Michael Crichton - Timeline

He found himself studying their watches. Both men wore big, heavy Rolexes, but the metal watchbands were fitted loosely, so the watches flopped and dangled down their wrists, like a woman's bracelet. It was a sign of indifference and wealth, a casual sloppiness that suggested they were permanently on vacation. It annoyed him.

When one of the men began to play with his watch, flipping it around on his wrist, Chris finally could stand it no longer. Abruptly, he got up from the table.

He mumbled some excuse about having to check on his analyses back at the site, and headed down the rue Tourny toward the parking lot at the edge of the old quarter.

All along the street, it seemed to him that he saw only lovers, couples strolling arm in arm, the woman with her head on the man's shoulder. They were at ease with each other, having no need to speak, just enjoying the surroundings. Each one he passed made him more irritable, and made him walk faster.

It was a relief when he finally got to his car, and drove home.

Nigel!

What kind of an idiot had a name like Nigel?

The following morning, Kate was again hanging in the Castelgard chapel when her radio crackled and she heard the cry "Hot tamales! Hot tamales! Grid four. Come and get it! Lunch is served."

That was the team's signal that a new discovery had been made. They used code words for all their important transmissions, because they knew local officials sometimes monitored them. At other sites, the government had occasionally sent agents in to confiscate discoveries at the moment they were first found, before the researchers had a chance to document and evaluate them. Although the French government had an enlightened approach to antiquities - in many ways better than Americans - individual field inspectors were notoriously inconsistent. And, of course, there was often some feeling about foreigners appropriating the noble history of France.

Grid four, she knew, was over at the monastery. She debated whether to stay in the chapel or to go all the way over there, but finally she decided to go. The truth was that much of their daily work was dull and uneventful. They all needed the renewed enthusiasm that came with the excitement of discoveries.

She walked through the ruins of Castelgard town. Unlike many others, Kate could rebuild the ruins in her mind, and see the town whole. She liked Castelgard; this was a no-nonsense town, conceived and built in time of war. It had all the straightforward authenticity that she had found missing in architecture school.

She felt the hot sun on her neck and her legs and thought for the hundredth time how glad she was to be in France, and not sitting in New Haven at her cramped little workspace on the sixth floor of the A A Building, with big picture windows overlooking fake-colonial Davenport College and fake-Gothic Payne Whitney Gym. Kate had found architecture school depressing, she had found the Arts and Architecture Building very depressing, and she had never regretted her switch to history.

Certainly, you couldn't argue with a summer in southern France. She fitted into the team here at the Dordogne quite well. So far it had been a pleasant summer.

Of course, there had been some men to fend off. Marek had made a pass early on, and then Rick Chang, and soon she would have to deal with Chris Hughes as well. Chris took the British girl's rejection hard - he was apparently the only one in the Périgord who hadn't seen it coming - and now he was behaving like a wounded puppy. He'd been staring at her last night, during dinner. Men didn't seem to realize that rebound behavior was slightly insulting.

Lost in her thoughts, she walked down to the river, where the team kept the little rowboat that they used to ferry across.

And waiting there, smiling at her, was Chris Hughes.

"I'll row," he offered as they climbed into the boat. She let him. He began to pull across the river in easy strokes. She said nothing, just closed her eyes, turned her face up to the sun. It felt warm, relaxing.

"Beautiful day," she heard him say.

"Yes, beautiful."

"You know, Kate," he began, "I really enjoyed dinner last night. I was thinking maybe-"

"That's very flattering, Chris," she said. "But I have to be honest with you."

"Really? About what?"

"I've just broken up with someone."

"Oh. Uh-huh…"

"And I want to take some time off."

"Oh," he said. "Sure. I understand. But maybe we could still-"

She gave him her nicest smile. "I don't think so," she said.

"Oh. Okay." She saw that he was starting to pout. Then he said, "You know, you're right. I really think it's best that we just stay colleagues."

"Colleagues," she said, shaking hands with him.

The boat touched the far shore.

At the monastery, a large crowd was standing around at the top of grid four, looking down into the excavation pit.

The excavation was a precise square, twenty feet on a side, going down to a depth of ten feet. On the north and east sides, the excavators had uncovered flat sides of stone arches, which indicated the dig was now within the catacomb structure, beneath the original monastery. The arches themselves were filled in with solid earth. Last week, they had dug a trench through the north arch, but it seemed to lead nowhere. Shored up with timbers, it was now ignored.

Now all the excitement was directed to the east arch, where in recent days they had dug another trench under the arch. Work had been slow because they kept finding human remains, which Rick Chang identified as the bodies of soldiers.

Looking down, Kate saw that the walls of the trench had collapsed on both sides, the earth falling inward, covering the trench itself. There was now a great mound of earth, like a landslide, blocking further progress, and as the earth collapsed, brownish skulls and long bones - lots of them - had tumbled out.

She saw Rick Chang down there, and Marek, and Elsie, who had left her lair to come out here. Elsie had her digital camera on a tripod, snapping off shots. These would later be stitched together in the computer to make 360-degree panoramas. They would be taken at hourly intervals, to record every phase of the excavation.

Marek looked up and saw Kate on the rim. "Hey," he said. "I've been looking for you. Get down here."

She scrambled down the ladder to the earthen floor of the pit. In the hot midafternoon sun, she smelled dirt, and the faint odor of organic decay. One of the skulls broke free and rolled to the ground at her feet. But she didn't touch it; she knew the remains should stay as they were until Chang removed them.

"This may be the catacombs," Kate said, "but these bones weren't stored. Was there ever a battle here?"

Marek shrugged. "There were battles everywhere. I'm more interested in that." He pointed ahead to the arch, which was without decoration, rounded and slightly flattened.

Kate said, "Cistercian, could even be twelfth century…"

"Okay, sure. But what about that?" Directly beneath the central curve of the arch, the collapse of the trench had left a black opening about three feet wide.

She said, "What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking we better get in there. Right away."

"Why?" she said. "What's the hurry?"

Chang said to her, "It looks like there's space beyond the opening. A room, maybe several rooms."

"So?"

"Now it's exposed to the air. For the first time in maybe six hundred years."

Marek said, "And air has oxygen."

"You think there's artifacts in there?"

"I don't know what's in there," Marek said. "But you could have considerable damage within a few hours." He turned to Chang. "Have we got a snake?"

"No, it's in Toulouse, being repaired." The snake was a fiber optic cable that could be hooked to a camera. They used it to view otherwise inaccessible spaces.