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He sat up in the dank, humid tunnel.

As much as he enjoyed playing whatever games with Laramie that would irritate her the most, there remained the issue of his mission-which, even as the most obstinate member of Laramie’s team, he had nonetheless come to believe to hold probable significance.

Having read Laramie’s documents from the terror book, examining the San Cristóbal theme park up close and personal, and seeing that fucking Pentagon memo…hell, even before dropping from the MU-2B, Cooper concluded that the U.S. populace was, in fact, up to its ears in some very deep shit. And were the U.S.-government-employed snuffer-outers who’d taken out the likes of Cap’n Roy also ultimately responsible for putting their own nation’s populace in the deep shit in which it currently found itself? Probably-make that definitively yes.

But it didn’t matter now-when it came to the suicide-filo threat, too many somewhat innocent lives were at stake. Which Laramie had been trying to point out to you during her huff at Paddy Murphy’s lively Irish pub.

Possessed of too much firsthand experience staring at the ass end of U.S. foreign policy, Cooper couldn’t discount the danger of the products the Guatemala research lab might well have turned out-meaning that whoever had been culpable to begin with, even if they were trying to silence that culpability now, the fact remained that if Márquez had got his hands on the filo that fucking lab had pumped out, and was now planning on using it in a wholesale bomb-dispersal scheme, then somebody had to stop him.

And why wouldn’t the bastard stepchild of the government that had empowered Márquez to begin with be the right man for the job?

Yet here you sit, an emissary of the Great Developer of Weapons and Hate, sent to dispose of public enemy number one-

And you’ve failed miserably.

In fact, you failed pathetically: all that you’ve managed to do is kill a couple of twenty-year-old soldiers and suffer a panic attack.

Flicking on his Maglite, Cooper picked a direction and started carefully down the tunnel. It wasn’t long before he grew comfortable-cozy, even-experiencing that feeling of pulling on an old sock, wrapped around you in a way you’re accustomed to, but not without a hole or two. Like a paroled convict finding solace in the stupidity of returning to the joint.

Apparently one fort’s maze of passageways weren’t much different from another’s-Cooper occasionally wondering whether he’d turned a corner into the same labyrinth of his imprisonment. Ducking down the short tunnels and into rooms, some featuring prison bars, some with decrepit storage racks, it occurred to him that these passages hadn’t been built entirely by Spanish land barons.

No historian I, he thought, but some of these are older.

He decided the more likely scenario would have seen the conquistadors discovering the subterranean tunnel work, razing whatever the natives had put atop it, then constructing palatial forts in which to hunker down while the pillaging continued apace.

He thought for a moment of Ernesto Borrego, a thought that made him curious how deeply Márquez’s contractors had explored the meandering rabbit runs he was caught in now, and whether there might be any number of buried chambers loaded with some good old-fashioned antiquities the Polar Bear wouldn’t mind snatching.

If so, maybe a new wave of violence would follow that stash wherever it headed too.

Márquez’s mansion, it seemed, was positioned at one end of a vast network of passages and rooms. Cooper spent a few hours poking around, and had almost convinced himself he’d seen all there was to see when he encountered something odd.

He’d made a few mistakes, been through the same tunnels a few times, but the door he now stood before was a new door. Not just a new sight for him on his exploration of the tunnels, but literally new-of recent construction, assembled with materials mimicking the authentic style of the arched, shoulder-high doorways that came with the place, but lacking rot and rust.

He thought suddenly that he heard a noise, and switched off his flashlight. In a few minutes-when there came no subsequent sound-he wondered how disoriented he’d become, and whether this section of the grid was too close to the main house for comfort. Congratulations-perhaps you’ve discovered Márquez’s wine cellar, including the armed security detail standing at attention beside the Bordeaux.

He kept the Maglite doused and his eyes soon adjusted somewhat to the darkness. He couldn’t detect any residual light from the tunnel, and it seemed no lights were on behind the door. Satisfied he remained alone, Cooper flipped the flashlight back to life, turned the door handle as silently as he could, and pushed open the door.

It hit him immediately-an oddly familiar, distinctly sour scent.

He thought immediately of Eugene Little, the malpracticing former plastic surgeon and current medical examiner for the U.S. Virgin Islands. Little always reeked of the scent Cooper had just taken in, mainly because the place the medical examiner worked reeked of it too. Which made sense for Eugene Little and his place of work-but not, Cooper thought, down in these tunnels.

The bouquet of vinegar and lime he’d just caught was unmistakable: it was the fragrance of formaldehyde.

He was half expecting some kind of surprise-a bullet or a punch, perhaps-but when he lifted the flashlight to pass its beam across the contents of the room, he found himself caught completely off guard by the unexpected sight before him.

Cooper had just seen a ghost.

52

Her body lay in repose, more or less the way children’s books depicted the fate of Sleeping Beauty, placed on a gilded coffin in the center of the room. Preserved to perfection not ten feet from him, Cooper found himself staring at the real-life version of the priestess depicted by the golden statue from his bungalow-the only clue to her inanimate state the moonlike pallor of her skin, exposed as it was by the beam of the Maglite. Otherwise, the woman looked as though she’d simply nodded off.

If this wasn’t the real-life person represented by the golden statue-which Cooper gauged to be all but impossible-she presented as close a match as you’d find. Cooper had to assume that Sleeping Beauty here was a descendant of the tribe from the Guatemala rain forest crater, massacred by the Pentagon lab spill.

But the resemblance seemed even too uncanny for that.

Oh, yeah, Cooper, came a caustic, hollow whisper he recognized immediately as the voice of the golden priestess. Make no mistake-it’s me you’ve found. Been callin’ you here, and now I’m found. Only you’re too fucking late, old man. And ain’t that too bad? But it doesn’t matter…and it never did. You were the one calling yourself back-

Cooper shook off his latest flirtation with insanity and closed himself in the room. He turned, steeled himself against the reek, and came back around with the flashlight. Time, he thought, to conduct a more rational examination of the mausoleum you’ve just stumbled into-maybe I can even determine whether I’m hallucinating, or I’ve managed to stumble into a new phase of my nightmares.

He came in and took a look around.

Like its new door, the room too had been updated with recent construction. Peering at the ceiling, corners, and walls, Cooper thought for a moment he was feeling some kind of déjà vu aftershock, a residual rhyming vibe put out by Sleeping Beauty or her golden priestess statue counterpart-but then snapped out of the dream state and realized where he’d seen this place before. Almost to the inch, it matched the main room of the subterranean crypt he and Borrego had found beneath the rain forest village. The key difference being the decor: the crypt in Guatemala, when they’d found it, had already been pillaged by Borrego’s intrepid grave robbers; here, the sort of gold artifacts found in Cap’n Roy’s lost stash of goodies remained fully intact and on glorious display.