Black Rain: A Thriller (48 page)

McCarter took it almost reverently.

“For the journey,” the Old One said, with words McCarter recalled from the meeting in the village.

Next, he went to Hawker, presenting him with an obsidian spear tip, before touching the latest of Hawker’s wounds and speaking the Chollokwan word for warrior.

Hawker bowed in thanks and the Old One turned back to Danielle, placing his hands together like a yoga master once again. Looking her in the eyes, he spoke the word
“Ualon,”
nodding at her.

McCarter recognized that word too. “He’s calling you the Old One,” McCarter explained. “But it doesn’t mean old, it means
Chief.”

Danielle nodded, surprised by the compliment. She mimicked the Old One’s actions with her hands and smiled at him. He smiled back, then turned and, with the help of his assistant, began to walk away.

The next day, with several Chollokwan warriors as escorts, the NRI group left the clearing, in the midst of
what had become a variable but near-constant rain. What had been a four-day hike in dry weather became two weeks of slogging through the mud. And even as they reached the river beside the Wall of Skulls, the skies darkened and the rain poured down upon them once again.

Danielle shivered in the cold, but her eyes caught sight of things she hadn’t noticed before: fine mist spread on a fern like beads of liquid silver, fuchsia-colored orchids among the trees and a brilliant yellow flower closing up suddenly just as the downpour began.

She’d been in the rainforest for over a month and, until now, hadn’t noticed any of it. She almost wished they would encounter another line of industrious ants for McCarter to point out and marvel over.

From the Wall of Skulls they turned south and hiked back toward the Negro. Five days later they hailed a passing vessel—a diesel-powered barge loaded down with mahogany and trailing a second bundle of logs in the river behind it. As they clambered aboard, Danielle looked back for their Chollokwan escort, but the natives had already gone.

Aboard the vessel, the NRI team thanked their new hosts, politely deflecting questions about their battered and grungy appearance, until eventually they were left alone to ponder their own unanswered thoughts.

McCarter found himself spending a great deal of energy thinking about the temple they had left behind. Despite what they’d learned, it remained in the greater sense a mystery. One that left him to guess, mostly, with big gaps in what they could prove or even grasp—much
like the study of archaeology itself. Still, in a private discussion, he offered a theory of the temple they’d found. He looked at Danielle. “I admit to having a hard time accepting what you suggested, about the cave and the body. But like you, I can’t explain it any other way. Especially considering what we found,” he said, referring to the stone in her pack.

“If you’re right, the deformed body we found was probably one member of a group. A team of people or perhaps even test subjects in an experiment who came back in time. When they got here they found a world that did not agree with them, sun and rain that burned their skin. With few other options to choose from, they forced the natives who lived here to build that temple as a cap over the cave, training the natives to use rope and tackle and stone. Imposing themselves as demigods in the process, perhaps even over the nascent beliefs these people had begun to develop. In the
Popul Vuh
we see this as the ascent and self-magnification of Seven Macaw.”

Susan sat next to McCarter. “I’ve been thinking about the heroes who vanquished Zipacna,” she said. “They were shown to have trapped him. But he’s never described as being killed, just subdued beneath the mountain of stone. I wonder if that was supposed to be some kind of warning, if the original tellers of the story knew the Zipacna could get out again if the temple was opened.”

“A warning, hidden in plain sight,” Danielle said. She looked at the water gliding past. “Like the floating body we found.”

McCarter nodded, guessing the Chollokwan had dumped the man in the river as a warning to the Nuree
tribe, but also, knowing what the water did to the Zipacna, they could be sure the larva growing inside him would not survive.

“Honestly,” McCarter said, “I could see this place influencing many of the Mayan legends. The evil beings of the underworld: the Xibalbans, the wooden people, Seven Macaw and Zipacna. We tend to think linearly in the Western world, one answer for one question. But in many older cultures, things were not as black and white. Oral tradition meant constant changes to the story. Groups intermingled, often borrowing from one another and repeating themselves with different variations. From the same base come different versions of the truth.”

Danielle looked his way. “I can understand that. I came here looking for the source of those crystals, thinking they were part of some machine, a creation from a more advanced time. They were parts to us, really—like spark plugs or fuel injectors—and we wanted the whole engine. But to the Chollokwan they were sacred objects that could help bring the rain. Relics from the original Black Rain. And who’s to say they’re wrong? We returned them to the tribe and the rains came. Two versions of the truth, both correct in the eyes of the respective beholders.”

McCarter listened and nodded, then looked over to Hawker, who had been quiet since they had left the clearing. McCarter wondered what Hawker was thinking. While his own mind tended to concentrate on what they could figure out, he’d noticed that Hawker tended to focus on things more remote than the question at hand.

“Any thoughts?”

Hawker smiled, as if he’d been caught at something. “It just makes me wonder,” he said. “I’ve been on a few journeys in my life. Seven days across unpaved desert in a truck, two months on a freighter that seemed to find one storm after another. I wouldn’t have made those without something important to do on the other end. But this, traveling through time. It had to be horrendous. Why even try it? And why go back to such a primitive era when you did? It didn’t seem to work out all that great for them.”

Susan offered an answer. “Maybe the process is not very precise. Maybe they didn’t mean to go that far back.”

Danielle seemed to agree. “An experiment of some kind,” she said. “Like Columbus trying to find a new route to India. Sometimes you get lost and bump into things, places you never meant to go.”

“Maybe,” Hawker said, looking away, “but it feels like there should be something more.”

McCarter found himself silently agreeing, though what that something might have been he couldn’t guess. In some ways, what they’d found was enough for him. It seemed as if they’d discovered one source of what would go on to become the Mayan religion, a religion that eventually took root on another continent, growing into the greatest civilization of the preindustrial Americas, flourishing for a thousand years before collapsing back into a less ostentatious but more personal set of beliefs. All unbeknownst to its earliest members, who still existed: the Chollokwan tribe of the Amazon.

The journey downriver continued slowly, the dark waters of the Negro bringing them back to Manaus. As
they grew closer, the lush banks of the river widened, and they began to notice huge plumes of smoke at various points on the horizon.

The smoke came from the plantations lining the river. With the rainy season finally at hand, the plantation keepers were burning off the standing foliage to prepare the ground for crops: the slash and burn that marked the beginning of each planting season. Seeing this, McCarter had one more thought.

“We expected the rains to kill the Zipacna, like the canteen water did to the grub. But the air of today is filled with pollution, including sulfur from coal and other sources. It may not be like acid that can strip paint, but it’s far more acidic than the rain of three thousand years ago.”

“You think that’s why the Zipacna didn’t die from it so quickly,” Hawker guessed.

McCarter nodded, then turned back toward the smoke. “These fires create a little pollution,” he said. “But all across America, Europe and Asia, coal-fired power plants are pumping billions of tons of sulfur into the air. Not to mention carbon and other poisons.” He looked at Danielle; in some ways he now understood her quest. “Seems like we’re making a world more fit for other life than for our own.”

Several hours later, they reached the outskirts of Manaus, a sight most of them never thought they would see again.

During this last leg of the journey, Danielle found
herself drawn to the prow of the barge. They were almost home, and she’d begun to wonder what awaited them there. An hour from their arrival, the captain of the vessel came to find her. “You are Americans?”

Danielle nodded.

“Yes, well, someone is looking for you,” the captain told her. “They fear you are lost.”

“Who?” she asked, suspiciously.

“On the docks,” the captain said. “Another American. He radioed us. Looking for a lost group, with a pretty, dark-haired woman named Danielle. That’s you, no?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I guess that’s me. Do you know who this other American is?”

The captain shook his head. “A friend of yours,” he said, excited, as the bearer of good news should be. “He say they look for you everywhere, checking every boat that comes back from upriver. That’s an amigo, then. For sure.”

Hawker came up as the captain walked away. “What was that all about?”

She looked at him unenthusiastically. “We have an
amigo
waiting for us on the docks.”

Hawker’s brow wrinkled. “I thought we were all out of amigos.”

She nodded. “We are.”

An hour later they approached a crowded wooden dock, quite near the spot where Hawker and Danielle had been shot at. After some deft maneuvering around smaller boats, the barge had come close enough for
Danielle to see three men standing among the locals who crowded the dock. Two wore dark sunglasses and seemed to be armed; the third wore an open-collared linen shirt, with his arm in a sling. She recognized him instantly. “Arnold!”

He smiled at her from the dock. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he told her.

The boat touched the dock and Danielle jumped off. She hugged him carefully. “I was told you’d been killed.”

“Yes, well. As I’ve said before: never confuse the official version of reality with the truth.”

“What happened?” she asked, looking at his arm.

“Fractured it when I fell, the only thing twenty-four layers of Kevlar couldn’t prevent.”

Moore explained how Gibbs had betrayed him and how he’d survived the bullet and the fall, only to shatter his arm on the bridge’s caisson and nearly freeze to death clinging to the pylon underneath it. He hadn’t suspected Gibbs’ actions, but believing he was meeting the men who’d killed Blundin, he wasn’t taking any chances.

Danielle relayed the short version of events while the others began to come ashore.

Susan Briggs came first, with the two surviving German shepherds on their leashes at her side. Behind them McCarter helped Brazos hobble onto the dock, and finally Hawker emerged, dragging a disoriented William Devers, whom Danielle had sedated as they approached Manaus to prevent him from escape. Last out was Eric.

Moore’s guards moved toward him, but Hawker stopped them. “This man goes free.”

“He’s coming with us,” Moore said. “He has information.”

Hawker pointed to Devers. “You’ll have to get it from him.”

“He won’t have what I’m looking for,” Moore said.

Hawker stood his ground. “Then you’ll have to guess at it.”

Moore exhaled loudly and the two men stared at each other. But Hawker would not move aside; if not for the man’s accuracy with the Barrett rifle, Hawker would have been dead.

“Let him go,” Danielle said, firmly. “It wouldn’t be right. Not after everything that went down out there.”

Moore huffed in exasperation. “Very well,” he said, smiling and seeming to approve of the change he sensed in her. He turned to the mercenary. “You’re free to go, young man. You’ve been given a gift today—your life back—use it wisely.”

The blond-haired man looked at Moore and Danielle and then Hawker. He seemed unsure. “Get out of here,” Hawker said. “Go back home, if you can.”

With halting steps, the former mercenary began to walk down the dock, glancing backward several times, before disappearing into the crowd.

Moore turned to Hawker again. “Speaking of going home,” he said, “I understand that a deal has been made. And though the expedition has failed, you seem to have held up your end of the bargain. This is not unappreciated. However, in our current situation, we appear to have lost any ability to reciprocate. Our director of operations has disappeared and is under investigation for a wide range of crimes, including embezzlement,
forgery and murder. Young Ms. Laidlaw here is listed as missing and is considered to be a suspect as well. And I … well, officially I’m dead.”

Moore shook his head softly. “Be that as it may, we are in your debt, and if we don’t end up in prison ourselves, we will do what we can for you.”

Hawker knew the situation. He turned to Danielle. “You could always stay here,” he said. “I know a certain nightclub owner who might be willing to hire you on.”

She smiled at him; it was tempting. “Maybe next time,” she said. “I have some things I have to straighten out first.”

T
hree months after leaving the Amazon, Professor Michael McCarter waited in the warmly lit corridors of the Harry Hopkins Federal Building. The hallway exuded a quiet charm, its walls covered with cherry-stained wood, its railing and handles made of polished brass from the glamorous, stylistic decade of the 1920s. Surrounded by that ambience, McCarter lingered, having just finished giving some testimony in front of a hastily convened Senate committee.

The senators on the panel had questioned him politely and directly for the better part of four hours. But in a style that he found welcome at first—and strange later on—they avoided pressing him for any type of significant detail. Only in the later stages of the hearing did it occur to him that they were being deliberate: they didn’t want complete disclosure.