It was a fragment of dull yellow metal, about three quarters of an inch long, inlaid with a remarkable pale crimson stone, translucent as crystal. Bowerdale held it up, his face quizzical in the flashlight beam, then turned back to the bundle he had unfurled.
“There are more fragments here,” he said, pointing with the pencil. “And there’s something else.”
But he didn’t need to say that because Deborah was already staring at it dumbstruck. It was a rod of yellow metal, perhaps eighteen inches long, and on one end there was something that looked like a dove, white and glossy as enamel. There was also a polished wooden log inlaid with jade and, encircling one of the many small bones, what looked like a ring engraved with an unusual design.
“What the hell is that?” Bowerdale whispered, his voice carrying the same baffled awe that Deborah felt breaking out all over her like sweat.
“If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I’d say most of this stuff was...”
“Gold,” he finished for her.
It can’t be, she thought. It’s not possible.
There was no gold in the Yucatan. That’s part of the reason why the Spanish paid it so little attention. And the tomb was too old for there to be imported gold from other parts of Mexico.
And yet, she thought, dazzled by the way it sparkled in the beam of her flashlight, there it is.
Chapter Eleven
Porfiro Aguilar looked at the chaos of half-unpacked lab equipment and wondered, not for the first time, what the hell he had been thinking. It was one thing to sign on as assistant field director to the woman from the States, but handling artifact analysis and conservation for an entirely new find was nuts. He would be stuck in Valladolid for weeks. He hadn’t even seen the tomb yet and didn’t know when he’d be able to go.
Sweating, he put a box of sample containers on his desk. The air-conditioning in the lab whirred like a stalling biplane, cooling the room by ten degrees, maybe less. Outside, the usual hundred-degree midmorning heat blazed. Sometimes he really hated the Yucatan.
Porfiro Aguilar was from the hip Colonia Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City, which, with its museums, clubs, and café culture, was another country entirely. He had been raised in Santo Domingo but had been a bit of an urban sophisticate even before he had the money to live that way, and he felt almost as out of place in a provincial town like Valladolid as the damned gringos. Almost as out of place as Miller herself, who—he imagined—was out of place everywhere. She could have been pretty if she wasn’t quite so angular and awkward in her movements. She had to be a couple of inches over six feet tall, which meant she loomed over almost everybody but Bowerdale. Her thick, unruly brown hair was always pulled back, but he had a feeling if she took it down and put some makeup on her dark almond-shaped eyes, she’d turn a head or two. Still. Her workaholic personality made it impossible for him to see her as anything besides yet another boss.
He had seen the village where Miller was staying, the way the people lived there. Naked kids on dirt floors. Pigs and turkeys everywhere you looked, all waiting to be Christmas or Easter dinner. Those Goddamned palm-thatched roofs. Everyone still living off corn three hundred and sixty-two days a year as they had before the Spanish—his true ancestors—arrived. It was the fucking third world. Aguilar had made the Maya his professional life, and was proud of their history and achievements, but when he had to deal with their living descendents, he felt something like contempt. He didn’t like the feeling—hated it, in fact—but there it was. In the end he had more in common with norteamericanos than he did with the Maya. He even looked more like them, and until he spoke, he could pass for one of them on their streets. In Ek Balam, everyone but Miller and Bowerdale was a head shorter and two shades darker.
He liked Miller well enough. She knew her own mind and wasn’t too proud to let him know when she needed help. Bowerdale, however, was a smug son of a bitch. He was good at his job, sure, but he’d take advantage of anyone if there was fame or skirt to be had and never feel bad about it. Aguilar bore his prejudices against the Maya with the humility of failure and sin. He felt no such failure for hating Bowerdale.
Aguilar rolled his eyes at the sight of Miller and Bowerdale walking into the lab together, looking earnest, excited. Bowerdale handed him the only sample taken from the tomb: a fragment of gold-colored metal mounting a pale, red, uncut crystal the size of a bottle cap.
“What am I looking at?” said Aguilar, adjusting the setting on his microscope.
“We were kind of hoping you could tell us,” said Miller.
Aguilar peered at the red stone again and, sensing Bowerdale watching him critically, felt a sudden flash of anger.
“I’ll need to do some serious analysis before I can tell you anything concrete,” he said, as calmly as he could manage, “but I can give you some preliminaries.”
“Shoot,” said Bowerdale.
“Well,” said Aguilar, pushing back from the microscope, “I think it’s fair to say that I’m not nearly as stupid as you think I am, and that the next time you want to see if I know my job you can look at my damned resume.”
He stared them down, his face flushed with anger. Miller looked at Bowerdale, and then back to Aguilar.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“You didn’t get this stone from the site,” said Aguilar. “I am as good at my job as anyone you might have brought from the States.”
For a moment Miller looked genuinely taken aback.
“No one doubts your credentials, Aguilar,” she said.
“So what’s this about,” he shot back, with a curt nod at the red stone. “Where did it come from?”
“I was there when she went in,” said Bowerdale, as if his word was worth more then Miller’s. “She got it from the chamber under the acropolis.”
“Where did you find it?” said Aguilar, his eyes still on Miller.
“In the tomb,” said Miller. She said it carefully, emphatically, and held his eyes. He held them for a long moment and then shrugged.
“I don’t understand how that could be possible,” he said, his voice carefully neutral.
“And yet,” said Bowerdale, with a smug smile.
There was a long silence. Aguilar shrugged.
“OK,” he said, “I need to do some tests but I am as sure as I can be that the stone isn’t Mayan. My guess is that it’s from Europe. I’d need better equipment than I have here to estimate its age, but I’d say it was mined a long time ago. It’s clearer than any natural stone I’ve ever seen. Then there’s the metal, yellow and malleable.”
He gave them a pointed look and they glanced at each other, but he still saw confusion rather than amusement. He decided that maybe this wasn’t a practical joke after all.
“This isn’t Mayan,” he said, becoming more serious. “It’s gold.”
“It’s not the only piece,” Miller said. “The stone—what is it?”
“Corundum, probably,” he answered. “The red kind, which makes it...”
“Ruby,” said Bowerdale.
“Of a sort,” said Aguilar. “Paler than usual.”
“What’s it worth?” said Bowerdale. “The stone.”
“As jewelry? Less than you’d think. The color is too watery. So,” he said, and paused, “you want to explain how an early medieval European crystal shows up in a Mayan tomb?”
“Someone must have gotten inside fairly recently,” said Bowerdale.
“And put artifacts in the tomb?” Miller replied, studying the crystal. “That would make a change. And besides, I’d swear that entrance has been covered up for a long time.”
“That’s your opinion as an archaeologist, is it?” said Bowerdale.
“I’ve seen packed earth before,” she said. “It takes time to settle as densely as the dirt over that passage. At least a hundred years, maybe five times that.”
Aguilar watched her closely, trying to see how sure she was.
“You said you’ve never seen anythin
g like it before,” she said, turning to him.
“Natural crystals are almost always flawed at the microscopic level,” he answered. “This is clean.”
“You think you could search for these same properties and see if anything comparable has been turned up elsewhere?”
“I can try, but I can’t do much more than look at it and do some rudimentary chemical tests here. I’ll need to send it to a more advanced local lab, then to the US for further tests, which means clearing it with the government first.”
Mexico owned everything that came out of the tomb regardless of who found it.
“Do it,” she said.
“You’re going to have to lock the site down, you know,” he added.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know what this is,” he said, nodding at the gem, “but it complicates what was already a remarkable find.”
“There’ll be a feeding frenzy,” Bowerdale said, cutting in. “We need to manage publicity.”
“Probably so,” she said.
“So we talk to no one,” Bowerdale pressed. “Strictly need to know.”
Miller took a breath as if to steel herself. “I’ll make that call, thanks, Martin.”
Bowerdale’s eyes hardened and his smile quivered, as if threatening to turn into something nastier, but then he recovered his composure and snapped his smile back into place.
“Sure,” he said, shrugging. “Whatever you say.”
He strode out. Miller watched him go, then turned to Aguilar, who met her eyes, held them for a moment, and then nodded fractionally in approval.
Chapter Twelve
Deborah spent half the day on the phone, which meant standing on top of the cell phone tower instead of being in the tomb. Adelita ran updates from Bowerdale, who was documenting the find. The slight girl could scale the tower in half the time Deborah could, swinging up and down with fearless childish grace on her long, brown limbs.
“Careful, Adelita,” said Deborah periodically. “It’s a long way down.”
“I saw the jewels,” said the girl in Spanish, unable to stifle a secret smile. “Beautiful. Red, but not dark. Like—” She searched for words. “Sangre y lagrimas.”
Blood and tears.
The girl flashed her brilliant grin, pleased with the phrase, and scurried down the ladder.
Deborah called Powel, she called Valladolid, and she called various labs in Mexico and the US talking timetable and resources, experts, equipment, and, of course, money. The find changed everything, not least who would be coming down for the dig proper. If she didn’t have the right team on site, the university affiliates would start weaning her off the project, and if there was the faintest hint of incompetence, the Mexican government would shut them down.
So she forced herself to leave the site, and spent the rest of the morning instead in front of a laptop screen at the Valladolid lab, scanning CVs for specialists who might be prepared to drop what they were doing and get down here within the next forty-eight hours. Steve Powel was doing what he could to funnel names to her, but it wasn’t easy, given their decision to keep the contents of the find quiet. She caught herself having phone conversations that began, “I have to ask you to keep what I’m going to say confidential, and if you don’t think you can do that, I’m going to hang up.” It made her feel absurd, like a secret agent in a sixties spy movie.
The weakest link in their team was in Maya osteology—bones—and she didn’t know where to start. Eventually she gave up and sidled over to Aguilar, who was laying dustless paper on three long tables ready for the first of the tomb artifacts. He looked harried. They all did. They hadn’t intended to start analytical work for another ten days, and had expected no more than soil samples, maybe a few seeds or potsherds.
“You need to tell Bowerdale to wait,” said Aguilar. “I need more people. The artifacts are best left on site.”
“The heat might affect them,” said Deborah. “The tomb has been cool for centuries. Now it’s open and heating up fast, and after the flooding, there’s a lot of humidity. I’d rather get everything crated up and brought down here to a climate-controlled environment, even if we can’t start the analysis yet.”
“We’re rushing,” he said. “This is how mistakes get made. I should be on site documenting and cataloging there. You let those kids move stuff and things are going to get missed or damaged.”
“The kids, if you mean the undergraduates, are on their way to the airport,” she said. “The big storm meant they got an early start to their week off.”
“So we have no labor?”
“Other than the two graduate students and whoever Eustachio hires from the village, no,” said Deborah.
Aguilar swore.
“The upside is that the undergrads never even saw the tomb,” said Deborah. “There are rumors, of course, but they don’t really know anything so they won’t be able to tell anyone what we have till we’re ready to talk.”
“I need to be up there, at the site,” he insisted.
“Give me a half hour and we’ll go up together,” she said.
He frowned and laid down a set of calipers.
“What else needs doing here?” he said.
“I have to hire an osteologist. Today. Can you give me some names?”
“Not really my field,” he began, but Deborah cut him off.
“It’s nobody’s field except theirs. Who do you know who’s good?”
“There’s Rylands at Texas A&M,” said Aguilar. “Pain in the ass, but good at his job. Penn State has a good program. I think Keri Havers is there. She published a piece in American Archaeology on dentition and diet that got a lot of attention. She’s cute too.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ve got to call Powel. Again.”
“I guess I should stay here, anyway,” he said, regretfully. “There’s too much to do. Just make sure they’re careful, and photograph everything in situ. Everything. And get some experts down here soon or we’re going to be in serious trouble.”
Deborah smiled, pleased by his earnestness.
“Doing my best,” she said.
He glanced at his computer. “Wait,” he said, looking up. “Just got a preliminary chemical composition report on that crystal I sent to the lab.”
“Go on.”
“OK,” he said. “Let me see. This isn’t really my field...” He caught her glance. “It’s corundum, specifically ruby. The usual aluminum is replaced with chromium once every fifty thousand atoms or so, which is what gives it its red color and changes the way the stone interacts with light. That’s not that uncommon, but this is.”
“What?” said Deborah.
“See there,” said Aguilar, pointing to the data breakdown on the screen. “In addition to the chromium plus three, we’ve got Fe plus three: ferric iron.”
“That’s unusual?”
“A combination of chrome and iron?” said Aguilar, frowning. “Very rare indeed.”
“And what does that tell us?”
“Other than the fact that our lab isn’t equipped to handle whatever is in that tomb?” said Aguilar. “I have no idea.”
Chapter Thirteen
Bowerdale hadn’t left the dim, silent tomb in over three hours. He denied that he was guarding the find, but he was and even Miller knew he was right. He didn’t think anyone would deliberately break in to plunder the tomb, but he didn’t want curious tourists messing things up or helping themselves to a few shiny souvenirs. The locals knew better than to mess with their cultural legacy, but they were dirt poor and you could only expect so much loyalty to abstractions like heritage. This sort of find needed a watchful eye at all times to keep it secure.
Bowerdale scowled to himself. It was taking far too long for Eustachio and the Mayan laborers to get the access stairs finished, and it was likely to be at least another day before they could even begin moving stuff out of the tomb, probably more. They had built a framing scaffold over the hole and had been able to anchor
a ladder down to the passage opening, which made getting in and out easier than swinging on ropes like a bunch of apes, but they wouldn’t be able to move artifacts until they had a real staircase or ramp system in place. They didn’t have enough lumber with them and had already wasted half a day trying to recover a piece of tube steel scaffolding that had been dropped into the cenote. When Miller got here, he’d have some choice words for her in regards to her choice of workers, and if she chose to fire him, so be it.
Except, of course, that this wasn’t a find he could afford to let slip through his fingers. There were going to be articles and photographs and TV shows, and he had to make sure he was front and center in all of them. His tenured faculty performance review at Princeton had not gone well, and his chair had quoted the committee as suggesting that he was “sitting on his laurels”: a polite way of saying he hadn’t done anything in the last three years. And there had been that messy business with one of his undergraduates when she’d recast their little dalliance as something predatory, something less than entirely consensual. It was a lie or, more accurately, a trick to pay him back for moving on so quickly to another student he found more enticing, but the chair had read him the riot act.
If they could just process the site properly, examine what they had, and get their findings published quickly. If, in the process, they could solve the riddle of those odd crystals that Aguilar had told him had a rare combination of iron and chrome, so much the better.
He heard someone inching down the ladder and turned to face them as they entered the tomb. It was James, the thin and bespectacled graduate student who read comic books like an eight-year-old. Bowerdale sighed.
“Eustachio wants to know what we’re going to do tonight,” said James. “We’ve only got a couple more hours of daylight left and there’s no way we’ll have moved anything off site by then. We can’t just leave all this stuff here. I’d ask Dr. Miller, but...”
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