Timeline by Michael Crichton Page A

don’t you put aside these old books and do some real history? Some hands-on history?”
    So, hands-on it was — hanging way up here. Not that she minded: Kate had grown up in Colorado and was an avid climber. She spent every Sunday climbing the rock cliffs all around the Dordogne. There was rarely anyone else around, which was great: at home, you had to wait in line for the good pitches.
    Using her pick, she chipped off a few flakes of mortar from different areas to take back for spectroscopic analysis. She dropped each into one of the rows of plastic containers, like film containers, that she wore over her shoulders and across her chest like a bandolier.
    She was labeling the containers when she heard a voice say, “How do you get down from there? I want to show you something.”
    She glanced over her shoulder, saw Johnston on the floor below. “Easy,” she said. Kate released her lines and slid smoothly to the ground, landing lightly. She brushed strands of blond hair back from her face. Kate Erickson was not a pretty girl — as her mother, a homecoming queen at UC, had so often told her — but she had a fresh, all-American quality that men found attractive.
    “I think you’d climb anything,” Johnston said.
    She unclipped from the harness. “It’s the only way to get this data.”
    “If you say so.”
    “Seriously,” she said. “If you want an architectural history of this chapel, then I have to get up there and take mortar samples. Because that ceiling’s been rebuilt many times — either because it was badly made and kept falling in, or because it was broken in warfare, from siege engines.”
    “Surely sieges,” Johnston said.
    “Well, I’m not so sure,” Kate said. “The main castle structures — the great hall, the inner apartments — are solid, but several of the walls aren’t well constructed. In some cases, it looks like walls were added to make secret passages. This castle’s got several. There’s even one that goes to the kitchen! Whoever made those changes must have been pretty paranoid. And maybe they did it too quickly.” She wiped her hands on her shorts. “So. What’ve you got to show me?”
    Johnston handed her a sheet of paper. It was a computer printout, a series of dots arranged in a regular, geometric pattern. “What’s this?” she said.
    “You tell me.”
    “It looks like Sainte-Mère.”
    “Is it?”
    “I’d say so, yes. But the thing is . . .”
    She walked out of the chapel, and looked down on the monastery excavation, about a mile away in the flats below. It was spread out almost as clearly as the drawing she held in her hand.
    “Huh.”
    “What?”
    “There’s features on this drawing that we haven’t uncovered yet,” she said. “An apsidal chapel appended to the church, a second cloister in the northeast quadrant, and . . . this looks like a garden, inside the walls. . . . Where’d you get this picture, anyway?”
    :
    The restaurant in Marqueyssac stood on the edge of a plateau, with a view over the entire Dordogne valley. Kramer looked up from her table and was surprised to see the Professor arriving with both Marek and Chris. She frowned. She had expected to have a private lunch. She was at a table for two.
    They all sat down together, Marek bringing two chairs from the next table. The Professor leaned forward and looked at her intently.
    “Ms. Kramer,” the Professor said, “how did you know where the rectory is?”
    “The rectory?” She shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. Wasn’t it in the weekly progress report? No? Then maybe Dr. Marek mentioned it to me.” She looked at the solemn faces staring at her. “Gentlemen, monasteries aren’t exactly my specialty. I must have heard it somewhere.”
    “And the tower in the woods?”
    “It must be in one of the surveys. Or the old photographs.”
    “We checked. It’s not.”
    The Professor slid the drawing across the table to her. “And why does an ITC employee named Joseph Traub