Deity (35 page)

The Truth

“Hold
your fire!” Matt hollered for the third time and the gunfire finally quit
beneath his voice echoing through the trees.

Peet
was stunned speechless, and given the shell-shocked expression plastered over
Father Ruiz’s face, he knew he wasn’t the only one. He dared not move from behind
the log, even as men began to sever themselves from the jungle’s grasp. There
were seventeen in all, each heavily armed and following along the heels of a
dark man—his hair was black, his skin was dark, his eyes deep. Even his clothes
were shadows of jungle twilight, the perfect camouflage for the tropics.

“It’s
about time you caught up, Abe,” Matt said lightly as the dark man and his
brigade joined them.

Abe
remained stone-faced. “Is it now?” he said in a tone that wiped the smear from
Matt’s face. He glanced down at the Zapatista still kneeling at Matt’s feet. “Who
do we have here?”

Matt
snagged the Zapatista’s balaclava and ripped it off the head of none other than—

“Chac
Bacab.”

Chac’s
burning eyes held steady to the dark man standing over him. “Abdullah,” he
spat.

“It’s
been a long time, Chac. You should keep in better touch.”

Chac’s
glare shifted onto Matt as he joined Abe. “It appears you’ve been keeping tabs
on me all this time. I should have suspected this Mormon was working for you.”

“Is
it my fault the years have degraded your reflexes?” Abe asked. “Peace times
have a way of doing that. You get comfortable, slow…forgetful.”

“I
haven’t forgotten anything,” Chac spat.

Peet
couldn’t take his eyes off the Mayan archaeologist. What was he doing here? How
did he manage to find them in all this jungle?

Was
he really a Zapatista?

Just
whose side was Peet supposed to be on? One thing did seem clear. He was caught
in the middle of something he wasn’t supposed to have any part in.

Matt
inspected Chac’s pistol which he now flipped in his hands like a plastic toy. “So
when did you finally figure it out, Chac? What clued you in to our little
game?”

“The
moment I saw that cross in the cavern,” Chac growled.
“Though
it became increasingly clear when the bomb went off.”

Matt
chuckled. “So you did get my message. It’s too bad it didn’t have more of an
effect on you. I knew you’d catch on if you discovered I’d taken the Kin
piece.”

Matt left the bomb
? The scenario seemed
perfectly clear now, but why had he taken the Kin piece and put the blame on
Chac?

“I
thought you said Chac gave you the Kin piece,” Peet challenged.

“And
you believed me at the time, didn’t you.”

Peet
scowled but held his tongue. There was perhaps one reason why Matt lied about
Chac finding the Kin piece. The same reason he left the bomb behind—to
discredit or eliminate the competition.

So
many questions raced through Peet’s mind as he simply sat there, witnessing this
strange confrontation. Matt had been a long time colleague. Although Peet
hadn’t always agreed with some of Matt’s theories, he did respect them. But now
something had changed. Matt had somehow become involved with Abe and his thugs.
He’d even deceived Peet into having doubts about Chac Bacab, but now he
was severely doubting
those doubts. As Peet’s trust in Matt
began to fade, his faith in Chac began to grow.

“You
were so close to the prize, Chac,” Matt said, reaching into Chac’s shirt and
retrieving the Talking Cross. “But it just wasn’t meant to be. I thought you
Mayans would have figured that out after you lost the cross the first time.”

“It
won’t help you any more than it helped the Cruzob,” Chac spat.

“We’ll
see about that once we find the original Long Count,” Matt taunted.

Peet
was fit to be tied. “You deceitful—” he sputtered beneath a slew of insults
that wouldn’t coordinate on his breath.

“Give
it up, Peet,” Matt objected.

“First
you used John to uncover the Tun clue and now you’re using me to find the Long
Count Calendar!”

“Join
the club,” Chac muttered beneath his breath. “He’s apparently been using me for
years.”

“Admit
it, Chac,” Matt said. “You were looking for the Talking Cross too. Do you
honestly believe I needed to join forces with someone just to copy and record
ancient pictographs? I was looking for your knowledge, Chac.”

“Just
who are these infidels?” Abe asked as his eyes swept from Peet to Father Ruiz.

Matt
shrugged.
“Baggage, mostly.”

“You
rescued us from the Zapatistas,” Peet shot back.

“Only
because I saw your
plane go
down. The Zapatistas
aren’t in the habit of shooting just anybody down. I was sure your plane was
one of Abe’s so I moved in to provide assistance. You can imagine my surprise
when I discovered it wasn’t our plane at all.”

“Who
exactly are you?” Father Ruiz asked.

Matt
passed him a sly grin. “In the end, I’m your future.”

“What
the hell is that supposed to mean?” Peet grumbled beneath his breath.

“You
weren’t looking for divine intervention at all,” Father Ruiz cut in. “You knew
exactly which cross to take from that chapel.”

Matt
spun the cross in his hand. “Of course I did.”

“How
did you know?”

“I’ve
had years to research. I searched chapel records, death records, and finally
government records. When I saw the drawing behind the Kin piece, I realized
there was only one gear-shaped cross on record, and that was the one your government
handed over to the cathedral.”

“But
the cross in the cavern was a pegged cross.”

Matt
snagged Father Ruiz and shoved him to the ground.
“On your
knees.”
The priest complied and Matt pushed his head toward the ground
until his back was level like a table top. Then, positioning the cross in a
beam of sunlight directly above him, he cast the cross’s shadow onto the
priest’s back.

“Look
at the silhouette,” Matt said. Peet did and noticed exactly what he was
implying. The profile of the cross did indeed appear to have pegs at the end of
each arm, an effect created by the ridges and recesses of the gear-shaped
shafts.

“The
peg is a gear rib,” Peet observed.

Abe
quietly slipped in behind Matt and snatched the cross from his grasp. Matt was
clearly upset by the intrusion, but he wasn’t about to argue with a superior.

“Finally,
the cross is in our control,” Abe said, stepping back to get an eyeful of his
prize.

“The
Zapatistas are one thing,” Father Ruiz snapped. “But what could you possibly
want with that cross?”

“We’ve
been in a race for this relic for years, haven’t we, Chac?” Abe said, still
studying the cross. “It’s about time one of us found what we were looking for. We
owe Matt a great deal of gratitude for his endurance. Not everyone can pretend
to be a Mormon archaeologist for fifteen years.”

“Pretend?”
Peet choked.

“BYU
was just a cover,” Matt explained. “Their interest in Mesoamerica
made it all the more convenient to quietly search for the Talking Cross without
raising local suspicion.” He smiled down at Chac. “The disguise worked better
than I could have ever imagined.”

“Until
you were fired,” Peet added.

Matt
laughed. “You think BYU fired me? I intentionally had myself fired. As handy as
BYU was, they did have their drawbacks. The duties of a professor were
frustratingly restricting to my hunt for the cross. I was running out of time
so I knew I had to sever my ties with the university. The Zapatistas seemed to
be increasingly closer to finding the Talking Cross so the first thing I did
after leaving BYU was to learn what the Zapatistas knew. Who better to shadow
than good ol’ Chac
Bacab.
”

“And
well executed, I might add,” Abe said.
“Except for one
thing.”

Abe
turned to Matt now, his dark eyes thunderously menacing. The look seemed to
catch even Matt by surprise.

“I
managed to get access to the museum and cathedral just as you requested,” Abe
continued in a threatening tone. “I even bought you all new diving equipment.”

“I
had to leave my equipment in my car as a decoy,” Matt reasoned.

The
excuse made no impact on Abe. “I did all this for you and how did you repay me?
You disappeared. Did you believe I wouldn’t figure out that you’d located the
Talking Cross?”

Matt
noticeably cringed beneath Abe’s glare. “I wanted to be sure that I’d found the
real thing.”

Abe
didn’t buy it. “When was that going to be, Matt?” he pressed. “When you used
the Talking Cross for yourself? You held out on me.”

Beads
of sweat broke out on Matt’s brow. It seemed like an alarmingly expedient
reaction considering how cool he’d handled himself just moments before. But now
the perspiration was clearly glistening just below his blond hairline.

“Look,
I didn’t want to alarm you in case it wasn’t real.”

“Did
it not occur to you that the bomb in the cavern would alert us to your
deception?” Abe insisted. “Or maybe you were hoping we would investigate the
cavern after we never heard back from you. Did you want us to believe you were
dead, or did you set that bomb for me?”

Matt
feigned a surprised laugh but his nervousness bled through. “That’s
ridiculous,” he said. “If I was trying to get rid of you, why would I
investigate that plane the Zapatistas shot down?”

Abe
didn’t even bat an eye. “I think you were hoping it was my plane. I can’t keep
someone I can’t trust.”

Matt
suddenly hit panic mode. “You can trust me, Abe. You’ve trusted me all these
years.”

Abe
glanced at the cross again. “Your usefulness has come to an end, Matt.”

With
that, before Peet could even blink, Abe pulled his pistol and shot Matt
square
between the eyes. Shocked, Peet spun away as Matt’s
head whipped back, spurting blood into the air as his body dropped to the
ground.

“My God!”
Father Ruiz gasped as the pistol shot
dissipated through the jungle.

Abe
lowered the weapon and tightened his grip on the cross. “That’s not a bad
eulogy,” he sneered.
“For a Mormon.”

Katun

Tacana’s
pillar was surprisingly similar to that of Izapa’s, just a little taller. Complete
with its own pillar ball at its crown, the pillar stood like the grave marker
of some forgotten person whose life bore no consequence to the world as it
stood now.

Her
skin still smarting from the ant attack, Lori paused a short distance from the
pillar at the insistence of Rafi’s rifle. Tarah continued alone down into the
ravine toward the pillar waiting in the bottom. There was no reverence in her
posture, nothing that would indicate respect for the altar she was approaching.
She simply marched toward like a stone-conquering Amazon. She paused before the
pillar as if taking a moment to size it up. Then slowly, commandingly, she
marched around it, her eyes trained to the stone as if were a prisoner expected
to attempt escape.

One
complete lap around the pillar and Tarah stopped to turn back to Rafi and Lori.
Between tightly drawn lips, she barked, “Bring her.”

Rafi
nudged the muzzle of his rifle between Lori’s shoulders and she obediently
stepped forward. Hurrying to stay ahead of the rifle, she half slid, half ran
down the side of the ravine, coming to a floundering stop in front of Tarah who
snatched the gag from her mouth.

“Well?”
Tarah snapped. “Is this the next clue?”

Lori
glared at her, her tongue running across her gritty teeth.

Tarah
nudged her closer to the pillar. “Well? Is it?”

“I
can’t inspect the stone with my hands behind my back,” Lori snapped back.

With
an irritable sigh, Tarah released Lori’s hands. Hesitantly, Lori turned to the
pillar. She scanned its relatively clean surfaces, taking her time to allow the
circulation back into her hands. With only grass growing immediately at its
base and nothing more, the pillar appeared to have been erected just yesterday.
There was no moss, no lichen. In fact, there was very little wear to the carvings
etched into the stone.

Strange for such an exposed artifact.

There
were handprints carved on either side of the pillar ball, just like there’d
been on Izapa’s pillar ball. She also found the familiar long lines that
trailed down the length of the pillar itself. And then there was the glyph.