Excerpt of Full Circle by Shannon Hollis

THERE WAS NO SUCH THING as a dead man's curse.

In the murky twilight of two hundred feet of silty water, Daniel Burke felt like arguing the point as he squinted through his mask, searching for the ribs of the sixteenth- century Basque galleon on the ocean floor.

This recovery expedition had been cursed with everything from bad organization to shoddy safety practices, and the fact that Daniel knew he was only here to give it some legitimacy with the inevitable press orgy didn't help. He should have said no when the Society for the Preservation of Antiquities had approached him. He should have told them that water wasn't his element — he belonged in the desert, where layers of sandstone and petrified ash yielded their secrets as reluctantly as a beautiful woman, where caves and hills whispered to him of long-lost civilizations.

But no. The Society had promised him enough money to fund his next trip to Asia Minor, and he, like any dope, had fallen for it.

If the Society's information was correct, the master of the whaling ship had been the first European to set foot on the shores of the New World. Not Columbus.

Not Cabot or Cartier. But a wily Basque captain who had seen the money that could be made out of whale oil from the dangerous waters off the Atlantic coast of Canada. Daniel had no idea how many trips the ship had made before those waters had claimed her, but the success of this expedition and maybe even his own reputation were waiting on the results.

Not to mention the kid's father.

The reason he was down here on an emergency rescue mission.

Ian MacPherson was a nineteen-year-old archaeology student swabbing decks in exchange for the SPA's exclusive right from the Canadian government to study the site. The fact that the kid's father was a high-ranking Canadian cabinet minister was the reason the Society had its permit — and Ian. The dumb-ass had swiped some diving equipment and gone over the side alone this morning, and some fifteen minutes had passed before anyone had noticed. Daniel was going to haul him back aboard by the scruff of his neck and ship him back to his father on the chopper.

As soon as he found him. "I got not'ing forty feet from the site." The transmitter in Daniel's ear clicked as Luc Pinchot reported in from his left.

"Moi non plus," said the diver on his right.

"Another ten feet," Daniel said. "He has to have gone in to look at the site. He'll be here somewhere."

"The currents 'ere are pretty mean," Luc said. "E could have been swep' to de nort'."

"One can only hope." Daniel's voice was grim. The little weasel was going to wish he'd been washed up on the Newfoundland rocks after Daniel got through with him. The untimely death of the cabinet minister's son was not the kind of publicity he needed right now.

A freak current cleared the silt for a split second — just long enough for him to see a flash of yellow neoprene in the beam of his lamp. "Straight ahead, twenty feet," he snapped. "Looks like our boy got himself into trouble."

The three divers put a little steam on and silt boiled around them as they surrounded Ian the Idiot. Somehow he'd managed to get his right foot caught between two heavy timbers — and was held down like a ferret in a leg trap.

"AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED?"

Jah-Redd Jones, former NBA basketball star, Oscar nominee, and now the latest king of the talk-show hosts, leaned forward and his studio audience took a collective breath in anticipation.

Daniel brushed at his jeans and work boots and gave a modest smile that hid the disgust that hadn't quite faded, four months later.

"We worked his foot loose and got him up to the surface. But not before we discovered that the galleon had been used for more than just transporting whale oil." He grinned at the camera, drawing out the suspense, milking the extra second for all it was worth. "I figure the captain was an opportunistic kind of guy — because when an English ship blundered across its path, probably blown off course by a storm, he took the opportunity to relieve it of some of its cargo. Which in this case happened to be cases of Flemish wine and about fifty gold guineas."

The audience gasped and even Jah-Redd, pro that he was, sat back on the interviewer's couch with a big goofy grin. "Daniel Burke, man, there's a reason they call you 'the real Indiana Jones.'Folks, can't you see this as a movie? Huh?"

The studio audience burst into applause, the women in the front row whistling and stamping as if Daniel were an exotic dancer and they wanted to tuck bills in his G- string.

Daniel masked a sigh and held the grin between his teeth. His reputation was what brought in the funding. The fact that it was more of a media creation than reality didn't make it any less useful. Besides, there was a curvy woman in the front row and he'd bet a hundred bucks she'd be waiting at the street door when he left after his segment. While the audience clapped, he toyed with a few interesting possibilities.

"So tell me," Jah-Redd said, leaning on his elbows and clasping his hands under his chin, "is it true that the Canadian government gave you the Order of Canada for saving Ian MacPherson's life?"

"No." Daniel brought his wandering thoughts back to business. "There was talk, but it's hard to take a medal for doing what you'd do for any member of your crew." And saving a kid from his own stupidity isn't worth a medal. "The divers with me helped get him free, and that's when we discovered the gold. It was in a strong-box directly under where Ian was trapped. His struggles to get free had disturbed the silt that covered it."

Jah-Redd appealed to the audience. "Save a person's life, find a buried treasure, all in a day's work. How many people would like a job like that?" The audience applauded again.

"I'd like a man like that!" hollered the curvy woman, and Daniel mentally awarded himself a hundred bucks.

"Not married, huh?" Jah-Redd cocked a knowing eyebrow in Daniel's direction. "Girlfriend, significant other, rows of willing concubines?"

Daniel had a flash of memory — a wide and sensuous mouth, long-lashed eyes, sun-streaked brown hair spread on red sandstone — and covered the mental lapse with a laugh.

"None of the above. Not too many women will tolerate a pot hunter, even when we clean up nice. We spend half the year in remote locations and the other half holed up in dark offices writing research papers about them. Not the best conditions to nurture a relationship, I'm afraid."

"By pot hunter I take it you don't mean the green leafy stuff." The audience laughed along with its host.

"How did you get started, er, pot hunting?"

"Did you ever dig holes in the backyard as a kid, hoping to get to Australia?"

Jones nodded. "Now I just take Qantas and let them do all the work."

Daniel smiled while the audience cracked up. "Well, I just never stopped digging. After my folks were killed when I was six, I went to live with my godparents. I found a Native American artifact in their yard in the burbs when I was twelve, and I knew then I wanted to be an archaeologist. So I went to the University of Chicago, then did postgrad work at the University of New Mexico, specializing in the work of a particular Anasazi potter. From there I assisted in a couple of Central American digs, and that of course led to Argentina and —"

"The Temecula Treasure."

"Right."

On the screen above them, a clip began to play from the documentary PBS had done last year on his discovery of a trove of gold artifacts. Audience members who hadn't seen it yet gasped. He couldn't blame them. He'd done the same when he'd realized that, instead of finding pottery, he'd stumbled on a grave belonging to a much later civilization — one that believed the dead needed jewelry in the afterlife. Spectacular jewelry.

"Did you get to keep any of it?" Jah-Redd wanted to know.

Daniel shook his head. "It belongs to the Argentinian government, of course. We had six months to study it all before our permit expired and we turned everything over."

But not before he'd published the second of two groundbreaking papers that had made his name in the academic world and clinched the funding that made his projects possible.

Beautiful funding. Nonacademic funding that took him all over the world and satisfied his itch to get his fingers into every stratum of soil this planet had to offer. That was his real passion. Discovery. It was the media that had latched on to a couple of lucky finds and branded him with this adventurer persona. After the Newsweek article, someone had even sent him a fedora and a leather whip, which had sent the archaeology department's assistant into gales of laughter and made him the butt of half disgusted, half admiring jokes for months afterward. The other faculty members might gripe in private about his celebrity, but no one complained when it was grant-writing time and the money poured in.

Jah-Redd had returned to the subject of women, prompted, no doubt, by the screaming in the front row. "It's hard to believe that a man like you — you're what, twenty-eight? Thirty? — wouldn't have someone important in his life, though," his host said with mock gravity. On the screen, still shots of three actresses appeared. "Indiana Jones loved three women over the years of the movies. Which one would be most like your ideal? The tomboy adventurer with the broken heart, the blond bombshell or the seductress?"

Daniel laughed while the audience waited, the expectant silence punctuated by blatant come-ons and even a boob flash — mercifully unseen by the studio cameras — from the front row.

Again, her face drifted through his mind's eye, laughing down at him from some impossible rock out-cropping while she trusted her life to bits of metal jammed in where metal was never meant to go.

"I'd have to say my ideal woman would have the brains and adventurous spirit of Marion Ravenwood, the loyalty of Short Round, and the sexual curiosity of Dr. Elsa Schneider. But of course, a woman like that already exists — I believe you snapped her up for yourself, Jah- Redd."

The audience laughed and applauded, and while Jones announced they were cutting to commercial, Daniel sat motionless while memory attacked him.

Because a woman like that did exist.

And he'd chased her out of his life long ago.