“But there’s a negative vibe already circulating in the camp,” said Nora.

“True. And that damned FBI agent showing up out of nowhere didn’t help things.”

Nora nodded. “Let’s decide later. We should finish excavating the quad on the off chance we can locate Samantha’s missing—”

She paused as a shadow fell over the excavation. Jack Peel stood at the edge of the quad, dressed in his long duster, staring down at them, his face creased with mingled sorrow and anger. He slowly raised his arm and pointed at the skeleton with a trembling finger.

“Samantha Carville?”

“Yes,” said Nora.

Peel didn’t respond. He simply stood there, immobile.

“Is…is there anything in particular you’d like to know?” Nora asked, spooked by the man’s intensity.

“I’ve already heard everything I need to know.” And with that, Peel turned and walked fast across the meadow toward the trail, duster flapping behind him.

“If we had any plan to keep this on the down low,” said Nora, “it’s walking away with that man right now.”

“What is it with that guy? He prowls around like an extra from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

Nora shrugged. “Let’s cover this up. Adelsky is already waving us over for lunch.”

Clive looked over. “I swear, for a skinny kid, that guy’s got a hell of an appetite. I wouldn’t want to be snowbound in a tent with him.”

* * *

After lunch, Clive and Nora resumed work on the quad. “I hope that FBI agent is safely strapped to her desk in Albuquerque by now,” Clive said.

Nora worked with her brush. “If she’d identified the Parkin skeleton, she might have shut down the dig—or taken the bones.”

“With that jigsaw of a midden heap? Good luck.” Clive shook his head. “The look on her face when you had the tarp pulled away was epic.”

“Actually, luck is only a part of the equation.”

Clive glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

“Meaning parts of the jigsaw puzzle might be easier to put together than you might think.”

“How so?”

“You know how we’ve been plugging all our data into the HQ computer? The Institute purchased the latest, most powerful archaeological software available—I showed you the rudiments on the iPad—and once you get up to speed on its intricacies, it’s pretty amazing.”

“It must be—you three hunching over your tablets every chance you get.”

Nora put down the brush. “I’ll show you how it works in a minute.”

They walked past the tent to the midden heap, which was still partially covered with tarps. A worktable adjacent to the excavation, in the shade of a tarp, held a variety of equipment as well as a few bones in a tray, removed for specific analysis.

“Help me get this tarp off.”

They unpegged a tarp covering the area of the midden heap that Agent Swanson had looked over the day before. Nora donned a fresh pair of gloves and reached into the padded neoprene case where they kept the expedition’s twelve-inch iPads.

“As I started to explain the other night, we enter every pertinent detail of the dig into our iPads—survey coordinates, grid points, depth markers, artifact locations, photographs, and so forth. The software crunches all the data, creating an extremely accurate 3-D rendering of every object, placed in a detailed topographic map of the location.”

“So you told me.”

“But that’s only the beginning. We can’t access the internet, of course, but using this local VPN, we can communicate with each other and the host laptop via Wi-Fi. Obviously, to conserve power, we use the computer only at specific times, such as when we make our uploads and downloads at the end of each day.”

“I was going to ask about that.”

“We’ve got that small generator and solar boosters to charge up all this electronic stuff.” With the iPad in hand, she stood at the edge of the midden heap. “As confused as this looks, the AI suite makes sense of it all. The cataloging and mapping software can show us this midden in any number of ways: by depth, by types of artifacts, locations of particular bones, even who excavated what and when—all overlaid on X, Y, and Z axes. You can also slice the midden heap any which way to look at a cross-section.”

Nora showed Clive a wireframe image of the midden. As he looked on, she swiveled it in various directions. In turn, the screen displayed sections illuminated in different colors.

“Looks like an Atari arcade game,” Clive said.

Nora laughed. “It means a lot of work up front, inputting the data, but once that’s done we’re able to do stuff that would have been impossible even a few years ago.” Using the iPad’s stylus, she made some markings, tapped a few icons. On the screen, one wireframe section of the midden was suddenly highlighted in green: irregularly shaped, filled with darker green shapes. The rest of the midden receded to gray.

“This is the section Jason worked on two days ago,” she said. “The dark areas are individual artifacts. Extensive metadata exists for each one.” She tapped one dot at random with her stylus, and immediately the screen zoomed in on it in 3-D, showing what looked like an old wooden button, with a panel of text scrolling up one edge of the display.

“So you actually know who dug up what, and when?”

“Yes. And more than that—the AI is powerful enough to help us reassemble artifacts. At a Paleolithic dig site, it could reverse-engineer a scattering of flint flakes into the original point they were struck from. Here—as an example, I’m going to ask the software to locate all the metatarsal bones and likely fragments it can. Watch.”

She tapped with the stylus and the screen changed once more, zooming out to show the surface of the midden, several bones highlighted in green and blue.

Clive whistled. “I’m beginning to see what you meant about the jigsaw puzzle.”

“Now,” said Nora, “I’m going to ask it to locate all the clavicles we’ve unearthed.”

Nora tapped the screen again. This time, instead of a particular cross-section, a small scattering of bone shapes and fragments were highlighted.

“You’ll see there are a total of eleven pieces, none intact. Note how in at least two instances they tend to be clumped together—these three pieces, here, and those four over there. And now, let’s look at them in reality.”

Walking over to the midden, and using the tablet as a guide, she carefully removed three bone fragments from the matrix with a gloved hand. Then she set them on a black velvet cloth in a specimen tray atop the worktable. Putting the iPad aside, she examined the pieces closely, moving them this way and that with her gloves. After a moment, she managed to fit them together.

“See?” she said.

“That’s incredible,” said Clive. “You’ve reassembled somebody’s collarbone—just like that!”

“Not ‘just like that.’” Nora smiled. “This is the result of meticulous excavation, good data entry and documentation, months of software training, years of classwork—and, of course, good financing.” She pointed at the broken collarbone. “No signs of recent fracture here.” Picking them up, she returned to the midden, knelt, and carefully replaced them where they had originally been.