The Ice Limit Page 3

  "Hugo Breitling would love to be in on this."

  "Breitling? He couldn't find a meteorite if it hit him in the ass."

  "He found the Thule meteorite," Lloyd replied, slapping the dust from his pants. He gave McFarlane a sidelong glance. "Which is bigger than anything you've found."

  "But that's all he found. And that was sheer luck."

  "Fact is, I'm going to need luck for this project." Lloyd screwed the top back on the thermos and tossed it into the dust at McFarlane's feet. "Here, have yourself a party. I've got to get going."

  He began striding toward the helicopter. As McFarlane watched, the engine revved and the heavy rotors picked up speed, beating the air, sending skeins of dust swirling erratically across the ground. It suddenly occurred to him that, if the chopper left, he might never learn how Masangkay died, or what he had been doing. Despite himself, he was intrigued. McFarlane looked around quickly: at the metal detectors, dented and scattered; at the bleak little camp; at the landscape beyond, parched and unpromising.

  At the helicopter's hatch, Lloyd paused.

  "Make it an even million!" called McFarlane to the man's broad back.

  Carefully, so as not to upset the hat, Lloyd ducked his head and began stepping into the chopper.

  "Seven fifty, then!"

  There was another pause. And then Palmer Lloyd slowly turned, his face breaking into a broad smile.

  5: The Hudson River Valley

  June 3, 10:45 A.M.

  PALMER LLOYD loved many rare and valuable things, but one of the things he loved most was Thomas Cole's painting Sunny Morning on the Hudson River. As a scholarship student in Boston, he had often gone to the Museum of Fine Arts, walking through the galleries with his eyes downcast so as not to sully his vision before he could stand before that glorious painting.

  Lloyd preferred to own the things he loved, but the Thomas Cole painting was not to be had at any price. Instead, he had purchased the next best thing. On this sunny morning he sat in his upper Hudson Valley office, gazing out a window that framed precisely the view in Cole's painting. There was a very beautiful line of light penciling the extreme horizon; the fields, seen through the breaking mists, were exquisitely fresh and green. The mountainside in the foreground, limned by the rising sun, sparkled. Not much had changed in the Clove Valley since Cole had painted this scene in 1827, and Lloyd had made sure, with vast land purchases along his line of sight, that nothing would.

  He swiveled in his chair, gazing across a desk of spaulded maple into a window that looked in the opposite direction. From here, the hillside fell away beneath him, a brilliant mosaic of glass and steel. Hands behind his head, Lloyd surveyed the scene of frantic activity with satisfaction. Work crews swarmed over the landscape, fulfilling a vision—his vision—unparalleled in the world. "A miracle of rare device," he murmured beneath his breath.

  At the center of the activity, green in the Catskill morning light, was a massive dome: an oversize replica of London's Crystal Palace, which had been the first structure made entirely of glass. Upon its completion in 1851 it was considered one of the most beautiful buildings ever constructed, but it had been gutted by fire in 1936, and its remains demolished in 1942 for fear it would provide a convenient landmark for Nazi bombers.

  Beyond the overarching dome, Lloyd could see the first blocks being laid of the pyramid of Khefret II, a small Old Kingdom pyramid. He smiled a little ruefully at the memory of his trip to Egypt: his byzantine dealings with government officials, the Keystone Kops uproar about the suitcase full of gold that no one could lift, all the other tedious melodrama. That pyramid had cost him more than he liked, and it wasn't exactly Cheops, but it was impressive nonetheless.

  Thinking of the pyramid reminded him of the outrage its purchase had caused in the archaeological world, and he glanced up at the newspaper articles and magazine covers framed on a nearby wall. "Where Have All the Artifacts Gone?" read one, accompanied by a grotesque caricature of Lloyd, complete with shifty eyes and slouch hat, slipping a miniature pyramid under his dark cloak. He scanned the other framed headlines. "The Hitler of Collectors?" read one; and then there were all the ones decrying his recent purchase: "Bones of Contention: Paleontologists Outraged by Sale." And a Newsweek cover: "What Do You Do with Thirty Billion? Answer: Buy the Earth." The wall was covered with them, the shrill utterances of the naysayers, the self-appointed guardians of cultural morality. Lloyd found it all an endless source of amusement.

  A small chime rang on a flat panel laid into his desk, and the voice of his secretary fluted: "There's a Mr. Glinn to see you, sir."

  "Send him in." Lloyd didn't bother to suppress the excitement in his voice. He had not met Eli Glinn before, and it had been surprisingly difficult to get him to come in person.

  He closely observed the man as he entered the office, without even a briefcase in his hand, sunburnt face expressionless. Lloyd had found, in his long and fruitful business career, that first impressions, if carefully made, were exceedingly revealing. He took in the close-cropped brown hair, the square jaw, the thin lips. The man looked, at first glance, as inscrutable as the Sphinx. There was nothing distinctive about him, nothing that gave anything away. Even his gray eyes were veiled, cautious, and still. Everything about him looked ordinary: ordinary height, ordinary build, good-looking but not handsome, well-dressed but not dapper. His only unusual feature, Lloyd thought, was the way he moved. His shoes made no sound on the floor, his clothes did not rustle on his person, his limbs moved lightly and easily through the air. He glided through the room like a deer through a forest.

  And, of course, there was nothing ordinary in the man's résumé.

  "Mr. Glinn," Lloyd said, walking toward him and taking his hand. "Thank you for coming."

  Glinn nodded silently, shook the proffered hand with a shake that was neither too long nor too short, neither limp nor bone-crushingly macho. Lloyd felt moderately disconcerted: he was having trouble forming that invaluable first impression. He swept his hand toward the window and the sprawling, half-finished structures beyond. "So. What do you think of my museum?"

  "Large," Glinn said without smiling.

  Lloyd laughed. "The Getty of natural history museums. Or it will be, soon—with three times the endowment."

  "Interesting that you decided to locate it here, a hundred miles from the city."

  "A nice touch of hubris, don't you think? Actually, I'm doing the New York Museum of Natural History a favor. If we'd built there instead of up here, we'd have put them out of business within a month. But since we'll have the biggest and the best of everything, they'll be reduced to serving school field trips." Lloyd chuckled. "Come on, Sam McFarlane is waiting for us. I'll give you a tour on the way."

  "Sam McFarlane?"

  "He's my meteorite expert. Well, he's still only about half mine, I'd say, but I'm working on him. The day is young."

  Lloyd placed a hand on the elbow of Glinn's well-tailored but anonymous dark suit—the material was better than he expected—and guided him back through the outer office, down a sweeping circular ramp of granite and polished marble, and along a large corridor toward the Crystal Palace. The noise was much louder here, and their footsteps were punctuated by shouts, the steady cadence of nailguns, and the stutter of jackhammers.

  With barely contained enthusiasm, Lloyd pointed out the sights as they walked. "That's the diamond hall, there," he said, waving his hand toward a large subterranean space, haloed in violet light. "We discovered there were some old diggings in this hillside, so we tunneled our way in and set up the exhibit within an entirely natural context. It's the only hall in any major museum devoted exclusively to diamonds. But since we've acquired the three largest specimens in the world, it seemed appropriate. You must have heard about how we snapped up the Blue Mandarin from De Beers, just ahead of the Japanese?" He gave a wicked chuckle at the memory.

  "I read the papers," Glinn said dryly.

  "And that," said Lloyd, becoming more animated,
"will house the Gallery of Extinct Life. Passenger pigeons, a dodo bird from the Galápagos, even a mammoth removed from the Siberian ice, still perfectly frozen. They found crushed buttercups in its mouth—remnants of its last meal."

  "I read about the mammoth, too," Glinn said. "Weren't there several shootings in Siberia in the aftermath of its acquisition?"

  Despite the pointedness of the question, Glinn's tone was mild, without any trace of censure, and Lloyd didn't pause in his answer. "You'd be surprised, Mr. Glinn, how quickly countries waive their so-called cultural patrimony when large sums of money become involved. Here, I'll show you what I mean." He beckoned his guest forward, through a half-completed archway flanked by two men in hard hats, into a darkened hall that stretched for a hundred yards. He paused to flick on the lights, then turned with a grin.

  Before them stretched a hardened, mudlike surface. Wandering across this surface were two sets of small footprints. It looked as if people had wandered into the hall while the cement on the floor was setting.

  The Laetoli footprints," Lloyd said reverently.

  Glinn said nothing.

  "The oldest hominid footprints ever discovered. Think about it: three and a half million years ago our first bipedal ancestors made those footprints, walking across a layer of wet volcanic ash. They're unique. Nobody knew that Australopithecus afarensis walked upright until these were found. They're the earliest proof of our humanity, Mr. Glinn."

  "The Getty Conservation Institute must have been interested to hear of this acquisition," Glinn said.

  Lloyd looked at his companion more carefully. Glinn was an exceptionally difficult man to read. "I see you've done your homework. The Getty wanted to leave them buried in situ. How long do you think that would have lasted, with Tanzania in the state it's in?" He shook his head. "The Getty paid one million dollars to cover them back up. I paid twenty million to bring them here, where scholars and countless visitors can benefit."

  Glinn glanced around at the construction. "Speaking of scholars, where are the scientists? I see a lot of blue collars, but very few white coats."

  Lloyd waved his hand. "I bring them on as I need them. For the most part, I know what I want to buy. When the time comes, though, I'll get the best. I'll stage a raiding party through the country's curatorial offices that will leave them spinning. It'll be just like Sherman marching to the sea. The New York Museum won't know what hit them"

  More quickly now, Lloyd directed his visitor away from the long hallway and into a warren of corridors that angled deeper into the Palace. At the end of one corridor, they stopped before a door marked CONFERENCE ROOM A. Lounging beside the door was Sam McFarlane, looking every inch the adventurer: lean and rugged, blue eyes faded by the sun. His straw-colored hair had a faint horizontal ridge to it, as if years of wearing heavy-brimmed hats had permanently creased it. Just looking at him, Lloyd could see why the man had never taken to academia. He seemed as out of place among the fluorescent lights and drab-colored labs as would the San Bushmen he had been with just the other day. Lloyd noted, with satisfaction, that McFarlane looked tired. No doubt he had gotten very little sleep over the last two days.

  Reaching into his pocket, Lloyd withdrew a key and opened the door. The space beyond was always a shock to first-time visitors. One-way glass covered three of the room's walls, looking down on the grand entrance to the museum: a vast octagonal space, currently empty, in the very center of the Palace. Lloyd glanced to see how Glinn would take it. But the man was as inscrutable as ever.

  For months Lloyd had agonized over what object would occupy the soaring octagonal space below—until the auction at Christie's. The battling dinosaurs, he had thought, would make a perfect centerpiece. You could still read the desperate agony of their final struggle in the contorted bones.

  And then his eyes fell on the table littered with charts, printouts, and aerial photographs. When this happened, Lloyd had forgotten all about the dinosaurs. This would be the pièce de résistance, the crowning glory of the Lloyd Museum. Mounting this in the center of the Crystal Palace would be the proudest moment of his life.

  "May I introduce Dr. Sam McFarlane," Lloyd said, turning away from the table and looking at Glinn. "The museum's retaining his services for the duration of this assignment."

  McFarlane shook Glinn's hand.

  "Until last week, Sam was wandering around the Kalahari Desert looking for the Okavango meteorite. A poor use of his talents. I think you'll agree we've found something much more interesting for him to do."

  He gestured at Glinn. "Sam, this is Mr. Eli Glinn, president of Effective Engineering Solutions, Inc. Don't let the dull name fool you—it's a remarkable company. Mr. Glinn specializes in such things as raising Nazi subs full of gold, figuring out why space shuttles blow up—that sort of thing. Solving unique engineering problems and analyzing major failures."

  "Interesting job," said McFarlane.

  Lloyd nodded. "Usually, though, EES steps in after the fact. Once things have gotten fucked up." The vulgarity, enunciated slowly and distinctly, hung in the air. "But I'm bringing them in now to help make sure a certain task doesn't get fucked up. And that task, gentlemen, is why we're all here today."

  He gestured toward the conference table. "Sam, I want you to tell Mr. Glinn what you've found, looking at this data over the last few days."

  "Right now?" McFarlane asked. He seemed uncharacteristically nervous.

  "When else?"

  McFarlane glanced over the table, hesitated, and then spoke. "What we have here," he said, "is geophysical data about an unusual site in the Cape Horn islands of Chile."

  Glinn nodded encouragingly.

  "Mr. Lloyd asked me to analyze it. At first, the data seemed... impossible. Like this tomographic readout." He picked it up, glanced at it, let it drop. His eyes swept over the rest of the papers, and his voice faltered.

  Lloyd cleared his throat. Sam was still a little shaken by it all; he was going to need some help. He turned to Glinn. "Perhaps I'd better bring you up to speed on the history. One of our scouts came across a dealer in electronic equipment in Punta Arenas, Chile. He was trying to sell a rusted-out electromagnetic tomographic sounder. It's a piece of mining survey equipment, made here in the States by DeWitter Industries. It had been found, along with a bag of rocks and some papers, near the remains of a prospector on a remote island down near Cape Horn. On a whim, my scout bought it all. When he took a closer look at the papers—those that he could decipher—the scout noticed they belonged to a man named Nestor Masangkay."

  Lloyd's eyes drifted toward the conference table. "Before his death on the island, Masangkay had been a planetary geologist. More specifically, a meteorite hunter. And, up until about two years ago, he'd been the partner of Sam McFarlane here."

  He saw McFarlane's shoulders stiffen.

  "When our scout learned this, he sent everything back here for analysis. The tomographic sounder had a floppy disk rusted into its drive bay. One of our technicians managed to extract the data. Some of my people analyzed the data, but it was simply too far outside the bell curve for them to make much sense of it. That's why we hired Sam."

  McFarlane had turned from the first page to the second, and then back again. "At first I thought that Nestor had forgotten to calibrate his machine. But then I looked at the rest of the data." He dropped the readout, then pushed the two weathered sheets aside with a slow, almost reverent notion. He began leafing through the scatter and removed another sheet.

  "We didn't send a ground expedition," Lloyd continued, speaking again to Glinn, "because the last thing we want to do is attract attention. But we did order a flyover of the island. And that sheet Sam's holding now is a dump from the LOG II satellite—the Low Orbit Geosurvey."

  McFarlane carefully put down the data dump. "I had a lot of trouble believing this," he finally said. "I must have gone over it a dozen times. But there's no getting away from it. It can mean only one thing."

  "Yes?" Glinn's voice was low, en
couraging, holding no trace of curiosity.

  "I think I know what Nestor was after."

  Lloyd waited. He knew what McFarlane was going to say. But he wanted to hear it again.

  "What we've got here is the largest meteorite in the world."

  Lloyd broke into a grin. "Tell Mr. Glinn just how large, Sam."

  McFarlane cleared his throat. "The largest meteorite recovered in the world so far is the Ahnighito, in the New York Museum. It weighs sixty-one tons. This one weighs four thousand tons. At an absolute minimum."

  "Thank you," Lloyd said, his frame swelling with joy, his face breaking into a radiant smile. Then he turned and looked again at Glinn. The man's face still betrayed nothing.

  There was a long moment of silence. And then Lloyd spoke again, his voice low and hoarse with emotion.

  "I want that meteorite. Your job, Mr. Glinn, is to make sure I get it."

  6: New York City

  June 4, 11:45 A.M.

  THE LAND Rover jounced its way down West Street, the sagging piers along the Hudson flashing by the passenger window, the sky over Jersey City a dull sepia in the noon light. McFarlane braked hard, then swerved to avoid a taxi angling across three lanes to catch a fare. It was a smooth, automatic motion. McFarlane's mind was far away.

  He was remembering the afternoon when the Zaragosa meteorite fell. He'd finished high school, had no job or plans of one, and was hiking across the Mexican desert, Carlos Castaneda in his back pocket. The sun had been low, and he'd been thinking about finding a place to pitch his bedroll. Suddenly, the landscape grew bright around him, as if the sun had emerged from heavy clouds. But the sky was already perfectly clear. And then he'd stopped dead in his tracks. On the sandy ground ahead of him, a second shadow of himself had appeared; long and ragged at first, but quickly compacting. There was a sound of singing. And then, a massive explosion. He'd fallen to the ground, thinking earthquake, or nuclear blast, or Armageddon. There was a patter of rain. Except it was not rain: it was thousands of tiny rocks dropping around him. He picked one up; a little piece of gray stone, covered in black crust. It still held the deep cold of outer space inside, despite its fiery passage through the atmosphere, and it was covered with frost.