Libby nodded. 'Like you could tell it was there, you could see its size, but you couldn't distinguish any details?'
'Exactly,' agreed Claire.
Both women hunched lower behind the wall when they heard gunshots from the south. Lots of gunfire. Like a small battle. Claire said, 'What the hell’s going on? Who are they shooting at now?'
Claire had the grim mental image of Ethan standing before a firing squad, collapsing in a hail of bullets from Rourke's security guards. But the firing didn't sound like that. It sounded like fighting. Fighting between two different groups.
'They're fighting someone,' said Libby.
'Are they fighting each other?' Claire wondered if perhaps not all of the security guards were part of Rourke's plan. Perhaps some of them were making a stand.
'It could have been police on that plane,' offered Libby. 'Maybe someone got a call out for help.'
Still crouching, Claire pivoted on her right sneaker. 'What plane? I didn't see a plane.'
Libby nodded. 'Ethan told me you weren't expecting any more planes until next season, but I heard one landing just before I ran into you. It flew right over me. Didn't you hear it?'
Claire thought back to her ride in the jeep. It was possible she missed the sound of a plane in all the chaos.
She said, 'The police were coming because of Joanne, but they wouldn't be here yet. Not unless they were already close.'
'It must be the police,' guessed Libby. 'Who else could it be?'
'Makes sense,' agreed Claire, listening. She guessed the gunshots were coming from across the Plaza, beyond the Gallery. If police had landed on the silt lake, they would likely encounter the security guards around that location. 'If it is the police, it doesn't sound like they're having an easy time of it. They wouldn't have come prepared for this.'
'Is there somewhere safe we can hide?' Libby looked back at the tree line again. 'What about inside the Gallery?'
'Safe' wasn't a word Claire used to describe the Gallery. Most the accidents she attended as a safety officer occurred inside there. Always preventable accidents. People got hurt because they misjudged their surroundings or were rushing. Broken toes and crushed fingers were most common. The Gallery seemed to warp a person's senses, as though the entire alien nature of the place reached into some part of your brain and modified how you perceived it.
Inside, it was so far removed from anything Claire had experienced that it took an extra reserve of mental effort to maintain her normal functions. She felt emotionally drained just walking around in there. Some people even needed to turn their backs on the walls, look away from the artwork, or risk permanent distraction as their eyes constantly drew to the wriggling lines and curves between the dismembered figures. Claire had seen intelligent people unable to hold a normal conversation in the Gallery.
Above all, however, she knew a very good reason to avoid the place. 'Rourke knows the Gallery better than anyone. It's definitely not safe from him in there.'
'Look,' hissed Libby quietly, pointing.
As though Claire's mention of his name had summoned him, Rourke walked into their line of sight. And there was Ethan.
Rourke shoved Ethan ahead with the barrel of his rifle. A black cable-tie bound Ethan's hands behind his back.
The men almost immediately disappeared from site again, heading east towards the Gallery.
'I know what we have to do,' decided Clare, straining to catch a last glimpse of her friend. 'But it's not going to be easy.'
#
Crossing the top tier, keeping his rifle covering Ethan, Rourke listened to the gunfire across the Plaza.
He had a bad feeling about the team of six who had just strolled unannounced onto his site.
The mysterious intruders were another annoying complication that he didn’t need.
In an hour it won't matter anyway.
Two years of hard work would pay off in less than an hour. Two years of trial and error, failures and frustrations, dead ends and disappointments.
Two years of squirming through stale stone corridors, working in the dark six hours every night, then pretending to care about site security during the day. Two years of racing a team of so-called experts.
Well, they lost that race, and Rourke had won. On his own, without their years of training and expertise, Rourke had done what none of them could even begin to do.
Really, he'd never had a choice. The Plaza, the Gallery in particular, was just waiting for the right person. One of the first people inside after Ethan had cleared the Gallery's rubble-filled entrance, Rourke had been instantly amazed by the architecture. He would have been impressed had it been achieved with today's technology, let alone six hundred years in the past. To think that people had worked with this kind of scale and precision six hundred years ago was incredible. That very first day he'd developed a craving, a focused preoccupation with the Gallery, an obsession.
He knew this place was built to protect something. The layout of the Plaza was plainly obvious to a military mind, if not the archaeologists.
Rourke's theory came down to the history-proven truth that great need consistently heralded great technical innovation. The Gallery itself, Rourke now understood more than any living person, represented the incredible technical innovation, but what was the great need?
That one burning question had driven Rourke to find the answer long before the archaeologists.
He shoved Ethan again to keep him moving. Ethan hadn't spoken since Rourke cable-tied his hands with the same kind of tie he'd used to kill Nina.
No matter. He'd be talking soon enough. He wouldn't be able to help himself. Rourke was about to show Ethan what he'd been hiding for the last four months. It made a fitting end. Closure, in a way. It wouldn't seem right if Ethan couldn't witness what Rourke had achieved while Ethan's precious team slept. Rourke had planned on waiting a day or two until the site was completely empty of researchers, but Joanne's death meant police investigators would be crawling all over the place within the day. It wouldn't take too much of that kind of scrutiny before someone noted Rourke’s excessive interested in the Gallery.
Keeping Ethan alive was actually quite inconvenient.
Why am I keeping him alive?
He'd told himself, convinced himself maybe, that he needed Ethan to complete the translation. But was that really true? Was that the reason?
No. This close to achieving his goal, Rourke knew that wasn't the real reason. He wanted to rub Ethan's nose in it.
You're a petty man, Ambrose Rourke. You don't even really need him to translate it. You just want to see the look on his face when you show him that you beat him to it.
Rourke was drawn from his thoughts by gunfire cracking across the Plaza again.
Sounds like Kline couldn't convince them to turn around and fly out of here.
Ethan spun towards the gunfire. 'Is that Claire? Did you just kill Claire?'
Rourke listened as another nasty-sounding skirmish kicked off to the west. Even Ethan realized it didn't take that much shooting to kill one person. Rourke shoved him to get him moving again.
Ethan persisted, asking over his shoulder, 'What is going on here? Who are you shooting at?'
Rourke ignored him. When the shooting abruptly stopped, he called Kline on the radio.
'Kline, report.'
No answer came back.
Perhaps Kline had encountered more resistance than he'd expected. Well, that was his problem. Rourke had called in enough resources to deal with the problem three times over. It was Kline's problem if he'd failed to stall the interlopers before proper backup arrived.
Reaching the broad stairs leading down to the middle tier, Rourke repeated in his radio, 'Kline, report.'
Nothing. Idiot. Kline just had to stall them for a few minutes and then he could have taken them easily. He was overconfident, as usual.
Ethan suddenly stopped on the stairs. He turned to face Rourke. 'I'm not moving another step until you tell me what's going on.
And I want to see Claire.'
Rourke kicked Ethan in the chest. A big push-kick that sent Ethan tumbling backwards down the stairs with his hands still bound behind his back. Rourke regretted the attack as soon as he'd launched it. Hands bound, Ethan stood an excellent chance of breaking his back or his neck. Or both.
Ethan yelped out a startled gasp and then several painful cries as he bounced down the steps. Rourke watched as, surprisingly, Ethan managed to control his fall in a way that took most of the impact across his shoulders and hips. Until he reached the bottom, anyway. Rourke winced as Ethan's head struck the edge of the bottom step.
Ouch. He's not getting up from that.
Rourke walked steadily down the steps, surprised Ethan was still semi-conscious. He grabbed Ethan's elbow and yanked him to his feet experimentally, expecting the scientist to collapse, but Ethan kept his footing.
'You filthy animal,' groaned Ethan. Blood oozed from a cut above his right ear. He winced when Rourke shook his elbow.
'No broken bones then?' tested Rourke, giving Ethan a bit more of a shake. 'You're tougher than you look. Let me give you some advice. Next time you decide to make a stand, do it at the bottom of the steps. It's not as far to fall, you idiot.'
He shoved Ethan away from the stairs. 'Trust me - in a few minutes you're going to forget that Claire ever existed. I'm going to show you something that will blow your mind.'
#
Dale and Mercerelli didn't speak as they wove through the upper tier ruins towards their goal.
In fact, they hadn't spoken in three days.
Mercerelli was a great slab of a man. On their first meeting, Dale thought Merc resembled his brawny old uncle who he could always rely on for an alibi.
Things changed quickly.
'A face like a mud-sandwich' had been Dale's drunken comment six weeks later which ignited the bar fight in Milan. 'With features,' he'd slurred through bloodied lips after getting up off the floor, 'that impinge on each other’s territory without permission.'
'Well at least I don't talk like a silver-spoon-schoolboy out chasing skirt,' Merc had come back with. 'Does your mother know you're out this late with such bad men, Dale?'
And so on and so forth.
After enough fist-fights, a face forgot how it was supposed to look. Merc's face, a perfect example, had settled into a permanent look of belligerence. The fight had been brewing for weeks. Dale felt relieved it was over. Even if Merc, twenty years Dale's senior, had kicked Dale's ass. In Dale’s defense, only Merc's hair revealed his age. The grey-flecked wiry stubble resembled the scouring pads Dale's mother used for scrubbing greasy pots. It had nothing to do with Merc's overall fitness. He had no problem matching Dale's pace as both men wove alertly the last fifty meters to their goal. From behind, Merc's hair looked like sparse, dry grass that badly needed water.
Ahead, their goal stood out like a dog's balls.
For one, the structure was fitted with a humming air-conditioner. As far as Dale knew, the Aztecs hadn't taken to installing air conditioners in their buildings. The archaeologist, however, needed the air-conditioner running twenty-four-seven to keep the temperature and humidity constant while treating their artifacts.
Our artifacts, Dale mentally corrected. These babies are ours now.
One of the more intact original Plaza structures, the squat limestone building was the length of two caravan trailers hitched end-to-end. The air-conditioner fitted into the space above the door. Tacked to the door just below the air-conditioner hung a set of laminated rules. The most important rule stood out in all capital letters down the bottom: KEEP THIS DOOR CLOSED AT ALL TIMES.
Merc scanned the door for security sensors and then cut the padlock with bolt cutters.
Dale covered Merc and then followed him in, pulling the door closed behind him. Just before the door closed, Dale stuck a tiny motion sensor with a twenty-five meter range on the wall. If anything approached the door, Dale would know.
Inside, Dale briefly assessed the interior by the shrinking light of the closing door. No internal walls, just one long room crowded with sealed plastic containers on floor-to-ceiling aluminum shelves. A digital temperature gauge hung on the north wall. Under the device was another laminated sign which read: If temperature alarm sounds, call site supervisor immediately! Under that sign was a spare air-conditioner unit still in its box.
Pulling the door completely closed, Dale noted the structure's south end was dedicated to chemicals, safety equipment and a plain metal desk. Just before the light disappeared, he spotted the laptop computer. Hopefully the laptop still contained the artifact cataloguing system. The files would speed things up if Merc could access them.
Merc flicked on a light switch just inside the doorway. A row of fluorescent lights flashed to life along a wooden frame hugging the stone ceiling.
'Hey, the light!' warned Dale.
'This place is hermetically sealed against sunlight,' said Mercerelli, as if to an idiot. 'If no light can get in, then no light can get out. If you want to work in the dark, then close your eyes. I'd rather do things the easy way.'
Dale knew too much sunlight could be a nasty shock to something buried underground for six hundred years. He bit back a nasty remark as Merc crossed to the desk and fired up the laptop.
Merc tapped his carbine impatiently as the laptop went through its start-up.
'What if they've changed the password?' asked Dale.
'If they haven't changed it in three years, then why would they do it now?' To prove his point, Merc typed in the password Spader had acquired. He hit enter and smiled as the login was accepted. 'Told you.'
'Well, at least that worked better than those forged orders,' said Dale. 'Kline wasn't having a bar of that.'
Merc just grunted as he watched the computer screen. Apparently he'd used up his quota of human words for the day.
Standing so his rifle covered the door, Dale glanced at the computer and decided to push Merc further. 'That Fontana really thinks he's really the business, huh?'
Mercerelli didn't comment.
'You know him well?'
Merc shrugged. 'He's got what it takes when the shit hits the fan.'
'Yeah. Except as I understand it, he's always the one who turns the fan on full speed and then throws the shit up in the air.'
Merc sniggered. 'You've been listening to Randerson too much. Randerson exaggerates.'
Dale rolled his eyes. So far, Randerson was the only team-member that Dale genuinely liked. He was the only half-decent banana in the bunch.
Merc shook the computer mouse impatiently. 'OK, here it is. Down, down, down, and bingo - artifact treatment manifest. You ready?'
'Yep. Let's have them.'
As Merc read out codes from the electronic manifest, Dale moved quickly up and down the room lifting the coded plastic containers to the floor.
'Where's all the good stuff?' asked Dale, cracking open a few containers. 'This is just pottery and shards. We're hardly going to balance the books with this junk. I can buy this off the shelf at Walmart. Maybe you should let me drive the computer. I have a better eye for it.'
'This is what Spader wants. He said he wanted these exact artifacts.'
'This-is-all-junk,' repeated Dale slowly. 'At least look for something made of jade or gold.'
'There's nothing here made of gold. They haven't recovered any precious metals. Spader told us that.'
'Bullshit,' spat Dale. 'These people were good for two things - finding gold and chopping each other’s heads off. There must be another manifest.'
Merc scanned the manifest again. 'There isn't. At least it's not here.'
Mercerelli shook his head over the electronic manifest. 'I don't even think they know what they're looking for. This dig profile is all over the shop. It's text-book. They haven't targeted any of the sweet spots yet. Looks like Spader and Gordon will do the hard yards today.'
Dale hissed out a frustrated sigh and started cracking open the lids on all the c
ontainers. 'I was kind of hoping we could steam in, bag up the goodies and be gone before the dust settles. Now we have to depend on Gordon. Half the time he doesn't know his ass from his elbow.'
Mercerelli smirked as he unzipped their big black bag and withdrew a metal cylinder about half the size of a scuba tank. Next he pulled out a dozen sliver bags, each with a plastic sealing strip and valve at one end. 'If it was that easy, someone else would have done it already.'
'Give me some of those bags,' said Dale. The bags resembled those vomit bags in planes, except these bags were four times as large. 'Tougher the operation, the bigger the bag of booty.'
Mercerelli raised an eyebrow. 'Booty? Man, you've spent too much time underwater. Might not be gold, you know. You worked on shipwrecks, right? You need to get that kind of thinking out of your head. Gold doesn't need any conservation. There’s no need to leave it on site between seasons. There are plenty of other things worth just as much as gold to the right buyer. We just have to make sure it’s intact when it reaches them.'
'Yeah, I know,’ groaned Dale. 'Spader's Chemistry 101 for thieves. I would have gone to university if I wanted to learn all that. I hated chemistry at school.'
'Well, you better have been listening this time, because if you screw up, we're gunna take it out of your cut.' Merc pointed to the temperature gauge down one end of the room. It's cooler in here than outside, so the packing foam is going to expand when it hits ambient outside temperature. And we'll need to take into account the pressure drop when the plane hits altitude.'
'I know all that,' insisted Dale. 'I just don't know why we're stealing this boring junk.'
'We take whatever's selling.'
'And how do we know what that is?'
'Depends on the market. On the history of the goods. That's why we have Spader.'
'Give me gold any day,' repeated Dale. 'Easy to sell. Maybe they cracked the motherload and have it stashed somewhere. They could have fudged that manifest.'
Mercerelli laid the silver bags in front of every plastic container. ‘The site records show continuous work in the scheduled quadrats for the entire season. If they had cracked a motherload, then you would see it show up in this data as everything was interrupted. People would have been pulled from other pits. Hell, work would have stopped everywhere else. It was business as usual until we showed up. Just relax, Dale. Spader can sell this stuff. It's not a problem. His business plan always delivers. We just have to do our part.'
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