This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, corporate or government entities, facilities, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2023 by Splendide Mendax, Inc. and Lincoln Child

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  First Edition: August 2023

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  ISBNs: 9781538736821 (hardcover), 9781538736838 (ebook), 9781538765975 (int’l edition), 9781538756874 (Canadian edition), 9781538742532 (large print), 9781538757109 (B&N signed edition), 9781538757116 (signed edition)

  E3-20230718-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

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  58

  59

  Epilogue

  Authors’ Note

  Discover More

  About the Authors

  Also by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

  Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child dedicate this book to the Authors Guild, America’s oldest and largest association of authors, journalists, and poets

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  1

  BRANDON PURDUE AND his frat buddy Mike Kottke sat on a rock underneath a big fir tree, near where their Jeep had skidded off a Forest Service road into a ditch and run over a sapling. They were passing a bottle of Captain Morgan Spiced Rum and a joint back and forth between them. There was no cell service this far up in the mountains, and it was getting dark. But they were already too drunk and stoned to hike out, and besides it was a good ten miles to the nearest paved road. There was no chance someone else would come along the road they’d taken on their drunken joyride—it was closed, and they weren’t supposed to be there. The only thing to do, Brandon told his buddy Mike, was to sit under a tree and get messed up.

  “Don’t bogart that joint, my friend,” sang Kottke in a cracked voice, holding out a hand.

  “Get wrecked, dude.” Purdue handed it over to Kottke, who took a toke while offering the bottle in return.

  “Dude, you let it go out!” Kottke complained, holding the reefer out at arm’s length and staring at it disapprovingly.

  Purdue handed him the lighter. Kottke fussed with it, swearing as the wind picked up. He finally got the joint fired up and sucked in a lungful of smoke.

  “It’s getting cold, man,” said Purdue, tilting up the plastic bottle of rum.

  “No shit, Einstein. We’re only at ten thousand feet above sea level.” Kottke looked at the roach. “This is finito.” He tossed it. “Got another?”

  “Suck on this.” Purdue fumbled in his day pack and drew out a big bertha, lit it, and held it out to his friend. God, he was high. The big trees around them were all moving in the wind, or maybe they weren’t moving at all and it was just his brain that was moving. But it was getting colder by the minute. It was Hallowe’en, and it might go below freezing that night. Definitely would go below freezing. They couldn’t spend the night in the Jeep, tilted as it was in the ditch, its windshield broken, the interior strewn with glass. On top of that, there was a smell of gasoline that made Purdue guess the sapling had punctured the tank. If they tried to start up the Jeep for warmth, they might blow themselves up.

  What were they going to do? They couldn’t stay out here in the open, drinking and smoking until they passed out and froze to death. Purdue pushed the thought out of his mind as he took another pull on the bottle of rum. That would warm him up, at least temporarily.

  “Brandon, you feel that?” Kottke yelled.

  Purdue’s head swam back into focus. “What?”

  “Rain. I felt it on my face. A drop of rain.”

  Purdue took another gulp from the bottle. As he did, he felt something cold touch his cheek.

  Kottke reached into his day pack, pulled out a flashlight, and turned it on. He shone it up into the sky. “It’s snowing!”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Purdue let out a groan. Snow. Of course. In the Manzano Mountains at ten thousand feet. In late October. They were screwed.

  “Hey,” said Kottke. “We’ve got to find some shelter. Seriously.”

  Purdue groaned again. Shelter? They didn’t have a tent, sleeping bags, nothing. Just light jackets. Was there a blanket in the Jeep? He couldn’t remember but didn’t think so.

  “Light a fire?” Purdue finally said.

  “That’s not going to stop the snow. We gotta find, like, shelter, man.”

  Now Purdue could feel the cold sting of snow against his face. The wind was rising. Kottke stood up and circled the area with his flashlight. The ground sloped down into a forest of fir trees. Kottke shouldered his pack and took a few steps forward, shining the beam left and right.

  “What are you doing?” Purdue said.

  “What do you think? Get up and let’s go find a place to spend the night. We can hike back down in the morning.”

  Purdue lurched to his feet, fighting a sudden rush of dizziness. He followed Kottke down the slope into the forest, stumbling and shuffling. The temperature was plunging and snowflakes swirled around them. Far below, Purdue could see the distant lights of Albuquerque’s South Valley, dissolving in the haze of snow.

  “Dude, you see those big rocks down there? We might find an overhang.” The flashlight played into a ravine that didn’t look promising to Purdue at all. The slope got steeper. The smooth, pine-needled forest floor gave way to rough stones and small outcrops, interspersed with dense bushes and roots. It looked, in fact, like a good place to break some bones.

  “I don’t know about this,” said Purdue.

  “Come on!”

  Purdue followed reluctantly, angling down into the ravine. The snow was accumulating now, and the ground was getting slippery. Purdue forced himself to focus on where he was putting each foot, but even so he felt unsteady and slipped constantly, swearing and grabbing for handholds. His butt was already soaked from skidding down and sitting in the snow.

  The slope continued plunging toward the bottom of the ravine, which was filled with boulders dusted with fresh snow. Purdue felt like he was sobering up fast. “I’m not going down there,” he said. “All you’re going to do is get our asses flash-frozen.”

  “Hey! Check that out!” Kottke yelled, pointing.

  Purdue looked over. The flashlight beam, piercing the swirling snow, vaguely illuminated the far side of the ravine. About ten feet from the bottom it revealed a small, dark triangular hole—the opening to a cave.

  “You see that?” Kottke asked.

  “We can’t fit in there, man,” said Purdue.

  “Yeah? Watch me.”

  They slipped and slid to the bottom of the ravine and climbed up toward the opening. The rock here was rough lava, with lots of hand- and footholds, and in a few minutes they had reached the cave mouth. Kottke shone the light in. The beam revealed a space opening up beyond—a cavern with a sandy floor.

  Kottke crawled through the opening and Purdue followed.

  “Oh, man!” said Kottke, staggering gingerly to his feet. He raised his arms. “This is righteous. And I found it!”

  His flashlight beam probed the space. It was, Purdue had to admit, an ideal shelter, tall enough to stand up in although narrowing in the back to a crawlspace.

  “I’m freezing,” said Kottke. “Let’s light a fire.”

  “Yeah.” Purdue peered back out the cave entrance. The ravine had been scattered with dead and fallen trees and branches. It meant going back out.

  “You go back out, hand me up the wood,” Kottke said.

  Reluctantly, Purdue crawled out. While Kottke held the flashlight, Purdue gathered a bunch of kindling and branches and handed them up. He had no gloves and his hands were wet and freezing, but in very little time he’d amassed a heap of sticks big enough to do the job.

  Purdue crawled back in while Kottke lit the fire. Even though the wood was a little damp from the snow, dry grass and leaves had blown into the cave, and he soon had a fire going, the smoke being drawn out through a crack near the front. It was close to perfect—a miracle.

  Purdue warmed his hands at the blaze. “You got another doob for us? I need something after all that work.”

  “Coming right up.” Kottke unzipped his pack and took out another plastic bottle of rum, a small jar with a couple of buds, a hand grinder, some rolling papers, a Kit Kat, a Snickers bar, a bag of Peanut M&M’s, and a large can of Pringles.

  “You came prepared, bruh.”

  “If I carry weed, I also carry munchies. Straight-up rule.”

  Purdue grabbed the new bottle, cracked the cap, and took a deep swig, trying to revive the warm feeling he’d enjoyed earlier, before the snow began to fall. He watched as Kottke stuffed a bud into the grinder and gave it a good twist, the smell of herb drifting in the air. Then he proceeded to roll a fat one.

  The fire was now throwing off so much warmth that Purdue unzipped his jacket. He took another long pull on the bottle. His head was whirling pleasantly once again, he was warm, and they had found themselves a cave. The wind howled outside, the snow falling. Tomorrow would be crap—but that was tomorrow, and for now they had shelter and they were buzzin’.

  “Whoooo, this the shit!” Kottke said, firing up the blunt. They swapped the rum and the doobie. Purdue sucked in a hit, then another, then a third.

  “Hey, check that out!” Kottke said.

  Purdue turned and saw what Kottke was pointing at. In the light of the fire, near the narrow back of the cave, was a long flat surface of stone, and on it were pecked several designs. Petroglyphs.

  Purdue squinted. In the firelight he could see a spiral, several faces, a zigzagging arrow, a bird, and a hunchbacked figure playing a flute. Hallowe’en. Being here, tonight of all nights, he felt a bit creeped out despite his buzz.

  But Kottke, unfazed, just picked up a rock. “Two points if I hit that spiral.” He threw it and missed, striking one of the faces. “Three points for that!”

  “No points for that,” said Purdue, determined not to act like a wimp. He picked up a rock of his own. “Five points for the bird.” He lobbed it and smacked the bird right in the middle, leaving a gash. “Yes! Five points!”

  Kottke picked up a bigger rock. “This is a ten-pointer.” He heaved it at the spiral and it struck with a crash, shaking a few pebbles loose from the ceiling. “Ten points!”

  Not to be outdone, Purdue began prying a bigger rock out of the side of the cave, wiggling it loose. Then he took a step closer.

  “Hey, that’s cheating!”

  “The hell it is.” He chucked it at the bird, where it impacted with a big hollow boom. Now a bunch of small rocks fell from the ceiling. “Fifteen points!” he cried, laughing uproariously.

  “Fifteen points, my ass.” Kottke pried out an even bigger rock, so heavy he could barely carry it, then shuffled all the way to the back and slammed it against the flute player. It jarred the stone wall so hard that it moved, and a sudden grinding noise came from the ceiling. With a yowl, Kottke leapt back as a torrent of rocks were shaken loose and came down with a clatter, raising a cloud of dust. Kottke, who had barely escaped being brained, fell into the dust settling from the small cave-in. He was laughing hysterically.

  “Enough of that shit,” said Purdue. “I don’t want to be buried alive.”

  Kottke kept laughing. Purdue settled back and took another swig of rum. The bottle was almost empty. God, how much had he drunk? For a moment he forgot where he was, lying on the ground looking up at the firelight on the ceiling, unable to organize his spinning thoughts. He heard more hysterical laughter—was that him or Kottke? The laughter turned into the sound of vomiting, but now he was so tired he didn’t care. He just wanted to close his eyes and go to sleep. But he was cold. He managed to crawl nearer to the fire and lay down again in the sand, trying to get comfortable, but the sandy floor had some lumps in it, and he twitched and wriggled. Something was digging into his back, right where he wanted to sleep.

  He vaguely heard more retching—Kottke puking again. He flopped over onto his stomach and dug his hand into the sand to move the thing poking his back. As he scraped and dug, he saw that it wasn’t the rock he’d assumed, but something smooth and light brown, like a dome. Even with his head spinning and his eyes barely able to focus, as he brushed and fumbled he saw two dark hollows appear, followed by grinning teeth and a clump of braided hair attached to a dried patch of flesh.

  “Holy shit!” Purdue screamed. “There’s a dead motherfucker in here!” He pushed himself backward with his feet and hands, trying to get away from the thing that stared at him out of the sand, black eye sockets and gleaming teeth. “Mike! Mike!”

  But Kottke was lying sprawled on the other side of the fire, unconscious, his shirt covered in vomit.

  Purdue tried to get up, but, unable to maintain his balance, crawled backward instead, pushing with his feet. Finally, when he had gotten as far away from the thing as the cave would allow, he eased onto his side and curled himself up into a ball, shutting his eyes tight, hoping this would all go away, that it was just a nightmare, while his drunken brain sank into unconsciousness.

  2

  SPECIAL AGENT CORINNE Swanson stopped at the secretary’s desk outside the door—the closed door—of the SAC’s office. The young man glanced up at her.

  “You can go in,” he said, pressing a button on a terminal on his desk.

  Corrie grasped the doorknob of the corner office with more than a little apprehension. It had been almost four months since her last big case: a case involving, among other things, the murder of Hale Morwood, the senior agent who’d been mentoring her since her arrival at the Albuquerque Field Office a year ago. She was still traumatized by his death. Not a day passed without something reminding her of Agent Morwood, a dull, stubborn ache that never went away. Corrie was slow to respect people, and even slower to trust them . . . but Morwood had earned both from her before his death.

  Her last big case. For the past four months she’d attended the various boards of inquiry, sat for lengthy debriefings, and submitted to several lie detector tests. Given the craziness of that case, the blowback was not surprising. She’d brought the investigation to a successful conclusion, if unconventionally . . . But as soon as it was over, almost the entire project had been classified, which, she realized belatedly, meant she wasn’t going to get much public recognition or the chance of a commendation. Even more troubling was that Special Agent in Charge Garcia had not yet assigned her a new mentor—technically, she was still an agent in training—or even given her a new case of any note. She wasn’t being punished—she would have been told that—but Garcia had kept her on low-profile, low-risk tasks like surveillance, and she couldn’t help wondering if she was under some kind of clandestine evaluation.

  Shoving these thoughts aside, she entered the office.

  SAC Julio Garcia rose from behind his desk and stretched out his hand to shake hers. Although it was some time since she’d been in his office, it looked exactly the same. The only thing that seemed to vary was the amount of traffic on the freeway beyond the windows.

  “Agent Swanson,” he said, “thank you for coming. Please take a seat.”

 

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