Douglas Preston - Relic

He stopped. “Why are you so interested?” he asked suspiciously.

“To explain what?” Smithback interjected.

Jörgensen looked at him with distaste. “Young man, if you open your mouth one more time I’m going to ask you to leave.”

Smithback narrowed his eyes but remained silent. Margo wondered if she should go into detail about Frock’s theories, the claw marks, the damaged crate, but decided not to. “We’re interested because we feel that there’s a connection here that no one is paying attention to. Not the police, and not the Museum. You were mentioned in this letter. We hoped you might be able to tell us more about this expedition.”

Jörgensen held out a gnarled hand. “May I see that again?”

Reluctantly, Smithback complied.

Jörgensen’s eyes passed over the letter again, hungrily, as if sucking in memories. “There was a time,” he murmured, “I would have been reluctant to talk about this. Maybe afraid would be a better word. Certain parties might have sought to fire me.” He shrugged. “But when you get as old as I am, you don’t have much to be afraid of. Except maybe being alone.”

He nodded slowly to Margo, clutching the letter. “I would have been on that expedition, if it hadn’t been for Maxwell.”

“Maxwell? Who’s he?” asked Smithback.

Jörgensen shot him a look. “I’ve knocked down bigger journalists than you,” he snapped. “Now I said, be quiet. I’m talking to the lady.”

He turned to Margo again.

“Maxwell was one of the leaders of the expedition. Maxwell and Whittlesey. That was the first mistake, letting Maxwell muscle his way in, making the two of them [228] coleaders. They were at odds right from the beginning. Neither one had full control. Maxwell’s gain was my loss—he decided they didn’t have room for a botanist on the expedition, and that was it for me. But Whittlesey was even less happy about it than I. Having Maxwell along put his hidden agenda at risk.”

“What was that?” Margo asked.

“To find the Kothoga tribe. There were rumors of an undiscovered tribe living on a tepui , a vast tableland above the rain forest. Although the area had not been scientifically explored, the consensus was that the tribe was extinct, that only relics remained. Whittlesey didn’t believe this. He wanted to be their discoverer. The only problem was, the local government denied him a permit to study on the tepui . Said it was reserved for their own scientists. Yankee go home.”

Jörgensen snorted, shook his head.

“Well, what it was really being reserved for was depredation, land rape. Of course, the local government had heard the same rumors Whittlesey had. If there were Indians up there, the government didn’t want them in the way of timbering and mining. So anyway, the expedition had to approach from the north. A much less convenient route, but away from the restricted area. And they were forbidden to ascend the tepui itself.”

“Did the Kothoga still exist?” Margo asked.

Jörgensen slowly shook his head. “We’ll never know. The government found something on top of that tepui . Maybe gold, platinum, placer deposits. You can detect lots of things with satellites these days. Anyway, the tepui was fired from the air in the spring of ‘88.”

“Fired?” Margo asked.

“Burned clear with napalm,” Jörgensen said. “Unusual and expensive to do it that way. Apparently, the fire got out of hand, spread, burned uncontrollably for months. Then they built a big road in there, coming up the easy way from the south. They hauled in Japanese hydraulic mining equipment and literally washed away [229] huge sections of the mountain. No doubt they leeched the gold and platinum or whatever with cyanic compounds, then just let the poison run into the rivers. There’s nothing, I mean nothing , left. That’s why the Museum never sent a second expedition down to search for the remains of the first.” He cleared his throat.

“That’s terrible,” breathed Margo.

Jörgensen gazed up with his unsettling cerulean eyes. “Yes. It is terrible. Of course, you won’t read about it in the Superstition exhibition.”

Smithback held up one hand while slipping out his microcassette recorder with the other. “Excuse me, may I—?”

“No, you may not record this. This is not for attribution. Not for quotation. Not for anything. I’ve received a memo to that effect just this morning, as you probably know. This is for me: I haven’t been able to talk about this for years, and I’m going to do it now, just this once. So keep quiet and listen.”

There was a silence.

“Where was I?” Jörgensen resumed. “Oh, yes. So Whittlesey had no permit to ascend the tepui . And Maxwell was the consummate bureaucrat. He was determined to make Whittlesey play by the rules. Well, when you get out there in the jungle two hundred miles from any kind of government. ... What rules?” He cackled.

“I doubt if anybody knows exactly what did happen out there. I got the story from Montague, and he pieced it together from Maxwell’s telegrams. Not exactly an unbiased source.”

“Montague?” Smithback interrupted.

“In any case,” Jörgensen continued, ignoring Smithback, “it appears Maxwell stumbled upon some unbelievable botany. Around the base of the tepui , ninety-nine percent of the plant species were absolutely new to science. They found strange, primitive ferns and monocotyledons that looked like throwbacks to the Mesozoic Era. Even though Maxwell was a physical [230] anthropologist, he went crazy over the strange vegetation. They filled up crate after crate with odd specimens. That was when Maxwell found those seed pods.”

“How important were they ?”

“They were from a living fossil. Not unlike the discovery of the coelacanth in the 1930s: a species from an entire phylum they thought had become extinct in the Carboniferous. An entire phylum .”

“Did these seed pods look like eggs?” asked Margo.

“I couldn’t say. But Montague got a look at them, and he told me they were hard as hell. They’d need to be buried deep in the highly acidic soil of a rain forest in order to germinate. I imagine they’re still in those crates.”

“Dr. Frock thought they were eggs.”

“Frock should stick to paleontology. He’s a brilliant man, but erratic. At any rate, Maxwell and Whittlesey had a falling out. Not unexpected. Maxwell couldn’t care less about botany, but he knew a rarity when he saw one. He wanted to get back to the Museum with his seed pods. He learned that Whittlesey intended to scale the tepui and look for the Kothoga, and it alarmed him. He was afraid the crates would be seized at dockside and he wouldn’t get his precious pods out. They split up. Whittlesey went on deeper into the jungle, up the tepui , and was never seen again.

“When Maxwell reached the coast with the rest of the expedition, he sent back a stream of telegrams to the Museum, lambasting Whittlesey and telling his side of the story. Then he and the rest were killed in that plane crash. Luckily, arrangements had been made to ship the crates separately, or maybe it wasn’t so lucky. Took the Museum a year to untangle the red tape, get the crates back to New York. Nobody seemed in a big hurry to do it.” He rolled his eyes in disgust.

“You mentioned somebody named Montague?” Margo asked quietly.

“Montague,” Jörgensen said, his eyes looking past [231] Margo. “He was a young Ph.D. candidate at the Museum. Anthropology. Whittlesey’s protégé. Needless to say, that didn’t exactly put him in the Museum’s good graces after Maxwell’s telegrams arrived. None of us who’d been friendly with Whittlesey were ever really trusted after that.”