by Larry Baxter
Best thing would be to interview him in Ernesto's hotel suite. He'd asked for the top floor of the Princess, big big bucks, lots of marble and gold and Oriental rugs, Muñoz would be way off balance. If he went to Muñoz' pigsty sweatbox of a cop station, Muñoz would be comfortable, and he'd have help, real close.
Ernesto and Hector collected their baggage and called Muñoz from the airport.
"Colonel Muñoz."
"Ernesto Diaz, colonel. I'm at the Cancún Princess, room twenty sixteen. Come to this room in an hour."
"Senor Diaz, always a pleasure. To what do we owe the honor of a personal visit?"
Shut up, sleazemouth bastard. It would be a pleasure to see the fear on his face. "An hour, Muñoz."
"But why? Can you not see me here? I'm in the middle of a difficult interrogation."
"I do not do 'Why.' I pay you five thousand US every month so I do not have to do 'Why.' One hour. Say nothing but Sí, unless you wish to put your fat salary and your fat body and your fat family at risk." During the long pause that followed, Ernesto could feel the hate and power that Muñoz had built up in his "interview" dissolve into fear.
Finally, Muñoz said "Sí."
Ernesto said, "Room thirty two. One hour," and hung up the phone. That went well, it should put Muñoz in the proper frame of mind to continue his education. He caught a cab for the hotel with Hector, rolled the window down for fresh air, and they drove to the hotel in silence. Once in the suite, he turned up the air conditioning and explained to Hector his responsibility in the upcoming meeting. Hector grunted.
Muñoz was a large man, maybe five feet nine in his sweat-stained khaki uniform but carrying an extra thirty or forty pounds like most of the older Mexican cops. Mordida had made their lives too easy. He had a ludicrous handlebar mustache waxed to an oily gloss, and wore a wide belt studded with nine mm cartridges like Pancho Villa. On his belt he wore two matching pearl-handled stainless-steel Glock automatic pistols. He had his confidence back; he swaggered into the room as if he spent all his spare time in two thousand dollar a night penthouse hotel suites.
Ernesto made himself a scotch and water at the minibar, adding a single ice cube to two minibottles of the excellent single malt scotch. He took a long sip.
"I'll have a whisky and water," said Muñoz.
Ernesto watched Muñoz in expressionless unmoving silence. Hector stood at the far wall. Muñoz dismissed him with a glance. Lots of people dismissed Hector with a glance, Ernesto thought, smiling to himself. This would be amusing. He enjoyed this work.
The silence deepened, and Muñoz waited, not speaking, not afraid now. Must be his interview experience, he's not babbling at all.
"Colonel Muñoz, perhaps you would care to explain the recent event, where our Tulum operation under your protection was invaded by a small army?"
"Ah, sí, I have heard of that. I knew you would be interested, so I myself personally investigated."
"You yourself? We are indeed fucking honored. I don't suppose you found anything?"
"Unfortunately, not too much, except that probably some college archaeologists from the U.S. were behind this. There is also something about some disease in the U.S., they say the caves show how to cure the disease."
"College archaeologists did not do this thing."
"It seems strange to me, also."
Ernesto turned to Hector. "It seems strange to him, also." Hector smiled and nodded. Ernesto turned back to Muñoz. "Have you ever run a business? No, of course not. You could not possibly run a penny ante poker game without fucking it up. I am trying to keep this thing working. I have schedules, customers, supply problems, labor disputes. I have cash flow problems, inventory management problems, and transportation problems. I have employees who suck up enough product to make them stupid. Top-heavy management, five goddam tiers of distribution. And at least fifteen organizations in seven countries are trying to put us out of business." Ernesto pounded both fists on a table. "And so you know what my biggest fucking problem is, Colonel Asshole?"
Muñoz shook his head no.
"Of course you don't. You don't know jack shit. My biggest fucking problem is employees who fuck with me. Improvements must be made. Lessons must be learned. Discipline must be maintained. Colonel Muñoz, look out the window."
Confused, Muñoz did so.
"Now look straight down."
"The window does not open, Ernesto."
"Señor Diaz."
"Pardon. Señor Diaz."
"Hector, open the window for the Colonel."
"It is fixed in place, Señor Diaz, it does not open, the window," said Muñoz.
Hector slowly detached himself from the wall, picked up an overstuffed Chippendale chair and threw it through the quarter inch glass with a casual flick of his wrist. Muñoz stood staring at the wreckage.
"Hector, help the Colonel to look down. He is still having trouble looking down."
Hector moved with an unexpected swiftness to Muñoz' side, wrapped an arm around his waist, picked him effortlessly off the floor, and propelled him towards the opening. Muñoz emitted a muffled noise and grabbed the windowsill with both hands to check his movement but Hector with a quick motion of one hand slapped his arms up and shoved the upper half of his body through the jagged hole. Muñoz screamed in terror as his center of gravity passed the point of no return, but Hector held on to his legs.
Ernesto said, "Be quiet. Look down. Are you looking down?"
"Yes! Yes! I am looking down!"
"Would you like to try to fly?"
"No! No!"
"Are you working for anyone else but us?"
"No! I swear! No! Nobody!"
"Not the Federales, not the D.E.A., not the peons, not the stupid college boys?" He signaled to Hector, who rolled Muñoz back and forth on the broken edges of the window.
"Nobody! Madre Dios! I swear on the grave of my mother! Jesùs, I am cut in half!"
"I spit on the grave of your mother. Pull him back in."
Hector dragged Muñoz back into the room with blood dripping from a dozen small cuts around his ample stomach.
"Ha!" said Ernesto. "Now you must pay me for the fat removal surgery! I think two thousand a month would be fair. I will adjust your salary. Get out. Do not let those college dirtbags anywhere near Tulum. Move. Now."
Muñoz fled, leaving a trail of blood on the carpet. Hector shadowed him closely to discourage any ideas he might have about drawing his guns. His uniform hat with the gold braid had been knocked off in the struggle; Ernesto tossed it through the broken window. A minute later the telephone rang.
"Front desk. Security reports a broken window in the penthouse. Are you all right?"
"Sí," said Ernesto. "But your housekeeping staff is totally incompetent. Such a mess. Get somebody up here to straighten this room, pronto." He heard a strange snuffling noise and looked at Hector, unruffled by his exertions. Hector appeared to be doing something which might be laughing. He had never seen Hector laugh before.
Chapter 33
* * *
Tulum, November 12, 2010
Robert ran the probe along the west wall of the cave in the bunkroom, watching the color display. The sensor used a combined field of high frequency ultrasonic and electromagnetic radiation, and it had an effective range of between ten and fifty feet, depending on the soil composition. In this irregular limestone, the ultrasonic probe reached a little farther and its magenta image showed a larger visual field than the electromagnetic's green image.
Teresa and the Bolero crew watched the display. As they worked, Phil Schwartz arrived carrying a cooler. "Hey, guys, this is where it happened, huh? Anybody thirsty?" He produced a frosted bottle of Corona. Bela grabbed it. Phil produced another. It, too, was claimed and soon the entire crew was sipping Corona or soft drinks.
"Hold it! Hold it!" said Phil. They turned to look, and he handed out foil packages of Macadamia nuts. "Almost forgot the nuts. Conchita sends her love, Robert, I think she really likes you."<
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Robert moved to the north wall and quickly found a strong return. The display showed a void starting a foot or so beyond the wall. He stopped and scanned the sensor beam laterally. It painted a picture of a long rectangular room. "Here it is," he said, and they all gathered to look.
"Goddamn," said Phil, "That box can see right through rock? I want one."
Robert brought the hammer drill into position and bored a two-inch diameter hole about waist level. It broke through in a foot and a half, and he asked for the fiberscope. Threading it into position, he looked around. Score. Home run. His heart started hammering like the drill and the image danced as his hand shook. "This is it. Big, long room, flat walls, man-made. No glyphs I can see. There's niches in both side walls—shelves—with some kind of statues on them. There's water on the floor, we'll go in at this height."
They quickly enlarged the hole.
The room was not completely flooded, with only two feet of water on the floor. It was about eighty feet long, twenty feet wide, and at least ten feet high. The black walls sloped in at a slight angle. Robert had learned that the Maya did not know about the arch, or did not use it. Instead they supported ceilings with this sort of construction.
As they moved into the room, they got a better look at the walls. The niches in both walls held an incredible collection of small art objects, mostly jade and gold. Colored gems were everywhere, inserted for eyes, studding sword handles, making decorative borders on plates and goblets. At the far end of the room a steep staircase led up to a small opening outlined with engraved green stone tiles.
Robert was caught up by emotion. Twelve hundred years of history—perfectly preserved—sealed in this museum. The smell was strange, ancient, and slightly sweet with an odor of hazelnuts mixing with the musty aroma of an old cellar. The objects in this room surely doubled the world's collection of Maya art. And this must be where the scientists of Tulum had done their work, although it did not look like a laboratory. The connection with the past was strong through the twelve centuries of elapsed time. He felt the people who had carved the statues—who'd chiseled the caves out of the living stone—as if they were still nearby, hacking out another room, setting an amethyst eye into an obsidian jaguar.
"They look as if they were made yesterday," said Teresa, her voice soft and reverent, "I thought anything this old would be inches thick with dust. They're just a little fuzzy."
"No air circulation," said Gabor. "Nice shiny sealed walls."
"Yes," said Robert. "If no dust gets carried in by air currents, they'd stay clean. But then how did they work in here, without air? Wait; maybe they had ventilation shafts and a way to close the vents if they wanted, say, to lower the humidity. If they did have a charge microscope in operation, they would need a way to keep the humidity down. And they could easily work for many days without exhausting the oxygen in this big space."
The rest of the group filed into the room and stared in respectful silence for several minutes at the scene, illuminating it with the beams of many flashlights. Bela panned a video camera around the shelves.
Teresa rushed from one to another, brushing tears from her face, "I can't believe this. Look, look at this one, early Toltec. And look here, this parrot looks as if he could take off and fly. Feathers carved from jade. Here's Olmec work, you can see the characteristic rectangular shapes, but this jaguar looks as if it is ready to jump off the shelf. The stones, emeralds, sapphires, this must be ruby. Some of these pieces must have been a thousand years old when this city was built. There are only a handful of pieces from early Mexico with inset gemstones in museums, and here they're everywhere you look."
Phil picked up a figurine and weighed it in his hand.
"Not bad, not bad at all," he said, as he looked at the bottom as if for a label or maybe a price.
"Hands off," said Robert. "These are heading for a museum. Teresa, I thought the Maya had no gold."
"They weren't supposed to. But most of this is clearly Maya craftsmanship. This room may rewrite a few history books."
"Before we start rewriting history, we better see if we can take care of the present," said Robert. "We still need to find the glyph. The rooms have been sealed to prevent humid air infiltration. There's a charge microscope somewhere." He climbed carefully up the steep steps. The small opening at the top led to another room, very long but narrower and completely dry, its floor level with the bottom of the opening. He moved in, and the room was soon lit with many flashlights. No charge microscope here, there was no furniture or shelving.
The walls sloped in, but in this room they were glossy black obsidian with tiny neat glyphs inscribed from floor to ceiling. Teresa moved to the wall and started reading as Robert tried to estimate the size of the room, maybe twelve feet wide and high and so long that his flashlight beam did not reach the other end. He clapped his hands and timed the echo from the far wall. Nearly one second delay, more than four hundred feet long. Amazing. Dead straight, from what he could see.
In a few minutes, Teresa announced, "Astronomy, planetary orbits, a calendar date of a comet. Temple design and construction. Mathematics, here's the Pythagorean theorem. The law of cosines. Fibonacci series."
"Any Bessel functions?" asked Robert.
"Not yet, why?"
"Nothing."
"Maybe we'll find them here somewhere, this'll take weeks. These glyphs are tiny, a tenth the usual size." Her fingers traced the carving. "Agriculture, here's a record of corn harvest compared to planting date. This is truly incredible. This room records the scientific knowledge of the Maya kingdom. It's a giant lab notebook. Better than those tree-bark jobs, this is for the ages."
"Do you see the glyph for the Austin virus?" asked Robert.
"No. I'll keep looking, I bet it's here somewhere. It looks as if the Maya scientists did work here in Tulum, mostly. The observatory is above ground, of course, but I bet we find more labs underground. Hey, information, I bet these science types were selling information. The same thing happened in ancient Greece, like the oracle at Delphi. Same thing happens today on the Internet. You want a good corn harvest? Bring a jade figurine, or maybe food and clothing, you get planting tables and fertilizer suggestions. You building a pyramid? Complete, detailed plans are yours for a gold statue or two."
"Of course! And some of the loot is next door, the room outside is the bank!"
"That would explain the gold. Other cultures, Aztecs, they would have known about the knowledge bank, here, and could have brought gold. We don't have a laboratory yet, though, just the library."
Robert walked down the long room, footsteps echoing as if in a cathedral. About half was inscribed, the rest of the walls were untouched. Blank pages. The cave seemed to have been cut from obsidian, an amazing feat, as obsidian had the characteristics of glass. The hill here must be the residue of an ancient volcanic outflow to deposit that much pure obsidian. On closer inspection he found the secret, almost invisible razor cuts in a foot-square pattern: the entire room had been carefully tiled with obsidian.
At the end of the room, a six-foot disk, a terra cotta bas-relief of a man holding a small pointed tool, was set flush against the wall.
"Goldstein! Could you bring the electromagnetic probe over here?"
Goldstein brought the probe and its display and following Robert's gesture, scanned the wall and moved the probe across the bas-relief. A picture built up slowly of another room behind a foot thick wall. The probe revealed an aperture in the wall behind the bas-relief.
Robert tried to move the bas-relief but it seemed to be cemented permanently to the wall.
"Kiraly!" he called. Kiraly materialized. "Can you help lever this sculpture off the wall?"
"Do you care if we break it?" asked Kiraly.
"No. Forgive me, Maya scholars."
They both pushed on one side, and with a crunching sound the large circular sculpture slowly rotated to one side, happily without breaking. It revealed a small trapezoidal opening, roughly two feet hi
gh and set low in the wall. Robert knelt and shone his beam into the aperture. Almost the first thing the beam illuminated was a metal globe, half a foot in diameter. Robert's pulse began to accelerate. He and Kiraly crawled through the hole. The charge microscope! It was set up vertically instead of horizontally, but it was unmistakable. He quickly scanned the wall. It appeared that they had used the polished wall to receive the image and then used a hard stone, maybe sapphire, to inscribe the image for permanence. And near the microscope—possibly the last image it had made—he found an unmounted obsidian tile bearing the Austin virus glyph.
"Teresa!" he yelled.
He heard echoing sounds from the next room. Bad acoustics. He ran back and stuck his head through the small opening.
"Teresa!" he called again.
"There he is!" she said. "Or, there's his head, at least. What did you find?"
"Here's where you earn your paycheck. We found the microscope. And the glyph."
"Goddamn!" she responded.
The rest of the group squeezed through the opening and joined Robert in the smaller room.
"There's the microscope. There's the Austin glyph. Can you translate the text over here?"
Teresa knelt before the glyph as if in prayer, running her hand over it reverently. Then she studied the adjacent text. It seemed supernaturally quiet, as if everyone in the room was holding their breath.
Teresa spoke one soft word, "Wow," and it seemed to become even quieter. "Here's a description of the symptoms. Black tongue, bleeding from the mouth. They understood the connection between the symptoms and the virus molecule. They got five days incubation time. And this glyph—the one you said might be an antiviral image—is connected to these glyphs for some kind of a tree. Or part of a tree. Maybe blossoms, flowers. Then here's a group of glyphs I've never seen, I can't translate these, maybe we'll be able to figure it out from the surrounding text. They seem to be in a hurry, here, you can see the carelessness of the inscription and they're leaving out words."