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

Four months earlier, the closest Mira had ever come to a tropical jungle was the Rain Forest Café at the MGM Grand on the Las Vegas strip. She had been making the circuit of Sin City casinos, winning big, but not too big, and gradually but determinedly feathering her nest. Gambling afforded her no addictive thrill. With her intuition guiding her bets, it was merely working for a living.

One night while playing colors at the roulette table, she had felt the tingle of someone watching her. Surprised that she had been noticed so early in the evening, she had nevertheless taken that as her cue to cash out her winnings and head for the door. The watcher in this case was not the pit boss, however, but rather a sweaty, smiling, little fat man who spoke to her as if they were already old friends.

“My dear Mira,” he had said, grinning cryptically, “you have a gift.”

Her “gift” told her that, where Marquand Atlas was concerned, looks could be deceiving, but she sensed nothing threatening about him. And that, coupled with the fact that he had correctly recognized her abilities and seemed impressed by them, was enough for her to accept his offer of a drink.

They made an unlikely pair in the cocktail lounge. Her elfin physique and features were not exactly glamorous, but she knew that most men found her attractive. Under normal circumstances, she could have had her pick of companions, and at first she had imagined that onlookers would wonder why she had picked the portly Atlas. Only later, when she finally began to get an inkling of his net worth, did she realize that the jealousy she had sensed was actually directed at her.

For his part, Atlas had never tried to impress her with his wealth, much less make any sort of sexual advances. From the outset he had focused solely on her unique attributes, all but interrogating her in an effort to define exactly what she was capable of doing. Later that night he had shown her the codex.

Without even knowing what it was, physical contact with the brittle, discolored pages had filled her with certainty regarding the codex’s authenticity. More than that, it had triggered what she could only describe as a homing instinct, a powerful urge that over the course of several weeks would lead her, with Atlas in tow, to a buried Mayan temple in Honduras more than three hundred miles from the ruins of Copan near the Guatemalan border and from there even farther south to the rugged wilderness of the Darien Gap in search of the legendary Mayan underworld.

But that night in Vegas, as her fingertips brushed the decorative leaves of the codex, she understood for the first time the thrill that made ordinary people gamble away their last dollar on the promise of what the next roll of the dice might bring.

*

“Is it a warning?” Lancet asked.

“A no trespassing sign, of sorts. It’s a boundary marker. Beyond this point, we are in the realm of Xibalba.” Atlas made a dismissive gesture. “From the looks of it, the lords of Xibalba have been gone for a long time.”

Mira wasn’t convinced. When they had discovered the tomb of Storm Jaguar in the catacombs beneath the temple in Honduras, she had felt only an overwhelming desire to press on, to retrace the steps of the ancient Mayan king. Now, however, on the threshold of that final discovery, her urge to move forward was being countered by a more primal instinct. It wasn’t exactly panic, but something pretty damn close.

Atlas evinced no such inhibition. Drawing his bush knife, he began clumsily breaking trail beyond the stele. Ever loyal to his employer, Lancet reclaimed his own blade from Mira and joined the effort, with considerably more effectiveness. As the two men hacked at the verdant barrier, Mira remained vigilant, sniffing for any hint of imminent peril.

In a matter of minutes, the jungle yielded up another carved stone—not a stele, but rather an entire wall peeking through the growth. The markings on it were definitely not Mayan hieroglyphs.

“It’s Atlantean,” gasped the billionaire.

The ambient sensations presently inundating Mira’s precognitive abilities could not quite hide the subtle change in Atlas’ aura. The very sight of the strange markings—a language that was far more reminiscent of a phonetic alphabet than any pre-Columbian pictograph—had awakened something deep inside the man, something buried so deep that she had never sensed it before. The only word to describe it was “hunger,” and the impression was so sudden and overwhelming that the irony was lost on her.

What have I done? she thought. I shouldn’t have brought him here.

Atlas continued chopping away the vines to uncover more of the unique text, and where he did, his fingers brushed at the recessed letters lovingly, his lips moving silently as he read whatever was written there.

Lancet stood paralyzed in disbelief. “You can read this?”

“It is the language of Atlantis. I had long suspected that what Storm Jaguar called Xibalba was really an outpost city built by refugees from that fallen civilization. This”—he patted the wall reverently—“is the tomb of the king of Atlantis.”

“That doesn’t explain how you are able to read it,” Mira countered.

“Tsk, tsk, my dear. Did you think you knew all my secrets?”