Free Tear of the Gods by Alex Archer

to another for the first several minutes, leery of suddenly running into any of the men she’d encountered the night before, but eventually she realized that the camp was deserted and that let her move about more freely in the open.
    The killers, whoever they had been, had fled.
    Her free hand touched the torc through her shirt. What was so important about it that someone would kill to possess it? she wondered.
    The entire attack just didn’t make sense. While she knew there was a burgeoning trade in black-market artifacts, she wouldn’t expect a piece like the one she currently carried to be of particular interest. They’d only dug it up yesterday, for heaven’s sake!
    She knew the only way information could have gotten out about the torc was for someone on the dig team itself to have relayed word of the find to the outside world.
    Which meant one of the people she’d been working with for the past two days was responsible for the deaths of more than thirty others.
    It wasn’t a comfortable thought. Realizing how close she’d come to dying sent a shiver down her back.
    It also put a fire in her belly. She would find out who was responsible for this and bring them to justice, no matter what.
    Annja came to her own tent and discovered, not surprisingly, that it hadn’t escaped the attention of the intruders. She picked up her clothes from where they’d been scattered about and pieced together an outfit of clean jeans and a fresh T-shirt. An oversize Henley would help ward off the cold. Annja stripped, leaving her muck-covered clothes in a sodden heap on the floor of the tent. Goose bumps rose across her body as the chill morning air caressed her naked flesh and she didn’t waste any time pulling on her new set of clothes. Her boots were unfortunately ruined, but some rummaging around in the other tents turned up a spare pair that was only a size bigger than her own. An extra pair of socks helped overcome the difference; it wasn’t perfect, but it would do for the time being.
    Feeling slightly better, Annja turned her attention to the rest of her belongings. Her iPod and BlackBerry were gone, more than likely snagged by one of the intruders, but she found her wallet, camera and laptop computer tossed into a corner. The computer screen had been smashed, what was left of it still bearing the muddy impression of the boot that had done the deed, but a few minutes with a screwdriver she scrounged from elsewhere allowed her to recover the hard drive that contained all her notes from the work they had done to date. Even better, the camera looked undamaged. That was the first good news she’d had all day; with the data on the drive and the torc in hand, she had a much better chance of identifying it.
    Once she did that, she could narrow the list of individuals who might have been interested enough in it to kill to possess it.
    Annja searched through the other tents, looking for a working cell phone, but came up empty. She briefly considered going back and searching the bodies of the dead for one, but then decided against doing so. Even if she got lucky enough to find one, it would probably be too waterlogged to operate properly, anyway. And the thought of pawing the bodies of those she’d been working next to only hours before made her wince with distaste. They deserved better than that and she’d see to it that something was done as soon as she got out of here.
    She considered her options. Without a working cell phone, she couldn’t call in help from the authorities. Nor was anyone expected to arrive at camp that day, which meant the assault could go unnoticed for days unless she got back to civilization and reported it. To do that, she needed to hike back to the staging area where she’d left her rental car.
    It wasn’t a bad hike, she knew, but it would get hot soon, so she looked around until she found a shoulder pack and a few bottles of water to go inside.
    She stepped out of the tent she’d been rummaging