David Morrell - Assumed Identity

by Assumed Identity(lit)

  All these years later, without ever having set foot on a Mayan ruin, without ever having climbed a pyramid, without ever having stared face-to-face at the hook-nosed, high-cheeked, slope-browed visages of the Maya in the hieroglyphs, he was one of the top five Mayan epigraphers in the world (perhaps the top of the top, if he believed his wife's flattery), and soon - not tonight, of course, but tomorrow perhaps or certainly the day after - he'd have managed yet another flight, this one to a primitive airstrip, and have accomplished the difficult journey through the jungle to Tikal, to his life's preoccupation, to the center of his world, to the ruins.

  To the hieroglyphs.

  His heartbeat increased as the jet touched down. The sun was lower behind the western mountains. The darkness thickened, pierced by the glint of lights from the airport's terminal. Nervous with anticipation, Bartenev unbuckled his seat belt, picked up his briefcase, and followed his wife and other passengers along the aisle. A frustrating minute passed, seeming to take much longer, before the aircraft's hatch was opened. He squinted past the passengers ahead of him and saw the murky silhouettes of buildings. As he and his wife descended stairs to the airport's tarmac, he breathed the thin, dry, cool, mountain air and felt his body tense with excitement.

  The moment he entered the terminal, however, he saw several uniformed, government officials waiting for him, and he knew that something was wrong. They were somber, pensive, brooding. Bartenev feared that his premonition had been justified, that he was about to be refused permission to enter the country.

  Instead a flustered, thin-lipped man in a dark suit stepped away from them, nervously approaching. 'Professor Bartenev?'

  'Yes.'

  They spoke in Spanish. Bartenev's compulsive interest in Guatemala and the Mayan ruins throughout Mesoamerica had prompted him to acquire a facility in the local language since much of the scholarship being done on the hieroglyphs was published in Spanish.

  'My name is Hector Gonzales. From the National Archaeological Museum here.'

  'Yes, I've received your letters.' As they shook hands, Bartenev couldn't help noticing how Gonzales guided him toward the government officials. 'This is my wife, Elana.'

  'I'm very pleased to meet you, Mrs Bartenev. If you'll please come through this door...'

  Abruptly Bartenev noticed stern soldiers holding automatic rifles. He cringed, reminded of Leningrad during the worst of the Cold War. 'Is something wrong? Is there something you haven't told me, something I should know?'

  'Nothing,' Gonzales said too quickly. 'A problem with your accommodations. A scheduling difficulty. Nothing serious. Come this way. Through this door and down this hallway. Hurry, or we'll be late.'

  'Late?' Bartenev shook his head as he and his wife were rushed along the corridor. 'Late for what? And our luggage? What about-?'

  'It's being taken care of. Your luggage will be brought to your hotel. You don't need to go through Immigration and Customs.'

  They passed through another door, into the night, onto a parking lot, where a jeep filled with armed soldiers waited in front of a black limousine behind which there was another jeep filled with armed soldiers.

  'I demand to know what is going on,' Bartenev said. 'In your letters, you claimed that I would feel welcome here. Instead, I feel like a prisoner.'

  'Professor Bartenev, you must understand that Guatemala is a troubled country. There is always much political uneasiness here. These soldiers are for your protection.'

  'Why would I need-?'

  'Please get in the car, and we can discuss it.'

  The moment an escort shut the door on Bartenev, his wife, Gonzales, and two government officials, Bartenev again demanded, 'Why would I need protection?'

  The limousine, flanked by the jeeps, sped away.

  'As I told you, politics. For many years, Guatemala has been ruled by right-wing extremists.' Gonzales glanced uneasily at the government officials, as if he suspected that they would not approve of his vocabulary. 'Recently moderates have come into power. The new government is the reason that your country now is permitted to have diplomatic relations with ours. It also explains why you were invited here. A visit from a Russian academician emphasizes the good will that the Guatemalan government wants with your country. You were an ideal man to invite because you are not a politician and because your expertise relates to Guatemalan history.'

  'The way you speak.' Bartenev hesitated. 'It makes me think you work less for the National Archaeological Museum than you do for the government. What is the name of the dynasty that ruled Tikal?'

  Gonzales didn't answer.

  'In what century did Tikal reach its zenith of power?'

  Gonzales didn't answer.

  Bartenev scoffed.

  'You are in danger,' Gonzales said.

  'What?'

  'The right-wing extremists strongly disapprove of your visit,' Gonzales explained tensely. 'Despite the collapse of Communism in Russia, these extremists see your visit as the beginning of a corrupting influence that will make this country Marxist. The previous government used death squads to enforce its rule. Those death squads are still in existence. There have been threats against your life.'

  Bartenev stared, despair spreading through him. His wife asked what Gonzales was saying to him. Grateful that she didn't understand Spanish, Bartenev told her that someone had forgotten to make a reservation for them at the hotel, that their host was embarrassed about the oversight, and that the mistake was being corrected.

  He scowled at Gonzales. 'What are you saying to me? That I have to leave? I refuse. Oh, I will send my wife to safety. But I did not come all this way only to leave before I see my dream. I'm too old. I will probably not have this chance again. And I'm too close. I will go the rest of the way.'

  'You are not being asked to leave,' Gonzales said. 'That would be almost as ruinous a political act as if someone attempted to kill you.'

  Bartenev felt blood drain from his face.

  Gonzales said, 'But we must be extremely careful. Cautious. We are asking you not to go out in public in the city. Your hotel will be guarded. We will transport you to Tikal as quickly as possible. And then we request that after a prudent length of time - a day, or at the most two - you feign illness and return to your home.'

  'A day?' Bartenev had difficulty breathing. 'Perhaps two? So little time after so many years of waiting for...'

  'Professor Bartenev, we have to deal with political realities.'

  Politics, Bartenev thought, and wanted to curse. But like Gonzales, he was accustomed to dealing with such obscene realities, and he analyzed the problem with desperate speed. He was out of Russia, free to go anywhere - that was the important factor. There were numerous other major Mayan ruins. Palenque in Mexico, for example. He'd always been fond of photographs of it. It wasn't Tikal. It didn't have the emotional and professional attraction that Tikal had for him, but it was accessible. His wife could accompany him there. They would be safe there. If the Guatemalan government refused to pay for further expenses, that wouldn't matter - because Bartenev had a secret source of funds about which he hadn't told even his wife.

  Indeed secrecy had been part of the business arrangement when the well-dressed, fair-haired American had arrived at Bartenev's office at St Petersburg State University. The American had shown him several photographs of Mayan glyphs. He had asked in perfect Russian how much Bartenev would charge to translate the glyphs and keep the assignment confidential. 'If the glyphs are interesting, I won't charge anything,' Bartenev had answered, impressed by the foreigner's command of the language. But the American had insisted on paying. In fact, his fee had been astonishingly generous: fifty-thousand dollars. 'To ensure your silence,' the American had said. 'I've converted some of it to rubles.' He gave Bartenev the equivalent of ten thousand dollars in Russian currency. The remainder, he explained, would be placed in a Swiss bank account. Perhaps one day Bartenev would be free to travel, in which case the money could easily be obtained.

  Failin
g that, couriers could be arranged to transport prudent amounts into St Petersburg for him, amounts that wouldn't be so large that the authorities would ask questions about their source. Since that visit, the American had come two more times, in each case with more photographs of Mayan glyphs and with the same fee. Until now, the money had not been as important to Bartenev as the fascinating, although puzzling message (like a riddle within a code) that the glyphs revealed.

  But now the money was very important, and Bartenev bitterly meant to get full value from it.

  'Yes,' he told Gonzales. 'Political realities. I will leave whenever you want, whenever I have served your purpose.'

  Gonzales seemed to relax. But only for a moment. Abruptly the limousine arrived at a hotel, the steel-and-glass modern design of which was jarringly unHispanic. The soldiers escorted Bartenev and his wife quickly through the lobby, into an elevator, and to the twelfth floor. Gonzales came with them as a government official spoke to a clerk at the check-in desk.

  The phone was ringing as Gonzales unlocked the door, turned on a light, and guided Bartenev and his wife into the suite. Actually there were two phones, one on a table next to a sofa, the other on a bar.

  Gonzales locked the door behind them. The phone kept ringing. As Bartenev stepped toward the one by the sofa, Gonzales said, 'No, let me answer it.' He chose the closer phone, the one on the bar. 'Hello.' He turned on a lamp. 'Why do you wish to speak with him?' He stared at Bartenev. 'Just a moment.' He placed a hand over the telephone's mouthpiece. 'It's a man who claims to be a journalist. Perhaps it would be wise to give an interview. Good public relations. I'll listen on this phone while you use that one.'

  Bartenev pivoted toward the phone on the table beside the sofa. 'Hello,' he said, casting a shadow against the window.

  'Go to hell, you Goddamned Russian.'

  As the window shattered inward, Bartenev's wife screamed. Bartenev did not. The bullet that struck his skull and mushroomed within it killed him instantly. The bullet burst out the back of his head, spraying blood across the flying glass.

  3

  Houston, Texas.

  The space shuttle, Atlantis, was on the second day of its current mission. a no-problem launch, an all-systems-go performance so far. and Albert Delaney felt bored. He wished that something would happen, anything to break his tedious routine. Not that he wanted excitement exactly, because he associated that word with a crisis. The last thing NASA needed was more foul-ups and bad publicity, and at all costs, another Challenger disaster had to be avoided. One more like that and NASA would probably be out of business, which meant that Albert Delaney would be out of a job, and Albert Delaney preferred boredom any day to being unemployed. Still, if anybody had told him when he'd been accepted by NASA that his enthusiasm for what he assumed would be a glamorous career would all too quickly change to tedium, he'd have been incredulous. The trouble was that NASA prechecked the details of a mission so often, testing and retesting, going over every variable, trying to anticipate every contingency that by the time the mission occurred, it was anticlimactic. No, Albert Delaney didn't want excitement, but he certainly wouldn't have minded an occasional positive surprise.

  A man of medium height and weight, with average features, in that cusp of life where he'd stopped being young but wasn't yet middle-aged, he'd noticed that more and more he'd been feeling dissatisfied, unfulfilled. His existence was ordinary. Predictable. He hadn't yet reached the stage of his syndrome where he was tempted to cheat on his wife. Nonetheless he was afraid that what Thoreau had called 'quiet desperation' might drive him to do something stupid and get more excitement than he'd bargained for by ruining his marriage. Still, if he didn't find some purpose, something to interest him, he didn't know if he could rely on his common sense.

  Part of his problem, Albert Delaney decided, was that his office was at the periphery of NASA headquarters. Away from the mission-control center, he didn't have the sense of accomplishment and nervous energy that he imagined everyone felt there. Plus, even he had to admit that being an expert in cartography, geography, and meteorology (maps, land, and weather, as he sometimes put it bluntly) seemed awfully dull compared to space exploration. It wasn't as if he got the chance to examine photographs of newly discovered rings around Saturn or moons near Jupiter or active volcanoes on Venus. No, what he got to do was look at photographs of areas on earth, sections that he'd looked at dozens of times before.

  It didn't help that the conclusions of the research he was doing had already been determined. Did photographs from space show that the alarming haze around the earth was becoming worse? Did high-altitude images indicate that the South American rain forest continued to dwindle due to slash-and-burn farming practices? Were the oceans becoming so polluted that evidence of the damage could be seen from three hundred miles up? Yes. Yes. Yes. You didn't need to be a rocket scientist to come up with those conclusions. But NASA wanted more than conclusions. It wanted specifics, and even though the photographs that Albert Delaney examined would eventually be sent to other government agencies, it was his job to make the preliminary examination, just in case there was something unique in them so that NASA could get the publicity.

  The shuttle's current mission was to deploy a weather satellite over the Caribbean Sea and perform various weather-related observations and experiments as well as transmit photographs. The photograph currently in front of Delaney showed a portion of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. For several years, a blight had been attacking the palm trees in that area, and one of Delaney's jobs was to determine how far the blight had spread, something that could easily be seen in the photographs since the sick, denuded trees created a distinct, bleak pattern. The theory was that substantial loss of vegetation in the Yucatan would disturb the oxygen,'carbon-dioxide ratio in the area and affect weather patterns just as the disappearance of Brazil's rain forest did. By measuring the area of blight and factoring that information with temperature and wind variations in the Caribbean, it might be possible to predict the creation of tropical storms and the direction of hurricanes.

  The blight had definitely spread much farther than photographs of the Yucatan taken last year indicated. Delaney placed a transparent, scale-model map over the photograph, aligned topographical features, recorded measurements, and continued to another photograph. Perhaps it was his need for a break in his routine. Perhaps it was his need to be surprised. For whatever reason, he found that he was examining the photographs far more diligently than usual, paying attention to matters that weren't related to the palm-tree blight.

  Abruptly something troubled him, a subconsciously noticed detail, a sense that something was out of place. He set down the photograph he was examining and went back to the one he'd just finished looking at. Frowning, he concentrated. Yes, he thought. There. At once he felt a stimulating flow of adrenaline, a warming in his stomach. That small area in the bottom left corner of the photograph. Those shadows among the denuded palm trees. What were those shadows doing there?

  The shadows formed almost perfect triangles and squares. But triangles and squares did not exist in nature. More, those shadows could be made only by sunlight that struck and was blocked by objects above the ground. Large objects. Tall objects. Normally, shadows didn't pose a mystery. Hills made them all the time. But these shadows were in the Yucatan's northern lowlands. The descriptive name said it all. Lowlands. There weren't any hills in that region. Even if there were, the shadows they cast would have been amorphous. But these were symmetrical. And they occupied a comparatively wide area. Delaney made quick calculations. Thirty square kilometers? In the middle of an otherwise dramatically flat section of the Yucatan rain forest? What the hell was going on?

  4

  'For our final report, something old discovered by something new. Computer-enhanced photographs received from the space shuttle, Atlantis, have revealed what appears to be a large area of unsuspected Mayan ruins in a remote section of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. The rain forest in that region is so dense an
d inaccessible that it could take months before a preliminary assessment of the ruins can be completed, but a spokesperson for the Mexican government indicated that the apparent scope of the ruins suggests that they have the potential to rival the pyramids, palaces, and temples at legendary Chichen Itza. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so we move on - into the past. This is Dan Rather. For CBS news, good evening.'

  5

  The Virgin Islands.

  The visitor noted that several more artifacts - figurines, ceramics, and masks - had been added to the collection. All were authentic, expensive, and illegally obtained examples of ancient Mayan craftsmanship. 'The woman disappeared.'

  'What?' The old man, who'd been distracted as he attached an intravenous line to a needle in his arm, snapped his head up. 'Disappeared? You assured me that wasn't possible.'

  'I believed it wasn't,' the fair-haired man said. His tone was somber. 'She was being paid so well and treated so lavishly that I thought it highly unlikely she would want to leave.'