Tears of the Jaguar (8 page)

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.”

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...”

“
Miss
Miller is not here,” Bowerdale concluded.

And she wouldn’t know what to do anyway
, he added in his head.

“We’ll have to cover the hole,” he said.

“The entire
cenote
?” said James. “We’ll never do it. We don’t have the materials.”

“Then we had better get them, hadn’t we?” said Bowerdale.

“OK,” the kid said with a shrug, his tone suggesting that it wasn’t OK at all. “I’ll tell Eustachio.”

“And tell him he can come down here himself next time,” said Bowerdale. “I don’t like dealing with errand boys.”

James bridled.

“He can’t manage the ladder safely,” he said. “His leg...”

“Then maybe he should find a new line of work.”

James took a breath and said, “You want me to pass that along too?”

“Just get them to cover the hole,” said Bowerdale.

The student didn’t speak or nod. He just turned and made his way back down the passage. In seconds, Bowerdale could hear the ladder creaking as he climbed up to the surface.

James was right, of course. There was no way they would be able to cover the
cenote
in any way that would really keep people out, and he wouldn’t have insisted on it if he hadn’t started to feel so crossed. He adjusted the light he had brought down with him so he could look at the jewels and the rest of the bundle with the carved piece of tree trunk, the ring, and the gold rod with the dove. It annoyed him to admit it, but Miller was right. They just didn’t belong. He needed to find out what they were
and quickly. In the right hands, he was sure they would be worth something. Possibly a great deal.

He heard the noise of the ladder but didn’t bother turning until he realized it was her, bent almost double in the low passage.

“You told them to cover the entire hole?” she said, without preamble.

“We have to protect the tomb.”

“Not like that, we don’t. That could take days, even if we had the materials, which we don’t.”

“So what’s your solution?”

“We set up fence posts and ropes to cordon off the
cenote
, for safety as much as anything else...”

“That won’t keep people out if they want to get in.”

“That was why I was about to propose that we stay here overnight. We can work shifts, some preparing the lab, the others watching the tomb.”

“For how long?”

“Until we can safely move everything out,” she said.

“That could be weeks.”

“It won’t be that long. It can’t be. We’ll get work lights out here so we can start shifting stuff out as soon as they have the storage space ready.”

“Days, then,” said Bowerdale.

“I put in a request to get the official archivist down here as soon as we made the discovery yesterday. I’m hoping we can get him tomorrow or the day after. When he gets here, we can start the cataloging process. In the meantime, we ready transit crates and we prepare the lab to receive the artifacts. OK?”

He wanted to argue, doubly so now that he realized that James was behind her, shadowed by her great stork-like frame, listening.

“You’re the boss,” he said.

James had volunteered to take the first watch because he knew Alice didn’t want to do it and because he thought she would be impressed by how casually he agreed to sit in a tomb in the jungle in the dark. Alice was sexy, in a grungy kind of way. She wore no makeup except black eyeliner and had a tough-looking tattoo on one shoulder. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent, like she’d been living underground for most of her life. She had strong, sinewy arms, and her legs were made for hiking boots, but her chest and belly were soft. She had great boobs. Not real big, but shapely. Sometimes she went without a bra and you could see her wide, pink nipples through her shirt. Nice.