Touching Midnight Page 14

  “And like it.”

  The voice was low and succinct and as dry as the Atacama Desert, sending a small shiver up her spine.

  A shadow flickered over the canvas, and Quin’s heart jumped a beat as Jay ducked and entered the tent.

  Cain stiffened. “Didn’t you read the sign, Lomax? This is a restricted area.”

  “I can read. The question is, can you listen?” Jay’s gaze caught on Quin’s, night-dark and utterly cold; then his attention shifted back to Cain. “The only reason you’re here is because some bureaucrat in the government screwed up. Like I said before, one wrong move and you’re gone.”

  “You’re bluffing. You don’t have that kind of power.”

  Jay opened the tent flap wide. “Take a look, Cain. Jungle, hills, mountains—and one treacherous bitch of a river. A government permit and TV cameras don’t mean much here. When you run out of diesel, or your generator breaks down, don’t expect a helping hand. And by the way, you’re camped on a flood plain. If you don’t move to higher ground, you’ll lose everything in the next downpour.”

  Cain’s face reddened. “You know what, Lomax? You look familiar. I don’t know where I’ve seen you, but I’ve seen you somewhere. I might just do some research.”

  “Be my guest. If you find anything interesting, let me know.”

  Jay jerked his head, indicating that Quin should precede him out of the tent.

  As they strode through the camp, Quin was acutely aware of him beside her, his gait smooth and unimpeded. “You’ve lost your limp.” And gained a whole lot of something that made her chest tight and her stomach turn somersaults.

  Physically, Jay had always been imposing, but now she felt on the back foot mentally, and that hardly ever happened. In her profession, she met a lot of bright guys, most of them academic nerds who lived for the power of information, but none possessed the edge and sheer masculine confidence that were as much a part of Jay as his lean, muscular height. With Cain she’d witnessed something she thought she would never live to see: Cain’s ass being thoroughly kicked.

  “And you’ve lost your shyness.”

  “I don’t remember being shy.”

  “Maybe ‘discretion’ is a better word. Olivia expected you up at the house an hour ago.”

  “I was on schedule until I saw Cain.”

  “So you thought you’d beard him in his den.”

  “I don’t think of Cain as a lion. His belly’s too low to the ground for that.”

  He opened the driver’s door of her Jeep and gestured she get in. “Don’t underestimate him. He’s smooth, but he’s dangerous.”

  And you would be the one to know.

  Even in a comatose state, he’d been able to reach out and mentally grab her by the scruff of the neck, but now there was no sign that he’d ever suffered a stroke and partial paralysis, no sign he’d ever lost any part of himself but his patience. “Don’t worry, I know what he’s like. I just wanted to put him on notice.”

  Jay closed the door, walked around the bonnet and climbed into the passenger seat. “Same old Quin. Live by the sword.”

  Humor surfaced despite the roiling in her stomach because Cain, the desecrating bastard, was actually here, in her valley.

  She turned the key in the ignition, reversed and turned onto the winding drive that led to the mission. “When it comes to Cain, that’s the only way.”

  He grinned, teeth white against the hard line of his jaw, and Quin almost drove into the ditch.

  Clamping her jaw, she stared rigidly at the road and drove.

  Here we go again.

  Ten years, and she still had it as bad as snakebite.

  Eighteen

  From the library windows, Quin watched the sun slide below the western hills while the gentle strains of Beethoven’s “Adagio Cantabile” wafted from the lounge—another of the changes at the mission. Olivia and Hannah had a CD player.

  In the last of the fading light, the earthquake damage to the mission was more evident. The shadows emphasized hairline cracks in the exterior walls and “bald patches” on the roof, where tiles had been dislodged. But apart from the visible damage, and a few broken windows that had already been repaired, the mission had escaped relatively unscathed and looked better than ever.

  In the years Quin had been away, the exterior walls had been resurfaced and newly limed, the fences and outbuildings had been put into good repair, and a new apartment had been built for Jay, linking the garage and outbuildings in a U-shape that enclosed the courtyard on three sides. Instead of the hunting ground for free-ranging chickens that the courtyard had once been, the area was now neatly paved and overhung by shady trees, with a fountain tinkling in the center.

  Quin turned when Olivia entered the room with a tea tray. “Does Cain know who you are?”

  Olivia didn’t look happy. “Not yet, but give him time. My books are still in circulation. I’m almost certain I saw that weasel, Hathaway, reading one yesterday.”

  “You could move. You can afford it.”

  Olivia’s jaw set. “I’m not going to be pushed out of my home. All we have to do is sit tight. Cain doesn’t usually stay any place longer than a month or two.”

  Quin glanced at the corner of Cain’s encampment, which was visible from the window. “He could be longer on this one, if the legend he’s pushing has any credence.”

  Olivia made a rude sound. “He’s setting himself up for a fall. Apparently he’s been interviewing the villagers and old Elena has given him some spiel about a jewel called The Eye of the Sun God.” She lifted her shoulders. “Maybe there’s something there, and maybe there isn’t, but the odds are against it, even if the temple did have a gold seal. Whatever was kept there must have been very important—too important to leave. If the temple was abandoned, for whatever reason, in all likelihood the place was stripped centuries ago. Cain will bull his way in to find nothing but stale air and dust.”

  Quin strolled across the thick Turkish rug that now softened the library floor. “If a natural disaster happened, like an earthquake, or the slip that buried the city, all of the temple possessions could still be there, which would explain why the gold seal was still intact.”

  Olivia’s glance was sharp. “In my opinion that’s an unlikely scenario. The slip could have happened at any time.”

  Quin was inclined to agree. Greed was a factor in any age, and the ancient ones weren’t exempt. If there had been treasure of any kind inside the temple, the people of the temple’s time would have known about it. Chances were it would have been ransacked at the first opportunity.

  But her stomach, and the memory of the dream, said something else. In the dream she’d been on her way to collect something important—to remove it for safekeeping—and she’d never made it.

  Quin studied the artifact Hannah had sitting on a pile of notes, acting as a paperweight. The afternoon light caught the fragment of stone, making the serpent seem even more deeply incised. She indicated the reams of notepaper covered in Olivia’s neat hand. “You’ve been working.”

  “And I’ve made progress. I even made it inside the maze a few times, until I got caught. Now Cain’s upped the security.”

  Quin weighed the chunk of blue granite in her palm, studying the way the embedded quartzite sparkled in the light. “This is definitely Incan, but the doorplate isn’t.”

  Olivia went still. “You’ve seen the seal?”

  “And handled it.” Jay’s dark voice cut through the gentle strains of the adagio as he strolled through the door and deposited a bundle of mail on the desk. “She broke into Cain’s tent.”

  A grim smile twitched at Olivia’s mouth. “I’ll bet he’s messing his pretty pants about that. He hasn’t released any information about the seal, because he’s afraid someone will work it out before he does.”

  Tension tightened all along Quin’s spine as she watched Jay help himself to tea, then take up the position at the window she’d just vacated.

  Since he’d in
tervened with Cain and hitched a ride with her back to the mission that afternoon, Quin hadn’t seen Jay at all. Apparently he spent his day managing the orchard and running an engineering workshop, which employed several men from the village. In his spare time he took care of any maintenance the mission required. According to Olivia, the place was now run with military precision, and she had nothing to do but complain, get under Hannah’s feet, make trouble and cook.

  Olivia taking over the kitchen wasn’t an ideal arrangement, because cooking wasn’t her favorite pastime, but she had insisted. Jay had taken on the responsibility of making the mission solvent, and now that it was a productive enterprise that provided employment for a good deal of the village, she’d argued that the least she could do was provide them all with one hot meal a day.

  Quin replaced the artifact and accepted the mug of tea Olivia handed her. “The excavation needs someone with depth and integrity. That doesn’t exactly describe Elias Cain. He’s already pushed the local guys aside. I didn’t see any of the Peruvian team guarding the tent, but then, that’s his style. He uses his fame and the cameras to intimidate.”

  Jay turned from his vantage point at the window. “Not to mention the illness, which seems selective. Most of the Peruvian team went down.”

  Olivia made herself comfortable in the old-fashioned leather chair that was positioned behind the desk. “And when Garcia died, all but a handful pulled out.”

  Setting her mug down on the desk, Quin pulled a blank piece of paper toward her and deftly began drawing glyphs. “That’s why you should be running it. Cain wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “That’s a nice theory, but if I came out of the closet, it’s highly unlikely the Peruvian government would let a woman who harbored a child illegally get anywhere near the site.”

  Quin set the piece of paper with the glyphs down in front of Olivia. “It’s an old crime, if it was ever a crime at all.”

  Olivia slipped on a pair of spectacles and leaned forward. “We’ll see. Chances are the salsa’s going to hit the fan soon, anyway. I might have been out of the loop for nearly thirty years, but sooner or later, someone’s going to recognize me.”

  She frowned as she examined the glyphs. “An eye, a hand and a sword. They’re easy enough—as clear as a ‘Keep Out’ sign, and they look almost Egyptian. As for the rest…” She slid the glasses more firmly in place. “Not Incan or anything distinctively meso-American, or Egyptian.” She shook her head, finger tracing the smaller glyphs. “They’re completely different in form, size and composition—they look more like a mathematical equation.”

  “Or a language.”

  “Exactly.” Abstractedly, Olivia searched the bookshelves, reached for a book, flipped pages, then ran her finger slowly down lines of scripts. “Aramaic is the closest thing to it, but even that doesn’t quite…”

  She set the book down on the desk and reached for another, opening to a page that was already marked. “The whole city is a mystery, but there’s a connection here somewhere…. The fact that the Incas got into the act and built over the original structures shouldn’t cloud the issue. We’ve seen it happen often enough before. The new culture supplants the old, and the new temple gets built on the site of the old one—sometimes beside it, sometimes right on top of it—and using the old materials. It comes down to practicalities. Why shift stone when you don’t have to? Why clear a new site when the ground-work’s already done and construction materials are at hand? In this case we have a city that is patently not Incan. And the maze—” She shook her head as she opened a drawer, pulled out a large sheet of paper and spread it on the desk. “The maze was used by the Minoans.”

  “Did you say a maze?” Quin stared at the sketch Olivia had started, and the sense of déjà vu she’d felt when she picked up the gold seal hit again, although this time not as strong and minus the claustrophobia. She’d seen a map of the maze before.

  Riveted by the certainty, she reached for a pencil, pulled the map toward her and began to draw, filling in the blanks using information that had no basis in science, ephemeral glimpses of another life, another time, that made her chest tighten and her throat close with grief. When she had finished the rough outline, she stared at what she’d drawn.

  The temple complex was huge. Cain had found only the western corner.

  Jay watched as the sketch of the ruin grew more detailed and complex beneath Quin’s deft hand. Her eyes were slightly unfocused—dreamy—as she worked, the tension that emanated from her palpable, and all the hairs at his nape lifted as not just a temple but an entire city slowly came into focus.

  Her hand slowed, stopped, the pencil poised.

  He indicated the blank section of the sketch that had stopped her. “The filler tank for the aqueduct goes there.”

  Quin lifted her gaze to Jay’s. In the dim light of the library, the disturbing sense of the present and the past merging intensified. For a split second Jay’s face wavered, became subtly different—his eyes a shade narrower, cheekbones even sparer. “How did you know I was drawing the well?”

  “Simple engineering. Common sense.”

  Quin was certain she’d heard him say those same words before, even though she knew she never had. Then, as abruptly as if a switch had been flicked, the déjà vu was gone.

  Olivia indicated a large chamber she’d drawn in the center of the maze. “What’s that?”

  What the maze was designed to protect.

  “I don’t know. Maybe the center of the temple itself.” She stared at the drawing, then transferred her gaze to the line of glyphs. They were small, precise—easily handwritten. “Another enigma.”

  “And Cain’s in charge of solving it.” Olivia’s expression was grim.

  Quin’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know how he wangled his way in here.”

  “Money and influence,” Jay said curtly. “The Peruvian government doesn’t have the funding to excavate. Apparently Cain’s come in with a seven-figure budget.”

  The fact that Cain had begun exploring the maze itself made her stomach churn. “Just how far has he gotten?”

  “According to Cain, all the way. He’s been exploring the temple and the maze for the past ten days. He’s found some household utensils, all of them broken, as if the place was ransacked, and the crumbled remains of furniture and clothing, but so far, apart from the seal, none of the gold he’s looking for—and no human remains. Like Olivia said, looks like someone beat him to the punch about three thousand years ago.”

  Nineteen

  Quin eased off her hiking boots and sat down at the table that was set beneath a towering magnolia in the courtyard—and which, lately, had become her office. Rummaging in her rucksack, she pulled out her diary, set it beside her laptop, then simply sat while the computer booted up, absorbing the cool after the baking heat of the day.

  Reaching into her pocket, she extracted a fragment of granite and examined the partial glyph carved into one edge of the stone. What was left of the symbol was shallow and blurred, almost erased by time and the constant abrasion of water and silt, but even so, the lines and curves had a power that held her.

  As her fingertips moved over the symbol, she felt like a sleeper waking, once again alive to senses that had been dulled by years of academia and lost in the sharp hustle of Washington, with its clipped vowels, old buildings and even older money.

  She’d spent the past week skirting the closed-off ruin, working a grid pattern in all the areas Cain wasn’t interested in, trying to physically map the city and find one of the alternate entrances to the temple. So far she’d found what had always been there: thick undergrowth, trees and rocks.

  To make the search more difficult, in the wake of the earthquake, cut rock was everywhere, as if a giant hand had played a game of dice with the city. When the side of the hill had originally slid millennia ago and buried the temple city, it must have sheared off almost every intact building that had been above ground. With this second massive slide, the devastatio
n was revealed. Debris was scattered all the way to the Agueda. Unfortunately, the confused jumble of mud and rocks didn’t help solve many puzzles. Quin was more interested in where the rocks had been before the landslide, rather than where they’d ended up.

  Her simple enjoyment of being back in the valley aside, one thing was certain: she wasn’t achieving much hiking around the hills. The landscape had altered so much with earthquakes, slips and thick undergrowth that trying to visualize the location of the ancient buildings and temple gates was proving impossible. So far, the hypothetical city she’d drawn was just that: a theory. What she needed was to get inside the ruin.

  Placing the glyph beside the computer, she opened a file and began transferring data from her diary, logging the location covered, along with any significant terrain data or finds. Unhappily, her major find for the day—the glyph—had been found by sheer chance as she’d waded across the Agueda on her way home.

  As she entered the details, a familiar form emerged from the shadows.

  “Luis. What are you doing here?” The last she’d heard of him, he’d moved to Lima and was working for a construction crew. He had always drifted in and out of the mission—although this time, according to Hannah, he’d been gone for a good eighteen months.

  “I heard there was some work going, so I headed back. Olivia told me to wait for the boss.” He ran liquid dark eyes over Quin. “Looking good, girl. You got yourself a man yet?”

  Quin lifted a brow, and Luis held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, enough said. What use have you ever had for a man? Still…” He flexed his arm, showing respectable biceps. “It’s good to have some muscle around, eh? Just like the good ol’ days.”

  As he sidled closer, a four-wheel drive came to a halt on the other side of the courtyard and Jay climbed out.

  A whiff of cologne teased her nostrils as Luis leaned closer still, ostensibly to examine the geological map she was studying. Quin gave him a direct look. “Don’t even go there, Luis.”