Callsign: King (Jack Sigler) (Chesspocalypse #1)

She shook her head uncertainly, trying to get a handle on the premonition. In some cultures her gift was called ‘second sight,’ but in sensorial terms, it was nothing at all like vision. Having lived with it all her life, she could not explain it any more than she could explain her other five senses, but the closest comparison she could offer was the olfactory sense.

Second smell, she had once told one of her Agency handlers with a chuckle, but that was exactly what it was like. Sometimes, a rosy “smell” hinted that something good was about to happen, while other situations just plain stank. This one, however, was harder to pin down.

It was neither good nor bad. It was just . . . potent.

She directed her words to Lancet. “Send them back to camp.”

Atlas’ eyes began to dance with anticipation. “Yes, send them back. If they catch even a glimpse of what we’ve found, we’ll be fighting off tomb robbers for weeks.”

Mira hid a frown. She wasn’t worried about protecting the discovery from the looters that she knew were dogging their steps; her concern was for the safety of the hired workers. She didn’t know what lay beyond that curtain of foliage, but she was certain that it was as dangerous as a loaded gun in the hands of a child.

She held Atlas back with a raised hand until Lancet finished sending the laborers back to their camp a few miles back. Only when their murmured conversations were no longer audible did she advance along the freshly blazed trail, stopping exactly where the workman had been moments before. The indescribable feeling grew with each step forward.

“Curt, let me borrow that sword of yours.”

Without question or hesitation, Lancet drew a large Pathfinder knife from the sheath on his belt, right behind a holstered SIG Sauer 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He casually flipped the knife and caught the fourteen-inch blade between thumb and forefinger, proffering the hilt to Mira.

Mira was less cavalier about her handling of the knife. She did not hack at the brushy barrier, but rather used the blade to probe the thicket, gently bending vines and branches out of the way. Her surgical precision gradually laid bare the object that the laborer would have discovered with his next cut.

It was a stone stele, standing shoulder high to the petite Mira, adorned with what looked at first glance like Mayan glyphs. Maintaining her calm demeanor, she continued to clear the remaining growth away, fully exposing the carved bas-relief message.

“It’s Mayan, all right,” Atlas announced. From the moment she had revealed the first glyph, he had commenced scanning the image into his palmtop computer.

“What’s it say?” Lancet asked in a breathless whisper.

“‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,’” Mira muttered, not quite joking.

Atlas chuckled. “That’s a pretty close translation actually. It is indeed a warning, from our old friend Storm Jaguar.”

*

Though she was no expert on the Maya, Mira knew more about Storm Jaguar than any classically trained pre-Columbian archaeologist. The truth of the matter was, due to a series of unfortunate circumstances beginning with the actions of an opportunistic Dominican friar and extending forward five centuries, no one in the scholarly world had ever heard of him at all.

Storm Jaguar—the name was a literal translation of the ancient pictographic script—had been the king of an early city-state in western Honduras, well to the south of what most historians believed was the limit of Mayan expansion. His life story had become the basis for the Mesoamerican equivalent of an epic poem, committed to paper—or huun, as the Maya called it—in the fifth century.

A thousand years later, and several centuries after their civilization had mysteriously vanished, most surviving examples of the ancient texts were destroyed by Spanish conquistadores who believed the writings would inhibit conversion of the native population to Christianity. A scant few books, bound and folded into codices, survived the purge, preserved by Spaniards who recognized their worth, but remained hidden and forgotten for hundreds of years thereafter. Experts now knew of four authentic Mayan codices and had used these in combination with the relief carvings in Mayan ruins to develop a fairly comprehensive translation matrix, but none of the known writings mentioned Storm Jaguar. That name was found only in a codex that Atlas had purchased on the black market.

A translation of the document yielded, among other things, the Mayan equivalent of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale of how Storm Jaguar left his kingdom and journeyed to Xibalba, the Mayan Underworld. The tale expanded on the creation myths found in the Popul Vuh—a collection of folklore based on oral tradition passed down in the Quiché language—but the provenance of Atlas’ codex had been impossible to establish through conventional means. Which left only unconventional means.

Enter Mira Raiden.