Extraits

Chapter 1

The harruunukking was too insistent to ignore.

“Ten more minutes.”

Harruunukk.

“All right, I’m up!”

Still tired, she sat up and rubbed her eyes. The clock on her desk told her it was almost one-thirty in the morning. Breakfast number one was late. No wonder there was so much complaining.

Huh-huh-harruunukk.

The willowy blond woman rolled out of the tangled sheets on the portable cot and trod barefoot from the cramped office into the large research laboratory. As soon as she appeared, the abominable noise stopped and turned to impatient snuffling.

“You could let me sleep through the night for a change.”

Dr. Nancy Derringer stepped to the rail and held up a hand. The great beast in the auditorium-sized, plant-filled pen stretched its serpentine neck and pressed its cheek against her hand.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was trying to make sense of the directions he had been given.

Story of his life.

These particular directions came from a sleepy clerk at the Moscow International Airport rental-car desk. She traced the route with a yellow highlighter on a flimsy map, which was so old it still referred to Moscow as the capital city of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. “This is your deztinashun—see little star?” She highlighted a yellow star on the map.

Remo found the little star not at all helpful, and the step-by-step driving directions on the right-hand side of the page were written to take him a hundred miles out of his way.

Still, he was trying to make use of those directions, now that he was actually in the Russian city of Monino. He was on the correct street, as far as he could tell. The street had seen better days, and the street numbers were missing from most of the buildings. When he was about where he thought the museum should be, he had two choices, one on either side of the street. One was a black, silent hulk of a building that looked big enough to hold a couple of simultaneous World Cup matches. The second one appeared to be a convenience store with so many female employees they wouldn’t all fit inside.