“Do not move!” Yusif’s voice had all the tension of an over-stretched wire. “Play the camera around the inside of the passage.”
Reid slowly panned the flashlight and camera across the passage walls. Just past the slit in the ceiling, he made out the letters: PULVIS PUTRESCERIS.
“You seeing this?” Reid asked.
“I do. Kaplan’s working on it.”
Reid stood in silence, hearing his breath rasp through the filters in his mask. The elastic that sealed the contamination suit had begun to eat into his skin, and he couldn’t so much as scratch.
“Reid? Kaplan says it translates as ‘dust of rot.’”
“And that means . . . what?”
“Perhaps something they scraped off of a decaying animal?”
“Like corpse powder?”
“This term I do not know.”
“In the American Southwest, the native peoples, Navajo and Pueblos, they have stories of witches grinding up desiccated corpses and blowing the powder onto people to make them sick.”
“Egyptians were not known for grinding up their dead. We do know that poisons were impregnated into the tomb surfaces. Perhaps they allude to that.”
“I guess I’ll see.” Reid took a step and watched his bootie-covered foot plant itself on the stone passageway.
The floor held, then with a crack, sank three or four centimeters. Reid leaped back. He’d no more than caught his balance before a thump sounded overhead. He looked up, headlamp beam illuminating the ceiling as a cloud of dust exploded from the dark slit. Driven by compressed air, it blasted down around him in a fine talc-like powder.
“Son of a bitch!” He took another step back, slapping at the dust that settled on him.
“Do not break the seal on your contamination suit! Do you hear?”
“Yeah? You got any wild-assed guess about this stuff?”
“Kaplan says to give them a reading with the XRF.”
“Now, there’s a thought.” Reid reached for the pistol-like spectrometer. He switched it on, watched it load and calibrate. He programmed the settings he needed and pointed it at a concentration of dust on his shoulder. Then he pressed the trigger. “It just looks like chemistry to me. Lots of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, phosphorus. Organic instead of mineral.”
“It’s reading on the computer here. We’re uploading the data to Kaplan.”
“Should I come out?”
“The trap is sprung, eh? As long as that ancient dust isn’t eating holes in your suit, to be followed by holes in your skin, it can’t contaminate you again.”
“You’re a sick man.” Reid cleared the XRF pistol and reholstered it.
“I’m not the one covered with a mysterious dust.”
“I’m taking a sample now, sifting some into a ziplock.” Reid labeled the ziplock with a Sharpie and stowed it in his pack.
“Good. Now, as the dust settles—so to speak—what do you see?”
Reid carefully stepped over the sunken stone and into the square passage. Less than a meter beyond the “Dust of Death” he saw the words PRAECIPITARES AD INFINITUM painted on the floor. But for the brilliance of his headlamp and flashlight, he’d have never seen it.
“Ah, this one I know,” Yusif’s cheery voice sounded in the earpiece after the warning had been translated. “Somewhere just up ahead there is a drop. A covered pit, if you will. One wrong step and you fall like a stone to a very hard, or pointed, landing perhaps three or four meters down.”
“How do I recognize the pit?”
“Can you see any irregularity on the floor?”
Reid dropped to a knee and shone the light along the floor. Trickles of the whitish corpse powder drifted down from folds in his suit. “I see a slight line in the stone. A sort of disconformity.”
“That will be it, my friend. Can you jump it?”
“How the hell should I know? Who do you think I am, Indiana Jones?”
“Unfortunately, sahib, it would seem that like it or not, you are. And unlike the Hollywood gags, these booby traps are meant to kill you. Kaplan just called. She believes from the XRF data that you are now coated with a combination of aspergillus and ergot spores. They suspect Ochratoxin A and something called vioxanthin.”
A shiver ran through Reid’s body.
“Yusif? I need a confirmation from Kaplan about the filters in this mask. Are they up to handling this stuff?”
“Reid?” Yusif’s voice sent a jolt through his system. “Ms. Kaplan assures you the filters are good down to 100 nanometers. Spores are much larger than that.”
“Charming.” He dared to breathe again. “Now, what about this pit in the floor?”
“I’ve been giving that some thought. Return to the main entrance. I have an idea.”
“One that will keep me from dying in this house of horrors?”
“Oh, I want you very much alive, sahib. If you die, I have to take your place.”