Believing that the sacrificial wells at Chichen Itza might hold clues to what he called the ‘Progenitor Race’ which seeded civilisation across the globe, Reginald King had camped near the sinkholes for three months. Ben had spent the summer before starting at Oxford with his father and still now remembered the surrealism of the site. So still, placid and beautiful now, the waters had once turned red as the remains of those offered to ancient gods were dumped in them.
“Yeah,” he admitted to Nadia, “but I’ve never seen the victims used in the foundations before.”
“Are you sure they’re actual skulls?” Sid asked.
Nadia was irritated by her friend’s questioning. Having met at Oxford, Sid was probably closer to the Russian woman than anyone, yet even she appreciated the reason most of the expedition members referred to her behind her back as ‘The Ice Queen.’
While brilliant, she had few people skills and didn’t like her conclusions to be questioned. As an osteoarchaeologist, specialising in the study of human bones, she didn’t expect to be queried by a ‘run of the mill bog-standard archaeologist’ like Alysya “Sid” Siddiqa.
In many ways the two women were like chalk and cheese. Sid’s grandparents had moved to London from the slums of Bombay in the nineteen fifties and with their entrepreneurial spirit selling clothing at Camden Market they had built a successful business. Eventually, Sid’s parents had taken that business global and become very wealthy. Wealthy enough to finance their most promising daughter’s education through Oxford University.
She was attractive in a very pretty way, her mocha-coloured skin offsetting dark eyes and a round face framed by black-as-night hair. Despite coming from a very privileged family, albeit self-made, there was nothing pretentious or superior about her. She had an ever-ready smile and a gentle, caring nature.
Nadia, on the other hand, had lived a hard life, growing up in the Dagestan town of Izberbash on the coast of the Caspian Sea. She had seen her fair share of war and horror as a young child in the troubled state which was fighting for independence from Russia, but had escaped the difficulties when her genius level IQ had been spotted at an early age.
By sixteen, she had won a scholarship at Moscow State University and became the youngest ever graduate in Quantum Physics. She went on to study practical science and medicine and became known as one of the world’s most intelligent people.
With three degrees to her name by the age of twenty five, she returned to her home town to work with her father, Iosef, himself a respected quantum physicist. But following his brutal murder by the militant organisation Shariat Jamaat, Nadia had fled to Great Britain, seeking asylum, both from the militants, and from the state that had declared Iosef Yashin a traitor. Traumatised by her experiences, Nadia had sought a new direction in life and earned her fourth degree, this time in archaeology, from Oxford.
Her experiences had made her hard and cold. She rarely socialised with people and a smile was a very rare thing to grace her beautiful yet stern face. She was the epitome of sexiness, turning many young men’s eyes. Her body was toned and firm, but not as firm as her icy manner. Much as most of Oxford’s young men may have wanted to, no one got close to the Ice Queen.
Deigning to respond to Sid’s query, Nadia instead said, “We must report this to Doctor McKinney.”
“What?” King demanded, shocked. “We’ve not even checked this passageway out yet.” He started off down the tunnel.
“Nadia’s right, Ben,” Sid called after him. “We’ve got to report in.”
“But who knows what else might be down here?” he argued.
“Precisely,” Sid pressed. “No one knows what’s down here. More to the point, no one knows that we’re here. If something happens to us they won’t know to look for us in a hidden passageway — it’s hidden, you see, that’s kinda the point.”
“The procedure is to report any unmapped passages before proceeding down them,” Nadia added.
“What, and let McKinney and all her brown-nosers find whatever’s down here and take all the credit? No way! This is our discovery. The three of us. You go back and make your report if you want but I’m taking a better look around.”
He headed off again, this time with the tell-tale gait of a man whose mind was made up. Sid rolled her eyes and glanced at Nadia. “Why can’t he ever be that passionate about me?” Then she headed off after him. A heartbeat later, Nadia fell into step too, without saying a word.
Despite the Russian’s desire to follow procedure, King could tell that somewhere under her cold exterior she was as excited as he was. And it was true. Doctor Juliet McKinney, the strong-minded, blusterous, hot-tempered Scottish bitch in charge of the expedition would swoop in and steel the glory of the moment. She was a fame seeker, spending every possible moment in front of the documentary crew’s cameras. She would relish this find. So far, after almost six months camped on Sarisariñama’s jungle-clad summit, all the archaeological team had found was meter after meter of empty tunnels. Thus, they had dubbed it, The Labyrinth.
The construction of the tunnels themselves was fascinating to any scholar and had already sparked fierce debate in the circles of academia.
Firstly, the presence of sophisticated tunnels boring into the rock of a table-mountain had reopened the age old question about whether or not a more sophisticated and established society than isolated Indian communities could exist in the inhospitable rainforest. For decades the general consensus had been that the jungle was too imposing an environment for civilisations like those found in the distant Andes to evolve.
But it was the design of the walls inside the tunnels that had stirred up the real hornets’ nest in halls of learning across the globe.
Constructed out of hundreds of oddly shaped blocks of varying sizes, carved to fit snugly against one another, the walls bore an uncanny resemblance to the Inca structures scattered around the Sacred Valley of Peru.
That the Incas could have established an outpost so far into the immense rainforest, so far from the safety of the Andes, had sparked a renewed interest in the legends of El Dorado and the Lost City of Z. The general public’s interest in the dig had been enormous and, with the power of modern technology, the expedition had been a true multi-media event. Blogs were posted on the dig’s official website, live videos were streamed whenever satellite coverage permitted, and hundreds of thousands of people followed the events on Twitter and Facebook.
Despite being in one of the most remote places on earth, the expedition was an open book for the whole world to see.
The biological division of the expedition had been hugely successful, the team of UNESCO scientists identifying a number of brand new endemic species of flora and fauna. But the real public interest lay in the archaeological mission and that, sadly, had been far from the roller-coaster, Indiana Jones-like adventure which many had expected.
Seeking fame, all McKinney had been able to report on in six months was the numerous, almost identical tunnels and a few shards of broken pottery which had yet to yield the secrets of Sarisariñama.
The discovery of a hidden passage lined with human skulls would send McKinney into fame-fuelled overdrive and King had no doubt that she would shut him, the ‘radical son of a radical archaeologist’, as she had already referred to him, out.
Before she did that, however, he wanted to find out anything he could about his exciting discovery.
They continued down the tunnel slowly, stopping occasionally to examine the walls and jot down notes.
“Poor Karen,” King said. “Can you believe she missed out on this find?”
He did feel genuine regret that Karen Weingarten, the German archaeologist who had been assigned the exploration of this section of the tunnel system, had missed out. By all rights, it should have been her team’s find, but she had been taken ill, contracting some sort of tropical disease. UNESCO had organised her emergency medical evac. The expedition’s supply chopper, a private contractor based in Caracas, had brought a medical team to the summit. Once they had confirmed that no other expedition members were showing signs of the illness, they had transferred Karen back to Caracas and, from there, flown her to a specialist hospital in the States.
McKinney had reshuffled the eight teams of three archaeologists who had each been assigned a section of the tunnel system. King, Sid and Nadia had been reassigned to Karen’s sector.
“I know,” Sid replied. “She would—”
Her words were drowned out by the sudden, sharp cracking of stone and, before her eyes, King vanished!