Forty feet into the shaft he discovered a body. This was an older man, almost certainly Dr. Adams since all the other members of the archaeological team had been young students. A flip-top satellite cell phone lay between his legs and a leather-bound book rested on his lap, still held tightly in his hands.
Mason eased it out of his grasp and flashed his light on it, seeing that it was the original copy of Díaz’s journal. He gently placed it back in the man’s lap. He would leave the honor of taking it to Lauren — it was the least he could do.
The body’s facial features were frozen in a rictus of agony. Dried blood covered his cheeks and lips and neck.
“Hemorrhagic shock,” Mason whispered. “It got every one of them, whatever the hell this is…”
He carefully stepped over Adams’s outstretched legs and moved deeper into the stone-walled tunnel. After he’d gone only a few feet, he encountered a giant slab of rock pulled away from the entrance to a dark inner chamber.
Out of simple curiosity, he edged through the opening and noticed the ceiling had receded and the room was a good fifteen feet high and almost twenty feet deep. He stood, relieving the pressure on his aching knees, and moved the beam of his flashlight over a scene taken from the pages of ancient history.
A shriveled corpse lay upon a stone altar, arms folded over its chest, preserved by some primitive mummification method, which along with the airtight seal of the tomb had prevented most decomposition of the skin.
Surrounding the altar were clay urns and piles of deteriorated cloth, possibly robes or garments worn by an Aztec king.
“Montezuma,” Mason said softly, mouthing the name rather than actually speaking it aloud.
The remains of two mummified monkeys lay curled in fetal positions near Montezuma’s feet. As he leaned down to look at them more closely, he noticed one was wearing a deerskin collar embedded with precious emeralds and rubies with beaten silver bands while the other’s neck was bare.
He straightened up and looked around the chamber again. Standing in a burial tomb from the 1500s, Mason felt he understood the excitement Dr. Adams and his team members must have experienced when they entered this room. How could they have known this was also potentially a time bomb, waiting for centuries to explode?
He passed his flashlight over a few more relics and backed away, moving toward a square of daylight at the end of the shaft. More than history had been uncovered here, he told himself as he stepped around the corpse of Dr. Adams to begin the serious work of finding out what caused so many sudden deaths.
In the pit of his stomach he felt more than uneasiness, as though what brought him here would forever change mankind’s view of epidemic disease in ways even he, with all his medical training, couldn’t begin to comprehend.
When he emerged in the bright sunlight he saw his team members intent upon their specialized tasks and briefly, he felt better. He had some of the best men and women in their respective fields, a crack medical investigative force despite their personal differences.
Mason smiled grimly. If anyone could find out what caused these deaths at Tlateloco, his Wildfire Team stood the best possible chance.
He started back across the clearing with his flashlight to add his own specialty, bacteriology, to the effort. Walking past rotting corpses, he wondered about Lauren Sullivan and the advisability of bringing her along. So far she was showing toughness he hadn’t expected her to possess. Hopefully, she would continue to hold up under the extreme pressure of the gory job he’d given her to do.
What he hadn’t told her was the primary reason identification of the bodies had to take place in Tlateloco. If this were truly an extremely contagious epidemic, as it appeared to be now, the remains of every student archaeologist and staff member and laborer would have to be burned in place — destroyed completely to keep the germ from spreading, whatever it was. The risks of sending the bodies home for burial were simply too great.
And he didn’t want to even consider the potential political and scientific outcry he would have to overcome if he had to advocate fuel bombing the entire site and destroying those precious archaeological relics in the tomb.
He chuckled to himself, thinking about what a shit-storm that would be.
He paused for a moment, glancing around the clearing at bodies lying everywhere, his team covering them with black plastic sheets to prevent further scavenging by predators. He was reminded of old newsreels from the Vietnam War of fire zones containing corpses of young American servicemen lying like stacked cordwood, awaiting transport back to the States.
His lips tightened when he reasoned that these young archaeologists also died in a war, though their killer wasn’t foreign soldiers but some microscopic assassin even more deadly.
He pushed the grisly images from his mind and offered a silent prayer, knowing if his team was not successful here they could be looking at a death toll far greater than what America suffered in Southeast Asia or even World War II… an epidemic of potentially limitless proportions.
He didn’t want to even contemplate what would happen if the hot-bug that had caused one hundred percent mortality in this site were to escape the jungle and travel to civilization without a cure having been found.
As he strode toward a tent roof Lionel and Joel had erected over various pieces of laboratory equipment resting on folding aluminum tables, he was suddenly distracted by a moving shadow in the jungle off to his right.
At first he thought it might be an animal, until a closer look revealed a half-naked boy with pronounced Indian facial features looking over his shoulder at the men in orange space suits while running deeper into the forest.
“Son of a bitch!” Mason cried, pointing to the place where he saw the boy disappear. “Someone just ran into those trees,” He yelled, starting to run after him. He knew that if the boy had been exposed to this disease, whatever the hell it is, he could spread it all over this part of Mexico.
The other members of the team turned and looked at Mason, but they were too late to see the fleeing figure as it disappeared into the brush.
Chapter 7
As she identified more and more of her friends’ bodies, Lauren became increasingly unsteady on her feet, breathing in short bursts despite Dr. Williams’s warnings. Her battery-operated air supply hummed loudly in her ears, buzzing like a swarm of angry bees. The harsh noise combined with the claustrophobic feel of her hood and the rubbery smell of filtered air made her feel queasy, nauseated.
To make matters worse, she was quietly sobbing, caught in the grip of despair so deep, so intense that words could never have described it. At the edge of the jungle forest she leaned against a palm tree, fearing what her next few footsteps would reveal.
In dormitory tents erected where shade offered some escape from central Mexico’s furnace-like heat and humidity, she knew she would find the bodies of many of her friends and former students. She could see some of them now, lumpy forms lying on canvas folding cots beneath tent roofs surrounded by mosquito netting. They were partially hidden in patches of mottled shade provided by leafy limbs where the jungle canopy thinned near the clearing’s edge.
This was… had been Charlie’s camp. According to department records, thirty-one graduate students had accompanied Dr. Adams here this summer, students from every level in the archaeology program. She remembered their excitement when Charlie told them his initial expedition to this spot convinced him he’d found the fabled Aztec city of Tlateloco, and a massive stone temple where records found in an overlooked collection of four-hundred-year-old documents in Spanish archives hinted at the location of Montezuma’s burial chamber, a find that had eluded archaeologists and treasure seekers since the year 1521.