PLAZA

by Shane M Brown

  The Captain listened, then asked a few questions for clarification. 'Human remains, you say? Well that's not uncommon on an archaeological excavation. Isn't that the type of thing they're looking for, after all?'

  'Not human remains with gold fillings in their teeth, Captain. I know it sounds far-fetched, but Abby is convinced that something there is attacking people.'

  The line started crackling. Maria pressed the phone into her ear. She just caught snatches of Oloroso before the line disconnected.

  'I've lived here all my life,' he had said. 'I grew up in the jungle, and there is nothing like that around her anymore.'

  Maria put the phone down, staring at the receiver. Anymore?

  #

  'What's that noise?' shouted Ethan, turning on the spot to pinpoint the sound.

  An intense squealing noise came piercing through the Gallery. The source sounded either very close or very loud.

  'Super-siren?' guessed Spader, flicking a glance back to Gordon.

  'What's a super-siren?' asked Ethan. He'd never heard of one before.

  'Broadly speaking,' Gordon explained, 'it's an emergency navigation tool. The US Navy designed them for navigation emergencies. Sometimes you still find them used at isolated lighthouses. A ship’s captain is supposed to hear them over roaring seas. They've been illegal to purchase since a right-wing activist was caught planting one among a G11 demonstration a few years ago. Had it activated, hundreds of demonstrators would have been crushed in the stampede.'

  'I still say they were banned because of the whales,' added Spader. 'Sure did a number on them.'

  'Is it yours?' asked Ethan, wondering why Spader and Gordon knew so much about them.

  'No,' answered Spader. 'We don't use them.'

  Gordon added thoughtfully, 'You think someone is using one to navigate? Like a point of reference.'

  Spader shook his head. 'Not with the walls moving. You could accidentally get sealed up with the thing. Too risky.’

  'What happens then?' asked Ethan.

  'Your brain packs up shop and calls it a day,' replied Gordon. 'All your senses go out of whack. If you're too close, say, less than twenty feet from the source, it's completely incapacitating. You're too stunned and disorientated to even run. If you're far enough away to run, depending on how long you've been exposed, or how fast you can run, you get what's called sensory shock. It's not pretty.'

  'Sounds like a weapon,' observed Ethan. 'What does it look like?'

  'Usually a silver canister. About the size of a drink can. There's a pin on the side like a grenade.'

  'Rourke had something like that on his belt this morning,' Ethan remembered. 'I'd never seen them before. I was going to ask him about it. It had a lime green stripe, about one inch wide, two-thirds of the way down.'

  'That's the one,' confirmed Spader. 'You say Rourke had one? What about Kline?'

  Ethan thought back and then shook his head. 'Just Rourke. Kline wasn't carrying any that I could see.'

  'Then Rourke's in the Gallery,' reasoned Gordon. 'And not far behind us by the sound of it.'

  Spader stared back in the direction of the sound. 'And he just used the super-siren on someone. He must have realized the siren would be devastating in a confined space. I wonder who he used it on.'

  Gordon pulled a pained face. 'Merc and Dale or Fontana and Randy?'

  'Neither, I hope,' said Spader. 'Maybe it's just navigation.'

  'I've heard of people beating them,' offered Gordon. 'If someone was frightened or angry enough, they could overcome the disorientation and escape the danger zone.’

  Ethan read the look on Spader's face. Spader was considering going back. Gordon saw it too.

  'If we go back,' pre-empted Gordon, 'there's little chance we'll find them. We're better off continuing to the core chamber. They know that's our goal. If we're all heading the same way, we're more likely to find them.'

  Spader nodded, seeing the logic. 'I hope so, because we're not leaving without them. We arrived together, and we're leaving together. And don't start on about Fontana. I don't care how many times he - '

  The Gallery's shifting barriers interrupted Spader.

  Ethan checked his watch. ‘Four minutes again.'

  'Huh?' grunted Spader.

  'The barriers change every four minutes,' confirmed Gordon, checking his watch.

  Ethan adjusted his own watch to the countdown mode. He set the alarm to activate in three minutes and fifty seconds. If the Gallery stayed true to form, he would have a ten second warning before the barriers cycled again.

  Spader donned his cave code goggles to check the newly surrounding corridors. Ethan studied one barrier closely. I need more light. He searched around in his pockets and found Rourke's dive light. It illuminated less of his surroundings than he'd hoped.

  'Pull back the sleeve,' directed Gordon, pointing at Ethan's flashlight.

  'What?'

  Gordon took Ethan's flashlight, gave the front a quick twist, then pulled back the plastic casing around the light. 'Turns it into a lamp. Better for in here.'

  It was better. Ethan would hate to be in here with no lights. They would literally be forced to feel their way blindly along the walls. Walls that kept moving.

  The barriers are one mystery solved at least.

  He now had a fair idea how the barriers functioned. A theory, anyway.

  Each barrier turned like a windmill blade. A blade of solid limestone. The windmill turned a quarter rotation whenever the Gallery changed. At any time, with most of the barrier concealed in the walls and ceiling, only a quarter of the turning stone disk was visible blocking the archways. The feature on that visible section defined the barrier's nature. Ethan guessed that each barrier only had two features: an archway-sized aperture and a triangle aperture. The disk's remaining surface was smooth, but the quarter-turn increments often halted the stone between the apertures, presenting the 'flat' impassable barrier.

  Counterweights. Ethan looked at the ceiling. His imagination looked higher. Gravity and mass propelled. Momentum increments.

  'They must be powered by drop stones,' rationalized Gordon, reading Ethan's mind. 'But how did they reset them afterwards?'

  'Good question,' agreed Ethan. 'I'm guessing they manually turned the barriers back the other way. It would be a monumental task. We saw how hard it was for Rourke to move just one.'

  'You could never be sure without pulling the place apart,' murmured Gordon. 'Or finding one already falling apart.'

  Ethan felt his wonder at the Plaza renewed. He remembered the man he stood beside was Gordon Merrit. He asked Gordon, 'How many examples of modern architecture could function perfectly after six hundred years buried? None, that's how many. Not a single one. This place is a marvel. How did they get the stones here? How did they raise them and cut them and lay them and position them? What on earth is this place even for? It is the only surviving structure of its type ever found, and we have absolutely nothing to compare it too.'

  Gordon said quietly, so Spader couldn't overhear. 'You've got nothing to compare it to. You're just assuming nothing like this has ever been found.'

  Ethan thought he was beyond being shocked again today. Apparently not. 'Are you saying this isn't the first?'

  Gordon didn't answer, which was almost an answer in itself.

  Ethan didn't want to raise his voice and alert Spader to their conversation. It was hard to believe that Spader missed anything within earshot. 'Tell me,' hissed Ethan urgently. 'This isn't the first? You've found more like this?'

  'Forget I said anything,' answered Gordon, waving for Ethan to keep quiet, then not responding at all to Ethan's meaningful, angry, then imploring glares.

  Spader suddenly called from the corridor heading south, 'I've found Rourke's original trail again. Come on - this way, hurry before everything shifts!'

  Following Spader, Ethan thought, they know more about this place than they're admitting. What did Gordon say it was? A safe? Ethan needed to start ta
king Gordon and Spader’s 'safe' theory a bit more seriously.

  The idea of a Mesoamerican safe was not, strictly speaking, unheard of. It just happened that the one Ethan had studied ten years ago, the one in particular he spoke about in lectures, functioned very differently from a modern conventional safe.

  The 'water safe' had long been a fascinating cultural oddity that Ethan shared with his students. The water safe was a deep, steep-sided stone fissure in the earth. Long ago, volcanic activity formed a tube to the surface. This lighter volcanic material had eroded, leaving an open vertical shaft in the earth. Fed by natural springs and rain, water filled ninety percent of the shaft.

  Ethan had scuba-dived into what now resembled a stone-walled tunnel, seventy-five meters across, leading straight down into the earth. He'd been studying the walls. The submerged stone walls held the secrets.

  Riddling the walls, thousands of small niches and cavities became the cultures equivalent of safety deposit boxes. Accessing the boxes, the niches, was the hard part. Young men, from boyhood, trained to dive deep into the safe. But deep diving provided only the first measure of security. Finding the exact niche among thousands offered the real challenge, and one supposedly overcome by the divers remembering and keeping in strictest confidence the exact combination of handhold they used to pull themselves down the wall.

  Rather than an exercise in swimming or diving, the maneuver was more of an upside-down underwater climb. Only the person who initially placed the item knew the combination of handholds to reach the niche again. Only that person could recover it.

  Only that person knew the combination.

  It was a big leap from that kind of safe to one Gordon now claimed they occupied. Gordon would know all about water safes, and Ethan suspected if Spader hadn't been around, Gordon would share what he knew about the Gallery. Everything seemed to come back to Spader.

  After three more chambers, Ethan rose to his feet after climbing through a triangle barrier. All three men had squirmed through the barrier as quickly as they could, fearful the stone might shift and slice one of them in half.

  Ethan brushed his palms on his pants, turning his attention to Spader. 'You don't seem very interested in working out how this place works. You haven't said anything about the moving barriers.'

  'I'm very interested,' countered Spader. 'It just so happens that I'm travelling with the two most esteemed experts in the world. The best way I can learn is by listening to you and Gordon talk.' Spader tapped his temple. 'It's all up here. Word for word.'

  Gordon said, 'He's got a little tape-recorder running in his head all the time.'

  Ethan raised one eyebrow. 'Mind like a steel trap, huh? Too bad you're wasting it on crime.'

  Spader stopped. His flashlight lowered to the floor. 'That's hardly polite. You don’t know me. It's a little early in the day to be labeling me a criminal. We're not that different, Ethan, you and I. Essentially, we're in the same line of business.'

  Ethan spluttered out an incredulous half-laugh. 'The same line of business? You must be joking. You're a thief! You came here to steal any valuable artifacts your team could lay their dirty hands on! I bet you've already cleared out the conservation huts.'

  Spader turned and studied Ethan carefully. 'And is what you're doing much different, Ethan? Do you think the original owners of those artifacts had you in mind as their successor? Do you think they intended their property to end up in a museum, or, even worse, a store room? Let me assure you that your goals are not that far removed from mine. We are both here to take something that doesn't belong to us. Lost property is fair game, Ethan, and that is exactly what this place is - lost property.'

  Ethan shook his head. 'The artifacts I recover are conserved and protected. The descendants of the civilization that built this place can visit a museum and see the fabric of their past.'

  'Really?' asked Spader. 'Were they consulted? Did you go around and perform a census asking if the descendants actually wanted these things removed from the ground?'

  'Don't be stupid,' argued Ethan. 'It's a given. Why would they want them to remain a mystery?'

  'Maybe for the same reason they buried the Plaza. But you'll never know, because you never asked the true cultural custodians if they wanted their history uncovered and removed and placed on display to the world. The way I see it, if I'm taking it from you, then I’m just taking it from somebody who never deserved to have it in the first place.'

  'I can see you've justified it all in your own mind,' said Ethan. 'You've put a lot of thought into this.'

  'And you haven't thought about it enough,' replied Spader. 'That's the problem. You think that history belongs to society. It doesn't.'

  Spader stalked off, stealing Ethan's chance to debate further.

  Gordon nodded for them to follow Spader. 'Just leave it. Just do what he says.'

  'Like you do,' spat back Ethan.

  Gordon paused and replied simply, 'Like I'm lucky to. Come on. We must be very close to the core chamber now.’

  Spader had stopped in the next chamber. 'Wait. I think this is it. I think this is the end of Rourke's trail.'

  Everyone scanned the chamber. It appeared identical to all the others. If this was the core chamber, then it was a major disappointment.

  Ethan's watch started beeping. He counted down in his head, turning on the spot, watching for the barriers to change again.

  Six...five...four...three...wait for it, and now.

  To the second, the barriers shifted around the men. Open arches became flat slabs. Slabs became triangles or archways. One new archway led west. All three men shone their flashlights through the open archway into the chamber beyond.

  Ethan stood dumbfounded. Now that was a core chamber. But it wasn't the chamber that caught his attention.

  It was what stood in the center of the chamber. Awestruck, all three men solemnly approached.

  'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' asked Spader.

  Ethan wasn't sure who Spader was asking, but Gordon answered.

  Gordon said, almost in a whisper, 'I'm thinking that's a pretty big piece of gold.'

  Ethan agreed. The gold cylinder stood five feet high, and was at least twelve inches in diameter. It looked solid.

  The gold monolith was covered in hieroglyphics. Inscriptions that Ethan, just from where he stood, could already partially translate. This was where Rourke was bringing him. Rourke wanted the inscription interpreted. Standing before Ethan might be all the answers he was searching for. The answers to the greatest archaeological mystery of an age.

  #

  Spader stared at the gold.

  It was, by far, the biggest chunk of gold he'd ever seen in his life. It looked like a giant gold rolling pin, standing on end, with its handles chopped off.

  Ethan rushed over to study the pictograms.

  Gordon made to approach the gold, but Spader grasped his arm. 'Wait. Give Ethan a chance.'

  Gordon looked suspiciously between Ethan and Spader. He lowered his voice, but Ethan seemed too preoccupied by the object to overhear. 'What are you doing, Spader?'

  'I'm giving Ethan a chance. This is what he's been after all this time. He’s put a lot more work into finding this than we have. Let's give him a moment.'

  Gordon's bearing hardened. 'Bullshit. I know you, Spader. I know how you operate. Nothing is ever that simple with you. You have plans within plans. I know how you got Dale Brish on the team, remember? I know how you got Mercerelli. That dumb Fontana still doesn't know how you tricked him. He brags that he tricked you! And I know how you got me, for God's sake! But you're not doing that today.'

  Gordon pointed at the gold. 'Not with that at stake.'

  Spader replied quietly, 'You worried about the gold or are you worried about Ethan?'

  'Right now I'm worried about Dale and Merc and Randerson and even Fontana. Not recruiting new bodies. And that's what you're thinking about, isn't it?'

  'Maybe it crossed my mind,' admitted Spader. 'Why c
an't we have both? Why can't we leave with a better team than we arrived with?'

  Gordon's temper surfaced further. 'Because it never works out that way. What about Dale's friend? The one who needed the medicine for his sister. Are you ever going to tell Dale that was all a lie? His friend died because of you, and he thought he was doing it to help Dale. You conned them both.'

  'It wasn't like that,' said Spader quietly. 'You don't know the entire story. They were trying to rob me. I just turned the situation to my advantage.’

  Gordon insisted, 'I know he was trapped in that underwater nightmare because of you. I know they dragged his body out of that mud because you put him there.'

  Spader shook his head. 'I tried to save him, but he panicked and fought me. It was all I could do to reach Dale in time.'

  'And that was it, wasn't it?' said Gordon. 'All to get your manipulative hooks into Dale Brish. You couldn’t just ask him. You had to get him into a position where he couldn’t say no. None of us can leave you, can we? You've set it up so none of us even realize that we should want to.'

  'Then why exactly are you still here, Gordon? I thought it was friendship.'

  'We're standing in the reason I'm still here, Spader. This Gallery. And you know that. You've been pushing our friendship to its limits for a long time now.' Gordon pointed to where Ethan studied the gold. 'He has a family. What we do, it isn't for him. Not here. Not today. Not like this.'

  'You were the same as him four years ago. Would you change anything?'

  Gordon didn't answer, and Spader said, 'I didn't think so.'

  Gordon crossed to the gold to stand with Ethan.

  'Sounds solid,' said Ethan, looking up.

  Solid gold, thought Spader, trying to put the sting of Gordon's comments from his mind

  Gordon's was the voice of reason. 'How we going to move it?'

  Spader assessed the chamber properly for the first time. Fifteen meters across, the core chamber was twice as large as a standard Gallery chamber. Rourke had transformed the chamber into a makeshift workshop. Spader mentally inventoried the items: two folding camp tables covered in tools, a dozen lengths of reinforcing steel, empty water bottles and field rations, fluorescent lanterns, a bedroll....