Like killing a couple of fellow field agents, for instance.
“But surely we have enough,” I begged Ellen Robb during our debriefing, “to go after Sommers. Greg gave us everything but the name of his contact. There’s got to be enough there to go with.”
She did not look encouraging. “As you might suspect, Sommers can field some pretty heavyweight attorneys. They’ll make this a case of ‘he said, she said.’”
“He told us he’d been recruited by Sommers’s people. The email you found on his laptop—”
“Doesn’t mention Sommers by name. And it’s from a dead account under a name that traces to dozens of people. None of whom have any connections to Sommers whatsoever. And trust me, Gina, their lawyers will use the circumstances of Greg’s confession to their advantage.” She shook her head. “God, I still can’t believe it myself. Greg Sheffield . . . I thought he was incorruptible. I would have staked my life on it. I did stake your lives on it.”
“How will they be able to use this to their advantage?” asked Cruz.
She shrugged, coming back to the here and now from her trip up Recrimination Row. “You were under duress. Literally in the dark. Gina indicated there was a moment when she wasn’t sure which one of you was the turncoat.”
“A split second,” I corrected, my face flushing. “Less than that—a nanosecond.”
Cruz smiled slightly as he no doubt added this to the List of Things to Hold Over Gina’s Head.
“You might have misunderstood what he said. He did, by your own admission, make an allusion to conning his alleged contact at Sommers into trusting him. Maybe what he described to you was a sting within a sting, and you misunderstood who the target was.” She glanced over at Cruz.
“Of course,” he said. “Greg Sheffield was a longtime agent, an American agent. I am a foreigner. Who knows if I can really be trusted?”
“No way!” I protested. “They wouldn’t make citizenship an issue, would they?”
“Race,” said Cruz softly.
“They wouldn’t,” I repeated. “We know what we heard. And saw. The photographs—”
“Are inconclusive,” Ellen said, spearing me with her impossibly green eyes. “They show a startled agent holding a gun. Even the one taken in the tomb shows you crouched on the floor at Greg’s feet. His stance could easily suggest he’s protecting you. As awful as it sounds, Gina, Cruz is right: his testimony may not carry that much weight if Sommers’s attorneys decide to play the xenophobia card and twist things around a bit.”
“But either way, Sommers is implicated as an organization. If Greg was running a sting—”
“They might maintain they were cooperating in a plan to root out dishonest employees. Greg’s dead. Who’s to know?”
Cruz shook his head, dug into his pocket, and placed a microcassette on the table in front of Ellen.
She picked it up, raising an eyebrow. “Please tell me this is what I think it is.”
“It is a complete recording of everything that transpired from the time Greg Sheffield entered the Treasure Room.”
“You were wired?” I asked incredulously.
He shrugged. “I thought merely to record the directions to the cache in case something happened to my PDA. When things took a turn for the treacherous, I thought . . . if our bodies were ever found . . .”
I shivered. “I love your sense of optimism.”
“This,” said Ellen, “changes things.”
I left the debriefing praying she was right, and praying, too, that Dave had left a message on my cell phone. The comfort afforded by that old no-news-is-good-news saw has a shorter shelf life than yak butter.
There was no message.
“Anything?” Cruz slipped up beside me in the lobby of the Park Service offices.
I shook my head. “How long can she do this? Duck in and out of consciousness?”
“I’ve seen people go weeks that way. It is a good sign. Trust me.”
I did trust him, I realized, when it came to this.
“I knew a man once,” he said, “who went into a coma for years, then just spontaneously came out of it. At the end, he was in and out for about a week. Then one day. Bang—he just woke up. Funny thing, though, he went into the coma as a teenager—barely sixteen—and came out of it as an adult of twenty-three. But inside—” He tapped his breast. “Still a kid. The only thing that seemed real to him was a TV show he had loved. So for a while, he lived in that world instead of this one, until he caught up.”
“And this is supposed to comfort me?”
He laughed. “What I’m trying to tell you, and doing it poorly, is that even in much more extreme cases, a complete recovery is possible.”
My new cell phone chose that moment to massage my hand. I yipped and fumbled it; Cruz fielded it neatly and put it to his ear.
“Cruz Veras. Gina’s right—” He broke off, his eyes meeting mine while he listened to whoever was on the other end. “We’ll be there in ten. How’s R—” He blinked. Apparently the speaker had hung up.
“What?” I said.
His answer was a swift hustle toward the parking garage.
“You’re going to the hospital. You can drive yourself or you can leave Boris in the garage and I’ll drive you. Your call.”
“But why am I going to the hospital?” I asked. “Is it good, bad—what?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was Dave. He sounded . . . excited. He might’ve been laughing or crying or both. I honestly couldn’t tell. Who’s driving?”
I started to say that I’d get myself there, then gave it up as a bad deal. I wouldn’t be safe, driving. My hands were shaking, my legs felt like Silly Putty, and my brain had shut down all sensory input.
We were there in less than ten minutes, something I attributed to the fact that Cruz had probably learned to drive in Mexico City. We checked in at the nurse’s station and were sent directly to Rose’s room in the ICU.
I swear when we came through her door, I couldn’t tell what state Dave was in. His face was haggard, his eyes were red and teary, his mouth was doing mysterious things behind his new beard and mustache. If he hadn’t left her side even to shave, I didn’t want to ask what else he’d forgone.
My eyes were on him, trying to read the news in his ambiguous expressions, when a raspy voice said: “Hey, what year is it?”
I pivoted toward the bed.
Her eyes were open, dark with overmedication, but open. She smiled.
Dave beamed at me and hiccupped. I threw my arms around him and squeezed hard enough to knock the stuffing out of him.
“Don’t I get one?” Rose complained. “I’m the invalid here.”
I gave her a gentle, tremulous hug.
“I’m not made of glass, Tink,” she whispered, and squeezed my stuffing.
I responded in kind. I hiccupped. I wept. I made a mess of the more-than-Gina-but-not-quite-Marianna makeup I’d put on that morning. I felt Dave’s arms go around both of us.
“Hey,” said Rose, into the middle of our group hug. “What the hell’s he doing here?”
Dave and I straightened and followed Rose’s eyes to the end of the bed where Cruz Veras lounged, looking singularly at ease with our display of emotion.
“That’s a long story, Rose,” he said. “You have time to hear it?”
“Time, I got lots of,” she said. “Pull up some chairs.”
Time was something Sommers auction house did not have. The Department of Justice and the NPS moved more swiftly than I could have possibly imagined and, within three short weeks, Sommers had to deal directly with Greg’s taped confession. They dealt with it by selecting one of their “special acquisitions clerks” to be the ritual sacrifice—trotting him out in a closed-door hearing at which Greg’s taped testimony was one of the star witnesses. The other was Rose Delgado, out of ICU and well enough to give video testimony from her hospital bed in regards to her two run-ins with the hit man Greg had suspected was in Sommers’s empl
oy.
It was at this hearing that Ellen Robb played her own trump card. The NPS, in cooperation with the INAH, had run Revez’s remaining two operatives to ground (quite literally, in one case) and had jogged loose a couple of names. Neither was the name of the sacrificial goat, and Sommers was forced to give up not one, but three of its high-level employees for federal prosecution.
It was gratifying, I have to say, to be sitting on the prosecution side at the point Ellen was asked about the confessions of Revez’s runners (which I think is a great name for a soccer team). I don’t believe I’d ever seen faces quite so red as the ones on Sommers’s legal team as Ellen recited the names.
Now, one bad egg might be chalked up to . . . well, one bad egg. But three bad eggs indicates a systemic problem. Sommers gave up a supervisor. Who, under questioning, inadvertently gave up his supervisor.
PROSECUTOR: “So, rather than labeling the shipment as instructed, you chose to divert it to this ‘special holding area’ you mentioned?”
SUPERVISOR: “Oh, no sir. I labeled the shipment as instructed.”
PROSECUTOR: “Excuse me?”
SUPERVISOR: (Oops.) “I’m sorry, could you repeat the question?”
PROSECUTOR: “Did you label the shipment as instructed by your superior? Please remember that you are under oath.”
And so on and so forth.
In the end, a total of five Sommers employees were indicted—including an acquisitions director and a senior vice president—and the auction house’s accounting, shipping, receiving, human resources, and data entry practices came under scrutiny by a hydra with heads from the NPS, the FBI, the SEC, InterPol and other acronyms.
The most serious charges—murder in the first degree and conspiracy to commit murder—were spread about in such a way that the prosecutors were fairly confident that this time fingers would be pointed and heads would roll. There is no amount of money that can compensate a sacrificial goat for a life sentence without hope of parole.
Oddly, when the aforementioned finger-pointing was over, not one member of Sommers’s board of directors ended up in court. Go figure.
The major San Francisco museum in which Cruz had first seen artifacts from Bonampak and Itzamnaaj Balam (a name that stuck, by the way) immediately and very publicly released every last artifact of questionable provenance to the Mexican government. Others, Cruz assured me, would follow as they determined it best to cut their losses.
And as for us, the intrepid field agents (tongue very firmly in cheek), we got to see ourselves on TV and in the newspaper; we were interviewed on National Public Radio. The government commended us, the NPS tried to recruit us, and friends wanted to throw us parties. I cheerfully accepted the first, gave the second serious consideration, and skillfully wiggled out of the third. I am not and never have been a party animal.
The only party I was interested in attending involved a whole and healthy Rose Delgado coming home from the hospital to her family. This was the occasion of much subdued festing and feasting at which the inevitable happened: Cruz found himself in a room with my mother and father. Dad was happy to talk shop (law enforcement and antiquities of the Japanese variety). Mom had a whole other agenda which involved, as I had feared, procuring samples of Cruz’s jet-black locks.
There was not a court attorney born who could grill a witness in quite the way Mom could.
“You are not married? But then you travel so much, eh? But a good-looking young man like you must have a girlfriend, yes? Or perhaps many girlfriends? No? But then what woman could contemplate such a life—crawling through ruins, toting guns through jungles?” A pointed glance at me. “A very hard life to share, this archaeology. Not very many women are robust enough for such a life. I imagine you would be pleased to find such a woman, yes?”
And so it went.
As for Cruz, he was neither standoffish nor overly intimate with me, but struck a balance somewhere just to the left of friendship—a step, maybe two. It was enough to make Mom’s lips curl and Dad’s eyes sparkle, and Alvie’s eyebrows draw into an uneasy inverted V.
And what did it make me do? It made me warmly aware of him . . . and of myself. It made me pray to keep my head on straight.
When Cruz left the Delgado’s sometime around 9:00 P.M., I walked him out to his car and apologized profusely for the grilling he’d taken from Mom.
“No need to apologize,” he assured me, leaning against the flank of his Honda. “She was charming in every sense of the word. In fact, she reminded me very much of my own mother. Right down to the grueling interrogation.”
I laughed. “It would be fun to get them into a room together just to see what happens.”
“They would either become the best of friends or end up hurling spells at each other.”
“Oh? Is your mommy a witch, too?” I asked in my best little girl voice.
“Oh, powerful. A most prodigious bruja.”
“What does she do, your mom?” I asked, picturing some cute little, roly-poly Mexican señora in a bright smock dress.
“She’s head curator at the Mexican Anthropological Museum.”
I smiled. “Of course she is.”
He leaned toward me conspiratorially. “When you meet her, be prepared to give up a lock of your hair.”
I blushed. “I’m really sorry about that. God, could she be any less subtle? ‘Oh, look, Dr. Veras, there’s this tiny too-long piece of hair hanging over your collar. If you want I could trim that for you.’”
He grinned at me and slipped something out of his pocket. “Here, give this to her with my compliments.”
I took it. It was a tiny zip-up plastic baggie with a lock of black hair in it. “Cruz, why? You’ll only encourage her.”
“Your choice,” he told me. “Give it to her or not.” He gave me a swift kiss on the cheek and slid into his car. “Take care of the hip.”
“Sure,” I said, and watched him drive off before going back into the house.
I put the baggie in my pocket.
Epilogue
The Haunted Girl
The room was large, well-lit, and crowded with boxes and crates full of antiquities. On the ample work surface at the center of the room, Rose had laid out the most exquisite and delicate of the finds from Itzamnaaj Balam. They included the museum acquisitions, the lots uncovered in an out-of-the-way warehouse that may or may not have been used by Sommers, my “wedding present” for my fictional bridegroom, and what had come to be known as the Peacock Hoard (Felipe Revez’s private stash).
Front and center in our gathering of gods and great men were the mask of Shield Jaguar II and the statue of his daddy, Bird Jaguar IV.
Rose had been granted (the official term was “assigned” but I suspect there was some begging involved on her part) the privilege of overseeing the cataloguing, describing, and packing of each incredible piece of Mexico’s past. And I had been granted the privilege of assisting her. To Rose, and therefore to me, this was something in the nature of a ritual. A setting to rights and redressing of wrongs.
Most of the swag would be crated oh-so-carefully and flown to Mexico City, but the two pieces at the center of our collection were to be hand-carried by one Dr. Cruz Veras, PhD, of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. They would be presented by that institution to the President of Mexico in a special ceremony that was part political haymaking and part fund-raiser. If Itzamnaaj Balam was going to be excavated, monies would have to be set aside, and if monies were to be set aside, they had to come from somewhere. A nice big meet ’n’ greet photo op with international media attention was just the thing.
Cruz would be the focus of much of the hoopla, of course. Not only was he a person to whom the INAH and the Mexican government owed a debt for the restoration of their national treasures (and who’d helped the U.S. government put a good-sized hurt on the illicit antiquities trade), but he was a well-known and eloquent science journalist, a legitimate (and dashing) archaeologist, and he photographed well.
He was the sort of character they made movies about. Or at least they might if he learned how to fly a helicopter.
I’d made that observation to him before he’d taken off with a survey team to Itzamnaaj Balam for a week of mapmaking.
“No matter,” he’d told me. “Whether or not I fly a helicopter in real life, I’m sure I will fly one in the movie. And of course, there must be at least one scene with me hanging from the landing struts, fighting off the villain.”
“Oh, while I try to fly the damn thing I suppose,” I’d said.
He had laughed. “No, no. In my movie, I fly the copter while you fight off the villain. A team effort.”
“Earth to Gina. Earth to Gina.”
I looked up from the statue I’d been absently stroking to see Rose regarding me with raised eyebrows from about three feet away. She had a cardboard box in her arms.
“Where were you?” she asked me, setting the box down on the table.
“In a helicopter teetering dangerously over Itzamnaaj Balam.”
“Uh-huh. Well, bring it in for a landing. We’ve got artifacts to pack.”
I looked dubiously at the box. “We’re not going to pack these in cardboard.”
“No, silly, of course not. We’re going to pack them in these. Or at least most of them.” She lifted a stack of plastic containers out of the box.
I was stupefied. “Tupperware? You’re going to put a thousand-year-old Mayan mask in Tupperware?”
Rose laid a piece of bubble wrap on the bottom of the container, then set Shield Jaguar’s life mask on top of it. “Grampa told me that the eyes of the spirits must be always able to look up at the sky. So, the mask will be stored like this—face up, with a clear plastic cover so that the spirit of Shield Jaguar can see the heavens. Hey, it’s not romantic, but it keeps the spirits happy.”
“Oh, well, if it keeps the spirits happy, then by all means. What about daddy-o here? You have a piece of Tupperware that’ll fit him?”
The Antiquities Hunter Page 28
