The Moses Riddle (Thomas McAllister 'Treasure Hunter' Adventure Book 1) (10 page)

Martha reached Saqqara about ten o’clock that evening. She’d gotten home from work at half past eight and showered, before checking her messages. There had been an edge in Thomas’s voice that she hadn’t heard before. She had immediately dressed and driven to Saqqara. She had a hammer and chisel in the tool box in the back of the Mercedes. She was planning to deface a national treasure . . . but it was to save a priceless world icon.

Subconscious alarms sounded when she noticed a van parked in the visitor’s lot. The grounds had been closed for over two hours. It could be parked here for a million reasons: maintenance personnel, guards, tourists with a broken down car.

She hurried the hundred yards to the temple Unas, which contained the pyramid texts, but she froze as she approached the entrance. A light was shining out of the doorway of the temple. She advanced cautiously. She could hear voices inside. It sounded like they were arguing about something. She inched her way along the wall of the temple, trying to stay as inconspicuous as possible. When she reached the entrance, she peeked through the partially open door. There, in his wheelchair, pointing up at the portion of the wall that contained the Moses Riddle, was
Dr. Sinistar
.

Martha hugged the side of the door and slowly took another look. Sinistar wasn’t alone. He was at the base of a ladder barking commands to someone who was working near the location of the riddle. He was holding something in his hand, pointing.

Thomas’s message had said that someone had stolen
The Amenophis Builders Notes
. The theft must have been arranged by Dr. Sinistar. Inwardly, Martha cursed herself for giving Dr. Sinistar so many details of Thomas’s visit. She had to get a message to Thomas to tell him that not only had she not been able to destroy the riddle, but that Dr. Sinistar was trying to find and decipher it.

She inched backward, into the darkness of the Egyptian desert. With no moon, it was pitch black. She spun, ran to her car, and raced back to her apartment. She was still breathing hard when she left the phone message for Thomas.

The next day, Thomas met Arturo on the same patio. Arturo told Thomas about the various microclimates around Oaxaca over a breakfast of true Mexican omelets. Thomas took it as a good sign that they were eating alone. After breakfast they took a walk around the ranch and Arturo, with still no agreement to help, asked questions about the clues that had led Thomas to believe the treasure was in Mexico.

Despite misgivings about sharing information before he had Arturo’s agreement to assist, Thomas took him through the events of the last two weeks, explaining how he’d found the clue in the
Builder’s Notes
, found the riddle in Egypt, and gone on to solve it. He told him that he was now looking for a formation of pyramids that were laid out like the stars in Orion’s belt, like those at Giza, which Thomas demonstrated by arranging rocks on the ground. After their walk, Arturo took Thomas to his home office, a comfortable room off the living room, with a Satillo tile floor and a beamed ceiling of thick Mexican oak. Thomas showed Arturo the exact arrangement of the stars that Dick Hightower had given him for Orion’s Belt.

“The pyramids must have this same formation. Don Ozgood loaned me these maps. Hopefully they will be familiar to you. Don said these are the best available.”

Arturo smiled as each of the maps was rolled out on the library table. “You’re smiling. Why?”
“I’ve used each of these many times. They are as familiar to me as

Arturo strode to the custom-built wall unit that covered the entire east wall of his office. He reached to locate a key, hidden behind a vase on one of the shelves, and used it to unlock the doors that enclosed the middle shelf. There was a dowel in the middle of the shelf, holding about ten rolled maps in place. He reached in, slid one of the maps out, and brought it over to the desk. Thomas moved his maps out of the way.

As Arturo unrolled his map, from right to left, Thomas first saw the Atlantic, then a small bump about the size of the head of a nickel, which was Cozumel, after which came the Yucatan Peninsula, and then all of Mexico.

“This is a recent satellite photo, commissioned by the INAH.” Thomas nodded. He owned similar photos of Egypt.
Arturo continued. “I worked on this project. These are the first results

“What are these clusters of dots that are all over that place?” Thomas pointed to only a few, of the hundreds of places, where there were small groups of three or four dots.

Arturo smiled. “Those, my friend, are the genius of this map. Many regions of Mexico, to this day, remain unexplored. Consequently, many of our oldest sites remain unfound. We know of some, but we needed a way to be able to find them all. A cost analysis showed that the expense of sending expeditions out to look for them was prohibitive. We needed a means, like your depth charge technique in the Valley of the Kings, that would enable us to know where all the ruins lay, without having to travel there.”

Thomas had used sonar images, retrieved from planting small explosives underground, to lead him to hollow areas in the Valley of the Kings. The process had been ground-breaking, literally, and had been well chronicled in archeological journals.

Arturo continued, “Unlike the Valley of the Kings, where the ruins are relatively close together, the ruins in Mexico are spread out over thousands of square miles.”

Arturo smiled with pride. Thomas could tell he was leading up to something, savoring his coup de grace. Arturo pointed to the map. “What I did, you see, was to tell the people in Washington who run this satellite to have it move across this area just as the sun was rising. Every mound, every ancient pyramid, even the old cenotes, would cast a shadow. I had them take pictures, wide, nonstop pictures. They sent them all to me. This one is the best. Every pyramid in Mexico can be found by its shadow. Every mound is here. We picked up naturally occurring hills and mountains, but we overlaid a topographical map and erased them. Thus, we were left with only our pyramids, and we are a whole lot smarter than we were before. Nice, huh?”

“Ingenious, Arturo!” Thomas exclaimed. “Pure genius. I may try something like this in Egypt!” He caught himself. “After you’ve published your paper, of course.”

“Good luck, amigo, these satellite companies are real snobs. It was like, how do you say, ‘pulling teeth,’ to get them to do what we wanted.”
Thomas took out the drawing he had made of the Orion constellation and placed it next to Arturo’s satellite photo. “Let’s see if your map can help us find our destination. You take the western half of the map, and I’ll take the eastern. Okay?”
The two men scanned the map, inch by inch, looking for a cluster of dots that might represent Orion’s belt. They weren’t more than ten minutes into the examination when Thomas hastily reached for the paper on which he’d drawn the stars. Using his mechanical pencil he connected the dots, then laid the paper over the map. The pyramid shadows were visible under the paper, and Thomas had found a cluster that lay directly on the path of the lines he had drawn. “
I’ve got it
!”
“Let me see.” Arturo moved over to take a look. “Yes, that’s it. That’s a match.”
“I can’t believe it. We’ve got it! The accouterment to Orion, in the land of the West.”

Thomas accepted Arturo’s voluntary, solemn promise that he would not tell another soul about the project. There was no need for a confidentiality agreement. It would have been an insult. As they packed, he filled Arturo in on the details of the Moses Riddle. He told him everything hoping that Arturo might help with some of the still missing facts.

Thomas told Arturo about the Amenophis notes, and read Arturo the exact translation of the Riddle the next day while they were driving. Occasionally, Arturo asked him questions, but mostly Arturo stared at the road, occasionally crossing himself. He didn’t say so but he was shocked at what he was hearing. Shocked, at the sad sequence of events that had led up to Thomas finding the Riddle. Shocked, that the man beside him had put so much information together in such a short period of time. He was also worried about the theft of the
Builders Notes
. He didn’t share any of these thoughts with Thomas. Nor did he tell him that he had a .357 Magnum, seven shot revolver hidden under the front seat of the truck.

Arturo’s map indicated there was a road from Mercado to El Manati, but recommended they stay away from the town so as not to arouse suspicion. “I think we should park the truck in an inconspicuous spot a few miles outside of Mercado. We can cut our way through the jungle from there. It will take a couple of hours, and it will be slow going, but no one will know we are there.”

Thomas had seen Arturo loading Bushmaster machetes into the back of the pickup, and nodded his agreement.
El Manati had remained a small dejected site buried deep in the jungle, while the huge sprawling ruins of nearby La Venta and Palenque attracted the academic attention and the tourist dollars. The jungle surrounding El Manati was thick, hot, humid, insect-filled. Thomas was accustomed to the desert, where he could walk right up to his target needing only a hat to shield him from the sun, and good boots to keep the sand out.
They had driven three hours when Arturo suddenly pulled off the dirt road onto a sandy median. Thomas’s pulse quickened. The old feeling, the excitement, of being close to lost treasure returned. They gathered their supplies and started their trek inward. Arturo left a note on the windshield explaining that he was a government employee conducting official surveying work so that his pickup wouldn’t get stripped while they were gone.
The going was tough from the beginning. The network of thick, wiry jungle grew right up to the shoulder of the road. Every step had to be earned by chopping or cutting. There was constant stopping to re-chop a stubborn branch or to re-apply the super-strength military mosquito repellent. As the early morning hours passed, Thomas grew to respect Arturo’s resilient and tenacious leadership style. It became clear that from an anthropological perspective Arturo, and his ancestral Maya, were perfectly suited for this terrain. Short, stocky legs and arms perfectly evolved for chopping vines and bending and ducking under branches. It was no wonder the Maya had flourished here.
Arturo doggedly cut and wove, always maintaining the same consistent pace. He was at one with the land. Thomas, much taller, often had to stop to chop away the higher plant growth. This meant raising the machete above his head, causing him to use more calories and different muscle groups. Thomas stopped to swing and cut, Arturo glided over, under, and through. After only ten minutes Thomas’s shoulder was burning, and he often had to hurry to catch up, never able to fall into that mind numbing, steady-smooth chopping pace that would have helped make the trek more bearable.
It was close to noon when they reached their destination. Thomas was instantly disappointed when he saw what was left of the pyramids. Accustomed to the huge, overbearing structures that pocked the Egyptian horizon, it was hard to believe that the three hills before him had ever been pyramids. At best, they were mounds, covered with brush and small trees. No rock formations, or any formal man made structures, were even visible.
“Are you sure this is El Manati?”
“Yes, yes, this is El Manati. These pyramids are known, but appear on few maps. In their day, they were probably twice as tall as they are now. Yes, Thomas, this is your site.”
Thomas thought of the last verse of the Moses riddle
. You will find it in the middle of the eastern middle, marked by a circle on a square
. Thomas took this to mean that he needed to excavate the easternmost pyramid, in the middle of its east side. He needed to find the middle of the eastern pyramid but these pyramids were badly eroded and were shorter than they would’ve been in Moses’ time. Thomas considered how he might find the middle as he helped Arturo set up camp near the base of the pyramid. He determined the only way to find the true middle was to try to use the angles of the pyramid’s sides to calculate its original height. After they’d set up camp he began to climb to the top of the eastern pyramid, counting paces as he went.
It was not high when compared with most well-known pyramids in Mexico, but it did get Thomas above the tree line, and the view was magnificent. He gazed across an endless green sea, in all directions. So different from the dry Egyptian desert. Far off to the west he could see a few two-story buildings in what must’ve been the little town of Mercado.
The riddle had directed him to find the spot halfway up the eastern side. He counted the paces down. Forty. He then walked back up twenty paces and drove a stick into the mound next to his foot, to mark the halfway point. Before he and Arturo started digging, he would use the lightweight surveying camera to pinpoint the true middle. But neither of those points would be where they would start digging.
Since the apex of the pyramid had eroded, Thomas would input the slope of the sides of the pyramid into a trigonometric formula to determine how high the pyramid had been 3000 years ago. They would then start digging at the real halfway point. If all went well, when they hit the side, there would be a mark, hopefully a circle in a square. And, that would be how he would know he was in the right spot.
They had tortillas, Snickers, and water and then started to dig. It was tough going. They were in direct sunlight all afternoon. As the day progressed, so did the heat and humidity. The earth was hard and dry, and fine dust drifted up into their eyes and collected on their sweatsoaked skin. Digging together, continuously, it was three hours before their shovels struck the hard surface of pyramid rock.
His heart skipped a beat when he felt the vibration of solid rock through the shovel. Arturo’s next try struck home, too. Hard digging so close to a find was normally taboo, but they were not excavating like true archeologists. They were treasure hunting and Thomas had made it clear to Arturo that there was no time for traditional charting, stratiography, or trowels or brushes to whisk away the dirt. This find was much too important to do the job right. That would have taken months, or in bureaucratic Mexico, maybe even years, even with Arturo’s influence. No, in this case, hard-core shovel digging was the only option.
Normally, Thomas followed governmental procedure, but even Arturo agreed that had they waited, it would’ve given whomever had stolen the
Builders Notes
time to solve the riddle and claim the site as their own. Plus the process would’ve locked Thomas in a bureaucratic battle for years. Worse, competition might show up at the sight, outnumber him, and take the treasure by brute force. Even if they posted guards, which inevitably had to be done during long digs, it was like advertising. Plus, guards couldn’t always be trusted.
Despite the desire to be quick, they soon agreed that it would take a minimum of three days to get all the soil cleared, identify the right panel, move it, and excavate the contents. At seven o’clock, after a full day of travel and digging, they were exhausted. They retreated down the hill to their camp, and started a dinner fire. Thomas left Arturo for a few minutes to climb back up the mound, and take a look at the surrounding country at night.
He climbed to the crest of the middle pyramid, passing the hole they’d dug on the way. What he saw when he got to the top stopped him dead. They weren’t alone! There was light coming from the far side of the next pyramid.
Thomas crouched and watched the pattern of the light. He saw a shadow moving steadily, rhythmically. Someone was working. This was the worst possible scenario. Someone was already here, and it looked as if they were digging. Could they be working on the same project? Had someone already interpreted the texts? Or had he misinterpreted the texts? Was he digging on the wrong pyramid?
He crept down the middle pyramid, towards its twin to the west. He reached the base and worked his way halfway up and then horizontally around its circumference to get a closer look at whoever was working over there. He considered going to get Arturo. Site robbers were notoriously mean, hardened and unforgiving, willing to commit crimes and take any measures to keep from getting caught.
Halfway to his target, he angled right and crept low, forcing himself to go slowly, listening for the ka-chunk of the shovel after each step. The hood of a green sport utility vehicle came into view, the word DISCOVERY written in white across the hood. It was parked near the base of the mound, and although the passenger door was open, the interior light was not on. A cord ran from the back of the truck up to the base of the mountain, providing energy for a powerful flood light that illuminated that side of the pyramid.
The ka-chunk was much louder now. He prayed he wasn’t too late. He crouched, and wove his way closer through the thorny vines and dried brush. He barely noticed the burning in his thighs and back as he became increasingly more obsessed with learning who was under the light and what they were searching for.
A few more feet.
Finally he could see the pale yellow of a straw hat. It looked like it was only one person. That was good. Not a major expedition. But were there other people here, guarding the site from a distance? My God, he’s digging intently, Thomas thought. He crept forward to get a better look. As he did, he set off one of the oldest and most primitive alarm systems ever invented. He tripped a wire that was attached to a pole holding a few tin cans. They fell rattling to the ground, piercing what had been, aside from the sound the shovel made, an amazingly peaceful evening. Thomas dove headfirst to his right, hoping he could scramble away from the source of the noise to hide. He sailed through the air for a much longer period than he felt he should have. He realized his dive was toward the downward angle of the pyramid and he readied for a hard landing. The landing knocked the air out of his lungs, but it was something else that set off internal alarms. Something was terribly wrong. Something underneath him was stabbing, stinging, trying to get out from underneath him. A burning sensation shot into his stomach. He immediately thought of a scorpion or snake. The pain was excruciating. He saw light come toward him and he stifled a moan. Carried by someone who was running toward the sound of the cans, the light swung quickly back and forth like a pendulum. Before he could move, a long shadow stretched over him.
“Roll over! I’ve got a gun!” The voice was female, and it was fierce. But Thomas couldn’t move. The slightest twitch sent cords of unbearable pain rippling through his midsection.
“
Roll over, damn it
!”
Thomas managed one word. “Can’t.”
His captor came closer and leaned over. He saw yellow hair fall from beneath her wide-brimmed hat.
All he could see of her face was an intent, angry expression. She deserved to be angry. Someone had been spying on her out here in the middle of nowhere – where she was vulnerable. But Thomas detected no fear in her voice, only fury. “Try anything and I’ll shoot you. This gun is fully loaded. Roll over so I can see your face.”
“Can’t. Pain. No joke.” Thomas tried to move, but gave up.
“If this is a trick I’ll shoot you in the back of the head, I swear it.” She put the flashlight on the ground, but kept the gun focused on him as she adeptly rolled him over with her free hand.
She picked the flashlight up and pointed it toward his stomach. “My god!”
Staring up at the stars Thomas said, “Scorpion? Snake?”
“You should be so lucky.
Echinocactus grusonii
, more commonly known as the Golden Barrel cactus. It’s a small stem cactus, known for it’s very hard, very sharp spines.”
“Feels like I hit a den of scorpions.”
She slid the deadly little .38 in her belt, removed a Swiss Army knife from her pocket, found the tweezers, and kneeled next to Thomas. “Here, hold the flashlight so that it focuses on your stomach.” She began plucking needles.
“Name is . . . Thomas.” He winced and closed his eyes.
“Ann.”
The indirect light from the flashlight shown dimly on half her face. Despite being half blinded by pain, he could still see that she was young, tan, and determined. She concentrated on her work with objectivity. Efficiency. Like a good surgeon.
She would’ve had to have been in the field quite awhile to get a tan like that. He wondered what she was doing, who she was, but mostly what she was looking for. She wasn’t volunteering anything.
“What are you doing out here in the middle of the Mexican desert, Thomas?”
He was ready for her question, “My friend and I are hunting puma.”
Her work suddenly became less gentle. Thomas clenched the flashlight and bit his bottom lip until it bled. “We haven’t found any though. In fact, we’re thinking of . . . giving up and . . . going fishing.”
It had the desired effect and her plucking softened.
He continued his story. “We’re camped on the other side of that big hill.” Thomas saw her smile, presumably at his reference to the “big hill.”
“Camped?”
They were both walking an information tightrope. Archeologists in the field were always guarded, never divulging information to strangers. Often they tried to lead each other astray by deflecting interest, twisting facts, or, when called for, bold-faced lying. Each would show as little interest in the other as possible and they would go to any length to try to deceive, in an attempt to get the other person to believe that their reason for being there was trivial, or even a mistake. Thomas continued his improvised ruse.
“Yes, camped. Our tents are already up. Why the skepticism?”
“I just wondered why you would camp out here, when we’re so close to Mercado.”
Thomas knew Mercado was only five miles away down a passable road, but he and Arturo had wanted to stay out of the little town at all costs, to keep from arousing interest. “I didn’t know there was a road to Mercado, or we probably would be there tonight. Is it passable?”
“Yes,
and
there is a nice little hotel in town.”
Was she trying to get rid of him? “Are you at the hotel, or are you camping?”
“I’m at the hotel.”
Thomas didn’t want her to think that he was interested in staying at the site when there was a hotel so near. Going with her would give him an opportunity to learn about the purpose of her exploration. There was a chance she would even volunteer the information.
Her plucking had become less frequent and less painful. “I’m going to unbutton your shirt, to see if I got all the spines. It may hurt.”
“It’s okay. I’m think I’m officially in shock.”
She quickly unbuttoned his shirt and pulled up his T-shirt. “I don’t see any more, but you’ve got a nice raw spot right down the middle of your abdomen. You should put some antiseptic on it, when you get back to your . . . campsite.”
“Would you mind if my friend and I hitched a ride with you to Mercado?
“I guess that would be all right. I was getting ready to call it a day when you stumbled over my early warning system. Give me a few minutes to pack up my gear.”
“Great, that will give me time to get back to my friend and tell him we’ll be sleeping in a real bed tonight. Thanks for the first aid.”