night no one had camped out on the balcony, but two policemen had wandered the grounds and hallways. And this morning Gideon was under strict instructions to wait for his escort before going to the site.
He smiled faintly, Making that one come true would take some doing. Even if there weren't cops crawling all over the place.
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Chapter 22
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The hot weather had returned. That was one more thing wrong with the day. Gideon glanced at his watch as they arrived at the site; 7:55 and already the air was like glue. Sweat dripped from the end of his nose. Under a lead-gray sky Tlaloc had the festering, derelict look of an abandoned garbage dump. The combination lock on the gate had been changed, but a guard materialized from behind the West Group to let them in. Inspector Marmolejo was already in the temple, he told them.
'Will you tell the inspector I'll be along in a minute?” Gideon asked his escort in Spanish. “I need to get a few things from the shed.'
Against one wall of the work shed's storage area was a framework of wooden storage bins, doored and latched, but without locks, in which crew members kept whatever personal effects they liked. Gideon's was in the middle row on the right, and in it he kept his tools, tables, field guides, and osteological atlases, his thick, tattered old copy of Morris's
It was always a hodgepodge, but when had he let it get into this condition? Julie was right; he was getting sloppy. The front of the bin was literally plugged with the rolled-up jacket, the poncho, and the Morris. When he finished today, he would take twenty minutes to clean the whole thing out and straighten it, then keep it that way, the way a professional should. This was ridiculous.
It was also a little familiar. Wasn't it something he told himself most mornings? Well, maybe, but this time he meant it.
As he tugged at the stuff blocking the front of the bin, the train of thought that had eluded him earlier came suddenly back to him. He remembered what he'd been thinking—or dreaming—about. It had been that scene at the bottom of the pyramid in 1982, after they'd come out of the temple, when Howard had assigned shifts for guarding the codex.
'I'll take the first shift,” he'd told them, and Worthy would take it with him. “Be back at nine,” he had said to Gideon, and then with a smile: “Does that meet with your approval?'
Now what was it that was bothering him about that? There was something there, something he was overlooking, something that kept tickling away at him. He paused with his hand on the wadded-up plastic poncho. “Be back at nine...'
He shrugged and pulled. The poncho and jacket came loose abruptly; the heavy old volume of Morris thunked on the limestone floor, fortunately landing flat on its side. He reached into the bin only to find the interior stuffed with boxes, notebooks, loose tools, more clothing. What was all this junk anyway? Was that his hat? Had someone else run out of room and started using his bin? It was possible, he thought grouchily, but you'd think they'd notice it was already in use. There were other empty ones. He tossed the stuff out onto a work table and bent to peer inside, but the bins were awkwardly long and narrow—about eighteen inches high and wide, and almost three feet deep—and little light reached the back. Was that his instrument case wedged diagonally into the left-rear corner? Damn, he'd never have left it there like that; those things were delicate. And expensive. Somebody had been in here, fooling around with his things.
Puzzled and annoyed, he reached in with his left hand. His fingers brushed the pebbled leather of the case but couldn't quite grasp it. Who had designed these bins? With an irritated sigh he set his body, jammed his shoulder against the bin's opening and inserted his arm as far as he could, stretching, wriggling his fingers, trying to get hold of the case. And then froze.
Gideon was by no means slow-moving. He was athletic, his reflexes were sharp, and his mind was quick to react. Yet there were times when his analytical, left-brain-oriented intelligence outwitted him, using up precious milliseconds for thought or inquiry when he would have been better off letting his animal reactions take over.
It was one of those times. When he felt the first twinge of pain, stinging but superficial, as if someone had pricked the side of his hand with a pin, his response was to stop and consider. A loose tool? The pruning shears? No, something smaller. A probe? Maybe, but—
The second jab was sharper, not a stab as much as a pinch, and with it, astonishingly, there was an unmistakable tug. He jerked his arm out of the bin and something came out with it, hanging from just below the base of his little finger, squirming and wriggling. He flicked his hand, but the thing hung on, snapping violently from side to side like a loose spring. Shuddering, he whipped it against the framework of the bins, but still the snake held on, straight out of a nightmare, sinuous and muscular, its small, toothy mouth clamped tightly to his hand, chewing away. He whipped it against the wood again and then again, and at last it came loose, dropping to the floor with a fleshy smack. He thought it was dead, but it only lay stunned for a moment, a coiled, gleaming cylinder of red, yellow, and black, then came awake with a start, slithered rapidly out the doorway, and was gone.
Gideon looked anxiously at his hand. All he could see were four or five inconsequential-looking pockmarks, as if a playful puppy had tried its sharp new teeth out on him. There were only a couple of welling droplets of blood and not much pain—no more than an insect sting, and already fading.
Gideon scowled down at the hand. He knew next to nothing about snakes—wild animals were Julie's province, not his—but he knew enough, or thought he did, to know that a poisonous snake didn't chew on you; it struck with
