An Artifact of Death

by J. J. Cagney

  “I’m not going to apologize for being more than a dumb cop. Now, what agency director called you?”

  Jeannette fidgeted. Sam stared her down.

  “NSA,” she whispered.

  “The head of the freaking national security agency…what is this?” Sam asked.

  Jeannette pressed her thumbs to her eyes. “A global power struggle. One, that, if we can’t get Cici and her buddy off that mesa soon, we’ll lose.”

  “For?”

  Jeannette looked up at him and sighed. “It’s all about the optics, Sam. Public relations. Spin. Yes, it’s deadly. But think of how many people believe the Russians—that they had nothing to do with the nerve agent gassing of their former spy. Why? Because MI-6 refused to talk. They wouldn’t walk the public through the details they know to be true. We’re losing because we can’t control the message. Hell, we can’t control our borders.”

  Questions whirred through Sam’s mind but he focused on the most pressing issue: Cici.

  “Did you get a green light for extraction?” Sam asked.

  “We’re getting a helicopter and some special forces. They want these guys who’re trying to blow our air support out of the sky brought in alive.” She paused. “The pilots took out the rocket launcher and both of the men who operated it.”

  “Two fewer, then.” Sam wanted to feel better about that—two fewer that Cici had to run from, fight off. “I want on that chopper,” Sam said.

  Jeannette closed her eyes. “Sam—”

  “Do not, under any circumstances, try to placate me or leave me out of this now.”

  Jeannette heaved another deep sigh. “You’re too involved.”

  Sam narrowed his eyes, refusing to take them off the road, refusing to see the pity in Jeannette’s expression.

  “That’s your mistake, taskmaster. You pushed and prodded me into this position. For your reasons. Now, for my reasons, I want to be there for the extraction.”

  “I know you want to make sure Cici’s okay…”

  Sam tuned Jeannette out. She would offer platitudes he didn’t care to hear. That didn’t change the truth: Sam should have acted years ago. He should have told Cici, as Anna Carmen suggested. Her ghost flat-out told him up on the Aspen Vista Trail, after Cici’s near-death experience, after he kissed her, that he needed to let her know how he felt—how he’d always felt about her.

  But Sam hadn’t acted.

  Dammit. When his life, his happiness, had been strung out before him, when he’d looked into Cici’s brilliant eyes and considered her saying she didn’t feel the same, Sam had faltered. He’d lied. He’d shut down. Because he hadn’t been brave enough to be honest.

  Hell of a time for a come-to-Jesus moment. Cici would be so proud of him.

  He pressed harder on the pedal.

  “Sam, will you just…ah, hell. You’re in love with her.” Jeannette muttered more curses. “I thought you wanted her because she looked like her sister.”

  “Guess you’re not as great an investigator as you thought,” Sam snapped, unwilling to deny his feelings. Not when, now, thanks to the fireball over the mesa, Cici might already be dead.

  Grieving her might well kill him, too.

  Wouldn’t that be ironic?

  He knew what the guys at the precinct called him—the Tin Man, meaning they thought he had no heart. The comments quieted for a bit after Anna Carmen’s death even as the speculation escalated about his inability to feel.

  Oh, he had a heart all right. What those guys never understood was Cecilia María Gurule had been holding it in her palms ever since she’d kicked him in the shins in the seventh grade when he’d tried to peek under Jane Kingston’s Santa Fe Prep uniform skirt on the playground.

  He’d never seen a female so full of fire and beauty and a deep sense of morality before or since. Cici’s heart was big and vulnerable and she took in everyone who needed affection. She always had.

  Seventh grade. He’d been a child then, barely aware of what it meant to be a man. And Cici never even looked at him twice. Not like he wanted her to.

  Not since he told her about being abused by his father. He closed his eyes, trying to block out the pain from both his father’s fists and his words. He relaxed his hands slowly, once the memories faded.

  Now, Sam worried Cici viewed him as weak. A victim. Unworthy.

  She said she didn’t. Sam wanted to believe her. So many emotions, so many issues wrapped up in his head, especially since he hadn’t been willing to tell her how he felt all those weeks ago.

  God. That’s all he ever wanted—to be worthy of Cici’s attention. Her affection.

  He pressed on the gas again. The suspension and chassis would be way out of alignment after this trip, but he didn’t care if he was able to bring Cici home.

  Jeannette sighed as if in defeat. “Fine,” she said, her voice flat. “You want on? You go. It’s a suicide mission,” she continued. “The special forces who are going to be on that aircraft are supposed to bring in the operatives. By any means possible. You don’t have their level of training.”

  Sam sucked in a breath, the first full one he’d managed since Jeannette dropped the information on his desk yesterday afternoon.

  “What you fail to understand is I’d rather die with her,” he said, his voice steady, “or die trying to save her.”

  “Your funeral,” Jeannette said on a sigh, but she opened what looked like a request page on her satellite phone. “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Jeannette stared at him for a long moment. She looked back down at her screen.

  “You never felt that way about me,” she murmured.

  “Did you expect me to? Want me to?” Sam asked, an edge of anger building along the words as he spoke.

  “No.” Jeannette sat for a moment. “But someone…” She sighed, a harsh dispelling of disappointment. Then, before Sam had to reiterate his request, she began to type.

  Could well be he’d asked Jeannette to sign his death warrant. With a jolt of surprise, Sam realized he was okay with that.

  But he planned to bring Cici home alive.

  No, he wasn’t special ops—had never served in the military. But he’d worked on a special task force in Denver that focused on the worst criminal scum and the group’s extensive training echoed that of the Army Ranger School program. Sam knew this because the former instructor was a special team commando and Sam’s best buddy in the group. Over the years Sam worked with Clint, they’d spent a lot of time talking and reenacting everything from city warfare to terrorist attacks to hostage situations.

  Sam went back over all the knowledge he’d gleaned—scant though it was. His real-world experience was limited to simulations, which offered a controlled encapsulation of all the shit that could go wrong.

  He gritted his teeth, clenched the wheel, and stepped on the gas, rocketing them forward once again.

  One way or another. Sam planned to bring Cici home.

  22

  Cici

  Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.― Confucius

  “I’m going to have to ask you to remove whatever you stole from the grave site here and leave it,” Cici said on a sigh.

  “Why would I do that? Especially now that the military understands the depth of hostility out here?” Anton shot back.

  Cici continued to walk forward, her legs aching, her face stinging from overexposure to the sun. In the scant shade of a juniper, she turned to face Anton, hands on her hips.

  “The ghosts who stay here are taking me at my word,” she said. Cici wasn’t sure this was true, but over the last couple of hours, a strange shift in the air surrounding them caused Cici’s anxiety to spike. For lack of a better way to describe it, the air turned hostile. Angry.

  Threatening.

  Cici spent the last hour trying to tease out how to best address her concern—rather, the supernatural concern communicated to her.

  “Anton, think about Rebecca,
” Cici said, her voice as weary as her body. “Would she want you to be part of this? To steal from the land of people who treated it with the dignity and respect our current culture lacks?”

  Anton raised a brow. “Rather nefarious of you to invoke the name of my dead wife in this.”

  He was right, but Cici held his gaze, unwilling to give in on this point. Her options narrowed down to just this one. She needed a more positive rapport with the native ghosts, and she needed Anton to help her achieve that goal.

  “You went through a grave—much like someone ransacking her coffin. That’s—”

  “Invasive, incredibly vile,” Anton said. He ran his palm along the back of his neck. “All right.”

  Anton reached into his shirt. “There are more than a million artifacts in the museum, you know.”

  Cici shook her head. She’d considered stopping at the museum before hiking—clearly that decision might well have spared her the last two days of terror, plus increased her knowledge of the area tenfold. From now on, she would always visit the museum or visitor center first.

  Cici frowned as Anton pulled from an inner pocket a small item wrapped in…was that leather?

  “The excavators have found more than two-hundred-thousand pieces of turquoise in their digs.”

  Cici hadn’t realized the breadth of the people’s creativity or trade—at least she assumed the locals must have traded with other cultures if they’d crafted that volume of turquoise.

  Turquoise. Oh. If he’d taken the Gambler’s stone. But he couldn’t…it wouldn’t be left here all these years…not with the number of archaeologists who’d dug in the area.

  “Most of the pieces are said to have come from New Mexico and Colorado, of course, but some, the researchers say, come from as far away as California.”

  How did he know this? Probably that damnable dossier.

  Cici craned her neck, trying to peer at whatever Anton dumped into his hand. He tightened his fingers into a fist, eliminating Cici’s ability to capture a glimpse of the object.

  “Thanks to this finding,” Anton said, raising his hand, “we know that Pueblo Bonita—”

  “That’s the area’s largest conclave here,” Cici murmured.

  “Right. We know they traded with artisans and tribes hundreds of miles away.”

  “I read that their trade routes were extensive and their belief system more widespread than we knew,” Cici said, the suspicion of what was in his hand growing stronger.

  This time Anton dipped his head. Cici realized that Anton humored her when she’d told him stories about the area. More than likely, he knew more about the region’s history and interconnected alliances than she ever would. A spy who did his homework—and then some.

  While impressed with his thoroughness, Cici tamped down the annoyance that built in equal measure.

  Anton opened his hand, and Cici gasped at the blue-green double-bird pendant he held. From what Cici knew of the region, this image wasn’t a local design. But that went to prove the point Anton had made. He stared down at the fragile stone, tracing his fingers over its edges. Disappointment coursed through Cici because, for a few brief moments, she’d been sure Anton had found the gambler-god’s grave and his turquoise talisman.

  “What do you want me to do with it?” he asked.

  “Give it back,” Cici said once again. That was the only instruction she’d gleaned from her sister—from the antsy feeling of the air around her.

  “You think it’ll help us?”

  Cici bit her lip. She hoped it would. She had to believe it would. “We’ll find a spot—”

  “No,” Anton said. His voice turned harsh. “If they want it, then they can have it. You hear me?” he yelled out into the open air. “You want this? You think somehow a necklace is going to make up for all the shitty things we did to your land? To your people? You think it’ll make one damn iota of difference?”

  Anton’s voice cracked. Cici’s heart ached and tears sprang to her eyes, though she did her best to blink them back. Anton wasn’t yelling into the void at ghosts. He was calling God out for taking Rebecca.

  In a swift motion, he brought his arm back and threw the pendant as high and as far as he could.

  A sharp cry of distress passed Cici’s lips as the effigy sailed upward, masked for a moment by the blue of the sky.

  “Shit,” he scrubbed his hands over his face. “That was stupid. Come on. We need to move away from here. I gave away our location. Shit.”

  She never saw the pendant land because her attention darted to the loud roar of a dirt-encrusted open-sided Jeep barreling toward them.

  Cici took a deep breath. She turned back for a moment to catch the slowing swirl of a dust devil about one hundred feet away—toward the spot where Anton had tossed the pendant.

  Dust devils spun across the Southwest with regularity—one had helped her escape her would-be killer yesterday—but something about that spot and the feel of the air surrounding her, caused Cici’s heart to pound. This time with a brief splinter of hope.

  “Come on,” she cried, pointing forward—which was also near the lip of the mesa, Anton’s intended target, no doubt.

  He shot her an exasperated look but let her lead him forward.

  As Cici predicted, the farther forward they ran, the closer they came to the edge of a plateau. Anton veered back inland, heading back toward the Jeep. Cici yanked him back toward the precipice.

  “Come on,” Cici whispered. “He gave it back. I kept my word.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Anton gasped. His face was slicked in sweat and grime.

  “Playing chicken with a group of assassins,” Cici said.

  Please, she whispered to the Chacoans she believed were here, watching, waiting; to her sister; and to God.

  Maybe—just maybe—someone would answer her prayer.

  “Are you insane?” Anton barked.

  “Probably. But so are you.” At this point, Cici’s response shifted to desperate.

  “I’m not going over the fucking cliff for you,” Anton snarled.

  “Do you have a better suggestion of how to get them to go away?” she yelled back. No need to be quiet now as the Jeep barreled down on them, closing the gap with terrifying speed.

  Anton snapped his jaw shut, but clasped her hand more tightly in his. His eyes held a melancholy understanding—the realization death was coming. He turned back to face the oncoming Jeep. At least three men jostled about as the driver sped ever closer. A gunman was propped in the front passenger seat, his arms extended outward with a machine gun aimed at them. Bullets bit into the dirt around them.

  Cici and Anton crouched, making themselves as small a target as possible.

  I need some help, Aci. Much as you and the ghosts here can give us. I did my best with the relic.

  The wind whipped through Cici’s hair, and she had to squint as grit slammed against her back and the sides of her face, flooding into the oncoming vehicle. Anton pulled out his gun, steadied it, and began to fire the pistol as the Jeep barreled ever-closer.

  A thick bloom of red exploded on the machine-gun holder’s chest. He keeled over, the gun sliding down the shattered windshield and onto the hood of the vehicle. The driver accelerated, yelling something in defiance and aiming for Anton. The man in the back tried to clamber over the seat to take on the machine gun.

  The wind wailed past Cici, a thick torrent of cold air and bits of sand and debris. The driver squinted. Cici held his eyes.

  They were gray.

  She rolled to the side, away from the edge of the hundred-foot-high mesa. The man gripped the wheel and slammed on the brakes. The two men bellowed in fear. The Jeep was moving too fast, had too much momentum, and the front wheels plunged over the edge. The man who’d been climbing into the front seat fell over the shattered windshield, screaming words in what Cici assumed must be Russian.

  The driver also cried out, his voice and words lost to the wind as he tumbled, with the Jeep, over
the edge.

  A moment later, a large explosion rocked the hilltop. Cici dropped to the ground, covering her head.

  A thick, dark plume of noxious smoke poured into the air. The second one she’d witnessed in as many days.

  Anton grabbed Cici’s hand again and yanked her away from the cliff’s edge. They ran at an angle toward the east, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the explosion as possible.

  Cici’s chest and legs cramped, but she didn’t stop pounding her feet forward. She didn’t let go of Anton’s hand. And this time, she didn’t look back.

  23

  Sam

  Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.― Confucius

  Getting the helicopter took too long, due to multiple added layers of red tape instituted by the morning’s events. Jeannette grumbled because the signatures and verbal approvals became necessary now that the fighter pilots engaged with known foreign agents on American soil earlier that morning. All the agencies insisted on hearing a direct accounting before committing to a full frontal assault.

  Sam tuned Jeannette out the fourth time she requested a combat-seasoned pilot. This appeared to be a query that had to climb the chain of NSA, CIA and who knew what other three-letter agencies before it could be turned over to the military base and its personnel for fulfillment. All of which took hours they didn’t have.

  Part of that time was spent when Sam and Jeannette drove up to the bomb site to catalog the blown bits of metal and wreckage from what had to have been the operatives’ main base. Little was left to salvage. They bagged up what they could and photographed the area before returning to the hotel room all the way back in Cuba to await their next move. Cici’s body wasn’t there.

  That was something—the best piece of evidence of her continued survival yet.

  Sam hated waiting.

  He wanted to be out there, on the mesa, searching for Cici now. But getting on the chopper remained his best chance of finding her. He just hadn’t expected it to take so stinking long to get the aircraft released.