by Rob Jones
“Sure,” Camacho said. “So after the host opens the door with one of the booby prizes behind it, the contestant still has a one in two chance of choosing the star prize – fifty-fifty.”
“Still so far so good,” Kim said.
“Except he hasn’t,” Alex said.
“Let me get this straight,” Scarlet said. “You’re saying James Bond is behind one of the doors, but behind the other two doors is a Ryan Bale?”
Despite the pain in her legs, Alex rolled her eyes. “If that helps you, then fine.”
“It does. You’re now saying I pick a door, and then the host opens another door revealing one of the Ryans, so the contestant – me, for example – now has to choose between two doors to get to James?”
“Right.”
“Two doors, one choice – simple... it’s a fifty-fifty choice of getting James.”
“But that’s not right,” Alex continued. “The probability of getting James is higher if you swap your original choice to the second door because that’s twice as likely to be where he’s standing.”
“You’re melting my mind,” Scarlet said.
2:57
“Mine too,” added Kim, sweeping her hair back from her face and trying to slow her breathing.
“They’re right,” Camacho said. “What you said doesn’t make any sense at all. We had three wires. I picked the yellow wire as the one that cuts the timer feed and then Juana told us the red one was one of the detonation wires. Now there are two left and I don’t know which one activates the bomb.” He turned to look at Alex. “In my book, that makes this a straight fifty-fifty and I’m going with my gut and cutting the yellow wire.”
“No, it’s called a veridical paradox,” Alex said. “That means even though it makes no sense at all it’s still right. When you started there were three wires. This meant you had a one in three chance, or thirty-three percent chance of getting the right wire. At this point the chance of picking a booby prize was two in three, or sixty-six percent.”
“Go on.”
“So you make your choice and the host opens one of the other doors to reveal a booby prize.”
“A Ryan,” Scarlet said, deadpan.
“A Ryan,” Alex repeated with a sigh. “So now you know where one of the Ryans is – in this case, one of the wires that trigger the bomb. If you stick with your original choice of the yellow wire you only have a thirty-three percent chance of picking James - the original one-in-three probability from the start when all the doors were shut. This means by not changing your original choice you have a thirty-three percent chance of getting James, and a sixty-six percent chance of getting a Ryan.”
“Someone get me a Tylenol,” Kim said.
“So what if you change your original choice?” Scarlet said.
1:59
Camacho checked the time. “While I’m impressed that you explained all this in less than two minutes, Alex, we can’t afford to wait much longer.”
“This is where the host – or Juana – comes in,” Alex said. “She knows which wire cuts the timer – the star prize – and after you selected yellow she told you the red wire was one of the booby prizes. As I said, you originally had a sixty-six percent chance of picking one of the booby-trap wires and only a thirty-three percent chance of picking the wire that deactivates the bomb, right?”
“Right.”
“But then the host turns up and eliminates one of the doors he knows hides the booby prize, or in our case eliminates one of the wires she knew would trigger the bomb. The analogy is identical.”
“I want vodka,” Scarlet said, her eyes crawling over the sleek, ticking nuke.
1:24
“It’s simple,” Alex continued, wincing at a fresh wave of pain in her legs. “If you get lucky and pick the door concealing James, then the host opens a door concealing one of the Ryans, right? This means if you change your choice you definitely get a Ryan, but – and this is the whole point – if you picked a Ryan first, which is twice as likely, and the host then opens the other door concealing a Ryan, a change of choice means a one hundred percent chance of getting James.”
“Still not with you.”
1:12
“Don’t you see? Every time you pick a Ryan first, a change of door means a higher chance of getting James, and the chances of picking Ryan first are sixty-six percent.”
Kim smiled. “I get it! You’re twice as likely to pick a Ryan first in the first place, so when the host opens the door on the booby prize – the other Ryan – switching doors means you’re much more likely to get James!”
Scarlet put her hand on Camacho’s shoulder. “So it’s simple, go with your gut or go with Alex’s completely incomprehensible statistics.”
“You know what?” Camacho said. “I’m goin’ with Alex.”
He took a deep breath and cut the blue wire.
0:03…
… and the timer stopped ticking.
“Pussy,” Scarlet said, sighing with relief. She recalled Bradley Karlsson’s words back in Tokyo when Ryan deactivated the Tesla device. “Ryan Bale waited until two seconds.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Morton Wade scrambled through the slit in the wall like a frightened rat. As he crawled under, a jagged rock on the top of the aperture caught his back and carved a deep gouge into his flesh. He screamed in pain, but knew there was no time to stop.
When he got to the other side of the slit, he staggered to his feet and felt the blood running down his back. Huitzilopochtli had forsaken him because of his treachery when he started worshipping Mictlantecuhtli, and worse, he now knew he was a coward.
Any idea he’d entertained of ending his own life had vanished like morning mist at the first opportunity afforded to him. He’d led so many to their deaths, and yet now he was running like a common criminal. In his confused, terrified mind one thing was crystal clear: this wasn’t the end of line, and no damned Limey soldier was going to kill him, either.
He ran a few paces and turned a corner. He looked around for a way out, and his mouth went as dry as sand when he realized he’d already been this way. He was just running around in circles, lost inside the God of the Dead’s hellhole Underworld.
And now, what was that noise?
It sounded like something breathing, moving – a sort of shuffling sound.
What was it now?
People.
Not a person – no, the noise was bigger than that. It was a group of people, but there was an unsettling synchronization in the way they were moving… like they were thinking as one. And the breathing was hurried, shallow… desperate.
And then he saw them.
Turning the corner ahead of him to his left was the source of the strange noise. It was the people he intended to sacrifice to Mictlantecuhtli. They were all there, venomous hatred in their pitted eyes as they moved closer to him. In their hands the very same obsidian daggers he was going to use on them. He knew what it meant, and he felt sick. How could it have come to this?
“No iba a hacer daño!” he tried to yell in his broken Spanish, but his voice cracked with fear and the words were no more than a pathetic whisper. He began to walk backwards away from them. “I wasn’t going to hurt you… I swear!”
But still they came.
“I have money. You can have all my money… Tengo un montón de dinero!”
His wretched pleas fell on deaf ears as they moved closer, the blades raised in their hands, trembling with rage.
He turned on his heel and sprinted deeper into the complex. So this was Mictlan, he thought as he pounded through the labyrinthine tunnels… and here I will die – and then he saw a familiar face.
“Silvio! Is that you?”
Mendoza came staggering around the corner but backed up immediately when he saw the danger approaching Wade.
“You know the way out of this shithole, Silvio?”
Mendoza said nothing, but glanced from Wade’s sweat-covered face down the tunnel to the men and women w
ith nothing but revenge on their minds.
“I’ll pay – you know I have the cash. Come on, Silvio!”
Wade wiped the sweat from his face and looked down at his hand. He realized he was still wearing the face paint. “What you got there, buddy?” he said, looking at the idol.
“I know the way out,” Mendoza said, ignoring him.
“Great – let’s get out of here, man.”
“The way out for you,” Mendoza said, stepping closer… “is death.”
Wade felt a savage blow smash into his stomach. He tried to scream but the blade punctured his diaphragm and then he felt the blood pouring out of the wound. He looked down to see Mendoza holding one of the obsidian sacrificial daggers.
“Silvio… help me!” Wade said as he crumpled to the floor.
“Chinga usted, Wade. I help no one but myself.”
Mendoza spat on Wade and turned on his heel.
“You Mexican bastard!” he screamed in his Texan drawl.
As Mendoza’s shadow receded along the wall of the tunnel, Wade turned his attention to the men and women with the daggers. They were almost upon him now, but he was helpless to move, bleeding out through the wound in his stomach.
They grabbed him by the legs and dragged him down the tunnel.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said. He felt his hair scraping in the blood of his wounds as they hauled him along the dirty tunnel floor. “If you’re going to kill me then just kill me!”
One of the men turned a stubbly, sweaty face to him and spoke in Spanish. “We are not going to kill you, Señor Wade. We are going to sacrifice you. It’s quite different as I’m sure you will agree.”
“What? Let go of me you bastards! Please… I’m so sorry. I’ll give you everything I have.”
Unmoved by his desperate pleas, they continued to drag him in solemn silence down the tunnel toward Mictlantecuhtli’s altar room.
Wade struggled against his captors but it was useless. He could do nothing as they heaved him up to the altar and held his arms and legs down. He watched in terror as one of the men moved forward, his chanting now a jumble of incoherent words mixed together by his trance-like state. In his hand, the man raised the obsidian knife. The razor-sharp blade of polished volcanic glass flashed in the low green of the glow stick.
“Please… I don’t deserve this! Oh, God help me, please…”
And then the jagged obsidian struck his chest. He gasped as he felt the volcanic shards tear into his flesh, and screamed in terror as the chanting began, louder now. His mind raced with panic as the man raised the dagger for a second strike. Would he live to see his own heart held above him, still beating?
He closed his eyes and screamed in fear as the dagger blows rained down.
CHAPTER FORTY
Silvio Mendoza ran into the night, breathing hard and wincing at the pain of the bullet wound in his arm. He tripped over the roots of a chicozapote tree and stumbled forward, momentarily losing his grasp on the strange golden idol. He lay there for a moment, the sound of his heart pounding in his ears as the fighting back at the temple complex started to subside. Hawke must have won, he cursed.
But the bastard Wade was dead, and he had sent him on his way. God only knew what had happened to him in that hell pit. How deep did it go? Was it really the entrance to Mictlan? Mendoza preferred a simple life of extorting money and exerting power. Ideas like Mictlan and the god of the dead could fly away on the Tehuano wind as it ripped through the Chivela Pass. Such ideas were not for him.
And yet there was still this enigmatic little piece of the occult now in his possession. Maybe the fool Wade was onto something after all… he felt a shiver of fear run down his spine at the mere thought.
Gradually the noise of the battle behind him seemed to fade away as he studied the idol from his filthy, humid covert down in the roots and tangles of the rainforest. He felt like it was almost calling to him… whispering his name, but it was just in his mind. The moonlight shone dully on the idol as he stared at the mysterious face. He looked at it closer now.
It was a woman – for sure… a goddess of some kind, but nothing he recognized and certainly not Aztec, and yet there was something approximating Aztec pictograms on its back and side. Either side of her head was the strangest headdress he had ever seen – it looked almost like she had a wheel on either side of her head, and it was covered in intricate carvings. It was bewitching, beguiling… he couldn’t take his eyes off her and her imperious, almost inhuman face.
What value must an object as precious as this hold..? His avaricious mind raced with an almost uncontainable delight as he thought about what such wealth could bring him… his freedom from the Americans and a powerful new cartel. It was almost too good to be true, but Wade had been certain that any treasure they found in Mictlan was sure to be priceless.
He picked the idol back up and slipped it in his jacket pocket. Whoever she was, she was all he had now. Wade had died horribly back in the complex – he could still hear the screams as the blood pumped from his chest – and the ECHO team had gunned down Garza and the others. But what had happened in America?
He called Aurora from the dank silence of his jungle hole and it didn’t take her long to explain about the failure to deliver Armageddon to the gabachos in California. His brother was dead, at the hands of ECHO once again, and Aurora was a fugitive on the run.
Mendoza snapped the phone shut without a word to her. “I will live to fight another day,” he said, cursing his failure. “And for my brother, you will pay with your lives.”
Then he scrambled away into the thick, sultry jungle.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
As the dust settled over the temple complex, Lea wound a bandage around the wound in Hawke’s side. As she worked, he watched Gonzalez’s men round up the last surviving members of Wade’s fanatical cult from the jungle around the complex, including a handful of the serpientes. They cuffed them ready for the journey back to civilization.
“Any sign of Mendoza?” he asked.
Sergeant Gonzalez shook his head. “He’s not among the dead we’ve searched either, but my men are still looking.”
Hawke nodded. “He’s long gone,” he said, and the sergeant tossed him a bottle.
“Take this,” said Gonzalez, lighting a cigarette. “You earned it.”
It was a bottle of tequila, and Hawke agreed they’d earned it. He tensed under the bandage and the pain of the obsidian blade wound coursed through his body.
Everywhere he looked he saw death and destruction. Black smoke from the fires started by the mortars bloomed up into a twilight sky now lit by the flames from the burning complex. Corpses of the dead lay strewn across the battle field, face-down on the ground and twisted inside the mangled wreckage of Wade’s blown-up chopper.
When it came to death, the jungle worked fast: the stench of the dead was already in the air. Hawke shook his head in disbelief. He guessed Mictlantecuhtli had gotten his sacrifices after all, but Silvio Mendoza wasn’t one of them. The cartel boss had escaped into the jungle with the mysterious golden idol and that couldn’t be allowed to pass. Worse than that, he knew he had to pass on to the others the revelation about Matheson being controlled by this mysterious Oracle. Finishing Wade’s lunatic Aztec prophecy had been a non-stop lightning ride, and he hadn’t had a single chance to discuss Matheson’s dying words with his friends.
Amidst the smoking ruins, Lea was now talking with some of the Mexican Special Forces. She looked tired, but still strong. He hadn’t spoken to her about it, but sometimes he wondered if they should get hitched… then visions of Matheson sprawled out dead in his study rose in his mind and he let the thought fly away. It was too soon after Liz.
Killing Matheson had helped to lay her to rest in his mind, but it was only half the job. Alfredo Lazaro, the Spider, was still out there somewhere, and he too would pay the ultimate price for his actions that day in Vietnam. But for now at least, Matheson’s death had eased some of the ang
uish he’d felt since that day.
As Ryan and Maria were hugging in a part of the complex they thought was out of sight, Lea took a call and meandered over to Hawke. “That was Rich,” she said. “The bomb is deactivated and Jorge Mendoza and the rest of the cult members are dead.”
“Juana Diaz?”
“In custody.”
“What about Aurora Soto?”
“Dropped off the radar, which is a worry… the crazy bitch.”
Hawke nodded. It was more than a worry. That meant both Silvio Mendoza and Aurora Soto, the insane lovers, were both free and in possession of what could easily be the world’s most important artefact.
They slowly congregated back at the base of the main pyramid. Reaper twisted the lid off the bottle of tequila and took a long gulp, wiping the spirit from his lips. “That’s the medicine I need,” he said with a happy sigh. “Oué vraiment, mes amis!”
“But firewater’s a dangerous medicine, Reap,” Lea said, taking the bottle.
“When do we get to see the treasure again?” Ryan asked.
Hawke looked at him like he was crazy. He had forgotten about the treasure, but now it all came flooding back. Despite the carnage all around them, they were sitting on top of one of the greatest discoveries in archaeological history – the Noche Triste treasure – an incalculable quantity of silver and gold bullion taken from Moctezuma by the Spanish but as they now knew, taken back again and hidden in the deepest jungle. This was one hoard the Caribbean pirates never even had a chance to seize.
“Something tells me we’re not going to see the treasure again,” Lea said.
Hawke let a brief smile dance on his lips as he watched Ryan take a slug of the tequila, wince in disgust and hand him the bottle. A humid jungle breeze blew across the complex and above their heads the first stars began to shine in the tropical sky.