by Graham Brown
McCarter went back to his notes. “Glyphs in your underwater temple give us instructions for how to find the next stone, the master stone if I’m reading them right.”
“Where?”
“At a place called the Temple of the Jaguar, somewhere in the mountains.”
They looked on as he smoothed out the map of southern Mexico. Using a straightedge and beginning at the location of the underwater temple, he drew a line calculated from another series of numbers. It stretched across Mexico and into the highlands of Guatemala.
“We take this angle,” he said, pointing to his line. “It leads to the next stone, the Sacrifice of the Body.”
“Where exactly do we stop?” Danielle asked, examining the line.
McCarter looked down at the map. His course cut across low jungle filled with mangrove swamps and up onto the foothills, traveling across the ridges of the Sierra Madre Occidental before continuing out to the Pacific.
To follow that line they’d have to hike through the jungle and then up and down a series of five- and six-thousand-foot peaks. It would take months.
McCarter scratched his head. “I’m not exactly sure,” he admitted. “The glyphs were written in Mayan form, but they read like someone was telling the artisan a story. It says: ‘The Brotherhood shall follow the path of those who were as gods, but moved like men. Frail and mortal, mere fragments of the gods, attempts at the human kind like the Wooden People of old. There was built the Mirror and the Temple of the Jaguar at the end of the shining path, in the footsteps of the gods.’”
“I’m not trying to be unromantic here,” Danielle said, “but that doesn’t exactly help us.”
“Sorry,” McCarter said.
“So what’s the shining path?” Danielle asked herself aloud. “Could it be the Milky Way? What with the Maya and all their astronomy.”
“I thought about that,” McCarter said. “But the glyphs don’t include a time component, or even a season. And like all stars, those in the Milky Way align lower on the horizon in some seasons and higher in others. You couldn’t use that as a reference unless you specified a month or day or at least the general time of year.”
“What then?” she asked.
He shook his head, but from the corner of his eye he saw Hawker grinning.
“I think I know what it is,” Hawker said. “Or at least I know how we can find it. All we need is—”
The house phone rang, interrupting Hawker. He grabbed it.
McCarter heard the front desk clerk shouting vigorously over the line.
“Get out, señor! Get out now! They are coming for you!”
CHAPTER 42
Hawker slammed the phone down.
“Get the kid and the stone,” he shouted as he threw open a closet and pulled out a shotgun.
McCarter grabbed Yuri, while Danielle pulled a backpack from a cabinet in the suite’s kitchen.
Hawker stepped to the door and opened it a crack. There were men coming down the hall, dressed like tourists but definitely not on vacation. Caucasians with grim, pale faces, not even sunburned. They certainly hadn’t been out enjoying the sights. Two stood near the far stairs while three others had stopped just one door down, at the suite Hawker had originally rented.
God bless that kid at the front desk, Hawker thought. He wanted his bonus. If they survived this somehow, the kid would have damned well earned it.
The first of the two men pushed into the neighboring room. And then the third one looked down the hall. Right at Hawker.
Hawker slammed the door.
“Get down!” he shouted, diving away from the door as a flight of lethal bullets ripped it to shreds.
Hawker came up firing, blowing a hole in the wall to the left of the door and then turning to the dividing wall between the two rooms. The concussions from the shotgun echoed as he blasted four gaping holes in the thin plaster. A howl of anguish followed one blast and the sound of something heavy crashing to the floor. He guessed he’d hit at least one of the thugs.
Crouching behind the counter, Danielle shouted to him. “Which way?!”
A shoulder slamming into the door and busting it open gave them the answer. Hawker fired at the shape in the doorway as Danielle led McCarter and Yuri to the balcony. That was their only hope: a twenty-foot drop to the sand below.
Before he could move to a new position a hail of bullets came tearing through the same wall through which he had fired, shattering the plates and glasses and the sliding glass door to the balcony. Hawker fired back blindly and scrambled to a new position. In the moment of calm he turned to see Danielle hurdle the railing, carrying Yuri with her. But several steps behind her McCarter froze.
Hawker could see him looking around for another way.
“Jump!” he shouted, just as heavy automatic fire began shredding the room again. Plaster and bits of wood flew through the air like confetti and Hawker dropped to the ground and crawled on his belly toward the balcony.
“Jump!” he shouted again.
McCarter looked back at him, one leg over the railing, frozen like a deer in the headlights. If one of the gunmen made it to the adjoining balcony from the suite next door, McCarter would be dead.
Distracted by McCarter, Hawker missed as one of the attackers kicked the remains of the wall in and fired.
Bullets hit around him, one scraping his forearm, as he spun and fired back.
His own shot was wild but the burly, dark-haired man who’d come through the wall dove to avoid it. With the shotgun empty, Hawker swung it like a club, knocking the assault rifle out of the man’s hand. As it clattered across the floor, Hawker lunged for it. But the assassin grabbed him and pinned him to the ground.
Hawker rolled and tried to throw the man off but was unable to free himself. The man was reaching for a shoulder-holstered pistol.
Hawker threw his hand out, desperately grabbing for an object to use as a weapon. His hand landed on a long shard of glass from the door. He gripped it, swung it forward, and plunged it into the man’s neck.
The man fell backward, clutching at his throat. Hawker scrambled away and ran for the balcony, launching himself through the air and tackling the wavering professor right off the edge of the railing.
They crashed into the sand, with Hawker on top of McCarter.
“Are you all right?” Hawker said.
“I will be,” McCarter grunted. “If you get the hell off me.”
“Look out!” Danielle shouted.
Hawker rolled defensively as she fired a handgun at a figure above them, hitting him just before he was able to fire down on them.
Hawker helped McCarter up and noticed McCarter’s clothes covered in blood.
“Your hand,” McCarter said.
Hawker looked at his hand as the four of them raced along the beach. Blood was flowing from a straight line cut by the shard of glass. He made a fist and tried to hold it against his side as they moved.
Fifty yards down they found a breezeway that cut underneath the structure, from the beach side of the hotel out to the street side. It was a maintenance access route. They ducked into it and raced through, breaking into a storage room while they were there.
By the time they came out the front, Hawker had wrapped his hand in a towel and the three of them were in worker’s overalls. They walked along the front of the grounds, Yuri holding on to Danielle.
Police sirens wailed as guests began pouring out of their rooms.
Sneaking past the valet, Hawker grabbed a set of keys and in a minute the four of them were driving off in a stolen rental car.
“Everyone okay?” Hawker asked.
“Except for you,” McCarter said.
“How’s Yuri?”
In the mirror, Hawker saw Danielle run a soothing hand over the boy’s shoulder. She looked up. “He seems fine.”
He did seem fine. The look in his eyes was flat, as if the madness had not even happened.
“Those guys weren’t Kang’s,” Danielle said.
“Russians,” Hawker said. “I figured we’d have to deal with them sooner or later. But I was definitely hoping for later.”
“How the hell did they find us?” she asked.
It was the same question he’d asked about Kang’s men on the water. He had no answer. They were an odd grouping, a white man and woman with an injured black man and a Russian child. That kind of diversity made them easy to spot but it wasn’t like they’d stayed in one place.
Hawker looked over at McCarter in the passenger seat. “When the hell did you get afraid of heights?”
“Two years ago, in that rattletrap helicopter of yours,” he said. “I pinpoint my phobia to that exact moment.”
Hawker laughed. He hoped McCarter was joking, because their next move would take them back into the air.
* * *
Ivan Saravich walked through the decimated hotel suite, heading toward the balcony through which his quarry had just escaped. Glass crunched under his feet and he could hear the sound of police sirens wailing in the distance.
To the left, one of his men lay dead, a long wedge of glass sticking out of his neck; two others were badly injured and a trickle of blood ran down his own side where several pellets of buckshot had caught him.
As his two remaining men helped their wounded comrades, Saravich stepped out onto the balcony.
“Get them to the van,” he said without looking back.
“What about Gregor?” one man asked.
Saravich shook his head. “Leave him,” he said. “He cannot be traced to us.”
The men shuffled out and Ivan looked around. A glass of rum lay undisturbed on the balcony table. He picked it up, sniffed the aroma, and then raised it to his missing adversary.
That’s twice the luck was with you. The third time it will be mine.
He downed it in one gulp and stepped back inside. As he was heading for the door, something caught his eye. Lying on the floor beside the overturned table was a large, unfolded map. He crouched down to grab it. To his surprise, he saw several places circled and a black line drawn across it.
Saravich smiled. Perhaps the luck was with him already.
CHAPTER 43
Thirty minutes from the hotel, now in possession of a different, legally obtained vehicle, Danielle, Hawker, McCarter, and Yuri were traveling north, back toward the more crowded sections of the coast near Cancun, headed for the airport.
Danielle sat in the back trying to communicate with Yuri in Russian. He had grown frantic and with the stone now so close to him again, he could not settle down.
“Yuri, we’re going to a new place,” she said. “It will be all right.”
He looked at her and then at the backpack containing the stone. “Brighter,” he said in Russian. “Brighter.” He covered his eyes.
They’d assumed this stone’s power wave matched the one from Brazil, but what if it didn’t? She wondered if it was near to peaking now.
“What do you see?” she asked in Russian.
He held his hand out, demonstrating curved lines. “Yellow,” he said.
“Is it hurting you?” she asked.
He did not respond.
“Does it hurt your eyes?” she asked. “Does the brightness hurt your head?” She touched the side of her temple.
He shook his head. “Yellow is good,” he said. “Blue, no good, darker then it hurts.”
Danielle was thankful for what he said. She noticed he’d gotten more used to having the stone around since the night before, but she guessed that would change if it began to power up again.
Their current guesstimate had the next scheduled peak coming in about five hours, an event she suspected would be a “normal” burst, nothing like the energy wave released on the boat. It could still be problematic. They would have to time their actions accordingly.
She stroked Yuri’s hair and he pressed into the seat, leaning against her. One thing for sure, the kid was a trouper.
Ahead of her, Professor McCarter sat in the front passenger seat. He seemed to be focused on pain in his leg. He touched the skin around the dressing, gingerly probing the bruised muscle.
“You all right?” Danielle asked.
“Either I hurt myself in the fall or the infection is coming back.”
“I’ll give you another dose of the antibiotics,” she said.
“Not right now,” he said. “I feel a little queasy. Let’s get settled somewhere first.”
She relented and looked over at Hawker. They were picking their way toward the local airport in heavy traffic along a narrow, two-lane road. They had been moving steadily earlier but it had become stop-and-go now.
“How the hell can a little town like this have so much traffic?” Hawker grumbled.
“Didn’t you see all those hotels along the beach?” Danielle said.
Hawker didn’t reply; he just switched on the radio. After scanning through a group of Spanish language channels he found one that was broadcasting in English. The announcer was British.
Danielle guessed it might have been the BBC Worldwide.
… they’ve come here by the thousands to celebrate this Mayan milestone. Serious scholars, curious travelers, and New Wave crystal worshippers searching for something called the vortex. Above all, tens of thousands of vacationers, mostly Americans and Europeans expecting a party that should be a cross between Mardi Gras and New Year’s Eve, with much nicer weather.
Until recently, that’s exactly what they’d gotten. All enjoying themselves and eagerly awaiting that ultimate moment when the Mayan calendar hits its end and rolls over to begin again. Most just smile and laugh when any talk of a cataclysm is raised. At least that was the case, until midday yesterday when an unexplained shock wave plunged half the country into darkness.
Hawker turned the broadcast up just a bit.
Officials insist the blackout was caused by an overload from the U.S. grid, after a mishap in the top-secret Groom Lake air base. But many insist a shock wave was felt here and was particularly strong along the coast. This, combined with what might have been a terrorist attack at one of the hotels earlier today and the sudden uptick in tensions worldwide, has the vast majority of these travelers trying desperately to get home.
End of the world or not, most of the travelers I talked to aren’t in the mood to stick around and find out.
Hawker shut off the radio and Danielle stared through the traffic up ahead of them. They were a mile or so from the entrance to the airport. She could see units of the Mexican army and riot police around the gates. Every car that passed was being checked and rechecked.
“They may have our description,” she said. “Not sure I want to chance making it through security.”
“I wasn’t planning on buying a ticket,” Hawker said. “I was planning on borrowing a helicopter.”
“You mean stealing one,” she replied.
“It’s not stealing if you bring it back.”
She laughed. Perfect Hawker logic.
“This is too hot, though,” he said. “Too many people. Too much security.”
McCarter seemed pleased. “I can’t say I’m completely disappointed.”
“Me neither,” Danielle said.
He smiled at them. “Might want to hold off on that,” he said. “You haven’t seen plan B yet.”
With that, he turned into a gas station, waited for a few moments, and then accelerated calmly back out onto the street, moving opposite of the traffic and away from the airport.
CHAPTER 44
Kang’s warehouse in Campeche had become a command center to rival Mission Control at NASA. On one side were scholars he’d hired to translate the glyphs from the submerged temple; on the other were banks of computers, dozens of screens, and groups of trained men working the equipment like air traffic controllers.
It was a face-to-face search with a twenty-first-century twist. Kang had teams scouring the various towns, villages, and archeological sites that he suspected the NRI team might visi
t, including the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. All in all two hundred men were running about, carrying cameras and other remote sensing equipment. They simply wandered around, scanning faces, moving from section to section, through plazas, airports, restaurants, and hotels, wandering up and down streets and avenues. His men did not have to find the NRI team; in fact most of them had no idea what they were looking for. They just had to execute the simple orders they were given. Kang’s computers would do the rest.
Behind him, racks of high-powered servers hummed as they absorbed and processed the data. Facial recognition software running at blazing speeds examined every image. A man moved down one street, and five hundred faces were scanned and ruled out. Another man wandered the airport from gate to gate, and in thirty minutes Kang could be certain that the NRI personnel were not there.
In this way his two hundred men could scour the countryside like a veritable army of spotters.
Kang checked the readout. His artificial intelligence system had initially predicted a 31 percent chance that the NRI team would access one of these points for additional information.
But that prediction was updated constantly based on the rate of progress. As Kang checked the readout, he saw a diminishing likelihood of finding the Americans at any of the known Mayan sights. And with all the additional faces that had been scanned and rejected at the university, that probability was falling as well.
The current analysis graded the possibilities in the following manner:
Probability that
NRI party has been captured or incapacitated: 3.27%
NRI party no longer in Mexico and heading for the United States: 9.41%
NRI party will use McCarter’s remote access to New York University mainframe: 11.74%
NRI party has sufficient information to locate precise point of next site: 14.69%
NRI party will access a local university or museum for data: 28.91%
NRI party has sufficient data to begin generalized search for next site: 31.08%