Death and Deception

by Seeley James

  No footfalls, just the approaching swish-swish, which then went in another direction. I rounded the corner carefully and moved silently down a dark passageway. In front of me was a lone figure, walking with the confidence of an officer. He was a silhouette backlit by a brighter area beyond. He turned a corner and disappeared into the brighter area.

  I stumbled over something. Checking around, I found god lounging on the floor as if he were on a throne eating grapes.

  Mercury said, You know, homeboy, they got twenty-four guys looking for you. When’s your luck gonna run out?

  I said, I was hoping you were handling that for me.

  Mercury said, Do I look like the god of invisibility to you?

  I said, Could you give me a hint about how to stay alive?

  Mercury mocked my voice, Could you gimme a hint… How about you give Jenny a hint about how you always win against impossible odds? Here I am, saving your ass every day and what do you tell her about me? Nothing. That’s disrespectful, ya feel me?

  Irritating as it was, he had a point. I’d been less than appreciative lately. I said, Look, soon as we get back, I’ll tell her a little bit at a time. If I tell her everything all at once, she’ll freak out and run away. I’ll warm her up. One step at a time. Whaddya say?

  Mercury popped up and grabbed my shoulder. OK, but this is the last freebie, bro. Yeah, I see you nodding like you just got away with lying to me again. I swear I go too easy on you. So here’s the deal. You looked over the screens back in the guard shack, but you never saw Mr. Baldy. Why? Because he’s around the next corner, personally guarding the secure communications room and getting ready to pop a .22LR through your skull.

  He was telling me something I’d already thought about, so it wasn’t like divine help, but I hadn’t been grateful lately, so I figured I’d play him. I said, Thanks, now that’s useful. You really are the one and only messenger. Say, what is she doing in there, anyway?

  Mercury said, I’ll tell you a little bit at time. If I tell you everything all at once …

  He laughed as he faded out of existence on our plane.

  The trouble with gods is they’re so omniscient all the time. You can’t get away with anything.

  Moving closer to the corner my quarry had rounded, I pulled up. I was in a wide passageway that spilled into a larger room. The light had an orange hue that came from fifteen feet deeper in the space. I sensed the presence of someone else. Maybe it was the electrical impulses humans give off. Maybe it was divine intervention, maybe it was Stearne’s Law, but I felt like he was three feet away, waiting for me to come around the corner.

  I considered the logistics. The report from a pistol would draw ten to fifteen armed men into this confined space. If I killed Mr. Baldy, it would be my last living act. I readied a dart. Once he was incapacitated, I could strangle him quietly.

  I readied to launch myself and whispered, “Captain.”

  The sound of half a swish came from around the corner. Then silence. Mr. Baldy wasn’t falling for the old ruse. I wanted him to sneak a peek around the corner so I could jam a dart in his eye. He wanted me to peek around the corner so he could put a bullet in my forehead. I knew if I didn’t move, he would have to investigate. He was a professional, so I knew how he would do it. I readied my back foot for a leap forward.

  The swishing sound resumed, this time I could track it. He was making an arc, swinging wide out of my visual range, to come around the corner five feet back from it. That way he could see me before I could reach him.

  I calculated the steps and waited until he was two steps short of where he would see me. I launched out of my stance like I was rushing the quarterback. He was farther back in the room than I’d anticipated. That meant I’d have to take more steps to sack him.

  Mr. Baldy had his Scorpion up and ready for my attack. His eye lay directly behind the iron sights. His arm steady. He took his time to find my center mass and squeezed the trigger. It hurt like hell. But the Sabel Armor did what liquid metal armor is supposed to do. It dissipated the energy over a wide area of my chest, preventing it from penetrating my flesh. I staggered a step but kept going.

  Mr. Baldy hadn’t expected that. He looked at his pistol in disbelief.

  I raised the dart and pounded it into his neck. He twisted a clumsy but effective right hook that threw me to the floor. I scrambled to my feet and looked at the Sabel Dart. The needle was bent in half. I looked at Mr. Baldy. He had a metal earring bleeding in his ear.

  Damn. What are the odds of hitting something as small as an earring?

  I reached for another dart, but Mr. Baldy had his pistol raised. This time he was going for the headshot. I ducked and rolled and somersaulted into his shins. He jumped in the air before I connected and landed on my rolling body. The unstable landing tossed him on his butt.

  Getting up as he went down, I slammed my heel into his face. Unfazed, he recovered and raised his pistol, this time looking for my thigh. I grabbed the last dart in my pocket and yanked. In my haste, it went sideways and caught in my pocket. Mr. Baldy fired again.

  Few people had seen the non-Newtonian liquid armor in the heat of battle. With a second bullet deflected, Mr. Baldy’s eyes lit up with recognition of why I was still alive. He quickly raised his aim to my face.

  I dropped my knees onto his torso as I swatted his arm away. The pistol fired another round harmlessly to the left. My body weight falling into his abdomen pushed the air out of his lungs. That gave me time to retrieve my last dart, but not enough time to stop his legs from spinning around, encircling me, and scissoring the life out of me.

  My arm was pinned to my side. He squeezed with all his might. Trying to free the dart and the hand that held it proved nearly impossible. I slammed my left hand to his face and felt his orbital socket crack. I gave him another, which only doubled his intent to squeeze the life out of me. Then I remembered one of the hundreds of training sessions I went through that dealt with scissor locks. I leaned back, used one leg to push off the floor, which flopped Mr. Baldy over like a pancake. He was facedown with my butt on top of his and me pulling back on his left leg. I reached blindly behind me and jabbed him with a dart.

  He went limp.

  I stood, gasped for air, pulled my pistol, and aimed.

  At that moment, a door opened in an orange wall. Cherry stepped out. Her eyes fell to Mr. Baldy. Then rose to me. I holstered my 9 mil. Killing an unconscious man doesn’t qualify as self-defense. Given her odd behavior, I didn’t think Cherry was going to lie for me if I capped Mr. Baldy. Which pissed me off. This was the moment I’d been working toward for days and I was denied.

  “Did you kill Captain Amanow?” she shrieked.

  “He’s resting.” I held up the dart and explained it. The look of horror on her face didn’t relax at all.

  “You called him Captain?” I asked. “Tell me you were reporting him for the execution of the number one expert in Mayan culture.”

  “Number two,” she said. “Uncle Rafael is the number one.”

  “Why you were calling the ICC?”

  She looked shocked that I knew about her call.

  “Will you at least call the local cops? He’s holding the murder weapon in his hands.”

  Cherry examined the Scorpion. They’re stainless steel with anodized black grips. Mr. Baldy chose the long barrel, giving it an extra sinister look. She shivered.

  Voices rolled in from the kitchen.

  Cherry pulled herself together and faced me. “How did you get in the secure area?”

  “Turns out, it’s not all that secure. What was the call about?” I took her elbow and marched her toward the exit at the opposite end.

  “I can’t tell you.” She pulled out of my grip. “Look, I appreciate your concern, but I’m fine. I have a car waiting. I’ll go straight to the hotel and speak to Uncle Rafael.”

  She might as well have slapped me. I stopped in my tracks. She gave me a look, then resumed her march to a small elevator. She pressed
the button.

  Behind me, boots clomped ever closer.

  I bolted down the service hall and up the stinky stairwell.

  When I got to the ground floor, I ran out the south exit. A Knight saw me and gave chase, calling to his friends. I bounded the fence into the neighbor’s yard and crossed that. The Knights hesitated, unsure if their orders included involving innocent civilians. They didn’t hesitate long. A bullet buzzed my ear. I zigzagged through the wooded area. Bark snapped off a tree trunk near my head.

  At the end of the first property, I leapt a smaller fence, then ran down the wooden dock to where Jenny waited in her boat. She’d kept the motor running. Behind me, the Knights came at full gallop.

  Jenny pulled away as I jumped. As soon as I landed, she cranked it up to full throttle and began evasive maneuvers.

  I dug out my phone and called mild-mannered Professor Tum. As soon as he picked up, I yelled, “Meet me at the Drake. Be ready to tell me everything you’ve left out.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Storming into the Drake’s lobby through the labyrinthine lakeside entry, I found Mercury striding alongside me.

  Mercury said, You see how you got into the mess, right homie? Jenny wanted you to save the day for Peng and Rafael. And you wanted to be Jenny’s hero.

  I said, I try to help people, that’s all.

  Mercury said, For your own glory, not for the good of the Dii Consentes. If you keep fighting vainglorious battles, there ain’t nothing any god can do you. That’s how Hercules died, bro. Now, you need to be thinking big. Like how you gonna get twenty-eight million out of Yuri Belenov.

  I said, Why don’t you tell me something useful? Why not tell me what in Jupiter’s name is going on here? And don’t start with tossing the Poison Stone back in the ocean. We’re past that. Tell me why Danny wanted to go after Griffith so badly. Tell me why Cherry doesn’t care who killed her friends anymore.

  Jenny kept pace to my left. She looked at me funny. “What are you mumbling about? Whose friends?”

  “Just working stuff out in my head, that’s all.”

  Across from the concierge, Rafael Tum and Gu Peng sat on a gold loveseat, their expectant eyes watched me approach. No sign of Danny or Cherry or anyone else from Griffith’s crib. I nodded toward the elevators. They followed. Jenny gave them a polite nod, but she sensed how pissed I was and wisely decided not to yin while I was yanging. Or whatever.

  We rode in silence to my floor and entered the suite.

  I pointed to an overstuffed couch facing two overstuffed chairs. They sat. Jenny took one of the chairs. I put a foot on the coffee table between us.

  I pointed at Rafael. “What did the Maya think that stone was?”

  “A weapon,” he said.

  I rolled my hand.

  “Maya history is divided into three main periods: Preclassic, Classic, and Postclassic,” Rafael said. “The earliest Mayans tamed the rain forest three thousand years before Christ. By 700 BCE, Mayans were building large cities like Nakbe. By 350 BCE, Tikal and El Mirador were thriving, erecting stelae and monuments covered in logosyllabic writing. Cities as big as Rome cropped up throughout Mesoamerica.

  “By the time of Christ, Tikal’s reign as the most powerful city was challenged by Calakmul, Palanque, and others. Wars and treaties followed. Then we enter the Classic period when the Maya flourished. As Rome descended into chaos, the Maya entered into elaborate trade pacts, built great roads, wrote detailed codices, and erected monumental pyramids. The codices detailed the extensive research of the Maya in mathematics, advanced astronomy, history, medicine, and religious practices. Their scientific examination of the heavens exceeded the Europeans by hundreds of years.

  “With success came increased rivalries. In 378 CE, a man from Teotihuacan named Fire is Born walked into Tikal. That same day, Tikal’s long-time king, Jaguar Paw, died. From then on, Tikal was allied with Teotihuacan. We can figure out what happened. From their glyphs we know of wars and threats and clashes that aligned various Mayan city-states over the centuries.

  “Science and education also prospered. The Mayans developed the Long Count calendar whose accuracy remained unmatched by Europeans until Simon Newcomb correctly calculated obliquity in 1895.”

  “Hold up,” I said. “Obliquity?”

  “Axial tilt.” Rafael looked at me like I’d forgotten my homework for a moment, then relaxed and softened to sympathy-for-the-dumb. “The Earth’s axis is tilted from the orbital plane, giving us summer, winter, fall, and spring. The tilt, or obliquity, is not constant. It wobbles on a forty-thousand-year basis. The Mayans accounted for the wobble and could map star and planet positions tens of thousands of years into the future or as far into the past.”

  “Oh, yeah. Heard something about that.”

  He nodded kindly and continued. “They understood and used the concept of zero in their mathematics. Something Europeans didn’t manage until the Arabs taught them algebra. If the Maya had harnessed the wheel for travel, we very well could’ve ended up in a Mayan-centric world today.”

  I contemplated that scenario for a moment. Human sacrifice atop the Statue of Liberty? Give me your huddled masses, we need to extract some beating hearts? He sensed the direction of my thinking.

  “Ritual sacrifice was what rulers did in many ancient societies, like the Celtics and Sumerians. Mayan rulers would cut themselves, letting their blood flow into bowls to appease the gods in time of crisis, or to demonstrate their commitment to their community. It was an act of solidarity, like blood-brother rituals among modern boys. A statement that says, ‘I’m willing to bleed for you.’ The highest honor was to be sacrificed for the good of all. Not unlike Jesus.” He gave me a retina-piercing stare. “Today, soldiers are willing to die defending their country. Back then Mayans were willing to die defending their communities from forces, physical or mystical.”

  I squirmed. “OK. What’s all this got to do with my alabaster albatross?”

  “By 750, the collapse was beginning. Something happened to specific cities that wiped them out. After booming for fifteen hundred years, in the space of two generations, millions of people, spanning a thousand miles stretching from Mexico City to Honduras, abandoned their authoritarian rulers and returned to village life. Palenque, Copán, Tikal, and Calakmul were abandoned while other cities such as Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Coba thrived until the arrival of the Spanish. The cities that survived were ruled by councils rather than kings.”

  “And the weapon part?” I asked.

  “There are obscure oral histories about the collapse that are quite different from the academic theories. The legends speak of a box containing the Enemy Stone or Poison Stone. In some stories, it is called the Freedom Stone. It was a secret weapon. One so secret, they never committed it to stelae or wrote about it in books. The city that possessed it would give it as a ‘gift’ to their enemy. Within days, the king would go mad or abdicate or simply disappear.”

  Jenny held up a hand as if she were in class, then realized it was unnecessary and asked her question. “Why only the cities with kings? How did the other cities survive?”

  “Monarchy, dictatorship, authoritarian is fragile thing,” Gu Peng said. “Single point failure. If king fall, city fall. Not work in democratic city, power share by council.”

  I expanded on her thought, “If you take out one council member, another continues the fight.”

  Rafael gave me an approving nod.

  Jenny looked confused. “Then the winners should’ve been invincible. It shouldn’t have brought down the entire civilization.”

  “When the US bombed Hiroshima,” Rafael said, “the atomic bomb was a monumental secret. Only a few people knew what could cause so much devastation. When they bombed Nagasaki, everyone knew. They didn’t know the specifics, but everyone knew the Americans had something powerful. The race to steal the plans began at that moment. And the same thing happened among the Maya. The danger of the Stone preceded the arrival of the box.


  “We don’t know who had it first or last, but if Tikal used it against a lesser city, then tried to use it against the king of Calakmul, instead of opening the box, presumably the king would keep it and throw back at Tikal’s ambassadors. It would have a reverse effect. Or, if you had it, you could force any captured enemies to touch it.”

  “So the short version is,” I said, “the box I’ve been dragging around led to the destruction of an entire civilization.”

  He shrugged. “If you believe the legends.”

  “Before the Mayans,” I said, “the Romans had it. In the hundred years before sending this box to the edge of the world, they went through Emperors like tissue paper. Someone was doing the same thing there. It led to the downfall of Rome. Theodosius was the first successful emperor for decades. He reigned for fifteen years. But he consolidated power, dislodging four co-emperors. About that time, the cult of Mithras was all the rage in the military. Were they the same Knights?”

  “We presume so,” Rafael said.

  “I’m guessing Theodosius used the Stone to help him. When he died, Stilicho got rid of it because he knew it could be used against him. So, what the hell is it?”

  “For thousands of years,” Rafael said, “people without the benefit of science had no idea why people who worked with mercury went mad. They only knew the result. Whatever is in that box was beyond their ability to describe. Between the five factions, we’ve come to believe—”

  “Five factions?” I asked.

  “Yes, the Brotherhood—” he nodded at Peng “—the Knights; my group, the Keepers; and two others, who we believe are dormant. As I was saying, the few scholars who’ve researched the Stones have formed some ideas. The primary concept is that they were large fragments of a meteorite. Just as we believe the building blocks of life came to Earth on a meteorite, many believe the Stones—”

  “Wait a second,” Jenny interrupted. “Did you say ‘stones’ plural?”