Deity (17 page)

He
turned back to Lori’s necklace and slipped it from the table, noting the
tarnished silver. The Kokopelli pendent had been worn thin, reminding him that
he’d never seen Lori without it. How many years had it dangled around her neck?
What a cruel twist of fate that she left it behind for the dive that would take
her life.

The
emotions stirred by that necklace were overwhelming. Peet closed his eyes
against the penetrating ache. He gripped the cool pendent tightly, silently
willing his palm to transmit her essence back to him.

“We
must let God take care of the dead, Profesor,” Father Ruiz pressed. Peet opened
his eyes and realized the priest had been watching him. “Who knows how long it
will take the search party to recover her body. In the meantime we must take
care of the living.”

“I
can’t leave.”

“The
priest is right,” Chac interrupted. “We have two colleagues to find. You must
go.”

Peet
choked with frustration. “Go where?”

Neither John or
Matt left any clues as
to their whereabouts, and if they were being held hostage in some form or
another, Peet couldn’t even begin to guess who their captors might be. Even if
he knew that, what more could he do about it than to contact the authorities? He
was out of his league with nowhere to begin.

“I
recommend we start with Izapa,” Chac suggested. “Somehow, the pillar ball is
the key to all of this. We don’t know where the Kin piece is, but there’s a
chance the pillar ball is headed back to where it came from.”

“This
feels like another needle in a haystack,” Peet admitted.

“As
I recall, Profesor, that’s what brought you to Mexico in the first place.”

Airfield

Peet
found the Ladybug amid a cluster of private planes, most of them single engine
Cessnas or little two-seater capsules with wings. In fact, aside from a small
Learjet parked at the far end, the Ladybug stood out as the largest plane on
the lot, its overhead wings spanning above the others like an eagle’s wings
embracing a brood of eaglets.

KC
wasn’t hard to find either. The ladder erected at the left wing gave her away,
and when Peet came around, he found her elbow deep into the Ladybug’s turbo
casing, her body gyrating atop the ladder as she ground a ratchet wrench somewhere
inside. Peet waited on the ground until she finished grunting and panting from
her efforts and descended back down the ladder. She didn’t notice him until she
stepped off the last wrung, startled.

“Geez,
Peet!” she gasped. “You’ll give a girl a heart attack standing there like
that.”

“Sorry,”
he mumbled as she continued for the toolbox lying open on the ground.

He
waited patiently as she knelt in front of her tools, unsuspecting, snapping the
socket from her wrench and exchanging it for a slightly smaller one. “So, did
you have a good swim?”

Peet
felt
himself
shifting uncomfortably on his feet and
forced control over his waver. “There’s been
an…
accident,”
he said over the rattle of tools as KC fished a rag from the bottom of the box.

“What
kind of accident?”

He
cleared his throat. “Lori’s dead.”

That
caught her full attention. She froze there over her toolbox as the weight of
the matter sank in. Peet didn’t know what else to say. He probably couldn’t say
it if he did. The awkward silence lingered until KC rose to her feet. She wiped
at a smudge of grease on the wrench but the chore was now secondary to the
concern washing over her face. Worry suddenly saturated her voice.

“What
happened?”

“There
was…” Peet struggled. Even he couldn’t quite believe what had actually happened
inside the cavern and trying to explain that now demanded too much effort. “There
was a collapse,” he said. “Lori didn’t make it out.”

Swiping
the rag across her oil-slicked hands, KC stepped into him. Without invitation
she pulled his shoulders into her chest.
“My God.
I’m
so sorry,” she said, wrapping her arms even tighter around his neck.

Peet
allowed her the moment, draping his own arms uselessly around her waist. He
wasn’t sure how to react himself. He felt numb inside, as if the shocking news
had injected his own body with anesthesia.

When
KC did pull back, her arms maintained their position at his neck while her eyes
explored his. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m
fine.”

“How about Lori’s partner?
What’s his name?”

“Chac,”
Peet choked. He swallowed hard.
Lori’s partner.
It
hadn’t been that long ago when those words referred to him. “Chac’s fine. It
was only Lori…”

Peet
swallowed again at the crack of his own voice. Hot tears threatened the rims of
his eyes and he suddenly felt unable to breathe. He felt smothered by KC’s
embrace and the closeness of her sympathetic eyes didn’t help.

He
spun away. “Something wrong with the plane?” he deflected, glancing up at the
turbo prop.

KC
took the cue and backed away. “Uh, not really,” she said, quickly turning her
attention back to the tool dangling in her hand. “Just a minor timing issue,
but I got it handled.
Nothing to worry about.”

Peet
was grateful for the diversion. He suspected KC was too.

“I
need to ask another favor, KC.”

“Where
we going this time?” she asked as she scaled back up the ladder.

“Izapa.”

“Where?”

“It’s
an archaeological zone in Chiapas.
Chac says there’s a town called Tapachula nearby. It has an airport.”

KC
buried herself into the turbo again. “Are you sure you need to be going
anywhere. I mean, with Lori and all—”

“It’s
best that I go,” he said simply.

She
must have detected his reluctance for after a brief pause, she went to
ratcheting inside the engine again. “What’s in Izapa?”

Peet
wasn’t quite sure how to answer that question. What did he expect to find
there?
A stolen pillar ball?
Matt
Webb perhaps?
Maybe John?
Then there was the
strange Kin piece carved right out of the cavern wall. Might that be there too?

“What
good is a stone gear?” he mumbled to himself.

“What’d
you say?” KC called down.

Peet
hesitated, but decided to ask anyway. “What would a stone gear be used for?”

KC
extracted herself from the engine casing with a twisted look on her face. “What
kind of gear?”

Peet
shrugged. “Just a regular run of the mill gear, I guess.”

“How big?”

“Oh,
I’d say maybe fifteen centimeters across—”

KC
shook her head. “You gotta speak in layman’s terms.” She lifted her wrench into
the air. “The only metrics I use are in fractions, if you know what I mean.”

Peet
retracted. “I’d say it’s about six inches in diameter, maybe an inch or two
thick.”

“And
it’s made of stone?”

He
nodded.

“How
wide are the teeth?”

Peet
shrugged again. “Considerable,” he said. “Seems to me like there
were
only eight or ten teeth total.”

KC
grinned, but checked the humor from it, perhaps a nervous residue from the news
about Lori. “Sounds like a child’s building block to me,” she said.

“Is
there any practical application for a stone gear?”

This
time it was KC’s turn to shrug. “Like any other gear,” she guessed, “it’s
probably good for turning other gears. But I can’t think of any mechanical use
for it. It’s just too simple.”

Peet
had guessed as much himself. From the moment he laid eyes on the gear-shaped
hole in the cavern, he had to assume the stone that filled that shape was more
coincidental than functional. Nevertheless, his mechanical knowledge was
restricted to primitive uses—wheels, levers and the like. If anyone knew
anything about gears, it’d probably be the person holding the wrench.

“I’m
sure it isn’t useful with today’s technology,” Peet pressed, “but can you think
of any elemental mechanics that might involve a simple gear?”

KC
shook her head. “I tend to leave the primitive stuff to you historians. I’m
more familiar with the complex systems, like planetary gears and the like.”

“Planetary
gears?”

“Yeah.
Like this turbo, for example. The
turbine shaft operates with planetary gears. That means there are several
smaller planet gears that mesh with one larger central sun gear.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“Maybe.
Planetary gears can offer a lot of
torque for tractors and heavy equipment but there are simplified versions that
are used in bicycles, pencil sharpeners, even combination locks. I highly doubt
your ten-toothed rock was ever used in this way though.”

Peet
sighed, wondering why he was still interested in the Kin piece after all that
had happened. He still had to find John, after all. But there was something
about that mysterious Kin piece that demanded some sort of answer, if only to explain
why the bomb had been set, and why Lori had to die.

The
sound of KC’s feet descending the ladder once again caught his attention,
reminding him that she’d been watching him. When he looked up she was right
there again, drawing close with those softened eyes.

Before
she could gather him into another hug, he asked, “Do you think you can have
this plane ready to go soon?”

KC’s
lips shifted apologetically, wrapping comfort and compliance into one
sympathetic grin.

“It’s
already been done,” she said.

Tunkuruchu

Voices
drifted through the darkness—distant and flat, and incomprehensible. There were
only two of them, one a woman and the other a child. They spoke to each other
in hushed tones, and in a foreign language.

Then
the voices stopped.

Lori
blinked her eyes open to a flat, ribbed ceiling only eight feet above her. A
dormant medical lamp hung above, but there was nothing more. Her eyes followed
the long, metal roofline to a blank, square wall on her immediate left. The
ceiling extended far to her right, past another hanging lamp, to an opening
just as large and as square as the wall beside her. The room was nothing more
than a large, rectangular box.
A shipping container.

And
she wasn’t alone.

Between
her and the open doors stood a young boy, his dark, black head a round
silhouette against the square sunlight. His square little body was at an angle,
but his face was turned toward her, watching her with wide, dark eyes. Sitting
on a stool in front of him was a rail-thin woman with straight, shoulder-length
hair. She was putting the finishing wraps of a bandage on the boy’s arm.

Small
details began to take shape as Lori lay there watching them. She noticed the
bench with transparent containers filled with swabs and tongue depresses. A
blood pressure cuff lay next to a stethoscope. A scale stood against the wall behind
the boy. An empty cot with white sheets sat nearby and above it, a sheet of
paper had been taped to the metal wall that read CRUZ ROJA MEXICANA.

The
woman finally stood and released the boy who immediately escaped through the
square opening of sunlight. Lori turned away as pain shot through her head. Her
eyes found comfort in the dark shadows of the wall beside her. But that didn’t
eliminate the sound of the woman’s firm footsteps approaching her cot.

Lori
felt the woman’s strapping frame standing over her. When she turned her head to
look, the woman smiled warmly.

“
¿
Lo
que es su nombre
?” she asked.

Lori
merely blinked back at her dark, curious eyes, waiting for the cloud to clear
from the edges of her mind.

“
¿
Su
nombre
?
?” the woman
repeated, but when Lori didn’t respond, she switched tactics.
“
¿Habla Español
?”

Lori
focused on the ribbed ceiling above the woman’s head. The shadows seemed
welcoming there, or at least that was where her eyes wanted to rest.

“Do
you speak English?” the woman persisted.

Lori
shifted back to the woman’s drawn face and she smiled again.

“So
you do speak English. That’s good. My name’s Tarah. Do you have a name?”

Lori
detected a slight accent, but it wasn’t Spanish that filtered through the
woman’s English. It sounded more…Arabic.
A touch
Middle-Eastern anyway.