“Hello, Dr. Rubicon—are you in there?” Mulder said, flaring his flashlight in different directions. His words reflected back at him with a resonating quality, a bell-like sharpness.
Mulder proceeded deeper into the pyramid, casting a glance over his shoulder to see the dwindling daylight from the opening. He wished he had brought bread crumbs to leave a trail…or at least sunflower seeds.
Water dripped from somewhere. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw movement—but when he flashed his light in that direction and saw the sharp shadows jumping, he knew it had only been an optical illusion. The darkness and the leaden air felt oppressive.
Thankful he wasn’t claustrophobic, he rubbed the back of his hand along the tip of his nose. The temperature had dropped, as if some force gradually drank all the heat from the air. It had been at least a dozen centuries since the interior of this temple had been open to the sunshine. Playing his flashlight ahead, he saw that the ceiling had been supported by wooden beams, rough-hewn tree trunks recently placed there, no doubt by Cassandra’s assistants. She must have been desperate to explore inside, he thought, excavating deeper and deeper into the pyramid, trying to unlock its secrets.
“Hey, Dr. Rubicon,” he said again, in a normal voice this time, afraid of the machine-gun echoes.
He looked down at his feet, at the dusty floor, untraveled—but then he saw a pair of footprints made by smaller shoes, definitely not old Dr. Rubicon’s, apparently a woman’s. Excitement beat in his heart. Cassandra had been here!
He proceeded cautiously now, intrigued on several different levels. His spatial perception suggested that he was approaching the heart of the pyramid. He was winding deeper, perhaps even underground.
The inner walls looked different now, unlike the corridors he had just passed through, which were made of simple blocks hewn from limestone. Those on his left were dark and unusually slick and smooth, as if they had been partially melted. This wall composition implied something new and unusual—of a different nature than the rest of the ancient structure.
Touching the slick glassy surface, he walked on. Up ahead, fallen rubble blocked off the corridor, a partially collapsed ceiling that sealed the passage leading directly into the pyramid’s center. Mulder stopped short, thinking he had taken a wrong turn. Neither Vladimir nor Cassandra Rubicon could have proceeded any farther than this—but then he saw an opening dug through the fallen rock, a narrow window that only a very slender or very desperate person might wriggle through.
He crept to the edge, feeling as if he were intruding upon something. The temple around him swallowed all sound and heat. Mulder’s light stabbed into the shadowy opening.
He raised himself up on the pile of rubble, pushing the flashlight ahead of him to look in. “Cassandra Rubicon?” he called, feeling foolish. “Are you in there?”
He was amazed at what he saw in the hidden chamber. His light played across smooth walls, reflected metal, curved objects made of glass or crystal. The eeriness and completely unexpected condition of the inner chamber made him pause with a thrill of discovery.
What had Cassandra thought when she first spotted this surprising change in architecture?
As visions of Kukulkan danced in his head, Mulder tried to peer deeper, but his flashlight began to flicker. He rattled it to keep the batteries in contact, the beam steady.
He would return to this spot and explore, as soon as they found Dr. Rubicon, Mulder thought. Maybe the old archaeologist could provide an explanation. It would take some work, though, to clear away an opening large enough for someone to get inside without tearing his clothes or losing some skin.
Mulder heard a distant voice, and froze. The words bounced through the winding passages of the temple. He didn’t have time to marvel at the acoustics as he recognized the faint sounds of Scully calling his name.
Her voice carried an urgency that made him snap into action, sliding back down from the rockfall and racing along the passages, taking the turns from memory. He shone his flashlight ahead of him—the batteries seemed to be working fine, now that he had moved away from the heart of the pyramid.
She called again and again. He heard the strain in her voice, and he raced faster. “Mulder, I found him! Mulder!” Her words rang between the stone walls, and finally he saw the light ahead, Scully standing at the opening, a humanoid silhouette surrounded by glare.
He burst out into the daylight, panting, his heart pounding.
She looked devastated. “Over here,” she said.
He was breathing too hard to ask her questions, but simply followed. She hurried around the base of the pyramid, through the narrow jungle path. They reached the fallen-brick platform where sacrifices had once been performed at the edge of the deep circular well.
Mulder stopped short and looked down at the murky, unfathomably deep water. Scully stood next to him, swallowing hard, saying nothing.
There, like a doll that had been twisted and broken and then cast aside, floated the body of Vladimir Rubicon, facedown in the sacrificial cenote.
22
Xitaclan ruins
Tuesday, 11:14 A.M.
They anchored ropes to sturdy trees near the rim of the cenote, then dropped the cables down into the water. Everyone stood brooding, like spectators at the scene of a car accident, stunned by the discovery of the old man’s body.
Fernando Aguilar offered the assistance of the Indian workers, suggesting that some of the wiry and muscular locals could easily scramble down the rope and retrieve Vladimir Rubicon. But Mulder refused. This was something he had to do himself.
Without a word, Scully helped to lash a rope harness under his arms and around his shoulders; she tugged the knots, checking that they were secure. Gripping the rope, Mulder eased himself over the rim and started down the rough side of the limestone sinkhole. Surrounding ledges made the wall itself lumpy and rugged, as if it had been chewed out of the rock with a giant drill bit. Mulder drifted away from the ledges and dangled as the Indians lowered him.
On the rim above, Fernando Aguilar stood close to Scully, bellowing instructions, berating the Indians when they did not move exactly as he said, though the helpers seemed to know what they were doing and paid no attention to Aguilar’s specific commands.
Upon hearing the news of the archaeologist’s death, the long-haired guide and expediter had reacted with shock and horror. “The old man must have wandered out in the middle of the night,” Aguilar said. “The edge is abrupt here—he must have fallen in—and it is a long drop. I am sorry for his misfortune.”
Mulder and Scully had looked knowingly at each other, but neither chose to challenge their guide’s interpretation, at least not openly…at least not yet.
Mulder reached the level of the placid water. He could smell the dankness, the sour algae and a taint of trapped vapors from the abortive volcanic outburst the first night they had arrived at Xitaclan. His feet dangled below, just touching the water.
Immediately beneath him floated Vladimir Rubicon, his drenched shirt clinging to his bony back, his shoulder blades protruding. The old man’s blond-gray head was twisted at an odd angle, his neck obviously broken—but had it been broken by the fall itself, or from a direct physical assault? Rubicon’s arms and legs dangled unseen in the deep dark water.
Mulder gritted his teeth and held his breath as the Indians dropped him the last few feet. He plunged into the water, getting completely soaked. The rope harness held up most of his weight, and he managed to swim. He stroked with his hands and feet, pulling himself over to Rubicon’s drifting body. The second rope tugged at him as he stretched it.
“Be careful, Mulder,” Scully called, and he wondered what she might be warning him about.
“That’s foremost on my mind,” he said. The water felt thick, almost gelatinous, warm with the jungle heat, and yet tingling against his skin. He hoped the sacrificial pool wasn’t infested with leeches, or some worse form of tropical life.
He looked down to whe
re the water swallowed up his feet and his lower body. He could see nothing. Mulder couldn’t tell what might lurk in the depths of the cenote beyond the range of sunlight. He thought of old Lovecraftian stories where ancient monsters from beyond time and space—feathered serpents, perhaps?—swam in the dark ooze, waiting to devour unwary innocents.
He thought he felt a ripple below his feet, and he jerked his leg away. Rubicon’s body bobbed in the water, jiggling from some unseen disturbance. Mulder swallowed hard, looking down, but still he saw nothing.
“Just my imagination,” he muttered to himself, knowing he did have a very good imagination.
He disengaged the second rope from around his chest and tugged for more slack. Above, the Indians obliged. Aguilar waved at him in encouragement.
Mulder draped the loose rope over his shoulder, wet and slick. Touching the old man’s waterlogged shirt, he pulled Rubicon’s limp body toward him in the water, then worked the end of the rope around the bony chest. He felt as if he were embracing the archaeologist.
“Goodbye, Vladimir Rubicon,” he said, securing the knot. “Now at least your search can stop.” He tugged on the rope, then shouted up, “Okay, pull him out!” His voice bounced around the wall of the sinkhole.
The ropes tightened as the Indians worked and heaved up above. Even Aguilar pitched in. The ropes strained, tugging Rubicon’s body free of the water as if the cenote only reluctantly gave up its new prize—leaving Mulder alone in the water. He hoped that whatever gods still lived in Xitaclan didn’t want to make it an even trade, Rubicon’s body for his.
The old archaeologist rose up like a soggy scarecrow. Water trickled off his arms and legs. His blunt, big-knuckled fingers hung clenched like claws, and his head lolled to one side. His goatee was scraggly, wet, and clumped with green algae from the surface of the deep well.
Mulder swallowed and waited, treading water in the cenote as the wet corpse was hauled up to the rim of the well like a load of loose construction material. The helpers seemed decidedly uneasy to be so near the dead man.
Mulder watched them swing the body over the lip of the limestone well, then drag it onto the dry ground. Scully helped, leaving Mulder alone for a moment.
The water around him seemed cold, like cadaverous hands feeling his arms and legs, tugging on his wet clothes. Mulder decided not to wait any longer and swam to the steep limestone inner wall, beginning to ascend the corkscrew ledges without any assistance at all.
He had made it halfway up before Aguilar and the Indians got around to taking up the slack on the rope and helping him the rest of the way to the top.
Dripping wet and cold even in the Central American heat, Mulder finally looked back down from the rim of the cenote, staring into the dark water. The sacrificial well seemed undisturbed, placid, infinitely deep…and still hungry.
Back in the plaza by the remains of their camp, Mulder raised his voice, trying to get through to Fernando Aguilar and losing patience. “No more excuses, Aguilar! I want to get that radio transmitter up and running now. We know where it is, so stop stalling. Dr. Rubicon intended to send a message this morning, and now it’s even more urgent.”
Aguilar finally conceded and smiled at him, backing away. “Of course, Señor Mulder, that is a very good idea. In light of this tragedy, we cannot handle the situation alone, eh? It is good that we give up our search for Señorita Rubicon and her team. Yes, I will go get the transmitter.”
Looking relieved to get away from Mulder, Aguilar sped off to the old cache of the UC–San Diego team’s equipment, which had been untouched since its discovery the day before.
Mulder didn’t tell him, though, that he had no intention of abandoning his efforts to find Cassandra.
Scully had laid out the body of Dr. Rubicon on the flagstones and began checking him over, trying to glean scraps of information from the condition of the cadaver. “I’m not going to need an autopsy bay to determine what killed him, Mulder,” she said.
She ran her hands over the old man’s neck, feeling his large Adam’s apple, then she unbuttoned his shirt to check his clammy chest, his rubbery arms.
The others had fled, not wanting to be around the corpse while she worked with it. For the moment, Mulder didn’t mind the solitude. The jungle isolation and their untrustworthy companions were making him more and more uneasy.
Scully pushed down on Rubicon’s chest, feeling his rib cage, cocking her head to listen as she expelled air from his dead lungs. She looked up at Mulder, her eyes wide and concerned. “Well, he didn’t drown—that much is for certain.”
Mulder looked hard at her. She felt delicately around Rubicon’s neck. “Several of his vertebrae are broken.”
She rolled him over, exposing a livid spot at the base of his neck, turned purplish from the skin’s immersion in the cold water. “I’m also convinced this injury wasn’t caused by a simple fall,” she said. “Dr. Rubicon didn’t trip over the edge and drop into the water. I think Aguilar wants us to believe he died by accident—but the evidence shows Rubicon was struck hard from behind. Something crushed his neck. My guess is that Dr. Rubicon was dead before he was thrown into the cenote.”
“Aguilar didn’t want him to make his transmission this morning,” Mulder pointed out. “Maybe that argument yesterday was more serious than I thought. What’s he hiding?”
Scully said, “Don’t forget that Aguilar led Cassandra Rubicon’s team to this site in the first place—and now they’re all missing. I think we have to presume them dead.”
“Do you believe he intends to kill us?” Mulder realized that was an absolutely serious question, no paranoid fantasy at all. “He holds all the advantages here.”
“We’ve still got our handguns, if it comes to that.” Her shoulders slumped. “Look, Aguilar knows we’re federal agents. He knows how the United States comes charging in if something happens to their own agents—remember when those DEA undercover officers were murdered here in Mexico? I don’t think he’d be foolish enough to bring that upon himself. He can still write off Rubicon’s death as an accident, unless we prove other-wise—but he couldn’t explain away all of our deaths as accidental.”
Mulder looked furtively around the plaza, seeing Aguilar and his ever-present Indian companions finally marching back out of the jungle. They carried a crate of equipment with them. The expression on Aguilar’s face did not give Mulder a warm fuzzy feeling.
“Aguilar might realize the consequences,” Mulder said, “but what if it’s not him after all? What if these locals themselves are making sacrifices, like our friend Lefty who cut off his finger yesterday?”
Scully looked grim. “In that case, I can believe they wouldn’t be overly concerned about U.S. government intervention.”
Fernando Aguilar hurried up to them while the Indians hung back, afraid of Rubicon’s body spread-eagled on the flagstones. “Señor Mulder,” he said, “I have bad news. The transmitter is broken.”
Mulder said, “How could it be broken? We just took it out of the box yesterday.”
Aguilar shrugged, taking off his spotted hat. “The weather, the rain, the conditions here…” He held out the transmitter, and Mulder noticed that the back plate was loose, bent out of its groove. The inner workings were muddy and corroded.
“Water has gotten in, or insects,” Aguilar said. “Who can tell, eh? The transmitter has been in that old temple, unattended ever since the first team got to Xitaclan. We are unable to contact outside help.”
“That’s a tragedy,” Mulder said, then muttered, “and also quite convenient.”
Scully shot him a look, and he knew that the two of them would have to play their cards carefully. If he stretched his imagination to the limits of credibility, he could believe in the accidental destruction of the transmitter, or he could believe in the accidental death of Rubicon, or in the accidental disappearance of Cassandra and the other archaeologists.
But he couldn’t take it all together.
Scully said with forc
ed brightness, “We’ll just have to make the best of it, then, won’t we, Mulder?”
He knew that she, too, felt trapped in the wilderness, with no contact from the outside…and the only people around them a potentially murderous crew who had no qualms about eliminating any inconveniences they might encounter.
23
Xitaclan ruins
Tuesday, 2:45 P.M.
Scully felt the weight of the rubberized canvas diving suit on her shoulders, a heavy alien skin that muffled her movements and insulated her body. Here out on dry land, stumbling across the weathered promenade toward the sacrificial well, the suit felt incredibly unwieldy and clumsy. The weights at her waist clanked together. She hoped that once she descended into the water, the suit would become an advantage instead of a hindrance.
Mulder stood back and looked at her, his hands on his hips, eyebrows raised. “That’s quite a fashion statement, Scully.”
She tugged at the thick fabric folds, adjusting the diving suit as she stood on the edge of the cenote. She felt an eerie sense of displacement. The suit had been purchased for Cassandra Rubicon to use during her own searches for ancient artifacts and the answers to Maya mysteries.
Now Scully was the only one who could fit into the suit—and her personal search was for something much more sinister, something much more recent.
After finding the body of Vladimir Rubicon, her dread had grown. She had little doubt that the five members of the UC–San Diego research team floated below the surface of the sacrificial well, waterlogged, decaying. If she did indeed find the archaeologist’s daughter, beaten like her father, her only consolation was that Dr. Rubicon himself would not be around to witness the grim conclusion to their investigation.
Mulder held the heavy insulated helmet in his hands. “And now to complete the ensemble,” he said, “your lovely hat.”
Even fresh out of the crate, it seemed an old suit, bargain basement. Scully hoped the equipment had been checked out and proven functional. Like many research expeditions, the UC–San Diego team had operated on a tight budget, forced to cut corners wherever they could. According to paperwork tacked inside the crate, translated by Fernando Aguilar, the suit had been donated by the Mexican government as part of its joint financing of the Xitaclan expedition.
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