Douglas Preston: Thunderhead

Lincoln Child dedicates this book to his daughter, Veronica, and to the Company of Nine.

Douglas Preston dedicates this book to Stuart Woods.

Acknowledgments

Lincoln Child wishes to thank Bruce Swanson, Bry Benjamin, M.D., Lee Suckno, M.D., Irene Soderlund, Mary Ellen Mix, Bob Wincott, Sergio and Mila Nepomuceno, Jim Cush, Chris Yango, Jim Jenkins, Mark Mendel, Juliette Kvernland, Hartley Clark, and Denis Kelly, for their friendship and their assistance, both technical and otherwise. Thanks also to my wife, Luchie, for her love and unstinting support. And I would especially like to acknowledge as an inspiration my grandmother Nora Kubie. Artist, novelist, archaeologist, independent spirit, biographer of Nineveh excavator Austen Henry Layard, she instilled in me from a very early age twin loves for writing and archaeology. She worked on excavations as far away as Masada and Camelot, and as close as her own New Hampshire backyard. Although she passed away ten years ago, during the writing of Thunderhead in particular she was never far from my thoughts.

Douglas Preston would like to offer his appreciation to the following people: Walter Winings Nelson, horseback riding companion across a thousand miles of deserts, canyons, and mountains, seeking the Seven Cities of Gold; Larry Burke, captain of the Emerald Sun, for hosting a memorable expedition up Lake Powell; Forrest Fenn, who found his own lost city; the Cottonwood Gulch Foundation of New Mexico; and Tim Maxwell, director of the Office also like to thank my wife, Christine, and my children Selene, Aletheia, and Isaac. I want to thank once again those two who can never receive enough thanks, my mother and father, Dorothy and Jerome Preston.

We would like to thank Ron Blom and Diane Evans at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for their help with an article of Douglas Preston’s explaining how space-borne radar is used in locating ancient trails. We offer them our apologies for creating the unpleasant and wholly fictitious character of Leland Watkins. No such persons as Leland Watkins or Peter Holroyd work, or have worked, at JPL. We would also like to express our great appreciation to Farouk El-Baz, director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, for his help with the technical aspects of remote sensing the earth from space; and we thank Juris Zarins, the archaeologist who discovered the lost city of Ubar in Saudi Arabia.

Our deep appreciation goes out to Bonnie Mauer, who read the manuscript not once but several times and offered excellent advice. Thanks also to Eric Simonoff, Lynn Nesbit, and Matthew Snyder, for their continued assistance, counsel, and encouragement. Special thanks to Mort Janklow for sharing a surprising and very moving personal anecdote in connection with our story. And to Clifford Irving, for his advice on the manuscript, as well as Kim Gattone, for so kindly assisting with some of the technical aspects of rock climbing. At Warner, we would like to thank Betsy Mitchell, Jaime Levine, Jimmy Franco, Maureen Egen, and Larry Kirshbaum for believing in us. Thanks also to Debi Elfenbein.

We hasten to add that any outrages commited in the name of anthropology and archaeology within the pages of Thunderhead are fictitious and exist wholly within the authors’ imaginations.

1

THE FRESHLY PAVED ROAD LEFT SANTA FE and arrowed west through piñon trees. An amber-colored sun was sinking into a scrim of dirty clouds behind the snowcapped Jemez Mountains, drawing a counterpane of shade across the landscape. Nora Kelly guided the rattletrap Ford pickup along the road, down chamisa-covered hills and across the beds of dry washes. It was the third time she had been out here in as many months.

As she came up from Buckman’s Wash into Jackrabbit Flats—what had once been Jackrabbit Flats—she saw a shining arc of light beyond the piñons. A moment later, her truck was speeding past manicured greens. A nearby sprinkler head winked and nodded in the sun, jetting water in a regular, palsied cadence. Beyond, on a rise, stood the new Fox Run clubhouse, a massive structure of fake adobe. Nora looked away.

The truck rattled over a cattle guard at the far end of Fox Run and suddenly, the road was washboard dirt. She bounced past a cluster of ancient mailboxes and the crude, weatherbeaten sign that read RANCHO DE LAS CABRILLAS. For a moment, the memory of a summer day twenty years before passed through her mind: once again she was standing in the heat, holding a bucket, helping her father paint the sign. Cabrillas, he’d said, was the Spanish word for waterbugs. But it was also their name for the constellation Pleiades, which he said looked like water skaters on the shining surface of a pond. “To hell with the cattle,” she remembered him saying, swabbing thick letters with the paintbrush. “I bought this place for its stars.”

The road turned to ascend a rise, and she slowed. The sun had now disappeared, and the light was draining fast out of the high desert sky. There in a grassy valley stood the old ranch house, windows boarded up. And beside it, the frowsy outlines of the barn and corrals that were once the Kelly family ranch. No one had lived here in five years. It was no great loss, Nora told herself: the house was a mid-fifties prefab, already falling apart when she was growing up. Her father had spent all his money on the land.

Pulling off the road just below the brow of the hill, she glanced toward the nearby arroyo. Somebody had surreptitiously dumped a load of broken cinderblocks. Maybe her brother was right and she should sell the place. Taxes were going up, and the house had long ago passed the point of no return. Why was she holding on to it? She couldn’t afford to build her own place there—not on an assistant professor’s salary, anyway.

She could see the lights coming on in the Gonzales ranch house, a quarter mile away. It was a real working ranch, not like her father’s hobby ranchito. Teresa Gonzales, a girl she’d grown up with, now ran the place by herself. A big, smart, fearless woman. In recent years, she’d taken it upon herself to look after the Kelly ranch, too. Every time kids came out to party, or drunken hunters decided to take potshots at the place, Teresa rousted them and left a message on the answering machine at Nora’s townhouse. This time, for the past three or four nights, Teresa had seen dim lights in and around the house just after sunset, and—she thought—large animals slinking about.

Nora waited a few minutes, looking for signs of life, but the ranch was quiet and empty. Perhaps Teresa had imagined the lights. In any case, whoever or whatever it was seemed to have left.

She eased the truck through the inner gate and down the last two hundred yards of road, parked around back, and killed the engine. Pulling a flashlight out of the glove compartment, she stepped lightly onto the dirt. The door of the house hung open, held precariously by a single hinge screw, its lock cut off long ago with bolt cutters. A gust swept through the yard, picking up skeins of dust and moving the door with a restless whisper.

She flicked on the flashlight and stepped onto the portal. The door moved aside at her push, then swung back stubbornly. She gave it an annoyed kick and it fell to the porch with a clatter, loud in the listening silence. She stepped inside.

The boarded windows made the interior difficult to make out, yet even so it was clearly a sad echo of her memory of the house she grew up in. Beer bottles and broken glass lay strewn across the floor, and some gang member had spray-painted a tagline on the wall. Some of the boards covering the windows had been pried away. The carpet had been ripped up, and sofa cushions sliced in half and tossed about the room. Holes had been kicked in the drywall, along with liberal pepperings from a .22.