Douglas Preston - The Ice Limit

"Send him in." Lloyd didn't bother to suppress the excitement in his voice. He had not met Eli Glinn before, and it had been surprisingly difficult to get him to come in person.

He closely observed the man as he entered the office, without even a briefcase in his hand, sunburnt face expressionless. Lloyd had found, in his long and fruitful business career, that first impressions, if carefully made, were exceedingly revealing. He took in the close-cropped brown hair, the square jaw, the thin lips. The man looked, at first glance, as inscrutable as the Sphinx. There was nothing distinctive about him, nothing that gave anything away. Even his gray eyes were veiled, cautious, and still. Everything about him looked ordinary: ordinary height, ordinary build, good-looking but not handsome, well-dressed but not dapper. His only unusual feature, Lloyd thought, was the way he moved. His shoes made no sound on the floor, his clothes did not rustle on his person, his limbs moved lightly and easily through the air. He glided through the room like a deer through a forest.

And, of course, there was nothing ordinary in the man's résumé.

"Mr. Glinn," Lloyd said, walking toward him and taking his hand. "Thank you for coming."

Glinn nodded silently, shook the proffered hand with a shake that was neither too long nor too short, neither limp nor bone-crushingly macho. Lloyd felt moderately disconcerted: he was having trouble forming that invaluable first impression. He swept his hand toward the window and the sprawling, half-finished structures beyond. "So. What do you think of my museum?"

"Large," Glinn said without smiling.

Lloyd laughed. "The Getty of natural history museums. Or it will be, soon — with three times the endowment."

"Interesting that you decided to locate it here, a hundred miles from the city."

"A nice touch of hubris, don't you think? Actually, I'm doing the New York Museum of Natural History a favor. If we'd built there instead of up here, we'd have put them out of business within a month. But since we'll have the biggest and the best of everything, they'll be reduced to serving school field trips." Lloyd chuckled. "Come on, Sam McFarlane is waiting for us. I'll give you a tour on the way."

"Sam McFarlane?"

"He's my meteorite expert. Well, he's still only about half mine, I'd say, but I'm working on him. The day is young."

Lloyd placed a hand on the elbow of Glinn's well-tailored but anonymous dark suit — the material was better than he expected — and guided him back through the outer office, down a sweeping circular ramp of granite and polished marble, and along a large corridor toward the Crystal Palace. The noise was much louder here, and their footsteps were punctuated by shouts, the steady cadence of nailguns, and the stutter of jackhammers.

With barely contained enthusiasm, Lloyd pointed out the sights as they walked. "That's the diamond hall, there," he said, waving his hand toward a large subterranean space, haloed in violet light. "We discovered there were some old diggings in this hillside, so we tunneled our way in and set up the exhibit within an entirely natural context. It's the only hall in any major museum devoted exclusively to diamonds. But since we've acquired the three largest specimens in the world, it seemed appropriate. You must have heard about how we snapped up the Blue Mandarin from De Beers, just ahead of the Japanese?" He gave a wicked chuckle at the memory.

"I read the papers," Glinn said dryly.

"And that," said Lloyd, becoming more animated, "will house the Gallery of Extinct Life. Passenger pigeons, a dodo bird from the Galápagos, even a mammoth removed from the Siberian ice, still perfectly frozen. They found crushed buttercups in its mouth — remnants of its last meal."

"I read about the mammoth, too," Glinn said. "Weren't there several shootings in Siberia in the aftermath of its acquisition?"

Despite the pointedness of the question, Glinn's tone was mild, without any trace of censure, and Lloyd didn't pause in his answer. "You'd be surprised, Mr. Glinn, how quickly countries waive their so-called cultural patrimony when large sums of money become involved. Here, I'll show you what I mean." He beckoned his guest forward, through a half-completed archway flanked by two men in hard hats, into a darkened hall that stretched for a hundred yards. He paused to flick on the lights, then turned with a grin.

Before them stretched a hardened, mudlike surface. Wandering across this surface were two sets of small footprints. It looked as if people had wandered into the hall while the cement on the floor was setting.

The Laetoli footprints," Lloyd said reverently.

Glinn said nothing.

"The oldest hominid footprints ever discovered. Think about it: three and a half million years ago our first bipedal ancestors made those footprints, walking across a layer of wet volcanic ash. They're unique. Nobody knew that Australopithecus afarensis walked upright until these were found. They're the earliest proof of our humanity, Mr. Glinn."

"The Getty Conservation Institute must have been interested to hear of this acquisition," Glinn said.

Lloyd looked at his companion more carefully. Glinn was an exceptionally difficult man to read. "I see you've done your homework. The Getty wanted to leave them buried in situ. How long do you think that would have lasted, with Tanzania in the state it's in?" He shook his head. "The Getty paid one million dollars to cover them back up. I paid twenty million to bring them here, where scholars and countless visitors can benefit."

Glinn glanced around at the construction. "Speaking of scholars, where are the scientists? I see a lot of blue collars, but very few white coats."

Lloyd waved his hand. "I bring them on as I need them. For the most part, I know what I want to buy. When the time comes, though, I'll get the best. I'll stage a raiding party through the country's curatorial offices that will leave them spinning. It'll be just like Sherman marching to the sea. The New York Museum won't know what hit them"

More quickly now, Lloyd directed his visitor away from the long hallway and into a warren of corridors that angled deeper into the Palace. At the end of one corridor, they stopped before a door marked CONFERENCE ROOM A. Lounging beside the door was Sam McFarlane, looking every inch the adventurer: lean and rugged, blue eyes faded by the sun. His straw-colored hair had a faint horizontal ridge to it, as if years of wearing heavy-brimmed hats had permanently creased it. Just looking at him, Lloyd could see why the man had never taken to academia. He seemed as out of place among the fluorescent lights and drab-colored labs as would the San Bushmen he had been with just the other day. Lloyd noted, with satisfaction, that McFarlane looked tired. No doubt he had gotten very little sleep over the last two days.

Reaching into his pocket, Lloyd withdrew a key and opened the door. The space beyond was always a shock to first-time visitors. One-way glass covered three of the room's walls, looking down on the grand entrance to the museum: a vast octagonal space, currently empty, in the very center of the Palace. Lloyd glanced to see how Glinn would take it. But the man was as inscrutable as ever.

For months Lloyd had agonized over what object would occupy the soaring octagonal space below — until the auction at Christie's. The battling dinosaurs, he had thought, would make a perfect centerpiece. You could still read the desperate agony of their final struggle in the contorted bones.

And then his eyes fell on the table littered with charts, printouts, and aerial photographs. When this happened, Lloyd had forgotten all about the dinosaurs. This would be the pièce de résistance, the crowning glory of the Lloyd Museum. Mounting this in the center of the Crystal Palace would be the proudest moment of his life.