Tear Of The Gods. Alex Archer

      Now he was starting to regret that decision.

      With Novick dead, Jackson focused his attention on the other prisoners, fully expecting one of them to tell him what he wanted to know. It only took a few minutes for him to realize that there was a problem, however; they really didn’t know anything. The majority of them had spent the day down at the dig site and had only been rounded up when he and his men had shown up and forced them back to camp at gunpoint. Those who’d been in camp all morning said the same thing Novick had—the torc should be with the rest of the artifacts in the main tent.

      Jackson had never been a patient man and at that point his day’s supply exhausted itself. “Get rid of them,” he’d told his men, and walked out of the tent where they were holding the prisoners just as the chorus of gunfire started at his back.

      Now he stood in the center of camp, weighing his options. Shaw would be expecting him to report in shortly and Jackson didn’t want to do that without having the torc in hand. Shaw was a harsh taskmaster; admitting he’d failed to secure the necklace might have some unhealthy consequences. No, the best thing to do was to hold off on making the call until he had the stupid thing in hand.

      That would be better for all involved.

      “Sir, I think we’ve got a problem.”

      The sound of the man’s voice pulled Jackson out of his reverie. He turned to find one of his men standing nearby, extending a cell phone toward him. He took it, noting as he did that it was a recent-model BlackBerry much like his own, and then glanced at the screen. The number displayed there, the last number the phone’s owner had apparently dialed, was the emergency line for the regional police.

      His man was right; this complicated things considerably.

      Jackson checked the phone’s log and noted that the call had gone through about twenty minutes earlier. He guessed the phone belonged to the chick with the sword; the call had been right before she’d done her best to throw a wrench in his entire operation and it made sense that she’d have tried to get help before moving to stop them on her own.

      He wondered what she’d said. She hadn’t been on the phone very long; the call had lasted less than a minute according to the log. How much information could a person relay to another in less than a minute? Had she had time to give the police their descriptions? Had she told them what they were looking for?

      He didn’t know. That meant he had to treat it like a worst-case scenario and go from there, hoping that he covered all the bases.

      With that in mind, he considered what he knew about the regional police force’s procedures in a situation like this. Their most likely response would be to do a quick flyby, probably via helicopter, to determine the reliability of the report itself as well as to assess the situation on the ground. If the flight crew deemed it necessary, a ground team would be sent in to investigate further.

      The nearest airfield was more than fifty miles away. The report would have taken time to filter up through the channels as the initial responder tried to decide if it was an actual call for help or some crazy teenagers trying to have some fun. Since the call had come in on the emergency line, the origin point would have been automatically plotted and logged on the response board. It wouldn’t have taken long for the duty officer to note that the call was coming from the middle of nowhere, increasing the likelihood that it was authentic. Their inability to get the caller back on the line would have tipped the scales that much further into the “believable” column and a response team would eventually have been dispatched to check things out.

      From the time of the call to the point where the response team’s transportation went wheels-up at the airfield would probably be fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, at most. Flight time was roughly another fifteen minutes, depending on course and airspeed, Jackson reasoned, so call it a good half hour, maybe forty minutes before they’d be over the site.

      That meant they had anywhere between ten and twenty minutes left before company arrived.

      Plenty of time, he thought.

      He ordered several of his men to gather up the bodies of those who’d been killed when they’d first arrived and to dump them in the mess tent with the others. Three men were stationed inside the tent with orders not to open fire, no matter what happened, unless it seemed evident that they had no other choice in order to avoid discovery. Others were told to spread themselves out about the camp and to look busy. When the first response team arrived, Jackson intended to pass them off as the camp’s legitimate personnel. All they had to do was convince the flyboys that everything was A-okay and they’d buy all the time they needed to finish up what they’d come here to accomplish. It was already late in the day; no one wanted to dispatch a ground team at night if they could help it and the recommendation would be to wait until morning if there wasn’t clear evidence of a problem on the ground.

      Jackson had every intention of showing them that things were just fine and dandy.

      No sooner had they finished policing the camp and making certain the bodies were all out of sight than the sound of the approaching helicopter echoed through the trees toward them. Jackson stepped out into the open space at the center of the camp and waited for them to come into sight.

      It didn’t take long.

      The chopper was a small, two-man unit, the kind of thing he could knock out of the sky with a few well-placed shots from the pistol he carried at his hip. He restrained himself from doing so, though, smiling up at them instead and waving with one hand as he used the other to shield his brow. They circled the camp once, then again, before coming back to hover a hundred yards or so above him.

      The downdraft from their rotors was stirring up dust and starting to pull at the canvas of the nearby tents, so Jackson began waving them off, figuring that’s what any good camp administrator would do.

      To his surprise, it worked. The pilot gave him a thumbs-up sign and then quickly gained altitude before heading back in the direction they had come.

      Leaving the inmates in charge of the asylum, Jackson thought with a grin. With the immediate threat taken care of, he and his men would have all the time they needed to dispose of the bodies and find that damned necklace.

      SEVERAL HOURS LATER Jackson found himself standing in the foyer of Shaw’s private estate, waiting for an audience with his employer. He’d been working for Shaw long enough to know that while he disliked incompetence, he hated those who shirked personal responsibility even more. Jackson stood a better chance of coming through this alive if he delivered his report in person, as backward as that might seem.

      Surviving the next fifteen minutes was something he very much wanted to do.

      Motion at the head of the stairs caught his attention and he stood straighter as he saw his employer come into sight. Shaw was still dressed; that was a good sign. That meant Jackson hadn’t had the misfortune of waking him from one of his infrequent periods of sleep. In the back of his head, Jackson rated his chances of getting through this five percent higher than he had a moment before.

      But only five.

      “Do you have my property, Mr. Jackson?” Shaw asked as he descended the stairs.

      Nothing to do to play it straight.

      “No, sir.”

      That obviously wasn’t the answer Shaw had been expecting to hear. Jackson watched as a series of expressions crossed the other man’s face, everything from surprise to distaste, but thankfully outright anger wasn’t yet one of them.

      Knock that percentage up a few more notches.

      “Pray tell me why not,” Shaw said. His tone had gotten noticeably colder.

      Like the good soldier that he was, Jackson laid out the events of earlier that evening in clear, concise sentences. Shaw didn’t say a word until Jackson got to the part about the woman and the sword.

      “She actually attacked you with a sword?” he asked, though Jackson couldn’t tell if that was because Shaw didn’t believe