Beautiful Sacrifice

cartridge. “This smells dead. It could have been fired days or weeks ago. Brass is still shiny.”
    She looked at the gun in his right hand.
    “Wrong caliber,” he said, smiling faintly.
    What he didn’t say was that he would bet good money that the spent brass had come from an AK-47.
    “But—” she began.
    “Quiet,” he breathed. He pressed her behind him into a shallow alcove in the mound of rubble. “Someone is out there.”

C HAPTER T WENTY
     
    L INA’S PULSE HAMMERED AGAINST HER WRISTS . S HE HAD trouble keeping still while being held off balance with one side of her head pressed to the stone and the rest of her pressed against Hunter.
    He stood quietly, his pale eyes raking shadows for a target.
    Changing direction and strengthening, the wind kicked up, no longer dry. It was like jaguar breath, hot and moist. Bits of man-made and natural litter danced along the ground, covering any sounds that might have come from farther away, beyond the edge of the clearing.
    Hunter waited, knowing there weren’t enough shots in the magazine to manage a standoff. Rodrigo’s illegal gun wouldput out a lot of stopping power, but not at a great range, certainly not enough to be much good against the thick cover of the encroaching jungle. Concealed by wind and vegetation, a dozen men could be closing in.
    But the shadow that had alerted him was no longer there.
    The exhalation of wind faded.
    “Stay here,” Hunter said.
    He eased away from her, then made a sharp motion that no watcher could have missed.
    Nobody cared enough to shoot.
    Deliberately Hunter shrugged out of the backpack and swung it out into the open. Nobody shot at the sudden target.
    He retreated to cover, shoved the gun into the back of his pants, put the backpack on, and returned to Lina.
    “Nada,” he said.
    She nodded without looking at him. Her fingertips were digging along a faint, straight line among the stones. Now that she had called his attention to it, he could see that other fingers had been there before hers, rubbing against lichen and moss, and keeping bigger jungle plants at bay.
    Hunter’s curiosity fired. “Is it a door?”
    “Looks like.”
    She worked her fingers along the tiny seam where the limestone blocks came apart. These huge pieces of stone were squared off, unlike the more uneven, harshly weathered blocks that had fallen from higher. It looked like a wall mostly concealed by rubble.
    “Is it stuck?” he asked quietly.
    “Probably hasn’t been opened in centuries. We should get an engineering study to make sure that—”
    With only the faintest grating noise, the stone moved.
    Lina made a shocked sound and peered into the darkness. She could see just enough to tell that the door had moved aside into a prepared niche in the wall.
    “It worked,” she said, astonished.
    “Too well.”
    “What do you—oh. It’s been maintained. How odd. Philip never mentioned anything. But then, he wouldn’t,” she added with faint bitterness.
    Hunter checked over his shoulder. Nothing but jungle, no sound except the faint rub of leaf against leaf as the wind slowly twisted. Whoever or whatever was out there wasn’t interested in confrontation.
    “What is this place?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” Lina replied. “It doesn’t feel like any tomb I’ve ever been in. Something is…odd.”
    He nodded. His eyes never stopped probing the surrounding jungle.
    “Look,” Lina said, her voice urgent.
    Hunter spun back to Lina’s position and glanced inside. She stood half in light, the rest of her consumed by shadows. A few feet farther into the mound was what looked like a wall, yet a faint light came from one side. It took only a few steps before a blunt, short hallway, perhaps three feet by five feet, maybe more, opened at an angle deeper in the rubble.
    Pale candles that smelled faintly of flowers burned in the darkness along one wall.
    “Someone lit these,” she said, going through the opening into the ruin.
    He stepped inside after her, pulling the gun once more. When he moved to the right, the door slid back into place behind him.
    “What the hell?” he muttered.
    “I think whoever was here is gone,” Lina said. “The candle-lined passage is empty and the flames are still. The opening of the door didn’t really affect them. Nobody has hurried by lately, disturbing the flames.”
    “Stay put. I have to check something.” He set the gun in an empty waist-level niche and took a penlight from his pocket, the