by Graham Brown
He wondered privately if that scenario would have caused the western command to launch some type of counterattack, firing back against anyone anywhere who might have been responsible.
The president was thankful that burst had happened so far from civilization. But it had caused a shift in his position. He’d begun coming around to what the director of central intelligence had been pushing all along: that these stones, these devices of unimaginable power, were incredibly dangerous instrumentalities. If the men who studied them did not understand them, or even know what they were capable of, how could anyone accurately predict their intended or even unintended consequences?
For the past month, he’d been swayed by the opinion of his longtime friend, Arnold Moore. But for all his well-known gifts of discernment, Moore didn’t seem to feel the danger.
“Mr. President,” the head of the Joint Chiefs said, “in the interests of national security I must formally request we move the military readiness status to Defense Condition Two.”
“Two?” the president asked, stunned.
“Yes, Mr. President. I feel in light of the Russian and Chinese actions it’s necessary.”
Escalation, the predictable result of itself. Certainly Moore had been right about that. Even if he was blind to his own part in the cause.
The president looked down at the photo in the briefing folder. Russian ICBMs fueling up. For the first time in decades. He felt a thin sheen of sweat on his palms. Things were beginning to come unglued. Prior to this moment he’d felt a conviction that he could do what was needed and keep everything and everyone reined in. Now he knew that was beyond his grasp. And he also knew with certainty that he could no longer protect both his old friend and the American people at large.
“Mr. President … I’m afraid we need an answer.”
Henderson closed the folder and looked up.
“No,” he said. “DefCon Three only. Take all defensive measures, but I don’t want any ships going to sea early, bombers on airborne alert, or ICBM activity. Do one damned thing to make them more afraid and I’ll fire your asses on the spot. You understand me?”
So forceful was the president’s voice, so unexpected, that the entire room shrank back. Henderson considered that a good sign. He knew there would still be visible signs of the upgrade but they would be minimal and perhaps it would be the start of a de-escalation.
“Yes, Mr. President,” the head of the JCS said.
As President Henderson stood, the room came to attention.
“I want updates in two hours,” he said, then glanced over at Byron Stecker. “Come with me.”
Henderson strode from the Situation Room and down the hallway. The glare on his face was dark enough that staff members who’d been waiting hours to speak with him pulled back into the shadows and let him pass.
Stecker caught up with the president halfway to the White House elevator.
“What’s your take on Moore?” the president barked.
Stecker fumbled for a moment, and then spoke. “He wants his way,” Stecker said, struggling to keep up. “Wants to win his argument.”
That wasn’t Moore’s style, the president thought. Moore could be obstinate but not for the sheer sake of it. If the facts were plain he would surrender his case. There was something else.
Turning the corner, he launched his next question. “Could he be withholding information?”
Stecker looked away, as if considering the possibility.
“I’ve had issues with the NRI since day one,” Stecker said. “And especially since Moore took over. I wouldn’t put it past him if he thought it was the right thing to do, but …”
“But?”
“But in this case it would take a hell of an effort. We have access to the stone; we have everything in their database. My people have been all over it for the past couple of weeks. Everything is linked to everything else. Every report they ran built on a prior one. If there were holes in the data we’d have found them. So if he is holding something back, it’s something he never disclosed in the first place.”
The president doubted that. Moore had been up-front that the stone had been brought here from the future, that it was creating ever larger waves of energy, and that it was ticking down to something cataclysmic. If you weren’t going to hide those facts, what the hell could be worth hiding?
And yet Moore’s actions in this particular instance seemed out of character: his initial reluctance to explain what his people were doing in Mexico, his private hiring of a mercenary to rescue his friend — a loss that the man Henderson used to know would have borne stoically out of duty’s sake, even with all its pain and anguish.
The president stopped thirty feet from the elevator and the Secret Service guard who stood beside it.
“Do Moore’s actions seem rational to you?” he asked.
If Stecker ever wanted to fire a broadside at Moore, the president had just given him the green light. But Stecker was subtle.
“If you have to ask, Mr. President …”
He did have to ask. And now he found himself furious with Moore for putting him in this position to begin with.
“I want you to go back out to Yucca,” he said. “I want you to keep an eye on Moore, personally.”
“Mr. President—”
“He’s too wrapped up in this thing to pull him off it now. He knows the stone and the research better than anyone else. But I’m strongly leaning toward destroying that damn thing, and on the chance that Moore finds that option unacceptable, you are to prevent him from interfering.”
The president paused and then added, “By any means necessary.”
CHAPTER 50
Ivan Saravich sat at the end of the poorly lit bar. A tepid shot of bad vodka sat in front of him.
He looked at the man beside him, the head of the FSB unit he now commanded.
Commanded. The word was a figment of someone’s imagination. Not his.
These men of his were as much his guards as his subordinates. They answered to him, yes, but only in regard to the quest. Their real masters resided in Moscow, with Ropa and the FSB.
“Let me get you a glass,” Ivan said.
“I don’t drink,” the man said.
Ivan shrugged. “Perhaps you should. You look upset.”
“We should not have left Gregor,” he said.
“It could not be helped,” Ivan said.
“We should have continued the pursuit,” the man said insistently.
Ivan downed his shot and poured another one.
“Along the crowded beach, with your weapons held high?” he scoffed. “How long do you think before the Mexican police arrived? How long before a helicopter and waves of cars made it impossible to escape? What would happen to our quest then?”
The man backed off a bit, but he still seemed angry and there was a sense of arrogance that would not fade. Finally he spoke. “I wonder if you really want to find the boy.”
Ivan smiled to himself, disgusted.
The man stood up. “We leave in the morning. You should know, I will not let you act that way next time.”
The man walked away. He was half Ivan’s age, thirty pounds heavier, and strong. Ivan guessed there was little beyond disdain in his heart for the old warrior.
How things change. He had once been a hero of the Soviet Union, and since its disintegration he had become a successful capitalist. He marveled at the differences. For him communism had meant honor without wealth, and capitalism wealth without honor. And now he was a disgrace, his only hope for redemption to assassinate a child.
Not a satisfactory end to either part of his life. The capitalist in him saw no profit in it and the communist saw no honor.
He downed another shot of vodka to quell that thought. The vodka was beginning to grow on him.
The truth was, if he didn’t succeed or do as ordered, these men would kill him. And if he did succeed … they would probably kill him anyway.
CHAPTER 51
; Professor McCarter held the church pew with his right hand for balance. He suddenly felt light-headed, as if he was swaying — or the ground was.
“Could you say that again?” he asked the priest.
Father Domingo stepped toward McCarter. He put a hand on McCarter’s shoulder. “The prophecy of Kukulcan,” he said. “The writings of Chilam Balam: December 21, 2012, the day in which darkness will pour from the sky. There are tourists everywhere in Central America because of it. But I sense you are different.”
“How can you tell?” Hawker said sarcastically.
“For one thing, you carry weapons. For another, none of you have cameras.”
He turned to Danielle. “And then there’s the object you brought with you. Something we have been waiting to see. You wish to deliver it to the Temple of the Jaguar, but you’re afraid of what will happen if you do.”
McCarter did not know how this man knew what he knew. But in McCarter’s weakened state it seemed ominous to him. “Or if we don’t,” he replied.
Father Domingo nodded in response to his statement. “Fear is the domain of the evil one,” he said. “Jesus told the mourners who believed their daughter had died to fear not and believe only. And she was healed. If you act out of fear, you will always make the wrong decision. You must act out of faith, whichever way you decide to go.”
“Easy for you to say,” Danielle replied. McCarter would have seconded that.
Father Domingo nodded. “Perhaps it is. And perhaps I can show you something that might make it easier for you. Come.”
He led them past the altar to a small door. Using a key on the modern padlock he released the cast-iron latch. The door creaked open. A long, wooden stairway beckoned.
With Hawker and Danielle’s help, McCarter followed Father Domingo down stairs made of old, lacquered pine. They arrived at a large wine cellar. Brick walls faced them on two sides and five huge oak barrels sat recessed within the earthen wall.
“San Ignacio was originally a fort and then a mission,” Father Domingo explained. “And after the conquest of Mexico it was turned into a monastery. The soldiers began to grow grapes here and when the monks took over they improved the vineyards and had these casks built. We still make wine and much of it will be served tonight as part of the novena, our celebration of the nine days before Christmas.”
Father Domingo walked slowly as he spoke, stopping finally at the last of the heavy casks. He slid a flathead screwdriver between two planks on the face of the barrel. Using a small hammer, he tapped it in farther. Taking great care not to bruise or split the wood, he levered the plank outward.
“Nice hiding place,” Hawker said.
“It even works,” he said grinning. “This one is the best wine of the bunch.”
He reached inside and pulled out a thin, flat box, like those used for long-stemmed roses.
McCarter hobbled forward as Father Domingo placed the box on the wine presser’s table. An inscription on the lid read: EN EL ANO DE DIOS MDCXCVIII.
“In the year of our Lord,” McCarter read aloud. “Sixteen ninety-eight.”
“Must be a rare vintage,” Danielle said.
Father Domingo looked up. “Very rare,” he said. “There is no other like it that I know of.”
Father Domingo opened the box. Inside, wrapped in a towel and then a layer of fireproof Nomex fabric was a sealed plastic bag. Within that was a cracking folded parchment wrapped partially in silk.
Father Domingo laid the parchment down, unfolding it with the greatest of care. On the top half of the yellowing paper they saw Spanish writing in faded blue ink. The bottom half was covered with symbols: Mayan hieroglyphs.
“What is this?” McCarter asked.
Father Domingo smiled. “The history of the church is not one of honor at times. Certainly not in this part of the world. When the conquistadors came, the church followed, and what wasn’t stolen by the men of Cortez was burned and broken by the church. Soon almost everything that had once been here was swept away. Lives taken, traditions banned, books and parchments thrown into the bonfire by the thousands, until there was little left but a pile of useless ash. If they could have, they would have swept the stone monuments into the sea.”
McCarter nodded sadly and turned to Hawker and Danielle. “Only four parchment books of Mayan writing are known to still exist. We call them codices — the Madrid codex, the Paris codex, the Dresden codex, after the cities they’re stored in. There is a fourth called the Grolier fragment. Four out of thousands. A few short pages of astrological studies are all that remain from hundreds of generations of Mayan civilization.”
“And the church was the chief destroyer,” Father Domingo said sadly. “A sin we shall bear until the day of judgment.”
“But this book,” McCarter noted, seeing there were several folded pages. “How did it survive?”
“Much of what God has done, he does through the fallen and the weak,” Father Domingo said. “In this case, in the darkest parts of the church’s shame there were those who spoke out. A missionary named DeVaca was one. One of the men whom his testimony reached was among the first to come here to San Ignacio. His name was Philippe Don Pedro. He had come from the Basque region of Spain, where he had owned a vineyard, only to see it burn once, and then after he rebuilt it, to see a pestilence destroy his vines.
“He came to the New World a broken man, a peasant priest. But when he arrived here he saw hills that would bring good wine and flat lands that could be irrigated and turned into productive fields. But he also saw that the people who lived here were happy and peaceful even if they were not yet Christian. And so he lied. His reports to the diocese described a place no one would want to set foot in, teeming with mosquitoes and fever and swampland. Surrounded by the most unproductive soil.”
“And Philippe Don Pedro found this parchment?” McCarter asked.
“No,” Father Domingo said. “When the oldest man of the village lay dying, he called for Don Pedro. He said he had lived in other villages before fleeing to the mountains and that Don Pedro was the only honorable man he had seen among the new regime. He promised he would convert to the religion of the cross, if only Don Pedro would protect for all time the last words of the old man’s dying world. Words no longer written, barely spoken.”
“The hieroglyphics,” McCarter said.
Father Domingo nodded. “As the story goes, Don Pedro asked the old man if he knew what converting meant. His reply was that his people, the Maya, had always known that only sacrifice and blood could atone for sins. If Don Pedro would tell him that Christ had done this for all, then he would believe.”
McCarter nodded. For many Central American religions, the story of Christ sacrificing himself on the cross, his life and blood offered for salvation, made perfect sense. Their kings and priests gave blood sacrifices of their own, cutting themselves and passing barbed ropes and other serrated objects through earlobes, lips, and tongues.
And while most in the church saw no similarity whatsoever in these actions, it made many of the indigenous people of the region easy to convert. At least partially.
It seemed they could be inclusive and worship both Christ and their own gods in a side-by-side sense. Only when they were forced to give up all other trappings of their former religion did the resistance began to stiffen.
“So the old man converted and gave Don Pedro the parchment,” Danielle said.
“And Don Pedro promised to protect it,” Hawker guessed.
Father Domingo nodded. “He wrote on it in Spanish the words that the old man told him. It reads, En los últimos días antes del Sol Negro, ellos vendrán. Tres blancos y uno negro, tres hombres y una mujer, y tres viejos, uno joven, tres sin ira, uno sin paz. Ellos decidirán el destino del mundo.”
As McCarter listened to these words, he translated them roughly in his head.
He looked at Danielle, and then Hawker. Danielle spoke very good Spanish and by the look of shock on her face she’d clearly translated the word
s. Hawker looked suspicious but wasn’t as fluent.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“In the last days before the Black Sun, they will come,” Father Domingo said, his voice resonating off the stone walls. “Three white, one black; three male, one female; three old, one young, three without anger, one without peace.”
As he heard the words, Hawker’s eyes narrowed and his square jaw clenched as if he were grinding his teeth to dust. He seemed more angered than awed by what they’d found and as McCarter studied his friend, he guessed that the final sentence would only make it worse.
He looked at Danielle; she knew. He returned his gaze to Father Domingo, who finished the translation, tracing his hand along the flowing lines of the Spanish script.
“Ellos decidirán el destino del mundo,” he said, once again. “And they shall determine the end of the world.”
CHAPTER 52
Hawker stared at the priest as he uttered the words. It was plainly evident that their little group matched the exact description on the parchment, but what did that tell them. Could it really have been meant to be them? Him, Danielle, Yuri, and McCarter?
He could see the gears in Danielle’s mind whirring. McCarter looked as if he’d just found some place of enlightenment himself, and Hawker could think of nothing more dangerous.
“Don’t get any ideas,” he warned. “It’s just a coincidence.”
“These are the last days, before the day of the Black Sun,” Father Domingo said. “When I saw the four of you, I must admit, my heart shook. With time growing short I have considered this parchment greatly and I wondered if anyone would appear. These words were written four hundred and ninety years ago.”
Hawker watched as Danielle moved to McCarter’s side and the two of them studied the parchment paper. There were several pages of Mayan hieroglyphics spread across its leaves and McCarter was instantly engrossed.