Laina Caidare chewed her fingernail, half crouching and half sitting on the twisted dead tree on the floor of the steamy hot Guatemalan jungle. She slapped absently at mosquitoes that buzzed around her unprotected legs and arms below her short sleeves and short pants, and kicked at the rotting plant debris on the forest floor. A big yellow centipede scrambled from between the leaves. With a half smile, Laina scooped the wriggling creature onto the toe of her heavy-duty black boot and punted it over the undergrowth into a pit where several locals dug into a rock-pitted hump in the earth. It landed on the head of one man, who yelped and jumped until the creature fell to his side and he recognized it as nonpoisonous. He turned his back on it and went back to his work. Laina, her amusement gone for the moment, went back to chewing on her fingernail.
Suddenly one of the men yelled, and a frenzy of digging possessed the little group. The knot of them squeezed tighter together in order to move a large vertical stone, about half the size of any of them standing. Seeing the size of the stone, Laina jumped up and ran to their side, eagerly watching as they scraped with bare nails against the mud that held the stone stable. “Come on, now, you’re almost there,” she muttered over and over in English, leaning eagerly into the pit, forgetting that they couldn’t understand her. It didn’t matter. They had all felt the draft of cold air behind the stone, signaling a hidden cavity, and each of them reached with grimy hands to bring it to light.
One of them jumped up and ran back into the woods. Laina turned on him. “You, what’re you doing? Stop now and I’ll pay you nothing!” she bellowed, glancing about for something to throw at him. There was no need. He picked up a sturdy branch for leverage and joined his companions in the pit. He stuck it in the small hole behind the stone and they grasped it with both hands. With a great effort they all leaned back, backs wet with perspiration and the stale-sweet smell of sweat in the air. The ground and roots beneath them shifted as the stone’s massive weight and size was wrenched to the side.
The locals heard a click behind them and they all scrambled back as Laina, with a gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, pushed past them and entered the small crevice on hands and knees. The locals, a couple of them smiling, muttered to themselves.
“Is she going to shoot ghosts with it?” one of them demanded of another, trying not to snicker.
“Powerful guns they must have where she comes from,” another muttered. “Ghost-pistols. I need to get myself one of those.”
“It’s not for ghosts,” one toward the back hissed warningly. “It’s for making ghosts. I’ve seen her use it on those who try to follow her, searching for a single button or bauble for themselves.” The little group fell silent.
The grotto smelled of musty earth and was crisscrossed with roots from the trees above. A single scorpion fell from the roof, brushing Laina’s hair. With an angry flick of her wrist, she swept the blue-black creature from her head onto the floor, then crushed it under her flashlight with a powerful thrust of her arm. It thrashed its legs and its poison-tipped tail madly, then went still. Laina gave it a disparaging flick with her finger, then crawled all the way through the opening, waving the flashlight back and forth. Stones the size of her hand littered the grotto floor, and she glanced up to see where they had fallen from the roof. The entire room, about the size of a large closet, had been tiled in this way, roots snaking out from between the stones.
A satisfied grin lit up her face as the flashlight beam fell onto the opposite side of the cavity. Five bundles lay stretched along one side. She crawled over to the largest of the five, set in the middle, and pulled her knife from her belt. With one long slash she ripped open the bundle. The glitter of gold greeted her eye, and she gleefully tore at the bundle until she had freed the exquisite necklace from the moldy bones. She set to work on the other four bundles, and scowled as they yielded nothing but old bones, a tuft of hair, and rotting fabric. She stuffed the necklace in her pocket and shoved the tattered bundles aside. Near the wall was a small hole where some old vessels stood. At one time they probably held food for the deceased occupant’s journey to the afterlife; now they held only earth from the roof as it fell over time. Laina worked one free from the earth and examined it as well as she could in the meager light, working it over with the flashlight beam. A slow smile spread across her face as she recognized the handiwork. This particular style always sells well at the auctions.
Laina cleared out all the pottery and handed it to the locals waiting outside, accompanying the pieces with the usual threats in her broken Spanish: “I know how many in here, so I better count same number later! You get pay when this done, not before, and if one steals even smallest piece, gets handed over to the military…if he survives! Do you understand me?” The locals nodded mutely, though not without anger, some wondering if the work and the threats were worth it to feed themselves and their families. At least one had decided on the spot to give it up once this site was done. The little Laina paid just wasn’t worth it, and he missed his family. May God grant that the crop doesn’t die next year, for no hunger is worth this slavery.
Once the pottery was out and the bundles thoroughly picked over, Laina did a curious thing. She took her knife and began popping out the tiles that lined the walls of the cavity, digging behind them and peering at the flat stones for any signs of marking or decoration. The locals watched, puzzled, wondering what she would want with rocks. All three walls she pulled apart, and would have started on the roof as well had the small space not begun to fill up with soil. It did not matter anyway. The thing she was looking for would have been in plain sight, would have been decorated with the sign she had been searching for. None of the crudely hewn rocks bore any kind of emblem. In frustration, Laina snatched up a tile and snapped the thin stone in half. She thrust both ends into the soil and left the tomb, disgusted. She and the locals then left the site, a yawning chamber spilling forth soil, roots, and human bone.
Acme HQ
June 14, 1980
Lynn sighed. “Always one step behind.”
“How soon did our people find this site after Laina left?” Suhara asked, examining the photograph before him of the raided grave in Lynn’s office.
“Barely a day, if that,” Lynn muttered, disgusted. She flopped down in her chair and folded her arms. “I swear, that woman must keep track of our people on radar. She must have them all fitted with little collars.”
Enrique scowled at her. “Listen, it’s hard enough tracking the heisla, they’re so damn well trained and know their areas so well, so you can imagine what tracking the wakero herself is like.”
Lynn shook her head. “I know tracking someone as unconventional as Laina is difficult, but you are an Acme agent. No case unsolved, remember?”
Carmen frowned at another picture, this one taken inside the tomb. “I don’t understand…why would Laina take apart the walls? The stones that had been placed there don’t look like they had been worth anything.”
Lynn gave her a look. “If you had been sticking to your MO readings and not been going around crook-hunting, you would understand this by now.”
“Lynn,” Suhara said softly.
“Don’t Lynn me,” she snapped at him. “She has to show responsibility if she is going to stay on this case.”
Enrique took the picture. “Laina’s crazy, that’s the bottom line. She thinks she’s on the trail of some magic artifact, and she’s willing to destroy both graves and lives to get it.”
Carmen made a puzzled, half-believing face. “Is that really true?”
Suhara blinked slowly. “Laina’s interest in the supernatural is not fact, it is mere speculation. So therefore it should not be taken too seriously.”
Grunting, Enrique muttered, “What other ideas do we have for this woman’s motives? She’s completely erratic. She tears apart graves that have nothing in them she can sell. Some of the things she finds, she doesn’t sell. She keeps them for herself. And they usually have some magic connotation connected to them.”
“It would help if we had an idea what she was looking for,” Lynn said. “Unfortunately, none of you seem to want to give me any.”
“We don’t have any ideas ourselves,” Enrique snapped. “I don’t think Laina herself knows. She just runs from one half-baked text to another, connecting theories that don’t have any connection. Remember when she went looking for Atlantis?”
Suhara smiled briefly. “Under the streets of Chicago, if I remember.”
“Exactly,” Enrique said, his voice half scornful, half amused. “Can you think of a less likely place for an undersea empire than in the middle of a continent?”
Carmen snickered. “Are you sure that’s what she was looking for?”
“No, I’m not sure,” Enrique conceded. “That woman doesn’t make any sense. But that’s what she was researching before she started digging in people’s basements. Maybe she took a side trip. Maybe she was trying to throw us off the trail. Maybe she figured she would find it in the least likely place, because all the obvious places had already been searched. Who knows.”
Suhara shrugged. “All in all, the magic motive theory cannot be proven. It comes from hearsay and a few odd coincidences that do not correspond with the usual wakero’s movements.”
“The woman has enough money,” Lynn told Carmen. “She comes from an old colonialist family. You’ve seen pictures of her house. It’s not like she really needs to dig out this stuff and sell it, black market or auction or anywhere else. The only motive we can think of is that she’s after something else.”
Carmen shuffled the photographs around in puzzlement. “But the file you gave me stated that Laina’s an extremely intelligent person and well versed in new technology. Why would she believe in old myths?”
“Belief in myth does not signal foolishness, Carmen,” Suhara told her softly. “Many people believe in myths. That is why they still like to tell stories about mummy curses and pyramid powers, UFO’s and secret societies. They probably always will.”
“There are still lots of stories surrounding the excavation of King Tut,” Lynn added. “Several of the main people on the team died from one thing or another; some attribute it to ancient curses. People like that sort of thing.”
“They take interest in the mysterious and the unknown,” Suhara said, nodding. “Probably Laina is no different.”
“Indeed,” Enrique said, nodding to himself. “Lots of highly intelligent people end up chasing mad dreams, or nursing strange obsessions. It’s a shame, really. If we can more of them rooted in reality then they could help us solve some of the world’s real problems.”
Carmen scratched her head. “Is there any way we can figure out just what Laina thinks she’s going to find?”
Lynn shrugged. Suhara said, “Perhaps she is only looking for something not magic, just unusual…a one-of-a-kind piece to cement her place in history. We do know that, in her twisted frame of mind, she thinks that whatever she is doing, whatever she finds, will somehow benefit the world at large.” He gave a grim little smile. “Of course, none of our people have ever gotten close enough to Laina to ask her.”
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