Lord of All Things (36 page)

Gary leapt to his feet. As he hurried over to where she stood, he seemed to take pains to stay between her and the girl. “Come outside with me for a moment,” he said awkwardly. “There’s something I have to explain.”

Charlotte shook her head. What could possibly need explaining? But she followed him. And so they stood in front of the slumped, crooked house that had been their home. Gary, too, was standing crooked and slumped, nervously picking lichen out of the cracks in the wall, unable to say a word—a pitiful sight. Charlotte looked away. She didn’t want to remember him like this.

“Go on then, say it. Who is she?”

Her name was Lilith, he finally confessed. Her father owned the auction house where Gary worked. One day she would inherit it—“And for goodness’ sake, Charlotte, don’t get the wrong idea, but at least it offers a bit of security. It’s better than scraping by with odds and ends of work up here in a Scottish backwater.…And besides, I was sure you were never coming back,” Gary concluded lamely. “Take a break, you said—you know how that always ends. I could see that someone like you wasn’t going to waste her time explaining to someone like me…” He trailed off, as though he had run out of words. A last, lonely raindrop dripped from the eaves above and splashed on his head. He blinked but didn’t say another word.

“And you just thought, why wait?” Charlotte looked at the man she had lived with for more than two years, the man she had loved, and knew it was over.

He said nothing. She hugged him. Startled, he let it happen, even clumsily tried to return the gesture.

“Look after one another,” she said. “I’ll let you know where to send my things as soon as I know myself.”

Then she went and got her suitcase as the thin girl watched, alarm showing in her eyes. Back on the street, she took out her phone and the driver’s card. She reached him as he was still on his way back to Aberdeen.

“That was quick,” was all he said.

TRAVELS

Adamson wondered yet again how Rhonda coped with the twins every day. He was drenched in sweat from the mere attempt to comb Mia’s hair. At least she wasn’t delightedly decorating the bathroom with her mother’s expensive shampoo like her sister, Jane, who was well on her way to dirtying the clean dress he had finally managed to put on her. The basic lesson of every management course he had ever taken was to concentrate on one task at a time. In a household with two four-year-old children, that was a joke.

“Stay still a moment,” he ordered, lifting the brush in what he hoped look like a convincing threat.

“But it hurts!” Mia protested, looking at him with big eyes.

He put the brush back down. It was no good; these girls could twist him round their little fingers when they wanted to. Of course it hurt. The twins had their mother’s hair, and she spent a good deal of time every morning cursing in front of the mirror. She needed more time just to keep her hair in order than he took for his whole morning routine.

“Jane,” he scolded, “you leave that alone, that’s Mummy’s shampoo. She doesn’t want you playing with it. Wash your hands now, there’s a good girl.”

Multitasking. Known and proven to be inefficient—any manager who boasted of using the technique only disqualified himself from any job that really mattered—but when dealing with children, it was the only possible strategy.

Rhonda stuck her head around the bathroom door. “Say, did you go see the doctor yesterday?” she asked. Gray-white spatters of some unappetizing-looking substance clung to her face and apron, doubtless part of the recipe she was trying out.

“Of course I did,” he said. “By the way, you have something on your face there.”

Rhonda rolled her eyes. “I have something all over. When I’m finished making this pie, we’re going to have to rip out the whole kitchen and build a new one. So what did he say?”

“What would he say? Everything’s okay. If I wanted to jump aboard a space flight tomorrow or take up deep-sea diving, I would have his full medical blessing.”

She groaned piteously. “Is life even remotely fair? We women subject ourselves to sports and gyms and who knows what and try every diet that’s going, and we just get more and more out of shape. You spend your whole day sitting on your butt, you eat like a lumberjack, and you’re as fit as a fiddle.”

“You’re not out of shape,” he objected. He’d learned in recent years what a husband ought to say at such moments.

“You’re lying, Bill Adamson,” she shot back, flattered.

He reached out a hand. “Come on, let’s get that blob off your nose. It looks like bird crap.”

“Bill! Don’t use that language in front of the children.” The fond smile switched to an angry glare.
Don’t even try to understand women
.

“Bird excrement?” he suggested.

“You’re impossible,” she said. “I have to go blow up the kitchen.”

And with that she was out the door.

The two girls looked at their father, aghast. They looked lovely in their blue dresses. Lovely, except for the knots and tangles in their hair.

“What’s Mummy doing now?” Mia asked. She was always the more nervous of the two.

“She’s just trying out a new recipe,” Adamson explained. “That’s because it’s Uncle Mitch’s birthday today, and he’s coming over to dinner. It just turns out to be a more difficult recipe than Mummy thought.” And then inspiration struck. “But I bet if you two girls come here and let me brush your hair nicely, we might be able to stop the kitchen from exploding.”

Mitch turned up twenty minutes late as always, nevertheless looking as though he had been in a hell of a hurry. Unlike his sister, who grew rounder with every passing year, the CIA analyst looked hungrier—and more watchful—as the years went by. He looked like a bird of prey, Adamson mused.

“So? What’s new?” Adamson asked once they had all given Mitch his presents.

“No talking shop at my dinner table,” Rhonda scolded.

So they waited until after dinner. Adamson went out on the deck to join his brother-in-law, who was smoking his after-dinner cigarette.

“You heard that Larry Gu died?” he asked.

Adamson nodded. “It made the news. Google Alerts helps me with stuff like that.”

“Okay.” Mitch leaned forward, propped his elbows on the balcony, and took a breath of the cool evening air. “So it looks like Beijing has nationalized his company. They don’t call it that anymore—those guys ain’t dumb. But it comes down to the same thing. State-run enterprise. In other words, it belongs to the party.” He gave a humorless laugh. “Did you know that the Communist Party of China is the world’s biggest capitalist? Nobody in the world has more money than those guys. All those state-owned corps—Gazprom, Saudi Aramco…they’re all huge. It defies belief. If they were actually traded on the exchanges, big bad capitalist giants like Google, Microsoft, Exxon, and so on would be small fry. That’s something these goddamned pinkos should wise up to.”

Adamson cleared his throat. It wouldn’t be wise to get involved in such arguments, or they’d be out here all night. “Do we have any idea why they did that? Or was it just on principle?”

“Not at all. Most of the time they let Hong Kong corporations go their own way. Special Economic Zone—you know the drill. The Chinese are completely pragmatic about these things. No, from what we can tell, they’re looking for something they suspect the company has hidden away.” Mitch glanced at him mockingly. “A machine our friend developed.”

“Well fancy that,” Adamson said, unsurprised.

“Though we have no idea where the thing could be hiding either. We don’t even know what kind of machine it was. They’ve made it damn hard for our agents. I’ve got to hand them that.”

“And…is there any news of our friend?”

Mitch shook his head and peered out into the darkness of the garden. “It’s all just business as usual. He’s sitting in that house of his up in the mountains in California, making money hand over fist with nanotech inventions and donating it to wacko groups looking for aliens. Oh yeah, and recently he’s been giving money to the Atlantis nuts, too.” He took one last drag on his cigarette and then flung it out into the night. “And we still don’t have permission to listen in on him. It makes me sick.”

It was good to hear Brenda’s voice. Even if it was just over the phone, it went a long way toward calming Charlotte’s nerves.

“All in all it’s great,” she answered happily when Brenda asked how things were going in Mexico with her bunch of nuts. “The sun’s shining, I get to speak Spanish again…”

“Aren’t you holding that conference of yours in English?”

“Well yes, English is the official conference language. But I get out of the conference center when I can. As much as I can, in fact.”

The conference center looked like a spaceship that had made an emergency landing in the Miguel Hidalgo suburb of Mexico City. Which made it a pretty good venue for a conference on alternative theories on prehistory. Most of the speakers were advancing some variation on the hypothesis that at some time before the dawn of history, mankind had been in touch with beings from the stars—some even posited the human race had been created by aliens.

Charlotte leaned against the balustrade in the gallery and watched the hustle and bustle in the hall below. Chairs and name plaques were being set up on the central stage where the big podium discussions took place in the afternoons. In the evenings the hall hosted concerts by offbeat, avant-garde bands. There was still more than an hour to go before the next scheduled event, but people were already sitting down in the auditorium and making sure they had their video cameras at the ready. Others were reading or deep in excitable conversation.

“How are things here?” Charlotte repeated Brenda’s question. “We have a lot of papers on topics like ‘Did the Neanderthals make contact with aliens?’ or ‘The search for Atlantis’ and that sort of thing. But there are others as well; it’s just those are the ones the journalists grab hold of for their headlines. There are some reputable scientists here as well, serious people.” Wasn’t she just trying to put a brave face on things, though? The prevailing atmosphere made it awfully difficult to hold on to the idea this was a scientific event—a venue for hypothesis, argument, and verification—rather than just a propaganda forum for half-baked ideas. She also had to admit that the Open Horizon Forum that was hosting the conference was not exactly an organization of intellectual firecrackers.

“Oh, it’s fun,” she went on doggedly. “And it’s certainly thought-provoking. We’ll all have a lot to talk about when we go home. Of course, any claims made here will need double-checking, but that’s true anywhere these days, isn’t it?”

“Charley,” Brenda said indulgently, “it’s fine if you’re just having fun. Or doing something crazy. That’s allowed, you know.”

Charlotte felt a lump in her throat. Come what may, Brenda would always be on her side, unwaveringly so. She was a rock. A mainstay of Charlotte’s life.

She swallowed and did her best not to sniffle as she asked, “And what’s up with you? Is everybody doing well? Does Jason still have that cold?”

“He told me yesterday he would feel much better if he didn’t have to get up so early every morning,” Brenda chuckled. “It’s still an ordeal to get him to go to school. But I’m actually calling about something else. Do you happen to remember Adrian? Adrian Cazar? He was at Jason’s christening. The two of you chatted out on the deck. Climatologist.”

A vague memory of a slim young man who looked a little like Johnny Depp. “Yes,” Charlotte said. “I remember him.”

“He asked me for your phone number. I thought I’d better check with you before I gave it to him.”

Charlotte made a face. “Uh-huh. Why does he want it? You know I’ve sworn off men. I’m a nun now, chastely devoted to paleoanthropology.”

Brenda laughed merrily. “Yeah, yeah. Until the next man comes along. That sounds pretty much like Tom’s motto that the best way to stay trim is to eat nothing at all between meals. Anyway, Adrian wanted to talk shop. It’s about some scientific project he’s planning. He was keeping very quiet about the specifics, said he would have to tell you himself.”

“I’m not sure. I have plenty to keep me busy with my own work, unscientific though it might be. I can’t do everything.”

“Oh come on, Charley. He’s a serious guy. You should at least listen to what he has to say. You can always say no after that.”

Charlotte sighed. “Well all right then. I’ll do as you say. He can call me. But not until this conference is over. I can’t concentrate on anything else until I’ve delivered my lecture.”

“You’ll do fine,” Brenda said with infectious certainty. Oh Brenda. She would have loved to have more children, but that looked unlikely. After three miscarriages, there was little hope of a brother or sister for Jason.

After hanging up, Charlotte roamed around the conference center restlessly, wondering how she could fill the three hours that remained until her lecture. Not that there was any point being nervous. Nobody would come anyway. They had given her the worst possible slot—a time when anybody with any sense would be off looking for a bite to eat—in one of the most remote and least attractive rooms. She would consider herself lucky if she didn’t end up standing in front of rows of empty chairs. Though there were moments when she hoped that was precisely what would happen. Like now, for instance.

After going back to Harvard, she had stopped caring about academic convention. She no longer bothered attending the seminars that struck her as nothing more than busywork. Why collect credits for their own sake? Instead, she had gotten transfer credits by taking a course in forensics and general criminology at a police academy. The professor had told her she had a gift for it and asked whether she would be interested in a career in forensics. No, she told him. Then she had set out to review all the material evidence that underlay current thinking on human prehistory. She was determined to take a personal look at the evidence wherever possible. It was an ambitious project but by no means impossible; after all, there were far more paleoanthropologists in the world than actual finds.

The core of her project was to apply forensic standards to the paleoanthropological evidence, to dissect the established arguments the way an attorney might pick them apart in court. For every single find, she planned to work out which of the accepted academic conclusions stood up to scrutiny and which could be blown apart as unfounded conjecture. She would cross-examine every last fragment of skull and hominid tooth, every scrap of bone and skeletal remains that had ever been excavated and cataloged as early human or hominid.

This was no way to make friends, of course. In the academic world a great deal of weight is attached to
who
says what, not just
what
they say. The unproven hypothesis of a renowned scholar carries much more clout than the provable claim of some nobody without a title, degree, or publication record. Many established researchers felt personally aggrieved by Charlotte’s project. So far none of the prestigious scientific journals of record had accepted any of her articles.

Nonetheless, she had some startling revelations to make. She had, for instance, been able to examine the Broken Hill skull in the Natural History Museum in London. This was generally accepted to be a well-preserved fossil of
Homo rhodesiensis
, a transitional form between the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans,
Homo heidelbergensis
, and early
Homo sapiens
. The skull was dated to sometime between 125 thousand and 300 thousand years ago and had a cranial capacity of 1,300 cubic centimeters, not far off the volume of the modern human brain.

But the most remarkable feature of the skull was the bullet hole.

The hole was on the right side of the skull, easily visible on most published photos. The classic interpretation was that holes such as these were made by large predators or caused by a fall. But if you examined the bones under a microscope—and if you had recently completed a course in basic forensics at the Boston Police Academy—then it looked a hell of a lot like a bullet entry wound.