The Antiquities Hunter

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

Cruz didn’t hesitate. He went straight.

  “I thought it was a right on the first turn,” I whispered.

  “Straight. I suspect you were distracted by Felipe blowing in your shell-like ear.”

  I did recall that something had made me kvitch right about here.

  “He didn’t blow in my ear. I walked into a cobweb or something.”

  “Ah. Why are you whispering?”

  “I dunno. It just feels like a whispery sort of place.”

  We’d reached a second junction. Same three (or four) options. This time we turned right. Three yards later we turned left. Then we went straight for a good ten yards, then left again, then right, then left. Fifteen yards later we were presented with a “T.” We turned left yet again.

  “Must be the south wall of the temple,” I guessed. “So when did you have the opportunity to get all this down? Don’t tell me you memorized his moves?”

  “The advantages of being left to bring up the rear. While you kept Felipe chatting, I kept track of the turns. It only took three keys: S, L, R. Pretty simple, really.” He paused to show me. Sure enough, the little notepad window revealed an unbroken line of letters: SRLLRLLLRL(P)RRRRSLRSLR

  “What’s P?” I asked.

  “That odd and rather steep descent—the corkscrew switchback. Reminded me of a pig tail.”

  “P is for pig tail?”

  “Precisely.”

  That weird, steep pig tail stair was the one place in our tortuous path that descended precipitously, but I was aware of a leisurely downward slope to a number of the passages. I’d gotten out my pocket compass by now and was trying to calculate how much distance we’d covered in each direction.

  “I’d be willing to bet we’re directly under the main entrance to this labyrinth,” I said when we’d negotiated the steep ramp followed by a series of quick right-hand turns. “We were probably right up there not twenty minutes ago.”

  I narrowed the beam of my flashlight and flicked it up toward the ceiling.

  “You’re whispering again,” Cruz said.

  Then he stopped.

  “Are we there yet?” I asked.

  “Funny. No. Right about here, Revez turned back to say something to me. I had to stop taking notes. I may have missed one.”

  I thought, suddenly, of the thousands of tons of earth and rock over our heads, which, to its credit, had been holding its own for centuries.

  “Now you think of this?”

  He consulted the PDA. “It says left, but . . . No, I missed one. He went straight here. Left at the next junction.”

  “Please be sure about this, okay? I don’t really want to become part of the ruin. And I’m not sure I’m carrying an obereg for getting buried alive. I think that’s Saint Damasus.”

  “Damasus is the patron saint of archaeologists.”

  “What did I just say?”

  He laughed, the sound echoing oddly on the rock around us. “Gina, where’s your spirit of romance? Chances are we’d find the trove by trial and error anyway. And if not, then we die in each other’s arms.” He uttered an exaggerated sigh.

  “Cruz, I appreciate your trying to soften the peril of creeping through dark underground tunnels beneath tons of earth and rock, possibly getting lost and falling into God knows what booby traps, but I’m not claustrophobic or anything like that. You don’t have to play class clown on my account.”

  He glanced down the passage to our left. “I was playing class clown, as you put it, on my own account, thank you. As it happens I am a bit claustrophobic.”

  I honestly couldn’t tell if he was serious or razzing me.

  “Then again,” he said, putting his hand to the left-hand wall, “if worse comes to worst, we could just reverse the directions in the PDA and follow them out of here.” He ran his hand up and down the angle of the corner as if searching for something. After a moment, he grunted and moved to the straight right-hand wall to repeat the exercise.

  “Ah,” he said finally.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Come here. Look.” He shone his light on the wall where his hand rested.

  I moved a bit closer and peered around him. Just above his fingertips at about the height of his shoulder, there seemed to be a vertical groove in the wall. It wasn’t much—the width of two fingers and only about three inches long.

  Cruz took my hand and pressed my fingers to the smooth slot.

  “The ancients weren’t dummies,” he said. “Weren’t you the least bit curious about how the king’s men found their way around down here? They notched the walls. Vertical slot for straight ahead, vertical and horizontal for left or right. Horizontal then vertical is left—”

  “Vertical then horizontal is right,” I guessed. “Go, ancients.”

  He was right about the missed letter and, in due course, we found ourselves in the transverse corridor that ran along the front of the Mural Gallery. He immediately started prowling toward the end of the long anteroom.

  “The controls for the lights must be here somewhere. Revez turned left out of the Gallery and went along here . . .”

  He found what he was looking for at the far end of the hall—a narrow access corridor that cut left. It required one to turn sideways to slip in, but inside, where it widened just a bit, there were a couple of huge, heavy-duty marine batteries hooked up to a set of cables. The cables did not—I noticed as Cruz flipped the switch that would shunt power to them—run back into the hall the way we’d come.

  “Where are you going?” Cruz asked me as I slipped past him in the narrow slot, following the wires away from the battery.

  The cabling ran back along the floor for a while, then went up the wall to disappear over the top of a pile of fill. It seemed like an odd place for fill, the usual intent of which is to foil further exploration of a tomb. I panned my flashlight up toward the ceiling, expecting to see a hole where the roof had caved in. The rock overhead looked seamless. This was deliberate, then.

  “What do you make of this?” I asked Cruz as he sidled up behind me.

  “Looks as if they’ve taken the wires in through the rear of the gallery. In fact,” he added, training his own light over the place where the wires ducked through a raccoon-sized hole in the top of the debris, “I’d be willing to bet that the ancients brought their booty in this way, then sealed up the corridor when the treasury was nearing capacity. It was hard to imagine them shoving some of those objects through that little access way in the Mural Gallery. This makes a lot more sense. A properly outfitted excavation team could probably clear this fairly easily and use this passage to remove the artifacts.”

  The Mural Gallery was just as impressive the second time around. I stepped over the threshold, wondering if this—this quickened breath, haring heart, and flushed skin—was even a tenth of what Cruz Veras was feeling. This was, after all, his thing. These vivid pictures, that room full of artifacts, were stunning to me in a Holy Mother of Pearl! sort of way. To Cruz, they were a life’s work, a calling, a cause.

  I watched him move down the length of the hall, his eyes on the bright and fantastic figures.

  “A penny for them,” I said, shutting off my flashlight and following him.

  He laughed. “I’m—what do you call it?—‘geeking out,’ aren’t I?”

  “A little. Justifiably so, I might add. What were you thinking?”

  “That I would love the opportunity to excavate the rest of this site. I wish there were a Geoffrey Catalano waiting in the wings to fund the venture—legally, of course. I doubt my government has the resources for this big an undertaking.”

  “Speaking of which . . .” I unpocketed my digital camera. “We should probably start photographing in here.”

  He nodded toward my camera as he pulled out his own. “You know how to shoot panoramas with that?”

  “Yeah. Is that what you want?” I made a sweeping birth-to-death gesture.

  “Exactamente. I’ll start in the Treasure Room.”

 
“Don’t space out in there.”

  He disappeared through the little crawlway into the inner sanctum while I started photographing the murals. I’d gotten to about the bloodletting ceremony that accompanied Shield Jaguar’s nuptials (which I find preferable in some ways to the production numbers people stage these days) when I felt a peculiar trembling in the air—maybe even in the stone and earth around me. It was almost, but not quite, a sound. A mere blip on my radar.

  I paused to focus on it, but it was gone, fading like the flutter of dragonfly wings on a lazy day at the beach. I shrugged it off as low blood sugar and went back to my work.

  When I was done, I crawled through to join Cruz in the tomb. He was sitting on the ledge that ran around the base of the corpseless sarcophagus, turning a large disk of beaten metal in his hands—a stylized mask made to look like the disk of the Sun. His camera sat on the step nearby.

  I took a seat next to him. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “You’re doing it again,” I told him after a moment.

  He shook his head and chuckled. “Hard habit to break. I was just getting ready to photograph it, I promise you. What have you got?”

  I handed him my camera, then sat back as he checked my work with a professional eye. He seemed pleased.

  Something tugged at the periphery of my hearing.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  He paused to listen. There it was again: a faint wisp of sound like a birdcall—high, thin, muted—then a sharp but muffled report.

  “That’s gunfire,” Cruz said, and shoved the camera back into my hands.

  We wiggled our way out of the Treasure Room and slipped back into the tunnels with weapons drawn, moving as swiftly and quietly as possible, not sure what we’d be facing or when. Cruz had left his military torch behind in the Treasure Room, in favor of a pocket flashlight, which he Velcroed to his left wrist. The guy was a regular Inspector Gadget.

  “Is there anything you don’t have in your pockets?” I murmured.

  “Right turn,” he said, ignoring me. “Kill your flash.”

  I did, and visibility was suddenly limited to the small pool of light cast by Cruz’s flash.

  “You’ve done this sort of thing before, haven’t you?” I said.

  “Actually, no. But I was a Boy Scout.”

  “You’re not really claustrophobic.”

  “I’ll never tell. Left.”

  I put my hand to the wall as we oozed around the corner, somehow comforted by the markings. If I had to, I told myself, I could find my way around down here in complete darkness.

  The sound of sporadic gunfire became clearer the closer we moved to the entrance. We’d just climbed the pig tail and were making our way along the south wall of the temple when we heard a shot that echoed sharply and clearly down the stone corridors as if . . .

  I caught at the belt of Cruz’s jeans to slow him down.

  “Cruz, that’s awful loud. I think the shooter might be in the temple. Maybe even in the Vestibule.”

  He turned to look at me in the chaotic dance of shadow and light from his flashlight. “In that last straight passage . . .”

  “Fish in a barrel comes to mind,” I said.

  He turned off his flashlight, plunging us into complete darkness. I was suddenly hyper-aware of the presence of gravity and oxygen.

  “Three right turns coming up,” he told me. “Then a left into the last leg.”

  “What do we do when we get there?”

  “Pray no one is watching for us.”

  “Oh. Great plan.”

  We were approaching the last right turn when my cell phone beeped. The sound was so shocking in this context, at first I wasn’t sure what it was or what to do about it.

  “Answer!” Cruz hissed.

  “Hello?” I said tentatively.

  “Gina?”

  “Greg?”

  A hiss of expelled breath rasped in my ear. “Thank God. I had visions of you buried under tons of rock or lost in the bowels of the Earth.”

  “Funny, same visions I was having. Where are you?”

  “Just inside the—uh—the upside-down garage door. Where are you?”

  “In the labyrinth. Maybe fifty, sixty yards from your location. What the hell is going on up there? Are you under attack?”

  He laughed. “No! No, that was me. Hoping just maybe you’d be able to hear me from wherever the hell you were and would come out to get me.”

  I sagged against the wall of the corridor, keenly aware of Cruz’s eyes on my face.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to leave you stranded. We were getting into our work.”

  “No problem. Is Cruz with you?”

  “Yeah. He’s right here.”

  “Great. Good. Come on up and rescue me.”

  I pocketed the phone. “Greg’s waiting for us in the lobby.”

  “The shooting?”

  “He was trying to get our attention. He couldn’t raise our cell phones. And we got so carried away with our archaeological zeal we forgot he’d need directions to the party.”

  I holstered my gun and started for the last turn.

  Cruz laid a hand on my arm. “Just in case,” he said, “keep the lamps off and hug the wall.”

  I started to protest, then realized he was right. If we’d been followed by Revez or whoever was messing with his head, there was at least a small chance that someone might have shown up to keep our guys company. For all we knew, Greg had placed that call with a gun to his head.

  That thought made it hard to relax even when we saw Greg squatting opposite the entrance to the maze in the wash of his flashlight beam. Cruz stepped into the entrance hall quickly, back to the wall, gun raised in a two-handed grip.

  Greg blinked and stood slowly, eyes wide and watchful, hands clear of his body. I waited just inside the opening to the labyrinth with my gun aimed at the drawbridge while Cruz scanned the nether shadows.

  “What?” Greg asked, his eyes on my partner.

  Cruz turned back to us and holstered the Glock. “I just wanted to make sure you were really alone up here. Dropping in by helicopter might have drawn unwelcome attention. And there is a possibility we were followed.”

  Well, duh. A helicopter. That explained the subtle fluttering I’d felt down in the Mural Gallery.

  Greg nodded. “So your message said. We need to move quickly. Secure the evidence and get Revez and his crew before he has a chance to move.” He picked up his flash. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re alone?” I asked. “I thought you were going to roll in with the whole support team.”

  “By chopper? If you think one little black helicopter might draw attention, imagine what three or four would do. The rest of the team’s coming in by ground from Bonampak. It made the best staging area, but it’ll take them a while to get here in the dark.”

  We made our way back through the knot of narrow passages and I couldn’t help but notice that, after a quick glance at his PDA, Cruz pocketed it and navigated without. I slid along behind him, trying to memorize the turns and using the wall notches for confirmation.

  “Road signs?” asked Greg from behind me.

  I turned to see him fingering the groove my hand had just abandoned.

  “Pretty clever of those old Mayans, huh?”

  “Yeah. Pretty clever. Not real obvious though.”

  “You have to know they’re there,” Cruz said over his shoulder. “Unfortunately, Revez’s first exploratory team didn’t. I understand one of his men lost a foot in a booby trap down below. Taking a wrong turn in here can be very costly.”

  A chill raced up my spine. I was damn glad I hadn’t heard Revez say that. While it’s true that I’m neither afraid of the dark nor claustrophobic, the thought of falling down a deep pit in the dark made my stomach turn flip-flops.

  “I should warn you,” Cruz continued as if he hadn’t just wrinkled my reality, “that the notches can be unreliable as well. Some of them may be intended to deceive.”


  I pulled my hands away from the wall. “Thanks for the safety tip.”

  Cruz kept up a brisk pace. Our return took about half the time it had taken us to navigate the King’s Maze in the first place. On the way, I found my eyes drawn down every false corridor, peering as far as the beams of our flashlights would reach, and wondering what nifty surprises the ancients had crafted for the unwary.

  Cruz noticed my morbid obsession. “Some of them are just plugged with fill,” he told me. “But I wouldn’t be surprised to find some drops that go through to the sublevels.”

  “Nice.”

  When we reached the Hall of the Puma Head, Greg exclaimed over the desecrated walls. “I suppose the friezes are already in private collections all over the globe. What a shame.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised to find some of them in public collections,” Cruz said. “The cache is unknown. Provenance for such a find can easily be fabricated.”

  He led the way into the Mural Gallery and I followed him, turning to watch Greg Sheffield’s face as he stepped over the eccentric threshold and saw what the walls contained.

  “My God.” Those were the only words he spoke during his entire circuit of the room.

  His reaction wasn’t nearly as gratifying as I’d expected, and I knew why. Rose should have been here to see this. I realized as soon as I had the thought that if Rose were here, I probably wouldn’t be. I’d be sitting on the patio at the Pavo, sipping virgin piña coladas and fighting boredom. Or worse, back in San Francisco spying on middle-aged joggers.

  Greg turned to me, shaking his head in awe. “This is beyond amazing. Where’s the hoard?”

  I pointed at the little doorway that formed a brief pause in Shield Jaguar’s busy life. Cruz had already gone on through.

  Greg bowed. “Ladies first.”

  I got down on my hands and knees and, pushing my flashlight ahead of me, crawled to the Treasure Room with Greg scraping along behind. Oddly, when I got to the far side, the room beyond was dark. I scooted my light out onto the floor and had just followed it with my head and shoulders when it winked out.

  “Cruz?”

  The darkness didn’t answer, but only pressed coolly against my face. I crawled out into the room and stood, the radiance of Greg’s flashlight leaking out of the crawlway to lap around my ankles. My skin tingled.