Black Sun: A Thriller

by Graham Brown

  If they had my notes, my very thoughts, what would they need me for?

  He tried to calm down. Needing his mind to stop whirling, he considered finding a bar and drinking himself into oblivion. But instead he slowed his pace and deliberately slowed his breathing. Somewhat calmer, he changed direction, heading down a random alley.

  What he really needed was a way to make notes and then destroy them instantly: a shredder or a fire, or something he could scribble on and erase over and over again without leaving any evidence of his conclusions.

  He needed a chalkboard. It was so simple but it was perfect. That would protect both himself and the mission. But unless he broke into a school somewhere, he wasn’t likely to find a chalkboard in the sleepy fishing village of Puerto Azul.

  The thought loomed like a giant roadblock. And then he looked up and found himself at the end of the alley, one narrow street from the edge of the sandy beach. With the tide going out, the sand was still smooth and flat and packed hard enough to draw in with ease.

  McCarter had found his chalkboard.

  CHAPTER 23

  Hawker could feel things beginning to move. Not just in the physical sense, as the freighter began to push toward open ocean, but in a more personal sense as well.

  Danielle had finally disconnected from Moore and slid the phone back into her bag. She was moving toward him with that purposeful look in her eye; on a mission once again.

  “You guys okay?” she asked.

  “We’re fine,” Hawker said. “I’m teaching the kid to fly.”

  He held his arm out like a wing once again and Yuri copied him.

  “I—” she began.

  “You don’t even have to say it,” he told her.

  “I have to go back,” she said. “McCarter’s still out there and he won’t come in.”

  Hawker could not believe what he was hearing. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy?”

  “Everybody changes,” she said.

  Hawker could not imagine McCarter changing that much, but obviously the professor felt strongly about what they were after.

  “You’re both OCD on this deal. You realize that, right?”

  “I guess,” she said. “Care to hop on the crazy train with us?”

  “You want me to come along?”

  She looked out to sea for a moment, hesitating as if she didn’t know what she wanted.

  “I don’t want to lie to you,” she said. “This mission is as odd as the last one. Maybe stranger. I don’t know where it’s going, but I know McCarter’s in deep.”

  “And you feel responsible,” Hawker said.

  She nodded. “I owe you a lot, too, though. So no arm-twisting.”

  Hawker exhaled. For the first time in a decade he had within his grasp a free pass to a new life: Moore’s money sitting in the numbered Swiss account. He could disappear, become someone else, and leave the darkness of his own world behind. He pictured a beach in St. Tropez, with a cool drink, warm sand, and beautiful women gallivanting about. In the ultimate fantasy, Danielle would join him. The two of them could travel the world on Moore’s tab. Even if they were wasteful, the money would last for years.

  But the fantasy would become a guilt-ridden nightmare if McCarter were to stay out and get himself killed or if Danielle were to go after the professor and both of them were to be harmed.

  Knowing himself, Hawker could foresee spending the rest of his life and all of Moore’s money seeking to punish Kang or Saravich for what they’d done. Not the kind of outcome he was looking for.

  “I think you and the doc are both insane,” he said to her. “This doomsday thing, end-of-the-world prophecy, it’s too far out for me to grasp. I promise you, if mankind’s going down for all the things we’ve done, quick and clean is too light a sentence.”

  “I understand,” she said, looking as if she were expecting him to say no.

  “But I can’t let you go alone,” he added. “When you found me in Brazil, I promised I’d see you through, right to the end. I thought getting back to Manaus safely was the end, but obviously we were all wrong about that.”

  She smiled. And he loved that smile. He loved the fact that she wouldn’t leave McCarter out there on his own, even though she’d almost been killed once trying to protect him.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to help you find McCarter and to keep you safe. That’s my quest. As far as these stones and everything else, that’s your problem. The way I see it they’re either some huge cosmic joke or some kind of Pandora’s box we should never have messed with in the first place. But since you two are crazy enough to keep pursuing them, then I’ll do what I can to keep you out of trouble.”

  “So you’re going to be the voice of reason?” she asked, barely holding back a laugh.

  Hawker put a hand on Yuri’s shoulder. “Me and the kid here,” he said. “We’ll keep you guys on the straight and narrow.”

  Yuri looked up. He didn’t say anything but his eyes were bright. He seemed to like the attention.

  She looked incredulous but pleased. “Sounds like asking the fox to watch the henhouse. But … thank you.”

  He saw the gleam in her eye. “Just remember. When this is over, assuming the world hasn’t blown up, I wash my hands of you two. You guys decide to go on another crusade somewhere, then go. I’ll have a beach waiting for me somewhere.”

  A crooked smile crossed her face. “You retiring or something?”

  “Actually I am,” he said. “I’ve recently discovered the benefits of a 401(k). Not my own exactly, but those of others.”

  She looked at him with suspicion but he decided not to explain.

  “Hmm …,” she said, playfully. “I guess that makes two of us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When this is over,” she said, “assuming the world hasn’t blown up, I’ll be done with the NRI and all of this myself.”

  Her voice was higher than usual, as if she were playing. And yet in a way it seemed like a contest: who could quit first or best. And if there was one thing he knew about her, it was that she loved to win.

  “Believe it or not,” she said, “I had a normal life for a while. And I liked it.”

  He could barely contain the laughter. “Really?” he said, more surprised than ever.

  “What? You don’t think I could have a normal life?”

  “Baking cookies and running errands?”

  “Try lobbying for millions of dollars and thinking about running for Congress someday,” she said sharply.

  Her indignation amused him. “First off,” he said, “that’s not a normal life. And second, it’s not that I don’t believe you could have one. I just can’t see you liking it for too long.”

  She laughed and shook her head as if she was greatly disappointed in him but her smile faded just a bit more than it should have, and he wondered if what he’d said had rung too close to the truth.

  CHAPTER 24

  Walking down to the sand, McCarter thought about the way he’d stumbled upon the beach. He and his wife had often traveled by car, and among the joys of those travels were the countless times he’d gotten them lost and she’d eventually gotten them back on track.

  He wasn’t sure he could chalk this up to some kind of spiritual intervention, but if there was anyone who knew he wouldn’t stop and ask for directions, it was his wife.

  “If that was you,” he said, “thanks.”

  The sand near the top of the beach was soft and loose. McCarter stumbled a little as he walked in it. But he made his way past it, down closer to the surf. He stopped just beyond the reach of the waves, where they peaked and exhausted themselves before falling back toward the Gulf of Mexico once again.

  The sand there was firm and he was soon drawing lines in it with his staff.

  He started with what he knew from the statue that had been stolen out from under them. Its sculptors had been among the earliest Mayan artisans of the area and
McCarter had connected them with the tribe that had emigrated here from Brazil. The glyphs on the statue had been confusing to him when he’d viewed them. The vast majority were numbers, a long series of them that made no sense to him at the time.

  Of course, the Maya had been obsessed with numbers; their calendars were only the most visible result of that. They had also been among the first cultures to discover and understand the importance of zero. They’d used mathematics in laying out their cities and building their pyramids. And some calculations, inscribed on stone at various cities, appeared to have been done for the sole purpose of proving they could do it. It was an ancient equivalent of trying to find the largest known prime numbers or calculate pi to more decimal points than anyone had done before.

  A mathematician friend of his had once suggested that perhaps the Maya were numerologists and that the elite among them truly worshipped numbers in and of themselves. McCarter could not go that far, but he knew that a calculation of some kind held the answer to his current question.

  He liked to work on the problem at night. So far he’d tested various theories and discarded them. The numbers did not seem to represent any specific place, or stand in for a name. Nor were they indicating time in years or months or some other permutation of the various Mayan calendars. They were just numbers, a long series of them without commas, he noted.

  Then, in one of his sleepless nights, McCarter had stumbled to the bathroom, where he kept an antiseptic lotion he used to fight the lingering infection in his leg. The antiseptic was concentrated and designed to be mixed with fresh water to form a solution. With the infection lingering, McCarter had decided to make the concentration stronger. He looked at the bottle for instructions.

  What he’d found was a series of numbers designating specific mixing strengths: one for ophthalmic use in the eyes, another for topical use on the skin, and a third for treating broken skin or other open wounds.

  The numbers had been in a series, in a ratio of water to medicine. It was 50:1 for use in the eyes, 30:1 for use on the skin, 10:1 for use on wounds.

  McCarter had then mixed it at about 2:1, poured it into the festering bullet wound, and grimaced in agony as it burned. But as he flushed out the foaming mixture and the pain subsided, the truth had suddenly hit him.

  The numbers on the statue were written in the same manner. They were ratios, with the second number always being the same: 90. And as he thought about them he suddenly realized what they were trying to tell him.

  The first of the number sets stood for the east-west demarcation line. The other two were angles off it, angles that could be drawn from certain ruins and places the Maya considered holy. If he was translating things correctly, the lines would converge in an arrowlike shape. The Tip of the Spear—which would lead them to the Temple of the Warrior.

  On the beach with his printouts and the numbers burned into his mind, McCarter had only to figure out which ruins, of the dozens in the area, the lines were to be drawn from.

  Looking at his papers, McCarter continued to make his marks in the sand. He drew an east-west line as straight and accurately as he could and then began to fill in the surroundings. He used small piles of pebbles and shells for the bigger ruins that could be seen with the naked eye, and then scooped out divots of sand with his hand for the ruins that could only be seen on the IR scan and were still buried beneath the jungle.

  He worked like this for an hour. Back and forth he went, hobbling around his diagram, crawling here and there to make changes. A couple walked by casting a disparaging look at McCarter and his masterpiece, but he didn’t care; he wasn’t building sand castles.

  He drew in a river, and then adjusted the positions of certain landmarks until he was certain he had everything in the right place and in the right scale.

  Stepping back, McCarter looked down on the layout and had to smile. To an onlooker it might be the scribbling of a madman, but to him it was the same as the satellite photo, and better yet, one that he could draw on and then erase.

  Looking around to make sure he was still alone, McCarter began to work on the next stage of his project: deciding which ruins to draw the lines from.

  The first line was to begin at the Great City by the Mouth of the Well. McCarter knew this to be the Yu-catec Mayan name for Chichen Itza.

  He found that particular spot on his beach map and tried to estimate the angle. For a moment he wished he had some type of protractor, but after erasing the line twice he came up with what he thought was a close approximation. He drew his line to the north, out toward the gulf and the foam of the lapping waves.

  The origination point for the second line was harder to figure. His own translation told him it was the Temple of the Sunrise, but there might have been fifty sites in the Yucatan that had a connection with the rising sun. So that didn’t exactly narrow it down.

  A second line of description had called this temple the Place of the Wasp Star, Xux Ek, which to some Maya was another term for Venus. As McCarter considered the connection, the first temple that came to mind was the coastal ruins of Tulum.

  He couldn’t be sure, but what did he have to lose? He found the small pile of shells that represented Tulum and then measured his angle. Grabbing his staff, he began to trace the line to the northwest, cutting back across the Yucatan peninsula. The new line was angling toward his first line, as he’d hoped. And then finally they crossed.

  He found only one problem: There was nothing on his makeshift diagram anywhere near the crossing of the lines. No stones or divots of scooped-out sand.

  Disappointed, McCarter sat and checked his math and then his angles and then he studied the photographic printouts. Not only were there no ruins in the area of his crossed lines, but there was nothing on the Landsat photo, either. No hidden limestone signature, not even a smudge to hint that something might have been built in that vicinity. Nothing but miles of jungle-covered coastline.

  McCarter exhaled in frustration. He rubbed his forearm across his brow to wipe the sweat away and only succeeded in covering his forehead with sand.

  Aggravated and dejected, he looked out over the sloping beach. It was a little past noon and the warm sun bathed his back, while the sound of the small waves rumbling in toward the beach soothed his mind.

  As McCarter sat there wondering what the hell he was trying to prove by staying on in Mexico, a speedboat zoomed out from the dock a half mile down. It accelerated noisily, running parallel to the beach a hundred feet out.

  As McCarter watched it move off into the distance, its bow wave came ashore, merging with the smaller, natural wave on its way in.

  Together they flowed up over the sand, surging higher onto the beach and cascading over the point where his two lines crossed. The water swirled for a moment, foam and silt frothing a few inches deep. And then it slid back, retreating to the gulf, leaving only a smooth canvas of sand where McCarter’s lines had crossed to form the tip of the spear.

  “Erasing my blackboard,” McCarter mumbled. “Does this mean I have to start over?”

  He stood wearily, guessing that it did. And then he noticed that nothing else on his diagram had been touched by the waves. A thought occurred to him. McCarter looked at his printouts once again.

  He checked the photo and then the lines he’d drawn in the sand. He realized that he hadn’t drawn anything to represent the coastline. But with the scale he’d chosen, the high point of the larger, boat-assisted wave was a fairly accurate equivalent of where that coastline should have been drawn.

  He gazed out over the shimmering waters of the gulf. The Tip of the Spear pointed in that direction. The Temple of the Warrior was out there hidden somewhere beneath the waves.

  CHAPTER 25

  Choi stood in the communications suite of Kang’s private Airbus A340. Stacks of electronic equipment, radios, and satellite transceivers lined the walls. The cramped space reminded Choi of the cockpit, without the benefit of windows, though at this particular moment they didn’t need them
. It was night and they were crossing the Pacific at thirty-seven thousand feet. There really wasn’t much to see.

  The radio officer handed Choi a printout, having decrypted it from the original satellite transmission. Choi looked it over. Pleased, he moved back into the aisle, walking forward to Kang’s private section of the aircraft.

  Normally Choi would have waited for morning to inform Kang, but Choi knew that Kang was awake and undergoing a treatment session from one of his many doctors.

  Choi knocked on the cabin door and a nurse opened it. Inside he saw Kang wired up to a newer, more powerful electrical stimulator. Instead of electrodes that simply attached to the surface of the skin, he was now having wires surgically implanted into his body. The doctors were attaching them to specific nerves that they believed could be regenerated and possibly even used to control prosthetics.

  It was a dangerous step forward in his course of treatment, but Kang was desperate to get out of his prison. So far he’d tried every treatment medical science was offering: stem cells, neurological transplants, untested drugs, and holistic remedies.

  But he’d continued to deteriorate.

  Of all the treatments, only the electrical stimulation had slowed the progress of the disease, and Kang had become more and more dependent on it. But keeping his muscles from atrophying was not the endgame he sought. At his urging the doctors had gone forward with a new theory: that the right electrical stimulation would force the nerves to repair themselves.

  Choi watched. Each time the electrical stimulators fired, one of Kang’s extremities would twitch, first his arm and then a leg. His fingers straightened and stiffened, shaking uncontrollably, and then the current was cut and they curled up into a lifeless ball once again.

  Kang had been sick for so long that these movements startled Choi. He hadn’t seen Kang straighten his left hand in years, hadn’t seen Kang’s legs move in over a decade. He found something disturbing about watching it now. When combined with the strange facial distortions that accompanied the shocks, it gave Choi an almost overwhelming desire to leave.