Bestiary Page 2

  He turned and gestured for the soldiers, and Hasan, to follow him. The soldiers looked puzzled for a moment and glanced longingly at the palace, as if to say, “Aren’t we busting in there?” and Greer understood their impulse. God knew what stuff might still be lying around inside, especially if Hasan was right, and the locals were too scared to set foot in there—but that wasn’t what he’d come to do. He’d come to find, and retrieve, one thing, and once he had that, he was out of here.

  It was a long walk around the side of the palace, but fortunately there was a sort of colonnade that provided some shade from the rays of the late afternoon sun. The heat was still nearly unbearable and, apparently, it had been too much for a couple of birds, whose bodies lay sprawled in the dust, their tail feathers spread like fans around them.

  “Peacocks,” Hasan said. “It was the al-Kallis’ favorite.”

  But these looked like they’d been picked clean with a knife and fork. All that was left were brittle bones and a spray of flattened feathers, a faint vestige of their purple and blue iridescence glinting in the sun.

  Greer motioned for the men to keep moving, his eyes swiveling from one side of the grounds to the other. They passed several smaller buildings—in one they could see the dust-choked grillwork of a Rolls-Royce, in another what looked like horse stalls—before coming to a short bridge spanning what was now a stagnant stream of green water. Greer tested the wood, pressing down with his boot, but it seemed solid. They crossed over, and into another vast courtyard, surrounded on all sides by towering palm trees. Underfoot, there was a length of fine meshed chain; Greer bent down to lift it up, but realized then that it was under both his feet—and under the feet of all his men, too. The chain was everywhere.

  “What do you think they were trying to catch in this net?” he wondered out loud.

  Nobody answered.

  Greer look at Hasan, who lifted his cuffed hands to point toward the top of one of the trees. “You see the hook?”

  Greer turned to see, and damned if Hasan wasn’t right—way up toward the top, there was a large iron hook driven into the trunk of the tree.

  “They all have such hooks,” Hasan said.

  “I still don’t get it,” Donlan said.

  “The net was not used to catch anything,” Hasan explained. “It was tied to those hooks and used to keep something in.”

  “Oh, you mean the birds? The peacocks?”

  Hasan shrugged. If that’s what they chose to think . . .

  “What are we looking for, anyway, sir?” Donlan asked. “It’s going to be dark soon.”

  Greer was studying the map; they were close. Straight ahead, there was a row of what had looked like little boxes on the map, but which he could now see were, in reality, cages, with loose straw thrown around their wooden floors. Some of the cages were small enough to hold a pair of rabbits; some were big enough for a couple of rhinos. All were enclosed at the top, too—and most of them were oddly dented, as if the creatures inside them had been banging their heads against the iron bars. On the last one in the row, the gates had been bent forward so far that they hung open on the twisted hinges.

  “What’d they do—keep a zoo?” Donlan said.

  There was the smell of a zoo, too, in the air. Although no animals were to be seen, the fetid scent of manure, rotting hay, and mangy fur still lingered. Behind a row of eucalyptus trees, and nearly concealed by dead vines and wilted flowers, Greer saw what he’d been looking for—the structure that was highlighted on the map with a yellow pen. It looked like an oversized mausoleum, made of the same yellow stone as the palace.

  “Follow me,” he said, striding up its steps and stopping at a pair of massive wooden doors, studded with iron bolts; with his gun still drawn, he pushed his way inside.

  The place was built like an atrium—circular, with ladders and rails made of olive wood running along all the sides. There were hundreds of shelves, many of them with old leather-bound books still on them, spiraling upward toward a domed ceiling; in its center, there was a stained-glass window that cast a pale purple light over everything below.

  “Nothing but books in here,” Lopez said. “I say we go back to the palace.”

  “I say shut up,” Greer said, folding up the map and slipping it back into his pocket; from here on in, he knew what to do.

  Mounted on the front wall was a big iron bird—okay, a peacock—with its wings spread wide. “Come here, Lopez,” Greer said. “And take hold of one of these wings.”

  Lopez looked confused, but he leaned his rifle up against one of the bookshelves and did as he was told. The bird was about six feet high and four feet wide, and the metal was warm in his hands. Would this thing be worth anything, he wondered, back in the States?

  “When I say so,” Greer told him, “press the wing forward.”

  “You want me to break it?” Now it’d be worth nothing.

  “Just do it. Now.”

  As Greer pressed on his side, Lopez pressed on his, and after some initial resistance, the two wings began to give way.

  “Keep pushing,” Greer said.

  Gradually, the two wings began to come together, and as they did so, dust began to crumble from the wall just below the peacock’s feet.

  Lopez, seeing the dust, started to ease up, and Greer said, “No, that’s what’s supposed to happen.”

  “The whole place is supposed to fall down?”

  Donlan, though he kept his rifle loosely trained on Hasan, was rapt.

  As the ends of the two wings touched, a narrow space below the peacock’s feet was partially revealed. According to his instructions, something should have opened up completely, but this was close enough for Greer. He crouched down and dug his fingers into the wall. Loose bits of brick and sand fell away, enough finally for him to reach inside—the slot was no more than ten inches high and perhaps a few feet across—and touch something. It was a metal box, covered with dust, and it was what he’d come for. When he pulled, he could hear the crunching of the sand underneath it, but moving it from this angle was tough. He pulled his hand out, brushed it clean, then reached in again and pulled the box another inch or two forward; it must weigh twenty or thirty pounds, he guessed.

  “You need some help, Captain?” Lopez asked eagerly. Maybe Greer knew what he was doing, after all. Maybe this was the treasure!

  Greer didn’t need any help—not now. Leaning back on his heels, he pulled the box out of the hole. It was matted with grime, and for all he knew, the damn thing was made of lead. Huge iron clasps were sealed on both sides, with antique padlocks that looked like they took a key the size of a fist.

  Lopez looked at the locks gleefully and said, “We can pop those—no problem.”

  Greer stood up, cradling the box in his arms. “Time to go.”

  Lopez and Donlan just stood there. Hasan was afraid of what might happen.

  “What do you mean, sir?” Donlan asked. “You mean, we open it back at camp?”

  “I mean, we go. Now.”

  Greer stepped around them, giving Hasan a shove toward the door. Donlan and Lopez traded a glance—what gives?—then slouched behind.

  Outside, the shadows were lengthening. The sun had fallen to the height of the walls, and a night wind was already beginning to kick up.

  Greer was marching Hasan past the rows of empty cages, then onto the wooden bridge. Hasan was only too glad to go. He didn’t know what those cages had once held, but he did not want to find out. Nor did he wish to know why the al-Kallis would have needed a fine mesh net large enough to have created an aviary a hundred feet high and ten times as wide.

  As they passed the garage with the Rolls parked inside, Lopez cast a covetous glance inside. What if the thing still ran? Why couldn’t he drive it back to camp, right behind the Humvee? Wouldn’t that be something?

  But then, he could swear he saw something move inside the garage. No, not that he’d actually seen something, but the light in there, the shadows, had changed. He glanced ahe
ad at the others—was it worth calling out an alarm? He looked again, his rifle leveled at the front of the Rolls. But now there was nothing, and the others were even farther away.

  He picked up his pace, his head turned to keep an eye on anything behind him. He was sorry he’d listened to all that bullshit from Hasan. Strange cries in the night, people disappearing. But he was even sorrier that he’d listened to Greer. What was all that crap about a treasure hunt? The only treasure he’d seen—and who knew what was inside that box?—was now gripped in Greer’s loving arms.

  On his left, he saw what he took to be the stables—there were empty stalls and unidentifiable pieces of harness hanging from the half doors. Lopez was from Santa Fe, and he’d actually worked summers at a ranch, but he’d never seen tackle like this. Maybe the al-Kallis kept those famous Arabian stallions he’d heard so much about.

  As they approached the back of the palace, he scanned the many narrow windows, wondering what lay behind them. Christ, did people really live like this? The palace reminded him of pictures he’d seen of places like the Taj Mahal. By joining the army he thought he’d see some of them. But so far, this was it.

  There was a cry, a loud, prolonged cawing from somewhere in the distance. It sounded like a baby being strangled.

  “Jesus,” Lopez exclaimed. “What was that?”

  They’d all stopped in their tracks.

  “It was a peacock,” Hasan said. “They cry for rain.”

  Lopez swallowed hard—his mouth was suddenly as dry as the desert. “They ever get it?”

  “Not often.”

  In the colonnade, the shadows made a kind of zigzag pattern on the floor. The sun had fallen now to just below the top of the outside walls. Their footsteps echoed here, too, but Lopez knew enough to make no Ghostbuster jokes this time. He pulled the damp collar away from his neck, and as he did so, he thought he heard breathing behind him, a low rasping sound. He whipped around, his finger on the trigger of the rifle, but there was nothing but a row of stone columns, glowing like burnished gold in the dying sun.

  “Hey,” he said, and the others stopped and turned toward him.

  “What?” Donlan said.

  “I thought I heard something.”

  “Hasan already told you—it’s peacocks.”

  “No. Something else.”

  Greer wedged the box under one arm and took out his gun. “Let’s keep moving.’”

  The back of Lopez’s neck tingled, and it wasn’t the drying sweat. He felt as though he were being watched. Tracked. He thought of the coyotes he’d shot back in New Mexico—and he felt like one of them.

  “When we get around front,” Greer said, “spread out in a—”

  And then it was on top of Lopez. A running shadow, a huge black stain, it lunged out from behind one of the columns and snatched him like a wolf picking off a stray lamb. Donlan panicked and sprayed a burst of automatic fire around the colonnade; Hasan flattened himself against the inside wall, but Greer suddenly felt something like a splash of hot water on his left leg. He knew he’d been hit by a ricochet, but he didn’t have time to look. He needed to get himself, and the box, out of there.

  He tried to run, but his leg was barely able to hold him up.

  Donlan was still firing as they fell back. Hasan was probably hiding somewhere back there. Screw it—who needed him anymore?

  Greer hobbled across the marble forecourt, leaving, he knew, a trail of blood. Whatever the hell that thing had been, it would sure as hell pick up this scent. He forced himself to keep moving—the adrenaline, blissfully, was keeping the leg from exploding in pain, but that wouldn’t last much longer. He could hear Donlan reloading. Night was falling fast, the way it did here—he could just make out the gates.

  Keep moving, he told himself. Keep moving.

  He dragged himself into the tunnel, shouting ahead to Sadowski, “We’ve been hit!”

  But he doubted his voice would carry into the closed Humvee.

  Donlan was firing again—was he shooting at something, Greer wondered, or just shooting?

  The headlights were on, and Greer careened into their glow, waving one arm.

  Sadowski spotted him, and leapt out of the vehicle.

  “Help me!” Greer shouted.

  Sadowski tried to take the box from him, but Greer said, “Just open the damn door!”

  Sadowski threw open the passenger door, and Greer tossed the box onto the floor.

  There was another crackling round of shots, and then Donlan raced up to them, panting.

  As Greer clambered, bleeding, into the front seat, Donlan jumped into the back as if there were a tiger on his tail.

  “Where’s Lopez?” Sadowski shouted, and Greer said, “He’s gone. Let’s move.”

  Sadowski slammed the door after Greer, then ran around to the driver’s seat. Lopez was gone? Dead?

  He threw the Humvee into gear. “What about Hasan?”

  “I said move!”

  As the vehicle started to turn in a wide circle, the headlights picked up something else—a figure running toward them, arms extended as if in supplication.

  Hasan, in the handcuffs.

  Sadowski glanced at Greer for his orders. Surely he didn’t plan to just leave him here?

  But a second later, something descended upon Hasan like a frenzied black cloud. Sadowski heard a scream, saw Hasan’s terror-stricken eyes widen in the glare of the headlights, before the thing had yanked him off his feet and into the night. All that was left in the headlight beams was that little black copy of the Koran.

  Sadowski’s hands were frozen at the wheel.

  “Drive,” Greer barked at him, wincing and clutching at his leg. “Can’t you see I’m bleeding?”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Present Day

  CARTER COX DIDN’T have to be down in the bottom of Pit 91. As a visiting fellow to the George C. Page Museum of Natural History, and head of its paleontology field research department, he could have been sitting in his comfortable, air-conditioned office overlooking Wilshire Boulevard. Instead of wearing overalls and a Green Day T-shirt, he could have been in a suit and tie—well, maybe not a tie, not many men wore ties in L.A., Carter had noticed—and his hands could be clean and his hair combed and his shoes shined.

  But then he wouldn’t have been half this happy.

  Right now, at the bottom of the tar pit, the temperature hovered in the high eighties, his hair was gathered under a sweaty headband, and his hiking boots were covered with a viscous coating of warm, black tar. Asphalt, actually. Even though these were called the La Brea Tar Pits, it was asphalt, the lowest grade of crude oil, that had been bubbling up under this ground for the past thirty or forty thousand years; those were methane bubbles that still rose lazily to the surface of the pit, swelling up like bullfrogs, before popping without a sound. And those were prehistoric bones, miraculously preserved in this thick, black goo, that he was still able to excavate with a chisel, a brush, and a lot of elbow grease.

  The pit itself was about fifty feet square, with wooden boards propping up the walls on all sides (in case of a cave-in or an earthquake), and rusty iron girders supporting the boards. It was open-air, about twenty-five feet deep, with a slanted plastic roof overhead to keep off the sun (or the rain, though in May in Los Angeles rain wasn’t much of a problem), and that was about it. Rows of heavy black buckets were stacked on the north wall for glopping out the bottom of the pit, and a thick red chain hung down from the pulley above.

  Today, Carter had a crew of three working for him. These were all volunteers who’d been trained by the museum. Claude, a retired engineer, was working on a three-foot grid in the east quadrant; Rosalie, a middle-aged teacher taking a year off, was working beside him; and next to Carter—where he usually seemed to find her—was Miranda. Miranda had just graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, and she was trying to decide if this kind of work was what she really wanted to do.

  At the moment, it didn’t lo
ok that way.

  “I think,” she said, “I’m stuck again.” She was kneeling on the boards that crisscrossed the floor of the pit, just above the area she was excavating, with her hands deep into the muck. Too deep, Carter knew. When you reached down to pull out the tar—and yeah, he had to concede that he called it that, too—you had to be careful not to dig down too far or to try to take out too much at one time. The stuff had been trapping animals of all kinds—from woolly mammoths to saber-toothed cats—for thousands of years, and it wasn’t done yet.

  “Just relax,” Claude called out. “Pull slowly.”

  “I am,” she said nervously, glancing up at Carter, who sat back on his haunches and wiped the sweat from his brow.

  “You’re pushing down with one hand while you’re trying to pull out the other,” he said. He inched along the board until he was shoulder to shoulder with her. “That means you’re getting one hand trapped after the other.” He put his hands on her forearms, then began to pull them up, slowly, with equal force. The tar was especially warm today, which made it even more resistant than ever. Their faces were just inches apart, so close he could smell that she’d recently popped a couple of Tic Tacs into her mouth.

  “There’s something down there,” she said. “Something big. I can feel it.”

  “There’s always something down there,” Carter said, as her arms slowly emerged from the hole. “So far, they’ve got about two million finds catalogued in the museum.”

  “How many from this particular pit?”

  “A lot,” he said as her hands emerged, black and glistening with goo; the stuff was too thick to drip. “That’s why we keep digging here.”