holding the urn, then the slab. They were nearly precise in dimensions. A chamber for a single pot perhaps. Unusual. He couldn’t be certain and reminded himself that creating what wasn’t there wasn’t his job. He turned his attention back to the urn.
When he finally unearthed it, the morning had passed, and he thought of his wife’s complaints about his obsession. But even Magdalena would appreciate this. A half day’s worth of painstaking work later, Eduardo felt the fragile pot shift under his hand. He stopped, simply to control his eagerness that might somehow ruin the find.
“Senor Valez. Professor? It’s late.”
Eduardo looked up, frowning that the generator lights had come on beyond the entrance, and he could smell the aroma of food. He shook his head, his smile ironic. “This is why my wife threatens to divorce me once a week.”
Gil chuckled softly and handed him a canteen. “Must be something good to keep you here for hours.”
Gil marveled at the stone tablet carvings but was instantly distracted when Eduardo flicked on a penlight to show the object clearly. He didn’t dare tug for fear of cracking it or scraping the delicate artwork.
“Oh, man, it’s intact.” Gil stooped for a better look.
Groups of ten small offering jars, or ofrendas, were found at the foot of the burial site in groups of five, ten, or twenty. Eduardo glanced back at the shallow excavation behind him. Perhaps these were the ofrendas of someone important. “A prize for certain, but look at the drawings. It’s not the lovers on it as the other shards. But warriors in combat.” He’d seen this picture a couple of times before, but only in fragments from a fallen ceiling.
“But none of the drawings show the Moche waging war for conquest or attacking a fortified settlement. No capturing, killing, or mistreating noncombatants.”
“Nor did they work as a single coordinated force like a modern army,” Eduardo reminded him.
“I think they were guerrillas.”
Romanticizing, Eduardo thought, yet the young man had a valid point. This burial was possibly a warrior of some significance. “This drawing depicts ceremonial combat. One-on-one for the purpose of producing a few vanquished prisoners. These unfortunates were needed to fill a central role in the sacrifice ceremony that followed battle. From the drawings on the walls and past finds, we know the warrior prisoners were first stripped of clothing and battle equipment. Then naked and leashed around the neck with a rope, they were brought to a ceremonial center. There the prisoners’ throats were cut, their blood consumed by the ceremony participants, and finally their bodies were dismembered.”
“Yes, but why? And who fought them? Why not use them as slaves or integrate them into the tribe? If they had, they might not have died out so fast.”
“Purity of race, perhaps.” Eduardo shrugged. “They needed sacrifices and wouldn’t do that to their own if they could avoid it.”
“But outsiders didn’t believe it was an honor. Poor souls. Professor Calan of UCLA found the burial tomb of a Moche priest and a child, both with a bone deformity. Yet they weren’t ritually killed.”
“Which proves they honored their own and sacrificed the outsiders.”
Gil look disgusted.
“You’re glad it’s an ancient culture?”
“Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to meet up with them in the jungle.” The young man pointed to the find. “The lid’s intact. Can you open it?”
“I want to X-ray it first. Bring me a box please.” The jar had a seal rimmed in flecks of gold and a waxlike substance.
Eduardo took photos and measurements, then tied the string grid lines from the rest of the dig to this spot. Until he studied and deciphered the icons on the urn, he wouldn’t open it. It had significant weight, and whatever was inside was preserved—and sealed for a reason.
U.S. Army Medical Facility
Virginia
Clancy’s heels clicking on the tile floor were like something out of a slasher movie. Distant and unsuspecting. That she was the only one working after hours magnified her seclusion. She stopped outside the primate lab and swiped her ID access through the security. Quick footsteps from somewhere to her left made her skin tighten.
Sergeant Victors appeared, his sidearm drawn. When he saw her, he pointed it to the ceiling and relaxed.
“Damn.” She snapped her fingers. “Lost another chance to fire your gun, huh, Daniel?”
“Oh yeah, I’m trigger-happy tonight. Be careful.”
“Next time come at me with more firepower than that. I feel insulted.”
He grinned like a new groom as she pushed open the door.
“You’ll be okay with that creature?” he asked.
Clancy glanced into the lab at the sedated orangutan in the titanium cage. “That wuss? Oh yeah.”
“He’s a 250-pound wuss, ma’am.”
“Yes, but I think our relationship is in the wooing stage. He tried picking fleas off me this morning.”
“Did he find any?”
Her narrow look lost impact when she smiled. “Okay, that does it, you’re off my Christmas list.”
Waving at him, she stepped into the lab, but didn’t turn on the overhead lights. The bluish illumination from inside the glass cold storage locker and the running lights under the tables shone off the black floor and stainless steel with an incandescent glow. Besides, Boris was sleeping and she’d like to keep it that way. Whenever she was near, he shook the cage and dry-humped the bars.
The embarrassment wasn’t half as bad as the fact that her only romantic prospect lately was a fat hairy orangutan that was doped up most of the time.
And he had his happy juice three hours ago, she thought, checking his stats for the day. Turning away from the computers, she slipped on latex gloves and prepared a syringe to draw blood. A pinprick was enough to examine under the microscope, but this would just save Dr. Yates from doing it in the morning. Boris had favorites and Francine Yates wasn’t one of them. Must be pheromones, Clancy thought, moving to the cage and stroking the sleeping orangutan’s forehead.
“You really are an ugly creature,” she said softly, swabbing the vein. “But I mean that in the nicest possible way.”
She pushed the needle into a protruding vein, then drew back the plunger. Boris didn’t even flinch. The syringe full, she drove the needle into the rubber-stoppered vial, then let a single drop fall onto the slide. Bending over a microscope was passé, and she brought the magnified sample up on the larger screen. At two thousand magnification, the blood cells were still working. She sat in a wheeled chair and admired the beauty of a simple cell.
She’d done this a thousand times in the last two months and had completed her third-stage computer synthesized tests just last week. Implanting Boris was only the first stage. They had to let it ride for weeks or perhaps months before they’d know if the pod did any severe damage to the animal’s
