili, her main contact at the institute. After several tries, the call went through. Tamara sympathized and wondered what the fuss was about, then said Kaye was welcome to come back and stay a few more days. ‘It is shameful, to push your nose into this. We’ll have fun, make you cheerful again,’ Tamara said.

‘Have there been any calls from Saul?’ Kaye asked.

‘Twice he calls,’ Tamara said. ‘He says ask more about biofilms. How do phage work in biofilms, when the bacteria get all socialized.’

‘And are you going to tell us?’ Kaye asked in jest.

Tamara gave her a tinkling, sunny laugh. ‘Must we tell you all our secrets? We have no contracts yet, Kaye dear!’

‘Saul’s right. It could be a big issue,’ Kaye said. Even at the worst of times, Saul was on track with their science and their business.

‘Come back, and I’ll show you some of our biofilm research, special, just because you are nice,’ Tamara said.

‘Wonderful.’

Kaye thanked Tamara and handed the phone back to the corporal.

A Georgian staff car, an old black Volga, arrived with several army officers, who exited on the left. Major Chikurishivili of the Security Forces stepped out of the right side, his face stormier than ever. He looked like he might explode in a cloud of blood and spit.

A young army officer – Kaye had no idea what rank – approached Beck and spoke to him in broken Russian. When they were finished, Beck waved his hand and the UN team climbed into their jeeps. Kaye rode in the jeep with Beck.

As they drove west out of Gordi, a few of the townspeople gathered to watch them leave. A little girl stood beside a plastered stone wall and waved: brown-haired, tawny, gray-eyed, strong and lovely. A perfectly normal and delightful little girl.

There was little conversation as Hunter drove them south along the highway, leading the small caravan. Beck stared thoughtfully ahead. The stiff-sprung jeep bounced over bumps and dropped into ruts and swerved around potholes. Riding in the right rear seat, Kaye thought she might be getting carsick. The radio played pop tunes from North Ossetia and pretty good blues from Azerbaijan and then an incomprehensible talk show that Beck occasionally found amusing. He glanced back at Kaye and she tried to smile bravely.

After a few hours she dozed off and dreamed of bacterial buildups inside the bodies within the trench graves. Biofilms, what most people thought of as slime: little industrious bacterial cities reducing these corpses, these once-living giant evolutionary offspring, back to their native materials. Lovely polysaccharide architectures being laid down within the interior channels, the gut and lungs, the heart and arteries and eyes and brain, the bacteria giving up their wild ways and becoming citified, recycling all; great garbage dump cities of bacteria, cheerfully ignorant of philosophy and history and the character of the dead hulks they now colonized and reclaimed.

Bacteria made us. They take us back in the end. Welcome home.

She woke up in a sweat. The air was getting warmer as they descended into a long, deep valley. How nice it would be to know nothing about all the inner workings. Animal innocence; the unexamined life is the sweetest. But things go wrong and prompt introspection and examination. The root of all awareness.

‘Dreaming?’ Beck asked her as they pulled over near a small filling station and garage clapped together from sheets of corrugated metal.

‘Nightmares,’ Kaye said. ‘Too much into my work, I guess.’

## CHAPTER FIVE Innsbruck, Austria

Mitch saw the blue sun swing around and darken and he assumed it was night, but the air was dim green and not at all cold. He felt a prick of pain in his upper thigh, a general sense of unease in his stomach.

He wasn’t on the mountain. He tried to blink the gunk from his eyes and reached up to rub his face. A hand stopped him and a soft female voice told him in German to be a good boy. As she wiped his forehead with a cold damp cloth, the woman said, in English, that he was a little chapped and his nose and fingers were frostbitten and that he had a broken leg. A few minutes later he went to sleep again.

No time at all after that, he awoke and managed to sit up in a crisp, firm hospital bed. He was in a room with four other patients, two beside him and two across from him, all male, all less than forty years old. Two had broken legs in movie-comedy slings. The other two had broken arms. Mitch’s own leg was in a cast but not in a sling.

All the men were blue-eyed, wiry, handsome in an aquiline way, with thin necks and long jaws. They watched him attentively.

Mitch saw the room clearly now: Painted concrete walls, white enamel bed frames, a portable lamp on a chromed stand that he had mistaken for a blue sun, mottled brown tile floor, the dusty smell of steam heat and antiseptic, a general odor of peppermint.

On Mitch’s right, a heavily snow-burned young man, skin peeling from his baby-pink cheeks, leaned over to say, ‘You are the lucky American, are you not?’ The pulley and weights on his elevated leg creaked.

‘I’m American,’ Mitch croaked. ‘I must be lucky because I’m not dead.’

The men exchanged solemn glances. Mitch could see he had been a topic of conversation for some time.

‘We all agree, it is best for fellow mountaineers to inform you.’

Before Mitch could protest that he was not really a mountaineer, the snow-burned young man told him that his companions were dead. ‘The Italian you were found with, in the serac, he is broken-neck. And the woman is found much lower down, buried in ice.’ Then, his eyes sharply inquisitive – eyes the color of the wild-dog sky Mitch had first seen over the arête – the young man asked, ‘The newspapers say, the TV say. Where did she get the little corpse baby?’

Mitch coughed. He saw a pitcher of water on a tray by his bed and poured a glass. The mountaineers watched him like athletic elves trussed up in their beds.

Mitch returned their gazes. He tried to hide his dismay. It did him no good to judge Tilde now; no good at all.

The inspector from Innsbruck arrived at noon and sat beside his bed with an attending local police officer to ask questions. The officer spoke better English and translated for him. Their questions were routine, the inspector said, all part of the accident report. Mitch told them he did not know who the woman was, and the inspector responded, after a decent pause, that they had all been seen together in Salzburg. ‘You and Franco Maricelli and Mathilda Berger.’

‘That was Franco’s girlfriend,’ he said, feeling sick, trying not to show it. The inspector sighed and pursed his lips disapprovingly, as if this was all very trivial and only a little irritating.

‘She was carrying the mummy of an infant. Perhaps a very old mummy. You have no idea where she got it?’

He hoped the police had not gone through his effects and found the vials and recognized their contents. Perhaps he had lost the pack on the glacier. ‘It’s too bizarre for words,’ he said.

The inspector shrugged. ‘I am not an expert on bodies in the ice. Mitchell, I give you some fatherly advice. I am old enough?’

Mitch admitted the inspector might be old enough. The mountaineers did not even attempt to hide their interest in the proceedings.

‘We have spoken to your former employers, the Hayer Museum, in Seattle.’

Mitch blinked slowly.

‘They tell us you were involved in the theft of antiquities from the federal government, the skeletal remains of an Indian, called Pasco Man, very old. Ten thousand years, found on the banks of the Columbia River. You refused to hand over these remains to the Army Corpse of Engineers.’

‘Corps,’ Mitch said softly.

‘So they arrest you under an antiquities act, and the museum fires you because there is so much publicity.’

‘The Indians claimed the bones belonged to an ancestor,’ Mitch said, his face flushing with anger at the memory. ‘They wanted to bury them again.’

The inspector read from his notes. ‘You were denied access to your collections in the museum, and the bones were confiscated from your house. With many photographs and more publicity.’

‘It was legal bullshit! The Army Corps of Engineers had no right to those bones. They were scientifically invaluable –’

‘Like this mummified baby from the ice, perhaps?’ the inspector asked.

Mitch closed his eyes and looked away. He could see it all very clearly now. Stupid is not the word. This is fate, pure and simple.

‘You are going to throw up?’ the inspector asked, backing away.

Mitch shook his head.

Already it is known – you were seen with the woman in the Braünschweiger Hütte, not ten kilometers from where you were found. A striking woman, beautiful and blond, observers say.’

The mountaineers all nodded at this, as if they had been there.

‘It is best you tell us everything and we hear it first. I will tell the police in Italy, and the police here in Austria will interview you and maybe it will all be nothing.’

‘They were acquaintances,’ he said. ‘She was – used to be – my girlfriend. I mean, we were lovers.’

‘Yes. Why did she return to you?’

‘They had found something. She thought I might be able to tell them what they had found.’

‘Yes?’

Mitchell realized he had no choice. He drank another glass of water, then told the inspector most of what had happened, as precisely and clearly as he could. Since they had not mentioned the vials, he did not mention them, either. The officer took notes and recorded his confession on a small tape machine.

When he was finished, the inspector said, ‘Someone is sure to want to know where this cave is.’

‘Tilde – Mathilda had a camera,’ Mitch said wearily. ‘She took pictures.’

‘We found no camera. It might go much easier if you know where the cave is. Such a find … very exciting.’

‘They have the baby already,’ Mitch said. ‘That should be exciting enough. A Neanderthal infant.’

The inspector made a doubtful face. ‘Nobody says anything about Neanderthal. So maybe this is a delusion or joke?’

Mitch was long past the point of losing everything he cared about – his career, his standing as a paleontologist. One more time he had screwed things up royally. ‘Maybe it was the headache. I’m just groggy. Of course, I’ll help them find the cave,’ he said.

‘Then there is no crime, merely tragedy.’ The inspector rose to leave, and the officer tipped his cap good-bye.

After they were gone, the mountaineer with the peeling cheeks told him, ‘You are not going home soon.’

‘The mountains want you back,’ said the least snow-burned of the four, across the room from Mitch, and nodded sagely, as if that explained everything.

‘Screw you,’ Mitch muttered. He rolled over in the crisp white bed.