Chapter 22
Professor McCarter stepped out of a cramped, aging apartment building and limped into the heart of a tiny fishing village called Puerto Azul. He’d chosen this particular place to stay because it was not a hotel or motel, and because unlike most guesthouses in the area it had only an inside entrance that led to a set of steep, creaky stairs and a hallway with five doors, facts that he hoped would enhance his security.
But mostly he’d chosen it because it reminded him of the apartment he and his wife had stayed in on their honeymoon, which they’d spent in this very town, while McCarter had worked on a dig an hour inland.
He couldn’t be sure if it was the familiar confines or the strange vision he’d had in the sweat lodge in the Chiapas village, but he had a sense now that his wife was with him. She was helping him. Watching over him.
He’d had several vivid dreams of her, some pleasant and others closer to nightmares. And at times both in public and in the privacy of his room, he found himself speaking out loud to her without thinking, as if she were right beside him.
He’d been in Puerto Azul for three days, after a week in the mountain village recuperating. Oco’s return with a bottle of antibiotics had saved him, both from the bacterial plague spreading through his body and the care of the shaman. And though the infection was not quite gone, he’d left the village as soon as he was strong enough to walk.
At the time McCarter hadn’t known where to go. He guessed that the men who’d attacked him thought he was dead; otherwise they wouldn’t have left him. But he considered the possibility that his reporting in to Moore would be leaked, or that Moore’s subsequent actions on Danielle’s behalf would lead their enemy to believe he might be alive.
So he’d hid and let his beard grow and returned, not to the town and hotel where he and Danielle had been based (and had left many belongings), but to Puerto Azul, eighty miles from Cancun on the northern coast of the Yucatan.
The town drew only a smattering of tourists, though enough that his presence would not be conspicuous. And though it was a long way from the interior and even the coastal Mayan sites, it remained within reach of the area where he and Danielle expected to find the next of the power-generating stones.
He stepped out onto the dusty street and began his daily walk, passing the street kids who’d taken to calling him Moses Negro: Black Moses. With the overlarge walking stick he used to support himself, a notebook in the crook of his arm, and the emergent bushiness of his graying beard, he must have looked the part. In some ways he felt the part, trying to lead the NRI to a promised land of sorts. He hoped it would not be forty years of wrong turns before they got there.
To find the Island of the Shroud, he’d combined what he’d learned from the cave in Brazil with Mayan writings found in Mexico and Belize. He’d used satellite imagery, infrared aerial photography, and the whispers of villagers who still lived in the old ways. It had brought them to the crater lake on Mount Pulimundo, to the monument of Ahau Balam, the Jaguar King. McCarter had expected to find the key to his search there. But the information they’d discovered was a blur, incomprehensible at the time, and only slightly more sensible after he’d transcribed the barely readable smudges from his linen shirt.
What he’d found prior to the Island of the Shroud told him this: The path begins with spirit guide Ahau Balam. The tip of the spear reaches out from the great city to the temple of the warrior. There will be found the Sacrifice of the Soul. From there to the shining path, the footsteps of the gods and the Sacrifice of the Body. With these shall rise the Shield of the Jaguar.
What it meant he, couldn’t say. The king depicted on the stolen monolith had held no shield, and no spear. The only glyphs they’d found on it were numbers. Even if he was the king or Ahau that the legend spoke of, McCarter could not see how that would lead them anywhere else. It was like finding directions that said: “Take the road to the other road and then turn on the third road.” Frustrated at his inability to come up with a meaning to this, he’d ventured out of his sanctuary. He needed more information.
He limped down the street, leaning heavily on the staff. Halfway between the apartment and the beach he found an Internet café. After paying his money and settling into a rickety chair, McCarter logged on.
He wanted to tap into his university’s system, where he would have access to data stored on its mainframe, data that included satellite surveys of the Yucatan. He rested, waiting for the connection to go through. He had no way of knowing if his account was being monitored by anyone but Danielle had warned him against any such actions on an insecure network. The people they were dealing with were extremely sophisticated and if they were monitoring the university somehow, tapping into his account would be like broadcasting to the world that he was alive and well in Mexico.
The thought of taking a bus to another town, to another Internet café somewhere, had crossed his mind. But he was too damned tired. He remained in recovery, weakened by the injury. The heat of the day sapped his energy and night sweats and chills kept him from sleeping.
Nervously he typed in his password.
As his finger hovered over the ENTER key, another thought went through his head. Let someone else do this. Simple enough, except others had more to lose than he did and he’d begun to think he might have something to gain.
He tapped the key. The hourglass flipped a few times and then he had access.
Zooming in close he could see some of the major ruins of the area and even some of the smaller ones. But he doubted anything they found in a tourist-ready environment would be helpful. McCarter was after older ruins, structures swallowed up by the jungle long before the great cities of Chichen Itza and Palenque were even built.
Modern theory said that Mayan civilization stretched back two thousand years or so. What McCarter and Danielle had found in the Brazilian rain forest suggested it had a precursor that existed long before that, and that the people who’d lived there had abandoned the site and moved north, journeying through the Andes and up through the isthmus of Central America, eventually settling in the highlands and the jungles of the Yucatan, Guatemala, and Belize.
The descendants of those travelers eventually became the Maya. And if McCarter and the NRI were right, the story of their exodus became part of Mayan prehistory, the departure from their place of origin, a place they called Tulan Zuyua, carrying with them the absolute essence of power: the spirit forms of their gods contained in special glowing stones, items eerily similar to the one that the NRI now possessed.
McCarter guessed that any similar stones would be found among the oldest ruins of the culture. And to find such ancient ruins he needed photos that showed more than the naked eye could see.
While the first set of visual images printed, he opened a second directory, this one filled with infrared images. The IR images peeled away the green of the foliage and showed heat. And the heat of different types of vegetation told him what he needed to know. The lowland Maya used limestone to build their structures and even when the forests had consumed those structures the heat they emitted was different than that of the regular ground.
As the image resolved on the screen McCarter felt hope growing quickly, followed by fear and a certain sense of hopelessness. There were hundreds of unexplored ruins in the Yucatan, two dozen or more within a twenty-mile radius. How the hell would he decide where to start?
A phone rang behind him, a cellphone in the pocket of another customer. It was a familiar ring, the same ringtone as his own, and it sent him into a moment of reflection. He recalled a conversation with Arnold Moore several months before.
“Hope I’m not bothering you,” Moore had said. The tone in his voice was that of a salesman who knew he was in fact bothering someone and didn’t really care.
“Do we have to do another hearing?” McCarter had asked, referencing the series of congressional inquiries that had focused on his few moments with the NRI.
“No,” Moore had said, “nothing like that.” A brief pause and then, “I understand you’ve been asking for access to the stone. I think I can arrange it.”
That had surprised McCarter. “Terrific,” he said.
“First I have some questions,” Moore replied. “What do you know about December twenty-first, 2012?”
Two thousand twelve: the supposed end date of the Mayan calendar. For the next ten minutes McCarter tried to explain that the date did not mean the end of times to the Maya, which so many people perceived it to mean. At least not universally.
“How’s that?” Moore asked.
“First off,” McCarter said, “there are monuments with inscriptions predicting events, often very mundane events that are supposed to happen well after that date. Second, the number of Mayan references to that particular date are relatively few given the overall hieroglyphic record. And third, because the Mayan Long Count was written like an odometer of sorts, some of the current theory suggested that even those apocalyptic descriptions were really references to things that happened on the previous rollover, 5,114 years ago.”
He tried to use an analogy that Moore would be familiar with. “It’s similar to the Revelation of John. Many biblical scholars would tell you that Revelation was not a prophecy of the end of times but a hidden description of contemporaneous events in Rome and the persecution of Christians in the first century.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Moore said, or something like that. It sounded as if he wasn’t really listening. Then, serious again, he asked, “Do you know of anything that would suggest otherwise, something reliable?”
McCarter racked his brain. “There is a monument, called Tortugero Monument Six. It’s heavily damaged, but the glyphs that remain reference an event at the end of the calendar, the folding of the Thirteenth Baktun, the end of the thirteenth period of 144,000 days, which occurs on December twenty-first of 2012. They tell us that the god of change, Bolon Yokte, will descend from the Black something and carry out … something.”
Stunned silence followed. “Something,” Moore said. “What do you mean, something?”
McCarter shrugged. “No one knows. The glyphs that describe what those somethings are have been destroyed. Much like some of the glyphs we found in Brazil. Almost as if they had been smashed deliberately.”
“So not the ever-present concern for the Maya that we’ve been led to believe,” Moore noted dejectedly.
“No,” McCarter said. “More like one strand of thought. Perhaps an outcast strand. Like most apocalyptic beliefs it was not really considered valid or worthwhile to the greater culture itself.”
“And yet it persisted throughout, unbowed,” Moore said. “What does that tell you?”
McCarter considered Moore’s words. What was Moore looking for? A strand of truth that could not be proved? All that could be proved by such persistence is that some group would not let the story die. A group within a group. A group with knowledge. The priests, perhaps. Or even a subset of them, making sure the date and the prophecy lived on despite its actual dismissal and unpopularity among the greater culture and its leaders.
“Keepers of the flame,” McCarter said. “But still just a fanatical devotion.”
“What if I told you I had something that might explain their fanaticism, something to indicate that an event of great importance will in fact occur on that day?”
McCarter knew what Moore was suggesting: the very subject of their call, the Brazil stone. “Then I’d tell you there may be others,” McCarter said.
Silence followed once again, long enough that it almost seemed the call had been dropped. This time McCarter sensed calculation behind the quiet. Deliberation, even concern. Finally Moore spoke again, asking, “Have you been sleeping well, Professor?”
It was an odd question, and odder still because McCarter had been suffering terrible insomnia for months. “No, I haven’t,” he said.
“Neither have any of us,” Moore replied. “You’d better come to Washington.”
“Book me a ticket,” McCarter said, “then we can talk.”
A loud bang startled McCarter back to the present. He whipped around defensively. Another patron had stood up and accidentally knocked over a chair.
McCarter found his heart pounding and his hands shaking. The young man and his female friend were laughing. She was urging him to be more careful.
They were Americans. Several buttons adorned her jacket. One read, 2012, PARTY LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW. The second was a reference to Dick Clark’s long-term stint as official Times Square New Year’s host. It read, 2012, KUKULCAN’S NEW YEAR’S ROCKIN’ EVE.
They just had no idea.
The pending date had brought thousands of extra tourists to Mexico for this moment. Most were from America, but large numbers had come from Europe and Asia, too. A few were there with legitimate interest, but the vast majority had come to enjoy the weather and another excuse to party.
Certainly McCarter couldn’t blame them, and their presence had made it easier to hide among the crowds while he and Danielle conducted their research. But now he worried who else might be hiding among those crowds.
The American couple looked his way; the man stared at him. Suddenly McCarter needed to get out of there.
He gathered his papers, logged off the computer, and handed ten dollars to the clerk. Hobbling out into the street he glanced back at the shop. The clerk and the other patron were watching him and for a moment a wave of paranoia swept uncontrollably over him.
Getting into a rhythm with his walking staff, McCarter moved quickly, albeit awkwardly, down the edge of the street. So what if they were watching him. They were nobodies, university-age tourists. They’re not with the enemy, he told himself. They’re not with the enemy.
He could hear the thoughts reverberating through his mind, thoughts that seemed to grow stronger the harder he fought against them.
“Help me,” he whispered to the air around him, in search of the spirit of his deceased wife. “Olivia, if you can, please help me.”
Hearing no reply, he rushed forward, seeking the only place he felt marginally safe: his small room at the guesthouse. He needed to get there and sit down and study the printouts and the data. There he could make notes undisturbed and try once again to make sense of the inscription he’d seen on the Island of the Shroud.
But as he hobbled along a new thought occurred to him. His notes would be extremely valuable to their competitor. A treasure that could be found or stolen. Of course the very act of making notes and conclusions in the first place would endanger him, perhaps even make him superfluous if he were caught.
If they had my notes, my very thoughts, what would they need me for?
He tried to calm down. Needing his mind to stop whirling, he considered finding a bar and drinking himself into oblivion. But instead he slowed his pace and deliberately slowed his breathing. Somewhat calmer, he changed direction, heading down a random alley.
What he really needed was a way to make notes and then destroy them instantly: a shredder or a fire, or something he could scribble on and erase over and over again without leaving any evidence of his conclusions.
He needed a chalkboard. It was so simple but it was perfect. That would protect both himself and the mission. But unless he broke into a school somewhere, he wasn’t likely to find a chalkboard in the sleepy fishing village of Puerto Azul.
The thought loomed like a giant roadblock. And then he looked up and found himself at the end of the alley, one narrow street from the edge of the sandy beach. With the tide going out, the sand was still smooth and flat and packed hard enough to draw in with ease.
McCarter had found his chalkboard.