The Joshua Files - a complete box set: Books 1-5 of the young adult sci-fi adventure series plus techno-thriller prequel

by M. G. Harris

  “The CIA.”

  “What now?”

  “The CIA,” she repeats, “NASA, ‘Majestic’, or whatever their latest name is. The government agency that does all the UFO cover-ups. The Area 51 people. You know what, Josh, I think you haven’t been thinking big enough. This could be really, really huge!”

  I thought I was getting paranoid, thinking about government conspiracies. But it’s beginning to make sense. There’s a long history of UFO sightings in Mexico. Mum, of course, goes along with the old chestnut, “Mexican people are a fanciful bunch.” And hadn’t Montoyo written to Dad, Web searches and emails are routinely monitored by organizations whose interest in the I* Code* might surprise you?

  The CIA!

  “They could track emails,” I say, almost to myself.

  “They could.”

  “Maybe they read my email to Montoyo?”

  “Who’s Montoyo?”

  I look at Ollie for a few seconds, wondering. She’s looking at me, her expression eager. Should I tell her? I can feel it all bubbling up inside me. It feels so good to actually talk to someone about this. Now that I’ve started, I don’t want to stop.

  So, I fill Ollie in on the emails I’ve found between my dad, Carlos Montoyo and that Peabody Museum guy, Martineau. I tell her all about the hunt for the Ix Codex and finish off with my discovery of the Calakmul letter in Dad’s college room. I carry it with me at all times now, still wrapped in its tissue paper. When she sees the manuscript fragment, her eyes widen; she’s impressed.

  “That is so wicked.”

  “I know.”

  “But it’s torn.” Suddenly she looks disappointed.

  “Yeah. The right-hand side of the message is missing. But Mayan writing goes up and down, in columns. So I’ll be able to decipher the first part of the letter at least.”

  “Where do you think the rest is?”

  I frown. “I don’t know . . . I sort of assumed that this is all that Dad found.”

  “Hmm,” she says thoughtfully. “Do you think it is part of the Ix Codex?”

  Dad’s emails to Montoyo and Martineau don’t suggest that. But then, I wouldn’t know what a real Mayan codex looked like.

  “Not sure,” I tell her. “Maybe it’s about the codex. Where to find it, perhaps.”

  She asks, “What’s Montoyo’s story?”

  “He seemed to know all about this Ix Codex,” I say. “Told Dad that people had disappeared looking for it. Funny really, because I’ve read lots of stuff about Mayan archaeology since this thing started. And I’ve never heard a single mention of the Ix Codex.”

  “That is weird. So how did Montoyo hear about it?”

  I pause, thinking. “No idea. And he asked to meet my dad. I emailed Montoyo to ask if he ever actually did.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Never replied.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that he might be the one who really killed your father?”

  “Of course,” I lie. OK, maybe I’d had a background-level suspicion. Ollie’s questioning is crystallizing all sorts of ideas I’d put out to dry.

  She warms to her theory. “He knew your dad was on to the codex. So he pretends to help him. Then he meets up with your dad, gets rid of him.”

  “And this guy they’ve framed for murdering my dad?”

  “That is a bit more tricky,” she agrees eventually. “The CIA could frame a person for murder. And they could have your house burgled.”

  “So you really think it’s the CIA, then?”

  “I don’t know, Josh. I’m just trying out some theories here. Isn’t that what detectives do?”

  I haven’t thought of it that way. The main thing, for me, is to prove to Mum that Dad wasn’t murdered for messing around with another woman. And to prove it to myself.

  The codex thing has me intrigued, definitely. My father was looking for it. Now I seem to be picking up on the trail. There’s a connection with his disappearance – I just know it. And something else, something weird I can’t quite put my finger on. It feels pretty thrilling to be following in my father’s footsteps. Thrilling – and a little dangerous.

  “You know what you have to do?” says Ollie. “Decipher that inscription. Maybe even find the codex. I could help you. You up for that? We’ll be like Mulder and Scully.”

  I grin. “If you’re Scully and I’m Mulder, then shouldn’t you be the sceptical one?”

  “What’s the difference? In the end they were both believers.”

  Ollie’s theories spark one of my own. Maybe the woman in Chetumal has something to do with Dad’s search for the codex? It would explain why Dad had spent so much time with her. She might know something about the codex. Maybe framing her husband was their way of keeping her quiet?

  No two ways about it; we have to talk to Chetumal Lady.

  I ask, “Are you a university student?”

  Ollie laughs. “Not yet! I’m in the lower sixth at St Margaret’s.”

  I know the school. Some of those girls have modelling contracts. It isn’t, after all, so surprising that Ollie seems so glamorous. I’m used to a more everyday type of girl.

  “So you really think we should try to find this codex, hey? Assuming it’s still out there.”

  Ollie’s smile is a thing to behold. “It’d be amazing.”

  “Seriously, though. It sounds dangerous.”

  “Aren’t you even a bit curious?”

  “Me? Sure, but I’ve been warned off.”

  “Don’t you want to get back at the people who killed your dad?”

  “By finding the codex?”

  “Yes,” she says. “By beating them at their own game.”

  Ollie’s blue eyes shine with excitement.

  I don’t know how much of what Ollie has said I actually believe, but her offer is tempting. All I know is that if this codex is still out there, other people will want it. And the codex will buy all sorts of things. Including the answer to the question, Who killed my dad?

  If I had the codex, they’d have to negotiate with me.

  “Well, to be honest,” I say, “I could use the help.”

  That’s how we team up. All because of Ollie’s powers of deduction.

  I’ve never met anyone like her. She. Is. Amazing.

  BLOG ENTRY: DECIPHERMENT!

  There are a couple of reasons for today’s blog entry. It’s a secret record that I daren’t leave on paper, or on the hard drive of any computer I’m known to access.

  But no one knows about the blog. I haven’t even told TopShopPrincess/Ollie that I’ve started the blog again. I’m kind of embarrassed about what I might write about her.

  Jeeeez. Ollie! What a turnaround. I stopped being angry with her about ten seconds after she apologized. Thing is, I’d always kind of thought of her as a slightly weird, kooky type of girl. She’s anything but that. She looks like a goddess, with the brain of an uber-geek.

  Ollie and I couldn’t work together at Summertown Library – we were getting too many beady looks and warnings to be quiet. Tyler, an old mate from capoeira, owed me a favour. I turned up on his doorstep with Ollie and told him, “Debt collection time. I need you to let me use your computer for the rest of the night.”

  I needn’t have said anything. With Ollie in tow, he’d have given his living room over to us, even if there was a big match on TV. When he offered to help out with the decipherment, we accepted. I figured there was safety in numbers: the more of us who knew, the harder it would be for Them to silence us.

  Them. Now I’m really talking like a conspiracy buff.

  We cracked open the drinks and the Pringles, put Batman Begins on the DVD as a decoy for Tyler’s parents. Then we started on the inscription.

  I quickly showed the other two what I knew about reading Mayan hieroglyphs. Mayan inscriptions were written in a grid format. According to the how-to book, the first glyphs give the date of the document. Then the writing proceeded in a two-column grid that could be labelled in
reading order: A2, B2, A3, B3, A4, B4, etc. until the end of the page. Then it continued in the next two columns: C2, D2, C3, D3, etc.

  We started with the easiest bit – the date. Mayan documents always start with the date. My dad taught me to read Mayan dates years ago, to stop me from whining with boredom. I still remember how, but I can’t do it without a dictionary.

  In Mayan, the date was 9.11.0.4.8 16 Pax 9 Lamat.

  In English, that translates to 8 Jan 653 AD.

  This letter was written in the seventh century!

  Then we got started on the main part of the letter. We each took one glyph apart at a time. First we’d look up the whole glyph in case we got lucky. Sometimes a whole glyph can mean something – like the name of a place.

  When we’d solved as many of those as possible, our eyes were getting blurry from looking at all the different glyphs. We took a little break.

  By then we knew the inscription included the words Cancuen, Yuknoom Ch’een, Calakmul, Bakab, Itzamna, servant, sacred, book, Ix, and “it will occur”.

  Then came the really tough part. We crunched through the rest of the glyphs syllable by syllable. When we thought we had a possible solution, we’d search for the word on the Web, find out all we could about it. That’s how we made sense of the translation.

  Six hours later we were still at it. We ordered pizza, kept going. It it was like each one of us was daring the others to be the ones to wimp out. I kept asking, “Shall we stop now, go to bed?” but they’d go, “No way, we’re almost there!”

  And as the dawn light filtered through the blinds, we had the whole thing deciphered.

  K’inich K’ane Ajk of Cancuen writes to Lord Yuknoom Ch’een of

  Calakmul

  I am your servant

  From Chechan Naab he emerged, from the Great Temple of the Cross

  The Bakab was defeated

  This sacred Book of Ix speaks of the end of days

  13.0.0.0.0 it is written in the Sacred Books of Itzamna

  It will occur

  I stare at the inscription for a few seconds and let out a slow, “Wow.”

  Tyler says, “What does it mean – ‘end of days’? Is that like. . .?”

  “. . . the end of the world?” I say. “Yeah. My dad told me about all that years ago. The Mayan calendar ends on the date 13.0.0.0.0 – Thirteen Baktun.”

  Tyler stares, expectant. “Um . . . when’s that, then? In our calendar, I mean.”

  I try to sound calm. “Well . . . it’s pretty soon, actually.”

  “When?”

  “The twenty-second of December, 2012.”

  Tyler’s mouth opens, as if he’s trying to think of something funny to say. But nothing comes out.

  “People have been trying to work out what that date – Thirteen Baktun – means for ages. No one knows.”

  Tyler stabs a finger at our translation. “This ‘Book of Ix’ seems to know!”

  “Book of Ix – that must mean the Ix Codex,” Ollie says thoughtfully.

  “I can’t see any mention of Ek Naab here. . .” I mutter.

  “Can we talk about this end of the world thing a bit more?” Tyler says, voice rising.

  “It’s not literal,” I say. “Not literally the end of the world. More like the end of an era. That’s what my dad told me.”

  “Good thing you’re so sure about that!” Tyler says. “I’ve never heard of it until now, but it seems pretty worrying to me! I mean – I’ve got plans, you know!”

  I say, “This is about a rare Mayan book – some book that maybe finally explains just what the Mayans meant by ending their calendar in 2012.”

  “Yeah,” Tyler says, emphatically. “And what if it really is about the end of the world?”

  Could it really be? The idea is so far from what I’ve been brought up to believe about the Maya that I can hardly take it in.

  I can’t answer Tyler’s question, so I look again at the Calakmul letter.

  The manuscript consists of two sets of two columns. The final sentence is incomplete.

  Not only are we missing part of the letter, we can’t make sense of the final sentence. The final glyph is a verb, the beginning of a sentence: utom – “it will occur”.

  Everything to the right of that is ripped away. Without the second half, we can’t even make sense of the first. Without it, we’ve no hope of picking up the trail of the codex. And without that second half, my dad wouldn’t either. So if he thought he’d found the codex – he must have hidden the second half of the Calakmul letter somewhere else. But where?

  “There’s that word again,” Ollie says. “Bakab. Wasn’t that in your dream? The one you blogged?”

  “I dreamt Bakabix.”

  “That’s right,” says Tyler. “Bakab, Ix. They’re both in this inscription.”

  The possibility that my dream might have some connection with the inscription hits me like a kick to the stomach. It’s all too weird. For a second, I imagine myself back in the leaf storm of my dream. There’s a flash of memory; a curtain of fragrant smoke behind which a stranger chokes to death.

  I suddenly need to be alone, to think. I manage to say, “I really need to get back now.”

  I drag myself back to Jackie’s just as the paper-round kids are hitting the street. The dream is still with me. It isn’t so much what I actually witnessed in the dream but the feeling of utter foreignness. Nothing about it felt familiar.

  The dream of the misty lakeside straw hut with its cold, unmoving death scene – like nothing I’ve ever seen. It feels otherworldly. Disturbing.

  That date turning up in the Calakmul letter – 22 December, 2012 – and the mention of the “end of days”. Written about in the Book of Ix – the Ix Codex.

  And those words together. Bakab. Ix.

  Summon the Bakab Ix.

  What – or who – is the Bakab Ix?

  Could it really be the guy in my dad’s photo? I’m feeling more and more like I’ve stepped out of reality.

  Later that morning I’m at school for an ICT class. Well, they say “ICT”, but this close to the end of term, it’s pretty freestyle. Most of us just surf the Web. I Google “Bakab”. The Bakab is a figure from Mayan mythology – one of four sons of the Mayan deity Itzamna. Itzamna is one of the top gods as far as Mayan deities go – the bringer of writing and agriculture to the Mayan people. Only the Creator Gods are above Itzamna. In Mayan mythlogy, Itzamna married a goddess named Ixchel. They had four sons, who were named Ix, Cauac, Muluc and Kan. The Bakab Ix must be one of these guys.

  Why would someone want to summon a Mayan god? Is it some weird occulty thing?

  After school I take the bus up to the hospital. I’m hoping to hear that Mum’s coming home this weekend. The attendant tells me how much better she is; they’ve changed her medication; it’s very light now and she’s “more herself again”. He lets me into her room, but she’s asleep. Fine – I’m pretty zoned myself. I lie down for a little nap in the second bed. And I’m out in seconds.

  Sometime later I’m vaguely aware of someone fumbling through my schoolbag. I’m still half asleep and in that state, all I’m thinking is that it’s fine; Mum’s always searching for neglected letters from school. Then there’s a long silence. Mum remains quite still.

  I wake up to find her staring at a photograph in her hand.

  It’s that photo – the one I found in Dad’s office.

  Mum’s tone is bewildered. “Where did you find this?”

  “Dad gave it to me.”

  Sharply she replies, “No, he didn’t.”

  I pause, surprised. “He did.” It’s a small lie, I decide; a detail.

  “He kept that photo on him. He was never without it.”

  “Why?”

  “If he really gave it to you, he’d have told you what it meant to him.”

  I stay quiet. No doubt about it – she’s sounding much better.

  “So you lied to me.” It isn’t a question.

  “I found it in
his college room. I went there to get some books.”

  “Why?”

  “Just . . . cos I wanted to learn about Mayan hieroglyphs.”

  “Why?”

  I groan, fall back on to the bed.

  “Jeez, Mum. Wow, you really are sounding like your old self! Look, it’s to do with the Mayan codex Dad was after. OK?”

  Mum looks puzzled.

  “You do remember me telling you about the codex he was searching for?”

  She says yes. But I’m not convinced.

  I snap, “Come on, Mum, we’ve been through this.” Then I remember where we are. And I’m filled with regret.

  Mum stares at me with a searching expression. “You tell me why you’re so interested in that photo and I’ll tell you what it meant to your dad.”

  “OK. Only. . .” I hesitate. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Why, are you going to lie to me again?”

  “No, it’s just that . . . well, you’re going to think it sounds stupid.”

  “Try me.”

  So I tell Mum about the dream. I tell her everything, with every detail I can remember. Relating it, I feel my spine prickle. And when I come to the end of the dream, I say, “Then he looks at me and he says. . .”

  “‘Summon the Bakab Ix’,” says Mum.

  “How?” I whisper. “How could you know?”

  “Because I’ve heard this before,” Mum says simply. “Your father had the exact same dream. All his life. Since he was a little boy. And he never, never understood it. It obsessed him. Andres researched the myth of the Bakabs. Wrote lots of papers about them. He wasn’t any closer to understanding the dream. Then, about a year ago, his mother wrote to him. The man who raised him, whom he called ‘Papa’, wasn’t his real father. That kind of family secret – it’s not unusual, especially in a Catholic country like Mexico. Young women who got pregnant out of wedlock didn’t broadcast it then, and they still don’t. She married a close family friend and that was that – they forgot about the real father. You certainly didn’t go telling your children that they were illegitimate.