Darwin's Blade Read Online Free PDF

stability during the descent.”
    â€œLike a rifle bullet.”
    â€œPrecisely.”
    â€œWhat do you think his… can’t think of the word…high point was?”
    â€œApogee?” said Dar. He looked at the computer screen. “Probably no less than two thousand and no more than twenty-eight hundred feet above the desert floor.”
    â€œHoly shit,” whispered Cameron again. “It was a short trip, but it must have been one hell of a ride.”
    Dar rubbed his ear. “I figure that after the first fifteen seconds or so, our guy was just a passive bystander, no longer a participant.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    Dar touched the screen again. “I mean that even at the lowest boost rates I can plot to get him from here to there, he was pulling about eighteen g’s when he left the asphalt. A two-hundred-pound guy would have…”
    â€œHad the equivalent of three thousand four hundred extra pounds sitting on his face and chest,” said Cameron. “Ouch.”
    The sergeant’s radio squawked. “Sorry,” he said. “Gotta take this.” He stepped away to listen to the rasping and squawking while Dar turned off his computer and stored it in the cabin of the NSX. The car was idling again to keep the air-conditioning going.
    Cameron stepped closer. His expression was a queer mixture of a grin and a grimace. “Forensics boys just excavated the steering wheel of the El Camino from the crater,” he said softly.
    Dar waited.
    â€œFinger bones were embedded in the plastic,” finished Cameron. “Deeply embedded.”
    Dar shrugged. His phone chirped. He flipped it open, saying to the CHP sergeant, “This is what I love about California, Paul. Never out of a cell. Never out of touch.” He listened for a minute, said, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” and flipped the phone shut.
    â€œTime to go to work for real?” said Cameron, grinning now, obviously phrasing the telling and retelling of this for future days.
    Dar nodded. “That was Lawrence Stewart, my boss. He’s got something for me that sounds weirder than this shit.”
    â€œSemper Fi,” said Cameron, to no one in particular.
    â€œO seclum insipiens et inficetum,” said Dar, to the same audience.

2
“B Is for Bud”
    I t took Dar less than fifteen minutes to drive to the crossroads truck stop–cum–Indian casino to which his boss, Lawrence Stewart, had asked him to hurry at all possible speed. In the NSX, with radar detector pinging fore and aft and sideways, all possible speed meant 162 miles per hour.
    The truck stop was west of Palm Springs, but was not one of the major Indian casinos that rose up out of the desert like giant adobe fake-pueblo-style vacuum cleaners set there to suck the last dime out of the last Anglo sucker’s pocket. This was a run-down, seedy little truck stop that looked as if it had hit its heyday about the same time Route 66 was booming (even though this one was nowhere near Route 66), and the “casino” was little more than a back room with six slot machines and a one-eyed Native American dealing blackjack on what seemed to be a twenty-four-hour shift.
    Dar spotted Lawrence right away. His boss was hard to miss—six two, about 250 pounds, with a friendly, mustached face that at the moment seemed quite flushed. Lawrence’s ’86 Isuzu Trooper was parked away from the pumps and the open garage doors, on a heat-rippled strip of concrete just catty-corner from the truck-stop diner.
    Dar looked for some shade to park the NSX in, found none, and pulled it into the shadow of Lawrence’s sport utility vehicle. One glance showed him that something was odd. Lawrence had taken out the Isuzu’s left “sealed beam unit” or SBU—car-guy talk for headlight assembly—and carefully laid the bulb and other pieces on a clean work cloth on the Isuzu’s high