“There’s the tunnel,” she said, aiming her light at a dark square near the foot of the temple, still too unaccustomed to the sound of her Racal’s breathing apparatus to ignore it completely when she spoke.
“Montezuma’s remains are about a hundred feet beyond the opening in a walled chamber. There are mummified bodies of monkeys and snakes and other animals in the tomb with him. Along with some clay tablets covered with hieroglyphs and a few extremely well-preserved garments.”
“Be careful where you step,” she said, shining her flashlight along the floor of the tunnel to reveal multiple small- to medium-sized stones lying half-buried in the sandy loam. “There appears to have been a minor quake at some time, causing the partial collapse of portions of the roof, especially near the entrance. It may explain why things are so well preserved despite this high humidity. The quake must have sealed the tunnel off completely, making it virtually airtight.”
“Charles and the students must have had to work very hard to excavate this tunnel,” Matos said, awe in his voice.
“Yes,” Lauren answered, “Charles was an excellent field man who knew how to get the most out of his students and the local laborers he hired.”
“As I said, due to the dry air of the tunnel and inner chamber, most of the artifacts show very little deterioration…”
Matos turned to glance at her. “Yes, but now that the tomb has been opened, the humidity and dampness will quickly work to ruin the specimens in this tomb. We either have to reseal the entrance with plastic or work very quickly to recover the artifacts and put them in plastic bags or otherwise protect them from the environment.”
She wondered how they could be talking about artifacts when Charlie and thirty-one students were dead all around her. Was she simply blocking it out or just using the talk of mundane detail of relic recovery to take her mind off the tragedy that had occurred?
She’d loved Charlie in ways few people would understand; he had been a father figure and a listening ear when the world seemed to be caving in around her in graduate school. She experienced a broken relationship of six years, the death of her father unexpectedly during her second semester of the doctoral program, and an overriding depression afterward lasting almost a year. Tears filled her eyes again, as she remembered Charlie.
“I just hope we are able to contain whatever this plague is,” Lauren said. “It would be a catastrophe beyond comprehension if whatever killed Charlie and the others were to escape and be unleashed on civilization.”
“The army has begun setting up perimeters around the site as Dr. Williams requested,” Eduardo said. “No one will be allowed in or out. Dr. Cardenez is also fearful of a widespread epidemic so close to Mexico City. The death toll could be staggering, but I simply cannot allow a discovery such as this to be destroyed as Dr. Williams believes it must be.”
He paused and stared at her. “Perhaps, Dr. Sullivan, you could be of help to me in reasoning with Dr. Williams.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, he has been talking of using a fuel bomb to completely burn this entire area in case they cannot find the cause of this terrible plague, or in the event that the cause is found but has no cure. You need to help me explain to him that the burial place of Montezuma is too important to the history of Mexico to be destroyed without first cataloguing all of the wonderful treasures here.”
He spread his arms out wide. “There must be some way to decontaminate this area. I know virtually nothing about diseases; however I will not permit something so important to be burned. Many secrets of the Aztec Empire may lie buried underneath this temple, so many unsolved riddles no one has ever been able to decipher. My government will never allow this place to be firebombed without absolute proof there is no other choice.” He hesitated, fixing on her with his eyes. “Will you help me?”
Lauren led the way to the tunnel opening and bent down to go inside, thinking about her answer. The wants and needs of science versus the potential deaths of hundreds or many thousands of innocent people was no contest.
“The decision may not be up to your government, Eduardo,” she said. “If enough people start dying like this, every country in the Western Hemisphere will demand that something is done to halt its spread.”
“It is unthinkable how such a disaster could occur with a simple archaeological discovery…”
The fan in Lauren’s breathing apparatus seemed louder in the tunnel as they followed the beam of her flashlight. “From what I have seen today, this is no simple archaeological find,” she said in a voiced dulled by sorrow. “Charlie may have found an explanation for the Aztecs’ sudden decline after Cortés looted their treasuries and in the process lost his life to the same fate as an entire civilization. Dr. Williams said he and several of the other doctors believe this is something that has been buried here for centuries, like what Carter unearthed in Egypt. Finding the burial place of Montezuma may not be the blessing it first seemed to be when Charlie discovered it.”
“How can you overlook the importance of it, Lauren? It is perhaps the most significant archaeological find in the history of Mexico, a missing piece to the Aztec puzzle and the collapse of their empire. My government will not allow its destruction, I can assure you.”
If enough people start dying in Mexico City they might, she thought, but kept her opinion to herself. She’d heard and seen enough of death in the past twenty-four hours to want to avoid discussing it whenever she could.
Although she was tired she knew she could never sleep… not here, not now, not until she left this dreadful place. Even though she found she liked Dr. Williams and other members of his team personally, this place would forever be synonymous with the deaths of her friends and mentor.
“Remember what Dr. Williams said about these suits, Eduardo,” she advised when she saw Matos stumbling along the tunnel, “to be very careful not to rip them or remove any part of it for any reason.”
Her flashlight beam fell on Dr. Adams’s body, the bag he was in. “This is where we found Charlie,” she said, with bottomless despair clotting her voice.
She stepped around the body bag and continued along the tunnel, resisting an overwhelming urge to break down and cry again. For some reason, now she thought about the terrible contradiction here. The excitement in Charlie’s voice when he came back from his first expedition to these ruins, and how sure he was this was Montezuma’s lost burial chamber described in letters he found last fall in Madrid. He had told her then that every sign, every marking on the temple pointed to the correctness of his assumption.
Then the full-scale expedition this summer with the big foundation grants to prove his theory, the discovery of this tunnel and Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s skeletal remains with his handwritten journal and its descriptions of what had happened to Montezuma and the Aztecs at Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital a few miles away.
The journal proved Charlie’s assumption, he told her breathlessly when a cell call finally made it through the Mexican phone company’s maze one night as he labored with a hurried translation, that they would be opening the inner chamber the following morning.
It was the last time Lauren would hear his voice until he called to describe the horrors of what was happening here, what had happened here, what was happening to him. Even Díaz’s journal, which he had been so happy to find, had been left lying in his lap within the body bag. Mason feared it was too contaminated to allow out until they’d discovered the cause of the deaths.
Lauren entered the inner chamber and cast her light upon the corpse of Montezuma. Eduardo’s flashlight wandered from place to place, from relic to relic, until he halted it on the mummified remains lying atop the sepulcher.