“That’s been waved obviously.”
“Gantz thinks it’s personal.”
“I was convinced it was Colonel Cook, but he has as much to lose as I do.” It was lost already, Clancy thought, but she refused to let an ass like Cook send her career completely down the tubes.
“Not if he sweeps all the blame on you.”
“He could. I’m the chief designer. I have access to all data. He could say I was party to it and that he knew nothing. The most he’d be accused of was failure to watch his own people. The only person who could say otherwise is Major Yates, and she’s in the sack with Cook.”
Mike didn’t see beyond that Clancy was the one getting screwed. “A regular family affair.”
She shrugged, indifferent. “It kept the money flowing into the project. She’s a good person, just follows orders better than I do.” She told him about Boris and the autopsy. “Boris is alive. Even she wasn’t dumb enough to cut open the ape without waiting for more reactive testing. They were going to push me out before I ever learned about the guys.”
“Because they were going into places you wouldn’t.”
She nodded.
Don’t trust what you see the first time, Mike thought. Everything is different with a closer look. She’d gone from prisoner to partner in record time, and he liked where she was coming from, liked what he was seeing. He smiled.
She met his gaze. “Don’t give me that movie star smile, Gannon. I’ve told you considerable classified information, and could go to jail for it. Yet you’ve told me nothing.”
“Catch that too, did you?” She didn’t smile, waiting, and if she were standing, Mike imagined she’d be tapping her foot. “You’re so cute when you’re trying to be intimidating.”
She blinked. “Some other time and place, that might get you somewhere, but not today.” She laughed when he looked crestfallen. “You were sent to recover the UAV. Was it loaded? Hellfires?”
Mike felt her stare as if she were nudging him along. “My sources say they blew up on impact.”
“Trust the source?”
“Hell no. Renoux was as conniving as they come.” He told her about the arms dealer.
“You have some dangerous friends.” Her gaze caught on the sideview mirror. “Gun it! We have company and he’s got better wheels than we do!”
Mike hit the gas and looked in the rearview. One big black all-terrain truck. Crap.
“He’s going to fire!” Clancy ducked low in the seat as the man leaned out the window to shoot.
Mike swerved and for a moment Clancy thought, He’s going to play chicken with that monster truck?
Then the tire exploded.
Richora closed his cell phone and tried not to throw it. The Americans were fast becoming a thorn in his side.
Salache looked at him, arching a brow. “They escaped?”
“Not for long.”
“Now they’re in my territory.” Salache picked up the gun lying on the desk and pointed it.
Richora wasn’t afraid. “You need me.”
“Do not think that you aren’t expendable.”
“And who will cover your borders, your shipments? They are my men and follow my orders.”
“There are enough of the others.”
“But you don’t speak the language.”
Salache was thoughtful and tipped the weapon to the ceiling.
“What are you doing?” Marianna stood in the doorway, and from the look on her face she’d witnessed the exchange. “Answer me!”
“My sweet, it’s not your concern, just men posturing.” He stood and walked nearer.
“With a gun? Why do you have that in my house? You know how I feel about weapons near my children.”
“Your house?”
She stiffened, her gaze shooting to Richora, then back to Nuat’s. “Do not, husband. You will regret it.”
Salache’s gaze narrowed, and for a moment Alejo thought he would strike her. He’d have to kill him then, he thought, yet watched as the man crossed to his wife and pulled her into his arms. She was reluctant to go.
“I swear to you, I will have the weapon removed now.” He glanced at Alejo and inclined his head.
Richora took the gun and slipped it behind his back. She really didn’t know anything, he thought. She has no suspicion of what would soon transpire. Of course she didn’t. Salache sheltered her inside his kingdom of money and power, and all of this dance with people and cargo was a skilled manipulation to avoid detection. Especially by his wife.
Salache kissed her gently and she melted into his embrace. Richora looked away from the tender sight.
“I am going to town for the day with the children.”
He nodded and she backed away, glancing once at Richora. In the single moment, he saw her private agony. “Get rid of it.” She left.
“Give it to me.”
Alejo frowned and dragged his gaze to Salache. He held out his hand. “You swore to her.”
“I have done so many times, and will, I suspect, again. She is a woman and needs her world to be protected. She understands that. But I have enemies and this is necessary to protect my family.” He put the gun in the desk drawer, then met his gaze.
He didn’t need the gun, Richora thought. Not unless a predator could get past the electrified wall and gate, or the guards placed where few could see.
“Is the first shipment ready to leave?”
“Two days.” Salache knew this and Richora wondered if he asked just to hear the sound of his own voice.
Salache smiled and settled in the leather chair. “Did you find the bodies?”
“You know we have not.”
Salache smiled. “If I am lucky, they have been dismembered and fed to the caimans.”
Lightly swinging in the leather chair, Salache stared at a glass-front cabinet and Richora turned to leave.
“Take care of this American problem yourself, Alejo.”
He looked back over his shoulder, and just realized Salache was admiring his face in the glass.
“Prove that your people are better than the primitives they are.”
Richora stiffened with outrage. It seemed that Salache’s new face had wiped the slate clean of more than his past.
Dr. Valez was exhausted by the time he reached the dig site. He could have taken a helicopter but the privilege had too high a price. My age should make it a requirement, he thought wryly, trying to slow his breathing in the thin air. Gil pushed on ahead of him, but Eduardo’s head felt light and he fell back against a tree and swiped off his hat. He ran the back of his wrist across his forehead.
He was anxious to reach the site. He hoped the urn’s home and surroundings would reveal more about the urn’s contents. It was being tested. The miniscule amount of sandy gray material in the dish was the consistency of talc, and he suspected it was ashes. But if it was, the icons made no sense. Breath of the gods, a warrior’s battle? Yet the warrior’s face bore the huge fangs and big eyes; a Moche version of a scare tactic, but the human skin on the seal troubled him more than the gruesomeness of the fact.
It had been layered with the waxlike substance experts were having trouble defining. He was not a chemist and could do nothing until they did. The human skin was shrunk tight around it, obviously never to be opened. Why, was a question he couldn’t answer.
A shriek startled him, and he shook his fist at the monkey dangling in the tree and hissing. Pests, he thought, pushing off and walking up the slope to the excavation site. Gil was already several yards ahead of him when he entered the center of the encampment filled with tents erected to the right and left of the site. A small Bobcat earthmover sat a few yards back, its engine silent.
Gil came out of a tent, scowling. “They must be at the site.”
Eduardo strode to his tent, batting back the folds. The papers scattered on the British campaign desk told him everything was as he’d left it, and empty. He left the tent and called out for his people, then noticed a man comi
ng up the ridge.
The young man rushed to him. “Oh, Dr. Valez. I’m glad you’re back.”
Valez grabbed his tools and with Gil, they followed the man to the dig. “Did you find something?”
“No, but we were cleaning up the site and had to stop yesterday to shore up the ceiling. It has caved in in small areas, but not the chamber.”
Cave-ins weren’t uncommon and Eduardo insisted on bracings each step of the way. He heard voices, the scrape of stone and wood, and found the team working efficiently to brace wood on the cave entrance. Though it wasn’t truly a cave, but a portion of a city, now underground. Over time, the mountain had swallowed it.
Farther down the mountain were more dwellings and digs excavated and searched decades ago. This one had only recently been unearthed. He passed the undergrads and workers, the students trying to get in fieldwork for college credit. He hated to tell them that archaeology didn’t pay much at all, yet knew only the dedicated would remain in the field. He loved the energy and excitement of young people, yet today he needed some he could depend on and glanced at Gil. The young man was so excited to join him this time, and Eduardo had assumed he’d found his calling boring. Sometimes it was, but then, a find like the urn changed that.
“Why do you think they used human skin?” Gil asked.
“A protection of some sort. They would not have worked gold into it without some significance. Perhaps it wasn’t meant for us to know.”
Gil looked at him, a studious scowl on his face. “I’ve a feeling we shouldn’t open it at all.”
Valez glanced. “Superstitious?”
“I’m Latin. Of course I am.” He smiled. “At least we have something to test.”
“There could be anything inside there with it.” It wasn’t showing well on the scans, just a mass that was loose and dense.
People greeted them at the entrance and he smiled, sending several off on a break. No one entered the cave without people on the outside ready to help, or call for help.
“How safe?” he said to the site manager.
“As well as it can be, senor. Have a care near the walls. It has caved in a bit since you left with the urn.”
Eduardo nodded and stopped at the entrance to put on his gloves and mask against the dust. His glasses would help deflect it, and when he looked at Gil, he smiled. The man had his head wrapped like a turban, a sash of muslin across his mouth.
“I choked on that stuff last time,” he said through the rag.
“Dust and dirt is the way of this life,” Eduardo said, ducking inside the long narrow tunnel. It was excavated in stages that often turned into levels. Then it opened and he straightened, the ceiling high in the chamber, the gas-powered lights bright inside.
The interior wasn’t shored by the workers, but by the Moche. On the far end was a doorway, small and no more than a molded frame. Long, narrow stone beams held back the earth, above it a stone crossbeam. Each five-foot-long rod of granite was notched and tightly fitted, yet beyond it was the remnants of the chamber that had held the urn. Inside, it was smaller, the ceiling lower. A temple, he decided. He crossed to it, kneeling with Gil to get inside.
“We need another rubbing of this.” He pointed to the stone slabs that had fallen when he’d pulled the urn free.
“There isn’t anything on it. It’s cut stone.”
“I want to be certain.” He ran his hand over it, his fingers as sensitive as the blind. “There are markings, below the cuts, small ones.”
“How did you know?”
He looked up, his glasses already dusty, and he brushed at the lenses. “I don’t. I am assuming there’s some warning, because there was one on the urn itself.”
Gil nodded understanding, then pulled a pack of rice tissue from his satchel and unfolded it. He placed it over the edge, and with charcoal he rubbed it while Eduardo rubbed the frame and right side. After a few moments, they had several pieces, each marked sequentially. Aboveground, they could lay the tissue out and have a replica of the urn’s final resting place.
Gil was bent over the find, carefully slipping the rubbings into a plastic sleeve. “I’ll send this back with the next group.”
Valez shook his head. “No, I need them here because you’re as skilled at deciphering the hieroglyphics as I am.”
The young man scoffed. “Get real.”
“You see the details that have, I’m afraid, escaped me lately.” His wife wanted him to retire and travel with her. Perhaps he should, if he was not a good enough teacher.
“That’s because I look with a fresh eye and not that of a seasoned scholar.”
“Are we done with compliments? Let’s see what we have.”
The pair gathered their tools and sacks. Gil left the chamber first. He was so tall he had to squat to get out the framed door. Beyond it, he waited for Eduardo.
“Doctor?”
“I wanted a last look. I have missed it.”
Gil shook his head, smiling. Dirt sprinkled his shoulder and when he looked up, a few stones rolled down the angle of the dirt walls. Then he saw a crack in the heavily packed earth. “Professor, come now. It’s starting to cave!”
Eduardo crossed the large open room, careful not to step on the cut granite that portioned off the urn’s chamber.
The ground shifted again, this time harder, and Eduardo fell, his hand catching on a sharp edge. He winced and cradled his hand to his chest, climbing to his feet, dirt rolling down the walls like rainwater. No, please no, he thought, and ran to the exit.
Gil was still on the other side of the framed door, waving him on. “Come quickly. It’s falling!”
Eduardo darted through and backed away with Gil, both moving to the tunnel entrance, yet too fascinated not to look. Chunks of earth fell, the dust cloud filling the first chamber, and they turned into the tunnel leading to the surface. Then it abruptly stopped. They exchanged a look that spoke of prayers and wishes.
“That was close.”
Gil only nodded, his gaze on the stones. Black and polished, they’d held the dirt in the shape of a door again. Crude, but efficient, and as he approached he studied the oblong columns. Then the stone pylons started to slip. Gil stumbled back. The left fell first, the impact felt through the ground. Flat across the entrance and creating a stone threshold. And without support the top crossbeam’s left side slid downward, looking for a moment as if it would tumble out. Dirt fell.
“It’s caving in on the other side,” Eduardo said, backing up into the tunnel again. The two sides leaned slowly inward, the earth above spilling between the two pieces, filling the gap before the ends hit. It stopped moving. The cave-in halted. Then as if a hand packed it, the loose earth jammed against the pieces by the weight above.
Gil rushed forward, running his hand over the pieces. “They’re locked in place. This is amazing.”
Eduardo held his brush, and started sweeping away the dirt. The shine of the rock showed, and as he cleaned he realized it was painstakingly polished and carved. He went to the other joints and found the same.
“It’s a puzzle piece, carved to fit into place.” Eduardo’s gaze toured the stone quickly, then once more slowly. “It was supposed to fall. Yet it makes little sense. You can still pass through, so it does nothing.” The dirt level was only halfway, and a look inside said it hadn’t caved in but a little.
“If it was a barricade, then inside should be caving in completely.”
“Yes, but why hide this with traps and levels? We are nearly fifty feet below the structure that is already yards below the last avalanche.”
“Doctor. Step back by me.”
The older man turned to the voice. Gil was a couple of yards back, nearer to the tunnel. Eduardo followed the direction of his gaze as he slowly back-stepped.
“It’s a triangle.”
“Yes, and mechanized to fall like that. The Moche were far smarter than we think.”
“They could smelt gold, they were whizzes, except the ritual blood th
ing,” Gil said, sounding so young to Eduardo just then.
“There’s no triangle in anything we have seen.” Eduardo slid his fingers over the edges. “The symbol has several meanings in different cultures. The Egyptian pyramids, holy trinity of Christianity, the pagan Celts, the symbol for fire.” Eduardo glanced at Gil. “We need a rubbing of this shape now. Quickly.”
After a few moments, Eduardo sat back and said, “It’s a warning. Passage into here is certain death.” He pointed to the icons showing the dead littered on the ground. “But no bloodletting, no cups catching it.” He admitted he was more confused and shone a light into the second smaller chamber where they’d found the urn. The slabs of stone once housing the urn had tumbled, revealing a small low tunnel behind the stone box. He felt air pushing through the chamber, and Eduardo moved to investigate it when dirt sprinkled on them.
The two men exchanged a glance. “Let’s wait till the crew can shore this up again. I’d feel better,” Gil said. Eduardo agreed and they walked up the low-ceilinged tunnel back to the surface. “Professor, did you notice the color in the etching?”
“Yes, I did.” Eduardo paused, and said softly, “Keep it to yourself, please. I have seen men die for a discovery like this.” Gold.
When Gil nodded, they continued up the narrow passage. All around them was black granite. Not surprising in the area, but that it was polished to a glossy sheen after thousands of years said the Moche were more progressive. Yet the purpose of the urn chamber still eluded him. Why lock it away and set traps to guard it? And the hole behind it? He must return.
The long narrow slabs had fallen inward, revealing the outside edge once buried under tons of earth. The three lengths of black stone now faced each other in a perfect triangle locked in place, its inner band etched in gold. It wasn’t the precious metal that fascinated him, or that the gold lining the carving was still as vivid as the day they created it.
Intimate Danger Page 17