August 24
Connell followed Mack Hendricks into the adit, carefully echoing the Aussie’s footsteps, ever conscious that a million tons of limestone hung over their heads. It had been a long time since he’d actually been inside a mine, and he’d forgotten how detailed the process was.
Finding a site was one thing. That was Connell’s job. Find it, put the right people in place, fund it properly, then sit back and wait for the magic to happen. He was a pusher of paper. He was a manipulator of people. Although he excelled at those tasks, Connell held true admiration for the artists who really made a mine happen; people like Mack.
Mack moved through the safe areas of the shaft, constantly glancing back to make sure Connell stayed close. Connell marveled at Mack’s ease within the stone cavern’s confines. It was little things, mostly, like how Mack didn’t watch the ground yet never stumbled on loose rock, or how his hard hat stayed naturally plastered to his head, while Connell’s continually bobbled no matter how many times he adjusted it.
“Bit of gravel here, mate,” Mack said, his voice echoing slightly off the rough stone walls. “Watch your step. The vertical shaft is just ahead.”
Smells of oil and gas fumes filled the long, horizontal tunnel. The ceiling was only seven feet high. It was lined with many parallel grooves, like a rock-eating monster had moved along, taking thousands of big-toothed bites. Squat diesel tractors — designed for mines and less than four feet tall from tire-bottom to cab-top — hauled loose rock, equipment and supplies to and from the vertical shaft.
Normally, a mine required dozens of the strange-looking trucks to do that job. That was because in every mine before this one, loose rock came from both horizontal and vertical shafts. Thanks to Angus’s invention, however, the vertical shaft produced no rock at all — only dust, which was blown out through thick tubes.
The growl of engines, the steady rumble of generators, the constant hum of blowers … the combined sounds made Connell feel like he was in the belly of some great beast, waiting to be digested.
“Here we are, Mister Kirkland,” Mack said. “Welcome to the vertical shaft.”
The cavern surrounding the vertical shaft spread out before them, a stone dome chewed out by the same many-toothed metal monster that had made the adit. Everywhere Connell looked the walls allowed just enough room for the machinery installed within. No extra space. It reminded him of opening a walnut and seeing how the inside of the shell perfectly mirrored the contours of the nut.
In the center of the dome floor, a strong, circular rail surrounded a twenty-foot-diameter shaft that led straight down. Metal framework perched over it, a crouching black spider forever frozen. A yellow crane sat close, hoist line connected to the eighteen-foot-diameter elevator deck — known as a “cage” — that was used to raise or lower men, supplies and rock. The cage wasn’t in use, because the cables that led from the black spider far down into the hole were currently connected to the laser drill. Those cables and a thick hose rose up from the hole, into the black spider, then to massive, half-empty spools that sat in their own perfectly carved niches.
Mack stood at shaft’s edge. He glanced down, then back to Connell.
“It’s not going to bite, mate. Come on.”
Connell realized he’d stayed back almost at the tunnel entrance, as if something might reach up out of that great hole and grab him if he came too close. He felt like an idiot. Mack was clearly enjoying Connell’s discomfort. He could just imagine the Aussie’s thoughts: You’re all big and bad when it comes to giving orders, but when it gets down to the real work, you wouldn’t know the business end of a shovel if I stuck it straight up your ass.
Or something macho like that, anyway.
Connell walked to the rail. He looked down into a bottomless pit.
Powerful lights burned every hundred feet along the shaft’s length, a glowing line of giant pearls reaching farther than he could see, lighting up the cable and hose that — somewhere, down there — connected to the distant laser drill.
“How deep is it?”
His voice sounded small in here. He already knew the answer, as Mack updated him daily, but Connell needed to hear it. Things on paper were one thing — seeing this in person, it didn’t seem possible.
It didn’t seem real.
“This morning we passed thirty-two hundred meters,” Mack said. Then he winked. “That’s two miles for you Yanks.”
Two miles down, a pulsed plasma laser array was hard at work. The laser array looked like a giant lawn-mower blade, ten feet on each side attached to a center rotor. One hundred and forty-four laser heads — each with a beam radius of one inch — were attached to the blade bottoms. Above the blades sat a compact liquid-ring vacuum pump. The rotor spun the blade, the lasers fired in a computer-controlled sequence that vaporized the rock in a level ring, and the vacuum instantly sucked in the vaporized limestone and pushed it up the tubes before the dust could damage the laser array.
The end result? A perfectly round shaft with sides as smooth as poured concrete.
Mack’s walkie-talkie squawked harshly, a garbled version of his name between bursts of white noise. He pulled it out of his belt.
“Hendricks here.”
“Mack, is Mister Kirkland with you?” the voice squawked
“He is, Jerry. What’s up?”
“You’d both better get back to camp fast,” said the static-laden voice. “There’s been an accident at the lab. Mister Kool and Mister Wright were hurt bad.”
• • •
Sanji, Sonny and two EarthCore guards carefully dug into the plateau’s dirt and rock.
Veronica watched them. She needed a break. A girl could only take so much.
It was different this time. And not just because of the bodies. It was this mountain. It radiated a feeling, perhaps an emotion all its own. A dark emotion, one that draped over the sprawling rocks and sand as a shroud drapes over the face of a corpse. Veronica had felt that vibe right off the bat but mentally drowned it out in favor of the feverish excitement of exploration. Now, however, the sweet taste of discovery soured in light of their recent find.
Mass graves were nothing new to her. They dotted Cerro Chaltén like a giant case of measles. Five times Veronica had excavated such sites of violence and death. Many were far worse in scope than what they’d found on this Wah Wah Plateau — but this time it affected her in a way she’d never expected.
She was furious.
The Cerro Chaltén massacres were from a distant, exotic, ancient culture. Primitive people who were dead thousands of years before modern civilization even began.
The remains of the destroyed camp she had just unearthed, though, belonged to Americans.
Her people.
And just like that, like someone had flipped a switch, her perception changed forever. She now saw the Chaltélians in a different light. She had thought of them as highly advanced in technology, in art, in communication. Drastically ahead of their time. They were all of those things still, sure, but now there was a new layer – they were a savage, merciless tribe bent on murdering anything that crossed their path.
Once word of the mass grave filtered back to camp, Sonny McGuiness had come running. He helped examined the artifacts: a rusted pistol, a mining pan and the termite-ridden remains of what he said was a sluice, used to separate valuable metal from plain dirt. Based on old newspaper articles he’d found a week earlier, Sonny felt certain that the mass grave belonged to the William Benjamin mining camp, a camp that had disappeared in 1885.
Just 130 years ago.
The thought that descendants of her Cerro Chaltén culture roamed the plains and mountains of the southwestern United States should have thrilled her beyond imagination. Instead, it bothered her. It even scared her a little. It all hit a bit too close to home. According to her findings, the Cerro Chaltén civilization had ended around 1500 BC. The Utah version of that culture hadn’t died out at all. It existed right up through the turn of the century.
The Chaltélians were modern.
Or at least part of a modern age. By no stretch of the imagination could she call such an incredible display of savagery “modern.” Just as at the Argentinean sites, Chaltélians had cut the Benjamin party to pieces. The longest human remain discovered on the Wah Wah Plateau thus far was a piece of femur just over eighteen inches. Veronica even found thin scraps of fabric around some of the bones. One tough leather shoe still surrounded a mummified foot.
Sonny said eight people had gone missing from the Benjamin camp, but the remains were so chopped up Veronica hadn’t been able to accurately count the number of victims. It was almost as if the attackers had carved up the bodies and made sport of their remains, tossing them back and forth until the plateau was covered with blood, bone and savaged body parts.
A few of the skulls were intact, but most had been smashed to pieces — literally “counting heads” wouldn’t work. Sanji had struck on the idea of counting feet instead. So far they had found twelve feet: seven left, five right.
Just like the massacres at Cerro Chaltén, all traces of the mining camp were buried a good six to ten feet underground.
Americans. Not people separated by distance and time. Americans. Her people. Hell, as far as she knew, one of these victims could have been her great-great-grandfather.
“Ronni,” Sanji called out, breaking her daze. “I found another foot. A right one, I think.”
Veronica shuddered, suddenly wishing — for the first time in her career — that she wasn’t digging up the secrets of those long-dead and forgotten.
She wondered if perhaps forgotten is where the dead should stay.
• • •
Connell held on for dear life as Mack drove the Jeep through the camp, honking the horn madly to warn everyone away. Mack hit the brakes, skidding the Jeep to a dusty halt at the edge of the landing pad.
Both men jumped out and sprinted to the helicopter. Its long blades had already spun up to full speed, blowing up a cloud of dust and stinging sand.
O’Doyle and Takachi finished loading Randy into the chopper. Angus was already inside. Both men had bloodstained white gauze wrapped around their heads, their hands. Angus had a huge, bruised goose egg under his left eye. Neither man was conscious.
Connell leaned toward O’Doyle, shouted to be heard over the helicopter’s roar.
“What happened?”
“Chemical tank blew,” O’Doyle shouted back. “Static electricity ignited it or something like that. Both men were standing in front of it.”
“Are they okay?”
O’Doyle grabbed Cho, pulled him closer, repeated the question.
“They should be fine,” Cho said. “But they both had head wounds, and you don’t screw with those. I’m sending them to Milford Valley Memorial Hospital for observation, just to be sure.”
Connell hated to lose Angus and Randy for even a day, but Cho had been a combat medic and Connell wasn’t about to argue with the man’s expertise.
O’Doyle ushered everyone to the edge of the landing pad. The helicopter lifted off and headed west.
As it shrank away into the distance, the noise faded with it. Connell could speak normally again, although he heard the angry growl in his own voice.
“Check out the accident, Mister O’Doyle,” he said. “Look for any sign of foul play.”
O’Doyle nodded. “My thoughts exactly, Mister Kirkland. I’m on it.”
Connell found it a bit too coincidental that a lab accident took out his top two scientists. What seemed more likely was that a rival company was onto them, trying to sabotage the camp and get to the Dense Mass from another entrance somewhere on the mountain.
If his suspicion turned out to be accurate, he was running out of time.
• • •
Kayla Meyers watched the helicopter head west. This place grew more interesting every second. A small blast had rocked the lab, followed by thin black smoke that seeped out the roof. Cho Takachi rushed in immediately after the explosion. Bertha Lybrand was there seconds later.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Kayla slipped back into her tiny, camouflaged dugout and returned to cleaning her weapons. A cloth lay spread out on the sand, her Steyr GB-80 pistol on top of it, loaded and ready to go. She loved the weapon, mostly because it held eighteen rounds in the mag and one in the chamber for nineteen shots of 9 x 19 mm stopping power. Her Israeli-made Galil ARM submachine gun lay in spotless, well-loved pieces on top of the cloth. She, like many others, considered it the best submachine gun in the world. Like the Steyr, she adored the Galil mostly for its ammo capacity — a fifty-round magazine of 45 millimeter shells.
Clean weapons meant peace of mind.
She paid close attention to the process, guarding against tiny grains of windblown sand. Couldn’t take any chances on weapon reliability out here. She had a growing feeling her babies would come into play before this little desert soap opera was over. She wouldn’t mind using the weapons, not one bit.
She smiled as she finished assembling the Galil. She popped in a fresh magazine. Her smile widened.
Nope. Wouldn’t mind at all.
• • •
The setting sun dangled just above the horizon. Its molten orange color shrouded the mountain range with a thick, smoldering glow. After only an hour of hunting, Sonny McGuiness had finally found his prey.
“Sonofabitch,” he said. “And I thought Kirkland was a devious prick.”
He’d spent the day with Veronica and Sanji, digging up that awful plateau. Calling William Benjamin “crazy” was like calling an aircraft carrier a “dingy” — the word didn’t even begin to describe the reality. Benjamin had chopped those men to bits. That was a special kind of psycho right there.
And that Veronica girl. Come on. Nice ass and all, but she thought some lost civilization had gone all purée on Benjamin’s crew? Sure. Right. If that’s how they taught college kids to think these days, Sonny was damn glad he’d never gone. She was all right, though — anyone who would work that hard under a blazing sun all day long deserved some respect. Her and Sanji both — neither one of them shied away from breaking a sweat.
After they found that weird line, though, they were done for the day. Sonny had headed back to the Land of Air Conditioning to get some sleep and wait for darkness so he could follow Angus and Randy.
Then some thingamajigger in the lab had blown up.
Now the two nerds were in a shitty little hospital in Milford. No more skulking around for them, at least not until they got back. Sonny should have taken advantage of that to get some real sleep, but that wasn’t how he was wired. The nerds were gone — whatever had dragged them out in the wee hours of the night was not.
Sonny had to know.
Curiosity: it was a real kick in the nuts.
He’d headed out an hour before sunset. No one stopped him, he had free rein to come and go as he pleased. Connell wanted Sonny to keep exploring, keep researching, keep looking for any and all information that would help the cause.
Angus and Randy knew nothing about covering their tracks. Sonny had found the secret spots, the hiding places, the hidden treasures of men who had mastered the desert — and who hadn’t left a footprint behind in over a hundred years. Following a one-day-old trail left by a pair of corncob-up-the-ass lab rats was a comparative cakewalk.
He’d tracked them. He’d climbed. He’d found this.
“You two little turdballs really take the cake,” Sonny said. “Serves Kirkland right, though — you treat people like shit, they shit on you right back.”
While EarthCore spent millions to sink a shaft, Angus Kool had found another way in. A way he kept to himself.
Like the loose fist of some stone giant, a small projection of greenish limestone camouflaged a clearing. Little more than a flat slab of rock, the small clearing protruded from the mountain, ending in a fifty-foot drop straight to a jagged outcropping below. Surrounded on three sides by large, weather-worn boulders, the tiny mesa offered a stunning view of the sprawling desert. At the back edge of the mesa sat an irregular dark opening, about two feet high and three feet wide.
Sonny noticed something above that opening. Scratches, and not the natural kind. He stepped closer, and as he did he saw the lines were thin, jagged letters chiseled into the stone.
S. Anderson D. Nadia W. Igoe Jr. 1942
Sonny’s blood ran cold. That creeping feeling washed over him again — Funeral Mountain, caressing his skin, a cat lightly batting a mouse to keep it away from safety for a few torturous minutes longer.
The place Anderson wrote about in his last report … this was it. This was the entrance to his tunnel. This was where he’d found the platinum knife. Right in there. Had the three boys died here? Had they gotten lost? Had they knocked out a linchpin rock and been killed in a collapse?
Or, had something killed them.
First the Benjamin bodies. Now this.
Anderson had stood in this very spot. He’d been both younger than Sonny and older than him, born long before Sonny was, dead far younger than Sonny was now.
Sonny wanted to turn around and head back to the camp.
His feet wouldn’t let him.
The tiny tunnel entrance beckoned, taunting Sonny’s curiosity like a grade-school bully.
Come on, Sonny Boy. Don’t be chicken. Don’t you want to know what’s in here? Don’t you?
He wanted to know. He had to know.
Sonny slid his silver bracelet from his wrist. He held it with both hands, thumbs rubbing on the faded swastika.
“It’s just a cave,” he said. “Just a tunnel. Ain’t nothing in there but bugs.”
He slid the bracelet back on. He pulled a flashlight from his bag and aimed the beam into the darkness.
Sonny crawled inside on his hands and knees.
At first he had plenty of room to lift his head, but the tunnel rapidly bottlenecked to a space no more than fifteen inches from floor to ceiling. That feeling, that funeral feeling, it was stronger in here. He forced himself to breathe slowly, to stay calm.
Maybe he should turn back? Bring Cho, maybe, do this in the daylight?
No, that was stupid. Daylight would only help for the first thirty feet or so. And Cho or no Cho, Sonny knew that once he left this spot he would never return. No fucking way. If he wanted to satisfy his curiosity, it was now or never.
The tunnel narrowed even further. Sonny had to turn his head sideways to fit through. Twice he bumped his head on unforgiving rock overhangs, but he ignored the pain. Soft, flour-like sand lay under his chest, leftovers from an ancient river that once flowed through the passage, carving the tunnel from solid limestone and leaving the powdery sediment behind. Jagged walls closed in on either side of him, a limestone crypt made for an oh-so-snug fit.
No sound other than his breathing.
His flashlight clumsily played down the tunnel, and he thought he saw an opening in front of him. He pushed forward, fighting back the panic growing in his belly and balls.
After another twenty feet, the ceiling suddenly slanted up, almost high enough for Sonny to stand up straight. The tunnel continued on. He wiped sweat from his face, leaving a smear of cave silt.
Sonny played his flashlight around the cave, knowing three young BYU students had traveled this same path over a half century ago. Evil-looking white spiders sat motionless in their webs. Small crickets with long legs and even longer antennae moved slowly along the walls and ceiling.
He continued on.
No footsteps here. Odd. This far into a tunnel, there wasn’t enough air current to blow sand, even powdery stuff like this. Any footsteps Anderson and his friends made should have still been here. Maybe water still flowed through here occasionally, surging up during an unseasonal rain, perhaps.
Sonny came to a massive pile of boulders, obviously the site of an ancient cave-in. A narrow, dark hole rested at the bottom. Just left of it, a small boulder that looked oddly like a limestone pumpkin.
This is where you boys stopped the first time. And when you came back here the second time, no one heard from you ever again.
He realized he was trembling. Shivering like a child just awoken from a nightmare. Maybe the evil that created this awful feeling lay just beyond this jumbled pile of huge boulders. Maybe Veronica’s lost tribe or even Benjamin’s demons waited for him just past the opening, waited for him to poke his too-damn-curious head through, waited to grab him and drag him off to some unknown horror.
Get ahold of yourself, you cowardly old fart. You’ve got to see what’s past here or it’s all you’ll think about for the rest of your days.
He wanted to know. He had to know.
Without giving himself time to reconsider, Sonny flopped to the ground. He crawled past the pumpkin-shaped boulder and through the opening. He stood, shaking, his body telling him to leave, his brain telling his body to shut the hell up.
His flashlight beam traced across the tunnel walls, came to rest on a small charcoal drawing. Six curving sunbeams reached out from a central circle. A primitive sun, maybe? The drawing was simple enough, but there was something odd about it. Sonny couldn’t place it, and at the moment he didn’t give a shit.
He wasn’t alone.
That feeling hit him all at once, irresistible, undeniable. His flashlight beam ripped across stone, this way and that, up and down and all over. Nothing but rock, nothing but shadows and darkness ringing a moving circle of light.
Sonny scrambled back through the cave-in opening, unforgiving rock punishing him for moving too fast, scraping at him, hurting him. Something was coming, the darkness forming up into a living thing that would drag him down and never let him go.
He pushed through, crawled past the pumpkin-shaped boulder.
Stooped over to keep his head from banging on the rocky ceiling, he sprinted up the tunnel slope, boots pounding into the fine, dry silt.
Up ahead: fading daylight.
Just like on the way in, the tunnel narrowed. Sonny dove to the ground. The flashlight clattered away, smashing against the wall. He crawled, breath coming as torn gasps that seemed to suck in as much dust and silt as they did air.
He banged his elbow, hard. He tuned out the pain, kept moving, and then he was out of the cave, back on the mesa.
Sonny stood. Chest heaving, stomach clenching, he stared out into the darkening sky. His elbow stung. So did his hands. He looked at them: three knuckles split open. Blood fell in small droplets against the sunheated rocks.
He turned, stared back at the cave opening, sure some horror would pour forth at any moment.
But nothing did.
It was just a cave. Just a small, dark opening.
Why had he been so afraid?
Claustrophobia, old-timer. Brought on because that cave reminds you of the coffin you’ll be wearing before too long.
That’s what he told himself. But somewhere inside him, inside the part that had taken to the land, the part that embraced the desert like a lost love, he knew it was a lie. Sonny sat on the cliff’s edge, his feet dangling above the fatal drop, his eyes staring out into the sunset.
This mountain was death.
A war raged inside Sonny McGuiness’s mind. His emotions and his intellect battled for dominance. To stay was to get rich. Rich enough to retire forever. To leave? To leave, he’d have to leave that wealth behind.
But at least he’d get to keep his life.
• • •
The helicopter touched down. Katerina Hayes was glad the ride was over. Not because she minded flying — which was more than a little thrilling, kind of like being in a movie — but because Achmed had looked like he might throw up at any moment.
“Oh, my,” he said, one hand over his mouth. “Have we stopped?”
“You can look now,” Katerina said. “Terra firma.”
For the first time in an hour, Achmed opened his eyes and looked around. The hand stayed over his mouth. She’d tried to tell him that shutting your eyes was about the worst thing you could do for motion sickness, but he hadn’t listened.
A man outside the helicopter opened the side door, letting a wave of heat slip in and slap her. Oh, Lord, was it going to be like this all the time?
“Doctor Hayes, Doctor Frigbane,” Patrick O’Doyle said. “Welcome to camp.”
Him again. She should have known.
Katerina didn’t like the big security guard. In fact, he scared the hell out of her. He’d killed people, or so the story went. Rumor had it he’d served in an Israeli commando unit and had once single-handedly slain four terrorists using nothing but a combat knife.
O’Doyle offered a hand to help her out. She took it, her skin already prickling from the heat. She stepped onto the landing pad’s concrete, sand gritting under her shoes.
He looked back into the helicopter. “Doctor Frigbane? Do you need a hand?”
“Several,” Achmed said. “And how many times do I have to tell you to call me Achmed?”
“As many times as times there are,” O’Doyle said, reaching in to help the man out. “And it still won’t work, Doctor.”
Achmed stepped out of the helicopter, stood on weak legs.
“You, I take to your quarters,” O’Doyle said to him. He glanced at Katerina. “You, I take straight to Mister Kirkland.”
Had she done something wrong? Had Angus blamed her for something?
“Why does he want to see me?”
“I don’t make a habit of questioning my boss’s decisions,” O’Doyle said.
“Can I clean up first?”
The big man shook his head. “No, ma’am. He said bring you straightaway.”
She wasn’t going to argue with him. She wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t kill her if she did.
They climbed into O’Doyle’s Jeep. He drove off the landing pad — stopping just long enough for Achmed to finally throw up — then into the camp. People bustled about. Mostly miners, by the looks of it. She didn’t know any of them. She recognized a few people from the Denver lab, some scientists, some techs and assistants. They all gave her a welcoming wave. The camp looked neat and efficient, everything new and gleaming.
The Jeep stopped at a Quonset hut. Achmed threw up again. Poor guy.
O’Doyle pointed to a trailer.
“That’s Mister Kirkland’s office, Doctor Hayes. Do me a favor and go straight there while I help your friend get cleaned up?”
A fair deal by any stretch, she figured.
Katerina walked to the trailer. Lord, please let that have air-conditioning. She reached out a fist to knock, then stopped.
Remember why you’re here. Remember who you’re doing this for.
She tugged a gold locket out from under her shirt. As the sun beat down on her, she popped it open. On one side was a tiny picture of herself with her husband, Harry. Their vacation in Puerto Rico, before the baby. Matching blue floral shirts. He had black hair, just like her. This was the only picture that made her agree with her friends’ constant observation — that Harry and she looked like brother and sister. On the other side of the locket, their daughter, Kelly, smiling, sitting at the piano. Katerina was teaching her, on the same piano her mother had used to teach her.
She hadn’t seen either of them in two weeks, not since this whole Wah Wah situation erupted. First, she’d worked incessantly in the lab with that bastard Angus, who never seemed to get tired and was never satisfied no matter how many hours the staff put in. Then, O’Doyle had told them all they were no longer allowed to go home, not until the camp was up and running, the mine was functioning and the company had full control of all land that needed controlling. Even her phone calls to her family were monitored, just to make sure no info got out.
She should have been furious at the invasion of privacy, but she wasn’t. The people who worked in EarthCore’s lab were far from stupid. Everyone saw the potential of this find. As people employed in the mining industry, they understood the find’s potential ramifications. If word got out too soon, other companies — even other governments — might not play by the rules. People could get hurt. If everyone obeyed the law, that would be a nice world to live in, but it wasn’t the real world.
Then came the call: Angus and Randy were injured. Connell wanted Katerina and Achmed to take their place. Immediately.
She had managed a quick phone call to Harry before she left, telling him that she was going to be on-site. No, she didn’t know how long. No, she couldn’t tell him where. No, she wouldn’t be able to call him. No, she didn’t know when she’d be able to call at all.
Yes, it might mean big things for her career.
That was all Harry needed to hear. He was so damn supportive. She often had to work late, as did everyone on Angus’s staff, yet Harry never complained. Not once. Inside the fridge she always found a meal waiting to be microwaved. Outside the fridge she always found a new crayon drawing from her daughter.
Keep working hard Mommy.
I love you Mommy.
I’m proud of you Mommy.
She knew Harry coached Kelly to write those messages. He never let his daughter write things like I miss you, or come play with me, things that would have drowned her with guilt. Even after years of Angus’s unending demands, there was nothing but support from her wonderful husband and her growing daughter.
Harry was the reason she still worked at EarthCore, where — despite her “genius” — she worked for a man who treated her like an imbecile. Harry had always told her someday it would pay off.
“For you guys,” Katerina said. She closed the locket, slipped it back into her shirt.
She knocked.
“Come in,” Kirkland called. She entered the trailer. She tried to look confident.
“Sit down, Doctor Hayes.” He gestured to the two folding chairs that sat in front of his cheap metal desk. She sat, looked into his cold, gray, penetrating eyes.
“Thank you for getting out here so fast, Doctor.”
She nodded. As if she’d had any choice but to come.
“Mister Kool and Mister Wright have been injured and will not be able to handle their duties for at least a few days,” Kirkland said. “You’re in charge while they’re gone.”
In … charge?
“Wait, what? Me?”
Kirkland sighed. “Your first words as boss, and you’re making me doubt my decision already. Do you not want the job or something?”
How had she just leapfrogged four, maybe five people ahead of her?
“Oh, no, no I want it,” she said. “Absolutely. I’ll tear this job a new asshole, Mister …”
Her voice trailed off. Had she just cursed in front of this man?
“That’s better,” he said. “I’ll take that over who, me? any day of the week.”
He smiled. A forced smile, no real humor behind it. She suddenly realized how exhausted he looked.
“I want it,” Katerina said. “It’s just that, well, Achmed has seniority on me. So do several other people in the lab.”
Kirkland shrugged. “You have seniority on Angus, but he’s been your boss for years.”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t think you can count him as normal in any equation, Mister Kirkland. I might not like the man, but there is no denying he’s special.”
“That’s one word to describe him.” Kirkland tapped his phone, called something up. “And to answer your question as to why you’re in charge, let me share several words he used to describe you. I quote, Doctor Hayes has an impeccable work ethic and never complains when I assign her extra duties. I know that when others on my staff are past the point of breaking, she will get the job done. Because of this, I give her far too much work, and yet she completes every task I assign. I can only compliment her by saying that in five or six years, she could be almost as good as I am now.”
He set the phone facedown on his desk. He stared at her.
Angus yelling, Angus insulting, Angus treating her like she was stupid. Her, stupid.
“He didn’t say those things,” she said. “He couldn’t have.”
Kirkland waved his hand dismissively. “I really don’t have time for junior high melodrama, Hayes. The lab techs reported they are detecting some kind of unknown seismic spike. I want you to figure out what’s causing it.”
“A seismic spike? Could it be rock settling due to the new vertical shaft?”
Kirkland drummed his fingertips on his desktop.
“For someone of your intellect, Doctor Hayes, do I need to define the word unknown for you?”
Her face flushed hot. Apparently, there were two people who could make her feel stupid.
“No, Mister Kirkland.”
“Good,” he said. “You’re in charge of the lab. The rest of the lab staff doesn’t know this yet. You inform them of my decision. This will upset some of them, but I don’t care. I want the cause of that spike identified within twenty-four hours. We have people in that shaft. Their safety is now your responsibility, got it?”
She nodded.
“Good.” He gestured to the door. “That will be all.”
Katerina wasn’t really sure what had just gone down. She was in charge of the entire lab. She left the trailer, floating more than walking.
On-site at the biggest test dig in the company’s history, and she was in charge. She wanted to rush to a phone and call Harry, but phone calls remained off-limits. Well, he’d find out soon enough; more immediate things demanded her attention. This was her chance to move up the ladder, her chance to be noticed.
If her coworkers thought Angus was a hard boss, they didn’t know anything yet. She might only have a few days, a week, tops, to make the most of this opportunity.
She wasn’t about to let it slip away.