The Kukulkan Manuscript

by James Steimle

  With his thumb, he pulled on the black hammer.

  It locked into place.

  He smiled without another word…and pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  9:06 p.m. PST

  “Harvey Goodwill is a professional eliminator, Peter…” said Andrews with a tight grin.

  In a quiet hall, wide enough for a compact car to drive through, Peter shook hands with Harvey, a short man who looked nothing like an assassin. What little hair the man had was dirty blond, and he stood in a simple olive-colored suit with brown shoes. Energy coursed through him, making his movements jittery and quick. He smiled like an old pal at a high school reunion. But he had the frigid eyes of a killer.

  “Pleased,” said Goodwill.

  Peter’s lips didn’t move. His voice box barely shivered as if frozen in sub-zero temperature.

  “Harvey is one of our friends.”

  The words were a code, the meaning: He is with us and party to our secrets.

  “Of course, that’s not his real name,” said the old man. “He’s not as sloppy as your man, Polaski. No one notices when Goodwill comes and goes. Excellent for our operations. Mr. Goodwill has served the needy by killing in most European countries and many of their colonies. He’s as nonchalant as a taxi on Manhattan Island and as careful as a software engineer,” said Andrews.

  “What’s he for,” said Peter, the air dusty and cold around them. He smelled cedar.

  The old man smiled. “Mr. Porter is being held in the North Bay Police department, is he not?”

  Peter nodded.

  “You will direct Goodwill there in order to accomplish one goal.” Andrews lifted his chin.

  “We want Porter killed before he discusses KM-2 and 3 in the federal courts,” said Peter.

  “Now you’re thinking like one of us, Peter. We will expect a summary of the proceedings.”

  * * *

  The bullet left the chamber, creating a burst of light and a painful chirp which echoed in the tight space behind Bruno’s cafe.

  Alred felt her heart stop.

  It started again when she realized she was still standing. Her eyes closed and snapped open accordingly.

  Figeroa’s twisting form fell limp against the ground.

  No way to escape this guy, Alred thought, staring at the man in black through the reeking darkness. She tried to examine his clothes and recognized them to some degree. This man could have been either of the two who’d murdered Ulman.

  Wisely, he stayed near the alley entrance, his gun sturdy in his hand at chest level. “It would be such a simple thing to kill you.”

  “But a complete waste,” she said. “I already told—”

  “I heard you. And if you’re lying—”

  “What happened to Porter,” Alred didn’t move. This man had just killed the thief behind her. If he’d slain Ulman as well, he would most likely not hesitate to execute her. But what else could she say? Alred refused to be beaten.

  “Bullets hit people who get in their way. Now, you’re going to help me—”

  “I’m not doing anything for you.”

  The man sipped liters of cold air. He pushed his bottom lip against his top, and sucked on his left canine. “All right.” He lifted the gun to arm’s length.

  A screen door came out of the back of Bruno’s. The weak metal smashed into the assassin, turning the gun away and shoving him over.

  A jaguar in the shape of a man followed the screen, lunging at the man with the weapon. Fists drummed like hail into the killer’s face until he tumbled into the ripped bags of reeking refuse.

  The gun disappeared among the garbage piles.

  When the man in black failed to rise, Bruno whipped around to face the student. One of the front tails of his button-down shirt had come free of his pants. The old man fixed it while the chemical rush gave his eyes fifty years of youth. “You okay?”

  Alred looked at the second assassin, unmoving, his head lost in the rubbish. Stepping away from the corpse, warm water floated up between her eyelids as she glanced at Figeroa’s body.

  Rubbing his worn and tender knuckles, Bruno said in a husky voice, the softest she’d ever heard from him, “Get out of here, girl. I’m phoning the police, an I gotta hunch you don’t wanna be here when they arrive.”

  She stared at the old man, attempting uselessly to decipher reality. But nothing made sense. Why would anyone kill so much over an archaeological find? Is this what Stratford feared? No professor could afford all these hit men, no matter how strong the lust to steal the glory Ulman deserved. Someone wanted KM-3 bad. But how could they know about it?!? Nevertheless…Porter couldn’t be right about all this.

  “Go!” said Bruno, moving to the cafe’s rear door, hidden in the dark. He shot her a serious look.

  Alred left the alley, thinking about predator shadows and hospitals. She wondered what Porter had faced and what had resulted….

  * * *

  May 3

  11:57 a.m. PST

  “Alred! I didn’t think you’d be my first visitor,” said Porter. He looked around the white room with red brick walls, thankful he could smell Alred’s sharp perfume instead of the sanitized hospital he’d been in the last couple days, or the dirty earth scent of his new cell.

  Squinting, Alred said, “You haven’t spoken with a lawyer?”

  “Not yet. Guess they’re booked. Or no one wants to work my case.”

  “You don’t know what I had to do to find you, Porter,” said Alred, pulling her overcoat tightly around her, though there was enough heat in the room to make a man think he had a fever. “How could you be in jail!?”

  “My mom always said I had a knack of getting into things,” he said into the microphone through the glass sheet separating them. There was enough room at the top of the pane to slide his fingers through to touch hers. But the cameras would see, the guards would freak, grab him, strip him, and arrest Alred. Not that she would slip her fingers over the glass to meet his anyway. Porter longed to feel the warmth of someone. But he couldn’t call his family, especially his mother, so he phoned no one. And Alred looked beautiful for some reason.

  “I didn’t want to believe it when they said you’d been shot. In the abdomen? How are the wounds,” she said, pointing with her chin at his shoulder. Porter’s right arm hung in a sling.

  “Sometimes I think there are people out there who just don’t like me,” Porter said.

  Alred smiled.

  “You one of them?” he said, his eyes sparkling, but his smile nodding downward.

  “If only you could read—”

  “Ah!” said Porter, lifting a hand quickly. His eyes flickered toward the microphone standing like a perched cobra about to strike.

  Alred grinned without emotion as she looked at the table.

  “It’s a terrible thing to have something you wanna tell someone, isn’t it? When you can’t utter a word?” said Porter. They were no doubt being taped.

  “You realize we’ve lost any chance of graduating,” said Alred.

  “Sacrifice is an important part of life. Build’s character,” said Porter, but the thought hurt inside. “There must be opposition in all things. We’ve walked into places angels don’t even talk about.”

  “I’m not so easily defeated,” said Alred.

  “Oh really?” said Porter with a sigh. “You saying that for your own peace of mind? Because you don’t want to think you’ve moved your last chess piece and admit the game is finished?”

  Alred smashed her lips together, but kept her eyes relaxed. She looked at Porter. “Isn’t there a Mormon prayer to help you out in court? May 5th is just around the corner.”

  “I was baptized on that day,” said Porter.

  “Well it will definitely be the day you begin your new life.”

  “Am I guilty?” said Porter.

  Alred stared at him. “Of many things. We all are. Plato quoted Socrates as saying everyone breaks the law just shy of the degree at
which they might get caught.”

  “I didn’t realize you read the classics?” said Porter with a grin. “What happens when these laws we’re supposed to follow are set by God?”

  “You’re the faithful one. Why do I sound like the optimist?” said Alred.

  Porter scratched the back of his head. “It can’t get much worse than this.”

  “They could nuke the building,” said Alred.

  Smiling, Porter said, “And I’d turn around and find myself in a happier place.”

  Alred let her head fall to the right. Her red hair fell in quick waves from behind her ear. “You don’t think you’re headed for Hades?”

  Leaning back in his chair, Porter rubbed his eyes with one hand. He sighed at the white ceiling and coughed into his left fist. “Have you come to discuss my beliefs? We have missionaries outside of prison walls who are more than happy to tell you about the afterlife.”

  “I came…because…I knew you were alone,” said Alred. “You’re hurting.”

  The light in Porter’s face faded and red pain took its place. “You know me so well?”

  “You’d love it, you know,” she said, insinuating the new codex.

  Porter lowered his chin to his chest. “I was on top of the world before I met you.”

  “Tell me one thing, Porter.” Alred leaded close to the microphone, looked him hard in the eyes, and whispered with sincerity on her face like a painting of a lonely girl. “How can someone with your intelligence…honestly believe that a god exists?”

  Porter focused on her pupils. “Alred, how is it that someone with your investigative capabilities and strategic learning skills does not put two and two together and realize that all I’ve been saying is accurate?”

  “I really don’t see your church as much different than any other,” said Alred, pushing the soft auburn behind her ears. “I went weekly to Catholic mass long ago, and all I saw were formulas filling in blanks when answers weren’t present.”

  “You would bring all this up when I’m at my weakest,” Porter said. He sighed and sniffed, rubbing his nose with the back of one finger. “Do you know why Mormons are called Mormons?”

  “Porter, I think I know why you’ve been hunted,” said Alred.

  “Would you be offended if I—”

  “And I think it has nothing to do with religion.”

  “Pardon?”

  Alred studied him for a moment before opening her mouth again. What was she seeing? “I was attacked twice…by armed men insisting I give them—”

  Porter lurched forward but kept his voice down. “You were what?!?”

  “Porter,” said Alred with solid smoke in her eyes, “I know for a fact now that Ulman…is…dead. I’ve seen—” Alred looked at the microphone, “—terrible things.”

  Sitting with his mouth hanging loose, Porter put the picture together in his mind. She’s seen…what. Ulman? Dead? Alred was attacked? After Porter was shot and charged with illegal possession of foreign artifacts? All while she’s been hiding KM-3? “And this has nothing to do with my church?”

  “I did some checking,” she said, reaching into her black bag. “This kind of activity is not unheard of.”

  “You’re suggesting…what?” said Porter.

  “Remember Dr. Peterson at Ohio State? He publicly revoked his statements connecting Ulman’s find and the Old World—”

  “When!” said Porter, leaning upward.

  “There was no date,” she said, sliding the pages face-up toward the glass.

  Pressing his fingers against the transparent wall as if it helped him speed-read, Porter hummed the growl of a faraway muscle car.

  “I pulled it off the Internet. Peterson reminds his associates that many scholars have made the same mistake with past archaeological finds. He even cites a stela which members of the LDS church reportedly associate with the Book of Mormon. Here, on this page.”

  “I see it,” said Porter with a heavy weight in the back of his throat, but he didn’t need to focus on the image and writing, for he knew it well. “Stela number five from Izapa.” He looked sharply into Alred’s green eyes. “That ‘tree of life’ stone has more than one hundred and fifteen arbitrary connections to an extremely detailed scene described in the first and second parts of the Book of Mormon. Peterson can’t use that as proof of—”

  “Nevertheless, he has,” said Alred with a sigh. “My point is Dr. Peterson refuses to note any more correlations with the Middle East. He has completely changed his testimony on the subject.”

  Porter slapped the tabletop, looked to his right, then back at her. He felt the pressure in his veins but tried to relax, fearing his excitement would draw the officer who’d led him into the room.

  “Peterson even suggests that he’d been fooled by Professors Ulman and Albright into thinking the site in Guatemala to be much more than it actually was.”

  Shaking his head, Porter laughed without humor.

  With her eyebrows high, Alred put the papers back into her portfolio. “Think now,” she said with a voice as controlled as it had been on the day they’d first met. “We know Albright died of a heart attack.”

  Porter opened his mouth.

  But Alred raised her voice. “The authorities are unified with that decision. We know Dr. Wilkinson was murdered, but there is no direct evidence to link him to Ulman’s find. And Ulman…only recently—”

  “I know,” Porter said, covering the microphone as if it stopped his thoughts.

  Staring at him in silence while he banged the logical facts against his predisposed brain, Alred pushed her lips into the tight red ball she often made. “They want the codex all right,” she said, relaxed. “But they are little more than modern-day grave robbers.”

  With a grin, but still no light in his eyes, Porter said, “You’ve seen too much Indiana Jones. Nobody steals ancient artifacts anymore.”

  Alred squinted at him. They both knew he was wrong and only lying to himself…and the microphone.

  Porter rubbed his forehead. “Did you know St. Basil pointed out long ago that with all the importance of the sacraments, the exact instruction and liturgy were never recorded by the original apostles?”

  Folding her arms, Alred said, “Never thought about it.” Her face shouted, Who even cares?!?

  “Why do you suppose that is? While the word for word blessing of the bread and wine are given in the Book of Mormon?” said Porter.

  Alred clenched her teeth together. What was this? Another desperate attempt by Porter to claim reason for this semester’s insanity? He’d made the greatest mistakes of his life, to her knowledge. He’d never attain the positions for which he had worked so hard and so well. He had nothing left but his religion, that which has throughout history been sought by poor souls when hope was feared to be lost. She had to listen. To humor him. To give him this last moment before the blade met the chopping block, publicly ending his existence forever.

  “There’s only one other place I know of where the words of the bread and wine sacrament have been written down, and that’s on an ancient Egyptian Coptic Christian manuscript called the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles discovered in 1904. Funny thing: it’s exactly the same prayer. That means archaeological evidence suggests Joseph Smith had an English copy of a sacred invocation, which he then placed in the Book of Mormon, a hundred years before the rest of the modern world possessed it.

  “I never said it before, but the Popol Vuh tells some specific stories that are found only in the Book of Mormon. Nowhere else that I know of can you find those stories. But the Popol Vuh wasn’t converted from Mayan into Spanish and published in a common tongue until 1857, about thirty years after the Book of Mormon was translated into English. Now anyone can pick up a copy of the Popol Vuh in English for under twenty bucks.”

  “I’m sorry Porter,” said Alred, attempting to be as sincere and open as possible. “I won’t fill your head with delusions. I have to be honest. You’re just not convincing me of anything. I need pr
oof that what you are talking about is real. Why aren’t there any more solid, undeniable texts? If the Book of Mormon really is an account of some of the ancient inhabitants of the Americas, why are there no more books confirming the idea? What happened to them all?”

  “Alred,” Porter whispered, “you know better than I do. All the Spaniards—Father Diego de Landa was a Franciscan friar who tore down Mayan temples, destroyed sacred shrines, and tortured the natives when he caught them worshipping in the fashion of their ancient ways. When he found in the village of Muna some who were able to translate the old writings in their possession, de Landa had their cache of twenty-four books, bound in jaguar skins, all burned! After tormenting thousands of Mayans, de Landa returned to Spain, then came back to the same people in the New World to rule as their bishop. There is also a strong tradition describing what are often called the Golden Books of the Mayas, fifty-two gold plates with engravings which relate the entire history of the Mayan people. Now, what would soldiers do if they found a book made of gold? You ask me what happened to the records of the Americas? White man happened. It’s an old story.”

  “I know about Diego de Landa,” she said, nodding.

  “Then why are you here, Alred?! Tell me the truth,” said Porter, knowing her words would be painful to hear, but utterly necessary.

  Staring at him for half-a-minute without speaking, Alred considered her options.

  This had gone on long enough.

  “You know I hated the project from the beginning,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “I stayed with you…because I had to find out what happened to Ulman.”

  “That’s it?” said Porter.

  “It’s all over now, Porter. And you know I won’t sacrifice my standards about our judicial system when we come to court.”

  “At least you have some standards,” Porter said, his face sagging. He eyed her, a mask of solemn thought changing his features to look like some ancient prophet contemplating the end of the world as seen in a vision. “Alred…you have…held the proof…in your hands.”

  “But I’ve had so little time to study the codex.”