The 44-year-old director’s voice came through his headphones. “I want to take a firsthand look before we decide how we’re going to handle this.”
Teresa was living up to her reputation, Janssen thought. “Did you travel by yourself?”
She nodded then leaned toward him. “Every time I show up with my aides the press knows every move I make, before I make it.”
“What did you tell them — before heading out here?”
She grinned. “I told them if I stayed in Washington one more day I was going postal.”
Janssen chuckled at her comment. It was politically incorrect, especially for a federal bureaucrat, and put him at ease.
After Janssen provided the director a courtesy air tour of the park, the Huey circled the mesa. Red dust swirled up as the pilot expertly set the helicopter down less than a hundred meters from the face of the cliff and not far from the cavern opening.
Once the pilot had given the okay, Teresa Simpson bounded out of the helicopter and zipped up a nylon aviator’s coat supplied by the crew. She stopped to survey the landscape and drew in several deep breaths. “Nothing like the Southwest to bring a sense of peace to mind and body.” She walked over to the pilot’s window on the right side of the aircraft and knocked on the plexi. The pilot opened the window, and she shouted over the thump of the slowing rotor blades. “We’ll be at least an hour. You guys do what you can to stay warm.”
The pilot smiled. “Yes, ma’am…. We brought along plenty of hot coffee.”
Teresa grinned and smartly turned around, waving with her right hand. “Okay, Glen, let’s go.”
Ten minutes later, she was studying the makeshift alarm system. “You guys test this for fingerprints?”
“Not yet,” Janssen replied. “I didn’t want to dismantle anything until someone had cleared us to move forward.” Janssen led the BLM chief to the sub-cavern. “I had our rangers rig a line to serve as hand rails.” He pointed out a tripod system with a Coleman lantern. “This provides plenty of light for the climb to the bottom of the cavern.”
“All the comforts of home,” Simpson responded dryly.
Glen lit the lantern, and the cavern glowed in the soft light. “Okay, you can climb down. It’s about forty feet to the bottom.”
When Teresa got her first glimpse of the city, her eyes opened wide in excitement. “Glen, this could be the archeological find of the decade, if not the century.” She turned to him. “You’re quite sure that our mystery guests were the first to find it?”
Janssen nodded. “If you take a look around, you’ll find artifacts including pottery, tools, even clothing like I’ve never seen before…. Like finding King Tut, with the entire tomb intact.
“So, they took nothing?”
“We know they took samples of the granite stones. From the footprints, they only seemed interested in the remains, the stones, and maybe the pictographs. Nothing else seems obviously missing or damaged.”
“So, they left a fortune in artifacts, and only take a few stones with no real value.” She chewed on her knuckle. “What do we know about them?”
“At least four, maybe five persons were involved. According to Jim Dixon, the owner of the rock store, they didn’t offer him any artifacts for sale or hint they had any in their possession. They only wanted information on the red-colored granite crystal they claimed to have found while hiking in the high desert.”
She nodded, but her expression remained serious. “Nothing more?”
“We believe we have a first name for one of them.”
“What’s his name?”
Janssen grinned. “It was a she, and the name is Leah.”
Teresa blinked and stared at the pictographs for a moment. “I think I might know one of your mystery guests. If this Leah is Dr. Leah Andrews, she’s one of our former employees, probably the best archeologist we ever fired.”
Now it was Janssen’s turn to blink. “Where is she now?”
“She had a run-in with the—” Teresa coughed into her hand. “Excuse me, I mean the Secretary of the Interior. Soon after she was fired, despite my best efforts to keep her.” Teresa shook her head. “She’s hardheaded and tough. That’s why I liked her; she reminded me of me.”
Janssen smiled.
“This has Leah Andrews’s signature all over it. She’s a maverick and damned good at finding dwellings in places we’d either walked over a thousand times or didn’t believe were worth the effort.”
Janssen leaned against one of the walls. “I’d think if someone was in that kind of trouble, they’d stay away from national parks and monuments. That’s like putting a gun to your head and daring someone to pull the trigger.”
“You don’t know Leah Andrews.”
“What’s our next move?”
Teresa Simpson grimaced. “I’ve got to notify the Secretary, as much as it pains me. Beyond that, I can only hope I find Leah before he does.”
CHAPTER 29
It was just before eight o’clock in the morning, and Secretary of the Interior Wick Emerson flipped through the morning news programs with a television remote. He sipped a Starbucks tall cafe latte from the recycled white paper cup with the familiar logo as he watched for political news — something he, like most politicians, did every morning.
After his near political death six months before over a mistake concerning two pieces of Native American pottery, he’d learned how fast one can get burned in Washington. He’d almost gotten past that issue, and now it had resurfaced again in spades. A report sat on his desk detailing the amazing discovery of an entire city hidden in a cavern within the national park system in southern New Mexico.
Since this would most certainly be national news, the story that nearly killed his career would certainly resurface, and in Washington, a bad story with legs could be damaging to his boss, the President. And fatal to the Secretary himself.
Compounding the issue immeasurably were suspicions that the person finding the city in the cavern was Dr. Leah Andrews, the government-employed archeologist turned pain-in-the-ass he’d summarily dismissed after the political firestorm had died down.
After she’d been caught trespassing on Federal lands, twice, he’d placed a bounty on her head: a lifetime ban from government employment and certain federal prosecution if she was caught nosing around federal lands in search of Native American sites.
Now it appeared Dr. Andrews had stumbled across a major archeological find and perhaps created an elaborate hoax designed to embarrass him along with the entire Department of the Interior.
He walked over and picked up the sample of feldspar-rich granite that Teresa Simpson had sent him from her visit to the site. The scientists who had examined the stones seemed sure it had originated in Antarctica, a conclusion the Secretary didn’t quibble with, although he scoffed at the idea that a few red stones had been transported by Native Americans to cliff dwellings centuries ago.
The Secretary reached down and lifted photographs of the getaway vehicle off his desk. They’d been taken by park rangers while chasing the suspected artifact hunters out of the park. If they could positively identify the face, perhaps by putting the screws to this person, Emerson could nail her permanently this time.
At that thought, a ghost of a smile crossed his face. He turned his attention back to the television.
CHAPTER 30
Jack and Paulson sat side-by-side, waiting to go live on the highest-rated network morning show in the world. Bonnie Glass, the 33-year-old co-anchor, would host the interview. She was petite, reserved, and known for lulling her victims into a false sense of security with friendly pre-show banter.