Black Sun: A Thriller (16 page)

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.

C
hoi 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.

The latest series of jolts ended and Kang’s body returned to stillness. He looked at the doctor who was watching the data displayed on a softly glowing LCD monitor.

“You wait too long to speak,” Kang said. “Is the news that bad?”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “Your neurological response is still weakening.”

“Then increase the stimulus,” Kang said.

“It will cause a great deal of pain,” the doctor said. “It will feel as if your skin is burning, as if a flame is cutting into you and you cannot pull away from it.”

“Yes,” Kang said. “And in my position you would welcome such sensations.”

The doctor nodded politely. “I’ll need a minute to adjust the settings.”

As the doctor scurried to a new position, Choi stepped forward. Apparently Kang noticed the look on his face.

“You disapprove,” he said.

“It is not my place to approve or disapprove,” Choi replied.

“That is correct,” Kang noted. “What do you have for me?”

“New information on the Americans. The one we thought had been killed in the mountains, the professor. It seems he might be alive.”

“So one of your failures is erased,” Kang noted.

Despite the anger he felt at Kang’s derision, Choi maintained his composure. Dying men had a habit of lashing out and Kang continued to do so.

“Let us hope,” Choi said. “What we know for certain is that either he, or someone using his password, accessed the mainframe at his old university. Information was downloaded, including satellite photos of the Yucatan.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Not precisely, but the terminal he used was in a small town, a large distance from where he and the woman were originally operating. And if she were to try and find him …” Choi let his voice trail off.

“Of course she will,” Kang said. “Where are your people?”

“In Tulum and Puerto Morelos. And in Mexico City, at the Museum of Anthropology, where they did some of their research.”

“This is good,” Kang said. “Keep them out of sight. You moved too early last time.”

Choi nodded and the doctor poked his head up from the equipment he was calibrating. “We’re ready,” he said.

Kang motioned for Choi to leave.

Choi bowed slightly and then stepped out through the cabin door, closing it behind him.

As he walked back to the communications suite, he heard a low buzz emanating from the room he’d just left. He also heard Kang grunting and wincing in unison with the electronic pulses. By the time Choi reached the communications room, Kang’s voice could be heard down the aisle, screaming in agony and pleasure.

H
awker sat in the front passenger seat of a dilapidated, rust-covered jeep as Danielle drove. Yuri sat in the back. The three of them had been motoring along in the Mexican sunshine for hours, a welcome change to the cold drizzle of Hong Kong and the South China Sea.

As they traveled up the coastal road toward Puerto Azul, Hawker watched the sunlight shimmering off the water. In the most bizarre way, it almost felt as if they were on vacation. He and Danielle traveling like some couple, their adopted child, Yuri, seat-belted in the back, wearing a touristy sombrero and oversized plastic sunglasses.

He was quiet, even when spoken to in Russian. Yuri did not often engage. But for the most part he’d been a model child, concerned with little things right in front of him far more than the bigger picture of his surroundings.

Even now he seemed more interested in the clicking sound made by the arms of the plastic sunglasses than actually wearing them. He repeatedly took them off, opening and closing the arms seven or eight times in proximity to his right ear, before Hawker would put them back on his face.

After the tenth round of watching this, Hawker turned to Danielle. “What do you think is wrong with him?”

Danielle glanced in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know,” she said. “He seems to be in his own world. In some ways it reminds me of autism but I’m not sure. He didn’t exactly have a great start to life.”

The look on Danielle’s face was sadness, disappointment. They’d rescued Yuri from one prison but the future likely held another. Hawker understood it.

The rules were often blind to the facts and though he and Danielle could keep Yuri with them for the time being, and certainly would never return him to Kang, the diplomatic situation with Russia would be more difficult. Yuri was a Russian citizen, a ward of the state. And when the time came and the Russians demanded him back, legally there would be no way to stop them.

“Maybe we can keep him,” Hawker said, joking.

“He’s not a stray puppy,” she replied. “But we can’t send him back there.”

Hawker watched as Danielle returned to scanning the roadside and the signs. The drive had been a long one. Nine hours cross-country with only a canvas targa top to block the sun. Sweat, sand, and grime coated their bodies and the urge to stop, shower, and sleep had been hard to resist. But time was short and so they’d driven almost nonstop.

And yet Danielle looked great to him, as stunning as he remembered, in some ways even better. In Brazil, pressured by superiors to get an impossible job done under a daunting timeline, she’d been very official and intense. But here, driving the old jeep, wearing jeans, a
T-shirt, and a crumpled cowboy hat, with her skin tanning in the sun, she seemed more natural, more at peace.

“You know,” he said, “we could’ve found a car with air-conditioning.”

She laughed, an easy laugh. “We have the two-sixty air conditioner.”

“The two-sixty?”

“Yeah, two windows down, sixty miles an hour,” she said.

“Great,” Hawker said, wiping more sweat from his face. “I bet James Bond never had the two-sixty air conditioner. Maybe next time we could get an Aston Martin.”

“This suits you better,” she said. “Kind of reminds me of your helicopter.”

He laughed at that. “Yeah, it kind of does.”

The road had taken them to a small fishing village. On the shore, a group of long boats with colorful but fading paint lay motionless side by side. They looked like sea lions basking in the sun. Up ahead was a row of small buildings.

“This is it,” she said. “If McCarter’s still in Mexico, and he wants us to find him, he’ll be here.”

“How can you be sure?”

“When we came down here, we set up shop about fifty miles inland near a ruined Mayan city called Ek Balam, the Black Jaguar. But McCarter kept talking about wanting to come visit this place. I guess he and his wife spent a couple of months here,” Danielle said. “Working all day and making love all night. Never slept a wink, according to him.”

“Sounds nice,” Hawker said. “Except for the working part … and the lack of sleep.”

“Wow, you’re such a romantic.”

She pulled the jeep to the side of the road.

By an hour later they’d checked every motel in town. There were two smaller bed-and-breakfast places up the coast, but one man they’d asked had suggested the small apartment house a few blocks inland.

Danielle pulled up in front of it.

“My turn,” Hawker said. He hopped out and went to see what he could find.

“Moses Negro,” the front desk clerk said, after Hawker described who he was looking for.
“Este es loco.”

Hawker remembered McCarter as calm and measured. It was hard to imagine him as
“loco”
or resembling Moses in any way.

The clerk pointed up the stairs.
“Trece, nueve,”
he said. Third floor, room nine.

Hawker climbed the rickety stairs and made his way down a short hall.

From the outside the building had looked pretty worn down, old red brick and peeling plaster, but inside it was well kept, though dated and a little cramped.

The hardwood floors beneath his feet were scratched and fading but had been swept immaculate. On a sofa table at the top of the stairs, a vinelike plant with deep green leaves and bright red flowers spilled out of its pot. Through a window he saw the courtyard; an old stone fountain bubbled in the center. Birds sat on its rim or
chirped in the bougainvilleas that climbed trellises along the walls.