Excavation (3 page)

She took off her glasses, settled them back in her pocket, and sighed softly, clearly well accustomed to passing on a dire diagnosis. “Yes. I'd say he came from Western Europe. I'd guess Portugal. And given enough time and more study, I could probably pinpoint even the exact province.” She shook her head. “I'm sorry, Henry.”

He recognized the sympathy in her eyes. With despair in his heart, he struggled to keep himself composed. He stared down at the Dominican cross in his hand. “He must have been captured by the Incas,” he finally said. “And eventually sacrificed to their gods atop Mount Arapa. If his blood was spilled on such a sacred site, European or not, they would have been forced to mummify his remains. It was probably why they left him his cross. Those who died on holy sites were honored, and it was taboo to rob their corpses of any valuables.”

The reporter had been hurriedly jotting notes, even though she had a tape recorder also monitoring their conversation. “It'll make a good story.”

“Story, maybe…even a journal article or two…” Henry shrugged, attempting a weak smile.

“But not what you were hoping for,” Joan added.

“An intriguing oddity, nothing more. It sheds no new light on the Incas.”

“Perhaps your dig back in Peru will produce more intriguing finds,” the pathologist offered.

“There is that hope. My nephew and a few other grad students are delving into a temple ruin as we speak. Hopefully, they'll have better news for me.”

“And you'll let me know?” Joan asked with a smile. “You know I've been following your discoveries in both the
National Geographic
and
Archaeology
magazines.”

“You have?” Henry stood a little straighter.

“Yes, it's all been very exciting.”

Henry's smile grew wider. “I'll definitely keep you updated.” And he meant it. There was a certain charm to this woman that Henry still found disarming. Add to that a generous figure that could not be completely hidden by her sterile lab coat. Henry found a slight blush heating his cheeks.

“Joan, you'd better come see this,” the radiologist said in a hushed voice. “Something's wrong with the CT.”

Joan swung back to the monitor. “What is it?”

“I was just fiddling with some mid-sagittal views to judge bone density. But all the interior views just come back blank.” As Henry looked on, Dr. Reynolds flipped through a series of images, each a deeper slice through the interior of the skull. But each of the inner images was the same: a white blur on the monitor.

Joan touched the screen as if her fingers could make sense of the pictures. “I don't understand. Let's recalibrate and try again.”

The radiologist tapped a button and the constant clacking from the machine died away. But a sharper noise, hidden behind the knock of the scanner's rotating magnets, became apparent. It flowed from the speakers: a high-pitched keening, like air escaping from the stretched neck of a balloon.

All eyes were drawn to the speakers.

“What the hell is that noise?” the radiologist asked. He tapped at a few keys. “The scanner's completely shut down.”

The
Herald
reporter sat closest to the window looking into the CT room. She sprang to her feet, knocking her chair over. “My God!”

“What is it?” Joan stood up and joined the reporter at the window.

Henry pushed forward, fearing for his fragile mummy. “What—?” Then he saw it, too. The mummy still lay on the scanning table in full view of the group. Its head and neck convulsed upon the table, rattling against the metal surface. Its mouth stretched wide open, the keening wail issuing from its desiccated throat. Henry's knees weakened.

“My God, it's alive!” the reporter moaned in horror.

“Impossible,” Henry sputtered.

The convulsing corpse grew violent. Its lanky black hair whipped furiously around its thrashing head like a thousand snakes. Henry expected at any moment that the head would rip off its neck, but what actually happened was worse. Much worse.

Like a rotten melon, the top of the mummy's skull blew
away explosively. Yellow filth splattered out from the cranium, spraying the wall, the CT scanner, and the window.

The reporter stumbled away from the fouled glass, her legs giving way beneath her. Her mouth chanted uncontrollably, “Oh my God oh my God oh my God…”

Joan remained calm, professional. She spoke to the stunned radiologist. “Bob, we need a Level Two quarantine of that room. Stat!”

The radiologist just stared, unblinking, as the mummy quieted its convulsions and lay still. “Damn,” he finally whispered to the fouled window. “What happened?”

Joan shook her head, still calm. She replaced her glasses and studied the room. “Perhaps a soft eruption of pocketed gas,” she mumbled. “Since the mummy was frozen at a high altitude, methane from decomposition could have released abruptly from the sudden thawing.” She shrugged.

The reporter finally seemed to have composed herself and tried to take a picture, but Joan blocked her with a palm. Joan shook her head. There would be no further pictures.

Henry had not moved since the eruption. He still stood with one palm pressed to the glass. He stared at the ruins of his mummy and the brilliant splatters sprayed on walls and machine. The debris shone brightly, glowing a deep ruddy yellow under the halogens.

The reporter, her voice still shaky, waved a hand at the fouled lead window. “What the hell is that stuff?”

Clutching the Dominican crucifix in his right fist, Henry answered, his voice dull with shock: “Gold.”

 

5:14
P.M.

Andean Mountains, Peru

 

“Listen…and you could almost hear the dead speak.”

The words drew Sam Conklin's nose from the dirt. He eyed the young freelance journalist from the
National Geographic
.

An open laptop computer resting on his knees, Norman Fields sat beside Sam and stared out across the jungle-shrouded ruins. A smear of mud ran from the man's cheek to his neck. Though he wore an Australian bushwacker and matching leather hat, Norman failed to look the part of the rugged adventure photojournalist. He wore thick glasses with lenses that slightly magnified his eyes, making him look perpetually surprised, and though he stood a little over six feet, he was as thin as a pole, all bones and lanky limbs.

Sam rolled up to one elbow on his mat of woven reed. “Sorry, what was that, Norm?” he asked.

“The afternoon is so quiet,” his companion whispered, his Boston accent flavoring his words. Norman closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “You can practically hear the ancient voices echoing off the mountains.”

Sam carefully laid the tiny paintbrush beside the small stone relic he had been cleaning and sat up. He tapped his muddied cowboy hat back farther on his head and wiped his hands on his Wranglers. Again, like so many times before, after working for hours upon a single stone of the ruins, the overall beauty of the ancient Incan city struck him like a draught of cold beer on a hot Texas afternoon. It was so easy to get lost in the fine ministrations of brush on stone and lose sight of the enormity and breadth of the whole. Sam pushed into a seated position to better appreciate the somber majesty.

He suddenly missed his cutting horse, a painted Appaloosa still back on his uncle's dusty ranch outside Muleshoe, Texas. He itched to ride among the ruins and follow its twisted paths to the mystery of the thick jungle beyond the city. He sat there with the ghost of a smile on his face, soaking up the sight.

“There is something mystical about this place,” Norman continued, leaning back upon his hands. “The towering peaks. The streams of mist. The verdant jungle. The very air smells of life, as if some substance in the wind encourages a vitality in the spirit.”

Sam patted the journalist's arm in good-natured agreement. The view was a wondrous sight.

Built in a high saddle between two Andean peaks, the newly discovered jungle city spread in terraced plazas across half a square mile. A hundred steps connected the various stonework levels. From Sam's vantage point among the remains of the Sun Plaza, he could survey the entire pre-Columbian ruin below him: from the homes of the lower city outlined in lines of crumbling stone, to the Stairway of the Clouds that led to Sun Plaza on which they perched. Here, like its sister city Machu Picchu, the Incas had displayed all their mastery of architecture, merging form and function to carve a fortress city among the clouds.

Yet, unlike the much-explored Machu Picchu, these ruins were still raw. Discovered by his uncle Hank only a few months back, much still lay hidden under vine and trees. A spark of pride flared with the memory of the discovery.

Uncle Hank had pinpointed its location from old tales passed among the Quechans of the region. Using hand-scrawled maps and pieces of tales, he had led a team out from Machu Picchu along the Urabamba River, and in only ten days, discovered the ruins below Mount Arapa. The discovery had been covered in all the professional journals and popular magazines. Nicknamed the Cloud Ruins, his uncle's picture beamed from many a front page. And he deserved it—it had been a miraculous demonstration of extrapolation and archaeological skill.

Of course, this sentiment might be clouded by Sam's feelings for his uncle. Hank had raised Sam since his parents had died in a car crash when he was nine years old. Henry's own wife had died of cancer the same year, about four months earlier. Drawn together in grief, they developed a deep bond. The two had become nearly inseparable. So it was to no one's surprise that Sam pursued a career in archaeology at Texas A&M.

“I'd swear if you listen close enough,” Norman said, “you
can even hear the wail of the warriors calling from high in the peaks, the whispers of hawkers and buyers from the lower city, the songs of the laborers in the terraced fields beyond the walls.”

Sam tried to listen, but all he could hear were the occasional snatches of raised voices and the rasping of shovel and pick echoing up from a nearby hole. The noises were not the voices of the Incan dead, but of the workers and his fellow students laboring deep in the heart of the ruins. The gaping hole led to a shaft that dropped thirty feet straight down, ending in a honeycomb of excavated rooms and halls, a subterranean structure of several levels. Sam sat up straighter. “You ought to be a poet, Norman, not a journalist.”

Norman sighed. “Just try listening with your heart, Sam.”

He thickened his west Texas drawl, knowing how it irritated Norman, who hailed from Boston. “Right now all I kin hear with is my belly. And it ain't saying nothing but complaining about dinnertime.”

Norman scowled at him. “You Texans have no poetry in your souls. Just iron and dust.”

“And beer. Don't forget the beer.”

The laptop computer suddenly chimed the six o'clock hour, drawing their attention.

A rattling groan escaped the narrow confines of Sam's throat. “We'd better wrap up the site before the sun sets. By nightfall, the place will be crawling with looters.”

Norman nodded and twisted around to gather his camera packs. “Speaking of grave robbers, I heard gunfire last night,” he said.

Sam frowned while storing away his brushes and dental picks. “Guillermo had to scare off a band of
huaqueros
. They were trying to tunnel into our ruins. If Gil hadn't found them, they might have pierced the dig and destroyed months of work.”

“It's good your uncle thought to hire security.”

Sam nodded, but he heard the trace of distaste in Norman's voice at the mention of Guillermo Sala, the ex-policeman from Cuzco assigned as the security head for the expedition. Sam shared the journalist's sentiment. Black-haired and black-eyed, Gil bore scars that Sam suspected weren't all from the line of duty. Sam also noticed the sidelong glances he shared with his compadres when Maggie passed. The quick snippets of Spanish exchanged with guttural laughs heated Sam's blood.

“Was anyone hurt in the gunfire?” Norman asked.

“No, just warning shots to scare off the thieves.”

Norman continued stuffing his gear. “Do you really think we'll find some tomb overflowing with riches?”

Sam smiled. “And discover the Tutankhmen of the New World? No, I don't think so. It's the dream of gold that draws the thieves, but not my uncle.
Knowledge
is what lured him here—and the truth.”

“But what is he is so doggedly searching for? I know he seeks some proof that another tribe existed before the Incas, but why this stubborn need for secrecy. I need to report to the
Geographic
at some point to update them before the next deadline.”

Sam bunched his brows. He had no answer for Norman. The same questions had been echoing in his own mind. Uncle Hank was keeping some snippet of information close to his chest. But this was always like the professor. He was open in all other ways, but when it came to professional matters, he could be extremely tight-lipped.

“I don't know,” Sam finally said. “But I trust the professor. If he has his nose into something, we'll just have to wait him out.”

A shout suddenly arose from the excavated hole on the neighboring terrace: “Sam! Come look!”

Ralph Isaacson's helmeted head popped from the shaft, excitement bright in his eyes. The large African-American, a fellow grad student, hailed from the University of
Alabama. Financed on a football scholarship, he had excelled in his undergraduate years and managed to garner an academic scholarship to complete his masters in archaeology. He was as sharp as he was muscular. “You have to see this!” The carbide lamp of Ralph's mining helmet flashed toward them. “We've reached a sealed door with writing on it!”

“Is the door intact?” Sam called back, getting to his feet excitedly.