Madrid arrived, hauling a little more than the others in his backpack, and stood up straight to take in the view.

“For you history buffs,” Borrego said, “this is the kind of place Mayan Indian culture thrived for as long as a thousand years beyond the period in which they have traditionally been declared extinct. Up here, you didn’t get any visitors until recently-not for six or seven hundred years at a time. And if you know how to do it, you don’t need more than what you’ve got in that jungle out there to live as long as you want. Forever, even-except for the continued encroachment of the rest of us human beings into all corners of the planet, and the diseases we bring with us.”

Borrego pulled the map the chop-shop laborer had given them and examined it for a while. Then he looked out at the jungle plateau, scratched his head, and pointed to what Cooper believed to be the northwest corner of the woods.

“If his sketch is legit,” Borrego said, “that’s where we’re going.”

Cooper shuffled his aching feet on the rocky earth of the crater’s edge.

“So that’d be the six or seven miles you were talking about,” he said, shaking his head.

“Yeah,” Borrego said. “Only it looks more like ten to me.”

“Christ.”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Borrego said.

“What’s that?”

The big man pointed again toward their destination.

“That the answer to who the hell your ‘snuffer-outers’ are, and why the hell they’re doing their dirty work, might actually lie out there. In the goddamn jungle.”

Cooper let his tired mind roam to thoughts of Cap’n Roy, and Po Keeler, and the frozen corpse buried beneath the Alaskan king crabs-seemingly so vastly distant from the time and place they’d flown, driven, and climbed to. A world away from this-how had Borrego put it?-garden of Eden. Planted square in the middle of a mostly irrelevant third world country-geopolitically speaking.

Even the original Eden wasn’t rumored to have been all peanuts and popcorn, and he expected no different here. In fact, there was something out in that rain forest crater the chop-shop laborer and part-time tomb raider had seen that convinced him this place, and anyone who visited it, was cursed.

Cooper didn’t really want to think much more about what they were about to find. At least not yet. He reached up-way up-and offered Borrego a friendly whack on the shoulder.

“Let’s see what there is to see,” he said.

34

They found the village just before dusk.

Cooper encountered the first of the structures, an overgrown rectangle made of clay and dark hardwood timbers that had barely rotted at all. He almost missed it, mainly since it wasn’t the kind of ruin he was expecting to find. Not that he should have expected one type of ruin or another-but where were the Mayan stones, crumbling into dirt as the jungle overtook them?

Soon he saw another such structure. Then another. The three of them had been working about fifty yards apart, covering as broad a swath as possible while still remaining within earshot, if not within eyesight. Cooper whistled.

“Got something,” he called out. “Not sure what, but it’s something.”

“Same here,” Borrego said, his voice arriving from somewhere off to Cooper’s left. Cooper heard Madrid, or some large animal in any case, approaching from the right.

It was getting hard to see, but not that much harder than it had been to see the whole time. The canopy of wide-leafed trees kept out most of the light. Everything was wet, and it was hot, maybe eighty-five or ninety degrees. Four or five times during their march through the woods, Cooper had heard, more than felt, rain showers, pelting the trees at the top of the canopy, the frequent rains seeping their way through over time, basically creating one giant soupy mud puddle underneath.

Madrid arrived and, along with Cooper, examined the small buildings.

“Not too old,” he said.

In the one Cooper was currently examining, there were cooking utensils, a wooden table and bench, two pots-worn out and dirty, but made, it seemed, of gold-and, up against one wall and aside the bench, two sets of human bones. Cooper poked his way over to the structure Madrid was looking through and found it nearly identical to the one he’d been examining, only it was slightly bigger, and featured three sets of bones rather than two.

When Borrego didn’t swing by, Cooper made his way over to the place from which he’d heard the Polar Bear answer his whistle. Madrid followed. It took them a few minutes-darkness was upon them now-but after shouting his name a couple times they found the big man crouched down on one knee. He appeared to be examining some bushes.

“You find your share of skeletons over here?” Cooper said.

Borrego rotated his flashlight from the bush he was looking at. Even pointed at the ground, it was nearly blinding because of the way their eyes had adjusted to the rain forest twilight.

“I did,” Borrego said, “but I found this too.”

He shone the flashlight out ahead of where he was crouched, where Cooper saw there appeared to be some kind of road. It was partially overgrown, but as Borrego worked the flashlight beam along the ground, Cooper could easily see tire tracks through the thin cover of brush.

“My guess,” Borrego said, “is this is where they dragged the artifacts out. Those are mechanized wagon tracks, kind of a specialized minitank today’s tomb raiders utilize as their excavation vehicle of choice. I’d bet we’ve circled back a ways-the edge of the crater closest to Belize isn’t far from here. There’s probably a steep mountain face a few miles from here at most, where they could have passed the artifacts down the cliff with ropes and pulleys.”

Cooper flicked on his own flashlight and walked around for a while, taking a look at whatever he could see that wasn’t a tree, bush, insect, or snake. He heard Borrego and Madrid fall in behind him, and they marched around that way in the dark, examining some additional structures, including one made of more traditional-looking stones. He found a few fire pits too. Everywhere they wandered, the sounds of the jungle were overwhelming-screaming insects, frogs, or some other creature, Cooper had no idea. There was the rustle of snakes, rodents, and maybe birds, plus the occasional, more intimidating growl. Cooper didn’t know what the sounds were, but he did know he hated them. He hated almost everything about this place-the look of each leaf, the width of the vines that wound up the tree trunks, the scents of rotting things and new, green growth. He found he had to clamp his jaw to keep the insanity and fear-an instinctive desire to run-from overtaking him.

He knew the reason: it seemed there existed no difference between this jungle and the one through which he’d fled-the one in which he’d been held, and into which he’d stupidly, arrogantly jumped.

His jumpy need to bolt came in waves, between which he paid close attention to what he saw-and what he saw, besides a reasonably primitive Central American Indian village, were more bones. Skeletons-lots of them.

Or, as the tomb raider in the chop shop had put it, all of them.

It was becoming rapidly clear-particularly given the positioning of the skeletal remains in their many different, seemingly casual angles of repose-that every single inhabitant of this village had died, or been killed, at almost the same time. Some had been attended, some not, but it seemed pretty obvious everyone had died fairly quickly.

Curse, indeed. Christ.

A wave of fear and nausea overtook him briefly and he set his hand against a tree to steady himself. As he did, he heard her. It was faint at first, just another part of the jungle sounds, but then her screeching, singsong tone ramped up in volume and he knew who it was. It was that goddamn golden idol of a priestess, calling out to him across the Caribbean. Her voice was deeper now, distorted, throat dry and scratchy-