Sam extended his wrist. Rivera grabbed it and used Sam’s counterweight to pull himself free. Sam felt Rivera’s weight shift forward. He twirled the flashlight in his fingers, shining the beam directly into Rivera’s eyes.
“Sorry,” Sam said again.
Even as he said the words he was moving, sidestepping left, using Rivera’s momentary blindness to get the gun barrel off him. Sam swung his right hand forward as though throwing a baseball. The salt hit Rivera squarely in the eyes. Knowing what was coming, Sam dropped to his belly.
Rivera screamed and started pulling the trigger. Bullets thudded into the walls and ceiling. Salt crystals rained down, sparkling in the glow of Sam’s flashlight. Rivera spun wildly, trying to regain his balance as he staggered across the floor, the gun bucking in his hand.
Sam pushed himself to his knees, coiled his legs like a runner in the starting blocks, then pushed off and charged. Rivera heard the crunch of Sam’s footfalls and spun toward the sound, firing. Still running, Sam dropped back to his belly and skidded across the floor, the salt crystals ripping at his chest and chin. He went still. Held his breath.
Rivera whirled again, trying to pinpoint the sound. He lost his balance again, lurched sideways, and stepped squarely into another hole. With a zipperlike crackling sound, Rivera’s legs plunged through. He spread his arms to arrest his fall. The gun dropped from his hand and skittered across the salted floor, coming to a stop beside Sam’s face.
He grabbed the gun and climbed to his feet.
“Fargo!” Rivera screamed.
Sam walked over to the hole. Rivera arms were fully extended. Only the palms of his hands were touching solid ground. Already his arms were trembling; the tendons in his neck strained beneath the skin. Still blinded by the salt, Rivera rotated his head wildly from side to side.
Sam crouched down beside him.
“Fargo!”
“I’m right here. You’re in a bit of a pickle.”
“Get me out of this thing!”
“No.”
Sam shined his flashlight into the hole. Salt-encrusted rock outcroppings jutted from the walls like barbs, leaving only a two-foot-wide gap in the center. Far below, Sam could hear the roar of waves crashing against rock. He grabbed a nearby softball-sized stone, dropped it into the opening, and listened to it ricochet off the rocks until the sound faded.
“What was that?” Rivera asked.
“That’s karma calling,” Sam replied. “About a hundred feet of it, based on Newton’s Second Law.”
“What the hell does that mean? Get me out!”
“You shouldn’t have shot my wife.”
Rivera growled in frustration. He tried to press himself upward but managed only a few inches. He slumped back down. His head dipped below the level of the floor. Beneath Rivera’s shirt, his muscles quivered with the strain.
“I just realized something,” Sam said. “The more your palms sweat, the more the salt dissolves beneath them. I think that’s what financial experts call diminishing returns. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but I think you get my point.”
“I should have killed you.”
“Hang on to that thought. Soon it’s all you’re going to have left.”
Rivera’s left hand slipped off the edge. For a split second he clawed at the ground with his right hand, his nails shredding, before he tipped sideways and started to fall. He landed back first on one of the outcroppings, shattering his spine. He screamed in pain, then slid off and kept tumbling, his head slamming on rock after rock before disappearing from view.
EPILOGUE
TWO WEEKS LATER,
GOLDFISH POINT, LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA
REMI LIMPED INTO THE SOLARIUM AND EASED HERSELF DOWN ON the chaise lounge next to Sam’s. Without looking up from his iPad, Sam said, “You’re supposed to be using your cane for at least another week.”
“I don’t like my cane.”
Sam looked over at her. “And you call me stubborn. How’s the leg feel?”
“Better. The doctor says I’ll be fit for full duty in a few weeks. Given the nasty alternative, I couldn’t be happier.”
“By ‘nastier,’ I assume you mean starving to death inside the crater of a dead volcano?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
Though Remi hadn’t been in danger of bleeding to death on what they’d since dubbed Chicomoztoc Island, the risk of infection and sepsis were all too real, Sam had known. He had only two choices: Stay put and wait for Selma to send help, which she was sure to do, but how quickly would her request for assistance take to make its way through the right channels in the Indonesian government? His second choice was to leave Remi alone and strike out on his own in search of help. In the end, Remi, knowing her husband as she did, encouraged him to leave her the gun and go. That left Sam the question of which direction.
The next morning he said good-bye to Remi and climbed to the lip of the caldera, where he stood for a time scanning the horizon. He’d all but decided to head south when he saw a faint trickle of smoke rising from the forest a few miles to the north.
At a jog, he zigzagged his way down the slope, waded into the water, and swam the half mile to the shore, where he headed north until he reached a river. This he followed inland, his eyes never leaving the smoke column until he reached a small clearing, in the center of which stood a man in a safari vest and a blue baseball cap bearing the BBC logo.
Upon seeing the disheveled Sam stumbling into view, the director of the documentary yelled, “Cut!,” and began demanding to know who’d just ruined his shot.
Two hours later Sam was back in the caldera with Remi, and an hour after that the BBC helicopter touched down on the beach. The next day they were back in Jakarta, Remi tucked safely in bed.
“WE HAVE TO START making some decisions,” Sam now said.
“I know.”
They were keeping some gargantuan secrets. Given the momentous nature of what they’d discovered in the weeks following their improvised excavation of the Shenandoah’s bell, it had come as a shock to realize that other than themselves, Selma, Pete, Wendy, Professors Milhaupt and Dydell, and the Kid, no one was aware of what they’d found. The outrigger in Madagascar was still perched atop its altar in the Lion’s Head cave; the Shenandoah was still sitting in the ravine on Pulau Legundi, buried under fifteen feet of Krakatoan ash; the maleo statuette they’d recovered from the Shenandoah was tucked away in their workroom safe; and the ceremonial cavern beneath the caldera remained hidden and unspoiled.
While they fully intended to hand over these discoveries to the world’s archaeological and anthropological communities, they also recognized the wisdom of taking a few weeks to consider the implications of what they’d discovered and prepare themselves for the media storm that was sure to follow the press releases.
SAM AND REMI now also understood why Garza had never let the Mexica Tenochca’s symbol, the jade statuette of Quetzalcoatl, be physically examined. If Garza’s Quetzalcoatl ever faced testing, Sam and Remi were confident of a match between those results and the ones they obtained on their maleo. The jeweled bird was in fact not made of emerald or jade but rather a rare type of garnet known as magmatic demantoid. Except for the meticulous sculpting the maleo underwent, its characteristics were identical to those of the stone Sam had taken from the cavern.
Wherever and however Blaylock had found the maleo, its surprisingly pristine condition, and the Shenandoah’s unique fate had combined to leave behind even more compelling evidence: microscopic traces of Indonesian-specific pigments that suggested the statuette had once been painted—perhaps to better represent the maleo bird itself.
IN THE DAYS following their return home, a number of minor secrets that had been nagging Sam, Remi, and the others slowly sorted themselves out: Blaylock’s journal, whose eccentricities continued to reveal themselves in dribs and drabs, had solved the bell mystery when Pete found two pages stuck together. In Blaylock’s own words he dramatically describ
ed being attacked by pirates while the Shenandoah was at anchor off Chumbe Island, two days before she departed for the Sunda Strait. Lest the bell, “Ophelia’s heart,” fall into the wrong hands, Blaylock jettisoned it overboard after removing a memento, the clapper, intending to reunite the two upon his return to Bagamoyo. In the same attack Blaylock lost his artillery sword, a short Gladius-style weapon, the same one Sylvie Radford found while snorkeling a hundred twenty-seven years later.
Blaylock’s beloved journal and walking staff, both of which were rarely beyond his arm’s reach, he’d left behind with one of his concubines the day before the Shenandoah departed for Indonesia; they eventually found their way to Morton and the Blaylock Museum and Curiosity Shop. Sam and Remi couldn’t help but wonder whether the enigmatic Winston Blaylock had somehow known he wouldn’t be coming home.
IN THE END, President Quauhtli Garza’s paranoia sealed his fate. Good soldier that he was, Rivera had left no trail that could incriminate his boss, so Sam and Remi devised a disinformation plot that capitalized on the fact that Rivera’s body remained missing. They were surprised when their scheme bore such spectacular fruit.
Armed with their suspicions about the tourists Rivera murdered in Zanzibar and the evidence supporting their theory about the true origin of the Aztecs, they used Rube Haywood’s connections to start a leak that quickly became a torrent: Itzli Rivera was alive and rather than face extradition to Tanzania, he was talking to the authorities, who had details about not only the murders but also Garza’s attempt to hide the truth about his Quetzalcoatl statuette and the Mexica Tenochca’s power-grabbing ruse. Within hours of the story hitting American cable news channels, Mexican networks were running it nonstop. Within days, Mexican opposition parties and legislators were demanding an investigation, and hundreds of thousands of protesters had taken to the streets in Mexico City, surrounding government buildings and grinding the city to a near halt.
Having spent nearly a decade safeguarding a secret that had the power to both glorify and destroy him, Quauhtli Garza now realized all was lost. In the space of weeks, all of it was gone, torn asunder by a pair of treasure hunters, no less. Americans—imperialists, just like Cortés and his hordes. It was unjust. History repeating itself. How had the Fargos managed it? And so quickly?
Curse them, and curse Rivera for that matter, the traitorous bastard, Garza thought.
He would not suffer the same fate as his forefathers. He was alone, but his destiny was still in his hands.
ON THE FIFTH DAY after the story broke, Garza, now trapped in his office by mobs chanting “Show yourself!” and “Garza must go!,” dismissed his security detail and staff and stared out the window at what had been, just hours before, his adoring public—now treacherous conquistadors returned to tear down what he’d built.
At sunset, a sunken-eyed Garza left his office, marched to the roof of his building overlooking Templo Mayor, took a final look at his city and what could have been, and unceremoniously leapt into the air.
Surrounded by thousands of stunned onlookers, his shattered corpse lay atop the jagged steps of the pyramid, the last remnant of the lost Aztec Empire.
SELMA’S STRIDENT VOICE came over the loudspeaker above Remi’s chaise: “I’m ready whenever you are.”
Remi replied, “On our way.”
They found Selma in the workroom, standing at the end of the table.
“I just finished plugging in the last of the data: a similar scenario run by the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago,” Selma announced. She’d collected information from dozens of other geological organizations and universities from around the world in addition to the USGS.
“Have you seen it?” Sam asked.
“And ruin your fun? Not a chance.”
One of the more troublesome questions that remained unanswered—or at least not answered to their satisfaction—was why, after traveling twelve thousand miles across the globe, had the Proto-Aztecs chosen Lake Texcoco as their ultimate home? Legend claimed they had been guided there by an eagle perched atop a cactus with a snake in its mouth, but Professor Dydell’s MDI—Migrational Displacement Iconography—theory suggested that image had begun as a maleo perched atop a durian tree.
“Go ahead, Selma.”
Selma pointed the remote at the LCD, and a moment later a Google Earth-like overhead image of Chicomoztoc Island appeared. The camera zoomed out to encompass the nearby isles and the bay itself.
Selma pressed another button.
Slowly at first, then gaining more speed, the image began to morph as a time line at the margin counted backward in ten-year increments. Sea levels rose and fell; coastlines retreated and expanded; jungles thinned and thickened. A column of smoke drifted across the bay, followed by a second.
“Hold,” Sam called, and Selma paused the animation. “Volcanoes?” Remi nodded. “Looks like it.”
Selma hit Play again. Water levels rapidly rose and retreated. And then land began moving.
“There it goes,” Remi murmured.
“Can you slow it down, Selma?” asked Sam
Selma touched a button on the remote.
The screen’s time line read 782 A.D. The animation slowed to one-year-per-second increments. Sam and Remi watched, transfixed, as the horns of the bay gradually began rising from the sea and crawling toward each other as all the islands in the bay except Chicomoztoc disappeared beneath the surface. By the time the time line reached the year 419 A.D., the bay had become landlocked. All that remained was a lone island, shaped like the flower-shaped cave in the Chicomoztoc illustration, in the middle of what had morphed into a lake.
“No wonder that otherwise marshy piece of land in the middle of Lake Texcoco looked so appealing to them,” Remi said. “They were coming home.”
SAM AND REMI thanked Selma and returned to the solarium.
“Which one do you want to do first?” Sam asked.
“Which what?”
“Which excavation: the outrigger on Madagascar, Chicomoztoc Island, or the Shenandoah? Once we make the announcement, I suspect it won’t take long for expeditions to begin forming. I’d like to think we’ll have our first pick.”
Remi thought about it a moment, then shrugged. “You?”
Sam smiled. “Each one has its appeal.” He dug into his pocket and came up with a quarter. He made a fist and placed the coin on top of his thumbnail. “Two tosses. We go with the winner?”
Remi nodded.
Sam Fargo flipped the coin and it twirled skyward.
Lost Empire: A Fargo Adventure Page 35