Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

axes were probably a highly valued gift to the dead.”
    Resnikov nodded, but said nothing. He was watching Jake rather than the amber.
    Shifting his grip on the artifact, Jake ran his thumbnail over the surface with measured force. As he had expected, his nail didn’t leave a mark.
    “I won’t put the hot needle to this,” he said.
    “Is it real, then?” Honor asked.
    “I don’t know. But if it is, it would be a crime to mark it in any way at all.”
    “Stalemate?” she asked.
    “No.”
    Gently Jake replaced the ax head in the box. Then he turned to his own case and began pulling things out. When he was finished, he had several tightly sealed jars in front of him. Each was about the size of a big coffee mug and partly filled with a clear liquid. He unscrewed the top of one jar, took the small ax head, and dropped it in. The amber dipped and settled to the bottom of the container.
    “What’s the liquid?” Honor asked.
    “Distilled water.”
    Jake fished out the artifact, dried it carefully, and unscrewed the top of the second jar. Though the liquid looked the same, the ax head floated on it like thin, opaque ice.
    “What’s in that one?” Honor asked.
    “Salt water with a specific gravity of one point zero five,” Jake said without looking away from the ax head. “If this were transparent amber instead of opaque, I would have used the third jar. That water has more salt in it, which means a higher specific gravity.” He lifted the ax head out and dried it carefully. “Clear amber is more dense than the cloudy kind, because the ‘clouds’ are caused by very tiny air bubbles.”
    Jake returned the ax head to its compartment in the elaborate box and selected another piece. Honor sensed his increasing excitement in the clarity of his eyes and the slight tension in his mouth. The change in him was so small she wouldn’t have noticed it if she hadn’t spent the night learning the depth of emotion he concealed behind his beard and impassive expression.
    She looked at Resnikov, wondering if he had noticed anything different. If he did, it didn’t show in his face. The Russian was watching Jake the way a fisherman watched a baited hook disappearing beneath the surface of the sea—uncertainty and hope combined.
    Jake picked up another artifact from the box. The figure’s shape suggested a horse. It was perhaps four inches wide by three inches tall.
    Though crudely made by modern standards, the artifact was nonetheless oddly powerful. A series of tiny drill holes, like tattoos, ran down the horse’s thick neck and over its short back to its stocky haunches. Its feet were close together. The piece had a shape that was both bowed and supremely centered in its own life.
    “It looks like one of those ancient horses,” Honor said. “The kind they just discovered running wild in Nepal or Tibet.”
    “It probably was modeled after an animal just like that,” Jake said. “They weren’t as scarce seven thousand years ago as they are now.”
    “Seven thousand years?” she asked, startled.
    “At least.”
    She leaned closer, staring at the small object more closely. It looked like it had been carved from fossil ivory or bone. Yet the way Jake handled the horse told Honor that he believed it was amber. Gently he put it into a jar of liquid. The figurine floated just as the other had.
    “Amber,” she said.
    Neither man answered. The gentle motion of the horse floating on salt water said it all.
    In silence Jake lifted piece after piece out of the box. Each one that was small enough to fit in the container floated. None of them tickled his instincts, telling him that there was less to an artifact than it appeared.
    The eighth piece he examined was a primitive statuette of a person. It was perhaps five inches tall, two inches wide, and obviously had been broken off below the knees so long ago that the scar had blended with the whole. The facial features were minimally carved—brooding, sunken eyes and a straight-lined, strongly defined nose. The mouth was either worn away or hadn’t been considered important enough by the carver to command attention. There were two small holes drilled where the armpits would have been.
    “Perhaps a pendant, perhaps a badge of office, perhaps a fetish hung by a cave door to protect the family within,” Jake said. Then he added softly, “A very, very fine piece.”
    “Some of the others are more carefully carved,” Resnikov pointed out.
    “And less powerful for