Free Ark by Charles McCarry

sweets for the locals, huge boxes of Godiva chocolates for everybody. In the mess tent, speeches were made. Henry—meaning Henry’s money—was cheered. By the end of lunch everybody was drunk except Henry, who didn’t drink in any meaningful sense of the word, and myself, who hated beer and would not drink with Bear Mulligan, who was too large to be affected by alcohol. Afterward, we toured the bone collection. This included a nearly intact Tarbosaurus, a carnivore slightly smaller than T. rex, and many other creatures, all of which had been alive one moment and entombed the next on a day more than a hundred million years before.
     
    Through it all, Bear had neither looked at me nor spoken a word to me—nor I to him, because the sight and sound of him made my skin crawl. The time to depart finally arrived. We walked over to the Humvee. Henry visited the latrine, leaving the two of us alone. Bear looked down on me with raw hatred in his eyes.
     
    “Be warned, bitch,” he said in the Chip-and-Buffie English he spoke when I knew him.
     
    “Of what?”
     
    “If you repeat one word of your rotten dirty lies about me to Henry,” he said, “I’ll hunt you down and tear your head off.”
     
    “Better do it now, then,” I said.
     
    “You’re going to tell him, aren’t you?”
     
    “You’ve made it pretty obvious that you and I have a problem. If he asks what it is, I’m not going to lie to him.”
     
    Henry emerged from the latrine tent. Still glaring, Bear muttered, “Here he comes. One lie and you’re dead. That’s a promise.”
     
    He reached out for Henry and gave him a gentle hug. So tender was the look on Bear’s face that for a moment I thought kisses might come next. Bear stood waving good-bye to Henry until we couldn’t see him anymore.
     
    Henry checked the Humvee’s navigation screen and told me we had just time enough to get to the road to nowhere before dark.
     
    I said, “Good,” but dreaded the bumpy ride ahead. Already the Humvee was pitching and yawing. I wished I had worn a sports bra. The windows were closed because of the dust. The chows, carsick already, whimpered.
     
    After a silence, Henry said, “What was that all about?”
     
    I didn’t pretend that I didn’t understand the question. I replied, “Bear was surprised to see me, I think.”
     
    “You know him?”
     
    “We knew each other in the past. It didn’t end well.”
     
    “Why not?”
     
    “He’s the rapist.”
     
    Henry stopped the Humvee. “Go on,” he said.
     
    “His family bought the judge and Bear walked on a legal technicality. The cops were so busy trying to subdue him—he broke some bones—when he resisted arrest they forgot to read him his rights.”
     
    Henry took my hand. I was astonished. He had a nice hand, dry and sinewy.
     
    “I had no idea,” he said.
     
    “How could you have?”
     
    “It should have turned up when he was vetted for the grant.”
     
    “That was long before you knew me. Wouldn’t you have given him the grant anyway? It would have been the broad-minded thing to do. He wasn’t convicted of anything.”
     
    “Probably,” Henry replied. “Are you afraid of him now?”
     
    “Terrified. I know him. When you were in the latrine he warned me that he’d rip my head off if I told you who and what he is.”
     
    “He meant it?”
     
    “Of course he meant it.”
     
    Henry was still holding my hand. His face was grim.
     
    “You’re going to tell Bear about this conversation?”
     
    “No,” Henry said. “But he’ll know. The money will stop.”
     
    “Then what?”
     
    “Then we contain him. You’re safer than you think.”
     
    ~ * ~
     
     
     
     
    2
     
     
     
     
     
    DARKNESS FELL BEFORE WE REACHED the yurts. We saw their lights, a white blotch in the anthracite sky, from a long way off. Their brightness puzzled, even startled Henry. He floored the gas pedal and the ungainly, rattling Humvee sped onward, headlights poking into the