Jade returned the smile, wondering exactly what “wonderful things” the man had heard, and who said them. Probably just being polite, she decided. “Thank you. It’s good to be here.”
She realized that the other man — Dorion — was staring at her like she was a supermodel. “I’ve seen you before.”
Jade noted the accent — French, she decided. Not Paris, though. Somewhere in the countryside — but it was the way he spoke, with an almost reverential awe, that made her feel very uncomfortable. Before she could respond, he added. “It was in a dream, I think.”
Sanchez bellowed out laughter. “Paul is such a charmer. Watch out for him, Dr. Ihara.”
Jade didn’t feel the least bit charmed. She glanced at Acosta, still aware of Dorion’s scrutiny, then addressed Sanchez. “Please, call me Jade. It will save time.”
“Jade it is. A lovely name. You know that jade was extremely precious to the early inhabitants of Mesoamerica. Oh, but look who I’m talking to. Of course you know that.” He clapped his hands together. “I’m Noe. This is Paul.”
“Dr. Dorion is our resident muon tomographer,” explained Acosta. “He’s the one who is making it possible for us to see through the walls of the pyramid.”
“Muon tomographer?” Jade asked. She actually knew a little about the process, but decided it wouldn’t hurt to hear it explained by an expert.
“Muons are high-speed elementary particles found in cosmic rays.” With the shift to Dorion’s area of expertise, his voice lost some of its creepy undertone. “We are constantly bombarded by them on the surface, but they are unable to penetrate down here — one hundred meters underground. At least, this is the case where the pyramid is solid. Where there are gaps — tunnels and chambers — the muons can pass through and reach the detector.”
“Like an X-ray machine?”
“Exactly. Only subatomic particles can penetrate much deeper than X-rays.”
“It’s working, too,” added Sanchez. “Paul, show her what we’ve found.”
Dorion stepped back inside the enclosure and bent over the computer, tapping out a few quick commands. The lines of text on the screen were replaced by a blue screen with blossoms of yellow and orange that reminded Jade of a Magic-Eye photo. Dorion continued to manipulate the image and Jade saw the largest blossom begin moving vertically down the screen.
“What am I looking at here?”
“Particle frequency is abnormally high in the quadrant we’ve been monitoring.”
Sanchez pointed into the chamber just past the enclosure. “There’s a passage just behind that wall.”
“We think there’s a passage,” amended Acosta.
“The data are consistent with there being a hollow space in the pyramid,” Dorion said.
“But that’s not the best part,” Sanchez went on, with child-like enthusiasm. “Paul, show her the model.”
Dorion tapped a few more keys and the blue screen vanished, replaced instead by a transparent three-dimensional representation of the pyramid. The chamber in which they now stood and the tunnel leading to it appeared as a pale red artery, ending in four-headed bulb directly below the apex, while a blue vein snaked a vertical course to a smaller cavity directly above them.
Sanchez pointed an eager finger at the picture. “The passage doesn’t extend to the exterior. It’s probably been sealed since the time of the pyramid’s construction.”
Jade grasped the reason for Sanchez’s enthusiasm. A sealed chamber might offer an unprecedented glimpse into the origins of Teotihuacan and its inhabitants. “Why a vertical shaft going nowhere?”
“A sacred well?” Acosta speculated. “If this is a tomb, it might well represent a passage to the Underworld. Or it may be some part of the original inhabitants’ belief system that we have never seen before. That’s what we hope to learn when we explore the chamber.”
“When can we enter the chamber?”
“We have to proceed carefully,” Acosta went on. “We are dedicated to minimizing the impact to the site, but of course when word of this gets out, it will become difficult to protect whatever treasures — in the archaeological sense — may lie within. Our plan is to dig a small intersecting shaft, just large enough to insert a robotic vehicle. I’d like you to take care of excavation, Dr. Ihara, but remember, we only want to get a look at what’s in there. We won’t be taking anything out.”
The restriction did not bother Jade in the slightest. She felt the group’s excitement catch fire within her. Even Dorion’s strange manner seemed irrelevant. “Then let’s get started.”
This is why I love being an archaeologist.
TWO
Jade watched as the Jeep rolled across the nearly empty gravel parking lot where she had made her own arrival only a few days earlier. She checked her watch. The Laco 1925 Navy Classic sported a big white face with easy to read numbers, sort of like a miniaturized wall-clock. Given her jet-setting lifestyle, she didn’t own a lot of prized possessions, but this was definitely one of the few things that she always kept with her. It had been a Christmas gift from Maddock, a German watch from a German watch shop. Maybe Maddock was gone, but she still clung to her memories of that magical Christmas in Germany. They visited the Cologne Cathedral to get a peek at the bones of the Magi inside the Shrine of the Three Kings and ended up tangling with a branch of the Dominion called Heilig Herrschaft. She had invited Maddock’s partner and best friend, “Bones” Bonebrake and his sister, Angel, to join them and….
And now Maddock and Angel were together.
I should get a new watch.
It was too late in the afternoon for more tourists, which meant the Jeep probably belonged to the man she was waiting for. When the vehicle finally stopped, she rose to her feet and stretched, shrugging off the muscle soreness of long hours of physical labor in cramped conditions.
The job of methodically digging out the exploratory shaft by hand, while physically taxing, had been the perfect distraction from her emotional turmoil, and as she got closer to the vertical tunnel, her growing anticipation made even the aches and blisters seem irrelevant. Now that the shaft was finished — a slot in the surrounding lava matrix that was just barely large enough for her to crawl through — she was eager to move on to the next phase of the investigation. With a final standing cat-stretch to work out the last of the kinks, Jade started out across the parking lot toward the newly arrived Jeep to meet the man who would make that possible.
The passenger side door opened and a fit, and not altogether unattractive thirty-something man got out. His dark hair was shorn close in a military buzz cut, which instantly made her think about Maddock, but she pushed away the impulsive comparison.
Lots of guys were ex-military. No reason to hold that against him.
“You must be the robot guy,” she called. Acosta had made the arrangements while her head had been, literally, in a hole. He had decided to bring in an American, both to help preserve site secrecy and to meet specific technical challenges, but Jade couldn’t recall if the administrator had mentioned his name.
The man flashed a disarming smile and stepped away from the Jeep, extending a hand. “And you must be Lara Croft, Tomb Raider.”
“Wow. Never heard that one before.” Strike one, thought Jade.