The Dinosaur Heist Read online

  “Now,” I said. “Tell me about these dinosaurs. Actually, start by telling me why you think I can help find them.”

  “They aren’t real dinosaurs.” Chanda took a deep breath. “Not anymore.”

  Her anger had burned itself away. She slumped forward, as if she had no energy left. “I’ve lost everything,” she muttered, more to herself than to me. “This was a discovery that would rewrite paleontology. This could have been my life’s work.”

  “Your discovery?” I asked.

  “No. Yes… It’s complicated,” she replied, as she lifted her head to meet my eyes.

  That was when I knew I was in trouble.

  I wasn’t the only person who got thrown into the local rumor mill. The rumors that floated around the community center about Mrs. Kelson’s daughter were…unkind, at best. To the point where I had been warned to stay away from her. Me!

  “She’s a nice girl,” they always added. “But—”

  There aren’t that many people who are really enthusiastic about sex. I mean, almost everybody enjoys it. Lots of people love it. But people who train for it? Put in the hours of physical conditioning to excel at it, the same way other people train for triathlons or the Olympics? There aren’t too many of those.

  We tend to recognize each other.

  How? Maybe it’s pheromones. Maybe it’s that we’ve had a lot of experience in evaluating possible sexual partners. I don’t know, and I don’t care. All I can say for sure is that I knew Chanda was in my league.

  And, suddenly, she knew it too.

  “Whoa,” she whispered.

  “You had to know,” I said. I realized I was wearing an absolutely ridiculous grin. “I’m a regular joke on the late-night shows.”

  She was grinning too, a huge grin which made her eyes sparkle. “There’s a big difference between being good and being easy.”

  “True.” I sighed. “Anyhow, business before pleasure. About your dinosaurs?”

  “Do you have an hour? I’ve got everything in my lab.”

  When you’ve accepted you’re going to sleep with someone, it changes the entire tone of the relationship. Chanda and I were going to end up in bed together. That was already a foregone conclusion. There was no need to fumble around with any awkward Will we or won’t we? We might as well have made an appointment to go to the gym. Until then? We needed to figure out how to talk to each other. Trust me on this: a mutual love of sex is not a substitute for love or friendship. Physical compatibility is how bodies fit together. It says nothing about compatibility between the minds or the souls of those involved.

  (If you want to turn me into a ranting maniac, all you need to do is tell me that two people can know if they’re “meant” to be together the first time they sleep together. No. That’s chemistry, not compatibility. Human beings have evolved beyond the panting and grunting phase of courtship, and we should honor that.)

  Now, Chanda and I were headed to her office to discuss dinosaurs. A topic that I was apathetic about, at best.

  Hold it together, Josh. The woman came to you for help, so help her if you can. Business before pleasure, indeed.

  We left Mrs. Lordes’ spare phone at the front desk, and not long after that we were walking across the National Mall, where the museums in the Smithsonian complex dotted a wide stretch of green lawn. I didn’t come here too often. Nobody explores the tourist centers of their own city, not until family comes to visit. Only one of my two brothers has kids, and they were still too young to drag around museums.

  I didn’t get the chance to do much of the tourist thing. Chanda took me through the employees’ entrance of the National Museum of Natural History. It was late in the afternoon. Most of the researchers who had their offices in the basement had already left for the day. Those few employees we passed either didn’t recognize me or didn’t care, but I saw a few of them grinning at Chanda. Some of them were friendly grins.

  Others…weren’t.

  Chanda ignored anybody wearing one of those judgmental grins.

  A door cracked open, and a man carrying the usual work paraphernalia appeared. He spotted Chanda, and shook his head. “How’s your impossible bird, Kelson?”

  “Hello, Rudnick,” Chanda said, her expression that of eternal endurance for a loathed coworker.

  “Are you…” Rudnick started to say, but he finally noticed me. He hit me with the usual blinking stare of people who don’t follow the news but almost recognize me. Instead of going through the introductions, it was easier for him to bid Chanda a good weekend and leave.

  “Hate that guy,” Chanda muttered. “Thinks avian dinosaurs belong to him alone.”

  Her office was down a large hallway, which surprised me. The route we had taken from the employees’ entrance had put us through some awfully small twists and turns, and there were boxes everywhere. I got the sense that space was at a premium.

  When I said this, Chanda smiled, and said, “Dinosaurs.”

  “Ah. Bodies, bones, and transportation?”

  She nodded, and pointed down the hallway. “There’s a loading dock down there,” she said. “Dinosaurs aren’t the biggest items that come in here, but they’re close.”

  I paused and took a moment to turn in a full circle. The hallway was large but quiet, with doors set in the walls. The doors themselves were oversized, and space between the doors was pretty big, about thirty feet or so, suggesting that the offices behind them were enormous.

  “I want a tour,” I said. “Not the main areas. This behind-the-scenes stuff—this is fascinating.”

  “If you get my dinosaurs back, you can have whatever you want,” she said.

  And then she winked.

  I laughed.

  Another few steps down the hall, and Chanda stopped beside a door with her name and title on it.

  “You’re a Doctor of Integrative Biology?” I asked. “What’s that?

  “Different things,” she said, as she unlocked the door. “It’ll make sense with props, I promise. Otherwise, I’m talking in circles.”

  She let us into a room that was more of a warehouse than an office. There were crates stacked along the walls, with a large table covered in maps in the middle. Large dinosaur bones were everywhere. Here and there were computers…

  …no. These weren’t just computers.

  I shut my eyes and walked into the room, listening to them. The little quantum organic computer chip in my head is very particular about the company it keeps. If I concentrated, I could hear every single computer in the museum, but most of them weren’t worth my time. The computers in Chanda’s lab? They were unique. I was drawn to them in the same way some songs call to the soul. And even though I didn’t know Chanda very well…

  “You built your machines,” I said, certain of it.

  “Yes.” There was pride in her voice. “You can tell that just by walking into the room?”

  “They’ve got you in their DNA,” I replied. “I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s what they feel like to me.”

  “It does,” she replied.

  I kept walking through the room, my eyes mostly closed. Her computers were bright, brassy things, powerhouses in small cases. They knew what they wanted, and they had no time for anything that slowed them down.

  Only one of them was on a network. That computer was old and cranky, a grumpy beast which had nearly outlived its usefulness. It crept along the internet, looking for email updates.

  That doesn’t make sense. Every computer is on a network now. Unless…

  Ah. There it is.

  Over in the corner was a private server, purring away. I opened my eyes and saw a series of long LAN cables attached to its ports. Those cables weren’t attached to the computers, but they were neatly coiled, waiting to be plugged in once work resumed tomorrow. Off to the side was another cable, also unplugged, that would connect the server to the museum’s network…but only when Chanda wanted it to.

  “You keep everything offline,” I said. “W
hy?”

  “Theft,” Chanda replied. She had taken a seat on top of a giant white skull as she watched me walk around the room. “My dinosaurs are the only ones of their kind left on the planet. I need to protect them, at least until they’re ready to go out into the world again.” She pointed at the server. “They live in there, and a few backup drives I’ve got stashed in safe places around the museum. Nowhere else.”

  “Okay, now I definitely need you to explain,” I said.

  “Come look at this,” she said, as she stood and went over to the table. “My dinosaurs—the stolen ones—came from…” she paused, and I saw her fold over a corner of the topmost map so a name disappeared beneath the edge of the paper, “…let’s say they came from a disputed territory in a location that isn’t exactly friendly to foreigners.”

  By now, I was close enough to see that the map was of a mountain range, and that all of the writing on the maps was in Chinese hanzi.

  “Someone’s been sneaking into Tibet,” I said, as I reached out to trace a path along the mountains.

  Chanda smiled. There was a lot of emotion in that smile, and not all of it spoke of happy memories. “If I had been, I wouldn’t admit it to another federal employee.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Especially as I’ve heard it’s almost impossible to sneak into Tibet without help from a local.”

  She nodded. “If I had done something as reckless as sneak into Tibet, it wouldn’t have been because a Chinese paleontologist colleague was desperate for help.”

  “Of course not.”

  Chanda tugged the map towards her, and tapped on a specific mountain. “There was a mineral mine here,” she said. “Paleontologists have been working in Tibet for decades, but it’s not a priority for them. Mountain altitudes and the big, flashy dinosaurs that draw kids into museums usually don’t go together.”

  I spotted a drawing of an animal’s foot beneath the corner of the map. I lifted the thick paper to reveal a…

  I didn’t know what it was.

  “I need to hire a real artist,” Chanda said. She was almost apologetic. “That’s printed from the computer model.”

  “It’s a good image,” I said honestly. “I just don’t understand what’s happening with its body. How many wings does this creature have?”

  “Two, but it’s complicated.” She came around the table and stood beside me. “This is a microraptor. It’s got two wings, but asymmetrical feathers are fastened to both its forelimbs and its hind limbs, so it appears to have four wings.”

  “Are its hind limbs supposed to be as long as its entire body? That looks impossible.”

  “Evolution doesn’t always embrace aesthetics,” she replied. “I think it’s a distinct descendent of Microraptor gui, another Chinese microraptor with asymmetrical feathers on its hind limbs. My models suggest our raptor was able to fold its legs in such a way as to give it extra force, allowing it to jump higher than other microraptors. If I’m right, my models can help demonstrate that the extra altitude from the jump increased the time this raptor stayed airborne. Unlike other microraptors, maybe it even had true flight!

  “But maybe not,” she corrected herself quickly. “Testing its flight capabilities is another few months down the road.”

  “How large is it?” I asked. From the drawing, it could have been any size, from a house finch to a house.

  “Small. Smaller than a cat. Here, I can show you. This is why I needed the props.” She took me over to one of her computers. It had three monitors, one of which was an oversized high-definition television. She tapped a few keys, and a dinosaur skeleton appeared on the big screen.

  “You asked about integrative biology,” she said. “It’s blending academic disciplines to create new ways of examining biology.”

  “Like computer science and paleontology,” I said, impressed.

  “Exactly.” The dinosaur skeleton began to move. It hopped along on all fours, and then stood on its hind legs to open a set of bony wings. The wings stretched down the length of its body and appeared to be anchored to its hind feet. “I don’t do much with actual fossils. Instead, I come in, take 3-D scans of the fossils, and render them as full skeletons.”

  “Ah.” I nodded towards the maps. “That would be easier than sneaking fossils in and out of Tibet.”

  “Yeah,” Chanda said sadly.

  “What happened to the actual fossils?” I asked, as I put a hand on her shoulder.

  She covered my hand with her own. “The mine ran dry, so they changed their methods. Scraped the entire top of the mountain off to get to the ore. That’s why my contact reached out to me. I got there in time to scan as many fossils as she could find. The whole place is rubble now.”

  “She couldn’t smuggle any of them out?”

  Chanda laughed before she could stop herself. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I forgot that you’re not a paleontologist. Fossils are delicate. Smaller skeletons can’t be moved without taking a couple hundred pounds of rock matrix along with them.

  “My colleague only managed to get one complete skeleton out. It’s a prize specimen. Unique, almost all bones present. You can even see the feathers on the front and hind limbs. With my data and the other smaller fragments we rescued, we can make a profile for the species, but that’s all that’s left of them.”

  “Gotcha.” I nodded towards the animated dinosaur on your screen. “Is that part of your missing data?”

  She shook her head. The room was dark enough that the light from the screen reflected along the waves of her hair. “If I get enough data from the same specimen, I can create models of individual animals. Then, we can compare how these animals move, and create a profile for the species. This is modeled on the data from a single animal, but that’s gone, along with all of the rest. Without it, this might as well be a kids’ cartoon.”

  “We’ll get it back,” I said.

  “I hope so.” Chanda took a deep breath. “Yeah. We’ll get it back.”

  I kissed the top of her head, and then took a few steps away so she could collect her thoughts. I walked over to examine the large dinosaur bones lying on the floor.

  “Those are replicas,” she explained. “Resin, epoxy, and a few other materials strong enough to survive the apocalypse.”

  I ran my fingers along the nearest bone. “Looks real enough to me.”

  “You want to know how to tell if you’ve found a real fossil?” Chanda’s voice had changed. It had taken on a low, husky tone which spoke to multiple parts of my body.

  I looked over my shoulder. She had turned to face me, and was watching my ass as I moved. “How?” I asked, grinning.

  “You lick it,” she said in that same come-hither tone.

  I had to shut my eyes as all of my blood rushed south. “Easy there,” I said, as my knees gave way. I had to sit down before I fell over. “We still need to find your data.”

  “Right, right,” Chanda fell back into her normal speaking voice. “That’s my usual paleontology pickup line. Fossils are porous, and your tongue sticks to them.”

  I shook my head, trying to get some circulation back in the rest of my body. “Damn, woman, you can knock a man down with only your voice?”

  “Imagine what I can do with my tongue,” she replied.

  I groaned.

  Chanda laughed, and got up from her chair to come sit beside me.

  I held up a hand. “If you touch me, your dinosaur hunt goes on pause for at least an hour. Probably two.”

  “I hate making choices.” She wrinkled up her nose. “Fine. I can’t find any of my microraptor data on my server. Find it, and I’ll take you straight to my house.”

  I straightened up and sat cross-legged, meditation style. “What about your backup hard drives?”

  “If I have to, I’ll use them, but it’s Friday,” she said. “That’s update day. I’d lose a week’s worth of work, and I finally solved a problem with how the forelimbs were aligned.”

  “‘The inverse to se
curity is convenience,’” I quoted, and shut my eyes to mentally enter her server.

  The minutes passed, then started to stretch out into uncomfortable silence. Beside me, Chanda would begin to fidget, then catch herself and fall still. After the better part of a half an hour, she said, “This doesn’t seem good.”

  “It’s not,” I admitted. “But I don’t want to jump to conclusions.”

  “Go ahead,” she said, sounding both terrified and resigned.

  I opened my eyes and ran my hands through my hair, trying to shake off the feel of exploring Chanda’s equipment. “You should know that I’m not the best data tech in OACET. I’m good, but others are much better. They specialize in this kind of stuff. I think we should call one of them in to help.”

  “Why?” she asked, one foot tapping on the floor with nervous energy.

  I looked over to where Chanda was sitting with her arms wrapped around herself, as if she knew bad news was coming. “I think someone stole your dinosaurs.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Thirty minutes later, Chanda and I were standing at the loading dock as a nondescript late-model sedan pulled up. The passenger’s door opened, and Rachel Peng stepped out. Rachel is one of my best friends. She’s a tall Chinese woman who wore her hair in a tight black bob, with stately business suits which fit her position as OACET’s liaison to the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.

  She took a good hard look at Chanda, then at me, and said, “Fuck, there are two of them.”

  “Excuse me?” Chanda sounded offended.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “Rachel is good at reading people.” The driver’s door opened, and a tall man with dark hair stepped out. “Jason, however…”

  “I heard that,” Jason Atran snapped. He paused to examine Chanda, and then smoothed his hair back from his forehead. “Hi,” he said to Chanda, grinning.

  “Don’t waste your time,” Rachel said, as she walked up the short staircase.

  Jason followed. When he reached Chanda, he asked, “Am I wasting my time?”

  She looked him up and down with a critical eye, and then finally handed him a business card. “Call me in two weeks.”