Burial Ground

I

Lima, Peru

October 31^st

3:02 a.m. PET

The French balcony doors opened inward with a muffled click. Two men stepped in from the rain, soles squeaking ever so softly on the tiled floor. Dressed in black from head to toe, they became one with the darkness inside the house. Only the tan skin around their narrowed eyes was visible through the holes in their ski masks, their irises black coals.

A flash of lightning through the doors behind them glinted from the pistols they held pressed to their thighs.

Thunder grumbled as they passed through the formal living room. When it faded, there was only the timpani of raindrops on the ceramic-tiled roof.

The man was supposed to be expecting them. There should have been a light on somewhere in the house, yet even the foyer had been dark through the front windows. Of course, the man had also expected them to ring the bell, not pick the lock and sneak in through the back.

So where was he?

They passed from one room to the next. The kitchen was deserted, the pantry empty. Only the dining room showed signs of recent habitation: a broken bottle on the floor and a demolished cell phone on the table next to a glass ashtray brimming with ashes. They followed the hallway past a bathroom and a vacant guest bedroom to the open door at the end of the corridor.

The scent of cordite ushered them into a study that contained a much less pleasant aroma.

A desk chair lay toppled on its side, its occupant sprawled on the ground. The hardwood floor was sticky with a black amoeba of blood, centered around the man's head, the back of which was a ruined crater of bone fragments and singed hair. Gray matter bloomed through the hole, a sickly flower of convolutions.

Both men looked at the wall to their right, where spatters of blood and brain chunks surrounded a deep hole in the cracked plaster.

The man had saved them a good deal of effort, but he had also robbed them of the little bit of enjoyment they were ever allowed to derive from their work.

Their employer wanted the golden artifact. He was just unwilling to pay such an exorbitant cost for its acquisition. Granted, he would have easily been able to turn around and sell it for twice what he paid, but why narrow the margin if he didn't absolutely have to? Their services came at a fraction of that cost, and their employer did have a reputation to uphold after all.

Besides, the man who had approached them had been an amateur. A greedy little Anglo.

They approached the corpse. The man clearly wore the headdress. Gold glimmered under his face, and the strap he had used to hold it in place was still around the back below the self-inflicted wound. They rolled him over with gloved hands and stared down at the sad sack of flesh.

The man's mouth hung open. His pupils were fixed and dilated. Trails of dried blood coiled around his eyebrows and nose. One of his cheeks was crusted with it from lying in the puddle. And the golden headdress covering his forehead---

"Son of a bitch," the man said in Korean. "It's useless to us now."

The pounded gold was scorched and warped around the hole where the bullet had entered just underneath the inset chrysocolla eyes. There was no way they would be able to sell an ancient artifact scarred by a bullet hole. The best they could hope for now was to melt it down and sell it as bullion for next to nothing.

And considering it was covered in blood...

They had been double-crossed in the act of double-crossing, which was probably what they should have expected from the start, especially knowing that the dead man at their feet was an American politician.