Thunderhead

Aaron Black left Smithback and came over, scowling as he looked around. “This tub is god-awful,” he winced.

“What were you expecting?” Aragon asked in a dry, uninflected voice. “The Ile de France?”

Bonarotti removed a small flask from his carefully pressed khaki jacket, unscrewed the glass top, and poured two fingers into it. Then he added water from a canteen and swirled the yellowish mixture. He rehung the canteen on a davit bolt and offered the glass around.

“What is that?” Black asked.

“Pernod,” came the reply. “Lovely for a hot day.”

“I don’t drink,” said Black.

“I do,” Smithback said. “Hand it on over.”

Nora glanced back at Willard Hicks, who tapped an imaginary watch on his wrist. She nodded in understanding and slipped the mooring lines from the dock. There was an answering roar from the diesels, and the boat began backing away from the ramp with a hideous scraping sound.

Holroyd glanced around. “What about Dr. Goddard?”

“We can’t wait around here any longer,” Nora said. She felt a strange sense of relief: maybe she wasn’t going to have to deal with this mysterious daughter, after all. Let Sloane Goddard come after them, if she wanted.

The team looked at one another in surprise as the barge began a slow turn, the water boiling out from the stern. Hicks gave a short blast on the airhorn.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Black cried. “You aren’t really leaving without her?”

Nora looked steadily back at the sweaty, incredulous face. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m really leaving without her.”

14

THREE HOURS LATER, THE LANDLOCKED Laura had left the chaos of Wahweap Marina fifty miles behind. The wide prow of the barge cut easily through the turquoise surface of Lake Powell, engines throbbing slightly, the water hissing along the pontoons. Gradually, the powerboats, the shrieking jetskis, the garish houseboats had all dropped away. The expedition had entered into a great mystical world of stone, and a cathedral silence closed around them. Now they were alone on the green expanse of lake, walled in by thousand-foot bluffs and slickrock desert. The sun hung low over the Grand Bench, with Neanderthal Cove appearing on the right, and the distant opening of Last Chance Bay to the left.

Thirty minutes before, Luigi Bonarotti had served a meal of cognac-braised, applewood-smoked quail with grapefruit and wilted arugula leaves. This remarkable accomplishment, achieved somehow on the shabby gas grill, had silenced even Black’s undertone of complaints. They had dined around the aluminum table, toasting the meal with a crisp Orvieto. Now the group was arranged around the barge in lethargic contemplation of the meal, awaiting landfall at the trailhead.

Smithback, who had dined very well and consumed an alarming quantity of wine, was sitting with Black. Before di

“Didn’t you also write that book on the museum murders in New York City?” Black was asking. Smithback’s face broke into an immensely gratified smile.

“And that subway massacre a few years back?”

Smithback reached for an imaginary hat and doffed it with a grandiose flourish.

Black scratched his chin. “Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great,” he said. “It’s just that . . . well, I’ve always understood that the Institute was a low-profile entity.”

“Well, the fact is I’m no longer Bill Smithback, terror of the tabloids,” Smithback replied. “I work for the buttoned-down, respectable New York Times now, occupying the position formerly held by a certain Bryce Harriman. Poor Bryce. He covered the subway massacre, too. Such a pity that my masterpiece of investigative reportage was his lost opportunity.” He turned and gri

Nora caught herself as she was about to smile. There was nothing amusing in the journalist’s braggadocio, even if it was tempered with a touch of self-deprecation. She looked away with a stab of irritation, wondering again at Goddard’s idea of bringing a journalist along. She looked toward Holroyd, who was sitting on the metal floor of the barge, elbows on his knees, reading what to Nora’s mind was a real book: a battered paperback copy of Coronado and the City of Gold. As she watched him, Holroyd looked up and smiled.

Aragon was standing at the bowrail, and Roscoe Swire was again by the horses, wad of tobacco fingered into his cheek, jotting in a battered journal and occasionally murmuring to the animals. Bonarotti was quietly smoking a postprandial cigarette, one leg thrown over the other, head tilted back, enjoying the air. Nora was surprised and grateful for the cook’s efforts on this first day of the journey. Nothing like a good meal to bring people together, she thought, replaying in her mind the lively meal, the friendly arguments about the origins of the Clovis hunters, and the proper way to excavate a cave sequence. Even Black had relaxed and told an exceedingly foul joke involving a proctologist, a giant sequoia, and tree-ring dating. Only Aragon had remained silent—not aloof, exactly; just remote.

She glanced over at him, standing motionless at the rail, gazing out into the fading light, his eyes hard. Three months on the Gallegos Divide, excavating the burned jacal site, had taught her that the human dynamic in an expedition of this sort was of crucial importance, and she didn’t like his resolute silence. Something was not right with him. Casually, she strolled forward until she was standing at the rail beside him. He looked over, then nodded politely.

“Quite a di

“Astonishing,” said Aragon, folding his brown hands over the railing. “Signore Bonarotti is to be complimented. What do you suppose is in that curio box of his?”

He was referring to an antique wooden chuckbox with i

“No idea,” Nora said.

“I can’t imagine how he managed it.”

“You watch. It’ll be salt pork and hardtack tomorrow.”

They laughed together, an easy laugh, and once again Aragon gazed forward, toward the lake and its vast ramparts of stone.

“You’ve been here before?” Nora asked.

Something flitted across the hollow eyes: the shadow of a strong emotion, quickly concealed. “In a way.”

“It’s a beautiful lake,” Nora went on, uncertain how to engage the man in conversation.

There was a silence. At last, Aragon turned toward her again. “Forgive me if I don’t agree.”

Nora looked at him more closely.

“Back in the early sixties I was an assistant on an expedition that tried to document sites here in Glen Canyon, before it was drowned by Lake Powell.”

Suddenly, Nora understood. “Were there many?”

“We were able to document perhaps thirty-five, and partially excavate twelve, before the water engulfed them. But the estimate of total sites ran to about six thousand. I think my interest in ZST dates from that event. I remember shoveling out—shoveling out— a kiva, water lapping just three feet below. That was no way to treat a sacred site, but we had no choice. The water was about to destroy it.”

“What’s a kiva?” Smithback asked as he strolled over, his new cowboy boots creaking on the rubber deck. “And who were the Anasazi, anyway?”

“A kiva is the circular, sunken structure that was the center of Anasazi religious activity and secret ceremonies,” Nora said. “It was usually entered through a hole in the roof. And the Anasazi were the Native Americans who peopled this region a thousand years ago. They built cities, shrines, irrigation systems, signaling stations. And then, around 1150 A.D. their civilization suddenly collapsed.”