Walker’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“I’m talking about Amanda.”
“Jesus Christ, I know my own ex-wife’s name,” Walker said, shaking his head, feeling as if he’d just taken a hard blow. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Father Cornelius still did not rise. “I’m your colleague and I suspect the closest thing you have to a friend within four thousand miles of here. You’re so lost in your own head that you can never see the needs of those around you. Change your approach to Kim, and when you get home, make peace with your former wife. Set an example for your son.”
Walker drew a hitching breath that turned into a soft laugh of disbelief. The words cut him, but the mention of his boy, Charlie, stabbed deep, twisted the knife. He knew that Father Cornelius hadn’t been himself today, that something had been troubling them all… haunting them. But the dull ache in his skull flared into a bright, suffocating pain and he felt anger uncoil inside him like a viper defending its nest. Twisting and uncontrollable.
“Hey, Father?” he said, jaw tight, fist clenched.
“Listen, Ben—”
“Go fuck yourself.”
Shaking, Walker turned and left him there, not caring what Meryam would say about broken promises or about the priest having unfettered access to the cadaver and the box and encasement. What harm could the old man do? Better that he be left to his work, tonight. Better that he spend his time with a corpse.
He sure as hell wasn’t fit to be in the company of the living.
ELEVEN
Walker missed music. He stood outside his tent in the stall and wondered how he could feel so exposed and so claustrophobic at the same time. Earbuds would have given him privacy, let him listen to the playlist of ’80s alt rock that always calmed him, but he didn’t want to block out other sounds. The only sound was the wind blowing through the ark’s upper passages, like the tide rolling in, but he didn’t trust the quiet. Didn’t trust the night. Not with people on such a ragged edge, not with two people vanishing last night. Yes, they’d probably abandoned the project, but what if they hadn’t?
The mountain felt heavy above him, as if it wanted nothing more than to close the cave down like a monstrous mouth, and swallow them whole. He couldn’t shake off that bit of claustrophobia because it was all too rational. Not that Ararat might be some sentient rock monster, but there had been a small earthquake and a landslide here just a couple of months ago. Another one could trap them here, kill them all.
Softly, he laughed at himself. So cheerful.
He stuffed his hand into his pocket and plucked out a small white plastic prescription bottle. His throat felt dry and his head muzzy. A spot on his left temple throbbed with the weird neuropathy that had troubled him for years. The pain in his spine and across his abdomen reminded him that he desperately needed to make time to stretch. He wetted his lips with his tongue and opened the pill bottle, tapped out a couple of dusty gray tablets, and recapped it.
As he tossed the pills back and dry-swallowed them, he caught motion in his peripheral vision. Kim froze when he turned toward her. Had she just started to emerge from her own stall and seen him, or had she been watching for a while and decided to withdraw when she saw him take his meds?
“Trouble sleeping?” he asked.
“I’d been wanting to ask you the same question.”
Walker felt the mountain close in even tighter. A flush went through him, an almost feverish moment of warmth that forced the chill of the cave to abate. Kim still looked tired and pale, but her eyes were focused and alert, nothing like the woman who had briefly shattered yesterday. How could she seem so confident now when she might run off, screaming and spouting gibberish at any moment?
“That really the question you want to ask?” he replied.
Her lips thinned into a dark smile. “I’m not feeling my best, Walker. My diplomacy is malfunctioning at the moment. You accepted the presence of a UN observer because you had no choice. I accepted the assignment because someone had to do it and it seemed like an opportunity to impress my superiors. Something happened to me yesterday that I don’t understand and it’s broken down my ability to be polite.”
“You were polite before yesterday?”
Kim’s expression flickered with anger, but then the mask broke and she gave a tired laugh. “All right. Perhaps I confuse courtesy and politeness.”
Walker did not laugh. He clutched the prescription bottle in his hand, then tossed it to her. She caught it with one hand. “Go on, Kim. Do your job. Ask the question you wanted to ask.”
She studied the label. “Zohydro?”
“Painkiller. Banned in parts of the United States, but not where I got them. Incredibly powerful. Incredibly addictive. Makes Oxycontin look like breath mints in comparison.”
Kim shook the bottle, listened to the rattle of the thirty or so pills remaining. “Incredibly addictive. So are you addicted?”
Walker held out a hand for the bottle. “Oh, absolutely. So I’ll need those back.”
Blinking in surprise at his frankness, she gave him the pills. Then it was her turn to surprise him.
“Do you take them for pain stemming from the injuries you sustained in Guatemala, or do you take them to stop thinking about your wife?”
Even the wind went silent. Walker drew in a deep breath and smelled the age of the timbers. The suffocation he’d felt earlier wrapped more tightly around him.
He’d met Amanda Nemeth at a National Science Foundation conference, where she’d been presenting a paper on unknown species discovered in cave ecosystems. He’d approached her after the lecture, discovered she was a professor at Columbia, and surprised himself by asking her out for coffee. Such an ordinary thing, so casual, but not typical behavior for Walker. Since college, he’d been strictly the set-up-by-well-meaning-matchmaking-friends type. But Amanda had both a dry wit and a passion for her work. He’d thought they truly understood each other, but three years after they were married, she’d forced him to sit and listen and focus on her words, and she’d told him that she had been serious all of the times she had said she couldn’t have a husband who refused to make their relationship a priority. Who couldn’t even tell her the truth about what he did for work, where his journeys took him, what kind of danger he was putting himself in.
Where he’d gotten his scars. The injuries that had almost killed him.
She didn’t want her son growing up in the shadows cast by his father’s secrets and his mother’s fears.
In the midst of this, his phone had rung and he’d been instructed to head to northern Canada, where retreating Arctic ice had revealed a system of subterranean catacombs full of artifacts and human remains that did not belong there. They had danced around it for weeks, known things between them were coming unraveled, but the moment she realized that he intended to go and couldn’t tell her where he was headed, Amanda had taken his hand, brought him into their living room, and sat him down.
“If you go,” she’d said, leaning toward him for emphasis, studying his eyes, “I will know I’ve chosen the wrong partner.”
He had come home from the Arctic to find her gone. She had left a note that was uncharacteristically succinct for a college professor: For Charlie’s sake, I wish someone else had been his father.
Now she had George, her artist boyfriend. Walker would stay in his son’s life, but if George could be the right kind of father—be there for Charlie—he wouldn’t deny his son that bit of happiness.