Tears of the Jaguar (43 page)

Even in daylight the Witch’s House gave him the creeps, and the sun would be down within the hour. In Ek Balam the site had been largely open with only isolated trees breaking up the grassy expanses between structures, but Kabah on this side of the highways was a dense forest of thin, stunted trees, with vines and brambles encroaching from all sides. Aguilar hated the jungle: the humidity, the flies, the constant fear of finding a fer-de-lance poised to strike each time you moved a log or a stone. Aguilar had a morbid fear of snakes, and knew the place was alive with more than the big lumbering iguanas. One of the locals said there really were jaguar in the woods: rare, but out there. As if they needed something else to worry about.

The Witch’s House itself was little more than a stone chamber on an unexcavated mound a little farther up the path. They had swept the sides of the mound, trimming back the undergrowth with machetes so that they could see what they were dealing with, but it was hot, slow work, and their lack of progress was starting to annoy them. It hadn’t been reasonable to expect that they would make the find on the first day, but he had been hoping for it anyway, and now the light was starting to fade.

He drank from the cooler constantly, but they couldn’t keep the water cold for more than a few hours, and it was evening, so the “coolers” had been warm since lunchtime. If this had been a real dig they might have had a generator, but the only power
they had came from the van batteries, and they couldn’t squander that on refrigeration. So he drank the warm water and scowled, and was about to pour himself another cup when Krista shouted, and suddenly everyone was running.

Dimitri paced while Bowerdale stared at the map for the thousandth time. Alice was curled up on the back seat, as she had been for at least two hours. It seemed like days since Dimitri had been asleep, and even his naps had been scarred by the dream. “Well?” he said.

Bowerdale shrugged, putting one hand to the bruise that stretched from his jaw up to his blackened right eye, and smiled in what was supposed to be a reassuring way. But Dimitri knew he was scared. So he should be. They wouldn’t be in this situation if Bowerdale hadn’t involved that idiot James, packing him off to Coba to dig up the bag. Dimitri knew Bowerdale had been trying to cut him out of the deal, trying to partner with some kid who would do as he was told. Well, the kid was dead, though Bowerdale hadn’t known that till he wandered into Uxmal looking to find his little errand boy. Finding Dimitri
instead had freaked the archaeologist out, and Dimitri had given him a beating for emphasis.

“I’m not sure,” Bowerdale said. “It would help if I knew why they had gone to Kabah.”

“How should I know?” spat Dimitri. “You think they call and tell me? I just follow them, but now they have CIA with them. We have to know where they are going and we have to take it before they get it. That or we let them get it, then take it from them.”

Bowerdale flinched, nervous in his rumpled seersucker suit. Dimitri hated that suit and Bowerdale’s dandified airs. He couldn’t imagine why any man would dress like that, especially out here where there was no one to impress.

“Take it?” said Bowerdale, his eyes flashing about. “How?”

Dimitri drew the gun, the CZ 75B, a decent Czech 9mm, with the ten-inch silencer, and considered it significantly. He didn’t like using the silencer. It felt wrong when the gun fired and it increased the chance of jamming. Most of all, though he couldn’t explain why, he missed the sound of an unmuffled weapon, the crack of it, the flash from the muzzle. The silencer made the gun absurd, apologetic, with its polite cough. He missed the authority, the command of the thing.

“You can’t,” stuttered Bowerdale, staring at the gun. “There are too many of them.”

“Then you’ll have to figure out where the stones are before they do,” said Dimitri.

It had been like this in Bosnia, he thought. When things had gotten bad—really bad—when there were only those who would do what was necessary and those who would not. Lots of them had balked. He had not. You put your mind to it and did
it, and any fear or anxiety was squeezed to nothing so that it only bubbled up in dreams.

The bulletproof women and children hemming him in against the back of the truck, their eyes locked on his so he couldn’t see to shoot...

He had grown what they called a thicker skin, though the skin was around his brain, enclosing his mind so that he felt nothing except the desire to get it done and move on. He sensed this would be like that. The girl was falling apart, and the man, though he pretended to still care about the stones, had already given up, unwilling to do what was necessary and only there at all because he was terrified of what Dimitri would do to him if he tried to run. As he should be.

Earlier, the three of them had climbed one of the palaces in Kabah and he had scanned the area with binoculars, but Miller and the others were nowhere to be seen, and the deep gold light was fading. The map showed other ruins on the west side of the highway, but the only one you could see from here was that rough, moldering pyramid, and there was no one there. If they were at one of the more remote sites, it might be impossible to get close without being seen, and whatever he said to Bowerdale, Dimitri didn’t want a firefight with the CIA. He needed a diversion, or darkness, which was why they were now waiting in the car for the last rays of light to go.

He was thinking about this when he saw another car pull into the lot. He trained his binoculars on it and watched as a familiar woman got out.

Krista Rayburn just knelt where she was and stared, the cry still on her lips.

It was a slab of limestone about halfway up the mound and covered with about six inches of soil. She had been probing the earth as they cleared the weedy undergrowth, and her rod had struck something hard. She tried it twice more, mapping the size of the stone. She scrabbled at the dirt first with a trowel and then with her hands, pulling up the grass and vine so that the covering mat of vegetation tore free like a rug, green on one side, a thick tangle of roots on the other. Once she had started to pull, it had come up almost in one piece, revealing a stone the size of a small door.

Carved into the surface was a crude relief of a man, short and barrel-chested, but without the hawkish profile of the locals or their flattened skulls. The light was low enough that she got as much from her fingertips as from her eyes, and she swept
them over the slab hungrily. The carved figure wore the feathery wings of the Ek Balam kings, and he brandished a sword in his one good hand. The other was missing from the elbow. And on either side of the figure was a letter, not a Mayan glyph, but an English letter: an
E
and a
C
.

Edward Clifford.

They were all around her by then. No one spoke, but their shadows made it even harder to see, so someone trained a flashlight on the stone. Then they used mattocks and picks to prize the stone free, working them into the crack around the edge and then leaning all their weight on the handles. The stone was heavy, but they worked silently, sweating, adjusting, until a finger of dark space appeared down the left edge. Then they moved to the right side and repositioned their tools. Krista caught Porfiro’s eye as he wiped the perspiration from his unreadable face.

Everyone pitched in. Even the CIA men used crowbars and logs as levers to work the slab free. Aguilar began repeating a Spanish word she didn’t know, and it became a rhythm they worked to, straining in unison, pausing, then pulling again, until—with a low, rasping, groan, the stone began to move. They slid it to the side rather than flipping it over, so that they were less likely to break it, and then stood there in silence, panting, hands on knees, staring.

It was hard to see past the grave goods to the human remains, but Aguilar would have a fit if he started moving things out of the way, so Chad Rylands shifted his position and guided the beam of his flashlight as carefully as he could. The right arm of the skeleton was severed just below the elbow. Even from here, and surrounded by all this gaping and gasping, it was clear that the bones of the thighs and upper arms were severely shortened, and the skull was disproportionately large with a prominent forehead. Below the knee and elbow the shortening was less profound, but the feet seemed undersized. He would need proper analysis to see if they displayed the separation between the third and fourth digits characteristic of achondroplasia, but he was as sure as he could be: this was the skeleton of the dwarf whose hand lay under the great pyramid in Ek Balam. The discoloration of the bones fit Miller’s guess as to the date of internment—about three hundred and fifty years ago—but confirmation would take analysis
of a kind he couldn’t do squatting by a hole in the ground of some Mexican forest. If only he could get all that other stuff out of the grave, and get rid of his gawking colleagues, he could get some real work done.

Nick Reese had not removed the camera’s viewfinder from his eye since the grave had been opened. He zoomed and fired the shutter, aware of little beyond the tiny electronic pop of the flash followed by its faint recharging whine. As he recomposed and shot, parts of the ancient Jewel House inventory he had read a thousand times in documents from the interregnum ran through his head. He carried a copy of the 1652 transcription made by Cromwell’s agents folded inside his camera case, and though he couldn’t have recited it perfectly, the items chimed in his memory as his eyes raked the contents of the grave.

One large blue sapphire, ten large diamonds, and as many rubies. 232 pearls. Four rubies in a fleur-de-lis, seven diamond crosses. 20 sapphires, 83 pearls. A small crown found in an iron chest, formerly in the custody of Lord Cottington, weighing 2 1b. 10 oz., whereof three
ounces are allowed for the weight of the stones. The globe, weighing 1 lb. 5 oz. Two coronation bracelets, weighing 7 oz.: Three rubies balases, set in each of the bracelets. Twelve large pearls. Two scepters, weighing 16 oz. A long rod of silver gilt, weighing 11.5 oz. One gold cup set with two sapphires and two rubies balases, weighing 15 oz. Diverse pieces of broken gold enameled, put together in a bag, weighing 5 lb.