Peet was dumbfounded. His own enemy, the very man that had just captured him moments before was now requesting assistance to fend off their unidentifiable attackers. Just who exactly was attacking them? It could be a rescue attempt. Would Peet dare fire against his own rescuers?
“Who am I shooting at?” Peet asked as the Zapatista resumed his position beside Father Ruiz.
He snatched up Matt’s rifle and pointed out to the jungle. “Just shoot that way!”
With that he resumed firing back at their assailants. Peet peeked over the log and saw only jungle. A leaf trembled here, a limb quivered there. Peet couldn’t find anything to shoot at but by the sound of it, there were many targets hidden out there. He didn’t dare say how many. He just knew they were outnumbered, and the Zapatista was sure to run out of ammunition soon.
“Peet!”
It was Matt. Ducking under fire, he inched his way over, talking in a hushed voice. “Free me and I’ll shoot. I’ve got a clear shot over there.”
Peet didn’t hesitate. He fished his Leatherman out of his vest pocket, extracted a blade and sawed through Matt’s ropes. Without so much as a thank you, Matt ripped the pistol from his hands. To Peet’s surprise, Matt didn’t return to his position behind the bush. Instead, he slipped around behind and headed straight for the Zapatista.
It made sense, Peet thought. Take out the Zapatista and this battle would be over. As good as that sounded, he couldn’t bear to watch Matt shoot a man in cold blood, and this time Father Ruiz wasn’t inclined to stop him.
Would Matt actually pull the trigger?
Peet held his breath. Matt inched up behind the Zapatista who was consumed by the rapid fire he was pouring into the jungle. Matt raised the pistol.
Peet’s heart skipped a beat.
The Zapatista must have noticed. His head snapped in Peet’s direction, perhaps wondering why he hadn’t fired yet. That’s when he noticed Matt standing right behind him. The Zapatista froze as the muzzle of his own pistol pressed against his head.
And then Matt said something Peet would never forget.
With the Zapatista on his knees, raising his hands in cautious surrender, Matt smiled down at him and said, “Welcome to the party, Chac.”
The Truth
“Hold your fire!” Matt hollered for the third time and the gunfire finally quit beneath his voice echoing through the trees.
Peet was stunned speechless, and given the shell-shocked expression plastered over Father Ruiz’s face, he knew he wasn’t the only one. He dared not move from behind the log, even as men began to sever themselves from the jungle’s grasp. There were seventeen in all, each heavily armed and following along the heels of a dark man—his hair was black, his skin was dark, his eyes deep. Even his clothes were shadows of jungle twilight, the perfect camouflage for the tropics.
“It’s about time you caught up, Abe,” Matt said lightly as the dark man and his brigade joined them.
Abe remained stone-faced. “Is it now?” he said in a tone that wiped the smear from Matt’s face. He glanced down at the Zapatista still kneeling at Matt’s feet. “Who do we have here?”
Matt snagged the Zapatista’s balaclava and ripped it off the head of none other than—
“Chac Bacab.”
Chac’s burning eyes held steady to the dark man standing over him. “Abdullah,” he spat.
“It’s been a long time, Chac. You should keep in better touch.”
Chac’s glare shifted onto Matt as he joined Abe. “It appears you’ve been keeping tabs on me all this time. I should have suspected this Mormon was working for you.”
“Is it my fault the years have degraded your reflexes?” Abe asked. “Peace times have a way of doing that. You get comfortable, slow…forgetful.”
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” Chac spat.
Peet couldn’t take his eyes off the Mayan archaeologist. What was he doing here? How did he manage to find them in all this jungle?
Was he really a Zapatista?
Just whose side was Peet supposed to be on? One thing did seem clear. He was caught in the middle of something he wasn’t supposed to have any part in.
Matt inspected Chac’s pistol which he now flipped in his hands like a plastic toy. “So when did you finally figure it out, Chac? What clued you in to our little game?”
“The moment I saw that cross in the cavern,” Chac growled. “Though it became increasingly clear when the bomb went off.”
Matt chuckled. “So you did get my message. It’s too bad it didn’t have more of an effect on you. I knew you’d catch on if you discovered I’d taken the Kin piece.”
Matt left the bomb? The scenario seemed perfectly clear now, but why had he taken the Kin piece and put the blame on Chac?
“I thought you said Chac gave you the Kin piece,” Peet challenged.
“And you believed me at the time, didn’t you.”
Peet scowled but held his tongue. There was perhaps one reason why Matt lied about Chac finding the Kin piece. The same reason he left the bomb behind—to discredit or eliminate the competition.
So many questions raced through Peet’s mind as he simply sat there, witnessing this strange confrontation. Matt had been a long time colleague. Although Peet hadn’t always agreed with some of Matt’s theories, he did respect them. But now something had changed. Matt had somehow become involved with Abe and his thugs. He’d even deceived Peet into having doubts about Chac Bacab, but now he was severely doubting those doubts. As Peet’s trust in Matt began to fade, his faith in Chac began to grow.
“You were so close to the prize, Chac,” Matt said, reaching into Chac’s shirt and retrieving the Talking Cross. “But it just wasn’t meant to be. I thought you Mayans would have figured that out after you lost the cross the first time.”
“It won’t help you any more than it helped the Cruzob,” Chac spat.
“We’ll see about that once we find the original Long Count,” Matt taunted.
Peet was fit to be tied. “You deceitful—” he sputtered beneath a slew of insults that wouldn’t coordinate on his breath.
“Give it up, Peet,” Matt objected.
“First you used John to uncover the Tun clue and now you’re using me to find the Long Count Calendar!”
“Join the club,” Chac muttered beneath his breath. “He’s apparently been using me for years.”
“Admit it, Chac,” Matt said. “You were looking for the Talking Cross too. Do you honestly believe I needed to join forces with someone just to copy and record ancient pictographs? I was looking for your knowledge, Chac.”
“Just who are these infidels?” Abe asked as his eyes swept from Peet to Father Ruiz.
Matt shrugged. “Baggage, mostly.”
“You rescued us from the Zapatistas,” Peet shot back.
“Only because I saw your plane go down. The Zapatistas aren’t in the habit of shooting just anybody down. I was sure your plane was one of Abe’s so I moved in to provide assistance. You can imagine my surprise when I discovered it wasn’t our plane at all.”
“Who exactly are you?” Father Ruiz asked.
Matt passed him a sly grin. “In the end, I’m your future.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Peet grumbled beneath his breath.
“You weren’t looking for divine intervention at all,” Father Ruiz cut in. “You knew exactly which cross to take from that chapel.”
Matt spun the cross in his hand. “Of course I did.”
“How did you know?”
“I’ve had years to research. I searched chapel records, death records, and finally government records. When I saw the drawing behind the Kin piece, I realized there was only one gear-shaped cross on record, and that was the one your government handed over to the cathedral.”
“But the cross in the cavern was a pegged cross.”
Matt snagged Father Ruiz and shoved him to the ground. “On your knees.” The priest complied and Matt pushed his head toward t
he ground until his back was level like a table top. Then, positioning the cross in a beam of sunlight directly above him, he cast the cross’s shadow onto the priest’s back.
“Look at the silhouette,” Matt said. Peet did and noticed exactly what he was implying. The profile of the cross did indeed appear to have pegs at the end of each arm, an effect created by the ridges and recesses of the gear-shaped shafts.
“The peg is a gear rib,” Peet observed.
Abe quietly slipped in behind Matt and snatched the cross from his grasp. Matt was clearly upset by the intrusion, but he wasn’t about to argue with a superior.
“Finally, the cross is in our control,” Abe said, stepping back to get an eyeful of his prize.
“The Zapatistas are one thing,” Father Ruiz snapped. “But what could you possibly want with that cross?”
“We’ve been in a race for this relic for years, haven’t we, Chac?” Abe said, still studying the cross. “It’s about time one of us found what we were looking for. We owe Matt a great deal of gratitude for his endurance. Not everyone can pretend to be a Mormon archaeologist for fifteen years.”
“Pretend?” Peet choked.
“BYU was just a cover,” Matt explained. “Their interest in Mesoamerica made it all the more convenient to quietly search for the Talking Cross without raising local suspicion.” He smiled down at Chac. “The disguise worked better than I could have ever imagined.”
“Until you were fired,” Peet added.
Matt laughed. “You think BYU fired me? I intentionally had myself fired. As handy as BYU was, they did have their drawbacks. The duties of a professor were frustratingly restricting to my hunt for the cross. I was running out of time so I knew I had to sever my ties with the university. The Zapatistas seemed to be increasingly closer to finding the Talking Cross so the first thing I did after leaving BYU was to learn what the Zapatistas knew. Who better to shadow than good ol’ Chac Bacab.”
“And well executed, I might add,” Abe said. “Except for one thing.”
Abe turned to Matt now, his dark eyes thunderously menacing. The look seemed to catch even Matt by surprise.
“I managed to get access to the museum and cathedral just as you requested,” Abe continued in a threatening tone. “I even bought you all new diving equipment.”
“I had to leave my equipment in my car as a decoy,” Matt reasoned.
The excuse made no impact on Abe. “I did all this for you and how did you repay me? You disappeared. Did you believe I wouldn’t figure out that you’d located the Talking Cross?”
Matt noticeably cringed beneath Abe’s glare. “I wanted to be sure that I’d found the real thing.”
Abe didn’t buy it. “When was that going to be, Matt?” he pressed. “When you used the Talking Cross for yourself? You held out on me.”
Beads of sweat broke out on Matt’s brow. It seemed like an alarmingly expedient reaction considering how cool he’d handled himself just moments before. But now the perspiration was clearly glistening just below his blond hairline.
“Look, I didn’t want to alarm you in case it wasn’t real.”
“Did it not occur to you that the bomb in the cavern would alert us to your deception?” Abe insisted. “Or maybe you were hoping we would investigate the cavern after we never heard back from you. Did you want us to believe you were dead, or did you set that bomb for me?”
Matt feigned a surprised laugh but his nervousness bled through. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “If I was trying to get rid of you, why would I investigate that plane the Zapatistas shot down?”
Abe didn’t even bat an eye. “I think you were hoping it was my plane. I can’t keep someone I can’t trust.”
Matt suddenly hit panic mode. “You can trust me, Abe. You’ve trusted me all these years.”
Abe glanced at the cross again. “Your usefulness has come to an end, Matt.”
With that, before Peet could even blink, Abe pulled his pistol and shot Matt square between the eyes. Shocked, Peet spun away as Matt’s head whipped back, spurting blood into the air as his body dropped to the ground.
“My God!” Father Ruiz gasped as the pistol shot dissipated through the jungle.
Abe lowered the weapon and tightened his grip on the cross. “That’s not a bad eulogy,” he sneered. “For a Mormon.”
Katun
Tacana’s pillar was surprisingly similar to that of Izapa’s, just a little taller. Complete with its own pillar ball at its crown, the pillar stood like the grave marker of some forgotten person whose life bore no consequence to the world as it stood now.
Her skin still smarting from the ant attack, Lori paused a short distance from the pillar at the insistence of Rafi’s rifle. Tarah continued alone down into the ravine toward the pillar waiting in the bottom. There was no reverence in her posture, nothing that would indicate respect for the altar she was approaching. She simply marched toward like a stone-conquering Amazon. She paused before the pillar as if taking a moment to size it up. Then slowly, commandingly, she marched around it, her eyes trained to the stone as if were a prisoner expected to attempt escape.
One complete lap around the pillar and Tarah stopped to turn back to Rafi and Lori. Between tightly drawn lips, she barked, “Bring her.”
Rafi nudged the muzzle of his rifle between Lori’s shoulders and she obediently stepped forward. Hurrying to stay ahead of the rifle, she half slid, half ran down the side of the ravine, coming to a floundering stop in front of Tarah who snatched the gag from her mouth.
“Well?” Tarah snapped. “Is this the next clue?”
Lori glared at her, her tongue running across her gritty teeth.
Tarah nudged her closer to the pillar. “Well? Is it?”
“I can’t inspect the stone with my hands behind my back,” Lori snapped back.
With an irritable sigh, Tarah released Lori’s hands. Hesitantly, Lori turned to the pillar. She scanned its relatively clean surfaces, taking her time to allow the circulation back into her hands. With only grass growing immediately at its base and nothing more, the pillar appeared to have been erected just yesterday. There was no moss, no lichen. In fact, there was very little wear to the carvings etched into the stone.
Strange for such an exposed artifact.
There were handprints carved on either side of the pillar ball, just like there’d been on Izapa’s pillar ball. She also found the familiar long lines that trailed down the length of the pillar itself. And then there was the glyph.
“This is the fourth clue, alright,” she said, kneeling at a small glyph chiseled into the side of the pillar. “This is the symbol for Katun.”
Tarah smiled. “All we need now is the Baktun. So where is this pillar telling us to go?”
Lori straightened, eyeing the ball atop the pillar. The palms of the pillar ball’s hands faced her, the fingertips pointing to the back of the pillar directly behind the Katun glyph. Lori placed her hands over the carvings and looked directly in front of her.
Her fingertips pointed down the ravine, back down the slope of Tacana.
“You mean we climbed all the way up here just to go right back down into that jungle?” Rafi complained.
“Follow the ravine,” Tarah ordered. “See if there’s anything down there.”
Grumbling beneath his breath, Rafi gathered his rifle and started down the ravine. Tarah waited patiently. Lori wasn’t so relaxed as Rafi disappeared into the jungle. She tried to anticipate what he might find. What lay at the end of this mysterious trail? Certainly the original Long Count Calendar was near, but what did it look like? Lori expected a stone of some sort, perhaps a rock wall littered with the carvings and brilliant calculations of the one who’d discovered the five thousand one hundred twenty-five year cycle of time. But there had to be more to it. If they were about to uncover the scribble pad of an ancient genius, where did the Talking Cross fit in?
Rafi’s movements were drawing near once more.
“Do you see anythi
ng?” Tarah called.
Rafi stepped out of the trees, marching back up the ravine. “There’s nothing,” he snarled. “I can’t tell where there’s ever been anyone down there.”
Tarah spun on Lori, her eyes snapping. “Are you sure this is the way we’re supposed to go?”
Lori’s breath caught short in her throat. She wasn’t sure of anything except that she was a long way from the Quetzalcoatl that had lured her to Mexico in the first place. She didn’t care about this quest for the Long Count Calendar. Not really. It was increasingly obvious that she was never going to find Dr. Webb and she knew nothing about the Talking Cross that had drawn her off track. She wished she’d never heard of Matt Webb. She wished she’d never fallen in with Abe and Tarah. More than anything, she wished she was far from Tacana, never to return.
“Where are we supposed to go?” Tarah demanded.
“The pillar points down the ravine,” Lori insisted.
Tarah snared Lori’s hair, pulling her down to her knees as she trained her pistol to her head. Lori didn’t struggle. The ants had taught her that lesson. Her mind reeled for an explanation. Maybe Rafi hadn’t gone far enough down the ravine. What if the Katun pillar was pointing them toward a different mountain all together? There just wasn’t enough information to go by.
Tarah yanked on her hair, sending sparks of pain across her bug-bitten scalp. “Where in the ravine do we go?” she demanded.
Lori’s neck ached from the severe angle Tarah was pulling on her head. “I don’t know,” she admitted through her tightly drawn throat. She suddenly feared that exposure, sure now that at any moment Tarah would draw a knife and cut her throat wide open.
Tarah didn’t draw a knife. Instead, she shoved Lori’s head aside, smashing the side of her face against the pillar. “Look again,” she ordered.
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