Tears of the Jaguar by A.J. Hartley

student, Alice. She looked frantic.
    “What is it?” said Deborah. “What’s the matter?”
    “Someone got into the tomb overnight,” said the girl. “We just found out. They stole everything. It’s all gone.”

PART 2

     

Chapter Seventeen

     
    Chad Rylands reminded himself that he shouldn’t be surprised by their amateurism. Still, this was incompetence on a new and appalling level. He blamed the Miller woman, who had no business running a find of this scale. At least the situation wasn’t as bad as he had feared. The thief had stolen the knickknacks, the jeweled trinkets on which so many archaeologists assumed everything depended. The good stuff, by which he meant the bones, was still there, apparently undisturbed.
    As an osteologist, an expert on bones, Rylands did not practice what the old-school establishment considered “real” archaeology. Or as he thought of it, dirt archaeology: squatting in mud and poking about till you found something that you then misinterpreted, publishing your arbitrary speculations in some big-shot journal to the applause of all. He, by contrast, was a scientist and could get more real, hard information out of a handful ofskull fragments than they could out of a square mile of digging. It was hardly surprising the dirt diggers felt threatened. They ought to. They were the dinosaurs of archaeology, lumbering about with their pickaxes, while the osteologists scurried between their feet, out-evolving them.
    “Why don’t you go look for your precious
artifacts
,” he said to Miller, spitting out the last word like it left a nasty taste in his mouth, “and leave me to do some actual work.”
    They had climbed down the ladder and were standing in the tomb, everyone from the van ride squeezed in together. For a moment he had stood there, breathless, not daring to speak in case he gave away just how astounding the place was. He gazed almost hungrily at the masked skeleton seated in place and the sacrificial bones bundled into its lap, the adolescent heads set on the ground around it. It was magnificent. They should have stationed armed guards outside the moment they found the place.
    Morons
.
    The story as he understood it was that the site staff had taken turns watching the tomb because the lab in Valladolid wasn’t ready for the contents to be moved for cataloging. It was an idiot move. If there was half the gold and precious stones in there that they had bragged about in the e-mails they had sent to lure him here, they should have known that the half-starved natives would try to grab what they could. Leaving a couple of dopey graduate students armed only with a cell phone that couldn’t get a signal till they climbed a hundred-foot tower at the other end of the site was beyond bush league, and he planned to let their organizers in Chicago know it.
    Anyway, some idiot kid—James, his name was—had been in the tomb by himself in the middle of the night and had heardsomeone coming down the ladder. He had waited them out and then, when he thought the coast was clear, went back up top to make sure they didn’t come back. Except, of course, that they hadn’t gone. They were waiting for him when he got to the top, hit him from behind with a log, and then ransacked the tomb. The kid had seen nothing and was now sitting in the shade of a tree under the acropolis with a bandage round his head and a pathetic look. While the rest of them were down here in the tomb, James was waiting for the police, though Rylands knew what that would yield.
    Miller and Bowerdale were screaming at each other while Marissa Stroud stood unnervingly still, staring fixedly at the skeleton in the throne like she was trying to talk to it. The environmentalist girl looked like her puppy had been run over, but she wasn’t saying much. He wished they would all get out and let him do his job.
    “You have more pictures than the ones you e-mailed me?” he said.
    “What?” said Miller, who had been yelling at