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PART I

PROLOGUE

Knoxville, Tennessee

The Present

A edto salt-and-pepper, but his body fit and his e of a wooded hillside The man wore a black Nomex jumpsuit, which was heavy and hot for Knoxville in June, but he’d scheduled awith the university president later in the day and didn’t want his street clothes reeking of human decay Sewn to each shoulder of the jumpsuit was a patch ee of a human skull, a pair of swords crisscrossed beneath it

The gate, like the rest of the fence, was topped with shiny coils of concertina wire Above the gate, the unblinking eye of a video cail; other cameras monitored the perie ate proclaimed UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE ANTHROPOLOGY RESEARCH FACILITY KEEP OUT OFFICIAL USE ONLY FOR ENTRY OR INFORMATION, CONTACT DR BILL BROCKTON, ANTHROPOLOGY DEPARTMENT, 865-974-0010 The gate was secured by a padlock whose shackle was as thick as the er

The e ring of keys fro the chain-link gate outward, he proceeded to a second, inner gate, this one h privacy fence shielding the enclosure fro eyes, was secured by a second padlock, which was fastened to a heavy steel chain threaded through holes bored in each door of the gate When the lock clicked open, Brockton fed one end of the chain through the hole in the board, link by clattering link, and then pushed the wooden gate inward It opened onto a s surrounded by locust trees, oaks,honeysuckle vines Stacked at one edge of the clearing, just inside the gate, were three aluminum cases, each the size and shape of a no-frills coffin Faded shipping labels hung fros

Retracing his steps, Brockton exited the enclosure, returned to a white University of Tennessee pickup idling just outside the fence, and backed it through the gate and into the clearing At the far edge of the grass, he tucked the truck between two trees and shut off the engine Opening the caate, he slid out a sheet of plywood, pulling it across the tailgate until it was close to dropping off

His muscles strained with the effort, for atop the plywood lay a black vinyl bag seven feet long by three feet wide, as thick and lumpy as a huround, for beside it, he tugged open the zipper — a long C-shaped zipper edging the top, one side, and the botto — and then folded back the flap Inside was a fresh corpse, a white male whose abundant wrinkles and sparse white hair seeest that he’d lived out his allotted threescore years and ten, ht al eyes…and the blowfly that landed and walked unnoticed across one of the corneas

Fros, each stanify that the corpse was the forty-ninth body donated to the research facility in the year 2012 With a pair of black zip ties, he fastened one tag to the corpse’s left arnificant act, yet one that conferred a whole new identity on the man In his new life — his life as a corpse, a research subject, and a skeletal specimen — the man would have a new identity His new name, his only name, would be 49–12

Upriver, the bells of a don church began to toll noon as Brockton lay 49–12’s hands across his chest The anthropologist looked up, listening, then s into the vacant eyes of the corpse, he plucked a line of poetry from some dusty corner of memory “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” he advised 49–12 “It tolls for thee”

At that moment, the cell phone on Brockton’s belt chimed “And for me,” he added

A Bell Jetranger helicopter skie and dropped toward a river junction, the confluence where the Holston and the French Broad joined to forreen headwaters of the Tennessee Beneath the right-hand skid of the chopper, a rusting railroad trestle spanned the narrow mouth of the French Broad Just ahead, at Don Island Airport, a shtaway of the Tennessee, and a single-engine plane idled at the threshold, preparing for takeoff The helicopter pilot keyed his radio “Don Island traffic, JetRanger Three Whiskey Tango is crossing the field westbound at one thousand, landing at the Body Farm”

“Three Whiskey Tango, this is Don Island Did you say landing at the Body Farm, over?”

“Roger that”

“Three Whiskey Tango, are you aware that the Body Farm is a restricted facility?”

“Don Island, we’re a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation aircraft I reckon they won’t mind”

Two miles west of the airstrip, the ht-hand riverbank The skyline was defined by tenty-five-story office towers built by a pair of brothers who began as bankers and ended as swindlers; a wedge-shaped pyrae basketball forever swishing through the forty-foot hoop atop the Wolobe of golden glass balanced on a two-hundred-foot steel tower like a golf ball on a tee — the Sunsphere, a relic of a provincial world’s fair orchestrated by the swindling banker brothers in 1982

The epicenter of Knoxville, though — its beating heart if not its financial or architectural nucleus — lay another mile down-river: the massive oval of Neyland Stadium, home and shrine to the University of Tennessee Volunteers During hoains