Anasazi Exile. Eric G. Swedin

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СКАЧАТЬ Inlaid into its burnished surface was a symbol, three triangles within a circle.

      “That’s metal,” Harry said, feeling giddy with stupidity. Only an idiot would state the obvious. “That doesn’t belong here.”

      “What is it? Steel?” She touched it. “Odd, it’s not cool. It sort of feels like ceramic.”

      “Don’t touch anything. Let me take pictures.”

      The room flashed with the strobe-like effect of Harry’s camera. He carefully took pictures of the box from all different angles, holding the camera out at awkwardly to avoid shifting his feet and disturbing the site any more than they already had.

      “It’s so strange,” Harry said. “There are no funeral goods, just that box.”

      “Yeah. Where are the objects to accompany the deceased into the next life? No weapons, no goods. Nothing. Not even a pot or a bowl.”

      “Now who sounds like an archaeologist?”

      She stuck her tongue out at him.

      He ignored her. “I don’t understand why the lid fell apart. The rest of the coffin is in such great shape.”

      “Maybe it was trying to escape,” she intoned in a melodramatic stage voice.

      “Perhaps they used a different type of wood, something that didn’t preserve as well. Maybe it was too thin. I wonder what it looked like.”

      More pictures.

      “That little box is the true find here,” Brenda said. “We should take it out and see if it opens.”

      “What?” Harry was horrified. “We’re not doing that! We’ve broken enough rules already. We need to back out of here and do this properly.”

      “I’ve already touched it,” Brenda argued. “We might as well take it out and look at it a bit closer.”

      Harry reluctantly nodded. It annoyed him that he found it so hard to deny her any request. “Okay, but we don’t try to open it. It’s unique. We should wait until we have it in a lab so we can preserve whatever might be in it. If it is a box then whatever is in it would most certainly be extremely fragile.”

      Trying their best to step in their own footprints, they withdrew and crawled up the stairs. After the cool of the tomb, the sun-drenched desert felt like an oven. Harry lowered the lid back onto the tomb, ratcheting down the hoist. He didn’t want any desert animals to get in and mess up the site—mess it up anymore than he and Brenda had already messed it up, he corrected himself.

      “It’s almost six o’clock and we skipped lunch.”

      They ate sandwiches, chewing quietly, shocked out of their normal verbosity. The box sat on the table between them, like a talisman of power. They shared a sense of mutual awe, as when faced with a technically perfect piece of art or a new technology with exciting possibilities. Harry remembered visiting the British Museum in London, a treasure trove containing the loot of an empire, and being amazed by objects that he had seen pictured in books as a child—the statues of winged bulls, fourteen feet high, that guarded the throne room of Sargon II of ancient Assyria; the crumpled remains of the Ludlow Man, tanned into leather by a peat bog; and the Rosetta Stone itself. Perhaps this find would someday rank with those icons of archaeology. But who was he fooling? He had completely ignored procedure. He was not angry at Brenda, just himself.

      Brenda took the digital camera and recorder and copied the images and audio to her laptop. Harry took the camera and recorder over to his own laptop and did the same, finding data assurance by having many backups.

      “I’ll be back in an hour,” he said.

      “Where’re you going?”

      “Trying to salvage my career.”

      Harry drove over to the sole campground in Chaco Canyon, where tourists brought along all the conveniences of home in RVs, including satellite TV. This campground also had a wireless access point, provided for free by the Park Service. Harry sat in his truck, tapped out an e-mail to Dr. Bancroft about the find, attached a few pictures, and sent it off. He took ten minutes to surf the web, checking a few of his favorite news sites, then closed the laptop and drove back to camp.

      CHAPTER THREE

      FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

      José Splith worshiped the Echelon system. Sipping at his coffee as he sat in the windowless basement of a National Security Agency building outside Baltimore, Splith watched the world. Three computer screens, filled with colorful graphics, kept him abreast of the millions of transmissions being captured every minute.

      Using satellites, taps on undersea cables, and giant dish farms to capture radio waves out of the ether, Echelon captured every cell call, every satellite transmission, every e-mail, every web request; in short, every electronic communication sent anywhere outside the United States. Federal law prohibited listening to transmissions within the United States and curiously enough, despite the paranoia of the conspiracy-obsessed fringe, the NSA used to actually follow the law to the letter.

      Nineteen hijackers on 9/11 changed everything. The legal barriers fell down and information flowed. A libertarian fringe of computer aficionados had always argued that information wanted to be free, that software should be free, and that there should no restrictions on who could know what; at the NSA, information was free.

      A massive farm of computers culled through the transmissions, flagging messages of interest and sending them to other computers for automated translation. The results flowed automatically to the screens of intelligence analysts, where they decided if something was worthwhile or just chatter by normal people. Despite the best efforts of the computer programmers, the NSA functioned in a constant state of information overload.

      Splith’s job was to keep Echelon running, and that required spot checks—the best part of the job. He liked to listen, rather than read e-mail or instant messages, and so he preferred English. Earlier in the evening, a man and woman had argued on a transatlantic phone call about his affair with a waitress in Ireland. An hour later he found two lovers, parted by distance, having phone sex. He really liked that.

      An alert window popped up on his computer screen, accompanied by a demanding beep. Splith sat down his coffee and peered closer. An e-mail sent from a computer in New Mexico to a computer in Scotland had been intercepted on a fiber optic cable stretched across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The analysis program had caught some keywords in the e-mail and prompted the alert.

      Splith tapped a key and was surprised to see instructions scroll onto his screen. Normally an intercept was simply sent to the appropriate analyst, closeted in some other NSA building. These instructions told him to do three things: forward the e-mail to an outside e-mail account; print it out and fax it to a number in Indiana; and then make a phone call to another number and read the contents of the message into the answering machine at the other end.

      He swallowed and blinked furiously. Those were phone numbers outside the NSA. He was being instructed to send top-secret data to outside numbers without a warrant or any form of oversight. He tried to wrap his brain around what this meant.

      He did as he was told.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Brenda lay on her sleeping bag, still in СКАЧАТЬ