Lost Empire

by Clive Cussler

They were labeled “Flint,” “Crocodile,” and “Flower”:

  “They look like a match to me,” Selma said.

  “Me too,” replied Sam. “Remi, all of these are from the Aztec calendar, correct? It might be useful to see the whole thing.”

  “I have the one Remi downloaded for me,” Selma said. She scrolled around the screen, found the correct file, and double-clicked it:

  “Now, that’s a calendar,” Sam muttered. “How in the hell did they make sense of that?”

  “Patience, I would imagine,” Remi replied. “The symbols we’ve found so far all belong to the month ring. It’s the fourth one from the edge.”

  “No wonder the one in Mexico City’s so big. How big exactly?”

  “Twelve feet in diameter and four feet thick.”

  “It’d have to be that big for anything to stand out. It’s fascinating.”

  “More so when you realize it’s over five hundred years old. Three hundred of those it spent buried under the main square. Workers found it while doing repair work on the cathedral. It’s one of the last vestiges of Aztec culture.”

  The three of them went silent.

  Selma’s cell phone rang. She answered, listened, then said, “We’ll be here. Bring it to the side gate. I’ll have Pete meet you.” She disconnected and told Sam and Remi, “Dobo’s on his way with the bell.”

  “That was fast,” said Remi.

  “Feels like Christmas morning,” Sam replied.

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER Pete Jeffcoat and Dobo came through the workroom’s side door, one pushing and the other pulling a chest-high wheeled enclosure constructed of two-by-fours; hanging inside it was the Shenandoah’s bell. Aside from a few darkened patches, the tarnish and barnacles were gone, swept away by Dobo’s magic. The bronze exterior fairly glowed under the workroom’s halogen pendant lights.

  Standing arms akimbo in his denim coveralls and white T-shirt, Dobo surveyed his handiwork. “Nice, yes?”

  “Beautiful work, Dobo,” said Sam.

  If not for his frequent and easy smiles, Alexandru Dobo would have looked sinister, with his bald pate and thick, drooping mustache. He was, Remi had once observed, a Cossack lost in time.

  “Thank you, my friend.” He clapped Sam on the back. Sam took a steadying step, then one more—away from Dobo. “You see inside?” the Romanian asked. “See inside! Pyotr, help.”

  Dobo and Pete unlatched the bell from its hook, lifted it free, turned it upside down, then returned it, mouth up, to the cage. “Look, look!”

  Sam, Remi, and Selma stepped forward and peered into the bell’s interior. Remi sighed. After a few moments Sam said, “Wish I could say I was surprised.”

  “Me too,” replied Remi.

  Carved haphazardly into the bell’s bronze interior were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of what appeared to be Aztec symbols.

  After a few moments Sam muttered, “All aboard the Blaylock crazy train.”

  SAM AND REMI GATHERED their team around the worktable, and over the next few hours, and a pair of family-sized pies from Sammy’s Wood-fired Pizzas, they mulled over the mystery before them. The crux of the issue, they decided, could be summed up in two questions:

  1. Did Blaylock’s apparent mental instability cast into doubt all they’d found?

  2. Were Rivera and his people on a fool’s quest based on Blaylock’s influence, or on other evidence?

  Clearly Rivera was either searching for something or trying to keep something hidden, something that was probably Aztec in origin.

  Pete Jeffcoat said, “If you’re right about the tourists they murdered, then it seems clear they’re trying to hide something. It’s hard for me to believe they’d do that just because of Blaylock. Wouldn’t they have been asking the same questions about the guy that we are?”

  “Good point,” Sam said.

  “If that’s the case,” Wendy said, “then maybe Blaylock wasn’t insane; maybe he was just eccentric, and there was something to his Aztec obsession.”

  “As well as his fixation on the ship,” Selma added.

  Remi said, “Okay, let’s take that as a given. How and why we don’t know, but Blaylock became obsessed with the Shenandoah, or El Majidi; at some point after that, his mind turned to all things Aztec. Before we go any further, we need to find out when that happened and what caused it.”

  Sam asked Pete and Wendy, “How’re we doing on Miss Cynthia’s letters?”

  “Another hour or so, and we should have them all examined,” Wendy replied. “Another two hours to scan them and have the computer do an optical character recognition search. After that, we’ll be able to easily sort them by date and search by key word.”

  Sam smiled. “Got any big plans tonight?”

  “I guess we do now,” Pete replied.

  ACCUSTOMED TO how her husband’s brain worked, Remi was not surprised to awaken and find him sitting up at the edge of the bed, Apple iPad propped on his knees. The nightstand clock read 4:12 A.M.

  “Lightbulb moment?” she asked.

  “I was thinking about chaos.”

  “Of course you were.”

  “And how most mathematicians don’t believe in it. They know it exists—there’s even chaos theory—but I think secretly they all believe in underlying order. Even if it’s not obvious.”

  “I can buy that.”

  “Then why would Blaylock go to all the trouble of randomly carving Aztec glyphs on the bell’s interior? And why the bell?”

  Remi said, “I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”

  “I’m working through it. Did you read this poem from Blaylock’s journal?”

  “I didn’t know there was one.”

  “I just found it. Pete and Wendy just uploaded it,” Sam said, then recited:

  In my love’s heart I pen my devotion

  On Engai’s gyrare I trust my feet

  From above, the earth turns, my day is halved

  Words of Ancients

  words of Father Algarismo

  “Not bad for a mathematician,” observed Remi.

  “I wonder if he used the bell because it’s durable, unlike paper. I also wonder if he used it because of its shape.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “The first line of his poem—‘In my love’s heart I pen my devotion’—he’s got to be talking about his wife, about Ophelia, which is what he renamed the El Majidi.”

  Remi caught on. “And a ship’s bell could be considered the heart of the ship.”

  “Right. Now, the second line, ‘On Engai’s gyrare I trust my feet.’ In Swahili, Engai is one of the spellings for the Maasai’s version of ‘God,’ and gyrare is Latin for ‘gyre’; it’s a synonym for vortex or spiral.”

  “As in the Fibonacci spiral. God’s pattern in nature.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Blaylock was using the spiral to guide himself. Put the lines together and maybe you’ve got Blaylock inscribing the bell with the source of his devotion—his obsession—and using the Fibonacci spiral as some kind of encoding technique.”

  “And since by the time he made the inscriptions his wife was dead and he’d found the Shenandoah, his ‘devotion’ was something else altogether,” said Remi. “What about the gyre? How exactly would that fit in?”

  “Picture a golden spiral.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now picture it superimposed on the interior of the bell, starting at the crown and spiraling downward and outward toward the mouth.”

  Remi was nodding. “And wherever the spiral intersects a symbol it means . . .” She shrugged. “What?”

  “I don’t know. Something to do with the last three lines of the poem, maybe. I’m still working on that. All I know is that two of the most frequently repeated items in his journal are the Fibonacci spiral and Aztec symbols. If he’s hiding something, they’re probably involved.”

  THEY GOT UP, made a carafe of coffee, and headed down to the workroom. Selma was asleep on a cot in the corner. The overhead ha
logen lights were dimmed. Pete and Wendy sat at the worktable, laptops open, the screens’ glow illuminating their faces.

  “Coffee, guys?” Sam whispered.

  Wendy smiled, shook her head, and nodded toward the collection of Red Bull cans on the table.

  “We’re almost done,” Pete said. “Those Ziploc bags must have done the trick. It’s just a guess, but I’d say the letters have been protected in one way or another for most of their life.”

  “You got them all?” Remi asked.

  Wendy nodded. “Aside from some illegible spots here and there. We’ll have everything uploaded and sorted in a couple hours.”

  “Sam’s got a hunch he wants to play,” Remi said.

  “We’re all ears,” replied Wendy.

  Sam explained his theory. Pete and Wendy considered it for a few moments, then nodded in unison. “Plausible,” Pete said.

  “Ditto,” Wendy added. “Blaylock was a mathematician. Those guys love order within chaos.”

  From across the room Selma’s scratchy voice said, “Buy what?”

  “Go back to sleep,” Remi said.

  “Too late. I’m up. Buy what?”

  She got off the cot and shuffled to the worktable. Remi poured her a cup of coffee and slid the mug down the table. Selma palmed it, took a sip. Sam reexplained his spiral/bell/symbol theory.

  “It’s worth a shot,” Selma agreed. “The crown of the bell would be the likely place to start the spiral, but how do we know how big it is? And you’re assuming it would unravel and end at the bell’s mouth. What if it doesn’t?”

  Sam smiled wearily. “Killjoy.”

  THE GROUP BEGAN BRAINSTORMING. At the top of their list was the question of scale. A Fibonacci spiral could be built to any scale. If Blaylock was in fact using a spiral, he would’ve used a reference size for the first box in the grid. They tossed around ideas for an hour before realizing they were getting nowhere.

  “It could be anything,” Sam said, rubbing his eyes. “A number, a note, a doodle . . .”

  “Or something we haven’t even seen yet,” Remi added. “Something we’ve overlooked.”

  Across the table, an exhausted Pete Jeffcoat laid his head down on the wood and stretched his arms before him. His right hand struck Blaylock’s walking staff, which rolled off the edge and clattered to the floor.

  “Damn!” Pete said. “Sorry.”

  “No problem.” Sam knelt down to retrieve the staff. The bell clapper had torn free of its leather bindings and was hanging by a single thong. Sam picked them up together. He stopped and peered at the head of the staff. He frowned.

  “Sam?” said Remi.

  “I need a flashlight.”

  Wendy pulled out a storage drawer and handed an LED across to Sam, who clicked it on and shone it onto the staff’s head. “It’s hollow,” he muttered. “I need some long-handled tweezers.”

  Wendy retrieved a pair, handed them over.

  Gingerly, Sam inserted the tips of the tweezers into the opening, wriggled them around for a few seconds, then began withdrawing them.

  Grasped between the pincers was a corner of parchment.

  CHAPTER 28

  “OH, SURE,” SAM MUTTERED. “IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN SOMETHING easy. Like a map with a big X on it.”

  Wary of damaging the remainder of the parchment, or anything else that might lie hidden inside Blaylock’s walking staff, Pete and Wendy had taken it into the archive vault for extraction and triage preservation.

  Ten minutes later a digital image of what Sam had grabbed with his tweezers appeared on the workroom’s LCD screen:

  Pete came out of the vault. He said, “We had to reduce it. The map’s actual dimensions are roughly six inches wide by ten long.”

  “What about those notations along the coast?” Sam asked.

  “Once we get the map digitized, Wendy’s going to work her Photoshop magic and try to clean them up. Based on their placement and the capital R suffix, they’re probably river names—in French, by the looks of it. The partial word in the upper left-hand corner—‘runes’—might be something we can work with, too.

  “There’s another notation,” Pete continued. “See the arrow I superimposed?”

  “Yes,” Remi replied.

  “There’s some microwriting overtop that little island. We’re working on that as well.”

  The archive vault door opened, and Wendy emerged carrying a rectangle of parchment sandwiched between two panes of Lexan clear polycarbonate.

  “What’s this?” Remi asked.

  “The surprise behind door number two,” replied Wendy. “This was rolled up at the bottom of the staff.”

  She laid the pane on the worktable.

  Sam, Remi, and Selma gathered around it and stared in silence for ten seconds.

  Finally Remi whispered, “It’s a codex. An Aztec codex.”

  FACED WITH two seemingly disparate artifacts, they divided forces. Pete and Wendy settled down at a workstation to identify the map, while Sam, Remi, and Selma tackled this new parchment.

  Remi began. “Codex is Latin for a ‘block of wood,’ but over time it became synonymous with any type of bound book or parchment. It’s the model for modern book manufacturing, but before binding became common practice anything could be considered a codex—even a single piece of parchment or several folded together.

  “You see, when the Spanish invaded Mexico in 1519—”

  Sam interrupted. “Maybe now would be a good time for an Aztec 101 course?”

  “Okay. Bear in mind, among historians there’s a lot of debate about the Aztecs, from the trivial to the significant. I’ll give you the condensed, middle-of-the road version.

  “Aztec is the popular name for a group of Nahua-speaking peoples that some historians refer to as the Mexica—sounds like Meh-SHEE-kah—who migrated into central Mexico from somewhere to the north in the sixth century.”

  “‘Somewhere to the north’ is rather vague,” Selma observed.

  Remi nodded. “Yet another source of controversy. I’ll cover that in a minute. So the Aztecs continued their migration into the Valley of Mexico, displacing and absorbing other tribes—including some of their mythology and cultural practices. This went on until around the twelfth century. At the time, most of the power in the region was concentrated in the hands of the Tepanecs in Azcapotzalco. Fast-forward: power trades hands, alliances are made and broken, and the Aztecs are fairly low on the power ladder.

  “Until 1323, when legend has it that the Aztecs were shown a vision of an eagle with a snake in its mouth perched atop a cactus. After a few more years of wandering, the Aztecs come across a swampy, barely inhabitable island in the middle of Lake Texcoco—which is mostly gone today; it sits beneath Mexico City. It’s on this island they supposedly see the eagle/snake/cactus vision. They stop wandering and start building. They called their new city Tenochtitlán.

  “Despite their new capital being as much marsh as it was land, the Aztecs pulled off an engineering marvel. Tenochtitlán occupied about five square miles on the west side of Lake Texcoco. They built causeways to the mainland, complete with rising bridges to accommodate water traffic; they built aqueducts to supply the city with fresh water; there were plazas and palaces, residential areas, and business centers all connected by canals. When the population got too big to feed with crops grown on the mainland, Aztec engineers created floating gardens called chinampas that could produce up to seven crops a year.

  “This went on another fifty years or so until the late 1420s, when the Triple Alliance among Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tlacopan was formed. All the tribes outside the alliance were subjugated as the alliance grew in strength. Then, slowly, over the next century, the Aztecs and Tenochtitlán rose to the top.”

  “And then Cortés arrived,” Sam said.

  “Right. In the spring of 1519. Within two years, the Aztec Empire was all but destroyed.”

  “What’s the rest of the controversy?” Selma said. “About the Aztecs?�
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  “Where they came from—north or south, or from how far away. Many of the classical and pre-classical Mesoamerican cultures—the Toltecs, the Maya, the Olmecs—share similarities with the Aztecs. It’s a chicken-or-egg situation. Was it simply a matter of cultural cross-pollination or was one of these peoples the precursor to all the rest? There are a lot of historians who think the Aztecs were Mesoamerica’s true progenitors.”

  Sam and Selma took all this in. Then Sam said, “Okay, you were talking about codices . . .”

  “Right,” Remi said. “When Cortés invaded and the Aztec Empire collapsed, there were a lot of codices written, most of them by Jesuit and Franciscan monks, some by soldiers or diplomats, and even a few by Aztecs as dictated to others. Those are fairly rare and usually discounted—or at least they were until the last couple hundred years. Aztec codices tended to stray from the Spanish ‘party line,’ which was that Aztecs were savages and that their conquest was wonderful and dictated by God. You get the idea.”

  “Again, victors write the history,” Sam said.

  “You got it.”

  Selma said, “You’re talking about the Codex Borbonicus, the Mendoza, the Florentine . . .”

  “Right. There are dozens. Usually they depict Aztec life either before, during, or after the Spanish conquest. Some are just tableaus of routine activities while others are meant as historical accounts of Cortés’s arrival, of battles fought or ceremonies, and so on.”

  Remi grabbed a magnifying glass from a drawer and bent to examine the codex. She spent ten minutes poring over every square inch, then stood up and sighed.

  “In theme, this one’s a lot like the Boturini Codex. Allegedly, the Boturini was written by an anonymous Aztec author between 1530 and 1541, about ten years after the Aztecs fell. It’s supposed to tell the story of the Aztecs’ journey from Aztlán to present-day Mexico.”

  “Aztlán?” asked Sam.

  “One of the two mythical ancestral homes of the Nahua peoples, which include the Aztecs. Many historians disagree about whether Aztlán is a legend or an actual physical location.”