Invisible City

by M. G. Harris

  It’s a pretty nice place, her hacienda, very tastefully furnished. Over iced tea and grilled cheese sandwiches, Camila tells us the whole story of her childhood. We sit in her garden under shady banana palms, among the hibiscus and allamanda flowers, overlooking the sea.

  “I didn’t know Dad stayed at Hotel Delfin,” I say. “I just thought it looked okay from the Web site.”

  “The owner has a jazz bar in Cancún,” Camila says. “The Dolphin Bar. Andres was crazy for it. You didn’t know that?”

  I listen, say nothing. It’s not every day you meet a long-lost relative. I don’t really know how to react. As the afternoon wears on and Camila tells us the whole story about her and my dad, I begin to feel something new: jealousy.

  Because the way it looks to me, Dad liked Camila a whole lot more than he ever liked me.

  The sun sets in the hills behind us while Camila gives us her version of Dad’s disappearance and the murder investigation. Ollie, Tyler, and I screw up our faces, trying to work out what was really going on. Did Camila’s husband know that she was Andres’s daughter? That would certainly throw out Saul’s motive for killing Dad—why would he kill his father-in-law? If the police didn’t believe it, why didn’t she prove it to them? Why would they want to hold Saul for something he didn’t do? Why wouldn’t they want to find the real killer?

  Camila sighs. She sounds a little irritated. I guess she’s been over this. “It’s not so complicated. You have to understand that many of the police here are corrupt. If some local narco wants a favor, then they deliver. But I have a friend who works at the police station. And she feeds me information.”

  Her theory is that Saul is being framed as revenge for not joining in with the drug cartel. The local drug guys thought that Saul’s avocado farm had a few too many fields of avocados, and not enough of marijuana. Saul turned down what he called their “interesting business proposition.” He expected trouble, and he was right.

  As for telling Saul that she was Andres’s daughter, of course Saul knew. So did the police. Camila and Saul protested as much when they arrested Saul as a jealous husband.

  “But as Ollie so cleverly pointed out,” Camila says, “I couldn’t prove it. Andres only wrote me that one letter.”

  She passes it to me.

  My dearest daughter,

  This letter, should you ever read it, will doubtless come as too little, too late. How can I hope to make up for the years I’ve missed? Since I tracked you down, I’ve experienced a rush of tenderness that’s entirely new to me. The lifelong love of a father for his daughter has seemed to be compressed into such a short period of time. Then there are regrets over lost time, guilt over continuing to keep you secret from Eleanor and Josh. I’ll admit that it’s been almost more than I can bear.

  If words could ever say it, I would tell you how much I’ve been with you your whole life. Even if you never knew me, I never forgot you. In my heart I was with you every day.

  But enough of that. I’m starting on something, you might call it old family business. A search for a lost Mayan codex—the sacred Book of Ix. It is possible that it could be dangerous. As I write this, truthfully I don’t believe it is, but then, some strange things have happened recently. And there have been warnings. So I’m taking heed.

  Which is why I’m entrusting you with something that is at once dangerous and priceless. My real father—a man whose death I’ve seen in my dreams since I was a boy—left my mother something else as well as me. The Mayan inscription I call the “Calakmul letter” has brought me to the point at which I’m ready to throw caution to the wind and venture into the depths of Mayan history in search of something I barely dare to believe can exist.

  If I don’t return, the search must end here. This is why I tell you nothing of my journey, of my research. This search has already destroyed more than one life. If I fail, I won’t risk anyone else in my family.

  So I’m asking you, my darling Camila, to destroy the Calakmul letter. Don’t be tempted to decipher it—you can’t. I’ve left the other half with someone else, someone I trust, also with the same instructions.

  Destroy it. Burn it. Tell NO ONE about it. Take the secret to your grave. Do this for the father who loves you and wishes with all his heart that he’d known you as a baby.

  Your adoring father,

  Andres

  Camila, she gets pages and pages. Us? We just got a few words.

  My dearest daughter. Your adoring father.

  I’ve crossed an ocean in search of the truth. But now I’m not so sure I want to hear it.

  Camila stares at me, her eyes wild with excitement. “You didn’t destroy your half, did you?”

  “Nope,” I say, trying to keep it together. It’s tough not to sound bitter. “So much for Dad’s trust. Why didn’t he just destroy the Calakmul letter himself?”

  Camila says, “I think he planned on coming back with a huge, important discovery. This would have been a pretty major piece of evidence. An ancient document—it’s not the kind of thing you destroy just in case things go wrong.”

  “Yeah, but what about all the danger?”

  “Guess that’s why he said to destroy it. To save us from any danger.” She turns to me with a grin. “He didn’t know his own children, though. Both just as curious as their father.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You see now why I couldn’t show this letter to the police?” Camila says. “At least until I’ve had a chance to find out what Dad was searching for. And that’s what they want. That’s what this is all about.”

  “Whoever killed Dad did it to get their hands on his secret.”

  “I hate secrets,” Camila says. “Don’t you?”

  Ollie leans over the wrought-iron garden table, pours herself and Tyler more iced tea.

  “Have you deciphered your half of the manuscript?” she asks.

  “Sure,” replies Camila. In Spanish she asks, “You trust your buddies, do you?”

  “Of course! They helped me to crack my half of the inscription.”

  Camila looks thoughtful for a second, then gives a little shrug and disappears into the house. She returns a moment later holding a small lacquered box. She opens it, removes a piece of bark paper.

  There’s a tear along the left-hand side of the manuscript. I reach into my back pocket and take out my half. I spread it out on the table next to Camila’s half. No question about it—they match.

  Camila gives me a look that’s somewhere between sisterly love and pride. “Here it is,” she says. “The Calakmul letter. My father talked about how he was studying this letter written to a king of Calakmul. But in my half there’s no reference to Calakmul at all.”

  “It’s to Yuknoom Ch’een, the ruler of Calakmul,” Ollie tells her.

  “From his servant,” adds Tyler.

  I want to fume quietly at this extra evidence of how much Dad preferred Camila—he’d even discussed his work with her. But even more than that—I want to look smart.

  “A letter,” I say, “telling how the Bakab was defeated. How the Bakab came from a place called Chechan Naab. And it mentions the Book of Ix.”

  Camila nods. “That’s it. The sacred Book of Ix. That makes sense. Well, look, let’s read it.”

  So we do. First we read out our translation, then Camila reads out hers.

  K’inich K’ane Ajk of Cancuén 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

  The Black Road will open the Heart of Sky

  It will be destroyed

  Healer of Worlds will be born

  In the Moon it walks

  In their Holy City of Ek Naab they wait

  They are still. They wait

  In wonder I stare at the inscr
iption. There it is—the final clue from Dad’s e-mails to Montoyo and the Peabody Museum guy.

  And the other city name, the city that no one seems to have heard of, the one that doesn’t exist.

  Ek Naab.

  Chapter 14

  “The ‘Holy City of Ek Naab,’” I say, pointing to a glyph. “Dad e-mailed some Maya scholars, asked about that place. No one’s heard of it.”

  “Utom,” murmurs Ollie. “So that sentence at the tear says The Black Road will open the Heart of Sky.”

  Camila’s section of the Calakmul letter is more baffling than ours.

  “It’s all Mayan mythology,” she tells us. “And although it sounds pretty strange, I know, I think maybe it has a real meaning for us too. I’ve spent days studying what it means. You wanna know?”

  We nod.

  “The Black Road—Xibalba be—is kind of the Mayan concept of the Road to Hell. But,” explains Camila, “there’s another interpretation.”

  She watches us closely, to make sure she has our full attention. “From astronomy. The Maya were really crazy for astronomy,” she continues, almost conspiratorially, “and no one really understands why they paid so much attention, or knew so much about what goes on in the sky. The Maya believed that you could see Xibalba be in the sky. Astronomers know it as the ‘Great Dark Rift’ in our galaxy: the Milky Way.”

  I’m impressed. This is much deeper than we’ve gone.

  “How about ‘Heart of Sky’?”

  “Well,” muses Camila, “the Mayan creation myth says that the world was created by the Heart of Sky and the Plumed Serpent. But there are scholars who say that it’s also an astronomical thing, that ‘Heart of Sky’ could mean Polaris—the Pole Star.”

  Two astronomical terms together.

  “Could that be some kind of astronomical event?” Ollie suggests. “The Great Dark Rift meeting Polaris?”

  “In the Calakmul letter,” says Camila, “it says ‘it will be destroyed.’ Doesn’t that sound kind of like a prediction of some cataclysmic event?”

  I feel a ripple of energy pass through me. The hairs on my arms prickle. What if the 2012 doomsday scenario is real?

  “Thirteen Baktun,” she continues gravely, “December twenty-second, 2012—the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. Even nowadays it’s thought that our galaxy will be aligned in a special way on that date. Maybe the Ix Codex describes what will happen then. And what if it’s not some harmless shift in the collective consciousness, or whatever these new-age types would like to believe, but a real end, some terrible event? It will be destroyed. What? The whole world?”

  “Maybe not,” I point out. “The Calakmul letter mentions this ‘healer of worlds.’”

  “Sure, that’s also interesting,” Camila muses.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Well … what if it’s a reference to something that could reverse the cataclysm, or protect people, something like that?”

  “What, like a spell or something?”

  Tyler makes a tutting sound of disapproval. “What’s wrong with you? That’s crazy, man!”

  Camila shoots him a withering look.

  I compromise: “Or something.”

  “‘In the Moon it walks,’” she quotes. “Now what does that mean?” mutters Ollie.

  She’s got a point.

  “Okay,” admits Camila, “I don’t have all the answers. Who knows—maybe I’ve interpreted everything completely wrong! But I do know this: Andres believed that the Ix Codex is a true document, that it contains a Mayan prophecy about the end of the world. The Calakmul letter—it’s giving only a hint of what’s in the Ix Codex.”

  “I knew it,” Tyler says, half angry, half smug. “This Mayan prophecy—it’s for real, man!”

  “Someone believes it,” says Camila. “Someone believes that codex is worth killing for. Someone with the power to murder Andres and frame my husband.”

  “Carlos Montoyo,” I breathe.

  Camila seems thrown. It’s clear that, to her, Montoyo isn’t a suspect. “Who, the archaeology teacher from Yucatán University?”

  “Dad was supposed to be meeting him. He knew all about the Ix Codex. He warned Dad off.”

  “Andres did meet him—in Guatemala,” says Camila, shrugging. “He didn’t seem suspicious of Montoyo. In fact, Montoyo gave him some useful information. About a small ruin not far from here, where Dad found some new emblem glyphs.”

  “Emblem glyphs?” I ask. “He found some new city names?”

  “You’d better believe it! He was really excited.”

  “And that’s all that happened with Montoyo?”

  “Yeah. That was it.”

  “So if not Montoyo,” I ponder, “then what about the CIA?” Camila gives me a strange look. “Why do you say that?”

  I reply, “It’s Ollie’s theory.”

  “Someone who could trace e-mails and Web searches,” Ollie says loftily. “Someone who could organize a burglary. Someone interested in extraterrestial encounters with the Maya. And the alien secrets they might have shared.”

  Camila stands up, clearly troubled. “There’s been something really weird about Andres’s death, right from the beginning.”

  “The UFO incident?” I ask.

  Camila gives a wry smile. “Yeah. To be honest, we all wondered. But then my girlfriend, the one who works in the police station, she brought me a photo she took. In the plane wreckage, they found something attached to the flight controls—a small machine. My friend never saw anything like it before. Then, she told me, some gringos came. They had badges—CIA, FBI, something like that—but she didn’t see which kind. And they took it away, the little machine. None of the police ever mentioned it again. It was deleted from a list of exhibits recovered from the crash.”

  “A machine attached to the flight controls …,” I murmur. “Something that could have made Dad’s plane crash?”

  Camila completes my thought: “By remote control. No need for a pilot to jump out of the plane midflight. Just put the dead body in the plane and send it up. Then crash it—and you’ve got a perfect accidental death. If everything goes to plan, you don’t even need to frame someone for murder. So, that only happens as an afterthought. When they inconveniently find the missing head of a strangled pilot. And that’s when they start looking around for a victim to pin with their dumb story.

  “These U.S. agents,” she says, “they killed Andres. It’s as clear as a bell. And the reason is in this Mayan inscription.”

  Camila leans back in her chair, takes a sip of tea. She picks up and stares at my half of the Calakmul letter for a few moments, concentrating. Then quite suddenly she stands up straight.

  “Oh my God! I can’t believe I didn’t see this right away!”

  We stare at her, expectant. When Camila looks at me again, her expression has gone from one of wonder to anxiety.

  “There’s one thing these people—whoever they are—cannot know. Something Andres only told to me. Something that tells us exactly where Andres went before he disappeared.”

  BLOG ENTRY: CHECHAN NAAB

  When we met Camila Pastor—my half sister—I wanted to know everything: when Dad had first made contact with her, how he found her, what they’d done, where they’d been together, how many times she’d seen him, why he’d ignored her for so long, why he didn’t tell us. That last one more than anything.

  But once I’d seen the letter Dad left for her, and her half of the Mayan manuscript, the whole codex mystery dominated our minds again.

  How weird was it that we’d both become obsessed with finding out what really happened to Dad and why?

  Well, according to Camila, not at all. When I brought the subject up, she seemed nonchalant. “Of course. Every day I sent you mental messages, willing you to decipher the inscription, to get interested, to come over.”

  “You didn’t even know I had the other half of the manuscript!”

  “I knew someone had it. I sent my telepathic message
to him,” she countered, grinning. “And it worked!”

  It sounds odd when I write it down. But in Mexico, people really talk that way.

  Camila thought our half was the important part. “Andres didn’t realize it, but he told me where he was going. That last day. He was all excited, because he said he’d worked out something really important. He’d worked out the real Mayan name of the ruins at Becan.”

  Becan, a ruin not far from Chetumal, was named by archaeologists, just like lots of Mayan cities where the original name has been lost. Nowadays no one knows its Mayan name. But Dad thought he’d made that discovery. It was a name we’d seen before, another city named in the Calakmul letter.

  “Andres found Becan’s emblem glyph on a marker in the forest nearby. He told me that the name translated as ‘City of the Watery Snake Knot.’”

  “‘Knotted Water Snake’—that’s what Chechan Naab means,” I said.

  I remembered that bizarre inscription to “Arcadio” in that book that the burglar was so eager to get his hands on, the one by John Lloyd Stephens.

  “When was Becan discovered?” I asked.

  Camila wasn’t sure. “The 1930s, I think.”

  “So not discovered by John Lloyd Stephens?”

  “Hey, that guy didn’t do everything, you know.”

  I breathed out slowly. That inscription in the book must be a fake—not scrawled by Stephens after all. It mentions Tikal, discovered a few years after Stephens wrote the book. I could just about believe that he’d been on a secret trip to Tikal. But Becan, or “Chechan Naab” … if it wasn’t even known about until the twentieth century? Still … it was all pretty odd. Whoever really wrote that inscription—they’d heard of a Mayan city I’d seen mentioned nowhere else.

  Ollie broke in then, quoting from the Calakmul letter: “From Chechan Naab he emerged, from the Great Temple of the Cross.”

  “There ya go,” Camila said. “I knew you would see it too. That’s what I realized when I studied your half of the manuscript. The morning he left, he was so excited you wouldn’t believe it. Like he was really on the brink of something. That was June 12. I saw him leave in his plane. He flew west. Toward Becan. It has to be! To Chechan Naab—to where ‘he’ emerged, according to the Calakmul letter. Can’t be a coincidence.”