The Aztec Heresy

by Paul Christopher

  ‘‘We checked with remote-sensing arrays and with the geophysical people at both my own university in Ohio and with the people at NASA. According to available satellite data there are a number of anomalies in the area— remains of old roadways and trails, thin spots in vegetation, regular shapes including one that might be a temple site, all of which add up to the probability that there’s something man-made out there in the jungle.’’

  Garza turned away for a minute and began digging around in his knapsack. Behind her Billy was sitting up.

  ‘‘Wha’ hap’ned?’’ he asked froggily. He cleared his throat and tried again. ‘‘What happened?’’

  ‘‘You were bitten by an ant.’’

  ‘‘One ant?’’

  ‘‘Just one.’’

  ‘‘Good Lord!’’

  ‘‘You were lucky. The one that bit you had a few million friends.’’

  ‘‘Miss Ryan?’’

  Finn turned back to Garza. ‘‘Yes?’’

  The colonel handed her a stiff piece of photographic paper. There was a multicolored image on it with one glowing yellow spot in the center, a vague oblong.

  ‘‘It may surprise you to know that Mexico operates its own satellite fleet. This is a blowup of the sector in question taken by Satmex Seven. The satellite was only launched three months ago, which is why we didn’t notice it before.’’

  Finn saw from the coordinates that the oblong glow was within a thousand yards of her objective, perhaps even closer.

  ‘‘What is it?’’

  ‘‘A radiographic satellite image of the GPS coordinates you gave to the museum people.’’

  ‘‘What’s the hot spot?’’

  ‘‘Plutonium-239, very small traces.’’

  ‘‘Could it be natural?’’

  ‘‘Plutonium-239 does not exist in nature.’’

  ‘‘Which means that what you see in that photograph is man-made.’’

  ‘‘Bloody hell!’’ Billy murmured, getting weakly to his feet. ‘‘A bomb?’’

  ‘‘Indeed so, Your Lordship. A hydrogen bomb.’’

  ‘‘Crikey!’’ Billy whispered. He staggered forward and looked at the picture over Finn’s shoulder.

  ‘‘That’s impossible,’’ said Finn.

  ‘‘I’m afraid it’s quite possible,’’ said Garza.

  ‘‘Explain.’’

  ‘‘On Monday, December 24, 1962, in the early-morning hours a B-47 bomber was flying reconnaissance patterns on the edge of Cuban airspace. This was only two months after the Cuban missile crisis, you must remember. No one remembers it today, but there was a large tropical storm front over the Yucatán that night.’’

  ‘‘The aircraft went down?’’ Finn asked.

  ‘‘Presumably into the gulf. Our American friends didn’t see fit to tell their allies to the south about it.’’

  ‘‘The plane was carrying nuclear weapons?’’ Billy asked.

  ‘‘Yes. Two B-43 MOD-1 hydrogen bombs.’’

  ‘‘Our government didn’t ask for Mexico’s help?’’ asked Finn.

  ‘‘Relations were somewhat strained back then. As now, Mexico supported the United States in matters of foreign policy but at the same time refused to break off diplomatic relations with Castro. We weren’t to be trusted, certainly not with information like that.’’

  ‘‘So the U.S. government chose to assume that the plane crashed into the sea?’’ Billy asked.

  ‘‘It would seem so. They probably sent a few U-2 flights over the area but clearly they found nothing.’’ He shrugged. ‘‘The jungle is very jealous of her secrets. She does not give them up easily.’’

  ‘‘So why not simply inform them now?’’ Finn asked.

  ‘‘Relations are not much better today than they were in 1962. All this talk of illegal immigrants, drugs. It would be a terrible embarrassment to both countries. The United States interfering with Mexico, Mexico keeping vital information from America. There is also another possibility.’’ Garza paused. ‘‘A much more dangerous one.’’

  ‘‘Such as?’’ Finn said.

  ‘‘We are well aware that Cuba has been trading with the drug cartels for a very long time. Drugs are a source of hard currency for them. Revolutions cost money and they can’t be paid for in bananas or sugarcane. What if the Soviet Union had brought atomic warheads into Cuba in 1962 and simply removed them to the Yucatán for safekeeping while Kennedy and Khrushchev argued? If such warheads were discovered and were found to be of Soviet origin, it would be a disaster. It might even provide the stimulus for an American invasion of Cuba.

  ‘‘Kennedy promised that would never happen, didn’t he? Publicly?’’ Billy interrupted.

  Garza smiled coldly. ‘‘He did. He was also assassinated within a year. Kennedy is long dead. The present administration does not feel bound to honor promises made more than forty years ago. They seem not to honor promises made five minutes ago. It is a pragmatic age we live in. Money is power. We would very much like not to be put in the middle of this problem.’’

  ‘‘So what do you intend to do?’’ Finn asked.

  ‘‘Find them, dispose of them. If there are no bombs there is no problem.’’

  ‘‘What’s to stop you?’’

  ‘‘A man named Angel Guzman.’’

  21

  Angel Guzman sat behind the desk in the headquarters building of his jungle camp smoking a cigar and listening to the rattle of rain on the tin roof over his head. The plump little madman sipped brandy from his personal Starbucks coffee mug and eyed the young, handsome figure of Harrison Noble tied to the plain kitchen chair next to the woodstove. The stove had been banked with kindling and the surface of the cast iron was steaming as errant drops of rain leaking from the roof hissed and danced on the hot metal. Harrison Noble was naked. There were circular boils on most areas of his exposed skin where Angel Guzman had applied the hot tip of his cigar.

  Harrison Noble had been crying. He had also been screaming for most of the night. It was early morning now. Angel Guzman wasn’t trying to extract information from the young man; he knew everything worth knowing. He was simply torturing him as an exercise in power. It was the kind of thing his people expected of him. He was known for inflicting unceasing pain on anyone who became his enemy. Angel Guzman was not the most astute politician in the world, but he knew that power not exercised was not power at all and could very well be considered its opposite: weakness.

  Like most megalomaniac psychotics, Angel Guzman was not a man who saw his life as a sequence of well-ordered events based on a series of logical steps, but rather as a series of brilliantly clear images of himself in various situations.

  As a child he’d regularly seen himself as Christ, sitting astride a donkey, glowing faintly as he rode through his village, just like the brightly colored picture in his Sunday school book. This had nothing at all to do with the other things the priest had him do in the little church vestry after mass, but the image remained: he was the savior of his village. Other images included riding in a limousine up to the Imperial Palace in Mexico City in the uniform of a general, pictures of himself with various movie stars, sipping champagne on a private jet, and one, a special favorite, of himself greeting the Pope and the Pope kissing his ring rather than the other way around. Right now, watching Harrison Noble squirming in the kitchen chair on the other sides of the room, Guzman was seeing himself in the Oval Office of the White House enjoying a photo opportunity with the president. It seemed very realistic.

  ‘‘Why is it,’’ said the man with the little pot-belly, ‘‘that Americans think they are smarter than anyone they perceive as speaking with an accent?’’

  ‘‘What?’’ the younger Noble asked numbly.

  ‘‘Your president cannot pronounce the name of the country he has invaded, but he thinks Mexicans are lesser beings because they do not speak English well. You are very arrogant, you Americans. There were people speaking Spanish when your ancestors were living in thatc
h-roofed huts on the coast of Ireland.’’

  ‘‘Don’t understand,’’ muttered Harrison Noble.

  ‘‘No, of course you don’t. You thought you and your hired thugs could come into my jungle, steal what you wanted and perhaps kill me in the process, isn’t that right.’’

  ‘‘This wasn’t what we agreed,’’ said Noble.

  ‘‘No,’’ said Guzman, smiling.

  ‘‘You broke your word.’’

  ‘‘What did you expect?’’ Guzman laughed. ‘‘After all, I am nothing but a peasant living in the jungle, not an honorable upstanding man like James Jonas Noble.’’

  ‘‘We had a deal.’’

  ‘‘So we did. Your father’s company wanted the rights to any pharmaceutical plants it discovered in the sector of the Yucatán that I control. In return I was to get a portion of the profits. An equitable arrangement. On the surface.’’

  ‘‘You agreed,’’ croaked Harrison Noble.

  ‘‘I wasn’t aware at the time that you already knew what you were looking for, nor how valuable it was. You told me Noble Pharmaceuticals was looking for an over-the-counter medication for constipation. Another one of America’s endless elixirs to move their bowels. What is this new drug your father wishes to bring to market next year?’’

  ‘‘Celatropamine.’’

  ‘‘A drug that allows you to eat as much as you want and still lose weight, correct?’’

  ‘‘Yes.’’

  ‘‘A gold mine. Better than Viagra.’’

  ‘‘Yes.’’

  ‘‘And?’’

  ‘‘With the extract from your plant it becomes incredibly addictive.’’

  ‘‘So the gold mine becomes a diamond mine.’’

  ‘‘Yes.’’

  ‘‘But you didn’t tell me this. You also did not tell me that the same additive to my cocaine does the same thing, increases its addictiveness a thousand times. You wanted to keep it all to yourselves.’’

  ‘‘You know there is a limited supply until we synthesize it. There are only the plants close to the temple.’’

  ‘‘The ones that have grown through many generations, mutating on top of my hydrogen bombs.’’

  ‘‘We don’t care about the bombs. Just the plants.’’

  ‘‘So you come to steal them.’’ Guzman sighed. He got up from his desk and went out onto the wide veranda of the headquarters building.

  ‘‘Fetch the prisoner,’’ he ordered the guard on duty. The man disappeared into the tin-roofed hut and dragged out Harrison Noble, still naked and tied to his chair.

  In the sodden courtyard puddles had formed in the mud at the base of a T-shaped scaffold that had been hammered deeply into the soil. A man hung upside down from each jutting arm of the scaffold.

  Two of the Blackhawk soldiers had been picked off in the initial ambush, but Tibor Cherka, the leader, and his second in command, a man named Bostick, had managed to survive. Like Harrison Noble they had been stripped of their clothes. They had been hanging upside down in the rain all night. Their hands were chained together and their heads hung a foot or so from the mud.

  The rain fell in steady lines down the slanted veranda roof with a continuous sloshing sound. The two Blackhawk men were far beyond making any noise at all, although both were fully conscious.

  ‘‘So foolish,’’ said Angel Guzman. ‘‘Thinking that you could get away with it using only four men. Now you have left me with this mess to deal with.’’

  ‘‘We just wanted the plants,’’ moaned Harrison Noble, staring at the two soaking men on the scaffolds.

  ‘‘To think that the simple yellow allamanda would prove so valuable. Allamanda cathartica. It grows like a weed in Mexico, and it will make me rich.’’

  ‘‘You won’t be able to synthesize it yourself. You need us to refine it.’’

  ‘‘I think our Cuban friends could do the job quite well. Imagine what access to this celatropamine drug could do to their economy.’’

  ‘‘You made a deal with my father!’’

  ‘‘You made a deal with the devil,’’ answered Guzman.

  The fat little drug lord with the thinning hair walked over to where the guard was standing beside Harrison Noble’s chair and slid the machete out of the man’s green canvas sheath. The machete was nothing special. It was stained, nicked, and its handle wrapped with black tape. It was two feet long and very sharp.

  Without another word or any sort of hesitation, Angel Guzman hefted the machete in his hand, walked down the veranda steps, and crossed the courtyard in the rain. He stopped in front of the T-shaped scaffold and swept the blade around sharply, striking at Tibor Cherka’s exposed waistline with a practiced back-hand like a tennis player. The first strike sliced through flesh to the spine. The second cut took out the spine itself and continued deeper. The third cut, this one a forehand from the opposite side, completely severed Cherka’s torso from the rest of his dangling body.

  The torso, still obviously alive, writhed in the mud, Cherka’s mouth opening and closing but making no sound. His organs spilled out as he twisted and turned, eyes bulging.

  Harrison Noble, although he hadn’t eaten in some time, vomited into his lap.

  Ignoring the thing twisting in the mud, Guzman climbed back up the veranda steps, rinsed the machete off in the overflow from the tin roof, and slid the weapon back into the guard’s sheath. The guard showed no particular expression. Guzman crossed to Harrison Noble and patted him lightly on the shoulder.

  ‘‘We have done experiments. Hung that way for so long, all the blood rushes to the brain. He will live for six or seven minutes, the brain fully functional, trying to figure some way out of his predicament. It can be quite amusing.’’

  ‘‘You’re mad!’’

  ‘‘That’s the least of your problems, Mr. Noble, I assure you. You’re going to have to explain to Daddy why you failed.’’

  ‘‘You’re letting me go?’’

  ‘‘In a while. After I’ve had a little more fun at your expense. And when I do I’m even going to send a sample back with you. The plants of course have been moved by now, as have the bombs themselves, but I’m sure your father and I can come to some arrangement.’’

  Cherka’s torso had slithered closer to the veranda, leaving a greasy trail of entrails behind.

  ‘‘I think he wants to talk to you,’’ said Guzman. ‘‘Shall I give him a hand up the steps?’’

  Harrison Noble threw up again.

  22

  Lord William Pilgrim lay prone in the tall grass at the edge of the jungle clearing and watched silently, holding back a scream of very unlordlylike terror as a gooey reddish white stream of inch-long worms slithered over the back of his hand and headed south, roughly in the direction of his belt line.

  ‘‘I’m going to scream if you don’t mind,’’ he said. ‘‘I’ve had just about enough of this insect stuff.’’

  Garza swept up a handful of the rust-colored creatures and popped them into his mouth. He chewed happily and swallowed.

  ‘‘Dear God!’’ Billy whispered, appalled. Finn, lying beside him on the other side, plucked one of the worms off his wrist and sucked it between her lips.

  Billy gagged.

  ‘‘Maguey worms. Caterpillars, actually,’’ explained Finn, smiling. ‘‘They’re the worms you find in the bottom of bottles of Mescal.’’

  ‘‘Much better fried in butter with a little garlic, ’’ added Garza. ‘‘Lots of protein as well.’’

  ‘‘Jij eet smegmakaas!’’ muttered Guido, who’d watched the whole procedure, eyes wide.

  ‘‘You’re both wussies,’’ Finn said and grinned.

  ‘‘Can anyone explain why we’re all lying here in the bushes eating bugs and whispering? ’’ Eli Santoro asked. He reached under his eye patch with his index finger and scratched.

  ‘‘Because we’re being careful,’’ answered Garza, the Mexican spy. He squirmed a little, dug into the backpack beside him and took out
a very sophisticated pair of Steiner military binoculars. He scanned the clearing for a long moment and then handed the compact device to Finn. She stared through the ultra-clear lenses, concentrating on what at first glance appeared to be a low hill at the far side of the jungle clearing. The hill was four-sided with a tall, almost chimney-like protrusion just off center. It was covered in undergrowth and was topped by several tall, spreading acacia trees, their thick roots like claws digging into the jungle soil with dark, gnarled fingers.

  ‘‘A temple perhaps?’’ Garza said quietly.

  ‘‘Too small,’’ murmured Finn, scanning the shape. ‘‘Less than fifty feet square.’’

  ‘‘A natural formation?’’ Billy asked.

  ‘‘The jungle here is flat as a tortilla,’’ said Finn. ‘‘Yucatán is basically a single limestone plateau. Anything sticking up like that is sticking up for a reason.’’

  ‘‘A sacrificial altar,’’ Eli Santoro said.

  ‘‘You’ve been watching too many Mel Gibson movies,’’ Garza said. ‘‘The Mayans didn’t spend every last minute cutting people’s hearts out. They had an empire to run, among other things. Commerce. Trade. Agriculture. A whole military subculture.’’

  ‘‘Science,’’ said Finn quietly, focusing the binoculars on the dark scar in the soil directly in front of the mound. ‘‘It’s a miniature coyocan .’’

  ‘‘What is this coyocan?’’ Guido asked, flicking one of the maguey caterpillars off his wrist with a faint shudder.

  ‘‘It’s the Mayan word for snail,’’ explained Finn. ‘‘That thing’s like a chimney. Get close enough and I’ll bet you’ll find what’s left of a spiral staircase inside that tower. An observatory. There’s a massive one at Chichen Itza.’’

  ‘‘Why have such a thing here?’’ Garza asked.

  ‘‘I don’t know,’’ said Finn. ‘‘And why is it so small? As though they were trying to keep it hidden. A secret.’’

  ‘‘Maybe that’s exactly what they intended,’’ answered Garza.