August 15
Veronica Reeves held the satellite phone to her ear, although she was barely aware it was still in her hand. Part of her still tracked the cold, the mountain wind, the warmth of her jacket and the chill in her toes that never went away no matter how many pairs of socks she wore.
He’d said six words. Six words that had scrambled her thoughts.
“Veronica?”
That voice on the phone. Was she holding a phone? Yes, she was. That hand was cold, because it wasn’t wearing a glove. Her other hand was wearing a glove. Why was one glove on and one glove off? And that voice … was that her dad? Yes, Sanji Haak, that lovely, lovely man who had raised her like she was his own flesh and blood.
“Veronica, are we still connected?”
“Uh, yeah. Sorry, Dad. I just came out of the caves, maybe I heard you wrong. I … can you say what you said again?”
“What, the part about us being connected?”
“No,” Veronica said. “The part before.”
“Oh. Of course. I said, they found a knife in Utah.”
Yep, the same six words. Words that made no sense.
In the past seven years, the word knife had lost its conventional meaning. She now associated it only with the double-crescent weapons she and her team had found scattered in and around Cerro Chaltén — the local name for the peak also known as Mount Fitz Roy. The knives were evidence of a unique culture that had likely dominated the southern tip of the Andes around 5000 BC.
Six impossible words.
“Are you sure it’s the same? It can’t be the same. Is it the same?”
Couldn’t be. The Cerro Chaltén knives were completely unique in all the world’s history — a highly crafted platinum-alloy blade made at a time when humanity still struggled to master flint arrowheads.
“It is,” her father said. “Would I have called you if I hadn’t verified it myself?”
Sanji’s voice: calm, measured, patient. A voice she knew almost as well as her own.
Of course he’d verified it first. As best he could, anyway. He was a scientist, yes, but a biologist — this wasn’t his area of expertise.
He was wrong. Had to be. Because if he wasn’t … well, the significance of a knife that far north was just … well, it was impossible.
“Has to be a fake,” she said. “Someone saw the Nat Geo article and is trying to screw with me, or the university. You know, 3-D modeling, metal coating, and—”
“Ronni, I am holding it right now.”
Ronni. His pet name for her. He’d called her that the first day she’d gone to live with him. He was the only one who called her that.
“I weighed it,” he said. “Identical to the ones you’ve found. Dimensions are also a perfect match. And to make sure I didn’t waste my dear girl’s time, I had Kilman in Chemistry take a look at it. She said it’s a platinum alloy, no question.”
Veronica’s brain was a broken record spinning only one phrase: that’s impossible. The world at large knew about the knives she had found but did not know their composition. She’d kept that fact hidden from all but a few trustworthy colleagues.
“Where, exactly, did you find it?”
“In a box on a museum shelf,” Sanji said. “It’s been there since 1941, apparently. With verified documentation of the check-in date. This is real, and it predates your find by over seventy years.”
Her breath felt short. The cold mountain air bit at her face. She needed to get out of the wind, soon.
“There’s more,” he said. “It was found by a BYU student, in a cave in the Wah Wah Mountains. Right here in Utah.”
Her legs sagged. She sat. A sharp rock dug into her butt cheek. She made no effort to move.
“Glyphs,” she said. “This student … did he report any glyphs?”
“I don’t know. All I know right now is that the knife came to our attention because of a prospector. That’s why I called you as soon as I knew it was real — my colleague thinks someone may be preparing to mine the area.”
Veronica’s blood simultaneously chilled and boiled. Miners. She hated that word, hated what those soulless people could do to invaluable archaeological sites, not to mention the irreparable damage they inflicted on the environment. That was why she’d always hidden the fact that her knives were made from platinum; if that had ever become known, miners and treasure seekers would have descended like locusts, torn the mountain apart with explosives, strip mines and leaching compounds, turned the entire area into a wasteland.
If she didn’t do something, fast, that’s exactly what would happen in Utah.
“I’ll be on the next flight out,” she said. “I’ll call with the details. I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, too, Ronni.”
She disconnected. Her legs still didn’t work. Just a moment sitting here, thinking, but only a moment — being high up in the Andes meant it was an adventure just to reach the nearest airport. A long adventure.
A knife.
In Utah.
If it was real, if this wasn’t a hoax, prank or a mistake, then that knife — combined with the ones she found — was the archaeological find of the century.
And some money-grubbing mining slime might ruin it all?
We’ll see about that, you vampires. We’ll just see about that.