by Alex Archer
“I have quite the monster for you to chase, dear Annja. We must meet for dinner tomorrow so I can give you my notes.” Edgar hadn’t meant a monster for her program, not Her Imperial Snakeship or any other fantastical beast. He’d meant a monster of a discovery. He’d meant his pot of gold at the end of his archaeological rainbow.
She studied the opening more closely. It was framed by an arch with numerous etchings of suns and birds. At the top the stone head of a creature with small ears and long fangs protruded. Was it a warning to stay out?
Chapter 31
Annja took a picture of the jaguar head and went inside. She made her way along a corridor that carried hints of painted designs. Annja tried to imagine what they’d looked like thousands of years ago—this structure had to go back more than two thousand years...four thousand more likely. Older? They’d used red paint, and some white and black, the suggestions of color intriguing. She took her time, recording as much as possible.
Among the images were death gods and gods of the thirteen layers of heaven, but always the death gods appeared on top, as if they were holding sway and were more powerful. Again there were more symbols she had no knowledge of, a language perhaps. There were bones—deer or elk, and pig, not typical of Mayan sacrifices, and so they were perhaps brought here for food. Next Annja discovered a chamber with a high ceiling. Her light grazed the top of it but could not reach to the other side. A massive room, then.
She moved at a snail’s pace, not looking at her watch. In truth, she didn’t want to know how much time she was spending here. Rembert said he would wait, and so he would, for some reason wanting to stay close to her....
She didn’t want time to intrude on this magical experience. It would take as long as it would take...as long as she could drag it out and enjoy the enchantment of it all. Or at least until her common sense got the better of her. Rebreathers were amazing, but they did not let a diver stay down indefinitely. Annja calculated she had four and a half hours, maybe five at the outside. And she had the bail-out tank in case she got in trouble.
Along the walls were still more carvings, these not as worn as the ones outside the building. Annja had a working knowledge of the Maya, because of trips to Central America for Chasing History’s Monsters and because of her overall fascination with anything archeological. Most of the carvings were of gods...the sun god; various gods of the underworld; Itzamna, an upper god or one of the creator deities. The depiction most prevalent was of Vucub-Caquix, a bird-demon that according to Mayan mythology pretended to be both the sun and the moon, father of Cabracan and Zipacna—two earthquake demons.
How appropriate, Annja thought. The being that the Maya people believed birthed earthquakes glorified in a temple that was swallowed by one. Was it possible there really was a divine hand involved with the watery entombing of this place?
There were more skeletons, and Annja’s sense of wonder disappeared. No longer game animals—the skulls were small, belonging to children, in some cases babies, probably all sacrificed to accompany whatever royal personage was buried here to the afterlife. She focused the light elsewhere, illuminating whistles carved from obsidian, intact bowls, pieces of jade, marble carved into the shapes of animals...badgers and beavers, masks, effigy figurines, jade ear bores. Annja took pictures of all of it. Some of the ceramic pieces were exceedingly valuable, codex-style, black-line-on-cream decorated with images to show mythological events. The cold of the lake had actually helped preserve these pieces. She knew from attending legitimate auctions that some of these pieces could bring eighty to a hundred thousand each—worth far more than the coins Joe had brought up.
Mexican and Central American officials were trying hard to lock down the trade of Mayan relics, challenging pieces that came up for auction, proving some of them forgeries and asking for the return of things verified as genuine. But these pieces...would these all be arrayed in display cases in museums? Or would the archaeologists and explorers who came after her get them to the black market? Would these be worth more because of where they came from?
Undoubtedly.
Had Joe entered this pyramid? Had he been able to squeeze through the tight passage? Was she following his course? Or had he found the gold pieces elsewhere? No! He’d been here. The pitcher that she’d purchased in the pottery shop, and the bowl. She squatted and took pictures. They were right here...the originals. Joe had seen them and copied them to remarkable likeness, maybe copied others, as well. These pots, somehow preserved in the cold water at the secret bottom of Rock Lake, were exceedingly valuable. Worth far, far more than the pieces of gold Edgar had...but it wasn’t those pieces Mr. A. had been after, was it? It was this location he’d sought, the place where the gold had come from. The thug had asked her that.
He’d demanded to know where the treasure was as he shoved the gun against her forehead in the alley.
This treasure chamber.
Either Edgar or Dr. Papadopolous, and most likely the latter—she told herself—had mentioned to the thug the possibility of more gold, of a Mayan hoard in Wisconsin. Or Peter. Maybe it was Peter. He was at the root of all the bad things, and probably oblivious to it. The clarity of it struck her. Edgar in his excitement had told Peter, Peter in turn had pestered both Edgar and Papa about getting cut in, had mentioned it to Elyse Hapgood...and who knew who she talked to? And once it was no longer a secret, the mysterious Mr. A. caught wind of it and acted. Manny said there was an illegal selling ring operating at the conference. So Mr. A. must have been primed and in a position to go for Edgar’s find.
That was what they had been after, Mr. A. and his cohorts. Not the few circles of gold Edgar and Papa had, but the mother lode.
The old pot Sully had mentioned...she would ask to take a look at it. Maybe it wasn’t one Joe made; maybe it was one he’d brought up from down here.
Nearing the back of the massive chamber, she found five intact skeletons, probably only kept that way because they’d at one time been wrapped in swaths of cloth that must have been elaborate. Now the cloth was in tatters, loosely keeping the bones gathered, strips of it floating in the water and looking ephemeral and insubstantial, like ghostly seaweed fronds. She took more pictures, the light touching the strips and revealing faint patterns that had been red—the color the Maya associated with death and rebirth. The five bodies were arranged facing north, aligning with where the Maya believed one of the entrances to the underworld could be found.
The treasure—the true treasure of this temple—was arrayed around the five bodies. Tucked in gashes and other small openings in the stone, there were wide gold and silver bracelets decorated with jade, massive elaborate necklaces that must have been too heavy to comfortably wear in life. The details were staggering, filigreed and engraved, images of suns and birds, of half men/half badgers, more symbols she had no understanding of. The more detail a piece of jewelry had and the larger it was, the more valuable. Annja recorded all of it on her camera and tried to touch nothing. Each of the skeletons had large headdresses, gold, serving in the stead of Egyptian funeral masks. She was struck with the notion...finding this temple, this chamber and seeing all this treasure.
The small gold pieces Edgar had in that envelope were insignificant next to this. Grains of sand in a desert. One of these headdresses alone could command more than a million, well more, given its condition and provenance. A fortune in just one piece. No wonder some archaeologists were tempted to take things away from dig sites.
She looked closely at the first skeleton, not finding its hands, then searching and searching with the light and catching sight of finger bones and jade and gold rings that had fallen off. This skeleton was the only one that did not have a necklace. Perhaps Joe had taken something from it.
Stepping carefully beyond the first skeleton, she looked at the others. Each body had so much jewelry and other trinkets buried with it. A very significant family, a king perhaps, the members of the family killed when he died. Two of the five skeletons were smaller, p
robably teenagers. Had one of the survivors ascended to the throne after the king’s death, and had that survivor ordered the deaths of the other family members so his or her rule would not be contested?
Archaeologists would pull up the bones and study them, record their health, try to determine what they’d eaten and how they had died; it would all be fascinating and would take years. And it would be a major boon to scientists in the U.S., who would not have to ask permission from officials in Mexico and Central American and South American countries.
The chamber extended beyond the skeletons and was packed with treasures for the afterlife. Statues almost life-size, urns and bowls. Annja was dizzy, giddy, as if she’d just arrived at the wildest party and gulped down an entire bottle of champagne. Her knees quivered. There was an assortment of bowls that looked as if they’d been filled with so much blood that it had stained them—she’d seen their dry counterparts in Mexican museums. Finger bones were nearby. What sort of sacrifices and ceremonies had been involved? Had these people glorified Vucub-Caquix? Some of the larger bowls had the bird-demon’s image carved in them, and one of the largest statues was of a man-bird with wings tucked close to his body.
Mayan gods were intriguing and complex; Annja knew she would be reading voraciously about them during her trip to Morocco and long afterward. That good and evil vacillated in the deities was a concept difficult to get a handle on. That a god could be perceived as evil one day, good the next, its worshippers not minding...that is, if she remembered her previous research correctly.
Above all of that, she felt the pressure and presence of evil here.
She’d seen so much evil since inheriting Joan’s sword. She shook her head at the notion and continued to be mesmerized.
Jade beads, the currency of the Maya, a waist-high urn, and there were weapons, too. Annja didn’t know enough Maya history to recall if they believed weapons were needed on the other side. There were daggers made of obsidian and chert, obsidian arrowheads, chert spearheads, the wood long since rotted away...enough to have equipped a sizeable force.
Initially the Maya were thought to be peaceful. Though the more historians and archaeologists studied the sites, the more they learned that there had been struggles within communities for dominance and with nearby communities. Some of the sacrifices were believed to have been related to retaliation for military strikes.
The bones, all the skulls...were they Mayan or Native American? Perhaps both. The scientists could probably sort it out with time.
How long had she spent down here? Annja finally gave in and looked at her watch. It was a little after nine...not as long as she’d expected. Dinner had been fast, and she was on the lake and in the water at six-thirty. So, close to three hours. She imagined that Rembert was tapping his foot impatiently and wishing he’d bought a second paperback. She would go back at ten for his benefit and return tomorrow. She’d be rested and would find a place to buy another memory card for the camera. But just a little more now. A little farther.
At the opposite side of the chamber, which she judged to be more than a hundred feet across, she found a sloping passage that fell away into darkness. The pyramid had multiple levels, then. She’d been through several in Egypt, crawling on her belly through tunnels to access the various rooms. This passage was taller and wider and could accommodate her and the rebreather tank.
It led to another chamber and then another below it. There was more pottery and more weapons, more bones, more jade, and a few dozen pieces of gold and silver jewelry. Millions upon millions of dollars worth of relics. A shaft went up, and she followed it, using handholds that the centuries had worn away but that were easy for her given her buoyancy. It led to the very top of the temple, flat and with an altar. More images of Vucub-Caquix were carved all over it, with grooves to allow the blood to flow away.
It was enough for this night...but only because she felt the cloying fatigue, a sensation like she was walking through wet cement. A few hours of rest would serve her well, and as excited as she was by all of this, Annja knew she’d have no trouble sleeping. She would do a more thorough job tomorrow.
She returned to the thin gap between the rock wall and the temple, again taking off her tank to squeeze through the very narrow part. The archaeologists who would come after her would have to blast away part of the rock to access the temple, to take their equipment in and eventually the relics out...and to find if there were other buildings down here, too. Often smaller structures were built around something of this significance.
Her flashlight cut through the ink-black darkness. More muskies down here, not schooling by any means, but drawn by her beam and their curiosity. There were bass, too, the largest closest to the bottom. Over the wrecked boat were smaller fish, looking a little like muskie, but thinner. Northern pike, she guessed, not as prized as their larger brethren, but striking-looking nonetheless. She stopped at Bob the Boulder. She heard something...more than the purr of her rebreather, a staccato sound oddly muffled by the water.
She ascended along the rope, going slowly at first and then faster when she shone the beam up and saw lines of bubbles in the water...the trail of bullets. The staccato sound had been bullets.
She abandoned caution, worried about Rembert and swimming as fast as she could. Was he shooting or being shot at? Hand over hand up the buoy rope, feet kicking to propel her faster as more lines of bubbles laced through the water. Her head broke the surface as one more gunshot sounded.
“Annja!” Rembert had the flashlight pointed toward the shore, cutting a golden path across the choppy water. He reached over the fence railing and extended his free hand. His other held his Glock. He tugged her up and she practically fell over the railing, like a big fish landing unceremoniously.
“What’s going on?” Annja dragged herself up onto a bench, unhooking her rebreather tank and tossing off her face mask. Her head pounded and she followed the beam, trying to see what Rembert had been shooting at. “Loons?” Had he been shooting birds? “What are you—”
He helped her get the tank off. He was out of breath and obviously frantic. “The girl with the knife,” he managed between pants. “She came back again.”
“Swam out here?” Annja staggered toward the railing, scanning the shore. Her vision was a bit blurry, but it was clearing. She only saw choppy waves in the light. Are you crazy? she wanted to ask him. “There’s nothing—”
“Annja, didn’t you hear me? I said again. This is the second time she’s been out here. Yeah, swimming. I used a whole clip on her the first time. Wasn’t trying to hit her, just scare her. And I did, the first time. Scared her off. Been jiggling the anchor rope, hoping you’d notice to get you up here. Four hours, Annja. You’ve been down there almost four hours. I thought you were maybe dead.”
Annja peered toward land. There were lights from a few cabins and from the near-full moon overhead, but the area was primarily wooded and mainly all she could see along the bank were trees, birches close together, some weeping cedars and where H.I.S.’s big light struck lily pads; the flowers were all closed up and pointing to the sky.
A host of frogs were chirping, sounding like birds, loons called, the motor from a small fishing boat hummed somewhere to the west and Rembert continued to sputter.
“I’m not lying, Annja, and I’m not—”
“I believe you.”
“About the girl?”
“Yes, Rem, I believe you. We should call—”
“Already did. I called the cops. Had the card of one of the men I talked to this afternoon. After she swam out here the first time and then went back, I called him. Said they would send a couple of units to the lakeshore. And then I called that Madison cop, but that was about a half hour ago.”
“Manny?”
“Found his card in your pack.... Sorry for poking around, but I had to use your prepaid cell. My battery was too low and I couldn’t get a signal.”
“It’s okay.” Her eyes still trained on the shore, she started t
o peel off the dry suit. The cool evening breeze touched her skin and started to dry her hair. It was a pleasant sensation, but overshadowed by her headache. She’d come up too quickly and had a mild case of the bends. Not as bad as if she’d been on a deep ocean dive or using a regular tank rather than a rebreather, but still pretty bad. Only three hundred feet down at the lake’s secret bottom, yet it wasn’t just depth that played a part; time spent underwater mattered, too. And she’d been down a long while. Her joints ached, thereby confirming her self-diagnosis. She’d be able to shake it without help; she’d done so before—thanks to her amazing constitution, which was linked to having Joan’s sword. It would just make her uncomfortable for a while. She massaged her temples.
“Guess it’s good you have a gun,” she said.
“Damn straight.”
“Did you get Manny? On my cell? He still in town?”
Rembert helped her pull off her boots. She and Rem continued watching the shore the whole time, H.I.S. listing precariously from their standing together.
“He was almost to Madison but said he was turning around, something about the icing on his retirement cake.” Rembert took the gun out and checked it, making sure he still had bullets left in the clip, this time putting it in his jeans pocket. “Your friend gave this to me, this Glock.”
“Friend?” Annja finally looked away from the shore.
“Well, maybe not a friend, but he knows you. Gary. Gary Knight.”
“I don’t know a Gary Knight.” But the moment the words came out, she remembered. She’d seen the name on a conference badge, the one pinned to Garin Braden.... She’d forgotten all about Garin.
