The arrival of the video crew still rankled her. Jade realized now that that deal with the production company had probably been in place long before she was hired and there was little doubt in her mind that her sex and physical appearance — the daughter of Japanese and Hawaiian parents, she had been called an ‘exotic’ so many times, the line made her want to throw up — had played a more important part in her selection for the archaeological crew than had her expertise. Her employer — or more accurately, an attorney from the legal department of the foundation that was sponsoring the dig — had made it clear that she was to give full cooperation and support to the cable television producers who had taken over the site.
Camera-friendly good looks notwithstanding, after two days of watching her carefully excavate tomb shafts, the crew had mostly lost interest in her. The on-site interview with Jeremiah Stillman, publisher of the fringe magazine Alien Legends, and esteemed “extraterrestrial astronaut theorist” who had arrived late the previous evening, was much more engaging than watching Jade removing dirt by the teaspoonful. Still, a viral video outing her as a skeptic would definitely not be a good thing.
Aside from Professor, the only other person to hear her was an intern, Rafi Massoud, and he was part of her team, not the production crew.
“You’re not going to rat me out, are you Rafi?”
The young man, a second-generation Arab-American and a student at UCLA, raised his hands in an exaggerated display of innocence. “I’m with you, Dr. Ihara. That guy’s a kook. No way am I putting any of this on my CV.”
“Oh, don’t be so Old School,” said Professor. He cocked his felt Explorer fedora forward in a near perfect imitation of Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones. “Everyone craves the spotlight, even the Ivy League guys. Trust me, no one is going to think less of you — academically speaking — for doing your job on camera, even if they edit it to make it look like you’re saying something you aren’t.”
“I know,” Jade sighed. “But…” She nodded toward the front of the museum where Stillman was holding up an unusually shaped human skull, which he claimed to have found while roaming the dunes, and gesticulating emphatically. In her best approximation of his voice, she said: “Aliens!”
Professor grinned. “It sells. Better, it gets the kids interested. Admit it, you’re secretly hoping that we do find something not of this world. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have taken the job.”
“Not true. I took the job for the money. That’s why it’s called a job.”
He was not completely wrong, though. While she had spent the last eight months doing very little that could be described as archaeology — long distance guest lecturing via telepresence and researching possible future projects — Jade had passed up several opportunities to get back in the field simply because the invitations were even less interesting than being cooped up in a library with a stack of dusty old books.
There were other reasons for her professional hiatus, however. To borrow a cliché from criminal parlance, Jade Ihara had been laying low.
Several years earlier, her search for the legendary pre-Columbian city of Cibola had put her in the cross-hairs of the notorious international quasi-religious criminal conspiracy known as the Dominion. She had subsequently tangled with them on numerous occasions, and in so doing, had painted a target on her back. The Dominion, in all its many forms, was obsessed with ancient symbols of power — artifacts that might be used to solidify their grip on the world, and which might, as she had seen more than once, actually possess supernatural attributes. As even more recent events had demonstrated, the Dominion was not the only enemy who might want to do her harm, which was how Professor had come to be her constant companion.
A former Navy SEAL and a genius in his own right — he came by his nickname honestly, with two post-graduate degrees — Professor was now working, in a semi-official capacity, for a division of the Central Intelligence Agency, acting as both a bodyguard for Jade and a sort of watchman, on the lookout for anything that might hint at some new threat, while at the same time, using his own not inconsiderable body of knowledge to buttress his cover as her research assistant. It was not the cush assignment that some of his peers might have imagined. The threats Jade faced were real, and all the more ominous since there was no way of knowing from where the next attack would come. And, if she was honest with herself, Jade knew that she could be a bit… prickly.
She liked Professor, liked him enough to entertain the possibility that their relationship might someday extend beyond the professional, beyond friendship, but she also knew that was a bad idea. He was now her closest friend and confidant, and if they took things to the next level and it went horribly wrong — something that seemed to happen whenever she led with her heart — it would ruin the perfectly acceptable status quo.
On Professor’s advice, she had spent the last eight months on what could only be charitably termed as a ‘sabbatical.’ She had spent a lot of time in the water, snorkeling in Waimea Bay and surfing the North Shore of Oahu waiting for Professor to give her the signal that it was safe to go back to her old life. After six months, the tedium had become unbearable and over his objections — truth be told, he was a bit overprotective — she had started looking for work again, whereupon she had quickly been reacquainted with the reality of just how boring, not to mention political, archaeology could sometimes be.
The offer to work at Wari Kayan, the ancient necropolis of the Paracas culture on the slopes of Cerro Colorado in Peru however had been too intriguing to pass up, partly because the expedition was being underwritten by a not-for-profit foundation with very deep pockets — a welcome change from the miserliness of academia — but mostly because it was a chance to lay her hands on one of the most sensational discoveries in modern archaeology: the Paracas skulls.
The Paracas culture had inhabited the western slopes of the Andes mountain range from 1200 BCE until their eventual assimilation into the Nazca culture which endured until about 750 CE before fading almost completely from history. Although the Paracas produced astonishingly beautiful polychrome ceramic ware and intricately patterned textiles, their greatest claim to notoriety stemmed from the relatively recent discovery of unusual elongated human skulls in Paracas burial shafts.
There was no great mystery to the skulls. The Paracas, like many other ancient cultures throughout North America and indeed, the rest of the world, had practiced a form of body modification known as “artificial cranial deformation.” In early infancy, Paracas children would have their heads bound tightly with blankets and sometimes wood planks, which had the effect of distorting the natural shape of the skull as it grew and hardened. The practice had been observed in several extant societies well into the 20th century and was in fact still done in some remote Pacific island cultures. It was generally believed that the reason for the custom was primarily aesthetic; ordinary round skulls evidently weren’t considered sexy enough.
The discovery of deformed skulls on the Paracas peninsula would have been simply another footnote, but for the close proximity of another intriguing archaeological mystery. A hundred miles away in the remote Nazca desert, an ancient civilization had created hundreds of enormous geoglyphs — shapes of animals and other elaborate geometric patterns — which were so large that the only way to identify them was looking down from altitude. Some scholars even speculated that it would have been necessary to have an aerial perspective in order to execute the patterns. In the latter half of the 20th century, the so-called Nazca Lines had provided fodder for alien astronaut theorists like Erich Von Daniken, who cobbled together a patchwork hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitors posing as gods, influencing ancient cultures and facilitating the creation of everything from the pyramids of Egypt to the moai statues of Easter Island, with little regard for the fact that most of the cherry-picked “evidence” to support the idea was easily explained without the influence of visiting alien astronauts.