pursue.”
“I saw the movie. Didn’t end well.”
The feeling of being watched returned. It wasn’t simply the sensation of being in a jungle that felt alive and
“Are you sure we’re alone out here?” Hunter asked, switching to English.
“As long as we aren’t testing mattresses, we’re okay,” Lina said in the same language. “The local Maya knew about this place long before anyone cared. It wasn’t disturbed then. It won’t be looted and sold on the black market now.”
Something rustled out at the edge of the clearing, twigs whipping against what sounded like flesh. The wind blew hot, feeling too dry for the jungle.
Hunter followed Lina around to the back of the mound and nearly ran into her when she stopped dead in the path.
“What—” he began.
She pointed, her finger trembling. Her voice made clear it was rage, not fear, coursing through her. “Some of the rubble has been moved.”
Whoever had done it had been careful to disturb as little of the overgrowth as possible. It took Hunter a moment to see what Lina saw.
“I can’t believe looters are here,” she said hoarsely.
Hunter had drawn his gun from beneath the backpack. He held the weapon along his leg, not wanting to spook Lina unless he had to.
“Neatest looters I ever saw,” he said.
She closed her eyes and tried to manage the rage that had flooded her at the thought of her secret place being pillaged. After a moment she opened her eyes and saw what Hunter had.
A casual visitor wouldn’t have noticed the subtle movement of rubble and overgrowth. There were none of the potholes and garbage and careless piles of dirt that were signatures of an illegal dig.
The breeze shifted shadows and sunlight. Something gleaming in the disturbed area caught Hunter’s eye.
Metal, not glass.
He followed a very faint trail winding amid overgrown blocks of rubble. Within four steps he saw the gleam of fresh brass. He bent and picked it up with his left hand. It was slightly cooler than his skin, no warmer or colder than the ground itself. On the back of the cartridge, the head stamp read 7.62 ? 39. He rolled it in his fingers and passed the open end under his nose, smelling for gunpowder but getting only the faintest trace. Probably his imagination.
“How long since the last rain?” Hunter asked Lina as she hurried to him.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It can rain every day, but the weather’s been weird here just like it has up in Houston.”
He wrapped his fingers around the spent cartridge. “This smells dead. It could have been fired days or weeks ago. Brass is still shiny.”
She looked at the gun in his right hand.
“Wrong caliber,” he said, smiling faintly.
What he didn’t say was that he would bet good money that the spent brass had come from an AK-47.
“But—” she began.
“Quiet,” he breathed. He pressed her behind him into a shallow alcove in the mound of rubble. “Someone is out there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
LINA’S PULSE HAMMERED AGAINST HER WRISTS. SHE HAD trouble keeping still while being held off balance with one side of her head pressed to the stone and the rest of her pressed against Hunter.
He stood quietly, his pale eyes raking shadows for a target.
Changing direction and strengthening, the wind kicked up, no longer dry. It was like jaguar breath, hot and moist. Bits of man-made and natural litter danced along the ground, covering any sounds that might have come from farther away, beyond the edge of the clearing.
Hunter waited, knowing there weren’t enough shots in the magazine to manage a standoff. Rodrigo’s illegal gun would put out a lot of stopping power, but not at a great range, certainly not enough to be much good against the thick cover of the encroaching jungle. Concealed by wind and vegetation, a dozen men could be closing in.
But the shadow that had alerted him was no longer there.
The exhalation of wind faded.
“Stay here,” Hunter said.
He eased away from her, then made a sharp motion that no watcher could have missed.
Nobody cared enough to shoot.
Deliberately Hunter shrugged out of the backpack and swung it out into the open. Nobody shot at the sudden target.
He retreated to cover, shoved the gun into the back of his pants, put the backpack on, and returned to Lina.
“Nada,” he said.
She nodded without looking at him. Her fingertips were digging along a faint, straight line among the stones. Now that she had called his attention to it, he could see that other fingers had been there before hers, rubbing against lichen and moss, and keeping bigger jungle plants at bay.
Hunter’s curiosity fired. “Is it a door?”
“Looks like.”
She worked her fingers along the tiny seam where the limestone blocks came apart. These huge pieces of stone were squared off, unlike the more uneven, harshly weathered blocks that had fallen from higher. It looked like a wall mostly concealed by rubble.
“Is it stuck?” he asked quietly.
“Probably hasn’t been opened in centuries. We should get an engineering study to make sure that—”
With only the faintest grating noise, the stone moved.
Lina made a shocked sound and peered into the darkness. She could see just enough to tell that the door had moved aside into a prepared niche in the wall.
“It worked,” she said, astonished.
“Too well.”
“What do you—oh. It’s been maintained. How odd. Philip never mentioned anything. But then, he wouldn’t,” she added with faint bitterness.
Hunter checked over his shoulder. Nothing but jungle, no sound except the faint rub of leaf against leaf as the wind slowly twisted. Whoever or whatever was out there wasn’t interested in confrontation.
“What is this place?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Lina replied. “It doesn’t feel like any tomb I’ve ever been in. Something is…odd.”
He nodded. His eyes never stopped probing the surrounding jungle.
“Look,” Lina said, her voice urgent.
Hunter spun back to Lina’s position and glanced inside. She stood half in light, the rest of her consumed by shadows. A few feet farther into the mound was what looked like a wall, yet a faint light came from one side. It took only a few steps before a blunt, short hallway, perhaps three feet by five feet, maybe more, opened at an angle deeper in the rubble.
Pale candles that smelled faintly of flowers burned in the darkness along one wall.
“Someone lit these,” she said, going through the opening into the ruin.
He stepped inside after her, pulling the gun once more. When he moved to the right, the door slid back into place behind him.
