Emergency sirens wailed as the first responders battled through the gridlock to the site of the crash while people from the first rows of cars to escape the carnage rushed to help the survivors.
“Well, I don’t think we’re gonna get our rental deposit back on that,” Tomskin tried to joke. Jones, ever the professional, ignored him and focussed on the charred and bloodied figure crushed within the folds of metal that had once been the sedan. Then he pulled his cell phone out and called the pre-programmed number.
“It’s done,” he said simply.
On the other end of the line, the man who had answered did not smile. He simply replied, “Good,” and then hung up and began dialling another number.
As he waited for the encrypted connection to be answered, the man glanced at the information on his computer. It displayed a medical report for Doctor Karen Weingarten, signed off by one Emmett Braun who had known the sick girl only as Jane Doe. It confirmed everything he wanted to know.
Weingarten had been an archaeologist working on the UNESCO funded Sarisariñama Expedition in Venezuela, one of the last places on earth he had expected someone with her ‘condition’ to be discovered.
Of course, he knew all about the expedition. It had been on the news for over a year now, ever since a billionaire playboy with nothing better to do had illegally base-jumped into an enormous sinkhole on one of the country’s famous table-mountains. His chute had been caught on the holes’ thick foliage, swinging him into the vegetation encrusted wall. But there, totally unexpected, hidden for hundreds of years by the thick vines and lush tropical vegetation, was a doorway, hewn into the rock. That doorway had led to a series of passageways tunnelling into the three-hundred square mile summit, sparking enormous academic debate over its origins.
Over eight thousand feet above sea level and defended by almost vertical cliffs on all sides, the summit of Sarisariñama had a uniquely isolated ecosystem with numerous endemic species of fauna and flora. Its four giant sinkholes burrowed over a thousand feet into the mountain and one of them, Sima Humboldt, was over a thousand feet wide. No thorough scientific study had been conducted on the summit since 1976, and no archaeological expedition had ever had cause to set foot there.
Hundreds of miles from the nearest road and accessible only by helicopter, Sarisariñama was one of the most isolated places on the planet. And it hid a secret far more powerful than a simple doorway.
A voice on the other end of the phone answered. “Yes?”
The man was quick to the point. “Braun confirmed it.” He eyed the computer screen again, looking at Weingarten’s plump but pretty face and wondered, not for the first time, how she had managed to get herself caught up in all this. Then he thought about the rest of the U.N. expedition — a multi-disciplined team of archaeologists and anthropologists, along with a host of biologists, botanists, zoologists and entomologists. The scientists were supported by a team of local workers, cooks and porters and an international film crew documenting the adventure.
But now, the entire expedition was in his way.
They had to be removed.
His next words, his orders, were cold and hard. “You have a go.”
2:
Black Death
With a final shove, Benjamin King burst through the prison of thick vines and fell unceremoniously onto the ground.
“Ben!” he heard Sid cry out in shock as her boyfriend suddenly vanished in a cascade of rotting greenery and crumbling stone. She wafted away the plume of dust from King’s passage and pushed into the hole in the wall, shining her torch through the gloom.
It took a few seconds for Sid’s eyes to discern King’s dark skin, betraying his African descent, amidst the gloom. “Ben?”
“I’m okay,” he coughed.
The passageway they had been exploring had led to a dead-end but King had realised that the blocking wall was different to the surrounding walls. Whereas the rest of the underground labyrinth of tunnels running through the mountain had been constructed with painstaking precision, every block cut perfectly to fit on top of the last, this wall was imprecise, sloppy even. The blocks were a haphazard jumble of irregular shapes, loosely piled up and then cemented together with a thick grey mortar. Unlike the smooth, almost marble-like finish to the rest of the passageway, these rocks were jagged and rough, allowing the jungle’s hardy vines to find purchase and spread across it like a spider web, concealing the narrow gap where some of the wall had fallen away.
It was through that gap that King, while slashing away at the vines with a machete, had fallen, part of the structure giving way beneath him.
He scrambled up onto his feet, chunks of ancient masonry and decapitated vegetation tumbling to the ground, and picked up his own torch, scanning it across the walls.
“Wow,” he mumbled under his breath. “This is amazing.”
“Uh… a little help here?” Sid called. King ignored her as he ran his light over the walls, his eyes picking out the intricate detail.
“Ben!” she snapped.
King whirled around, shaking off his astonishment, and hurried to assist her. She was part way through the newly excavated opening and had become intertwined in the crusted vegetation.
“Here,” he said, helping her to untangle herself and jump into the passageway. Another shape appeared behind her, a form even more lithe and athletic than Sid. Ben offered her a hand.
“I do not need any help,” a clipped Russian accent replied. Sure enough, moments later Nadia Yashina slipped into the hidden passageway unaided. Her sharp eyes surveyed her new surroundings and astonishment flashed across her normally stoic face.
“What is this place?” Sid asked, awed.
“I’m not sure,” King replied excitedly, scooping up his satchel and notes from where they had fallen on his less than elegant entry. He hurried up beside Sid to study the wall. “It’s absolutely amazing though.”
From top to bottom and stretching all the way into the gloom beyond where their flash-lights could penetrate, every single block in the wall had been carved into the near perfect shape of a human skull.
“They’re all like it,” Sid said enthusiastically, moving from block to block, running her hands over the polished craniums. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, most of the ancient South American cultures had their fascination with sacrifice and death and decorated their temples with images of skulls and skeletons, but I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“They’re all so lifelike,” King said. “I wonder what sort of stone they’re—”
“Bone.”
King and Sid both looked, mouths agape, at Nadia, but no elaboration was forthcoming.
“Bone?” Sid repeated. “You mean…” her voice trailed off as she realised what her friend was saying. Reverently, she removed her hand from a shiny plate and her face twisted into a slight grimace. “Oh.”
Each and every one of the skull-shaped blocks was in fact an actual skull.
“Well that’s a little on the spooky side,” King commented.
“Why?” Nadia asked sharply. She continued to study the bone-encrusted walls with her usual detachment. “As Sid said, the ancient peoples of the Americas were particularly fascinated with sacrifice and death. You’ve been to the Cenote Sagrado.”
King remembered his explorations around Central America very well, following his father on what some scholars termed a ‘lunatic’s quest to find the origins of civilisation’.