Timeline by Michael Crichton

again.
    “Damn.”
    “What?” Stern said.
    “I can’t find the wall. It was running right this way” — he pointed with the flat of his hand—” and now it’s gone.”
    They were standing in an area of particularly thick undergrowth, high ferns intermixed with some kind of thorny vine that scratched at his bare legs. Stern was wearing trousers, and he walked forward, saying, “I don’t know, Chris, it’s got to be around here. . . .”
    Chris knew he had to double back. He had just turned to retrace his steps when he heard Stern yell.
    Chris looked back.
    Stern was gone. Vanished.
    Chris was standing alone in the woods.
    :
    “David?”
    A groan. “Ah . . . damn.”
    “What happened?”
    “I banged my knee. It hurts like a mother.”
    Chris couldn’t see him anywhere. “Where are you?”
    “In a hole,” Stern said. “I fell. Be careful, if you come this way. In fact . . .” A grunt. Swearing. “Don’t bother. I can stand. I’m okay. In fact — hey.”
    “What?”
    “Wait a minute.”
    “What is it?”
    “Just wait, okay?”
    Chris saw the underbrush move, the ferns shifting back and forth, as Stern headed to the left. Then Stern spoke. His voice sounded odd. “Uh, Chris?”
    “What is it?”
    “It’s a section of wall. Curved.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “I think I’m standing at the bottom of what was once a round tower, Chris.”
    “No kidding,” Chris said. He thought, How did Kramer know about that?
    :
    “Check the computer,” the Professor said. “See if we have any helicopter survey scans — infrared or radar — that show a tower. It may already be recorded, and we just never paid attention to it.”
    “Late-afternoon infrared is your best bet,” Stern said. He was sitting in a chair with an ice pack on his knee.
    “Why late afternoon?”
    “Because this limestone holds heat. That’s why the cavemen liked it so much here. Even in winter, a cave in Périgord limestone was ten degrees warmer than the outside temperature.”
    “So in the afternoon . . .”
    “The wall holds heat as the forest cools. And it’ll show up on infrared.”
    “Even buried?”
    Stern shrugged.
    Chris sat at the computer console, started hitting keys. The computer made a soft beep. The image switched abruptly.
    “Oops. We’re in e-mail.”
    Chris clicked on the mailbox. There was just one message, and it took a long time to download. “What’s this?”
    “I bet it’s that guy Wauneka,” Stern said. “I told him to send a pretty big graphic. He probably didn’t compress it.”
    Then the image popped up on the screen: a series of dots arranged in a geometric pattern. They all recognized it at once. It was unquestionably the Monastery of Sainte-Mère. Their own site.
    In greater detail than their own survey.
    Johnston peered at the image. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “It’s odd,” he said finally, “that Bellin and Kramer would both just happen to show up here on the same day.”
    The graduate students looked at each other. “What’s odd about it?” Chris said.
    “Bellin didn’t ask to meet her. And he always wants to meet sources of funding.”
    Chris shrugged. “He seemed very busy.”
    “Yes. That’s the way he seemed.” He turned to Stern. “Anyway, print that out,” he said. “We’ll see what our architect has to say.”
    :
    Katherine Erickson — ash-blond, blue-eyed, and darkly tanned — hung fifty feet in the air, her face just inches below the broken Gothic ceiling of the Castelgard chapel. She lay on her back in a harness and calmly jotted down notes about the construction above her.
    Erickson was the newest graduate student on the site, having joined the project just a few months before. Originally, she had gone to Yale to study architecture, but found she disliked her chosen field, and transferred to the history department. There, Johnston had sought her out, convincing her to join him the way he had convinced all the others: “Why