Ruins Read Free Page A

nothing else. She looked toward the high levels of the ziggurat, expecting to spot a couple of students on the heiroglyphic stairs . . . but the pyramid stood deserted.
    By now the sunset was fading into dusk, the worst time of the day for visibility, when the shadows took on dim colors. Only a thin curve of the retreating sun remained above the treetops in the west, like an orange beacon backlighting the scene with an incomprehensible glare.
    Cassandra saw no one, no members of her team, none of the vanished Indian helpers.
    "Kelly, John, Christopher!" she called. "Cait, where are you?"
    Shading her eyes, she peered out into the open plaza where Cait had earlier erected an easel for her water-color work. Now the easel lay smashed on the ground. Cassandra could clearly make out a muddy bootprint stomped across one of the new paintings.
    Greatly uneasy now, she again scanned the steep staircase that ran up the outside of the ziggurat. There Christopher and Kelly had painstakingly cleaned the chiseled glyphs and sketched them on pads, translating the chronicle of Xitaclan's mythic history as they went.
    No Kelly, no Christopher ... not a soul in sight.
    Across the plaza where young John Forbin had been studying the collapsed ruins of a minor temple, she spotted his case of equipment, his small wooden stakes and colored ribbons marking line-of-sight intersection points— but found no sign of the grad-student engineer.
    "Hey! Kelly? This isn't a damn funny joke," she shouted. Her stomach knotted.
    She felt utterly isolated, engulfed by the surrounding forest. How could the bustling, verdant jungle be so damned quiet? "Hey!"
    She heard movement to the side—footsteps coming around the pyramid from the direction of the deep sacri-ficial cenote. She heaved a sigh of relief. Here were her friends after all.
    But then the shadowy silhouettes of strange men appeared—obviously not any members of her team. In the dim light she could barely discern their features, but she did see without a doubt that they carried guns. Rifles.
    The men pointed their weapons at her.
    One spoke in heavily accented English. "You will come with us, Senorita."
    "Who are you?" Cassandra demanded, the old fire within her flaring up enough to burn away her common sense. She gripped her flashlight as if it were a club. "Where is my team? We're American citizens. How dare you—"
    One of the other men jerked up his rifle and fired. The bullet ricocheted off one of the pyramid's stone blocks, barely six inches from her face. A spray of nee-dle-sharp stone fragments peppered her cheek.
    With a sharp cry, she ducked backward into the tem-ple, seeking refuge in the ancient darkness. She ran down the long tunnel, hearing loud shouts in Spanish outside. Angry curses. More gunfire. Merciful confusion.
    Her heart pounded, but she wasted no mental energy trying to guess who the men could be or what they wanted. She didn't dare think of what they might already have done to Cait, John, Christopher ... and Kelly. She would think about that later—if she survived.
    She glanced behind her. The men were barely dis-cernible outside the temple.
    She saw them appear at the doorway, arguing with each other. One figure cuffed another, then raised a fist high in anger. More shouts in Spanish.
    Cassandra ran around a sharp corner. Her flashlight beam bobbed ahead of her.
    She had forgotten to turn it off when she came out of the pyramid. Perhaps the mur-derous strangers didn't have lights of their own, but they could see the reflection of her beam on the stone walls. She switched off the light and plunged blindly ahead.
    More rifle shots rang out behind her. Bullets bounced along the pyramid walls, whining a high-pitched song of death. Regardless of how poorly these men could shoot, a ricochet could still kill her.
    Cassandra had no choice but to keep running head-long into the dark, labyrinthine passages, deeper into the barely explored depths. Rounding one corner, and then