The two men stopped now, the helicopter left well out of sight to their rear. Nimec looked at the gaudy red marker poking up out of the snow to his left. Then he wiped the fog of exhaled moisture off his goggles and browsed over the lines of bamboo staves stringing a long way past it into the distance. Their distribution in the groups that he could see appeared fairly even. Wind-rippled colored banners accented all of them, red ones indicating the boundaries of danger areas, green flags indicating the safer paths around them.

He looked over at Granger. The chopper pilot had his back to him and was staring across the crevasse field.

“You ought to have a peek through your binocs,” Nimec said. “So far I’m not finding any problems.”

Granger nodded, still looking out over the range, his probe chocked upright in the snow. Nimec saw him move his arm, reaching for what he assumed was the binocular case around his neck.

Then he turned toward Nimec, a Beretta pistol in his gloved hand, proving that assumption very wrong.

Nimec’s eyes grew large.

“You want a problem,” Granger said, “you’ve got it.”

“What is this?” Nimec said. His gaze was fixed on Granger’s drawn Beretta. “What the hell are you doing?”

Granger stood there pointing it at Nimec, his expression masked by his goggles and balaclava. “It’s like I said. You came here looking for a problem. But sometimes you find ones you don’t expect.”

Nimec looked at Granger, remembered something that had occurred to him just a short while ago. When the chopper was lifting out of sight of the paleontologic expedition.

The last known person in the world to set eyes on Scarborough and his team.

The thought turned over in his mind with new, cutting significance.

“That day in Bull Pass,” he said. “You didn’t just happen to see our people. You were scouting them.”

Granger held the gun steady.

“Forget about a confession from me,” he said. “Won’t happen. I’ve got nothing to gain from it.” He shrugged. “You’ll just have to leave this world holding on to all your questions.”

Nimec lifted his eyes to Granger’s covered face.

“No,” he said. “Not about you.”

Granger stiffened almost imperceptibly, the hand in which he clenched his gun tightening around its stippled rubber grip. Then he motioned its snout toward the crevasse zone beyond the marker.

“All right, hero,” he said, pulling his probe out of the snow. “I’m taking you for another walk.”

This time their walk was a short one. Moving behind Nimec, his gun held out between them, Granger suddenly ordered him to halt near a cluster of hazard wands some fifteen or twenty yards past the first red marker.

He sidled around him toward the red-flagged bamboo poles, never lowering the Beretta.

“Here,” Granger said. “Let me show you something.”