"Ann Maxwell - Risk Unlimited 01 - The Ruby" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maxwell Ann)

shovelful at a time.
While Cruz pursued the tantalizing fault, he didn’t notice the heat, the clouds of grit, or the slowly increasing
fatigue in his shoulders. He was used to ignoring comfort in favor of the chase, whether it was scientific facts or
international crooks he pursued.
Despite the heat, despite the ache across his back and arms, despite the stubborn rock, Cruz dug without pause,
chasing a strand of geological truth that had been ancient long before he was born.
He enjoyed every bit of the chase. To him, fault lines in the earth were as fascinating as flaws in the human soul. At
the moment, he was trying to run down a minor fault that had revealed itself for a few feet in a wall of rock before
diving underground beneath a mantle of debris.
Though small, the fault intrigued Cruz because it was in the wrong place. There were dozens of faults over on the
other side of the nameless flat-floored rift valley southwest of the Salton Sea. All those faults were offshoots of the
famous San Andreas.
But the fault Cruz was sweating over was all alone, located in a sun-baked slot canyon that cut into the base of the
Santa Rosa Mountains. The slot canyon was several miles away from any other fault lines. Though modest to the
point of invisibility, the isolated crack suggested new activity beneath the seamed surface of the land.
Cruz had been all over the crack like a dog with a fresh bone. His hobby and passion was to find signs of new
seismic activity, tracks of weakness or stress. He believed that fault lines, unlike people in general and women in
particular, could be understood by anyone willing to spend enough time, sweat, and logic on the matter.
He was more than willing. When he was out in the desert, reality changed. There were no clocks. No desperation.
No split seconds to decide whether to kill and live or hold your fire and die. No willfully naive media types to sell ad
space with bloody pictures on the one hand and antiviolence editorials on the other.
The desert had no newspaper except the anonymous tracks that were quickly scattered by the wind. The desert
had no ads to sell and no editorial judgments to make. It needed none. The survivors left tracks and the losers left
bones. Period.
The only kind of time the desert acknowledged was the slow shrinking of shadows as noon approached, followed
by an equally slow expansion of shadows until darkness flowed up out of every crack and crease and reclaimed the
land in a cool black tide.
Cruz loved the night as much as he loved the blazing sun itself. He loved standing in the desert, absorbing its
silence into his soul, feeling peace well up inside him like a transparent spring. The desert was all that had kept him
sane when every institution he had ever believed in and everyone he had ever counted on had turned on him and
demanded that he loathe himself as much as they did.
They almost had succeeded.
Cruz had been a long time pulling himself back from the brink. There were still moments when he wondered if he
had succeeded and, if so, if it had been worth the cost.
Those were the times he headed out into the desert. There he listened to the silence until there was no past, no
present, no future, nothing but the desert around him like a benediction whispered by God.
The beeper on Cruz’s belt went off again.
„Shit“
Cruz jammed the shovel up to its rim in the rubble pile and stabbed the button on the pager, silencing the shrill
sound.
Then he levered himself up out of the hole and got ready to head back to Karroo.
Cassandra Redpath was no fool, nor was she capricious. She beeped once if something was important enough to
disturb Cruz when he had made it clear that he didn’t want to be disturbed. If he chose to ignore the summons, fine.
Redpath would look elsewhere.
Two beeps meant an emergency.
The nice thing about geological mysteries, Cruz told himself as he yanked on his khaki shirt, is that they’ve teen
around for a long time and aren’t going anywhere in a hurry.
When he had free time again, the earth would still be there, still waiting, still mysterious. The thought helped to
take some of the heat out of his irritation. But not enough that he buttoned his shirt.
A shiny Grumman Gulfstream executive jet flashed low over Cruz’s head and turned onto final approach for Karroo.