The Darwin Conspiracy Read online

  Acclaim for John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy

  “An elaborate scientific thriller, rich with detail and the pacing of a good murder mystery.”

  — Winston-Salem Journal

  “You will hear, almost daily, the name Darwin, meaning a certain hard truth about life, but here, in John Darnton’s eloquent new book, is the man himself, and the way life was in the time that he lived.”

  —Alan Furst

  “Darnton has playfully created and solved several mysteries revolving around events during Charles Darwin’s early voyage on the Beagle.”

  — The Boston Globe

  “John Darnton makes mysterious and riveting a story we thought we all knew. He moves with great agility from Darwin’s England to the present day, from style to style and riddle to enigma. The old and the new seem equally surprising here; each page fairly begs to be turned.”

  —Nicholas Delbanco

  “Thrilling. . . . Flat-out engrossing. . . . We need this book.”

  — Chronogram

  “John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy is an ingeniously constructed page-turner. Based (like all Darnton novels) on exhaustive research, it is a work of dazzling speculation, masterfully blending character and plot into the kind of book Michael Crichton might write were he to collaborate with Ian McEwan. In short, this is one helluva read.”

  —Arthur Kopit

  “Blends history and imaginative drama to thought-provoking effect. . . .

  Darnton expertly builds suspense [and] once again displays thrilling fast pace and intrigue, meticulous research, and strong character development.”

  — Booklist

  “Take historical knowledge and literary imagination, add a good measure of talent to it, and you will understand why John Darnton’s new novel will appeal to many, many readers who will read it with delight.” —Elie Wiesel Also by John Darnton

  Neanderthal

  The Experiment

  Mind Catcher

  THE DARWIN CONSPIRACY

  A Novel

  JOHN DARNTON

  ANCHOR BOOKS

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2006

  Copyright © 2005 by Talespin, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Darnton, John.

  The Darwin conspiracy : by John Darnton.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882—Fiction. 2. Evolution (Biology)—Fiction.

  3. Naturalists—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.A727D368 2005

  813'.54—dc22

  2005010875

  e I S B N - 1 3 : 9780307278135

  e I S B N - 1 0 : 0307278131

  Book design by Anthea Lingeman

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v1.0

  John Darnton

  John Darnton has worked for thirty-nine years as a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He was awarded two George Polk Awards for his coverage of

  Africa and Eastern Europe, and the Pulitzer Prize for his stories smuggled out of Poland during the period of martial law. He lives in New York.

  For Bob, with love

  History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

  And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

  Guides us by vanities.

  —T. S. Eliot

  CHAPTER 1

  Hugh spotted the boat while it was still a dot on the horizon and watched it approach the island, making a wide, white arc. He shaded his eyes but still he had to squint against the shards of reflected light.

  Already the morning sun had cut through the haze to lay a shimmering sword on the water.

  All around him the birds swooped and darted in the cacophonous morning feeding—hundreds of them, screaming swallow-tailed gulls, brown noddies, boobies homing in with fish dangling in their beaks. A frigate circled behind a gull, yanked its tail feathers to open the gullet, then made a corkscrew dive to grab the catch—a flash of acrobatic violence that had long since ceased to amaze him.

  The boat appeared to be a panga, but that was odd: supplies weren’t due for days. Hugh fixed his stare on the dark silhouette of the driver.

  He looked like Raoul, the way he leaned into the wind, one arm trailing back on the throttle.

  Hugh dropped his canvas tool bag near the mist net and started down. The black rocks were streaked white and gray with guano, which stank in the windless air and made the lava slippery, but he knew the footholds perfectly. The heat pressed down on him.

  When he reached the bottom of the cliffside, Raoul was already there. He idled the swaying panga a few feet from the landing rock, a narrow ledge that was washed by an ankle-deep wave every few seconds.

  “Amigo,” shouted Raoul, grinning behind dark glasses.

  “Hey, Cowboy,” said Hugh. He coughed to clear his throat—it had been a long time since he had talked to anybody.

  Raoul was wearing pressed khaki shorts, a Yankees cap over his thick black hair at a jaunty angle, and a dark blue jersey with the insignia of the Galapagos National Park on the left breast pocket.

  “Just stopping by,” he said. “What’s new?”

  “Not much.”

  “I thought you will be totally crazy by now.” His English was almost perfect but sometimes an odd phrasing gave him away.

  “No, not totally. But I’m working on it.”

  “So, how’s the ermitano?”

  “The what?”

  “Ermitano,” Raoul repeated. “How do you say that?”

  “Hermit.”

  Raoul nodded and regarded him closely. “So, how’re you doing?”

  “Fine,” lied Hugh.

  Raoul looked away.

  “I brought two chimbuzos. ” He gestured with his chin to two water barrels strapped to the mid-seat. “Help me to deliver them.”

  Hugh leapt into the boat, unstrapped a barrel, and hoisted it over his right shoulder. The weight threw off his balance and he tottered like a drunken sailor and almost fell into the water.

  “Not like that,” said Raoul. “Put them overboard and shove them to the mat. Then you climb up and pick them up.”

  The mat, short for “welcome mat,” was the nickname the researchers called the rocky ledge. Raoul had hung around them so long, helping out now and then because he admired what they were doing, that he was picking up their lingo.

  Hugh finally got both barrels ashore and lugged them up to the beginning of the path. He was dripping with sweat by the time he returned.

  “Want to come on shore, stay a while?” he asked. The offer was dis-ingenuous. The water was too deep to anchor—more than eighty feet straight down—and if the panga docked, the waves would smash it against the rocks.

  “I can’t stay. I just wanted to say hello. How’re your crazy birds—getting thirsty, no?”

  “The heat’s rough on them. Some are dying.”

  Raoul shook his head. “How many days without rain?” he asked.

  “Today is two hundred something, two hundred twenty-five, I th
ink.”

  Raoul whistled and shook his head again, a fatalistic gesture, and lit a cigarette.

  They talked for a while about the study. Raoul was always eager to hear how it was going. He had once said that if he came back to earth a second time that was what he wanted to do—camp out and study birds.

  Hugh thought that Raoul had no idea what it was really like—the solitude, the fatigue and boredom and endless repetition of extremes, boiling during the day and then at night when the temperature dropped forty degrees, lying in your sleeping bag and shivering so violently you can’t go to sleep even though you’re exhausted. Anything can sound glamorous until you do it.

  “Say,” Raoul said lightly, “I hear you’re getting company. Two more guys coming out.”

  “Yeah—so I’m told.”

  Raoul looked quizzical.

  “Sat phone,” explained Hugh. “Satellite. I got a call day before yesterday. The thing scared the shit out of me when it rang.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I don’t know anybody in the project, really.”

  “What are their names?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “No.”

  Raoul paused a moment, then looked at him closely. “Hombre, you okay? You don’t look so good.”

  “No, I’m fine.” Pause. “Thanks.”

  “All that pink skin.”

  That was a joke. Hugh had been burned and tanned so many times that his skin had turned a leathery brown. His lips were swollen and cracked, despite the Chap Stick, and his eyebrows were bleached blond.

  “You think you ready to share this paradise with other people?”

  “Sure thing,” said Hugh, but his voice sounded uncertain.

  Raoul turned and looked out to sea. Far away the dark profile of a ship could be seen moving quickly with a funnel of gulls circling it.

  “The Neptune, ” he said. “More tourists for the Enchanted Isles.”

  “Whoever thought that one up deserves a medal,” said Hugh. He could see by the shadow that crossed Raoul’s face that the remark was hurtful. The depth of Equadorean nationalism always amazed him. He smiled, pretending he was joking.

  “More work for me.” Raoul shrugged. “Well, tengo que trabajar. ” He flicked his cigarette way off into the water and gave a little wave from the hip. “Ciao.”

  “Ciao. Thanks for the water.”

  “Don’t drink it all right now.” Raoul grinned as he turned the panga, gunned the motor, and pulled out so fast the bow rose up like a surf-board. Hugh stared after him until the boat disappeared behind the island.

  He carried the chimbuzos one at a time up the long path that wound up the south face of the volcano and then down past the campsite into the bottom of the crater, where in theory it was a degree or two cooler—but only in theory. On hot days, even here, he had seen the green-footed boobies shifting from one webbed foot to the other on the scorching rocks.

  He looked at his watch. Shit. Almost seven o’clock. He had forgotten about the mist net—he was sure he had seen a bird trapped there, maybe two. He had to hurry and free them before they died in the quickening morning heat. Once, months ago, before he got the routine down, he had lost a bird that way. They were surprisingly resilient if you handled them right, but if you made a mistake, like leaving them trapped in the mist net too long, they were as fragile as twigs. That time, he had recorded the death dutifully in the log, without explanation, in a single concocted word: “ornithocide.”

  At the top of the island it was even hotter. He grabbed his bag and looked at the net. Sure enough, there were two birds, small dark cocoons that rippled as he touched them. He reached in and held one to his chest while he deftly lifted off the black threads so thin they caught the birds in flight. As he untangled the mesh from the feathers he suddenly had a memory: playing badminton as a young boy during long summer evenings, those moments when the plastic bird hurled into the net and had to be carefully extracted.

  He now saw the finch’s color, black mottled with gray and dusty white. A cactus finch— Geospiza scandens—very common, no surprise there. He held it tightly in his left fist and raised it to look at it. The eyes, deep brown, looked back, and he could feel the tiny heart tickling his palm. He checked the bands—a green and black one on the left leg and a blue one on the right—and identified him in the register. Number ACU-906. A previous researcher had jotted down a nickname, Smooches, in a rounded, girlish American script.

  After all this time Hugh still had trouble identifying more than a dozen finches by their nicknames, the ones that hung around the campsite. Spotting them was a point of pride with the researchers, he gathered; they told stories of sitting around the rocks and rattling off the names of thirty or forty at a shot. “You’ll get to know them in no time,”

  he had been told at the farewell pep talk by Peter Simons, a legend in the field. “Just stretch out your arm and they’ll land on it.” That part was true at least. He was pleasantly surprised the first week when he was measuring a small finch and another came to perch on his bare knee and peer at him, its head cocking from one side to the other. At times like that they seemed curious and intelligent. But at other times—like when he forgot to cover the coffeepot and a bird almost dove in and drowned—it was hard not to think of them as stupid.

  That was back before Victor left. At first it was a relief to be alone—solitude was what he had been looking for, part of his penitence—but as weeks stretched into months, the loneliness he had sought became almost too much to bear. Then when the rainy season didn’t come and the lava island turned into a black frying pan stuck way out in the ocean, at times he actually wondered if he could keep going. But of course he did. He had known he would—in that way at least, in brute staying power, he was strong. It was his psyche that was brittle.

  He pulled out a pair of calipers and measured the bird’s wing and wrote it in the notebook, tattered over the years and swollen from the rain despite its waterproof cover. The bird froze as he measured its beak—the all-important beak—its length, width, and depth. Since 1973, when Simons and his wife, Agatha, first came here, generations of graduate students had braved the miserable conditions to measure thousands upon thousands of beaks and search for meaning among the minute variations.

  Hugh freed the bird and it flew off a few yards and landed on a cactus, shaking its feathers. He recorded the second bird and walked around to the north rim to check the traps. He could tell by looking that none had sprung shut. He went back to the campsite and fixed breakfast, watery scrambled eggs made from powder and weak coffee from used grinds. Then he went to the top of the island again to rest and look out over the blue-green water, choppy with waves from the treacherous currents. He sat in his familiar place—the smooth rocks, already hot, formed a throne that fit his rear. He could see for miles.

  Darwin was no fool. He didn’t like it here either.

  Hugh sometimes talked to himself. Or—even stranger—sometimes he couldn’t tell whether he had been thinking the words or saying them aloud. Lately, his interior monologues were becoming oddly disjointed, especially during the long hours when he worked hard under the hot sun. Half thoughts flashed through his mind, phrases repeating themselves over and over, admonitions and observations from himself to himself, sometimes addressed in the second person, such as: If it was Hell you’re looking for, buddy, you’ve come to the right place.

  And it had been Hell that he’d looked for, no doubt about that.

  Even the name of the island—Sin Nombre—had exerted an attraction the moment he heard it.

  So how about it? Was he willing to share this place—this paradise, he scoffed to himself, maybe out loud—with other people?

  Ten days later, they came on the supply boat. It was so loaded down with food and equipment that it rode low in the water, and in the glare Hugh could see only that there were three figures on board. He felt his pulse quicken
ing, a churning in his gut— Christ, why was he anxious?

  He scrutinized the campsite with a new eye—his tent, plastic dishes, bags of charcoal, supplies under a tarp. Everything appeared small and bleached out in the hot sun. There was nothing to be done about it, he thought, as he made his way down the path to the welcome mat and waited.

  As the panga drew near, a man cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted out: “Ahoy—if it isn’t Robinson Crusoe.” He had an English accent, upper class. Hugh flashed a grin by way of reply; it was hardly genuine but the best he could do.

  He then saw a woman, sitting in the bow, holding a coil of rope. He was shocked; he hadn’t expected this. She smiled as she tossed him the line and he fastened it to the iron ring drilled into the rock. The driver draped two tires over the side as fenders and Hugh, extending his arm as far as he could, helped her out.

  “Elizabeth Dulcimer,” she said, and added: “Beth.”

  Hugh shook her hand.

  “I’m Hugh,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied. “Hugh Kellem.”

  She turned around to help with the unloading. She was trim, with long tanned legs under khaki shorts, sneakers and a white T-shirt. Her hair, dark and silky, fell across her back as she moved with unstudied grace. A cap shaded her face; the logo on the crest read Peligro, and on the back in small letters was written

  NEW ORLEANS.

  The Englishman leapt off the boat, setting it rocking.

  “Nigel,” he pronounced loudly, smiling. He was tall and heavyset, with long blond hair that fell on either side of his ruddy face. He wore a safari jacket with four front pockets and a neck chain with a plastic slip-out magnifying glass. He gripped Hugh’s hand and pumped it, hard, and Hugh had a momentary vision of little finches disappearing inside those thick round fingers.

  Nigel looked up at the cliffside, a flicker of doubt on his face.

  “I expect we should carry this gear up,” he said.

  Not a good sign, thought Hugh—he’s been here all of two minutes and already he’s issuing orders. He looked at Beth, who smiled again.