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  The instructions hadn’t ended with the tunnel. There were other directions, which presumably would lead her straight to the Empress.

  She halted her work and smiled at Jorge. “I think I’ll stop for the day,” she said. “My shoulder is bothering me and I’m tired.”

  “You should rest,” he said with the shy concern he had often shown.

  “I will,” she said, and returned to the camp. Most of the men were already there, having grown bored with clearing an access route to those small chambers that seemed to be so much alike and produced nothing exciting. She was half a day behind them in going through the chambers, so it didn’t matter. Ben was there, sitting cross-legged on the ground while he cleaned and oiled his weapons. Alerted to her presence by some sixth sense, he looked around at her. She smiled at him but didn’t make any effort to converse, instead going to her tent.

  Ben continued with his task, but his expression was thoughtful. During their weeks together he had formed the habit of watching Jillian, closely studying her in an effort to find some little chink in her armor of capability that would allow him to get to her. He had become an expert on picking up the slightest deviation in her behavior, and now all of his senses were alert. She was up to something, but what?

  Jillian sat cross-legged in her tent, the coded instructions on the floor in front of her and the notebook open in her lap. Though she had memorized the instructions weeks ago, actually writing them down in English still helped to clarify her thoughts. Then she stared at what she had written for a long time. A sound just outside the tent alerted her and she swiftly tucked the sheet of paper under her sleep pad.

  Ben opened the flap and crawled in, crowding her backward. “Come on in,” she said sarcastically.

  “Thanks.” He winked at her. “I did. Okay, what’s going on?”

  He settled himself beside her, and she had the distinct impression that he wasn’t going to budge until he had a satisfactory answer. That playful wink was merely camouflage for his iron determination.

  She pulled out the sheet of notebook paper and gave it to him. “I remembered that there were more instructions, that they didn’t end with finding the tunnel.” She made certain her voice was so low that they couldn’t be overheard from outside.

  Ben read what she had written. “What are you going to do about this?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighed, her indecision reflected in her eyes. “What I’ve found so far isn’t exactly earthshaking, certainly not on the level with King Tut’s tomb or the Ouosalla find. I’ve found proof that humans lived here, but nothing, absolutely nothing, to indicate that they were an unknown tribe. We have a miracle of a tunnel leading in here, but not much else. Oh, archaeologists will be interested, and eventually someone will fund a dig here, but I haven’t found anything that’s going to grab any headlines. I wanted something that would set archaeology on its ear, force them to give Dad the credit due him, and I haven’t found anything that dramatic.”

  He lifted the paper. “Unless it’s here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And finding it could mean big trouble for us.”

  “Yeah,” she repeated gloomily.

  He cupped her chin and lifted it, a wry smile on his face as he looked at her for a moment. Then he leaned over and kissed her. “So I’ll look for the jewel while you keep the bad guys diverted,” he murmured. “If the Empress is there, I’ll let you know and then we can decide what to do. No point in worrying yourself sick about the gem when it might not even exist.”

  “Oh, it exists.”

  “Then there’s a good chance someone else carried it out of here centuries ago. People just don’t leave huge gems lying around, even if there are superstitions attached. The Empress doesn’t even have a good threatening curse to go with it.”

  “It could be a real curse for us, though.”

  “We’ll make that decision later. Even if the thing isn’t there, I might find something else you’ll like. Who knows? Maybe these people hid all their interesting stuff away.”

  “They sure did, from what I can tell.”

  “Then we’ll find out tomorrow.”

  She bit her lip as she stared at him. A month ago she wouldn’t have trusted him with her lunch, much less something as important as this. Since then she had gotten into the habit of trusting him with her life. As her life was infinitely more important than the Empress, she didn’t see any point in refusing to trust him to search for the gem.

  “You’ll be careful?” she whispered. “Make certain no one is following you?”

  “I promise. And if I find anything, you’ll be the first one to know.”

  Ben didn’t do anything unusual the next morning. He went with the others up to the first tier of chambers and helped clear out several more, then left Jillian and Jorge poking around while they returned to the camp. Kates seldom let Jillian out of his sight these days, so he had remained above. Ben busied himself around the camp doing several small chores, then settled down in the shade as if ready for a nap. Dutra, after eating lunch, did go to sleep.

  When the snores were issuing from Dutra’s barrel chest with loud regularity, Ben got up, draped the shotgun across his shoulder as he always did, even though they hadn’t found anything more dangerous than snakes in here, and ambled out of the camp. None of the others paid any particular attention to him. He had taken the precaution the night before of stashing his flashlight in a spot away from the camp, and he retrieved it, hoping he wouldn’t need it.

  They had begun their explorations, naturally enough, at the areas closest to the camp. Jillian’s code placed the Empress in a special chamber directly across from the tunnel opening. When he studied the bowl, he saw that its far edge was slightly higher, giving him a visual reference once he was out of sight of the tunnel. The bowl was at least a mile wide and half again that in length; the floor was choked with trees and undergrowth. Those trees bothered him, for some reason. Why weren’t they bigger? With so much sunlight flooding the bowl, there should have been some real giants in here. Though it rained every day, the heavy rains couldn’t erode the soil as they did in the Amazon plain; the soil was retained in the bowl.

  And just how did the water drain out? It had to, or the floor of the bowl would be a lake, instead of the very rich soil beneath his boots. The richness of the soil made the size of the trees even more puzzling.

  Unless the trees weren’t very old.

  He stopped in his tracks and stared at one lustrous hardwood, and a chill ran up his spine. Now, that was a spooky thought. Had the floor of the bowl been free of vegetation until the fairly recent past? Had the Anzar disappeared only a couple of decades, rather than centuries, ago?

  Nah. Impossible. If they had been here that recently, there would have been a lot more evidence than what Jillian had been finding.

  Unless they had moved out and taken most of their stuff with them.

  He shook himself. He had to stop thinking like that. Just take care of the business at hand, which was finding the place indicated in Jillian’s notes.

  Crossing the floor of the bowl was hard work, for he didn’t want to use the machete and leave a path even Kates could follow, but he figured it worked out about even, since slashing his way through would be hard work, too. He stopped occasionally to make certain he wasn’t being followed and that used up time, too, but he made it to the other side of the bowl within an hour.

  This close, he could see a cleft in the rock face, but getting up there would be a problem. There should be one of those inclines carved into the side of the cliff, if the pattern was carried out, so he began a systematic search for it. It had to be his lucky day, because he found it in only a few minutes.

  He worked his way up it and at the top noticed something different: unlike the other inclines they had found, this was a double one; another incline rose from the opposite direction to meet this one in an inverted V at the first tier.

  Directly ahead, according to Jillian’s instructio