She couldn't restrain her smile now.
They looked squarely at each other for a full five seconds, speaking only in smiles.
'I know it was you,' declared Ethan eventually.
Claire raised one eyebrow provocatively. 'Well, watcha gunna do?'
'That depends. Are you coming back next season?'
'Would you have me back?'
Ethan addressed Marco and Patrick as they removed each other's air tanks. 'Well, gentlemen, is she any good as a safety officer?'
Patrick wouldn't be baited.
Marco pretended to give the question great deliberation, watching Claire from the corner of his eye. 'I suppose we're still alive, so she can't be that bad. You can't believe the rumors.'
'Hey!' Claire playfully wacked Marco’s shoulder with her clipboard. 'Enough of that.'
'There you go,' noted Ethan. 'The people have spoken. Your contract will be here if you don't find another gig in the meantime.'
Claire winked at Ethan. 'Let me think on it, huh? It looks like Nina's waiting for you.'
Ethan glanced over his shoulder. Nina was idling near the bottom of the stairs, obviously waiting for a quiet word with Ethan. Before joining her, Ethan pointed at Claire and said, 'Think on it then. But don't take too long.'
Claire waved her clipboard as though his instructions were bothersome insects to be swatted away.
Nina fell into step beside Ethan as they climbed the stairs. She was shorter than he, so he climbed slower than normal. It was a good idea anyway - the stairs were treacherously angled in a way that if you were to fall, it would be the devil’s job to stop yourself before you tumbled all the way to the bottom. Thankfully, that hadn't happened yet.
'Before you ask,' she started. 'I didn't know anything about it.'
'That's alright,' smiled Ethan. 'I caught the culprit. I remember three years ago when she was wound tighter than a spring. Now she's comfortable pulling this kind of thing.'
Nina shrugged. 'She's still pretty uptight when she wants to be. But you're right, she's softened. I think she just had to do the hard ass thing for a while to get people’s respect. She has friends now.'
Ethan chuckled. 'Well, she will after today. That was truly a Kodak moment, huh?'
Nina laughed afresh. 'You might have been holding chocolates, but the look on your face was pure gold. Last day of the season is practical joke day. I'm surprised you fell for it. I heard that you actually sprinted here?'
Ethan avoided the question. 'And so what were you doing when you heard the radio message?'
'I was planning how to steal all that lovely gold for myself.'
Now they both laughed.
Ethan suspected Nina had broken a few hearts in her day. A woman still beautiful in her late fifties, Nina's intensely intelligent eyes and hazelnut skin had kept several of the more mature male volunteers on their toes. She was the crowd-pleaser. She still got letters by the dozen from past site volunteers who kept in contact. She made people feel important, no matter what they were doing. She was twenty years his senior, but they had 'clicked' immediately. Her unflagging support and energy over the last three years was phenomenal.
At the top of the stairs, Ethan turned to face his friend. 'Seriously. Thanks for everything. It's been a great season.'
Nina waved away the compliment.
'I have a confession to make,' added Ethan. 'When I first learned we would be sharing responsibility, I was worried we wouldn't get along. Personality clash or something.'
Before Nina could speak, Ethan continued, 'But it's been the opposite. I think you're awesome. I know you've had other offers, but I hope you'll stick with the project until we get our answers.'
She placed her work-calloused palm on his shoulder. Any archaeologist in the world would swap places with me. You'll have to carry me out of here in a box. Now get home to that family I hear so much about.'
She pushed off from him, heading towards her tent, calling over her shoulder, 'I’ve got three kids and an attention-starved Saint Bernard waiting for me. Plus there's the husband. I have to pack. And so do you.'
Ethan waved and then looked back down the stairs, listening to Claire and Marco’s voices echoing up the stairwell. Leaving the bunker always gave him the strangest feeling of cheating fate, or of overlooking something really obvious. But nothing on this site was obvious. Why would a Mesoamerican pre-metal age culture even need deep underground bunkers? Why such an isolated location? After three years on the site, they still had no idea who had even built the Plaza. The Aztecs? The Maya?
Ethan stared down the bunker stairs. Above all, one question returned again and again. What were the people who built this place so terrified of?
#
Abigail Astrenzi's clothes didn't match.
She only just now realized.
Entering her third story lab in the Decary Hall Building at the University of New England, she caught a look at herself in the lab mirror. She winced.
What was she even thinking when she got dressed this morning? Cargo pants and the top half of her old olive tracksuit? She undid the zipper on her tracksuit top. Underneath was the old pink singlet that should have gone into the rag pile years ago. In such a rush to get back to the lab, half asleep, she'd grabbed whatever was hanging on the bed. She heard her mother’s voice in her head: 'Would it be that hard to choose clothes that didn't imply you slept in a cardboard box?'
Apparently so.
Oh, well. No one cared how she dressed anyway.
She threw her swipe card and car keys down on the bench. Her computer was chugging away behind its screensaver.
She rubbed her hands together then tentatively reached out and hit the enter key. Her screen flashed to life.
It was finished!
‘Yes!’ she said, pumping her fist as though she’d just scored a goal.
Her pollen analysis of the Plaza dig flashed up complete. It had been running all night, analyzing the thousands of pollen samples forwarded from Ethan during his excavation. This last season's samples were all in the model now. The results were in.
Excited, she dragged over a chair on wheels.
Right, where to start? Her job was to map the Plaza’s ancient ecology. Identifying the plant and animal remains would help Ethan enormously.
Onscreen she had an aerial image of the Plaza showing the dominant plant species through time. It was amazing.
The entire Plaza had been hidden.
The implications were staggering, and her pollen analysis provided the key. It proved the Plaza’s concealment had been intentional. In order to stabilize the soil, plant species had been chosen for their soil-binding properties. Self-seeding plants were also chosen. Whoever had hidden the Plaza wanted it to stay hidden forever. And they had done an excellent job. Six hundred years later, just weeks before Ethan's discovery, the Plaza still appeared indistinguishable from the surrounding jungle.
The 'big hide' Abigail called it, making Ethan laugh.
Her research confirmed the largest cultural mystery of the century. And right now her new model was revealing even more.
Linking her fingers behind her head, she leant back and stared at the entire Plaza on the screen.
Abigail described the site to her friends by having them imagine a massive three-tiered ziggurat being turned upside down and stamped into the ground. The resulting shape was the Plaza. That gave the broad picture anyway: three nested tiers shrinking inwards towards the deepest point in the middle, the exact opposite to classic Mesoamerican architecture.
Calling the site a 'Plaza' initially made sense because no one expected to find structures deeper underground. The first season's excavation only found the top ruins.
The next season went deeper, finding the middle tier and the bunkers.
After the bunkers, no one expected Ethan to uncover yet a deeper level.
The Gallery.
The Plaza had saved the best, or possibly the worst, for last. It wasn't like any gallery Abb
y had ever visited, and if possible, she would never set foot inside the horrible place again. Whoever designed the Gallery had some very sick and twisted ideas about art. The place freaked her out, and that was just walking through its claustrophobic outer corridors. Ninety percent of the Gallery remained sealed. No one could even figure out how to get further inside. No one knew its secrets.
And those vile carvings on the walls....
Abigail shook off the creepy feeling, focusing again on her screen.
Her work was very different. Nothing was out of context in nature. In her science, there were no secrets that enough soil samples and pollen counts couldn't unlock. Already she'd established the site was not self-sufficient. Her pollen counts showed no sign of local agriculture, which meant all the food had to be floated or carried in.
She clicked through the onscreen options to view the Plaza's vegetation six hundred and fifty years ago. Over this image she laid the model she'd been running all night. This should give her an up-to-date picture of what the vegetation was like when the Plaza was in full swing.
She sat back in her chair, amazed at the pattern that appeared.
Thoroughfares. Cutting right through the site from the jungle to the Gallery. They were invisible until all the flora layers were added, because they had only existed in the form of flora. Normal roads were identified by the exclusion of plants, but this was the exact opposite. These thoroughfares were all plants! But why? What purpose was there to have these green corridors linking the surrounding jungle to the Gallery?
Abby sat back and pushed her fingers through her hair. What on earth had she just discovered?
Chapter 2
Striding across the Plaza's top tier, Ethan absently reached into his pocket. It was a mistake. Damn.
The flashlight.
Claire's practical joke had distracted him for a moment. Now all his worries came pressing in again. He'd been carrying the little orange flashlight in his pocket the last two days. That something so innocuous could cause him such mental anguish felt supremely unfair. He wished he'd never found the stupid thing.
No, that's not true. I wish it hadn't been there to find in the first place.
Finding the flashlight in the east bunker was like cracking open an Egyptian pyramid and finding the Pharaoh’s mummy wearing an iPod.
That ain't right in anyone's book.
And then there were the thefts. They were almost as troubling as the flashlight. It started when Marco couldn't locate over one hundred meters of steel cable from the stores hut. They needed the steel cable for Claire's safety fortifications. When the Sherriff's steel cable turned up missing, she immediately conducted a full stock take, finding a bizarre assemblage of items unaccounted for. The missing objects were not especially valuable, not compared to some of the electronic equipment lying around. In common, all the missing items were heavy and bulky, all difficult and costly to transport to the Plaza. Between them, Ethan and Claire estimated that enough steel cable and reinforcing beams were missing to fill the back of a small truck.
But who would want them? Where had they taken them? When? How?
Ethan imagined it must be exceedingly difficult to move large items around the Plaza undetected, and absolutely impossible to get them off the site unnoticed. But if they were still here, then why couldn't he find them? He and Claire had looked everywhere, and there weren't that many places to look. Marco's current theory - 'someone-stashed-the-stuff-in-the-jungle' - seemed the least implausible. There was a lot of jungle after all. They couldn't search it all.
First the missing equipment, and now the flashlight. I'm not liking this at all.
A voice jolted Ethan from his thoughts. 'If you go and start finding gold, I'll need to hire more security staff to protect it.'
Ethan shielded his eyes from the morning sun. 'Oh, Ambrose. I didn't see you there. The sun's a killer today, huh?'
'Summer equinox,' explained Ambrose, stepping out of the glare and to where Ethan could see him better. 'It's going to be a very special day today.'
From the neck up, Ambrose Rourke always reminded Ethan of the quintessential academic. His gaze had that transfixing quality. An inventor, perhaps. Someone pottering in sheds after bedtime. Intelligent eyes, receding grey-flecked black hair, bushy eye-brows arching down into a territory of deep facial lines mapped from long hours of study. Ambrose emanated the pervading calmness of old libraries and musty lecture halls. Claire had remarked on several occasions about his deep, authoritive voice being ideal for the background narration on future documentaries about the Plaza.
The giveaway should have been the tanned skin. The tanned skin and a physique that a twenty-year-old would envy. Rourke moved with the body and energy of a much younger man.
As the Chief of Site Security, Ambrose Rourke knew more about guns and surveillance cameras than libraries and lecture halls.
Ethan wondered again what drew someone like Rourke, quiet and retiringly intelligent, to the life of security management.
'I was a million miles away,' apologized Ethan. 'Sorry, you surprised me. What did you say about gold?'
Ambrose hopped lightly up and over the piece of collapsed wall that Ethan had been skirting. He waved back towards the bunker. 'The gold. I said that we'd need more staff now that you found the gold.'
'Oh, it's chocolate,' explained Ethan, guessing Ambrose had missed the joke. 'It was a trick. Claire’s warped sense of humor.’
'I know,' smiled Rourke. 'But holding a gold coin in a place like this, even a chocolate one, gives you a strange feeling, right?’
Ethan knew exactly what Rourke meant. He had sprinted to the bunker after all. Maria, his wife, teased Ethan by saying there was a little Indiana Jones, a little treasure hunter, in every archaeologist. She had threatened to buy Harrison Ford's whip and hat from eBay last Christmas.
Ethan remembered he had wanted to catch up privately with Rourke for a few days now. He was planning to visit Rourke's security tent next time he was passing, but now was just as good. 'Did you get a chance to question your staff for me?'
Rourke looked confused for a moment, then he realized what Ethan meant. 'The flashlight? You still worried about that little flashlight?'
'I'm worried about what it means.'
Rourke squeezed Ethan's shoulder. 'It means that you aren't getting enough sleep. That's all it can mean. It's the end of season.'
Ethan looked back towards the bunker. 'That place was sealed for six hundred years! How could the flashlight have gotten in there before our first dive?'
'Lots of ways.'
'Name one.'
Rourke raised one eyebrow. 'We've been through this.'
'Humor me.'
'Somebody dropped it from the surface. Maybe they kicked it in by accident when they were moving around the antechamber.'
'It was too far in for that,' said Ethan.
'OK. It was on your own dive gear, and it fell off, and then you found it.'
'It wasn't part of my gear.'
'So someone got their gear mixed up and clipped their flashlight on your vest by mistake. It has to be something as simple as that. But you won't know until you ask your team.'
'No. I'm not ready for that.'
'With respect, Ethan, I think you're being paranoid. You know these people. Every one of them. From what I hear, half these people learned their archaeology in your lectures. None of them penetrated the bunker before you. It just didn't happen. There's some other explanation, probably staring you right in the face.'
'You're right,' conceded Ethan. 'I know you're right. It's just...it doesn't feel right. The flashlight was way off in front of me, about twenty minutes into the dive, through an archway and well inside another chamber. It was half buried in silt.'
Ethan pulled out the flashlight and hit the switch to light it up. The strong beam of light was obvious on the front of Rourke khaki uniform, even in daylight. 'Look, the batteries still work!'
Rourke shrugged. 'Then you explain i
t.'
'I can't. I excavated the bunker entrance myself. We were practically sleeping in that chamber for three days before the first dive. There's no way someone could get in there before us.'
Ethan found the flashlight on their first dive into the flooded bunker. He was diving with Claire, and at first assumed she had dropped her flashlight. When they'd surfaced, she'd said the flashlight wasn't hers. Realizing something was amiss, he'd asked Claire not to mention the flashlight to anyone. Something like this could throw the entire integrity of his research into question, and as they stripped off their dive gear, he couldn't shake the feeling that someone else had beaten him to the punch. Before the day was out he'd checked the flashlight against everyone's dive equipment, without even mentioning his concerns to Nina. No one was missing their dive flashlight.
So if they were the first people in the bunker in six hundred years, whose flashlight was it?
Rourke changed the subject. 'Do you mind if I ask you another question? Before you break for the season there's something that's been really bugging me. It's about the bunkers.'
Rourke's questions had become something of a lynchpin in a relationship between two men who otherwise had very little in common. His always insightful questions often led Ethan down new roads of enquiry, and were in a large part responsible for Ethan wondering about Rourke's choice of occupation. 'Of course I don't mind, Ambrose, you know that. Ask away.'
Rourke thought for a moment, then said, 'I've seen hundreds of bunkers and fortified earthworks. They're all usually designed with a particular enemy in mind. You can tell from the layout, the way they're constructed, their location - you know, those kinds of things. I've worked security on dozens. I've even helped plan a few. You can tell a lot about what the defenders expected from the way they design their fortifications.'
Ethan found himself fascinated with Rourke’s train of thought. It had never occurred to him, stupidly, that a modern hands-on security expert might be the best person to help decipher the questions he himself was struggling with.
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