“But I’m not trying to do any of those things,” said Adikor. “Why won’t you let me go down to my lab?”

Dut looked at Adikor as if he couldn’t believe the question. “Why not? Because your Companion’s signals won’t be detectable from down there; we wouldn’t be able to keep you under scrutiny.”

“Marrowless bone,” said Adikor, softly.

Jasmel crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I’m Jasmel Ket, and—”

“I know who you are,” said the enforcer.

“Well, then, you know that Ponter Boddit was my father.”

The enforcer nodded.

“This man is trying to rescue him. You have to let him go down to his lab.”

Dut shook his head in astonishment. “This man is accused of killing your father.”

“But it’s possible he didn’t,” said Jasmel. “My father might still be alive. The only way to find out is to repeat the quantum-computing experiment.”

“I don’t know anything about quantum experiments,” said Dut.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” said Adikor.

“My, you are a mouthy one, aren’t you?” said Dut, looking Adikor up and down. “Anyway, my orders are simple. Keep you from leaving Saldak, and keep you from going to your lab. And I received a call from the alibi-archive pavilion saying you were heading off to do precisely that.”

“I have to go down there,” said Adikor.

“Sorry,” said Dut, crossing his own massive arms in front of his massive chest. “Not only can’t you be monitored from down there, but you might try to get rid of evidence that hasn’t yet been found.”

Jasmel did indeed have her father’s quickness of mind. “There’s nothing preventing me from going down to the lab, is there? I’m not under judicial scrutiny.”

Dut considered this. “No, I suppose not.”

“All right,” said Jasmel, turning now to Adikor. “Tell me what to do to try to bring my father back.”

Adikor shook his head. “It’s not that easy. The equipment is very complex, and, since Ponter and I assembled it ourselves, half the control buds aren’t even labeled.”

Jasmel was clearly frustrated. She looked at the big man. “Well, what if you went down with us? You’d be able to see what Adikor was doing.”

“Go down there?” Dut laughed. “You want me to go to the one place my Companion can’t be monitored—and to do so with a person who may well have committed murder there previously? You’re ruffling my back hair.”

“You have to let him go down there,” Jasmel said.

But Dut just shook his head. “No. What I have to do is keep him from going down there.”

Adikor thrust out his jaw. “How?” he said.

“I—I beg your pardon?” replied Dut.

“How? How are you going to keep me from going down there?”

“By whatever means necessary,” said Dut, his tone even.

“All right, then,” said Adikor. He stood motionlessly for a moment, as if thinking about whether he really wanted to try this. “All right, then,” he said again, and started walking purposefully toward the entrance to the elevator.

“Stop,” said Dut, with no particular force to the word.

“Or what?” said Adikor, without looking back. He tried to sound fearless, but his voice cracked, which didn’t really give the effect he wanted. “Are you going to stave in my skull?” Despite himself, his neck muscles contracted, already preparing for the blow.

“Hardly,” said Dut. “I’ll just put you to sleep with a tranquilizer dart.”

Adikor stopped walking and turned around. “Oh.” Well, he’d never run up against the law before—nor had he known anyone who ever had. He supposed it made sense that they had a way to stop people without actually hurting them.

Jasmel interposed herself between Dut’s dart launcher, which was now in his hand, and Adikor. “You’ll have to shoot me first,” she said. “He’s going down there.”

“If you like. But I should warn you: you’ll wake up with an awful headache.”

“Please!” said Jasmel. “He’s trying to save my father—don’t you understand?”

For once Dut’s voice had some warmth in it. “You’re clutching at smoke. I know it must be very hard to deal with, but you have to face reality.” He gestured with his launcher for the two of them to start walking away from the mine. “I’m sorry, but your father is dead.”

Chapter 17

The genetics lab at Laurentian didn’t have the special equipment for extracting degraded DNA from old specimens that Mary’s lab at York did. But none of that would be needed. It was a straightforward matter to take the cells from Ponter’s mouth and extract DNA from one of the mitochondria; any genetics facility in the world could have done it.

Mary introduced two primers—small pieces of mitochondrial DNA that matched the beginning of the sequence that she had identified years ago in the German Neanderthal fossil. She then added the enzyme DNA-polymerase, triggering the polymerase chain reaction, which would cause the section she was interested in to be amplified, reproducing itself over and over again, doubling the quantity each time. She would soon have millions of copies of the string to analyze.

As Reuben Montego had said, the Laurentian lab did a lot of forensic work, and so had sealing tape that could be applied to the glassware. The tape was used so that geneticists could truthfully testify that there was no way the contents of a vial could have been tampered with while out of their sight. Mary sealed the container in which the PCR amplification was happening and wrote her signature on the seal.

She then used a web terminal in the lab to access her e-mail at York. She’d received more e-mails in the last day than she had in the preceding month, and many of them were from Neanderthal experts around the world who had somehow gotten wind of the fact that she was now in Sudbury. There were messages from Washington University, the University of Michigan, UCB, UCLA, Brown, SUNY Stony Brook, Stanford, Cambridge, Britain’s Natural History Museum, France’s Institute of Quaternary Prehistory and Geology, her old friends at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, and more—all asking for samples of the Neanderthal DNA while, at the same time, making a joke of it, as if, of course, this couldn’t really be happening.

She ignored all those messages, but she did feel a need to send a note to her grad student back at York:

Mary read the note over a couple of times, then clicked “Send Now.”

She then simply sat, staring at the screen for a long, long time.

Damn it.

Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.

She couldn’t get it out of her head—not for five minutes. She guessed that fully half her waking thoughts today had been devoted to the horrible events of—My God, was it really only yesterday? It seemed so much longer ago than that, although the memories of the horrible things he’d done to her were still scalpel sharp.

Had she been down in Toronto, she might have talked it over with her mother, but—

But her mother was a good Catholic, and there was no way to avoid unpleasant issues when discussing a rape. Mom would be worried about whether Mary might be pregnant—not that she’d ever countenance an abortion; Mary and she had argued about John Paul’s edict that raped nuns in Bosnia had to bring their children to term. And telling her mother that there was nothing to worry about because Mary was on the Pill would hardly be better. As far as Mary’s parents had been concerned, the rhythm method was the only acceptable form of birth control—Mary thought it was a miracle that she only had three siblings instead of a dozen.