Intimate Danger. Amy J. Fetzer

a crock. “Well, now that we’ve both established we’re liars, what’s your sign?”

      He scoffed a laugh, but didn’t comment, and tried working off the rucksack. Clancy helped him. She was still for a moment, tempted to look inside, but he noticed.

      “Don’t even.”

      She made a face and pushed it between the seat to the rear. “They’ll be chasing us for a long time.”

      “We’ll be gone.”

      “I don’t think that will matter.” Mike glanced to the side and she tossed a thumb to the backseat. “We just became drug smugglers.” There were several well-packaged blocks of something in the rear.

      Mike looked. “Fuck.”

      “Fitting, since we’re screwed.”

      “We have to ditch that.”

      “And you don’t think they’ll come looking for this jeep, me, and the stash?” She scoffed, then glanced at the kilos of drugs, thinking Phil would have an orgasm over that. “We have to leave the jeep, just as it is.”

      “That would be possible if they weren’t there.” He nodded and Clancy saw the line of federal police, Richora in the road. Soaked to the bone and steaming mad.

      “This guy is so screwing with my chi.”

      Dr. Eduardo Valez watched the machine sweep over the urn several times and thought archaeology had progressed a great deal. The scans would give him slivers of the urn and its contents without breaking the seal. While his colleagues wanted to push ahead to open it, Eduardo wasn’t as eager to ruin the find just yet. Carbon dating put it pre-Inca, 450 B.C. A group of graduate students had copied the etchings on the urn by photo and hand, and were just beginning the painstaking process of accurately deciphering them. It had become a teaching tool, since Eduardo understood the iconology that depicted the fierce Moche warriors who were equal to the gods.

      A complete contradiction to their beliefs.

      He looked at the screen as the images blinked up, each one the same, except for the design on the urn itself and the gold and wax seal. It was real gold, of course, and despite its age and purity, it was nearly perfectly intact. The room was kept chilled to preserve the seal, but other than that, the urn was nearly flawless.

      The Moche didn’t have a written language. Only pictographs on pottery and cave walls. They did have numbers, deduced from the grouped sets of artifacts found in tombs. But these icon etchings were neatly formed and spaced, yet ones he’d never seen before in his thirty years of archaeology. Deciphering them would be a challenge, yet the gold and waxlike seal was highly unusual for a simple jar, and bespoke of something precious. Or something deadly.

      Either way, it was a warning he would heed.

      The surgeon removed the bandages slowly.

      Nuat Salache felt the drugs lace through his bloodstream and soften his body. He didn’t fear pain but he suspected the doctor feared him. He felt the wrappings lift off his skin, his eyes closed. He was alone, his preference at this moment. No one saw the results before him. Yet when the cool air-conditioned air spread over his warm skin, he felt the anticipation come alive in him.

      The doctor did not speak. He knew the routine by now.

      For weeks, he’d worn the silken mask of gauze. It was replaced daily, and between stitches removal and cream treatments, no one, not even himself, would see the final result. This was his sixth surgery in four years. The doctors had warned him that he could take no more, but Salache knew better. Improvement was always to be had somewhere. He simply found a surgeon willing to do the work.

      When the last of the cloths were removed and all that remained was the final thin hood, the doctor stepped back.

      “I will leave you now.”

      Salache nodded and waited till he heard the door close. Behind the thin veil of gauze, he opened his eyes, making certain he was alone. Salache pushed the button on the reclining chair, and it brought him upright with a slow hum. He grasped the silver-handled mirror and lifted it, then pulled the remaining fabric from his face. For a moment he recognized nothing of the man in the mirror. Perfect.

      He inspected and studied the face in the mirror. The reflection showed a handsome man, a dignified nose instead of the bulbous one birth had given him. A square strong jaw instead of the pointed receding jaw that had made him so horribly ugly that people turned away. No one had listened to the man he was, no one respected his innovations, his ideas.

      He smiled slowly, perfectly aligned teeth flashing in the space where crooked and broken ones once mangled his smile.

      This was only one portion of his new life. He was a visionary, and had already achieved what others had dismissed as impossible. As madness. The true achievement was that no one knew. No one. And this new face would keep it secret for as long as he needed. To the time of his choosing. To let loose the deadly repercussions on those who treated him as worthless.