She rubbed her hands together then tentatively reached out and hit the enter key. Her screen flashed to life.
It was finished!
‘Yes!’ she said, pumping her fist as though she’d just scored a goal.
Her pollen analysis of the Plaza dig flashed up complete. It had been running all night, analyzing the thousands of pollen samples forwarded from Ethan during his excavation. This last season's samples were all in the model now. The results were in.
Excited, she dragged over a chair on wheels.
Right, where to start? Her job was to map the Plaza’s ancient ecology. Identifying the plant and animal remains would help Ethan enormously.
Onscreen she had an aerial image of the Plaza showing the dominant plant species through time. It was amazing.
The entire Plaza had been hidden.
The implications were staggering, and her pollen analysis provided the key. It proved the Plaza’s concealment had been intentional. In order to stabilize the soil, plant species had been chosen for their soil-binding properties. Self-seeding plants were also chosen. Whoever had hidden the Plaza wanted it to stay hidden forever. And they had done an excellent job. Six hundred years later, just weeks before Ethan's discovery, the Plaza still appeared indistinguishable from the surrounding jungle.
The 'big hide' Abigail called it, making Ethan laugh.
Her research confirmed the largest cultural mystery of the century. And right now her new model was revealing even more.
Linking her fingers behind her head, she leaned back and stared at the entire Plaza on the screen.
Abigail described the site to her friends by having them imagine a massive three-tiered ziggurat being turned upside down and stamped into the ground. The resulting shape was the Plaza. That gave the broad picture anyway: three nested tiers shrinking inwards toward the deepest point in the middle, the exact opposite to classic Mesoamerican architecture.
Calling the site a 'Plaza' initially made sense because no one expected to find structures deeper underground. The first season's excavation only found the top ruins.
The next season went deeper, finding the middle tier and the bunkers.
After the bunkers, no one expected Ethan to uncover yet a deeper level.
The Gallery.
The Plaza had saved the best, or possibly the worst, for last. It wasn't like any gallery Abby had ever visited, and if possible, she would never set foot inside the horrible place again. Whoever designed the Gallery had some very sick and twisted ideas about art. The place freaked her out, and that was just walking through its claustrophobic outer corridors. Ninety percent of the Gallery remained sealed. No one could even figure out how to get further inside. No one knew its secrets.
And those vile carvings on the walls….
Abigail shook off the creepy feeling, focusing again on her screen.
Her work was very different. Nothing was out of context in nature. In her science, there were no secrets that enough soil samples and pollen counts couldn't unlock. Already she'd established the site was not self-sufficient. Her pollen counts showed no sign of local agriculture, which meant all the food had to be floated or carried in.
She clicked through the onscreen options to view the Plaza's vegetation six hundred and fifty years ago. Over this image she laid the model she'd been running all night. This should give her an up-to-date picture of what the vegetation was like when the Plaza was in full swing.
She sat back in her chair, amazed at the pattern that appeared.
Thoroughfares. Cutting right through the site from the jungle to the Gallery. They were invisible until all the flora layers were added, because they had only existed in the form of flora. Normal roads were identified by the exclusion of plants, but this was the exact opposite. These thoroughfares were all plants! But why? What purpose was there to have these green corridors linking the surrounding jungle to the Gallery?
Abby sat back and pushed her fingers through her hair. What on earth had she just discovered?
Chapter 2
Striding across the Plaza's top tier, Ethan absently reached into his pocket. It was a mistake. Damn.
The flashlight.
Claire's practical joke had distracted him for a moment. Now all his worries came pressing in again. He'd been carrying the little orange flashlight in his pocket the last two days. That something so innocuous could cause him such mental anguish felt supremely unfair. He wished he'd never found the stupid thing.
No, that's not true. I wish it hadn't been there to find in the first place.
Finding the flashlight in the east bunker was like cracking open an Egyptian pyramid and finding the Pharaoh’s mummy wearing an iPod.
That ain't right in anyone's book.
And then there were the thefts. They were almost as troubling as the flashlight. It started when Marco couldn't locate over one hundred meters of steel cable from the stores hut. They needed the steel cable for Claire's safety fortifications. When the Sherriff's steel cable turned up missing, she immediately conducted a full stock take, finding a bizarre assemblage of items unaccounted for. The missing objects were not especially valuable, not compared to some of the electronic equipment lying around. In common, all the missing items were heavy and bulky, all difficult and costly to transport to the Plaza. Between them, Ethan and Claire estimated that enough steel cable and reinforcing beams were missing to fill the back of a small truck.
But who would want them? Where had they taken them? When? How?
Ethan imagined it must be exceedingly difficult to move large items around the Plaza undetected, and absolutely impossible to get them off the site unnoticed. But if they were still here, then why couldn't he find them? He and Claire had looked everywhere, and there weren't that many places to look. Marco's current theory — 'someone-stashed-the-stuff-in-the-jungle' — seemed the least implausible. There was a lot of jungle after all. They couldn't search it all.
First the missing equipment, and now the flashlight. I'm not liking this at all.
A voice jolted Ethan from his thoughts. 'If you go and start finding gold, I'll need to hire more security staff to protect it.'
Ethan shielded his eyes from the morning sun. 'Oh, Ambrose. I didn't see you there. The sun's a killer today, huh?'
'Summer solstice,' explained Ambrose, stepping out of the glare and to where Ethan could see him better. 'It's going to be a very special day today.'
From the neck up, Ambrose Rourke always reminded Ethan of the quintessential academic. His gaze had that transfixing quality. An inventor, perhaps. Someone pottering in sheds after bedtime. Intelligent eyes, receding grey-flecked black hair, bushy eyebrows arching down into a territory of deep facial lines mapped from long hours of study. Ambrose emanated the pervading calmness of old libraries and musty lecture halls. Claire had remarked on several occasions about his deep, authoritive voice being ideal for the background narration on future documentaries about the Plaza.
The giveaway should have been the tanned skin. The tanned skin and a physique that a twenty-year-old would envy. Rourke moved with the body and energy of a much younger man.
As the Chief of Site Security, Ambrose Rourke knew more about guns and surveillance cameras than libraries and lecture halls.
Ethan wondered again what drew someone like Rourke, quiet and retiringly intelligent, to the life of security management.
'I was a million miles away,' apologized Ethan. 'Sorry, you surprised me. What did you say about gold?'