The Mayan Secrets

by Clive Cussler

  Russell glanced down and saw that the sweat soaking the front of his shirt was mixed with the pink makeup. First Russell and then Ruiz vaulted over the railing and walked on the sand.

  “How can they be gone?” said Russell. “Where would they even go?” But he knew they were gone. He knew it as well as he knew anything. If they’d come here from Spain, home had only been a pit stop. They had eluded him again. They were where they could cause the most trouble, in Guatemala.

  He waited until he and Ruiz reached his car. He had parked in a lot far down the beach. When he got there, he found a ticket on the windshield under the wiper. The check mark indicated he was parking after hours. He looked around him and saw the sign, unobstructed and bright under the streetlight: “Lot closes at 8:00 p.m.” He hadn’t noticed the sign when he had driven in.

  He supposed that he should be relieved that he hadn’t found the Fargos, taken a shot at one of them, and left, a parking ticket on record to show he’d been here. But he wasn’t capable of being relieved about anything. This was another gratuitous annoyance, an infuriating obstacle laid in his path, in case being blue hadn’t been enough.

  He looked out each of the car windows, checked the mirrors, and saw no police cars, but he decided to drive with extreme care. He knew it was a bad idea to rely on luck, or even probability, when things were going badly. If he lingered or sped off in a rage, a cop would surely come by, pull him over, shine a flashlight on his blue face, and start asking questions he and Ruiz couldn’t answer. He drove out of the lot and turned toward the freeway.

  He speed-dialed the number on his satellite phone. He knew she would have hers with her at all times, even when she was asleep, so when she said, “Yes?” he was neither surprised nor relieved.

  “Hello. I’m on the road going away from the Fargo house. There’s the older woman you met when you were there, the big dog, and two young people who seem to be employees too. No Fargos.”

  “No Fargos?”

  “No. I called to warn you. I’m afraid they might’ve gone back to Guatemala.”

  “What do you think they’re doing?”

  “I don’t really know. But now I’m wondering if they really did find something in the library in Spain. Maybe they had it in the wife’s purse, and he was just using the briefcase to keep us from going after it.”

  “That sounds possible,” she said.

  “Well, I just wanted you to know that you’d better be ready for them to show up down there.”

  “I want you to come here. Can you get a late flight tonight or early tomorrow?”

  “Uh, I’m a little uncomfortable talking about this. My face is still blue.”

  “You haven’t gotten rid of that yet?”

  “No. I’ve used every solvent I know of and every kind of wash. I’m still blue. The makeup helps, kind of.”

  “I’m going to get one of my doctors to call you. He’s very good and will know your problem, so don’t hang up on him. He’ll have a colleague in Los Angeles who will see you.”

  “What can a doctor do about this?”

  “If I were to guess, I’d say a chemical peel to remove the outer layer of skin that’s been dyed and leave nice new skin uncovered. But I’m not a doctor. He is. His name is Leighton. Whatever happens, I want you in Guatemala City by Thursday. And I want your friend Ruiz so you understand what people say to you.”

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll be there. Thanks for your help.”

  “It’s not a favor, Russell. I need somebody reliable to be here to keep the Fargos from ruining this opportunity for me. This is going to be the most important project of my life, and these people are malicious. No matter how graciously I’ve treated them, both at their house and my own, or how generous my offer, they’ve decided to be my enemies. I need you to make them aware of what a bad idea that was.”

  BELIZE

  Sam and Remi could not tell how much influence Sarah Allersby might have with the authorities in Guatemala, but they decided she was unlikely to have anyone watching Belize for their arrival. They flew into Punta Gorda on a private jet and took a bus down the coast to Livingston, then paid a fisherman to take them upstream on the Río Dulce to Lago de Izabal, across the border in Guatemala. A visitor could enter any of the four countries of the region and deal with customs officials only once, then pass freely to the others.

  They hired a second boat to take them the length of the lake. It was a vast expanse of blue-gray under a layer of clouds, and in the distance, beyond the shore, there was a wall of blue mountains. The trip was beautiful, and standing on the deck of the boat was a relief after so many miles on the road.

  Sam and Remi were better prepared for their trip into the high country of central Guatemala. They had enlisted in advance the cooperation of like-minded officials: Amy Costa at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City, and Commander Rueda of the Guatemalan national police. If the Fargos were to find any evidence that Sarah Allersby was violating the laws of the country regarding the transporting of antiquities, or had possession of the codex from the Mexican volcano, Rueda would arrest her. If necessary, he would fly in a squad of rangers to a remote area to do it.

  Sam had spoken to Amy Costa on a conference call. “He agreed to that? What caused the change of heart?”

  “It’s always hard to know,” said Amy Costa. “We ask for cooperation and we always hope to get it. This time we will.”

  After Sam and Remi hung up, Remi rolled her eyes. “You really didn’t notice?”

  “Apparently not. Notice what?”

  “She walked us past about thirty offices full of old married cops and went right into the office of this handsome guy about her age who couldn’t keep his big brown eyes off her.”

  “You’re saying our State Department official is fraternizing with a Guatemalan cop?”

  “No, I’m saying she’s every bit as smart as she looks.”

  Now they were back in Guatemala, and both of their satellite phones were programmed with the embassy number and the office of Commander Rueda. The lake was thirty-one miles long and sixteen miles wide, and as they reached the end at El Estor, Sam and Remi both felt good. Sometimes covering thirty miles in the highlands could take several days of hard climbing.

  At El Estor, they hired a small boat to take them up the Polochic River, which fed the lake from the west side. It was one hundred fifty miles long, a winding, narrow stream bordered by jungle that came all the way down to the water like a green wall. It was navigable upstream as far as the town of Panzós, with an unpaved road to take them on from there.

  As they moved up into the heart of the region, the forest was deeper and thicker, and the few settlements they saw seemed random, like places where people’s gasoline or enthusiasm had run out and they had decided to build shelters and stay.

  Once again, Sam and Remi had come armed. They still had their Guatemalan carry permits, and Selma had arranged to have four semiautomatic pistols purchased and waiting for them in Punta Gorda. As they had on their first trip, they carried one each in their packs and the others in bellybands under their shirts. They brought considerably more nine-millimeter ammunition, including ten loaded magazines each.

  Now that they were in central Guatemala, whatever they had brought in their packs would have to do. There was no going back to pick up one more item. The closest place where Selma could have anything delivered was far away in Guatemala City. When Sam and Remi reached the end of the navigable section of the river at Panzós, they saw a loaded coffee truck parked along the dirt road above the river and pointed west. They asked their boatman to serve as interpreter to ask the driver for a ride, and learned that he was the boatman’s friend. They arranged to pay him a few Quetzales in exchange for a ride to the end of the road.

  The ride lasted for two days. Their host had an iPod, with all of his favorite songs on it, and a cable that connected t
he iPod to the truck’s radio speakers. His playlist began with songs in Spanish and then a few in English, and soon the three of them were singing loudly in whichever language came up as they bounced along the rough, rutted road westward through the forest.

  At midday on the second day, they pulled into a depot where their dirt road met a larger dirt road. Trucks from other parts of the region were there unloading their coffee sacks onto a conveyor to be weighed, counted, and reloaded onto tractor-trailer trucks that drove on along the larger road. They bid an affectionate good-bye to the driver, who would soon get his turn at the scale, get paid, and go home.

  When they walked off to the west, they checked their position on the GPS screens on their satellite phones. They were within twenty miles of their first-choice destination. They walked the rest of the day, heading straight for it. In the late afternoon, they crossed a game trail, and that made walking easier, although the trail angled a bit north of their destination. The vegetation was thick, and the tops of the trees stood over the trail like a line of umbrellas. There was little breeze, but the shade kept them from suffering under the sun.

  They checked their position frequently and continued on the game trail. As they moved farther from the road and closer to the place they were looking for, they walked in near silence. When they needed to talk, they would stop to rest on a fallen log or a low, twisted limb, put their heads close, and whisper. They listened to the calls of birds and the screeches of the troops of howler monkeys passing overhead, trying to discern whether they’d been disturbed by human beings somewhere up ahead.

  Sam and Remi had trekked through wilderness together many times, so they were comfortable moving through the Guatemalan highlands. The rhythms of the forest immediately became their rhythms. They got up as the sun was beginning to restore colors to the world, but it would not be above the horizon for another hour. They ate simply and broke camp so they could get in three or four hours of hiking before the day grew hot. They stopped when the sun was beginning to sink so they could select a site and set up their camp while they could still see. They used each opportunity to replenish their water supply by boiling and treating springwater or the water from streams. Their fires were small, made in shallow pits that Sam dug. If the wood was damp enough to smoke, they would go without the fire and eat preserved food from packets.

  On the morning of the third day, the Global Positioning System on their satellite phones showed that they were close to the ruined city. They used Remi’s phone to call Selma in San Diego.

  “Good morning,” said Selma. “How is it going so far?”

  “We’re getting very close, so we’re calling now and then expect to be texting for a while to maintain silence,” Remi said.

  “Have you seen anyone yet?”

  “Not since we left the road three days ago,” said Remi. “Even then, we were the only truck on the road. Are you tracking our phones’ GPS signals?”

  “Yes,” Selma said. “Very clearly. I know right where you are.”

  “Then we’ll text you if we learn anything.”

  “Please do,” Selma said. “I’m getting a huge e-book bill and a ghostly pallor because I don’t want to leave the office to go to a bookstore and miss your calls.”

  “Sorry,” said Remi. “Kiss Zoltán for me.”

  “I will.”

  “Bye.”

  They hung up, and the next sound they heard was so shocking in the silence that they both swiveled their heads to locate its source. There was the faint thrum of a helicopter in the distance. They tried to spot the helicopter, but they were in a low dale beneath a thick canopy of leaves that obscured the sky. The engine grew louder until its roar overwhelmed all of the natural sounds of the forest.

  They knew better than to stand and climb up to see it. After a minute, the helicopter passed overhead, and Sam and Remi looked up at it, seeing the wind from its rotors whipping the leaves of the upper tree branches around wildly before it swept on to the north and out of sight. They could hear the engine at about the same decibel level for another two minutes, and then the sound stopped entirely.

  “I think it landed,” said Remi.

  “So do I,” said Sam. “Ready to take a closer look?”

  “Going to find them is probably better than letting them find us.”

  Sam and Remi put their packs in order. They loaded their spare pistols and moved them to a zippered outer compartment of their backpacks and hid Sam’s phone in another compartment. They took with them only one pistol each, under their shirts, and Remi’s phone. They hid their backpacks under thick foliage, marked the nearest tree, then moved off up the game trail.

  As they walked, they did not speak, just directed each other’s attention with a nod or a simple hand gesture. They would stop every twenty yards to listen but heard only the sounds of the forest. On the fourth stop, they heard human voices. Several men were talking loudly in Spanish, their voices overlapping and interrupting in cascades of words too fast for the rudimentary Spanish Sam had begun to learn.

  And then the forest ahead of them brightened. Beyond the rank of trees was a large clearing. A group of men unloaded equipment from the helicopter and carried it to a place where a sun awning had been erected. There were several aluminum cases, a couple of video cameras, tripods, and unidentifiable accessories.

  They could see the pilot, standing beside the open door of his helicopter, with earphones on and a wire connecting him to the instrument panel. He spoke to someone on the radio.

  Sam and Remi moved cautiously inside the forest, venturing closer to the edge. Suddenly Remi raised her eyes and pointed. At the right side of the large open area of low weeds and grasses, a high wooded hill that had been only partially visible looked different from this angle. From this side, Sam and Remi could see a stone stairway, straight and uninterrupted, running from the ground to the apex. The partial excavation of the steep hill revealed that what had seemed to be natural irregularities were layers of the pyramid. They were flat, with trees and brush growing on them, but in places the roots had dislodged stones from the structure and collapsed a corner from one level to the level below, making the profile more like a hill than a building.

  This was unquestionably the step pyramid that had been depicted on the codex map and had appeared in the aerial photograph. A crew of about a hundred workmen were attacking the structure with axes, picks, mattocks, shovels, and buckets to clear the pyramid of about a thousand years of accumulated leaves, humus, dirt, and living plants. They moved quickly and swung hard, more like a demolition crew than archaeologists. They hacked away at the debris covering the pyramid. Other workers were cutting and burning brush in different parts of the complex. Their labor was baring stone structures in all directions. Sam reached to Remi’s hand, took her phone, and began to take pictures.

  Remi whispered, “If David Caine could see the way this place is being pounded and abused, it would kill him.” After a minute, she noticed a platoon of armed men moving single file out of the jungle, on the far side of the complex. There were about twenty of them, all carrying rifles on slings. There were a few other armed men stationed on the upper levels of the buildings. A couple of them waved to the men just arriving.

  Sam was busy taking photographs with Remi’s phone. He reviewed the shots, then sent them to Selma. He put away the phone and tapped Remi on the shoulder. They stayed low and slowly edged away from the cleared area. When they could, they stood and walked back up the game trail until they judged they were out of earshot. Sam pressed a number on Remi’s phone and then the call button.

  “Policía federales.”

  “Hello. This is Sam Fargo.”

  “And this is Commander Rueda,” said the voice. “I’ve been keeping this line clear for your call.”

  “Thank you, Commander. We’re at the coordinates we gave you before we left home. As the Mayan codex indicated, what’s her
e is a large city with a temple complex. We’ve been watching a crew of around a hundred men clearing away dirt and vegetation as fast as they can. There are also armed guards. A little while ago, a helicopter landed with what looks like a film crew.”

  “Are they doing anything criminal?”

  “They’re uncovering the buildings with picks, mattocks, and shovels without much regard to the damage they do to what’s beneath. But I’d say that the main problem so far is the one we’ve told you about. The only way that Sarah Allersby could have found this place is if she has the stolen Mayan codex from the University of California, San Diego.”

  “If I send a squad of men to that location, will they find anything to charge her with?”

  “I think they’ll find notes that indicate where she learned the location, or even a photocopy of the codex page, which would prove it’s been in her possession,” Sam said. “Either way, maybe police can get the workers to excavate properly and not destroy what they’re uncovering.”

  “All right. I’ll send a helicopter with soldiers to check on the excavation. That’s all I can promise.”

  “That’s good enough for me. Thank you.” He handed Remi her phone.

  Remi called Selma. “Hi, Selma. We’ve been to the site. Have you seen the pictures? You can tell David it’s as big as he thought. Sam just called the cops to come and take a look at the terrible job they’re doing on this dig. We’re hoping they’ll also find evidence that she used the map in the codex.”

  “Don’t let the police forget that it could be in a computer or her phone, or it could be disguised as something else.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s a fishing expedition, and we know fish don’t all look the same.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. We’re on our way back to the site.”