Tears of the Jaguar (9 page)

He walked around the rope that circled the
cenote
, looking at the sky. He’d never seen so many stars in his life. James, who had been raised in Hackensack, had barely spent a day in the country in his life. His folks had taken him camping in Pennsylvania once but they had come back early when he reacted badly to
a bee sting. He’d been a city kid ever since, which was perfect really, since he was the kind of out-and-proud geek most at home in front of his MacBook or PlayStation, venturing out only to go to classes, the library, or the movies. Being here in the dark, with no one around, and just the chirping of crickets and frogs, was like being on another planet.

Alice
.

He hadn’t fancied her that much when he first met her. But he’d gotten used to her scowl and the way she looked you right in the eye when she talked. And she didn’t have the same smug look as a lot of cute girls he’d seen, the look that said,
Forget it, loser.
Sometimes the two of them sat up late and drank tequila together, talking about the clueless undergrads and Blowhard Bowerdale. Soon, he hoped, she might sleep with him. She wouldn’t think it was a big deal. It was to him, but she didn’t need to know that. His best chance with Alice was if she thought they were just fooling around, and that it didn’t mean anything. That was partly why he liked her. She was immune to other people. He envied her that, wished he cared less about things, including her.

He checked his watch. He had already been there an hour, sitting under the deeper shade of the ancient acropolis. He spent ten minutes at the mouth of the tunnel flicking stones into the
cenote
, listening for their distant splash, and then decided to check out the tomb. He could sit down there in the dark and listen to Bauhaus on his iPod: crank the whole eleven minutes of “Bella Lugosi’s Dead” down there among the bones.

Cool.

He got a flashlight, stepped over the rope, and eased his way off the platform and onto the aluminum ladder. They had lashed
it at the top with nylon rope and pinned it into the earth below with steel pegs, but the metal had a natural spring in it, and it felt precarious. He hadn’t admitted it to anyone, but he didn’t like heights, and the prospect of falling into the
cenote
with its underground river and who knew what swimming in it scared the crap out of him.

The birds had discovered the new water source before the sun had gone down, and he’d watched what he thought were swallows diving down and skimming the surface with their beaks. He thought it was one of them that whistled past his head as he began his descent, but he realized as it whirred and fluttered away that it was actually a bat. He wasn’t crazy about bats either. They had vampire bats down here too, he thought.

Just focus on the ladder
.

With each footstep, the metal bounced and shifted under his weight, and he was glad to get a foot on the remains of the passage floor. He turned carefully, because the roof was low. Deborah had to virtually crawl just to get in. James wasn’t so sure about Deborah. He liked her OK, he guessed, but she seemed kind of hard, not with Alice’s
whatever
apathy, but with something else, something deep and focused. Determination, maybe. She was kind of cute, for an older chick, but she was a good four inches taller than him, and that wasn’t cool.

Deborah had said they probably wouldn’t have work lights and a generator for at least another day. He snapped on the flashlight and the beam fell on the carved faces flanking the fanged hell mouth with the measuring rods they had set up for the pictures. He moved the beam into the opening and found the skeleton with the green death mask, its eyes and teeth made of unnaturally bright alabaster shells, and he shuddered. The place
had been weird even in daylight. Now, in the dark—the kind of dark a city boy like James had never seen before—with only the yellowish circle of his flashlight, it was beyond creepy, like being miles under the earth. Every sound reverberated oddly, and he could hear the soft lapping of the water in the
cenote
funneled up to him like it was being amplified through some old-timey ear trumpet.

Still, weird or not, it was also kind of cool, he told himself. He imagined what kind of mileage he’d get out of it back in the States. Any time anyone mentioned Bauhaus he’d have the best story about this one time in Mexico when he listened to Peter Murphy chanting about the virginal brides filing past Bela Lugosi’s tomb, while he was sitting in an
actual
tomb with this ancient Mayan king lying exactly where he had lain for fifteen hundred years or more, with
real
vampire bats wheeling and swooping in the night just outside the tomb’s entrance.

Ting
.

James looked up. It was the sound of the ladder. The sound of
weight
on the ladder. He listened, motionless.

Ting
.

And something else, a shuffling, scratching sound. Someone was coming down. Someone who was moving slowly, as if they did not want to be heard.

For a second he sat immobile, staring at the black hollow of the door, and when the sound came again, he felt his heart rising in his throat. He remembered the flashlight and spun it toward the entrance. It showed nothing but the tunnel itself and, if he bent and squinted a little, the very bottom of the ladder. Whoever was on the ladder wasn’t down yet. Perhaps the light would warn them off. He played it around the tunnel walls
and then, on impulse, began to talk, naturally as he could. Not shouting, just chatting, as if there was someone in here with him.

“Just down Essex Street from the medical center,” he said. “You know it?”

He hesitated and then, without really deciding to, added a kind of grunt in a lower register, something that might sound like another voice.

“Lived there all my life until college.”

He added another grunt, and behind it, out in the passage, there was silence. His eyes were wide, fixed on the entrance to the tomb, his mouth shaping words that hadn’t gone through his mind, all his attention focused on what he might hear outside.

“Anyway, I figured I’d just...”

Ting
.

The sound stopped him. He tried to find the thread of his imaginary conversation and it came again.

Ting
.

Whoever was on the ladder was moving quickly now, less cautiously.

The only question was whether they were going up or down.

Martin Bowerdale moved silently down the hall from the dormitory and tried the key to the lab door. He eased it open gently, slowly. He could see no light, but Aguilar had a habit of working unpredictable hours.

He breathed a sigh of relief. The lab was empty, the computers powered down. He closed the door behind him and locked it. He turned on Aguilar’s PC and entered his own name and password so that the system logged him on. He then accessed the ball-shaped webcam Aguilar never used, which sat on top of the monitor, angled down toward the keyboard. Bowerdale was an old-fashioned archaeologist in the field, but he had long ago conceded the value of computers and learned how to use them. When they had returned from the site that evening he had turned this machine on, set the webcam to record, and then asked Aguilar to access his data on a pot from the tomb. He now replayed the stored video, rewinding to the point where
the Mexican’s hands tapped out his password on the keyboard:
Nieves
. His dog’s name, if Bowerdale remembered rightly.

Isn’t that sweet
.

Bowerdale turned the camera feed off and deleted it, then hit the “switch user” button. He typed in Aguilar’s login name and the password and pulled up the folders he had created from the Ek Balam artifacts. He opened his own e-mail, addressed a message, and attached everything he could find on the red crystal in Aguilar’s files before sending it. He got an acknowledgement ninety seconds later. While he waited for his cell phone to ring, he shut the computer down.

Bowerdale set the phone on the desk and watched it for half an hour. Then another. He checked his watch. When ten more minutes had passed with no call, he got up and began to walk around. He listened at the door, and the hallway outside was quiet, but he had begun to sweat.

What was taking so long?

Ten more minutes and he’d call preemptively, protocol or no protocol. He stared at the phone where it sat, mute, beside the computer.

Finally, it buzzed, wobbling like a big black roach on the desk. He snatched it up and answered it in a thick whisper.

“What the hell took you so long?” he demanded.

“You need to not call me again, OK, Bowerdale?” said the Texan. “We’re done.”

“What are you talking about?” asked the archaeologist, baffled. “Clements, you called me, remember?”

“I mean, I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” said Clements. “You got me? No calls, no e-mails, no schemes.”

“What about the stone?” Bowerdale demanded.

“You aren’t listening. I said, I want out. I don’t want to see anything about those stones again. Ever. You understand me?”

“Excuse me?” said Bowerdale. He was trying to sound cheery, upbeat, as if this was just bargaining, but he had never heard the dealer sound so scared.

“Goodbye, Martin. Have a nice life.”

“Wait,” he spluttered. “What’s the problem? I’ll give you good terms, just tell me what you think it’s worth.”

“To me? Nothing,” said Clements.

“But you said I was right,” Bowerdale hissed. “You said it was valuable.”

“Not to me, Martin. And believe me when I say that the people who will want it are not guys you want to deal with.”

“This is nuts,” said Bowerdale.

“People are coming for this find, Martin. Bad people. For all I know, they may already be there. If I were you, I’d forget you ever saw that tomb and I’d get out of Mexico. Now.”

And before Bowerdale could think of a response, the line went dead.

The experts Deborah had hired to investigate the new find drove in from Cancun and Merida airports first thing in the morning. She waited for them at the lab in Valladolid feeling nervous, not just because there would suddenly be several new faces on site looking to Deborah for direction, but because their arrival reminded her of just how big the find under the pyramid was. It went without saying that any one of them was better qualified to lead the dig than she was. While she waited for their van to arrive, she called Steve Powel in Chicago and told him as much, but he didn’t want to hear it.

“This is a Cornerstone project,” he said, “and you are our man on site.”

She wasn’t certain if that “man” was a joke or some weird term of authority that she was to take as gender neutral. Maybe it was supposed to be a compliment, she thought, her heart sinking.

“You know who is coming?” she said, refusing to be diverted. “Krista Rayburn, the environmental archaeologist from Florida U. Marissa Stroud, the epigrapher from Minnesota who wrote the closest thing to a dictionary of Mayan glyphs we have, as well as that history of world royal regalia. Not to mention Chad Rylands, from Texas A&M, who wrote the world’s most important study of Mayan bones
before
he was tenured.”

“I know,” said Powel. “I suggested two of them, remember?”

Deborah hadn’t believed they could get Stroud, but Powel had pushed her to inquire. Stroud, it was rumored, had been so obsessed by her research that she had divorced a husband years ago and given him custody of their child without so much as a fight.

“Yes, they are top people,” said Powel. “But so are you. Orchestrating this dig is not a matter for specialists, Deborah. They lean toward the things they find most interesting. They divert resources toward their pet projects and ideas. Running the dig is about coordinating experts, getting them to work together for the good of the whole, and that—Deborah—is a job for a generalist. If you don’t think you can do it, tell me now, and I’ll replace you, but don’t mistake their expertise with bones and seeds and glyphs for the ability to run a dig.”