Douglas Preston - Reliquary

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Praise forRelic

“Want to pick up a thriller that arrives with the kinetic energy of a meteor smacking the Earth? Read

Relic [for] some of the most riveting passages ever contained between two covers. No debate, no

dispute. These guys are masters at scaring the hell out of people.”

—The Tampa Tribune

“Better than anything the theoreticallyrecombinant team of Michael Crichton and Peter Benchley could

ever hope to achieve.”

—Albuquerque Journal

“Far above Crichton’sJurassic Park.”

—Booklist

“What might happen if a creature fromJurassic Park came to New York City.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Wildly cool. ... Thrill hounds couldn’t ask for a creepier environment. ... A thriller staged in the world’s

scariest building, with no room for the squeamish.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Jawstakes Manhattan.”

—San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle

“Relicis a straight thriller. That’s like saying, however, thatDie Hard was just another action adventure

flick or thatGone With the Wind was just another Civil War film. Each stands as a superlative example

of its type.”

—Orlando Sentinel

By Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child from

Tom Doherty Associates

Relic

Mount Dragon

Reliquary

RELIQUARY

DOUGLASPRESTON

LINCOLNCHILD

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

Address author mail tolchild@ibm.net

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen

property. It was reported as “unsold and de-stroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the

publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the

author’s imagination or are used ficti-tiously.

RELIQUARY

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web:http://www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 0-812-54283-5

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 96-53533

First edition: May 1997

First international mass market edition: June 1998

First mass market edition: July 1998

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments.8

PART ONE.10

= 1 =.12

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PART TWO..72

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PART THREE.136

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= 62 =.191

= 63 =.193

= 64 =.196

AND LAST.198

Author’s Note.201

About the e-Book.202

Lincoln Child dedicates this book to his daughter,

Veronica

Douglas Preston dedicates this book to

James Mortimer Gibbons, Jr., M.D.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the following people for helping, in myriad ways, this book see the light of

day: Bob Gleason, Matthew Snyder, Denis Kelly, Stephende las Heras, Jim Cush, LindaQuinten, Tom

Espensheid, Dan Rabinowitz, Caleb Rabinowitz, Karen Lovell, Mark Gallagher, Bob Wincott, Lee

Suckno, and Georgette Piligian.

Special thanks to Tom Doherty and HarveyKlinger, without whose guidance and diligent ef-fort

Reliquary would not have been possible.

Thanks also to everyone on the Tor/Forge sales force for all their hard work and dedication.

We would also like to acknowledge all those readers who have supported us, whether it be by calling

during radio or television interviews, speak-ing with us at book signings, sending mail both conventional

and electronic, or simply by reading and enjoying our books. Your enthusiasm forRelic was the

motivating force behind this sequel.

To all of you—and to those of you who should have been mentioned, but were not—our deepest

thanks.

We listen to the unspoken, we gaze upon the unseen.

—Kakuzo Okakura,The Book of Tea

PART ONE

OLD BONES

REL-I-QUARYrelic-wary(n): a shrine or coffer for displaying an object, bone, or body part from a

saint or deity

= 1 =

Snow tested his regulator, checked both air valves, ran his hands along the slick neoprene of the suit.

Everything was in order, just as it had been when he last checked it, sixty seconds before.

“Another five minutes,” the Dive Sergeant said, cutting the launch to half speed.

“Great,” came the sarcastic voice of Fernandez over the sound of the bigdiesel. “Just great.”

Nobody else spoke. Already, Snow had noticed that small talk seemed to die away when the team

neared a site.

He looked back over the stern, watching the froth of the Harlem River spread out behind the propeller in

a brown wedge. The river was wide here, rolling sluggishly under the hot gray haze of the August

morning. He turned his gaze to-ward the shore, grimacing slightly as the rubber cowl pulled at the skin of

his neck. Towering apartment buildings with broken windows. Ghostly shells of warehouses and

factories. An abandoned playground. No, not quite abandoned: one child, swinging from a rusty frame.

“Hey, Divemaster,” Fernandez’s voice called to him. “Be sure you got your training diapers on.”

Snow tugged at the ends of his gloves and continued look-ing toward the shore.

“Last time we let a virgin out on a dive like this,” Fernan-dez continued, “he shit his suit. Christ, what a

mess. We made him sit on the transom all the way back to base. And that was off Liberty Island, too. A

frigging Cakewalk compared to the Cloaca.”

“Fernandez, shut up,” the Sergeant said mildly.

Snow continued to gaze over the stern. When he’d come to Scuba from regular NYPD, he had made

one big mistake: mentioning that he’d once worked a Sea of Cortez dive boat. Too late, he’d learned

that several of the Scuba team had at one time been commercial divers laying cable, maintaining pipelines,

working oil platforms. To them, divemasters like him were pampered, underskilled wimps who liked

clear water and clean sand. Fernandez, in particular, wouldn’t let him for-get.

The boat leaned heavily to starboard as the Sergeant angled in closer to shore. He cut the power even

further as they ap-proached a thick cluster of riverfront projects. Suddenly, a small, brick-lined tunnel

came into view, breaking the monot-ony of the gray concrete facades. The Sergeant nosed the boat

through the tunnel and out into the half-light beyond. Snow became aware of an indescribable smell

wafting up from the disturbed waters. Tears sprang involuntarily to his eyes, and he stifled a cough. In the

bow, Fernandez looked back, snig-gering. Beneath Fernandez’s open suit, Snow could see a T--shirt

with the Police Scuba team’s unofficial motto: We dive in shit and look for dead things. Only this time it

wasn’t a dead thing, but a massive wrapped brick of heroin, thrown off theHumboldt Rail Bridge during a

shootout with police the previous night.

The narrow canal was lined on both sides by concrete em-bankments. Ahead, a police launch was

waiting beneath the railroad bridge, engine off, bobbing slightly in the striped shadows. Snow could see

two people on board: the pilot and a heavyset man in a badly fitted polyester suit. He was balding and a

wet cigar projected from his lips. He hiked up his pants, spat into the creek, and raised one hand toward

them in greet-ing.

The Sergeant nodded toward the launch. “Look who’s here.”

“LieutenantD’Agosta,” one of the divers in the bow re-plied. “Must be bad.”

“Anytime a cop is shot, it’s bad,” said the Sergeant.

The Sergeant killed the engine, swinging the stern around so the two launches drifted together. D’Agosta

stepped back to speak with the dive team. As he moved, the police launch heeled over slightly under his

shifting weight, and Snow could see that the water left an oily, greenish residue on the hull as it slid away.

“Morning,” D’Agostasaid. Normally ruddy-faced, in the darkness beneath the bridge the Lieutenant

blinked back at them like a pale cave creature that shunned the light.

“Talk to me, sir,” the Dive Sergeant replied, strapping a depth gauge to his wrist. “What’s the deal?”

“The bust went bad,” D’Agostasaid. “Turns out it was just a messenger boy. He tossed the stuff off that

bridge.” He nodded upward toward the overhanging structure. “Then he shot up a cop and got his own

ass aired out good. If we can find the brick, we can close this piece-of-shit case.”

The Dive Sergeant sighed. “If the guy was killed, why call us out?”

D’Agostashook his head. “What, you just gonna leave a six-hundred-grand brick of heroin down

there?”

Snow looked up. Between the blackened girders of the bridge, he could see the burnt facades of

buildings. A thousand dirty windows stared down at the dead river. Too bad, he thought, the messenger

had to throw it into theHumboldt Kill, aka Cloaca Maxima, named after the great central sewer of

ancient Rome. The Cloaca was so called because of its cen-turies-old accumulation of shit, toxic sludge,

dead animals, and PCBs. A subway lumbered by above, shuddering and screech-ing. Beneath his feet

the boat quivered, and the surface of the glistening thick water seemed to jiggle slightly, like gelatin that

had begun to set.

“Okay, men,” he heard the Sergeant say. “Let’s get wet.”

Snow busied himself with his suit. He knew he was a first-rate diver. Growing up in Portsmouth,

practically living in the Piscataqua River, he’d saved a couple of lives over the years. Later, in the Sea of

Cortez, he’d hunted shark, done technical diving below two hundred feet. Even so, he wasn’t looking

forward to this particular dip.

Though Snow had never been near it before, the team talked about the Cloaca often enough back at the

base. Of all the foul places to dive in New York City, the Cloaca was the worst: worse than the Arthur

Kill, Hell Gate, even the Gowanus Canal. Once, he’d heard, it had been a sizeable tributary of the

Hudson, cutting through Manhattan just south of Har-lem’s Sugar Hill. But centuries of sewage,

commercial con-struction, and neglect had turned it into a stagnant, unmoving ribbon of filth: a liquid trash

can for everything imaginable.

Snow waited his turn to retrieve his oxygen tanks from the stainless-steel rack, then stepped toward the

stern, shrugging them over his shoulders. He still was not used to the heavy, constricting feel of the dry

suit. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the Sergeant approaching.

“All set?” came the quiet baritone.

“I think so, sir,” Snow said. “What about the headlamps?”

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PraiseforRelic “WanttopickupathrillerthatarriveswiththekineticenergyofameteorsmackingtheEarth?ReadRelic[for]someofthemostrivetingpassagesevercontainedbetweentwocovers.Nodebate,nodispute.Theseguysaremastersatscaringthehelloutofpeople.”—TheTampaTribune“Betterthananythingthetheoreticallyrecombinanttea...

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Douglas Preston - Reliquary

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