Flypaper: A Novel Read online

  “Where’s the light?” he asked stupidly.

  Marcia realized that without it their chances for survival would be remote. She crawled into the cave on hands and knees, sliding her hands back and forth in wide arcs. After a few panicky minutes, she felt the small, hard object resting in the salt on the cave floor.

  “I’ve got it!” she cried. Slumping beside Huang in the dark, she flipped the switch. Nothing happened.

  “Turn it on,” said Huang.

  “It’s not working.” Marcia shook the flashlight and it flickered for an instant, went out, then came back on. “It’s damaged from striking the floor. No telling how long it will last. We’ve got to get out of here before it quits completely.”

  They moved quickly into the cave, which now appeared to be carved from solid rock, a more comforting feeling than the sandy salt mixture that had caused their initial fall. The course of the rock channel was confusing, twisting back and forth. A branch passage appeared, and they stood for a moment, uncertain which way to go.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Marcia. “We don’t know which is the correct way. We just have to keep moving before the light fails.”

  “I knew we should have waited for them to find us,” said Huang.

  She had to admit, they now appeared to be in little danger of running out of air, but the question was a moot one. “There wasn’t any place where we could wait, Huang. If you remember, the salt collapsed beneath you.”

  The flashlight flickered constantly, forcing Marcia to shake it repeatedly. Finally, it simply died.

  They stood together in the gloom.

  “Now what do we do?” asked Huang, an edgy panic again rising in his voice.

  But Marcia wasn’t listening to him. There was something not quite so impenetrable about this darkness.

  “Can you see anything?” she asked.

  “Are you crazy? There’s nothing to see.”

  “But there is. Before it was like being blind. My eyes simply couldn’t focus. But I sense something in this darkness. Wait. Let your eyes adjust.”

  Sure enough, in a minute, Huang detected it, too. There was a slightly different level of blackness in front of them.

  “There must be a light source somewhere ahead. Come on. Keep one hand on the wall on your side and I’ll do the same on mine. That way we shouldn’t miss any more turnoffs.”

  After several minutes, they felt the gloom lift perceptibly. Then the walls pulled back until they could no longer touch them. A hundred paces more and suddenly they could see. Only they were hardly ready for what the return of vision revealed. They’d entered an enormous cavern. It was hard to gauge the size, but they could hear water falling somewhere, as though from a great height. And there was light! Blessed light filtered in far above them, bathing the cavern in a dim glow.

  “Oh my God!” Marcia said in astonishment.

  “What?” Huang’s frightened voice came from behind her.

  “It—it’s a burial chamber. Look.”

  Huang edged around her and stared. They could now see the cavern was at least a hundred feet high and several times that across. All around the sides, on platforms carved into the soft rock were dozens of mummified bodies. They appeared to be very old. In the middle of the cavern was a large, flat rock ringed by the mummified remains of horses decorated with aging finery including elaborate wooden saddles and silver-studded wooden stirrups. When Marcia went up to one of the horses and touched it, the beast virtually disintegrated into a pile of dust.

  Huang was staring at one of the bodies. Suddenly, he exclaimed, “Look! They’re not bodies at all.”

  Marcia moved in beside him and saw he was right. They weren’t mummies, but rather carvings of bodies chiseled from the soft native stone. The sculptures were exquisitely crafted. What had at first seemed like bodies swathed in cloth wrappings were really finely detailed figures wearing robes carved from stone. Each face was distinctive, an individual.

  She slowly circled the chamber. There was something vaguely familiar about the way the carvings were situated—a pattern certainly not associated with the Tarim mummies. “Stylistically, I’d swear these were Buddhist in origin,” she said. “But we must be a couple hundred miles from the nearest Buddhist sites.”

  “What on earth is the purpose?” asked Huang.

  “I think it must be a kind of memorial—some sort of tribute to the dead.”

  “What? A tribute to dead horses?”

  “No, the carvings memorialize the dead. Maybe the horses are to provide transport in the afterlife, except if it’s Buddhist in origin, that wouldn’t make sense. You don’t need a horse to ride to a new reincarnation.” She stared silently at the strange tableau. “It’s puzzling. Maybe it’s not a memorial, but a kind of . . . offering. An attempt to placate the gods. Most unusual.”

  She wiped her hands on her pants. “Anyway, it looks like we can climb up that way—toward the light. Come on.”

  It was a hard climb, but at last they pulled themselves out into brilliant sunshine. They stood on a ledge high above the dig site. Marcia stared down in surprise. “I remember seeing this small opening when we first arrived here. I thought it might be worth a look, but I guess I forgot about it when things began to get busy. Now we have even more to explore.”

  “You may explore all the caves you want,” said Huang. “I want nothing more to do with them.”

  “Don’t you see, Huang? It’s one more part of the overall significance of the Taklamakan site. The other bodies we’ve found, the Caucasian influence, the footprints and evidence of an Ice Age campsite, and cooking hearth. Now these strange carved figures. Taken together, they make this one of the most important sites I’ve worked on. It will take time to put it all together, but there’s a story here of a people we know very little about. I’d wager our World Heritage status is virtually guaranteed.”

  Huang brushed the dirt from his rumpled suit. His bureaucratic demeanor had already begun to return. Marcia knew a top archaeological site could be a path for the ambitious little fellow to promote himself. She understood him all too well. He’d lost face by revealing himself at his panic-stricken worst.

  “I will report your findings, Doctor.” He looked at his watch officiously. “But I’m afraid I must leave at once to attend a meeting. As usual, spending time with you has been most . . . adventuresome.”

  Kessler smiled quickly, understanding the little man’s deflated ego. She led them down the mountain to the dig site and watched silently as Huang got into his car. The door closed with the sort of clunk a breadbox might make if you pushed in the side slightly. The Chinese official disappeared in a cloud of dust. Off to his next victim, Kessler thought grimly. Still, the new discovery was exciting—one she firmly believed would further enhance her reputation on the world stage. She stared after Huang’s car and realized another cloud of dust was approaching. She watched as Corkie’s car appeared and pulled to a stop.

  “What on earth are you doing back here so soon?” she asked in surprise.

  “Evelyn forgot our shopping list.” He stared at Kessler’s disheveled appearance and then saw the collapsed entrance to the dig. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, you may be surprised . . .”

  Corkie looked back at the disappearing dust cloud raised by Huang’s car. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “Not this time,” she replied. “It’s too soon. We don’t know exactly what’s going on . . . or what mistake was made.”

  “Assuming it’s a mistake.”

  Kessler just shook her head. “We’ve got some cleaning up to do, and I’ve got a wonderful new find to show you. But I want to check something on my computer first.”

  She left a puzzled-looking Corkie and went over to the work station set up beside her small trailer. A tarpaulin was attached to the trailer by two slim poles. It was just enough shelter to keep the sun off. She sat down at a table made from two sheets of ­plywood laid across workhorses, opened her laptop,
and stared once again at the information in front of her.

  She’d been attempting to determine, by examining its entire genetic sequence, how her Tarim mummy was related to other, earlier bodies she’d uncovered. When sequencing the base pairs of her sample, she’d come upon a lot of debris. It wasn’t all that unusual to see this sort of background junk, and she’d pretty much put it out of her mind as not being relevant to her work. But then she’d noticed that after sequencing the debris appeared to have undergone a series of subtle changes. That made no sense. No sense at all.

  Someone at the lab had screwed up big time. At least, that was what she sincerely hoped.

  Edinburgh, Scotland

  Duncan parked his four-wheel-drive jeep in the vast lot of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, jammed the meter ticket in the windshield and headed inside. It was his third visit to Dr. Fitzhugh since the scientist’s heart attack a week before.

  He could still hardly believe how rapidly events had transpired. Just three weeks ago he’d been working away at the University of Wisconsin on his thesis on the native cultures of Siberia when his advisor called with a request from Dr. Malcolm Fitzhugh for an assistant to help at the site of a newly discovered bog body in northern Scotland. Dr. Fitzhugh was a renowned figure, both in the Department of Archaeology at Madison and on the world stage. For Duncan to be able to say he’d worked in the field with the great man would be worth its weight in gold on any resume he would ever submit. He dropped everything and took the first plane out.

  He hadn’t been disappointed. Fitzhugh was the prototypical professor. Now seventy-three years old and white-haired, he was good natured and vigorous. Or so it had seemed. The bog body had been uncovered when a farmer strayed onto the edge of an ancient peat bog and spotted a small, ocher-hued leg sticking straight up out of the ground. The man nearly had a coronary and called the local constabulary.

  Since Malcolm’s heart attack, Duncan had been directing the excavation. In charge of his own dig at the age of twenty-eight, before he had even earned his doctorate! It was a heady experience, one he fully intended to use to his advantage.

  He found Malcolm sitting up in bed reading Playboy. The professor looked up guiltily and put the magazine face down on the side table as Duncan raised an eyebrow.

  “My wife brought it for me.” He shrugged. “Can you imagine? The dear girl carried it all the way across the Atlantic and through customs for her poor stricken, decrepit husband.”

  The poor, decrepit scientist’s wife was actually a woman in her early thirties. Duncan had never met her, but understood she was extremely good-looking. “Count your blessings,” he said. “Most wives would have brought Archaeology.”

  Fitzhugh snorted. “Not my Leeanne. She’s an original. Well, I’m procrastinating. The doctor says I need one of those stent things in my artery. I’m out of commission for some time, I’m afraid. That leaves the site securely in your hands. Think you’re up to it?” Malcolm looked at him with a distinct twinkle in his eye.

  “What?” asked Duncan, eyeing his boss’s mischievous grin warily.

  The professor laughed. “I’d have given my eyeteeth for such an opportunity when I was your age. Hell, if I could have figured out some way to give my advisor a heart attack, I wouldn’t have hesitated.”

  Duncan wondered how the scientist had managed to read his mind. “I wouldn’t wish such a thing on you, Malcolm,” he lied.

  “Hmm . . . perhaps not. But you might as well make the best of the situation. That’s what I’m going to have to do. Now, has there been anything new?”

  “We’ve got the body fully uncovered and under a closed tent so it won’t suffer damage from the elements until we can move it safely to the imaging center for CAT scanning. And we’ve received the reports on the detached leg we already sent for examination. The body carbon dates to 5200 B.C.”

  Malcolm’s face lit up. “Excellent! One of the oldest bog bodies found so far, as I suspected.”

  “We’re calling her Carnoustie Woman, after the nearby village, for lack of anything better, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Of course.”

  “The leg has undergone spiral computed tomography and conventional radiography. We’ll know more later, but clearly it’s a female, probably in her late twenties. She already shows signs of degenerative arthritis and had frostbite and vascular calcification.”

  “All right. You need to complete the site work and get our young lady to the university for a full workup. There’s still a great deal to be done on-site, you know. There may be other bodies.”

  As he drove back to the dig along the narrow, winding roads of the interior highlands, Duncan’s head swirled with all of the things to do. He needed to hire his own assistant, had to line up a cadre of students to undertake the widening of the search area, needed to look into the legal aspects of access to the site, which was on private property. He had to see about obtaining a mitochondrial DNA sample for profiling. It would indicate relationships only through the maternal line, but would provide crucial information nonetheless. The student helpers and his personal assistant must be selected carefully. They needed to know who was boss. Any credit for further discoveries was going to be his alone.

  As he pulled into the tiny parking area, Duncan could see the entire staff a hundred yards away at the site. There seemed to be a good deal of confusion. That was something else he needed to address. His first dig was going to be well organized if nothing else.

  About twenty yards from the little gathering, he realized something was wrong. No one was working. They all seemed to be standing around the entrance to the tent where the body lay, murmuring in low voices. As he came up to them, Nicole Leduc, Fitzhugh’s longtime assistant, emerged from the crowd and met his eyes. She looked frightened.

  “What’s wrong?” He asked.

  “Oh, Duncan, thank God you’re back! It—it’s just too extraordinary.” Her voice trailed off.

  Duncan had a sudden feeling of dread. Had something happened to his bog body? Had it been stolen? It wouldn’t be the first time in the competitive field of archaeology. Without saying another word to Nicole, he pushed through the crowd and into the tent.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. The body lay on its back in the peat pit from which it had first emerged. Only four feet long, it had shrunk during its millennia encased in the earth. Duncan stared down in astonishment at the small figure he’d been counting on to make his reputation. He rocked back on his heels, his mouth falling open.

  Nicole appeared at his side. “That’s how we found her early this morning. No one looked in on her after eight o’clock last night.”

  A normal bog body could be an astonishing sight, especially to the uninitiated. They didn’t look like any other mummies or skeletons or even exhumed bodies from graveyards. The bogmen were much closer to living human beings in both form and substance. Though shrunken and discolored, there was real skin and fingernails and hair and facial expressions. One could even make out the pores in the skin. The action of the peat gave the flesh a deep, bronze hue. It looked like someone who might have stayed too long in a tanning parlor. Without a great deal of imagination, one could fancy the figure might rise up and speak.

  Which was why Duncan found himself staring at something that made no sense. This was not the same body he’d examined the day before. Carnoustie Woman had begun to deteriorate at an unprecedented rate. The skin now hung off the body in tatters and the bones showed through everywhere. Even the bones themselves appeared to be disintegrating, a fine white powder coating the surface where they were exposed. The facial features that only yesterday had suggested a woman of some beauty were now completely gone, the nose and cheeks having literally rotted away overnight. The teeth, previously hidden, now showed through and several had fallen away from their sockets. Even as Duncan gaped, uncomprehending, another tooth fell away, along with a tattered piece of flesh.

  “What in the name of God . . . ?”

/>   From the little crowd of workers came the comment, “It’s some sort of curse.”

  “Yeah, right,” said another voice. “The mummy’s curse. Where’s Brendan Fraser when you need him?”

  The rest of the crowd muttered quietly. Duncan looked at Nicole.

  “Did you get a sample for DNA?”

  “Not yet, and the deterioration will make any sample questionable. There obviously has been some sort of contamination here. But we should still be able to do our tests from the leg at the university.”

  Duncan looked accusingly at the little gathering. “No one saw any signs of deterioration before this morning?”

  Heads shook all around.

  “There must be something in the ground. Some contamination. Something . . . chemical, maybe,” Nicole suggested quietly. “Maybe when we exposed it to the air, it began to react in some way.”

  Duncan wasn’t buying it. No human body he’d ever seen had reacted in such a manner. “I want her bagged and removed to Edinburgh today. We need to do a full workup while there’s still anything left to work with. Then I want toxicology studies on the soil, the peat, and the water table.”

  He stared at the woman in the ground. This was his moment in the sun and the body was disintegrating before his very eyes. He intended to find out why.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A COLD RAIN had begun to fall and a bitter wind blew off a nearby ice field. Logan cursed their bad luck. Was there any other kind on this mission? They’d made good time since splitting up with Longwei, even though they were crossing some of the most difficult and inhospitable terrain on Earth. The glaciers of the Bogda Feng had largely given way to the rugged country that led to the border with Kazakhstan.

  For three days and nights, he’d cajoled his ragtag crew forward. Dr. Hu showed great stamina and patience, as had his wife. But Dazhao’s father-in-law and the children were exhausted. This frigid rain would sap whatever strength they had left.