Sunken Pyramid (Rogue Angel)

by Alex Archer

  She’d passed two cabins, but no one was home, and she was starting to think she was going to have to walk all the way back to Lakeside when she spied the fishermen. Sully had said he was taking the pontoon in the opposite direction—but that would have been too far of a swim...since she wanted to keep the tanks. To Annja the tanks were gold—her chance to go back down this very afternoon to the Snakeship’s Maw, as she was calling it.

  She’d briefly considered just treading water when she discovered the pontoon gone, hoping for Sully and Rembert to come back or hoping to catch the attention of a passing boat. But once she’d opted for this route, she was committed.

  Annja prided herself on being physically fit. But between the dive and the swim, and the walk along the shore to find someone willing to give her a lift, she was exhausted. Her legs felt like lead when she climbed into the back of the brothers’ pickup truck—joining a stringer of bluegill that sloshed around in a big bucket. The smell from the fish—and whatever else had been hauled in the truck—was strong, and she fought to keep down what she’d had for breakfast. The brothers dropped her near where Sully’s pontoon boat originally had been moored. The boat wasn’t there, but she hadn’t expected it to be. A woman washing out a canoe on the bank was helpful; Annja described where Sully and Rembert had been headed.

  “That would be The Office,” she said. “The owner named it that about twenty years ago, called it that so when men wanted to get out of the house for a drink without getting in trouble with their wives, they could say ‘I’m going to The Office.’ It has a new owner now, but he kept the silly name.”

  The woman volunteered to give Annja a ride to The Office when she realized the Chasing History’s Monsters star was in effect stranded. Annja had left a small pack containing her motorcycle key, beach-cabin key and her wallet on the absent pontoon boat. The woman gave Annja her business card in the event she needed further help: Jenn Walker, Bankruptcy Attorney. Annja would send her something nice as a thank-you when she got back to New York.

  H.I.S. was tethered to the dock beyond The Office. Annja dropped the tanks near the full one by the bench and grabbed her pack and the plastic pouch with Joe’s diving log...both of which had been left unattended. This late in the afternoon, that hazy spot between lunch and dinner, the parking lot had only two cars in it: the dented Impala she was familiar with, the other a Lakeside police car.

  Rembert was at a table inside, talking to two police officers. Detective Rizzo, who was at the table behind them intently listening, politely got up when she entered and pulled out a chair for her.

  Annja didn’t have to ask where Sully was. Manny laid it all out while Rembert finished with the police.

  Sully was fifteen miles away in the regional medical center, probably in serious condition. He and Rembert had been coming out of The Office with sandwiches and drinks when a teenage knife-wielding girl attacked them. She got Sully in the stomach and was going after Rembert, but he’d dropped the sandwich bag and pulled out a Glock. He didn’t have to fire it—the threat sent her running. The Office bartender called for an ambulance, the local police were dispatched, and Annja had walked in just as the officers were wrapping up the report.

  “A Glock?” Annja sat next to Manny, who gave her an up and down. She thought she probably looked like hell, her Bucky Badger shirt stained green from the lily pads and tall grass along the lakeshore, her hair a mess—she’d lost the tie somewhere in the lake—and her once-white tennis shoes the shade of canned mushrooms. She probably smelled like bluegills and night crawlers.

  “Your friend there—” Manny nodded to Rembert “—has a real nice Glock.”

  “How the—” Annja didn’t finish the question. She decided she didn’t want to know how Rembert came by a gun, at least not at this moment. He hadn’t brought it with him—he’d only brought the two carry-ons, and someone at LaGuardia would have spotted a Glock. “How...? Why...are you here, Manny? Isn’t this still out of your jurisdiction?”

  “Told you I was coming to Lakeside today, to see if I could find out more about your Dr. Schwartz and and his friend. Heard the call for a knifing and—” Manny laughed and gave her a lopsided grin. “I just knew I would find you here. Bet it’s the same girl that went after you. But for the life of me, I can’t connect it to anything else.”

  They sat silently while Rembert signed the report.

  “Your buddy here did provide some crucial information about the murders at the hotel. All the murders. There’s been one more. A young woman from Chicago, a waitress, not an archaeologist, but she was with someone attending the conference.”

  Annja sagged back against the chair, her mind suddenly as tired as her body. She wasn’t going to ask Manny to explain further. She knew all she had to do was wait for it.

  The Office bartender washed glasses and hung them from hooks above the bar, clearly trying to overhear the conversations.

  Rembert watched the officers leave, then he joined Annja.

  “So, Mr. Hayes here...while the local police scoured the woods for the teenager...told us about a man named Aeschelman who is probably behind the killings. Fits, eh? The Mr. A. your thug mentioned in the alley. Mr. Aeschelman.” Manny gave Rembert the signature lopsided grin. “Said there’s an artifact-smuggling operation that went on at the hotel last night, that Aeschelman ran it and that some of the archaeologists were involved. But Aeschelman’s flown the coop.”

  Annja’s eyes grew wide and then narrowed, as if to demand of Rembert, Why didn’t you tell me this?

  “Said all of it came to a head last night and in the wee early hours of this morning,” Manny continued. “Quite a fellow, Mr. Hayes. He not only attended the auction last night but he got footage of Aeschelman and the archaeologists buying and selling things, all of it most likely illegal. Arnie wants him to come down to Central for questioning. However, we can’t force him. He hasn’t done anything wrong. Got nothing to charge him with.”

  “I told you what I know,” Rembert said. “And I’ll make a copy of the video for you.” He adjusted the Glock so he could sit more comfortably. “And I’m not going to Central. I’m staying with Annja.”

  “And he’s taking me in his rental to the regional medical center to—”

  “—check on Sully Stever,” Manny said.

  And to ask his permission to keep using his pontoon, Annja thought, realizing she had never asked Sully his last name.

  If he objected, she’d find another boat to rent, but she liked the notion of the pontoon as a diving platform. Then she’d get the tanks refilled and go right back down, likely early this evening...and after getting a new battery for the flashlight.

  “Meet up for dinner, Manny? Say in—” She fished in her pack for her watch. The Office had one visible, but its hands hadn’t moved since she’d gotten here, apparently permanently fixed at five. “An hour? Five o’clock?”

  “Not going to be visiting with Sully Stever for long?”

  “I’m sure he needs his rest,” she returned. “Better make it an hour and a half to be safe.” She picked Blue Moon, thinking about the Creole chicken.

  Rembert wouldn’t talk on the way to Watertown...not about where he got the gun or how he found out about Aeschelman and the illegal auction. All he said was “You’ll see my video later. After I make my deal. I wasn’t on Doug’s clock for it. Or yours. My equipment, my time, my video.”

  The nurse said Sully was drifting in and out of consciousness, but he’d been upgraded, and given how filthy Annja was, they wouldn’t let her in to see him. Rembert secured permission to use H.I.S. as long as they were in Rock Lake; Sully knew he’d be in the hospital awhile.

  Annja cleaned up in a hospital restroom, bought a change of clothes at Award Winning Sports on Main and using Rembert’s iPad found a place called Under the Surface, a nearby dive shop. It cost her, all totaled, eighteen thousand, but she picked up boots, a buoyancy compensator, a wristwatch that doubled as a dive computer, two lights, a dry suit, a bail-ou
t tank, goggles, a camera that wasn’t quite as good as what she had wanted and a semi-closed rebreather system that would let her stay down a long while. The rebreather, which had been developed and used originally by the military, was the only one the shop had, and it was responsible for the bulk of her bill. It took several minutes for the shop to determine that Annja had the funds. She could resell the stuff back to the shop before she left—but at a considerable loss. Or she could ship it to her apartment...the more likely outcome. She thought she could use the dry suit elsewhere.

  “Expensive trip,” Rembert said. “So you’re going to be looking for overtime, too.”

  They were a few minutes late to the restaurant, and Annja wolfed down her meal—ordering less than she would have liked, but being careful because of her upcoming dive.

  “Going back on the lake,” she told Manny. “Or rather, into it.”

  “For your professor friend,” the detective said.

  Annja nodded, but really it was for herself now. Edgar’s obsession had somehow become hers. She had a taste of it...seeing the building deep in the Snakeship’s Maw, and she couldn’t walk away. It was far too significant of a historical find to ignore.

  “You going back to Madison?”

  Manny shook his head. “Still poking around here, getting everything filled in, you know. Arnie’s chasing down this whole Aeschelman thing. Gonna have to share it, but it’ll still sound good for my swan song.”

  “I’ll call you,” she said, “when I come back up. See if you’re still here.” She passed him her new cell phone and he took down the phone number.

  Annja grabbed the bill and dropped three fives on the table for a tip. “Any word on that girl with the knife?”

  “Not a syllable.”

  “It’s connected, Manny. Somehow it’s connected to all of this.”

  Chapter 30

  “Still not going to tell me where you got the Glock? I know you didn’t buy it. Never mind whatever the gun laws are, they’re not cheap, so you wouldn’t have sprung for it.”

  Rembert didn’t reply. He sat on the lawn chair next to the tiller and looked toward the setting sun. She had to admit the sun was beautiful, coloring the water a molten orange, loons cutting low over the chop and sending out their mournful cries.

  They’d dropped anchor next to the buoy Sully had put down earlier.

  “Don’t leave me, Rem. If nature calls—”

  He picked up the “stadium buddy” on the deck next to him and dropped it back down. She’d bought it at the sporting-goods store where she’d gotten her change of clothes.

  “And if any knife-wielding girl swims out here—”

  He pointed to the gun that protruded from his waistband.

  “I’m going to be down awhile.” She didn’t know how long, but the rebreather was a far better option than switching out tanks. “It’ll be dark before I—”

  He pointed to the pontoon’s fore and aft lights and to a battery light near the motor that he could use for reading, all part of Sully’s H.I.S. setup.

  “I hope you don’t get too—”

  He flapped the Western paperback and gestured to a small radio.

  “Look, if you don’t want to be here, you shouldn’t have said that you’d—” She’d been talking to him while she put on the equipment.

  “No, Annja, I don’t want to be here. You know I don’t want to be here. It is dangerous being anywhere around you. Me and Sully were across the whole lake and it was still dangerous. Sully got knifed. She was waving the damn thing at me, too. No, I don’t want to be here, but I’m here. It’s my best option right now, all right. That lesser of two evils. And no, I’m not going to talk about the gun—ever—or the auction or Aeschelman, who by the way is not a nice man. Not right now anyway. So go down looking for your friend Edgar’s pyramid or Sully’s Snakeship or whatever else you’re after. And then when you’re done with all of this...” He flapped the paperback again. “Then we can go home. I can sell my video, and I can go to work for another station and never ever film another episode of Chasing History’s Monsters again or catch another equally lame assignment from Doug. So when you come back to this crazy town to finish up the Her Imperial Snakeship segment, you can bring some other idiot with you.”

  Annja wished she hand’t prodded him; it was better when he wasn’t talking to her. She dropped into the lake and embraced its otherworldliness, happy to get away from Rembert. The dry suit would keep out the chill, and the rebreather with it... She really wouldn’t even be leaving bubbles behind.

  She passed Bob the Boulder and the wrecked boat, saw a three-foot-long muskellunge swimming lazily along the bottom. That was what the giant had been that she’d encountered hours ago. She’d described the fish to the man at the dive shop, and he’d told her it was a muskie, more properly called a muskellunge, the most coveted game fish in these inland lakes, a trophy fifty or sixty inches long. Annja knew the one in the Snakeship’s Maw was a trophy. Maybe in the secret depths of Rock Lake they just grew big.

  Her visibility was good, at least thirty feet, no diatoms here and minimal silt. Despite that, Annja had difficulty finding the crevasse, even though she’d memorized the pertinent page in the dive log and thought she had exactly retraced her steps from earlier today. It took her close to a half hour, and at the end of that she’d worried that maybe she wasn’t going to find it ever again. As far as the lake was concerned, the gash at the bottom really wasn’t all that long or wide, like a thin scar on a man’s chest. No wonder it had gone undetected. Joe had no doubt found it by accident. And without his dive logs...she would have never found it.

  The dive computer told her she hadn’t been far off her guess. The bottom of the rent was two hundred and ten feet down from the surface. Annja took the left, or what approximated the east leg of it, coming to what appeared to be a dead end until she aimed her light first one way and then the next, revealing the stone wall of a Mayan structure and a narrow gap between it and the rock wall. She’d thought about it on the ride to the hospital when Rembert wasn’t saying anything. An earthquake seemed the most logical explanation. The ground had opened up and dropped the building into it, sealing it in a rocky embrace and at the same time creating the lake and covering up the Native American burial mounds.

  Like the chieftain’s passed-down tale of their gods changing the land and calling up a lake to take care of the Mayan blight, Annja recalled. She took pictures of the stone and where it practically joined the natural rock wall, focusing on symbols that had been worn thin by time and the water. Then she hooked the camera to her belt and slipped in the narrow gap, going only a dozen feet before she could no longer fit. Wiggling free of the rebreather tank, she kept the mouthpiece in and held the tank to her side and started squeezing deeper in.

  “I would have taken more risks.” The haunting, prophetic words returned. But how many more risks did Annja have in her? Pressed between the worked stone and the natural rock, her flashlight focused on the hieroglyphic symbols, Annja managed to tug the camera up, take a few pictures that she prayed weren’t blurry and stuff it back. She looked down, seeing that she was no longer shuffling across the sandy bottom that had been part of the crevasse, but was on flat stone. It looked like a sidewalk, with its mortared segments every so many steps. Steps? She was on one of the steps of the Mayan pyramid.

  Her heart raced and she felt her chest grow tight with excitement. All thoughts of Edgar and Rembert, Doug and Sully, and Chasing History’s Monsters and Lakeside...all of it fled. There was only her and this moment of discovery, this amazing revelation, a once-in-a-lifetime happening. She felt euphoric.

  It was a sensation she wanted to bottle and keep and imbibe over and over, an archaeological junkie on a high she’d never experienced before and perhaps never would again. Annja took her time. She crept through the narrow gap, touching the worked stone only when she had to, feeling the natural rock behind her. So much of what once must have been intricate and beautiful were mere su
ggestions, a hint of a sun symbol, a half man/half jaguar, then an elk with the stylized visage of a man.

  A few of the etchings had been deeper and she could better make out just how detailed they’d been. Half men/half badgers, birds with their wings spread, symbols she didn’t know the meaning of but that she managed to get pictures of.

  Farther in, the gap widened and she could put the rebreather back on properly. Down and to her left the crevasse opened and descended even farther, and her light stretched about forty feet. Up, she could see the top of the pyramid. It resembled one she’d seen at El Mirador, which was one hundred and eighty feet tall.

  She followed the structure down, using both her dive computer and high-powered flashlight for reference. She reached the bottom and took a reading. Three hundred feet below the surface. Rock Lake had held on to this secret for a very long time. She climbed back up, taking pictures along the way, especially of symbols that were the most legible, using her light and her computer and setting the height of the pyramid at about one hundred and fifty feet tall.

  Once more she followed it to the base, but on a different side, taking more pictures, finding places where the carvings looked as if they’d just been made. There were more images of suns than of any one other thing, half men/half animals, symbols she had no clue to their meaning, images of death gods and depictions of beautiful long-tailed birds that tugged at her memory. She knew a name for the bird, but it was escaping her at the moment.

  The temple had nine steps, which was usually symbolic of the nine layers of the underworld. Likely members of a royal family were buried inside...along with sacrifices.

  Down and up again on another side, she found an entrance at the midpoint. Her heart quickened, and the euphoric rush skittered through her. A part of her wished she could share this with someone—Doug maybe, though he’d try to find a sensational angle with it, wouldn’t truly appreciate everything this represented. Edgar. Oh, she wished Edgar could have seen his work become this reality. The old archaeologist couldn’t have come down here, but Bobby Wolfe or she could have been his eyes. Papa might have been coaxed down, though even he would have had a tough time squeezing through the gap.