Marquez was not interested in gold. For ten years, he had prospected around the world for gemstones. In Montana, Nevada, and Colorado, he had prowled the old abandoned gold and silver mines searching for mineral crystals that could be cut into precious gems. Inside one tunnel of the Paradise Mine, he discovered a vein of rose-pink crystals in what the old miners had considered worthless rock. The gemstone in its natural state, Marquez recognized, was rhodochrosite, a spectacular crystal found in various parts of the world in shades of pink and deep red.

Rhodochrosite is seldom seen in cut or faceted form. Large crystals are in great demand by collectors, who have no desire to see them sliced to pieces. Clean, clear gems from the Paradise Mine that had been cut into flawless stones of eighteen carats were very expensive. Marquez knew he could retire and spend the rest of his life in style, but as long as the vein continued, he was determined to keep picking the stones from the granite until they petered out.

He stopped his battered old truck with its scratched and dented fenders and stepped out in front of a huge rusty iron door with four different chains attached to four different locks. Inserting keys the size of a man's palm, he unsnapped the locks and spread the chains. Then he took both hands and tugged the great door open. The moon's rays penetrated a short distance down a sloping mine shaft and revealed a pair of rails that stretched off into the darkness.

He fired up the engine mounted on a large portable generator, then pulled a lever on a junction box. The mine shaft was suddenly illuminated under a series of exposed lightbulbs that trailed down the shaft for a hundred yards before gradually growing smaller, until they became tiny glimmers in the distance. An ore cart sat on the rail tracks, attached to a cable that led to a winch. The cart was built to last, and the only sign of hard use was the rust on the sides of the bucket.

Marquez climbed into the bucket and pressed a b.u.t.ton on a remote control. The winch began to hum and play out the cable, allowing the ore cart to roll down the rails, propelled by nothing more than gravity. Going underground was not for the fainthearted or the claustrophobic. The confining shaft barely allowed clearance for the ore bucket. Timbers bolted together like door frames, known as a cap and post, were s.p.a.ced every few feet to sh.o.r.e up the roof against cave-ins. Many of the timbers had rotted badly, but others were as solid and sound as the day they were set in place by miners who had long since pa.s.sed on. The ore car descended the sloping shaft at a rapid rate, coming to a stop 1,200 feet into the depths. At this level there was a constant trickle of water falling from the roof of the tunnel.

Taking a backpack and his lunch pail, Marquez climbed from the car and walked over to a vertical shaft that fell away into the lower reaches of the old Paradise Mine until it reached the 2,200-foot level. Down there, the main drift and crosscut tunnels spread into the granitelike spokes on a wheel. According to old records and underground maps, there were almost a hundred miles of tunnels under and around Pandora.

Marquez dropped a rock into the yawning blackness. The sound of a splash came within two seconds.

Soon after the mine closed down and the pumps at the pumping station below the base of the mountain were turned off, the lower levels had flooded. Over time, water had risen to within fifteen feet of the 1,200-foot level, where Marquez worked the rhodochrosite vein. The slowly rising water, spurred on during a particularly heavy wet season in the San Juans, told him that it would be only a matter of a few weeks before it reached the top of the old shaft and spilled over into the main tunnel, spelling the end of his gemstone-mining operation.

Marquez set his mind on extracting as many stones as he could in the brief time he had left. His days became longer as he struggled to remove the red crystals with nothing but his miner's pick and a wheelbarrow to carry the ore to the bucket for the ride up to the mine's entrance.

As he walked through the tunnel, he stepped around old rusting ore cars and drills left by the miners when they had deserted the mine. There had been no market for the equipment, since nearby mines were closing down one by one at the same time. It was all simply cast aside and left where it was last used.

Seventy-five yards into the tunnel, he came to a narrow cleft in the rock just wide enough for him to slip through. Twenty feet beyond was the rhodochrosite lode he was mining. A lightbulb had burned out on the string hanging from the roof of the cleft, and he replaced it with one of several he kept in a backpack. Then he took his pick in hand and began to attack the rock that was embedded with the gemstones. A dull red in their natural state, the crystals looked like dried cherries in a m.u.f.fin.

A dangerous overhang of rock protruded just above the cleft. If he was to continue to work safely without being crushed by a rockfall, Marquez had no choice but to blast it away. Using a portable pneumatic drill, he bored a hole into the rock. Then he inserted a small charge of dynamite and wired it to a handheld detonator. After moving around the corner of the cleft and into the main tunnel, he pushed down on the plunger. A dull thump echoed through the mine, followed by the sound of tumbling rock and a blanket of dust that rolled into the main tunnel.

Marquez waited a few minutes for the dust to settle before carefully entering the natural cleft. The overhang was gone. It had become a pile of rocks on the narrow floor. He retrieved the wheelbarrow and began removing the debris, dumping it a short distance up the tunnel. When the cleft was finally cleared, he looked up to make certain that no threatening section of the overhang remained.

He stared in wonder at a hole that had suddenly appeared in the roof above the crystal lode. He aimed the light atop his hard hat upward. The beam continued through the hole into what appeared to be a chamber beyond. Suddenly consumed by curiosity, he ran back up the tunnel for fifty yards, where he found the rusty remains of a six-foot iron ladder among the abandoned mining equipment. Returning inside the cleft, he propped up the ladder, climbed the rungs, and pried loose several rocks from the rim of the hole, widening it until he could squeeze through. Then he thrust his upper torso inside the chamber and twisted his head from shoulder to shoulder, sweeping the beam of his hard hat's light around the darkness.

Marquez found himself staring into a room hewn in the rock. It looked to be a perfect cube approximately fifteen by fifteen feet, with the same distance separating the floor and roof. Strange markings were cut into the sheer, smooth walls. This definitely was not the work of nineteenth-century miners. Then, abruptly, the beam of his hard hat's light struck a stone pedestal and glinted on the object it supported.

Marquez froze in shock at the unG.o.dly sight of a black skull, its empty eye sockets staring directly at him.

2

THE PILOT BANKED THE United Airlines Beechcraft twin-engine plane around a pair of cotton-fluffed clouds and began his descent toward the short runway on a bluff above the San Miguel River. Though he had flown in and out of the little Telluride airport a hundred times, it was still a ch.o.r.e for him to keep his concentration on landing the aircraft and not on the incredible aerial view of the spectacular snowcapped San Juan Mountains. The serene beauty of the jagged peaks and slopes, mantled with snow under a vivid blue sky, was breathtaking.

As the plane dropped lower into the valley, the slopes of the mountains rose majestically on both sides. They appeared so close that it seemed to the pa.s.sengers as if the aircraft's wings would brush the aspen trees on the rocky outcroppings. Then the landing gear dropped, and a minute later the wheels thumped and screeched as they touched the narrow asphalt runway.

The Beechcraft carried only nineteen pa.s.sengers, and the unloading went quickly. Patricia O'Connell was the last one to step to the ground. Taking the advice of friends who had flown into the resort town for the skiing, she had asked for a rear seat so she could enjoy the fantastic view without its being blocked by one of the aircraft's wings.

At 9,000 feet in alt.i.tude, the air was thin but incredibly pure and refreshing. Pat inhaled deeply as she walked from the plane to inside the terminal building. As she pa.s.sed through the door, a short, stocky man with a shaved head and a dark brown beard walked up to her.

"Dr. O'Connell?"

"Please call me Pat," she replied. "You must be Dr. Ambrose."

"Please call me Tom," he said, with a warm smile. "Did you have a good flight from Denver?"

"It was wonderful. A little rough coming over the mountains, but the beautiful scenery easily offset any discomfort."

"Telluride is a lovely spot," he said wistfully. "There are times I wish I could live here."

"I don't imagine there are many archaeological sites to study for a man of your experience."

"Not this high," he said. "The ancient Indian ruins are at much lower alt.i.tudes."

Dr. Thomas Ambrose may not have fit the stereotype of an eminent anthropologist, but he was one of the most respected people in the field. A professor emeritus at Arizona State University, he was an accomplished researcher, meticulous with written reports of his on-site investigations. Now in his late fifties-Pat guessed him to be ten years younger-he could boast of thirty years spent on the trail of early man and his cultures throughout the Southwest.

"Dr. Kidd was very mysterious over the phone. He offered almost no information at all about the discovery."

"And neither will I," said Ambrose. "It's best that you wait and see for yourself."

"How did you become involved with this find?" she asked.

"The right place at the right time. I was on a skiing vacation with an old girlfriend when I received a call from a colleague at the University of Colorado, asking if I'd take a look at the artifacts a miner reported finding. After a quick study of the site, I realized that I was in over my head."

"I find that hard to believe of a man with your reputation."

"Unfortunately, my area of expertise does not include epigraphy. And that's where you come in. The only one I know personally who specializes in deciphering ancient inscriptions is Dr. Jerry Kidd at Stanford. He wasn't available, but recommended you highly to take his place."

Ambrose turned, as the outside doors to the luggage drop were opened and the terminal ticket ladies who doubled as luggage handlers began throwing suitcases onto a sloping metal tray. "The big green one is mine," said Pat, thankful a man was there to tote her fifty-pound bag, which was packed with reference books.

Ambrose grunted but said nothing as he manhandled the heavy bag out to a Jeep Cherokee that he'd parked in the lot outside the terminal. Pat hesitated, before entering the car, to absorb the magnificent view of the pine and aspen forests ascending the slopes of Mount Wilson and Sunshine Peak across the valley. As she stood enthralled with the panoramic scene, Ambrose took a moment to study her. Pat's hair was a radiant red and cascaded to her waist. Her eyes were a sage green. She stood as if sculptured by an artist, her weight on her right leg with her left knee turned slightly inward. Her shoulders and arms suggested a build more muscular than most women's, no doubt fashioned by long hours of exercise in a gym. Ambrose guessed her height at five feet eight inches, her weight at a solid 135 pounds. She was a pretty woman, not cute or strikingly beautiful, but he imagined she'd look very desirable when dressed in something more alluring than jeans and a mannish leather jacket.

Dr. Kidd claimed there was no better person than Patricia O'Connell to decipher ancient writings. He had faxed her history, and Ambrose was impressed. Thirty-five years old, with a doctorate in ancient languages from St. Andrews College in Scotland, she taught early linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Pat had written three well-received books on inscriptions she had deciphered on stones found in different parts of the world. Married and divorced from an attorney, she supported a young daughter of fourteen. A confirmed diffusionist, one who embraced the theory that cultures spread from one to another without being independently created, she firmly believed ancient seafarers had visited American sh.o.r.es many hundreds of years before Columbus.

"I've put you up at a nice bed-and-breakfast in town," said Ambrose. "If you wish, I can drop you off for an hour or so to freshen up."

"No, thank you," Pat said, smiling. "If you don't mind, I'd like to go straight to the site."

Ambrose nodded, took a cellular phone from a coat pocket, and dialed a number. "I'll let Luis Marquez, the owner of the mine, who made the discovery, know that we're coming."

They drove in silence through the heart of Telluride. Pat stared up at the ski slopes of Mountain Village to the south and saw skiers a.s.saulting the steep moguls on the run that dropped to the edge of town. They pa.s.sed old buildings that had been preserved over the past century, restored and now housing retail stores instead of a sea of saloons. Ambrose pointed to a building on his left. "That's the spot where Butch Ca.s.sidy robbed his first bank."

"Telluride must have a rich history."

"It does," replied Ambrose. "Right there in front of the Sheridan Hotel is where William Jennings Bryan gave his famous 'cross of gold' speech. And farther up the South Fork Valley was the world's first generating plant, which produced alternating-current electricity for the mines. The plant's equipment was designed by Nikola Tesla."

Ambrose continued through the town of Telluride, busy with the invasion of skiers, and drove into the box canyon to where the paved road ended at Pandora. Pat stared in wonder at the steep cliffs surrounding the old mining town, taking in the beauty of Bridal Veil Falls, which was beginning to cascade with the runoff from the melting snow brought on by the prelude of a warm spring.

They came to a side road that led to the ruins of several old buildings. A van and a Jeep painted a bright turquoise were parked outside. A pair of men were wearing wet suits and unloading what looked to Pat like diving equipment. "What can divers possibly be doing in the middle of the mountains of Colorado?" she asked vaguely.

"I stopped and talked to them yesterday," answered Ambrose. "They're a team from the National Underwater and Marine Agency."

"A long way from the sea, aren't they?"