The Bone Hunters (3 page)

5 May

The Long Wharf

Boston, Massachusetts

A man with the torso of a sumo wrestler gone to seed was standing in the brick-lined corridor sweating as if he had just run a marathon. His face was drenched, along with the collar of his blue oxford shirt.

The last time Barnaby had seen him was in a hospital room in Rockland, Maine. It was the day after his protégée Alexandra Vaughan had discovered the burial tomb of Leif Eriksson on an island off the coast of Maine. And it was after enough murder and mayhem to last Barnaby for ten lifetimes. Back then, the man in the corridor had been the deputy national security adviser to the president of the United States.

“I know you're in there, Dr. Finchem,” called out Ira Dusenberry. “Let me in. It's very important.”

Time had not been kind to him since. He had put on
at least thirty pounds, and his blunt, jowly face had the patina of painter's putty. His brown suit was stretched across his torso like a gigantic sausage casing.

Barnaby suddenly realized that his new cell phone number hadn't been given out by Astrud. It had been hacked by one of the intelligence minions of the all-knowing Big Brother called Washington. They could find out everything about any American they targeted. It made him angry to be on their radar again.

Barnaby unlocked the door and swung it open. Ira Dusenberry took in the full spectacle of his nakedness and immediately averted his eyes.

“I don't need to ask how you found this place,” said Barnaby bitterly. “With your untrammeled domestic spying network, you know all our secrets these days, the guilty and the innocent.”

“Not all of them,” said Dusenberry, “and it wasn't easy. We had to use extraordinary measures.”

He still could not force himself to look at Barnaby.

“Is that really necessary?” he finally demanded, stepping past him into the chamber. Barnaby closed the door and locked it again.

“Only if it irritates a dishonest excuse for a public servant like you,” said Barnaby.

“I am not dishonest,” Dusenberry said indignantly.

“Really . . . ? Last year we made the greatest archaeological discovery since Howard Carter blundered into Tut's tomb in the Valley of the Kings,” said Barnaby. “We proved that Leif Eriksson got to these shores five hundred years before Columbus and you decided to sit on it in the name of national security.”

“It
was
a matter of national security,” said Dusenberry, still refusing to look at him.

Walking to the ornately carved oak hall tree next to the steel entrance door, Barnaby grabbed the Moroccan
jeleba
from his Sahara expedition and wrapped it around himself.

“National security as defined by the Italian-American vote in the last election,” said Barnaby.

Dusenberry didn't respond.

“Now that the president has won reelection, you should have no concerns about our announcing the discovery.”

“Perhaps that could be arranged,” said Dusenberry with a curt smile, “if you can provide assistance to us on a far more important matter.”

He glanced around the vast expanse of the chamber.

“Are we alone?” he asked.

“You should know,” Barnaby responded, walking back toward the living area.

Astrud emerged from the sleeping loft and came downstairs. She was fully dressed in her Red Sox jersey, shorts, and sneakers, looking even younger than her thirty-one years.

“I think I've seen you on television,” she said to Dusenberry.

His eyes betrayed a hint of satisfaction at her recognition of his important role in the White House.

“You're one of the contestants on that reality fat show, correct?” she said, smiling. “The one about how much weight you can lose without killing yourself?”

Dusenberry didn't know if she was serious. “If you leave now, young lady, you will probably not be indicted
as a threat to the national security of the United States of America.”

“I was leaving anyway,” she said.

She turned and looked up at Barnaby.

“I'll see you later,” she said, taking her purse and closing the steel door behind her.

“In addition to all your other sins,” said Barnaby, “you may have ruptured one of the great romantic relationships of this century.”

“I need your help,” said Dusenberry. “The president needs your help.”

“I don't do mental counseling,” said Barnaby.

Dusenberry ignored the barb and said, “Look, I'm sorry about this. I was planning to meet you at Fenway Park, but you were thrown out of the game before I could get there.”

Barnaby had already noticed the brown mustard stains on his shirt and tie.

“How many monster dogs did you eat?” he asked.

Dusenberry's face revealed the accuracy of his guess. In fact, he had consumed three of the eighteen-inchers with sauerkraut and mustard, flushing them down with drafts of ice-cold lager. Gluttony was his only sin, he kept assuring himself.

“Can we sit down?” he asked, turning away from Barnaby to loosen his trousers while he headed for the nearest club chair in Barnaby's library next to the open kitchen.

Barnaby sank into the leather couch across from him.

“Have you ever heard of Peking Man?” said Dusenberry.

“He was once the most valuable man on earth,” said Barnaby.

“Was?” asked Dusenberry.

“He disappeared.”

“Precisely. You already know about him.”

“Every archaeologist knows about him,” said Barnaby. “His disappearance was probably the biggest disaster in the history of the fossil record of human evolution.”

“We need to find it . . . him,” said Dusenberry. “It's a matter of the highest national security.”

“It always is to you,” said Barnaby.

“He isn't just a priceless fossil,” said Dusenberry. “Have you ever heard of Falun Gong?”

“There are few things I haven't heard of in this world, but that is one of them.”

“Falun Gong is a contemporary Chinese moral philosophy in the qigong tradition. It is based on truth, compassion, and tolerance.”

“The Tibetans tried that and look where it got them,” said Barnaby. “Good luck in China.”

“Actually, Falun Gong was founded by a Chinese trumpet player named Li Hongzhi in 1992, and the religion took off like a comet. His followers call him the living Buddha. He now lives in Arizona.”

“A trumpet player,” repeated Barnaby.

“Yes, from humble origins, we might say, as was the carpenter from Galilee,” said Dusenberry. “Of course, he has to live here now or he would be rotting in a Chinese prison. Their government is bent on eradicating it. They have used every means to crush it. We have reports of thousands of atrocities, including the torture, murder,
and even organ harvesting of its followers. A million of the followers have been forced into reeducation camps like the ones set up under Mao during the great purge.”

“How does Peking Man fit into it?”

“There is a new offshoot of the movement and it has spread like wildfire. It is predicated on the belief of its holy men that Peking Man, the first known human being to stand erect and use tools, was in truth the original man, the anointed deity who started the human race.”

“God himself,” said Barnaby.

“Precisely,” said Dusenberry. “And as with Falun Gong, the Chinese government is stamping this sect out wherever it gathers traction.”

Dusenberry removed a creased photograph from his breast pocket and handed it to Barnaby. The edges were moist with sweat.

“Meet the Chinese oligarch Zhou Shen Wui,” said Dusenberry.

A benevolent Oriental face beamed up at Barnaby from the photograph, cherubic in its wholesome roundness. He was bald except for a fringe of hair and had thick eyebrows below his broad forehead. The man's eyes were large and knowing, his lips curled into a beatific smile.

“Zhou was chosen by the Chinese politburo to stop the spread of this new branch of the movement. Over the years, he has built an impressive record of chicanery, even on Chinese standards,” said Dusenberry. “When he isn't hacking into our top secret military programs or stealing intellectual property from American corporations, he rides around the remote hinterlands of China in a fortified train with a palace guard of two hundred trained
ninja warriors. I'm talking executioners and torturers. Wherever they find the faith beginning to flourish, and it is mostly in the rural hinterlands, they go there to wipe them out.”

“They were Japanese,” said Barnaby.

“Who?”

“The ninja warriors or
shinobi
were in feudal Japan, not in China.”

Dusenberry ignored him. “The Chinese government is now searching for the Peking Man. Their worst fear is that if he is found and introduced to the Chinese masses as a deity, the religious conversions among the lower economic classes will be uncontrollable. If the movement is embraced by the masses, especially the rural peasant class, it would only take a small percentage of them rebelling to completely overrun the Chinese military. In spite of the size of their army, the peasant population vastly outnumbers it.”

“And what does your crack team of advisers believe?”

“We believe it would be good to find Peking Man and present him to his followers.”

“And give the ruling clique in China something to focus on besides destroying us.”

“Precisely,” repeated Dusenberry. “We have had an informant in Zhou's entourage. His malevolent son, Li, is in charge of a paramilitary team that is dedicated to finding him.”

“This informant should give you whatever you need to know.”

“He disappeared from sight a month ago. Presumably he is dead.”

“So why me?” asked Barnaby as Dusenberry continued massaging his bloated stomach.

“A number of leads about the disappearance of Peking Man have surfaced over the years,” said Dusenberry. “We set up a Washington interagency task force to explore them three years ago, but as usual, they can't even agree on how to cooperate. We're dead in the water.”

“My field is Norse archaeology. I wouldn't know where to begin.”

“You have extensive contacts and good relationships among the leading archaeologists in every field. You also proved your ability to decipher an ancient mystery in the unfortunate Valhalla saga.”

Without confirming it, Barnaby was intrigued. He felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck. Forgetting for a moment about the bloodletting in China, Peking Man was the greatest archaeological discovery in history concerning the evolution of man.

“I might add that the president has authorized me to say that if you are successful in this, he is prepared to remove the security restrictions on the Leif Eriksson discovery.”

“I would need help,” said Barnaby.

“Anything you need,” said Dusenberry. “The whole task force is available to you.”

“It doesn't sound like they know how to get out of their own way.”

“A little leadership would go a long way,” cooed Dusenberry. “What about Dr. Vaughan and General Macaulay? The last time I saw them with you, they seemed
bound together like Siamese twins. They could be very helpful again.”

“They are no longer conjoined,” said Barnaby. “Leave them to me.”

“Then we have a deal,” said Dusenberry, raising the lid on the tureen of Norse wine stew that was still sitting on the granite countertop. “This smells delicious. Do you mind if I help myself?”

7 May

Kehlsteinhaus

oder Eagle's Nest

Obersalzberg, Germany

“It is not here,” said Jurgen Ritter, his eyes squinting from the snow-brilliant late-afternoon sun streaming through the big plate-glass picture windows of the Führer's conference room. Another foot of snow had fallen during the last hours, and the piercing light glancing off the summit of the Sonntagshorn forced Jurgen to look away from the windows.

“On what basis do you state this?” asked the Swedish archaeologist Sven Nordgren, tapping his iPad Mini to retrieve his latest text messages.

“I vud feel it inside me if it vas here,” said the German Jurgen, the expedition team's expert on pulse induction metal detection.

“How very scientific,” said Nordgren with a facetious grin.

Even though it was early spring, the raw afternoon wind on the Kehlstein was gusting at forty miles an hour and the loud shrieks echoed through the dimly lit passageways like a succession of anguished moans.

Nordgren had built a raging fire in the fireplace that dominated one wall of the conference room. It was still rimmed with the red marble and bronze tiles that had been a gift to Hitler from Mussolini. The flames barely warmed the room.

“I alvays feel dese things inside me,” insisted Jurgen in his fractured English. “You haff no head in your brain.”

The expedition leader, Dr. Alexandra “Lexy” Vaughan, moved to head off the confrontation between two key members of her six-person team.

“Let's go back over the tunnel data one more time,” said Lexy, gazing down at the snow-covered valley of Berchtesgaden below Hitler's mountain redoubt before moving to the fireplace to warm herself.

Roy Boulting, the Oxford-trained archaeologist who specialized in pre-Flatejarbok Norse manuscripts, brought over the five-foot-square architectural diagrams from the engineering company that had supervised construction of the Eagle's Nest in 1937. Unrolling the design plan for the tunnel system that had been bored into the granite mountain, he spread it out across the end of the conference table.

The first tunnel led from the roadway at the base of the mountain to the ornate elevator that had carried the Führer and his guests to the summit. Four hundred eighteen feet long, the tunnel was large enough for a man to stand erect for the long walk to the elevator.

“I haff scanned every centimeter of the tunnel floor,
side valls, and ceiling,” said Jurgen, “and dere is no air pocket or thing metallic.”

“Maybe your pulsating detector doesn't feel it inside,” said Nordgren.

“You are clot,” said Jurgen.

For the next three hours, they again examined the detailed construction plans, placing special emphasis on sections of the tunnel that housed electrical wiring, ventilation pipes, and exhaust filters, and then comparing them to Jurgen's readings from his PI detector. Taking only an hour to eat a cold supper, the team worked until nearly midnight before Lexy decided they needed to rest for the night.

They were three days into the search for a fourteenth-century calfskin parchment that had been stolen along with dozens of other rare Norse artifacts from the national museum in Trondheim after the Germans invaded Norway in 1940. Many in the Nazi hierarchy had admired all things Norse and held their race in reverential awe.

The parchment contained firsthand accounts of the sagas of two Norse expeditions across Canada in 1362 and 1374. Lexy was convinced that the accounts would finally prove her thesis that the Norsemen had established settlements in Minnesota more than a hundred years before Columbus sighted Hispaniola in the Bahamas.

Although she would never have revealed it to her expedition team, she actually agreed with Jurgen about the value of following one's instincts in the discovery of new archaeological finds. She had used her own instinctual gift on numerous occasions, including the discovery of Leif Eriksson's burial tomb off the coast of Maine.

Unlike with Jurgen, her own inner light was telling her that the ancient Norse manuscript was in fact very close, buried with other archaeological treasures deep inside Hitler's aerie.

Time was running out to prove it. Six months earlier, the charitable trust that operated the Eagle's Nest as a tour site had considered her request to search for the missing historical trove, reviewed her supporting evidence, and granted permission for the search during the same four-day window when other repair and maintenance requirements were already scheduled.

It had been a long, circuitous journey that had brought her to the windswept Kehlsteinhaus. She had found the initial clues to the possible resting place of the Norse treasures in the postwar trial documents of a German Gestapo officer who had commanded the police unit that had stolen them in Trondheim. Upon receiving the death sentence after the war for murdering a hundred French hostages in 1944, he attempted to save his life by writing a letter to the trial judge offering to provide details to the location of important art treasures that had been secreted in the “Bavarian Redoubt,” the birthplace of Nazism and the place where Allied war commanders believed Hitler would make a last stand. He was hanged without revealing the information.

Lexy's search had eventually led her to a war diary she found in the Schutzstaffel (SS) archives captured by the U.S. Army in 1945. To her knowledge, the diary had never been cataloged by the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and no one else had ever seen or reviewed it.

The diary had been kept by a Waffen SS officer named
Kurt von Seitzler. In late 1944, he had commanded the security guard battalion at the Berghof, Adolph Hitler's Bavarian retreat in Berchtesgaden. A number of entries in the diary had led her here.

“We have only tomorrow to find our answer, if there is one,” said Lexy to the others as they broke up to go to their rooms. “Let's gather back here first thing in the morning.”

“May I join you?” whispered Jurgen as she picked up her transcript of the von Seitzler diary and headed back to her cot in the Eva Braun Room.

“I need to study this,” she said as she went past. “And I must ask you to review your detection readings again before we meet in the morning.”

When she realized he was following her, she turned to face him.

“I vership you, Alexandra,” he whispered. “I drim of you. You are so beautiful.”

Jurgen resembled a young Maximilian Schell, strikingly handsome and well aware of it. In her years in the field, Lexy had learned how to fend off unwanted advances from other archaeologists sharing her tent. It was something she had had to deal with since she was fifteen and had somehow been transformed from a skinny tomboy with close-cropped hair into a creature that caused the boys in school to stop in the hallways and stare slack-jawed at her when she passed by.

The only two words below her photograph in the senior yearbook read
THE TEN
. One of her girlfriends had to explain to her what it meant. At Harvard, all her energy went into her course work and field trips.

There had been only two serious romantic affairs in
her life. The first had ended badly when the man she thought she loved stole her doctoral thesis. The second had been forged in a traumatic and dangerous set of events they had shared. She had fallen in love with him by the end, but even that relationship had given way to her dedication to her work. She still wasn't sure she had handled it well. There were times she missed him terribly.

After the team had assembled at the Eagle's Nest, Jurgen had followed her around like a smitten puppy, waiting for the few chances to be alone with her and declare his undying love. If he hadn't been the best interpreter of metal detection and side-scan radar in Europe, Lexy would have fired him after the second or third pass.

“I vership you,” he repeated.

“I don't have time for this,” she said, brushing past him again.

Back in her room and burrowed into her sleeping bag, Lexy reviewed the diary entries one last time. Turning off the light, she fell asleep as the howling wind outside her window brought a flood of surrealistic images to her brain.

In her tortured dreams, she saw the Braun sisters, Eva and Gretl, young and alive as they were before the war, seemingly carefree and happy as they cavorted in these same rooms, oblivious of the evil being perpetrated by the monster that was Hitler.

She was up before dawn and sitting at the conference table when the others gathered with their coffee and strudel. Another raging fire barely staved off the bone-chilling cold.

“We know that, according to von Seitzler's diary, a pioneer regiment of combat engineers arrived in
Berchtesgaden on October 6, 1944,” said Lexy, her breath condensing in the air, “and immediately began hauling drilling equipment up the Kehlstein road toward the Eagle's Nest.”

“What if they came to shore up the tunnels against bombing attacks?” asked Jurgen. “We know that Hitler hated the Eagle's Nest. Why vud he vant to create the treasure vault here?”

Lexy ignored his pleading look.

“Von Seitzler personally witnessed the pioneer battalion removing several tons of crushed bedrock from inside the tunnel and removing it to their waiting trucks,” she said. “I know from his shorthand style that he believed they were creating a space to store something. And no, it probably wasn't a decision made by Hitler. Martin Bormann supervised the construction of the Eagle's Nest. He probably ordered construction of this hiding place as the end of the war drew nearer.”

“And von Seitzler refers in one entry to a pallet of metal boxes that he observed near the entrance to the tunnel,” added Roy Boulter.

“They could have held food rations,” insisted Jurgen.

Looking down at the unfurled architectural design plan, Lexy pointed at the four-hundred-foot vertical elevator shaft that led from the base of the first tunnel to the Eagle's Nest perched on top. “It's possible that they crafted the hiding place in the vertical elevator shaft, not the tunnel leading to it.”

“Another goose chase,” protested Jurgen. “Let's return to Salzburg.”

“It's worth considering,” said Lexy, getting up from
the conference table and leading the team through the Eva Braun Room to the elevator passage.

The elevator car had not been altered since Hitler was a passenger. The machinery to operate it was original as well. All the appointments were intact, including its polished brass fittings and the Venetian mirrors mounted on the walls above the green leather seats.

“Hitler was claustrophobic,” said Lexy. “Supposedly the mirrors gave him the illusion of more space.”

“How are we going to get access to the shaft?” demanded Jurgen. “The steel walls of the car will interfere with my signals.”

“I hate to agree with Jurgen,” said Nordgren, “but it would have been impossible to drill into the granite walls from the elevator without creating a huge mess. Look at the elevator car. It is original and still in pristine condition.”

“In one of the construction files, I read something about a freight elevator,” said Lexy. “They could have bored into the granite wall from there.”

“You're right,” said Roy Boulting with mounting excitement in his voice. “I read last night that an open-walled freight elevator was originally attached underneath the Führer's elevator. It was removed some time after the war.”

“Can we rig a platform on the original mountings?” Lexy asked Tom Luciani, the logistics specialist for the expedition.

“Shouldn't be a problem,” he said.

Two hours later, a freight bed made of heavy oak planks had been cut to the needed dimensions and bolted to the original mountings of the freight elevator. Jurgen's
pulse induction detector had been mounted into position with clean access to the solid granite walls in the shaft. It weighed less than ten pounds and took up very little space, but there was still only room for him and Lexy.

Tom Luciani had rigged a governor on the submarine motor that powered the elevator. It allowed a smooth, controlled descent at less than five feet per second. They planned to make four trips, two descents and two ascents, with Jurgen focusing his detector on a different wall each time. Lexy gave the go-ahead to Hurd in the elevator above and the freight bed began to slowly descend.

Jurgen stayed too busy adjusting the discrimination settings on the monitor to pay unwanted attention to her. During the first descent, the LED indicators reflected no change in ground mineralization, meaning the area behind the wall was solid granite for a distance of at least one hundred feet. The detector was equipped with an external speaker so that both of them would hear any changes in the signal volume.

“No change in signal strength,” he said with frustration at one point.

When they reached the base of the shaft with no positive reading at any point, Jurgen adjusted his equipment to scan the second wall.

“Begin your ascent,” called out Lexy to Luciani.

They reached the top of the shaft about two minutes later with no pulsating alarm emitted from the detector.

“I told you,” said Jurgen as he adjusted the detector to face the third wall.

They were halfway to the bottom on the second descent when the detector began pinging out like a
telephone busy signal before fading out again a few seconds later.

“Stop and then slowly begin climbing again,” Lexy called out to Luciani.

They had risen back about ten feet when the detector began pinging again. Luciani stopped the elevator when it reached its strongest setting. Lexy stepped close to the wall and began to closely examine it. Almost immediately she saw faint striations in the rock surface. They appeared to be straight lines.

“We found something,” she called out to the rest of her team waiting in the elevator.

Removing her Case bone-handled pocketknife from her coveralls, she opened the blade and inserted it into one of the striated edges. It sank in an inch. As she twisted it to one side, a small eruption of powdery shavings crumbled away from the edge. She caught some of them in her hand.