Fallen Idols (52 page)

After they made love they casually looked about the mound, which was covered with a thousand years of growth. Their poking around was nothing more than idle curiosity—this area would not be developed for years. But as they looked more closely, Walt's practiced eye noticed what looked like an entrance to a hidden vault. Pushing aside the dirt and boulders, they started in.

After several minutes of slow crawling on their hands and knees, Walt shining his flashlight to illuminate their way, they emerged into a large chamber. Once Walt got his bearings, he realized they were in the burial tomb of a king or a high-ranking member of a royal family. The skeleton was mummified but amazingly intact, and surrounding it was the most extraordinary assortment of jewelry, pottery, and other important artifacts he had ever seen outside of a museum. There were several intricately carved jade statues, many embossed with gold and other precious metals and stones. Along with them was pottery and stela that would explain who these people were and what they had done.

My God, Jocelyn had exclaimed.

My God, indeed. The artifacts in this tomb were priceless, because there was no way to put a true value on them. If there was one—if this was pre-1983, and artifacts could be removed and sold to collectors or museums—he would estimate the value of what was in here to be in the millions. But that was beside the point, because they weren't going anywhere. They would be preserved, studied here at the site, and then eventually removed to a proper museum, here in their country of origin.

He knew he should declare the find immediately and safeguard it with armed guards, around the clock. But they had to leave in a few days. The rainy season was upon them, he simply didn't have time to put all that together. And he was worried about leaving these treasures here, even under heavy native guard. There had already been the other thefts. If tomb raiders wanted these treasures badly enough, they would find a way to steal them.

He and Jocelyn covered up the entrance, and told no one. Walt vowed to himself that he would do everything by the book the next time he came down, when he would have time to move the priceless antiquities to a safe repository.

A week before Walt and Jocelyn were about to embark on their next trip another element was tossed into the equation that caused him to rethink his plan.

National Geographic, one of his principal sponsors, informed him that they wanted to do a major article about La Chimenea and combine it with a TV special. Showing this treasure trove on film, as if it were a spontaneous discovery, would be an incredible event. But there was a logistical problem. National Geographic couldn't get their end of the project together until later in the year. The filming would have to be done over Christmas break, and the article and television special would come out the following spring.

After agonizing over what to do, he decided to keep his discovery a secret. This was too important, both to his career personally and to the project, not to maximize the opportunities for publicity. What difference would it make, he rationalized, if the hidden treasures came to light now or in a few more months? The site was fifteen hundred years old. Four months is an eye-blink in the continuum of such time.

As soon as he arrived back at La Chimenea, Walt snuck away to the secret location. From the outside, it was as he had left it. He cleared away the entrance and crawled deep into the tomb, his heart pounding like a hummingbird's. Finally, he reached the burial chamber, and shone his flashlight into the center of the enclosure.

The burial tomb was intact.

He collapsed onto the cold floor in relief; he realized that he had been fighting off an ulcer for months, worried that the site might have been discovered and looted. He had committed one of the most fundamental sins of his profession, even before the National Geographic situation further clouded his ethics. Not having had time to properly secure the treasures before leaving, he had rationalized that they might have been stolen had he reported their existence prematurely. But that was solipsistic buck-passing and he knew it. He had fallen into a pernicious trap—that he alone knew what was best for the preservation of the site.

It was all about his ego, the worst part of him. But he had pulled it off, and knowing he could, he was less anxious about doing it for a few more months.

One more time. He had to see the treasures in the buried tomb one last time before they left. He hadn't been inside the hidden space for the past couple of weeks; he didn't want to chance anyone seeing him. But he felt it was safe to go there now. He had a couple of hours yet—at the latest, it was three in the morning. No one, not even Manuel, would be up until five; there was no need to be. Everything was already packed up and ready to go.

Why had Diane come on to him? He flattered himself that it was simple attraction—he was almost twice her age, but he was still more of a man than anyone else here. And he was the leader, the biggest star in this constellation. Was that it, or did she have another motive? He hadn't thrown off any vibes that he was looking for outside action. Or had he, subconsciously?

Whether he had or not, it didn't matter. He had betrayed his wife with another woman, and he'd have to live with the guilt. He was human, and she had caught him unawares. A lame rationalization, he knew.

He hadn't cheated on Jocelyn in a long time. He didn't plan on doing it again. He was too old to have the kind of occasional affairs he'd had when he was younger.

The entrance to the tomb was open.

This can't be, he screamed silently. Then he was scrambling inside on all fours, eating dirt in his frantic haste to get to the inner sanctum.

The tomb had been stripped bare. Only the mummified remains were left. All the artifacts—the precious jewelry, pottery, statues, and figurines—all gone. Someone had found this tomb, and had robbed it.

He crawled back out and sat at the mouth of the entrance, rocking like a crazed parent who has just found out his child had died in some horrible, completely unexpected accident. Which was how he felt. He had lost something of immeasurable value, a piece of his soul.

Greed, ego, hubris. He had succumbed to them, and they had risen up and slain him. He had deluded himself into believing he was a god, above the rules of men. He didn't have to play by their rules, he made his own.

Well, he was a man, as mortal as any. This proved it.

Who had done this? he thought. Who would have found it? It was far removed from any area they had been working on. He couldn't fathom, in the furthest stretch of his imagination, that the looter came from his people. If someone from his team of volunteers had stumbled on this they would have come to him immediately. But security had been so tight. How had a thief from the outside come in and taken all that stuff without being noticed?

With a heavy, fearful heart, he covered the entrance up and returned to camp, where the others lay in blissful, ignorant sleep.

“That's why I was so upset that morning we were to leave, when the alternator didn't work,” Walt told his sons, taking a break from his merciless narrative. “Not only because of the physical danger to us, which was very real, as it too horribly turned out, but because I had betrayed a sacred trust and had it blown up in my face. What I should have realized, but I was too screwed up to think clearly at that point, was that the events were directly linked: the looting of that hidden burial ground, and the delay. I didn't make the connection. Going back to the troops being pulled, too. I didn't connect that to the theft of the artifacts, either. Because I was sure no one else except your mother and I knew of their existence, until the moment before she was killed.

“I had been wrong all along. And my misconception cost your mother her life. I found all that out, and why, when I got home.”

After Jocelyn's funeral was over and the boys had left Madison, Walt began the painful process of tying up Jocelyn's affairs. She had been the keeper of their finances—he didn't even know how much money they had or how it was invested, except in a vague, general way. He knew they owned their house free and clear, that they were well vested in their pension plans, and that they owned a few conservative stocks. Now he was going to have to get into the specifics, and figure out what changes would transpire because he was suddenly a widower. Among other things, he needed to know if she had left a will. She had a small amount of money of her own, which had been left to her by her parents. He knew that he was in good shape financially, but perhaps there was money that was earmarked to go to their sons, or to charitable causes.

He was still in incredible pain over what had happened down there. His wife had been murdered by the disgruntled local archaeologist who had raided the tomb. The man had then planted the artifacts in Walt's case, to make it appear as if Walt had done it. Walt knew those things with certainty—in hindsight, it all fit. When he returned—and he was going to return as soon as he could— he would go to the highest level of the government, the President if necessary, and demand that they take action. But first he had to take care of his wife's affairs.

The deed to the house, as well as other important financial documents, were in a safe-deposit box Jocelyn kept at their bank. Two days after he buried his wife of thirty years he mustered the courage to go down to the bank and open the box. He took everything home and read through it all, over and over, because he couldn't believe what he was seeing. When, late at night and several fortfying bourbons later, he finally figured out what had happened, it was an emotional blow that was almost as devastating as her killing had been.

They didn't own their house anymore—the bank did. Their pension plans were almost empty. All they owned were a bunch of virtually worthless stocks. Except for their salaries, they were broke. They had worked hard all their lives, and had nothing to show for it.

Walt was able to piece together how this catastrophe had happened by the order in which the various incriminating documents were dated, from the oldest to the most recent. Many of the documents detailed investments Jocelyn had been making over the past few years, most of them in tech stocks. In almost every instance, the value of the investments had gone up at first, some of them dramatically, but then, after the market crashed in 2000, they had plummeted. The figures on the pages informed him, in chilling black and white, that their net worth was less than a quarter of what it had been five years before. Even worse, the remortgages they had been taking on the house, which he had thought were going into their 401(k)s and other conservative investments, had been used to buy more exotic stocks, and then, when the prices fell, to cover the losses. And it wasn't only the remortgage money; she had also been borrowing against their pension plans, the rock of their retirement.

After he read the documents over more carefully, he almost threw up. They had gone from owning their house outright to having assumed a huge mortgage, their pension plans had been shrunk dramatically, and most of these stocks they held, which he'd never known about, had either tanked or in some cases were completely worthless.

He had never paid attention to their financial affairs. Jocelyn gave him papers to sign and he signed them, often without even bothering to ask her what they were for. She was the practical partner, making sure their health insurance was accurate and up-to-date, that the university was making the proper contributions to their pension plans, that the money from his speaking engagements and book contracts didn't lag.

Now he learned that she had been playing the market like all those other suckers who thought it would never go down. She had been doing a lot of day-trading, small purchases of hot stocks she read about on the Internet, a few hundred dollars at a time. It must have been exciting, like going to Las Vegas. Except she was beating the house, every roll of the dice, every hand of blackjack. Everything she bought doubled, tripled, in some cases went up ten, twenty, fifty times in value in a month or two. It was so easy—she couldn't lose, she had the touch.

She started plunging more heavily. She opened an account with the brokerage house in Milwaukee and hooked up with a young broker who was killing the market for those of his clients who had the guts and foresight not to be mired in the old clichés about whether a company was making a profit or showed the right value ratios, like Amazon, which had been in the red every month of its existence but kept going up, whose CEO had been named Time magazine's Man of the Year. Amazon was actually one of her more conservative buys. She had invested in all kinds of wild offerings.

And for two years, she had ridden an endless wave. Up, up, and up. Until the bubble burst.

The losses began accumulating slowly at first, then faster, then it was a tsunami. She couldn't keep up with the downward spiral. And she couldn't get out, because she had already lost too much. So she stayed in the game, trying to get back to where she had been. But she didn't. They had made a lot of money, but when the market went south, she, like millions of other holy fools, lost it. That's why she had been remortgaging the house, borrowing against their pension plans, insanely throwing good money after bad.

As bad as all that was, it wasn't the worst of their calamities. A year before she was killed she had taken out a short-term loan of a quarter-million dollars, to buy time until the market went up again. She had falsified the loan papers, putting up assets they no longer owned, as collateral. She knew it was crazy but she couldn't help herself, she had to try anything she could think of. But the market didn't go up, and the balloon payment on the loan was due at the end of the year. If she didn't pay it, the bank would find out about the fraud and go to the authorities.

At this point, Diane Montrose came into the picture. Diane had a reputation in the art world as someone who was willing to bend the rules if the payoff was high enough and the risks were acceptable. Jocelyn had found out about her, explained her desperate situation, and they made a deal, a real pact with the devil. Diane would help Jocelyn smuggle artifacts from La Chimenea out of the country and find a buyer for them. Jocelyn's share of their profits would cover the pressing shortfalls of her disastrous financial forays. She and Walt would still be in lousy shape compared to where they had been before she had decided she could beat the house, but at least in their old age they wouldn't be living in a room over one of their sons’ garages.