01-01-00

by R. J. Pineiro

Washington, D.C.

  They drove up Massachusetts Avenue and turned left on P Street, crossing over Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, heading into Georgetown, toward the university campus, a place Susan had avoided for the past few years.

  “Where do I turn?” asked Special Agent Trimble, steering down a tree-lined residential street dominated by two-story brownstones.

  Susan inspected the Post-it note in her hand. “Right on Wisconsin. Left on R Street. The number’s thirty-seven fifteen.”

  They reached the brownstone a few minutes later, parking by the curb. Dozens of cypress trees planted on both sides of the street projected their leafless canopies over the asphalt, merging in the middle of the road. Streetlights filtering through naked branches spotted the asphalt, creating islands of light in between ragged shadows. The sparse late-evening traffic had allowed some snow to accumulate on the street.

  “Stay here. I won’t be long,” she said, stepping out, snow pelting her coat.

  As Susan closed the door Gonzales rolled down his window. “You sure you don’t want us to come in?”

  “Nothing harmful in there. Just an old college professor. Besides, you two being in there might intimidate him.”

  “All right,” replied Gonzales. “We’ll stay put. Call if you need us.” The automatic window rolled back up.

  She opened the gate of a waist-high wrought-iron fence. Beyond it a narrow cobblestone walkway was flanked by a small garden. Everything but a few evergreens had lost its foliage to the frozen soil. She shuddered while filling her lungs with chilled air, wondering if she was trembling because of the cold or from being back on campus.

  Careful not to slip on the light frost layering the bedrock, Susan reached the front door, ringing the bell once.

  Shivering, she pulled up the lapels of her coat before bracing herself, glancing backward at the FBI sedan, engine running, smoke coiling from the exhaust.

  The front door opened. A man in a colorful shirt and blue jeans greeted her. He was around forty, athletically built, with a ruggedly handsome face and a full head of dark hair, save for a little gray over the temples. The top three buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing well-defined pectorals and a curious relic hanging from a plain silver chain around his neck. It looked like a small aboriginal stone head. The stranger smiled softly, looking more like a retired gymnast than a professor of pre-Columbian history. For a moment Susan wondered if she had gotten the wrong house.

  “Dr. Slater?” she asked tentatively.

  He nodded, looking directly at her, still smiling. Susan felt something stir inside. “And you must be Susan Garnett. Metcalf called. Said you would be dropping by.”

  “My apologies for the late hour.”

  “No problem.” He extended a hand. The sleeves of his shirt reached just below the elbows, exposing his forearms. A narrow leather band etched with glyphs hugged his left wrist. He wore no wedding band or watch. “I was just working on some papers.”

  Susan shook his hand firmly. “Pleasure to meet you.”

  “Please come in.”

  The man didn’t look like the eminent Dr. Cameron Slater, author of a number of textbooks on the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Incas—according to Jonathan Metcalf, the school’s chancellor, with whom Susan had become close friends during her professorship days. But this was the correct address and he did mention that Metcalf had already contacted him regarding this last-minute meeting. Still, now that he’d turned out to be anything but an old man, Susan had second thoughts about going inside the stranger’s house alone, and for a moment wished she would have let Gonzales come along. Something about Cameron Slater disturbed her, but she suddenly realized that it did so in a way that drew her in.

  “Just for a minute,” she said, extending a thumb over her left shoulder. “I have people waiting for me in the car.”

  Slater peered out toward the street. “Tell them to come in. No one should be outside when it’s this cold.”

  She shook her head while stepping inside the warm foyer, his remark easing her concern. “They’re shy.”

  Slater closed the door behind them.

  Susan stopped in the middle of the foyer admiring a tall stone statue of a hideous-looking creature, half man and half breast. The carved stone stood next to a set of tall clay vessels from which projected some of the most beautiful feathers she had ever seen. A low glass table next to the pots held smaller artifacts of apparent pre-Columbian origin, mostly made of stone. A mountain bicycle resting on the opposite wall seemed out of place with the unique decor, which took her by surprise, until she remembered that he was an archaeologist.

  She became conscious of Cameron Slater beside her.

  “That’s Kinich Ahau, jaguar god of the Sun in Mayan mythology,” observed Slater, pointing at the statue. “Or at least a hollow plaster replica,” he added, pushing it with a finger. It budged. “The real one’s where it belongs, near Tikal. This little thing is real, though.” He pointed to the relic dangling from his silver chain, which upon closer inspection resembled the head of the pagan god. “It’s supposed to keep me safe from the wrath of Kinich Ahau.” He winked.

  Susan grinned, relaxing a little around him.

  “But the vases are the real thing, as well as the quetzal feathers.”

  Susan had obviously come to the right place to learn about the Maya. “Quetzal?”

  “A tropical bird, worshiped by the Maya.” He picked up a two-foot-long hunter-green feather with streaks of violet and gold. It looked dazzling under the light of the foyer’s chandelier.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, running a finger across it.

  Slater frowned, replacing the feather. “Beauty can be a curse sometimes. The poor creature has been hunted into near extinction. I pulled those feathers from a young male shot dead near Tikal last year.”

  She followed him into a living room that resembled a museum. Glass cabinets lined the two side walls, enclosing artifacts of various shapes and sizes, some carved out of rock or wood, others shaped by clay artisans. Many of these figures sported heads that bore a similar resemblance: oversize foreheads, high cheekbones, pronounced noses, and full lips. Some wore feathers, others ceremonial hats. French doors in the back of the living room led to a small courtyard enclosed by a brick fence. A single sofa chair, covered with the skin of a brown animal, faced a cocktail table cluttered with old maps, a notepad and pen, a phone, and more relics. It became obvious to Susan that Slater used the living room as his workroom. However, a peek at the breakfast room to the right also revealed more artifacts on the table and two overstuffed bookshelves. It looked as if the entire house was his office.

  “Can I get you something to drink? Hot tea? Coffee?”

  “No thanks.”

  Slater extended a hand toward the sofa chair. She sat on it before realizing that it was the only place to sit in the living room. He grabbed a plain wooden chair from the breakfast room, turned it around, and straddled it, resting his elbows on its back.

  “So, Miss Garnett?”

  “Susan.”

  That smile again. “Susan. How can I be of service to the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”

  “Well, it may sound like a cliché, but what I’m about to tell you is considered a matter of national security,” she began. “Are you familiar with the recent computer virus that’s paralyzing networks around the globe?”

  He nodded. “It’s all over the news.”

  “Right,” she said, feeling a little stupid for having asked that.

  Standing, he walked over to the kitchen and returned with a small basket of apples and a small steak knife, setting them on the corner of the cocktail table. “Hungry?”

  “No thanks.”

  He snagged one and the knife. As she spoke, Susan noticed his forearms flexing while slicing a wedge and putting it in his mouth. He chewed it slowly.

  She told him a little about the ongoing investigation, including the software Sniffers that had led her to the lowlands of th
e Petén. Slater listened without interruption, consuming two apples in the process.

  “Has it really started?” he said more to himself than to Susan, staring in the distance, before mumbling something she couldn’t make out.

  “What started?”

  “How certain are you that the virus did originate in Tikal?”

  She shrugged. “As certain as the accuracy of the programs that I used … what has started?”

  “I’ll tell you in a moment. Now, please, tell me everything that you’ve learned regarding the accuracy of your observation.”

  She proceeded to explain the caveats with her findings, which included the possibility of the Sniffers being fooled by the queen virus. “So we’re going to try a different approach tomorrow night. See where that takes us. But assuming that it’s to the same place, I’m trying to get a head start by learning as much as I can about Tikal and the Maya to shed some light on this mysterious virus. There has to be a connection somewhere that might tell me how to kill it.”

  Slater stood, walked over to one of the bookcases in the breakfast room, and returned with a thick leather-bound tome. He set it on the cocktail table, sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor next to the sofa chair, and began to leaf through it. “So, these events started two days ago, right?”

  She leaned forward, her face only inches from his while he browsed through yellow pages with cracked edges and packed with text and drawings. “That’s right. Twenty days before the end of the millennium.”

  Cameron Slater smiled. “You know that’s not technically accurate, right? The end of the millennium is the end of the year 2000.”

  She nodded. “From the computer world’s perspective it is when the year changes from 1999 to 2000.”

  “Makes sense, I guess. But in any case, why did the countdown start twenty days from zero one, zero one, zero zero?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Zero one, zero one, zero zero is January first, two thousand, the first day of the new millennium, if you ignore the technical accuracy. Why did the countdown start twenty days before this date and not sooner or later?”

  “We haven’t been able to come up with any theories that explain the significance of the twenty days.”

  “Let me offer one. The Maya considered the number twenty quite sacred.”

  “They did?”

  “Our decimal system was created after the number of fingers that a human can count on, ten. The Maya just went a little further, including their toes to get up to twenty, making it a vigesimal system. See here.” Slater ran a finger across the middle of a page, showing her a table of Mayan symbols counting from zero to twenty. Zero was represented by a shell. One by a single dot. Two by two dots in a horizontal sequence. Three by three dots. Five became a horizontal bar. Six was represented by a single dot over a horizontal bar. The sequence continued, with nineteen shown as four dots over three stacked bars. Twenty was a shell with a single dot on top. “Also,” he added, “their months, or uinals, are twenty days, or kins, long.”

  Susan thought about it for a moment before saying, “That certainly gives the coordinates from the Sniffers some credibility. Tell me about Tikal.”

  Slater leaned back against the sofa chair. Susan sat sideways to face him. “Tikal is the greatest of Guatemala’s three thousand sites. It was once a bustling city of almost fifty-five thousand and one of the primary centers of learning in mathematics and astronomy, and also dominated commerce during the Classic Period, which extended from A.D. 200 to A.D. 900, when Tikal began to decline.”

  “Why?”

  “For reasons that still remain unexplained, the Maya abandoned some of their greatest cities around that time. The entire civilization stopped progressing, almost as if they lost their purpose in life.”

  “Was it because of the Spanish conquerors?”

  Slater shook his head. “No, that came much later. Around A.D. 1600. By then the once-glorious Maya had declined into rather primitive groups spread across the Yucatán Peninsula and southern Mexico. Something else prompted the Maya to stop advancing. They lost their inner fire. After several centuries of explosive growth, they just went belly up for no obvious reason.”

  “Any theories?”

  “Plenty. Some scholars believe that around 900 A.D., slaves and the common people revolted against despotic rulers. However, I don’t quite see how such a solidly established civilization could be overturned so easily. Besides, if the slaves and commoners were dissatisfied, there is certainly zero evidence of that in the centuries preceding their decline.”

  He went back to the breakfast room and returned with another book, this one more recent. He opened it to a section of color prints. “This is the way Tikal pretty much looks today. Here we have the sets of twin pyramids built facing each other across the Great Plaza, with its numerous stelae and altars. That one over there is the Pyramid of the Giant Jaguar. Other pyramids included the North Acropolis, the Temple of the Masks, and the Temple of the Lost World, which was used as an observatory by the Mayan priests. The whole place is part of a national park with plenty of wildlife on-site, including one of the last collections of quetzals in the region.”

  Susan stared at the photos while listening to him, all the while wondering how on earth such a virus could originate from a place like the one shown in Slater’s book.

  She leaned back. “This is all very interesting, Professor, but—”

  “Cameron, please.”

  “All right. Like I was saying, this is all quite fascinating, but I’m not making any connections. We’re talking about the world’s most advanced computer virus, something that appears to be a generation ahead in sophistication from anything we have to fight it. And I’m supposed to believe that it came from a primitive place like Tikal? Also, you still haven’t explained what you meant by your comment about something having started.”

  He regarded Susan like a father regarding a teenager who thinks she knows everything but who in reality has everything left to learn. “In order to truly understand the Maya you have to stop thinking like a Westerner,” he started. “In the eyes of our modern world, the Maya do resemble a stone age society, nothing more than another ancient, pyramid-building civilization. They had no metallurgy, no wheels aside from those used in toys, no weaponry beyond knives and spears. J. E. S. Thompson, the admirable compiler of two large tomes on the Maya, essentially regarded them as idiotic scholars, skilled in mathematics, architecture, and astronomy to the point of obsession, but to no apparent practical or meaningful end. Thompson, in all his expeditions and research, was never able to explain why. Why did the Maya go through the trouble of creating such civilization and then suddenly decline? Where did the astronomers and the mathematicians go? What legacy did they pass on to the generations after them? Why did they abandon not only Tikal, but also other great cities, like Palenque, Uxmal, and Chichén Itzá, leaving behind nothing but the ruins you see in these pages, and the glyphs and codices which have kept historians and archaeologists busy for decades trying to decipher?

  “You see, Susan, the problem is not with the Maya. The problem, according to this theory, is with us, with the way we measure—have measured—their accomplishments.”

  She frowned. “Now you have totally lost me.”

  “For many decades now, we have measured their civilization using the yardstick of Renaissance European values, which are based on the invention of material technology, the innovations that essentially have continued to the modern day, from the steam engine to the space shuttle, from a crossbow to nuclear missiles, from vacuum tubes to the silicon chip. In that light, Thompson was right, the Maya were indeed quite primitive.”

  “But you seem to believe otherwise,” she said, intrigued to see where he was headed.

  Slater rubbed his eyes and tried to suppress a yawn. “It’s not a belief, really. I’m simply considering other theories that may explain why they did what they did. Think of us archaeologists as detectives at the scene of a crime. We ins
pect what’s left and try to put it all back together again. Many times we can’t be certain, so we opt for possible explanations, or theories.”

  “Tell me.”

  Slater went back to the first book, finding a two-dimensional array made out of squares, each containing a different number written in Mayan. Susan made a quick count. There were thirteen squares across and twenty down. After Slater’s crash course on their number system, she was able to read the numbers in the squares. Some of the squares were white with black numbers. Others were reversed. The black and white tiles formed a strange pattern that resembled a crossword puzzle.

  “The theory that I’m going to propose is quite controversial, and you’ll soon see why. But I’m offering it to you because some observations do seem to match it. This is the Tzolkin, a matrix of thirteen numbers and twenty symbols created by the Maya as a harmonic matrix to achieve galactic synchronization.”

  Susan narrowed her eyes, puzzled. “Harmonic matrix to achieve galactic synchronization? I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a little clearer than that. I have no idea what that meant.”

  Slater smiled. “Very few people do, and those who do understand it are quite reluctant to accept it. What I’m about to propose is going to seem farfetched and, in layman’s terms, downright crazy, because it goes against our modern-day acceptable scientific state of mind, which is based on physical evidence—proof—to back suppositions. The reason why Thompson and many other archaeologists before and after him failed to understand the Maya is because they were never able to transcend their way of thinking from the Western mind to the mind of the Maya. They were incapable of seeing beyond the material evidence left behind, and thus were unable to answer the most fundamental question about the Maya: why? Why did they do what they did? Why create such large cities, develop such great mathematics, architecture, astronomy? Why? There is no evidence that they were able to apply their knowledge in the way Western culture would have: to advance the standard of living, to improve transportation, communications, health, physical life. Had they applied that knowledge in the way that we would have, in the way that we did, the Maya would have grown into an advanced society in a matter of a few hundred years, certainly way before the Spanish conquerors arrived. Actually, the Maya would have been the ones discovering, and possibly even conquering, Europe.”