Timeline. Part 7

"That makes it very difficult to trace. Whatever ITC is doing, it clearly requires secrecy. But why would this company fund your research, and also buy the land all around the site?"

"I have no idea," Johnston said. "Especially since ITC doesn't own the site itself. You'll recall they gave the entire area-Castelgard, Sainte-Mere and La Roque-to the French government last year."

"Of course. For a tax exemption."

"But still, ITC does not own the site. Why should they buy land around it?"

"I will be happy to show you everything I have."

"Perhaps," Johnston said, "you should."

"My research is just in the car."

They started together toward the Land Rover. Watching them go, Bellin clucked his tongue. "Ah, dear, dear. It is so difficult to trust these days."

Chris was about to answer in his bad French when his radio clicked. "Chris?" It was David Stern, the project technologist. "Chris, is the Professor with you? Ask him if he knows somebody named James Wauneka."

Chris pressed the b.u.t.ton on his radio. "The Professor's busy right now. What's it about?"

"He's some guy in Gallup. He's called twice. Wants to send us a picture of our monastery that he says he found in the desert."

"What? In the desert?"

"He might be a little cracked. He claims he's a cop, and he keeps babbling on about some dead ITC employee."

"Have him send it to our e-mail address," Chris said. "You take a look at it."

He clicked the radio off. Bellin was looking at his watch, clucking again, then looking at the car, where Johnston and Delvert were standing, their heads almost touching as they pored over papers. "I have appointments," he said mournfully. "Who knows how long this will take?"

"I think," Chris said, "perhaps not long."

Twenty minutes later, Bellin was driving off with Miss Delvert at his side, and Chris was standing with the Professor, waving good-bye. "I think that went rather well," Johnston said.

"What'd she show you?"

"Some land-purchase records, for the area around here. But it's not persuasive. Four parcels were bought by a German investment group about which little is known. Two parcels were bought by a British attorney who claims he's going to retire here; another by a Dutch banker for his grown daughter; and so on."

"The British and the Dutch have been buying land in the Perigord for years," Chris said. "It's nothing new."

"Exactly. She has some idea that all the purchases could be traced to ITC. But it's pretty tenuous. You have to be a believer."

The car was gone. They turned and walked toward the river. The sun was higher in the sky now, and it was getting warm.

Cautiously, Chris said, "Charming woman."

"I think," Johnston said, "that she works too hard at her job."

They got into the rowboat tied up at the river's edge, and Chris rowed them across to Castelgard.

They left the rowboat behind, and began climbing toward the top of Castelgard hill. They saw the first sign of castle walls. On this side, all that remained of the walls were gra.s.sy embankments that ended in long scars of exposed, crumbled rock. After six hundred years, it almost looked like a natural feature. But it was in fact the remains of a wall.

"You know," the Professor said, "what she really doesn't like is corporate sponsors.h.i.+p. But archaeological research has always depended on outside benefactors. A hundred years ago, the benefactors were all individuals: Carnegie, Peabody, Stanford. But these days wealth is corporate, so Nippon TV finances the Sistine Chapel, British Telecom finances York, Philips Electronics finances the Toulouse castrum castrum, and ITC finances us."

"Speak of the devil," Chris said. As they came over the hill, they saw the dark form of Diane Kramer, standing with Andre Marek.

The Professor sighed. "This day is completely wasted. How long is she going to be here?"

"Her plane is at Bergerac. She's scheduled to leave this afternoon at three."

"I'm sorry about that woman," Diane Kramer said, when Johnston came up to join her. "She's annoying everybody, but we've been unable to do anything about her."

"Bellin said you wanted me to talk to her."

"We want everybody to talk to her," Kramer said. "We're doing everything we can to show her there are no secrets."

"She seemed mostly concerned," Johnston said, "that ITC was making land purchases in this area."

"Land purchases? ITC?" Kramer laughed. "I haven't heard that one before. Did she ask you about niobium and nuclear reactors?"

"As a matter of fact, she did. She said you'd bought a company in Nigeria, to a.s.sure your supply."

"Nigeria," Kramer repeated, shaking her head. "Oh dear. Our niobium comes from Canada. Niobium's not exactly a rare metal, you know. It sells for seventy-five dollars a pound." She shook her head. "We offered to give her a tour of our facility, interview with our president, bring a photographer, her own experts, whatever she wants. But no. It's modern journalism: don't let the facts get in your way."

Kramer turned, and gestured to the ruins of Castelgard all around them. "Anyway," she said. "I've taken Dr. Marek's excellent tour, in the helicopter and on foot. It's evident you're doing absolutely spectacular work. Progress is good, the work's of extremely high academic quality, recordkeeping is first rate, your people are happy, the site is managed well. Just fabulous. I couldn't be happier. But Dr. Marek tells me he is going to be late for his-what is it?"

"My broadsword lesson," Marek said.

"His broadsword lesson. Yes. I think he should certainly do that. It doesn't sound like something you can change, like a piano lesson. In the meantime, shall we walk the site together?"

"Of course," Johnston said.

Chris's radio beeped. A voice said, "Chris? It's Sophie for you."

"I'll call her back."

"No, no," Kramer said. "You go ahead. I'll speak to the Professor alone."

Johnston said quickly, "I usually have Chris with me, to take notes."

"I don't think we'll need notes today."

"All right. Fine." He turned to Chris. "But give me your radio, in case."

"No problem," Chris said. He unclipped the radio from his belt and handed it to Johnston. As Johnston took it in his hand, he clearly flicked on the voice-activation switch. Then he slipped it on his belt.

"Thanks," Johnston said. "Now, you better go call Sophie. You know she doesn't like to be kept waiting."

"Right," Chris said.

As Johnston and Kramer began to walk through the ruins, he sprinted across the field toward the stone farmhouse that served as the project office.

Just beyond the crumbling walls of Castelgard town, the team had bought a dilapidated stone storehouse and had rebuilt the roof, and repaired the stonework. Here they housed all their electronics, lab equipment and archival computers. Unprocessed records and artifacts were spread out on the ground beneath a broad green tent adjacent to the farmhouse.

Chris went into the storehouse, which was one large room that they had divided into two. To the left, Elsie Kastner, the team's linguist and graphology expert, sat in her own room, hunched over parchment doc.u.ments. Chris ignored her and went straight ahead to the room crammed with electronic equipment. There David Stern, the thin and bespectacled technical expert on the project, was talking on a telephone.

"Well," Stern was saying, "you'll have to scan your doc.u.ment at a fairly high resolution, and send it to us. Do you have a scanner there?"

Hastily, Chris rummaged through the equipment on the field table, looking for a spare radio. He didn't see one; all the charger boxes were empty.

"The police department doesn't have a scanner?" Stern was saying, surprised. "Oh, you're not at the-well, why don't you go there and use the police scanner?"

Chris tapped Stern on the shoulder. He mouthed, Radio Radio.

Stern nodded and unclipped his own radio from his belt. "Well yes, the hospital scanner would be fine. Maybe they will have someone who can help you. We need twelve-eighty by ten-twenty-four, saved as a JPEG file. Then you transmit that to us...."

Chris ran outside, flicking through the channels on the radio as he went.

From the storehouse door, he could look down over the entire site. He saw Johnston and Kramer walking along the edge of the plateau overlooking the monastery. She had a notebook open and was showing him something on paper.

And then he found them on channel eight.

"-ignificant acceleration in the pace of research," she was saying.

And the Professor said, "What?"

Professor Johnston looked over his wire-frame spectacles at the woman standing before him. "That's impossible," he said.

She took a deep breath. "Perhaps I haven't explained it very well. You are already doing some reconstruction. What Bob would like to do," she said, "is to enlarge that to be a full program of reconstruction."

"Yes. And that's impossible."

"Tell me why."

"Because we don't know enough, that's why," Johnston said angrily. "Look: the only reconstruction we've done so far has been for safety. We've rebuilt walls so they don't fall on our researchers. But we're not ready to actually begin rebuilding the site itself."

"But surely a part," she said. "I mean, look at the monastery over there. You could certainly rebuild the church, and the cloister beside it, and the refectory, and-"

"What?" Johnston said. "The refectory?" The refectory was the dining room where the monks took their meals. Johnston pointed down at the site, where low walls and crisscrossing trenches made a confusing pattern. "Who said the refectory was next to the cloister?"

"Well, I-"

"You see? This is exactly my point," Johnston said. "We still aren't sure where the refectory is yet. It's only just recently that we've started to think it might be next to the cloister, but we aren't sure."

She said irritably, "Professor, academic study can go on indefinitely, but in the real world of results-"

"I'm all for results," Johnston said. "But the whole point of a dig like this is that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. A hundred years ago, an architect named Viollet-le-Duc rebuilt monuments all over France. Some he did well. But when he didn't have enough information, he just made it up. The buildings were just his fantasy."

"I understand you want to be accurate-"

"If I knew ITC wanted Disneyland, I'd never have agreed."

"We don't want Disneyland."

"If you rebuild now, that's what you'll get, Ms. Kramer. You'll get a fantasy. Medieval Land."

"No," she said. "I can a.s.sure you in the strongest possible terms. We do not want a fantasy. We want an historically accurate reconstruction of the site."

"But it can't be done."

"We believe it can."

"How?"

"With all due respect, Professor, you're being overcautious. You know more than you think you do. For example, the town of Castelgard, beneath the castle itself. That could certainly be rebuilt."

"I suppose ... Part of it could, yes."

"And that's all we're asking. Just to rebuild a part."

David Stern wandered out of the storehouse, to find Chris listening with the radio pressed to his ear. "Eavesdropping, Chris?"

"Shhh," Chris said. "This is important."

Stern shrugged his shoulders. He always felt a little detached from the enthusiasms of the graduate students around him. The others were historians, but Stern was trained as a physicist, and he tended to see things differently. He just couldn't get very excited about finding another medieval hearth, or a few bones from a burial site. In any case, Stern had only taken this job-which required him to run the electronic equipment, do various chemical a.n.a.lyses, carbon dating, and so on-to be near his girlfriend, who was attending summer school in Toulouse. He had been intrigued by the idea of quantum dating, but so far the equipment had failed to work.

On the radio, Kramer was saying, "And if you rebuild part of the town, then you could also rebuild part of the outer castle wall, where it is adjacent to the town. That section there." She was pointing to a low, ragged wall running northsouth across the site.

The Professor said, "Well, I suppose we could...."

"And," Kramer continued, "you could extend the wall to the south, where it goes into the woods over there. You could clear the woods, and rebuild the tower."

Stern and Chris looked at each other.

"What's she talking about?" Stern said. "What tower?"

"n.o.body's even surveyed the woods yet," Chris said. "We were going to clear it at the end of the summer, and then have it surveyed in the fall."