She had made significant progress on the glyph language. Many of the glyphs were recognizable: tribesmen with spears, many versions of the sun, insects and various animals, most notably bats. Most of the glyphs, however, were a language she had yet to crack. She knew that the pictures of the sun, suns of many colors, all with six rays radiating outward, were the most important part of the ancient language, and probably the entire culture as well.
One unique factor set the Cerro Chaltel language apart from any other ancient language she knew of — the use of color. Colors seemed to be as significant as the glyphs themselves; in fact they were part of the glyphs. It wasn't just a few browns and reds, but a full spectrum of colors with subtle shades and hues. The glyphs without color would be like written English without punctuation or spaces between words. She knew she'd crack the language, but had yet to find her Rosetta stone or anything that gave her a base from which to learn the language's rudimentary elements.
Carbon dating pegged the most recent cave artifacts at thirty-five hundred years old. She surmised the inhabitants had abandoned the city around that time, about 1450 b.c. and thought that they were possibly forced out by another culture. There wasn't enough evidence, however, to form a decent hypothesis about why the residents evacuated. There were no bodies, no burned remains, no bones of any kind.
Now, however, a clue had appeared, seven thousand miles away in the Utah badlands. The knife was unmistakable; there was no doubt of a close relation between Cerro Chaltel and Utah. She knew this because she'd never revealed the Argentinean knife's platinum composition.
Based on the metal alone, just one of the fifteen-pound knives was worth over $200,000. Such figures would draw treasure seekers and grave robbers like flies to a rotting corpse. The caves would be defiled, priceless artifacts stolen or destroyed by ignorant, greedy hands. And even worse would be the mining companies, lobbying the Argentina government for mineral rights, tearing into the mountain with their explosives and strip mines and leaching compounds, turning the area into a wasteland. As far as the world knew, Cerro Chaltel's knives were a very early example of steel. Outside of herself, her staff, Sanji, and a handful of trusted scientists, no one knew the truth.
The possibility that her lost culture had reappeared in Southwest America astounded her. No, not reappeared; that wasn't quite right. Carbon-dating the few organic scraps remaining on the Utah knife showed it to be 6,500 years old. The knife, and therefore the culture, existed in Utah while the Cerro Chaltel site was probably at the peak of its power over the Tierra Del Fuego area.
The obvious possibility numbed her imagination — the two sites weren't independent; they were part of an empire, a culture that controlled an area from Tierra Del Fuego through Central America into the southern United States — an area that dwarfed the amount of land controlled during the height of the Roman Empire.
The words Nobel Prize rang loudly in her brain.
Veronica had no idea of how she would stop the mining outfit, but she wasn't going to sit around and figure out a plan while the company drilled away at history. She'd figure something out when she got there. The anxiety of the wait and the jolting ride didn't help. She knew one thing — she wouldn't want to be the man in charge when Dr. Veronica Reeves arrived, already pissed off and ready to pick a fight.
Connell sat in the air-conditioned office shack and listened to Mack finish up the day's progress report.
"Let me get this straight,” Connell said. “You've done fifty-eight hundred feet in two days, and now you're telling me the last sixty-two hundred feet will take a week, maybe more? Bullshit, Mack. Unacceptable."
Mack glared at Connell. “The men are working overtime as it is, Mr. Kirkland. If they start to get careless, we're going to have accidents. I don't have accidents at my sites."
"It's not your site, it's mine,” Connell said, pounding a fist on the desk. “A week is unacceptable. I want it done in three days. This operation is running way over budget, and we need to know what's down there."
"Somebody's going to get hurt!” Mack said, suddenly standing and leaning forward, fists on the desk. His head bobbed wildly with each word. “You know damn well this is dangerous work."
"I know it, you know it, and so do they,” Connell said, gesturing in the direction of the mine. “They know what they're doing, that's why we're paying them double scale. If they can't handle the job, if they get hurt, that's not my fucking problem. Now I want that tunnel reached in three days. I advise you to shake your ass on out to the mine and get those men working harder."
Mack stood up straight and rigid. Cuts, scrapes, and scars covered his balled fists. Rage boiled off his face like a steam engine.
"People are right about you,” Mack said quietly. “You are a heartless prick.” He turned and stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind him as loudly as he could.
Connell sat quietly in the sudden silence, feeling the weight of Mack's words. Maybe he was pushing too hard.
Maybe.
Connell wearily rubbed his eyes. He managed only about three hours of sleep a night. He slept on a cot in his office, away from the barracks, away from everyone else in the camp. He even ate his meals in the office, separate from the mess-tent laughter. Alone, he stumbled to his cot around two or three a.m. Sometimes he dreamed about Cori. Sometimes he didn't. Either way, good sleep was hard to come by.
The phone rang.
"Kirkland here."
"Mr. Kirkland, this is O'Doyle. I'm at the front gate. We need you out here immediately, sir."
"What's going on?"
"I'm afraid we have visitors."
Connell slammed down the phone. He seethed with annoyance as he left his air-conditioned office and ventured out into the frying-pan Utah afternoon and promptly began sweating like a whore in church. He saw the green Jeep and the security guards on the other side of the camp, just outside the main gate. Blinding flashes of sunlight glinted off the rolls of razor wire surrounding the camp's perimeter. A small group of staffers gathered around, watching the scene. He hurried across the compound.
Bertha Lybrand gripped a squirming woman in a tight hammerlock. A beat-up straw hat lay in the sand. The woman wore a ponytail, but that didn't stop clumps of her blond hair from sticking out in all directions.
The other trespasser, an overweight man, lay facedown on the hood of a RAV4, his hands cuffed behind him. He was almost as big as O'Doyle, but fat and out of shape. O'Doyle stood silent witness, smiling bemusedly, his pistol casually pointed to the ground.
"What's going on here, Mr. O'Doyle?” Connell said.
Lybrand answered the question. “These people tried to trespass, Mr. Kirkland. I told ‘em to wait, but they insisted on coming in. I detained ‘em until you could be notified."
"Are you in charge here?” the blond woman shouted. Connell looked at her face; beautiful but furrowed with fury.
"Yes ma'am. I'm Connell Kirkland."
"Then you tell this bitch to let us go, now! You're facing one hell of a lawsuit."
Lybrand tightened her grip. “Just calm down, ma'am. We'll get everything worked out."
Connell looked at the captive blond woman, staring at her for a few seconds before speaking.
"If Miss. Lybrand lets you go, you and your associate will behave as proper guests and will go nowhere without our permission,” Connell said. “Is this acceptable?"
The woman glared at him with hatred and frustration. She was obviously used to getting her way, used to people meeting her demands. “Yes,” she said, calming her voice, grimacing at the concession to Connell's authority. “We will respect your property. I only wanted to see the person who was in charge."