Yuri cocked the pistol hammer. Lucy stared at the old man and then took a pace back from the remains.
‘Do it yourself,’ she snapped.
Yuri smiled as though somehow impressed by Lucy’s defiance, and the pistol shifted position. The shot was deafeningly loud in the confines of the tent as Yuri fired, and Ethan flinched as he turned and saw one of Jarvis’s escorts stagger backwards as the bullet slammed into his chest and then he toppled onto the cold ground. His head thumped down onto the rocks, his eyes staring wide and lifeless up at the tent roof.
Jarvis stared down at the fallen agent and then glared at Yuri. ‘Once a coward,’ he uttered.
Yuri pointed the pistol at Jarvis, but Lucy leaped forward.
‘No!’
Lucy stepped towards the mummy, and she quickly retrieved a pair of forensic gloves and some tweezers for the pocket of her jacket as she set to work un-wrapping the dense shroud.
Ethan looked at Jarvis, who was standing with his hands in his pockets. With a start Ethan realized that the old man still had the satellite phone tucked into his jacket pocket, and he was manipulating it as they watched Lucy begin to work.
XXXVII
Ethan watched as Lucy patiently peeled away the dense layers of frozen fabric wrapped around the mummy. The material had been woven with great care by skilled artisans hundreds of years before, the colors in the fabric still visible despite it being as hard as wood and difficult for Lucy to remove without damaging it.
As she slowly removed each layer so the figure trapped within gradually began to emerge, and it was rapidly evident that the remains within the burial shroud were anything but normal. It was subtle at first, what to Ethan seemed to be a slight imbalance between the size of the body in the shroud and the size of the head. But as more layers were revealed so it became clear that the individual inside the shroud had a skull shaped nothing like a human being.
Lucy labelled each layer as it was removed, sealing each of the ancient fragments inside plastic bags for later analysis. With forensic perfection she began to reveal the figure huddled inside the shroud, until suddenly she exposed a vivid length of jet black hair still bound in place, two strands of it woven between links of brightly colored fabric in dense plaits.
Ethan moved closer, fascinated as Lucy began to reach up to remove the final layer of fabric that covered the face of the figure within. Both Lopez and Jarvis also drew closer, Yuri moving in from the other side as slowly Lucy took hold of the last layer of fabric and gently removed it to reveal the mummy’s face.
There was an audible gasp from Yuri Polkov and his hand flew to his mouth as the final piece of fabric was folded aside by Lucy’s delicate touch and they stared into the eyes of a young girl who had died several hundred years before.
It was clear that the girl had been immensely beautiful, her features elegant and symmetrical. Ethan was stunned to see that her skin still maintained a natural tan color, her eyebrows delicately arched and her lips full and sculptured. The once dark orbits of her eyes had dried out long ago but her eyelids were closed as though she were merely asleep, small ears tucked close against the skull and her face serene and peaceful.
But above her face extended a skull that was far larger than normal, her hairline at least three times higher than that of an ordinary human being and her cranium shaped like a teardrop that ended in a narrow cone hidden beneath a thick blanket of glossy black hair.
‘My God, she’s beautiful,’ Yuri whispered as he struggled out of his chair once more for a closer look. ‘I could never have imagined…’
Draped across the girl shoulders and her chest was an immensely valuable solid gold necklace, forged in complex coils that looped in and out of each other. Her clothes were woven of the finest fabrics of her time and would have held enormous value to the Inca people, perhaps even more so than the gold. That she had been treated with the utmost respect in death was undeniable despite her obvious youth and the fact that her life been snatched away from her by the blow of a blunt instrument that had left a dent in the back of her skull.
‘Ritual sacrifice,’ Yuri observed as he hobbled around to one side of the mummy. ‘She was killed before her prime, struck from behind while watching the rising sun as a sacrifice to the gods that gave the Incas their knowledge and understanding of the universe.’
Lucy nodded, their predicament momentarily forgotten in the face of discovery.
‘Her throat is marked by ligatures,’ she observed, pointing to a line of dark bruising circling her neck. ‘She was garrotted after losing consciousness.’
Ethan saw that the girl’s tiny hands were gently folded before her, likely placed there by her killers after they had struck her down. She seemed at peace, and Ethan remembered what Lucy had said about sacrificial victims being plied with alcohol before their deaths to induce a state of stupefied semi-consciousness, the mediaeval equivalent of humane execution.
‘What happened to her skull?’ Lopez asked. ‘How did it end up like that?’
‘It’s the result of ritualistic deformation,’ Lucy said as she examined the skullcap closely without touching anything.
Ethan step forward as he looked at the remains. ‘Does this mummy contain the DNA that you’re looking for?’
Lucy shook her head instantly. ‘No, she is an example of cranial deformation and not a victim of something genetically inherited.’ She looked up at Yuri and smiled. ‘These remains are worthless.’
Yuri scowled at her. ‘How can you tell?’
‘The shape of the skull, can’t you see it?’ Lucy asked as though it were obvious. ‘Lots of people think that these skulls found all over Peru but mostly in the Paracus region are somehow the remains of alien children, but this has been disproven repeatedly because although you can alter the shape of a skull you cannot alter the brain volume. That’s what differentiates between skulls that were deliberately deformed by boards simply changing the skull’s shape, and the remains of skulls that have a brain volume far larger than an ordinary human child or adult.’
‘You’re lying,’ Yuri growled.
Lucy shrugged. ‘You know that I’m not. Go ahead, check the remains for yourself. I’ve seen enough of these skulls to know at a glance that this is the result of ritualistic deformation and not a genetic distortion. You lost your son for nothing, Mr Polkov. You wasted your time. The only people who will be interested in this mummy are museums, exactly where these remains belong.’
Ethan’s gaze drifted to Yuri and the old man suddenly screamed at the top of his lungs. ‘Take them to the mountain and kill them! Kill all of them!’
Ethan, Lucy, Lopez and Jarvis were marched out of the tent at gunpoint as the stretcher bearers followed them out into the cold wind, their weapons pointed at their backs. The sky above, once hard blue, was now filled with tumbling cloud coming in from the distant oceans, caused as the warm air rose up against the mountain range’s flanks, then cooled and condensed out into cloud. Ethan knew that the weather could change in the blink of an eye here on the mountains, much as it did in the Highlands of Scotland where he had made his new home. He noted the lowering cloud base and the banks of fog drifting over the high peaks and obscuring the snow line.
‘Over there!’
Yuri Polkov pointed to a dense drift of snow that had built up along the edge of a deep magma flow that has long since frozen solid, the black rock vivid against the white snow alongside it. Ethan judged the snow to be at least three feet deep, sufficient that it would probably never melt even in height of summer.
Ethan looked over his shoulder and saw the camp below them as they climbed, gradually receding until it was once more no longer visible behind the lower magma flows, only the tips of the helicopter’s rotors peaking from the ridgeline. The visibility was dropping quickly, thick moisture in the air and the threat of further snowfall increasing by the moment.