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had read him the riot act.
    If they could just process the site properly, examine what they had, and get their findings published quickly. If, in the process, they could solve the riddle of those odd crystals that Aguilar had told him had a rare combination of iron and chrome, so much the better.
    He heard someone inching down the ladder and turned to face them as they entered the tomb. It was James, the thin and bespectacled graduate student who read comic books like an eight-year-old. Bowerdale sighed.
    “Eustachio wants to know what we’re going to do tonight,” said James. “We’ve only got a couple more hours of daylightleft and there’s no way we’ll have moved anything off site by then. We can’t just leave all this stuff here. I’d ask Dr. Miller, but...”
    “
Miss
Miller is not here,” Bowerdale concluded.
    And she wouldn’t know what to do anyway
, he added in his head.
    “We’ll have to cover the hole,” he said.
    “The entire
cenote
?” said James. “We’ll never do it. We don’t have the materials.”
    “Then we had better get them, hadn’t we?” said Bowerdale.
    “OK,” the kid said with a shrug, his tone suggesting that it wasn’t OK at all. “I’ll tell Eustachio.”
    “And tell him he can come down here himself next time,” said Bowerdale. “I don’t like dealing with errand boys.”
    James bridled.
    “He can’t manage the ladder safely,” he said. “His leg...”
    “Then maybe he should find a new line of work.”
    James took a breath and said, “You want me to pass that along too?”
    “Just get them to cover the hole,” said Bowerdale.
    The student didn’t speak or nod. He just turned and made his way back down the passage. In seconds, Bowerdale could hear the ladder creaking as he climbed up to the surface.
    James was right, of course. There was no way they would be able to cover the
cenote
in any way that would really keep people out, and he wouldn’t have insisted on it if he hadn’t started to feel so crossed. He adjusted the light he had brought down with him so he could look at the jewels and the rest of the bundle with the carved piece of tree trunk, the ring, and the gold rod with the dove. It annoyed him to admit it, but Miller was right. They just didn’t belong. He needed to find out what they wereand quickly. In the right hands, he was sure they would be worth something. Possibly a great deal.
    He heard the noise of the ladder but didn’t bother turning until he realized it was her, bent almost double in the low passage.
    “You told them to cover the entire hole?” she said, without preamble.
    “We have to protect the tomb.”
    “Not like that, we don’t. That could take days, even if we had the materials, which we don’t.”
    “So what’s your solution?”
    “We set up fence posts and ropes to cordon off the
cenote
, for safety as much as anything else...”
    “That won’t keep people out if they want to get in.”
    “That was why I was about to propose that we stay here overnight. We can work shifts, some preparing the lab, the others watching the tomb.”
    “For how long?”
    “Until we can safely move everything out,” she said.
    “That could be weeks.”
    “It won’t be that long. It can’t be. We’ll get work lights out here so we can start shifting stuff out as soon as they have the storage space ready.”
    “Days, then,” said Bowerdale.
    “I put in a request to get the official archivist down here as soon as we made the discovery yesterday. I’m hoping we can get him tomorrow or the day after. When he gets here, we can start the cataloging process. In the meantime, we ready transit crates and we prepare the lab to receive the artifacts. OK?”
    He wanted to argue, doubly so now that he realized that James was behind her, shadowed by her great stork-like frame, listening.
    “You’re the boss,” he said.

Chapter Fourteen

     
    James had volunteered to take the first watch because he knew Alice didn’t want to do it