Touching Midnight

by Fiona Hood-Stewart

  He looked chagrined. “Hey, a guy’s gotta try, but don’t worry.” He made a production of examining his hands. “I’ve always liked my fingers.”

  “It’s not your fingers that are at risk.”

  Luis backed off, the grin diminished but not vanquished. “Ay, ay, what am I thinking? Trying to seduce the oldest virgin in Peru.”

  The oldest virgin in Peru? She had to be the oldest virgin in creation.

  Jay’s head jerked up. For a disconcerting moment his gaze fastened on hers, direct and unsettling; then he continued on toward the mission’s office, with Luis falling obediently in behind.

  Quin stared at the long line of Jay’s back as he walked up the veranda steps. When he’d looked at her, the air had been charged. She transferred her attention to the computer screen.

  He couldn’t have picked up her thought.

  That mind-reading stuff had happened years back, and only twice: once when she’d dreamed of healing him, and again when they’d had the break-in at the mission. It had been an aberration, just one more kicker to the Chambers curse, and it had seemed to be linked to the healing, something she didn’t do anymore.

  At midnight Quin slipped out of bed and dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt. Shouldering a small daypack containing water, a flashlight, spare batteries and her notebook, and carrying her boots, she padded down the stairs, careful to avoid the steps that creaked. When she reached the kitchen, she laced on the boots, stepped outside and quietly closed the door behind her.

  The moonlight was strong, its cold beam turning the Agueda to liquid silver, and making the shadows that surrounded the exposed ruin look black and impenetrable.

  Walking with care, she picked her way around the outbuildings, avoiding the gate, which also creaked, and climbing over the fence instead. She intended to circumnavigate the ruin and the armed thugs Cain paid to pull sentry duty, and approach the ruin from the high ground to the north. With any luck, she would be able to slip through the temple gate unnoticed.

  The moonlight made the going easier, but as she picked her way over a jumble of boulders, then waded knee-deep across the shallow part of the river, she could have wished for clouds and humidity. In the clear, thin air, every sound carried.

  The old track to the grove was thickly overgrown, making the going difficult, but she’d walked it so often that she still remembered where the gnarled roots of trees snaked across the ground, and where the hillside was pitted with dents and holes.

  Nervous excitement added an edge to the tension that gripped her as she skirted a dip that was little more than an inky pool of shadow in the moonlit landscape. She felt as if she was picking her way across a graveyard. Seeing the landscape from the perspective of an archaeologist put the sinkholes in a whole different context. Maybe they were a natural phenomenon, formed when the limestone beneath had eroded—but it was also possible they were indications of collapsed structures beneath the ground.

  When she finally reached the high ground above the ruin, she paused and took in the view. Some of the exposed city that lay below had been cleaned up and laid bare, and the string lines marking out dwellings and avenues gleamed like cobwebs in the moonlight.

  Picking her way through the thick growth of trees and ferns, she slowly made her way down to the slip, skirting the raw edge until she judged she was directly above the location of the temple gate. Taking a breath, she stepped out of the concealment of the forest, expecting at any moment to hear a staccato demand to halt. She’d dressed in black to make herself more difficult to see, but that had been a mistake. Against the bleached clay pan of the slip, her black clothing stood out like the proverbial sore thumb.

  Minutes later, she eased down a terraced wall and took cover in the shadow of an outcropping of rock. Her spine tightened as she pressed against stone that still retained the residual warmth of the sun. For an unnerving moment she was sure someone had seen her, but as long seconds ticked by and no demand was issued, she shook off the creepy feeling.

  Taking a deep breath, she stepped out into the open. Simultaneously, a man emerged from the shadows that swamped the temple door. He was less than fifty meters away—so close she could make out his profile and the glint of something metallic in his hand. Heart pounding, she dropped to the ground. As the man stepped over a string line, his back was turned fully to her. Grabbing at the chance to escape the glaring exposure of the moonlight, Quin pushed to her feet and ducked behind the rock, wincing as a pebble rolled down the slope. As the man vaulted down a level and disappeared from sight, something about the graceful way he moved made the back of her neck prickle. She couldn’t be certain, but for a split second she had thought it was Ramirez—although she had no idea what he could possibly be doing poking around the ruin. If he wanted to steal artifacts, he would have better luck raiding the tent down at Cain’s encampment.

  Long minutes passed while she waited, watching and listening as her heart rate and breathing dropped to something approximating normal. One of the guards strolled by the gate, then descended several levels and perched on a step that formed part of the main avenue, his back to Quin. The guard further down the slope was more difficult to spot, but he was less of a threat. He seemed content to patrol the lower reaches of the cordoned-off area.

  Frowning at the laxity of security at night, when during the day security was so tight that even authorized personnel couldn’t enter or leave the site without being searched, Quin adjusted her pack and once more started toward the temple door. If the night-watchmen were slack, that was Cain’s problem and her advantage.

  Abruptly, a hand snaked out of the darkness and clamped over her mouth. Off balance and effectively muffled, Quin found herself pulled tight against a warm, firm body.

  Jay’s gaze connected with hers, and his hand over her mouth loosened a little, but he didn’t immediately release her. As the seconds stretched out she became increasingly aware of the masculine arm banded around her waist and the heat that radiated from Jay, even through the extra layer of the daypack. She turned her head enough that she could make eye contact again, her temple brushing his jaw.

  He lifted a finger to his mouth and pointed in the direction of the temple gate just as another figure detached itself from the shadows and followed the man who had reminded her of Ramirez.

  Cold invaded the pit of Quin’s stomach at how close she’d come to a head-on confrontation. She would have managed to evade the temple guards, but she had been about to walk into a bear trap.

  A tap on her shoulder and a hand sign signaled that he wanted to move back. Slowly, he removed his hand from her mouth.

  Treading with care on the stone-hard surface, Quin followed Jay until he literally disappeared, dropping silently into a natural dip into the ground. A hand came out to help her as she slithered down the side of a gouge that angled toward the edge of the forest. When they reached the cover of the trees, Jay turned and lifted a compact pair of binoculars to his eyes. Seconds later, he handed the glasses to her.

  “Night vision?”

  He shook his head. “Too much light with the full moon. These are infrared. They operate on thermals. Anything with a heat source, like a human body, will stand out.”

  Quin panned with the glasses. She had seen four men, two on active guard duty and two exiting the temple gate. According to the infrared glasses, there were eight.

  An image of the man who had reminded her of Ramirez replayed itself in her mind. With a small shudder, she handed the sleek piece of equipment back to Jay. “Are they all Cain’s men?”

  “Good question.” He pushed a branch aside, waited until Quin had stepped through, then flicked on a flashlight. The narrow beam illuminated a thick tunnel of undergrowth, which almost completely blocked out the moonlight.

  Extracting her own light from her pack, Quin followed Jay deeper into the jungle, stepping along a path that was worn enough to indicate he’d been this way more than once. “You’ve been watching Cain.”

  “Ever sin
ce he arrived. I also keep a guard on the mission. Jorge saw you leave and woke me. The only trouble was, I lost you when you went up the hill.”

  If he’d followed her, then he had been silent, because she’d checked her back trail more than once and hadn’t heard or seen a thing.

  The track grew steep, winding down into a gully that was choked with vines. It was a way she’d never used before because the terrain was so difficult, a puzzle of rocks and sinkholes, and too thickly overgrown to push through easily. Minutes later, they followed a stream bed until it culminated in a wall of rock. The silvery trickle of water formed a small pool, the surface as shiny and still as black glass, before the water simply disappeared beneath the ground.

  Above them, the bluff rose, silvery gray and impressive in the moonlight, creepers and lianas clinging to its face like dark garlands.

  As Quin picked her way over tumbled rocks, she automatically assessed the stone on the ground, gauging size and any regularity that might suggest it had been hand-cut and dressed. Her gaze lifted briefly, swept the rock face and caught on a moss-encrusted line almost hidden by the fall of a creeper. She stumbled and corrected, her heart missing a beat as she stared at the arrow-straight groove. It was no more than a few inches long, and so subtle it was a miracle she’d seen it at all. Chances were, if she’d searched this part of the valley during the day with the sun overhead she would have missed it. “There’s something here.”

  The height of the cut in the rock was above her head, which meant that in all probability it continued down to the ground. Her heart pounded as Jay shoved back a heavy fall of creeper to reveal a shadowy opening, and abruptly she was sure: after days of searching, she’d finally located one of the doors.

  Jay shone his light into the opening. “It’s not a cave.”

  Ducking beneath his arm, Quin stepped into the tunnel, watching her step, because the floor was littered with debris where part of the door and wall had collapsed. Now that she was inside the tunnel, slabs of cut stone were everywhere, lying amidst drifts of leaves and smooth deposits of silt where the small stream had overflowed and spilled into the opening. Like the groove in the stone she’d seen outside, the jagged edge of the broken door was blurred by lichen, indicating that the breach wasn’t recent. This particular door had been lying open and exposed for years.

  Jay concentrated the beam ahead, and the stale, acrid odor that permeated the tunnel registered.

  A shiver swept her as she identified bat guano. In her job, bats, snakes and creepy crawlies were an occasional hazard, but that didn’t mean she had to like them. “Don’t tell me this is where vampire bats hang out.”

  “Too big. They’ll be fruit bats—basically harmless—but there could be snakes and a few spiders.”

  Repressing another shiver, Quin adjusted the straps on her pack and followed Jay further into the tunnel.

  The debris on the floor gradually decreased, until they were walking on a smooth, level surface, although the floor itself was thick with leaf litter and compost from years of being open to the wind and weather. “We’re going downhill.”

  “And it’s as straight as a runway.” Jay flipped open a compass, the directional reading glowing fluorescent green. “We’re headed directly toward the temple, although we must be at least a kilometer from the main entrance.”

  Ahead, the beams of their flashlights bounced off a wall, and Quin’s heart sank. The tunnel ended in a pile of rubble.

  Jay climbed the rocks until he was close to the ceiling. Debris cascaded down in a shower of pebbles and stone dust. “Looks like this is it, unless we start moving rocks, but the chances are this is a separate building from the temple, anyway.”

  Quin played her light over the walls. Her gaze caught on a glyph, partially obscured by the rock fall. A wisp of “memory” tantalized.

  Like street signs, the glyphs were only placed where direction was required.

  “No,” she said flatly, staring at the wall of debris. “There’s more. This was a door.”

  Twenty

  Quin examined the blurred symbol, excitement overriding caution as she scrambled over loose scree and leaned close. The formation of the glyphs was similar to that of the gold seal—definitely not Incan or meso-American. She stared at the lines and curves, abruptly hungry for knowledge—her mind impatient to leapfrog the years of study that would be required to research a people who not only no longer existed but who weren’t even known to have existed.

  Tracing the shape with her finger, she let her mind go loose, but the glyph could have been carved from plastic for all the response it elicited. She was left with nothing more than the odd wisp of “memory” and the initial feeling she’d had when she’d first walked into the underground tunnel—more an impression than actual knowledge. “I don’t think this is a separate building. It’s connected to the temple.”

  “If this is part of the temple complex, that would make it at least four times larger than Cain estimated.”

  “But Cain’s mind is still stuck in Incan and meso-American cultures. The people who built these core structures weren’t Incan. They were something else—literally. Something so far back, they were probably a myth to the Incas.”

  She placed her palm on the smooth granite, absorbing the chill and the quiet, the ancient stillness of a structure that had remained intact not just for centuries, but millennia, since before Christ had walked the earth, and long, long before the Spanish Conquistadors had cut their bloody swath through South America.

  Excitement stirred, gripping her so powerfully that all the skin down her back tingled. So far there hadn’t been one bend in the tunnel; it had been dead straight, built for speed, not to confuse and conceal. “Whoever built the maze around the temple did it to protect the inner structure. A secret escape route fits in perfectly with that logic. We’ve got to find a way through this.”

  Jay watched Quin’s excitement, vibrating just below the surface, the way she practically melted into the glyph she was studying.

  Shifting the beam of the flashlight, he examined the intact portion of the tunnel. Moisture seeped between stone blocks and pooled to one side of the tunnel before draining somewhere beyond the collapsed wall, which indicated that, flat as the elevation seemed, the tunnel continued to slope downward.

  Going down on his haunches, he examined the gritty fragments and powdery dust that littered the floor. Like the rubble that blocked the tunnel, the stone chips were fresh, the edges sharp and lighter in color than the weathered surface of the stone. “It’ll be dangerous. The damage here is recent, probably from the last quake.”

  Quin climbed down from her perch. “No more dangerous than what Cain’s doing.”

  “A lot more dangerous. Cain’s got bracing equipment.”

  “We can’t just leave this.” Her gaze locked with his. “Or maybe we should tell Cain, so he can come here and dig—”

  “Keep your voice down.” Jay straightened and found himself standing toe-to-toe with Quin. “If the tunnel’s as old as you say, then it’s unstable. The wrong pitch could set off a collapse.”

  “It’s stood this long, it’ll last another week.”

  “It could take months to get through the blockage.”

  “Then it’ll take months.”

  Jay’s jaw tightened. He could see why Olivia and Hannah had spent years tearing their hair out over Quin. When she hadn’t been running around like a wild child, she’d been handing out orders. It had been a moot point who had actually run the mission before he’d taken over, and even then, the legend had lived on. Quin had liked to have her own way, and she’d usually gotten it. “If I tell you this place is out of bounds you’re not going to listen.”

  “Neither will Olivia.”

  He frowned. For days his mind had been fastened on Quin; he’d forgotten how fixated Olivia was on investigating the ruin. “That’s a point. If Olivia finds out this is here, she’ll set up camp.”

  He watched as Quin climbed over rubble a
nd began examining it, stone by stone.

  When it came down to it, as important as this find was, he didn’t care if the temple stood or fell: all he wanted was Quin safe, but short of locking her up, there was no way of keeping her out of here.

  His gaze swept the tunnel again, his mind automatically calculating angles and loads—the viability of the building material—and his gut tightened. The place wasn’t safe. It was a fact that man-made structures always crumbled. It was just a matter of time—and this one had endured a lot longer than most.

  To compound the problem, water was flowing through the wall, which was a bad sign. If there had ever been a drainage system, like the network of aqueducts Cain had found, it had long since failed. The water would have etched through the granite, soaking in over time, the acid dissolving salts and minerals, and breaking down granular structures. The rock now resembled nothing so much as a rotten tooth on the verge of collapse. The whole temple network would be in the same kind of shape—not an accident waiting to happen, but an accident in progress.

  As he studied the seeping wall, automatically cataloguing the residue of salts and minerals encrusting the leak, his mind did a familiar sideways shift into…blankness. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten the geological and engineering knowledge that was always there at his fingertips; it was simply there.

  “All right,” he said bleakly. “But you don’t come here without me, and when we’re in the tunnel, you follow my orders.”

  Or what? hung in the air, but Quin found the sense not to utter the words.

  Grimly, Jay jerked his head. It was past time they left. The moon wouldn’t stay up forever, and if they had to walk in pitch darkness, they wouldn’t make it back to the mission until after sunrise; then Cain would know they’d circumvented his security. Not that Cain’s security was great. In fact, it was piss-poor—but that didn’t mean he couldn’t lift his game.

  Jay might not be able to remember how he’d obtained his engineering expertise, but he knew people, and, on a level he couldn’t explain, he knew Cain. The man was a bottom-feeder. It didn’t seem likely that he was connected with any of the radical groups like Shining Path, but Jay wouldn’t trust him as far as he could throw him. The two men who usually pulled night shift were armed with Skorpions, and Jay would like to know how Cain had managed to come up with Czech automatic weapons that were more commonly used by guerilla forces.