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turn. Into the water.” The moment Krause made it to the atoll, Merrit would set a fire on the catamaran that would reach its diesel bunkers before either diver could swim back.
    MacClary stood by the meteorite, facing him, eyes strangely bright. She’d brought both hands to her cross, saying something that sounded like a prayer. It wasn’t any language Merrit recognized.
    “Asking God to strike me down?” he asked.
    “Something like that.” Then she flung herself at him with unexpected speed, a small silver blade flashing in her hand, sweeping toward his unprotected face.
    Merrit, however, was a killer, and without the need for conscious thought he anticipated her again, driving Renault’s knife up through the soft flesh beneath her jaw, on through the roof of her mouth and into her brain. Impassive, he held MacClary’s body as she arched in spasm, then sank to the deck, dead before she reached it.
    Impressed by its workmanship and by the way it had been hidden, Merrit retrieved her blade. Taking the other half of the cross from aroundher neck, he slid the blade back inside, then slipped it into his open wetsuit before throwing her body overboard, followed by the first of her divers, and then Renault.
    Krause and the other diver were already in the water, swimming for their dive boat.
    Merrit didn’t care, knew how it would play out. The catamaran would be blazing before they reached it, and with all the blood in the water now, the sharks would soon complete his work for him.
    As usual in matters such as these, he was right.

FIVE
    Jess MacClary zipped up her red Gore-Tex parka, snapped the high collar closed, and stepped from her flapping tent into the Arctic wind.
    It streamed strands of long red hair across her face, bringing an immediate flush to pale cheeks, making her smile. The low sun was bright, the sky brilliant blue, and the gentle hills of stunted grass and peat stretched endlessly around her, broken only by the handful of other tents that made up the camp, and the far-off red and yellow jackets of the dig team, working the site a half kilometer away.
    She pushed her gloved hands deep in her pockets, inhaled the freshest air on the planet, and was as happy and content as she could ever remember. Doubly so today because the word had just come from Charlie Ujarak, the Inuit elder overseeing her work: She’d been right. Again. The burial ground had been found exactly where she had told the oilmen to look for it.
    By the cook’s tent, Charlie was waiting for her, a mix of the Canadian Arctic’s past and present. He wore the latest mirrored Ray-Bans, but his traditional sealskin parka had been made by one of his grandmothers from seals Charlie had harpooned himself. Its design and construction hadn’t changed for centuries, probably longer. He wore it open to reveal a red T-shirt with a faded white logo for York University. For him, August north of the Arctic Circle wasn’t cold.
    “Hey, Jess, Mr. Kurtz is waiting for you.” Charlie sounded as pleased as she felt.
    “I’ll bet.”
    She did without her morning tea—the constant wind was a bracing enough wake-up tonic. They set out across the springy, yielding ground toward the dig.
    “Did he say anything?” Jess asked.
    “Nothing to say. The old settlement was right where you told them it would be. They found the first remains this morning. Article Twelve of the UN declaration takes over now.”
    “The remains were a burial, right? Not just a body.”
    “Definitely a burial. The skeleton’s in a fetal position, and there’re still bits of grass and deerhide wrapping it.”
    “Good. It was a big village, maybe a hundred people or so. There’ll be more remains.”
    Charlie took on a more serious tone. “Then it’ll take a lot of praying to keep them at rest.”
    Jess understood. What was paleogeology to her, with a smattering of anthropology and archaeology mixed in, was to the Inuit elder his living culture and religion. She envied him his