He’d used a dozen names in the past. His time as Juan Carlos Sebastian in Prague had been the best of his life. Even now it was that persona who stepped forward when things got difficult. He was Paul Silver, but in situations like this, the assassin in him was plotting and executing the next move.
Since he didn’t know where the boats had gone, there was no way to know exactly when or if they’d return. The usual destination from Frontera Corozal was Yaxchilan, forty minutes downstream. But that Mayan site would be alive with employees and tourists by nine a.m. tomorrow. There would be no place for them to hide.
He’d seen extra gasoline cans in each longboat; it appeared they were going much further than Yaxchilan. The kidnappers could have built a camp somewhere along the river, but he doubted it. That would have required a lot of men and backbreaking work. The jungle here was truly a living thing, full of tremendous trees, vines as thick as a telephone pole and a plethora of dangerous creatures. Snakes, insects and animals would make life miserable for anyone trying to hack living quarters out of the dense vegetation.
But one destination made sense – the long-abandoned site of Piedras Negras four hours away by boat. Other than those ruins, there was nothing but miles and miles of uncharted territory and dense, impenetrable jungle on both sides of the river.
They were going to Piedras Negras. Paul was certain of it. He glanced at his watch. Ten p.m. If he was right, if the boats dropped off the prisoners and came directly back, they’d be here by daybreak. He’d be waiting for them.
Paul walked to the bushes where he’d put his luggage, opened his suitcase, and took out the Sig Sauer pistol he always carried. Since he’d joined the archaeological tour in Villahermosa, he’d had no air travel and consequently no problem with a weapon in his bag. All day long he’d waited for an opportunity to get into his suitcase stowed in the hold of the bus. Finally the chance had come. Julio was offloading bags. No one paid him any attention; they were all shaken, scared and trying to find their own luggage. In the darkness, it had been simple to throw his bags under the bus.
The other helpful thing he had was a second phone. Like the others, he’d handed over his phone, but he had another one fully charged and ready to go. The primary purpose of his joining the tour was to go to Piedras Negras, so he’d packed an Iridium satellite phone. Cell service in the vast jungle was spotty, only near the occasional tower put up by Claro, the Guatemalan phone company. His sat phone would work anywhere.
He considered leaving a message at the archaeological tour office in Durango to let them know what had happened, but he decided against it. For now he had nothing to report except his own position. He knew nothing about the motive behind the kidnapping, where the people had been taken, how many rebels there were – nothing.
Getting the US government involved might help save the captives, but it could also backfire. Boats of armed militia searching the riverbanks might spook Rolando. Who knew what he already planned for the hostages, much less what might happen if he felt trapped? Paul had to wait until he knew more. He wanted to talk to the boat drivers. Then he’d handle things himself.
He settled back against a tree and dozed, knowing he couldn’t miss the sound of the boats when they returned.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
One Year Ago
London
Roberto Maas held his breath for as long as he could, fighting the urge to take a huge, enveloping wonderful breath of air. Hot, dense, acrid smoke filled the tunnel almost completely. Every time he involuntarily sucked in a tiny bit of air, literally dying for just one more breath, he instead got the bitter taste of soot. His eyes burned from ash particles. He gripped the ancient iron bars that imprisoned him mere inches from fresh air and freedom. Growing clumps of ash and cinders floating down the passageway fired the hot metal of the bars. The bars scorched his hands.
The man behind him was dead. His hand had gripped Roberto’s leg, but now there was nothing. Roberto would be dead too in a minute or so. He’d gotten out of many perilous situations before, but this was the end. How crazy was it that he couldn’t break through a set of iron bars the Romans erected over a thousand years ago to block this end of the tunnel? But he couldn’t. His strength was ebbing fast. This was almost over.
His lungs were bursting. There was time for just one last thrust, one last attempt, one last try at saving his own life. He was losing consciousness; his brain began to swirl in a dizzy kaleidoscope of color as he ran out of air. Consciousness faded into a soft lightness. This is what dying feels like, he thought as he pushed on the bars as hard as he could. Finally he could wait no longer. It was finished. In a second or two he’d have to breathe. In a final effort he stood, backed up, and ran headlong toward the ancient iron bars as he succumbed to the overwhelming requirement for oxygen. When his body hit the bars, he involuntarily sucked in a huge gasp of hot smoky air. He felt a giddy sensation of floating, sailing, falling and falling.
After that there was nothing.
——
A bird chirped gaily nearby. Was he in heaven? Doubtful, Roberto thought idly as he struggled to clear his fuzzy brain. He carefully opened first one eye, then the other. It was a painful exercise – they were bloodshot and full of ashes. He lifted his hand to rub them and saw his filthy, grimy, dirt-encrusted skin. It was so black with soot that he resisted putting more nasty stuff into his already throbbing eyeballs.
Roberto was caught in the jumbled branches of a tree. He could hear the Thames River lapping at the shore somewhere close by. He looked down; he was stuck maybe ten feet above the ground. He tested his perch and found it surprisingly secure, so he took a few minutes to think.
The last thing he remembered was the wall of iron bars at the end of the ancient Roman passageway beneath St Mary Axe Street. There had been a fire, he recalled; he and Edward Russell were trapped in the crypt. He remembered running to the end of the tunnel, which from the outside was simply a hole in the embankment a hundred feet above the Thames. The Roman workmen who built it had secured that exit. They wanted the crypt to be safe from intruders. A thick growth of trees covered it over the ensuing centuries; today no one had any idea it was there.
He’d gotten out somehow. He hazily remembered desperately struggling to hold his breath and running with all his strength at the bars, but what had happened next?
He was here in a tree where he must have fallen from the tunnel above. It had been night when they were trapped by the fire – wasn’t that right? He thought so, but he couldn’t remember. Now it was daytime – he looked at his watch. Six o’clock. Morning or evening? Surely he hadn’t lain here twenty-four hours. It had to be six a.m.
As his mind cleared, he listened to the sounds of traffic somewhere above him. Buses were driving in the City of London, hauling passengers to work, everyone totally unaware that one man, Roberto Maas, had almost died but now was alive, hanging in a tree by the river.
For the first time in his life, Roberto Maas was completely free, truly unleashed. He’d reinvented himself time and again in the years since Russia. Despite his efforts, his pursuers had always caught up with him. This time was different. He was dead. He was alive.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The hardest part about shedding an identity was dealing with things you wish you didn’t have to leave behind.
Roberto Maas had been the latest identity of a man accustomed to recreating himself. He was young, incredibly wealthy and had no family and no close friends. His collection of ancient artifacts was the one joy and love in his life. He was passionate about history, and he had accumulated some truly amazing objects. There was the female pharaoh Hatshepsut’s long dagger made in 1478 BC. The unique weapon was sheathed in a golden scabbard and buried with her 3500 years ago. It had been removed by robbers several hundred years after that. A cartouche on the blade linked the dagger to the queen – any museum would have paid millions for it. It was one of thirty relics displayed in a flat in Lucerne that was owned by a shell corporation
. That company, one of many Roberto used to hide his own identity, had been left behind along with the artifacts and Roberto’s previous personas on that fateful day in London when he got his life back.
The day Roberto Maas died in the fire.
As much as he ran, as carefully as he hid, as much money as he used to create new identities, a few people had always managed to find him. They wanted him tortured in a gruesome, painful manner. Then they wanted him dead, once and for all. He was an assassin – at least that was what Juan Carlos Sebastian was. He was trained to kill without being detected, but he couldn’t shake the people whom he’d blackmailed as a teenager. Men pursued him even when the trail ran cold. They were driven by hatred and fear. They’d caught up with Roberto and were probably responsible for the fire that trapped him.
When Roberto had apparently perished in the massive blaze that burned two blocks of St Mary Axe Street in London, he became Paul Silver, an American citizen living in New York City. He performed a corporate and personal makeover as he’d done more than once before. He had safety deposit boxes in a dozen banks around the world. Each contained a wad of cash and everything he needed to become someone else: credit cards, passport and an identity card – everything required for a new life in a new place. Those things were the mechanical parts of becoming someone else, and Roberto had prepared well for this eventuality.
He also had access to hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and had investments worldwide. There were over a thousand separate accounts at banks, brokerage firms, real estate companies and financial services operations, each in a different shell name, each protected by a series of passwords. The access information was securely encrypted and loaded on two flash drives. One was made into an Egyptian falcon amulet that Paul wore around his neck. The other was in a safety deposit box in New Orleans.
He could have lost much of his fortune a year ago in Lucerne. He did, in fact, lose four hundred thousand dollars in a massive theft orchestrated by his second-in-command Philippe Lepescu. The greedy Romanian who was Roberto Maas’s financial officer siphoned funds to his own accounts. After his bold betrayal of both Roberto’s friendship and his trust, Philippe disappeared, leaving Roberto to change a thousand passwords and put safeguards in place. Almost another hundred thousand dollars disappeared during the time it took to switch everything, but that was nothing to Roberto. What concerned him were the people looking for him – did his cheating partner give them what was required to locate him?
Roberto was betrayed by a man he considered his friend – and he didn’t have friends to lose. That wouldn’t happen again. He’d let Philippe get too close. Friends were liabilities, not assets.
Philippe believed Roberto Maas died in the fire in St Mary Axe Street. His next step would be to seize his boss’s assets – he had the passwords he needed and he’d already started moving money – so Paul had to move fast.
Working round the clock, he changed account names and access codes, created new shell corporations and moved his assets out of Philippe’s reach. It was an incredible amount of work, but Paul had to ensure his fortune was secure. Finally it was done. Wherever he was, Philippe would never find the new Paul Silver or the millions that had belonged to Roberto Maas. All Philippe would see if he tried to steal more money now was that someone – presumably Roberto’s lawyer – had changed the passwords.
Roberto left no heirs and no will. Informed of his death, his lawyers in Geneva had no idea what provision he’d made for his assets, but in truth there was nothing required. Roberto, Juan Carlos, Slava – every person he had been – owned nothing at all. Not a single piece of furniture in one of a half-dozen furnished apartments around the world. Not a bottle of expensive vodka. Not a cherished artifact proudly displayed in a living room cabinet in Lucerne. Corporations owned everything, and Roberto walked away from all those personal items. He’d been handed a new life. He couldn’t risk any link to the past.
When the apartment leases began to expire and after exhaustive attempts to locate a will, his Geneva law firm sold all the personal property. For years they’d held a retainer and instructions to settle things in case Roberto disappeared. Since the corporate shell owners of everything were never located, most of the proceeds went into unclaimed property funds in various locales and eventually would enhance the treasuries of one country or another. It was unfortunate to lose several million dollars, Paul mused at the time, but the money he’d given up on those was part of his new anonymity. It was also a drop in the bucket; there were hundreds of millions in his vast investment portfolio, now shielded inside webs of new shell corporations worldwide.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When the bus full of hostages pulled into the parking lot next door, a few guests still lingered in the dining room at Escudo Jaguar, finishing a last beer before hitting the sack. At daybreak they were all going in longboats to Yaxchilan. No one gave the bus a thought; they could barely see the dark parking lot anyway from the bright dining room.
Once the bags were unloaded, Rolando and his compadre ushered the remaining people off the bus and divided them into two groups to make it easier to keep an eye on them. The hostages could hear the sounds of talking and laughter coming from the veranda of Escudo Jaguar. With people so close, some thought about screaming for help.
Rolando uttered a sharp command and Mark translated. “Don’t make a sound or he’ll kill one of us.” He added, “It’s unlikely the people at the lodge have weapons, and it’s certain they won’t react fast enough to save us. We have to do what he says.”
Each person took his suitcases. The bandits herded their captives down the steep stairway, the light of a nearly full moon illuminating the path. They had to cross a maze of sandbags and work their way to the dock. Most of these people are young, Rolando thought idly. They can haul suitcases down a hill, and maybe they’ll think next time about packing so much. Damn Americans. That made him smile. He saw the two older people were having a hard time.
He yelled at them, “Mas rapido.” Faster. He saw the man named Ted, the leader, stop to help the lady with her bags.
Two men stood on the dock in the darkness. Rolando greeted them with hugs, and they pointed to two boats, each with a driver and several cans of gasoline in the back. “These are ours,” his man said. “We’ve rented them for twenty-four hours.”
Rolando did a quick head count as the people clumsily tossed their suitcases into the long canoes ahead of them, then boarded. Twelve hostages sat down, six on each boat. Soon Diego, Rolando’s second-in-command, came running down the dock. He’d parked the bus in a grove of trees a quarter mile from town where it wouldn’t be seen for a while.
He and one of his men jumped into the first one, and the driver started the engine. Diego and another rebel boarded the second boat, and they putted away down the Usumacinta River.
The leader checked his watch. It was 9:30 p.m. They’d be at their destination in four hours if things went smoothly. It was dangerous doing this run at night, but the boatmen had navigated the rapids a thousand times. They’d get there with no problem. Everything had worked perfectly up to now. Nothing would go wrong tonight.
Ignoring his prisoners, he removed the ski mask and wiped his face with a dirty bandana. He took a swig of water, poured more on his head, and sat back, his pistol still in his hand. Something nagged at his brain. What wasn’t exactly right? Something, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. What was it? He’d made sure all the luggage was off the bus, and he’d counted all twelve people … Wait. Was that it? How many people had there been earlier? The driver was gone and there were twelve now. But weren’t there fourteen when they started?
Rolando had done a cursory count on the bus. He thought he counted fourteen, but he could be wrong. It had been a long day and he’d been occupied watching the hostages. There must have been only thirteen to start with. Now there were twelve.
Let it go. All is well. Focus for just a few more hours. Once we get to Piedras, we sleep. Now you must
concentrate.
Ted was on the second boat. He knew exactly how many people had been on the bus – they were his responsibility. Before Manuel was murdered, there had been fourteen. Including Ted, there were six hostages on this boat. It was so dark he couldn’t see the captives boarding the second one, but there had to be seven.
That was incorrect. There were only six.
——
Forty minutes after they’d left the dock, the captives saw dim lights flickering on the left bank ahead. “Yaxchilan,” Ted said. “Those are the lights of the buildings at the entrance to the site. I wondered if they were taking us there…”
“No talk!” the masked rebel in the back of the boat yelled over the buzz of the outboard motor.
Yaxchilan wasn’t their destination. The boats sped past a long dock without slowing. Mark wasn’t surprised. Yaxchilan didn’t make sense for this operation. There were too many people around. It would be very difficult to hide a group of hostages. There were acres of cleared and maintained ground, many temples in various stages of reconstruction, a visitor center, and dense jungle everywhere else. It simply couldn’t work.
He figured they were going to be held for ransom. If that were true, the rebels would need a remote location far from the river and sufficient manpower to guard hostages twenty-four hours a day. He hoped that was the plan. He didn’t want to consider what else their captors might be planning. Although they could have built a rebel camp virtually anywhere on either side, by now the archaeologist had a pretty good idea where they were going. If he was right, they’d be there in around three hours.
Despite the perilous situation, the monotonous hum of the engine lulled some of the captives to sleep. In the front of Rolando’s boat, David Tremont, a thirty-seven-year-old insurance agent from Kansas City, thought through his plan one last time. This was crazy, but he had to try it.
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