Effigy (37 page)

AFI Custody

John’s aching knee was killing him. He’d barely noticed the mob of hooded police officers bearing down upon him before he was viciously thrown to the ground and handcuffed. In a matter of minutes he and Eva were dragged off the temple and shoved into a dark-tinted AFI van with no explanation at all, even if it had to be translated from Spanish.

Lori had disappeared. He couldn’t worry about her now. His knee throbbed with a constant reminder of his outrageous and humiliating arrest. Despite that, he knew enough to hold his tongue as he sat next to Eva, arms bound behind their backs and with
Teotihuacan
falling further and further behind.

Eva apparently had no intentions of being so submissive.

“You can’t treat us like this,” she hollered to the two masked officers in the front seat. “I demand to know why we’re being arrested!”

Neither one of their captors bothered to reply. Perhaps neither of them spoke English. Whatever the case, they simply sat there and let the woman continue ranting through the bars separating them.

“Perhaps you should calm down,” John mumbled under his breath.

“I will
not
calm down,” Eva snapped. “They have no right to arrest us!”

Eva’s tirade was disturbing John’s analysis of their situation. In his mind, if they cooperated, perhaps the officers would come to realize they’d made a mistake and release them—no harm, no foul. On the other hand, this was Mexican law enforcement. Chances were they didn’t admit to mistakes.

It was this last thought that started John’s mind in motion. He’d long heard of the corruption still lurking beneath endless attempts to reform the police forces in central
Mexico
. He wasn’t aware of any probable cause that would warrant their arrest, and if these officers had acted without one, John quickly deduced that their release was improbable.

They needed an escape plan. If he couldn’t somehow talk their way out of captivity, perhaps he could buy their way out. Perhaps, he conceded, that was the only reason for their arrest—a clever scheme to frighten two American tourists out of their money. Unfortunately, even that conclusion left him feeling uneasy. If money was all these men were after, it wouldn’t have taken an entire police force to arrest a sixty year old man and a woman. And he had no idea what had happened to Peet, Derek and Lori.

“Where are you taking us?” Eva persisted.

John shifted his weight to catch her attention. “You’ll do us no benefit by provoking them.”

“If anyone is provoking someone it’s
them
!” She turned away to bark through the bars again. “What rights do you have to arrest us like this?”

John sighed and leaned back into his seat, and that’s when he felt the pressure in his back pocket. His cell phone!

He shifted again, his fingers digging into his back pockets, just barely reaching a slick metallic corner of the cell phone. It didn’t have all the fancy features of Derek’s BlackBerry, but it was sufficient to get a message across. Gently, he pulled the phone out and flipped it open.

“Where are you taking us?” Eva repeated.

Good. Keep talking.

John felt for the keypad and began dialing Derek’s number, a number he’d memorized on their flight from
Salt Lake City
, just in case they couldn’t find the boy right away. If by chance the others had escaped, they would need to know where to look for the effigy. If John was able to buy these policemen off early enough, perhaps they could all regroup in
Tula
.

“Why aren’t you answering me?”

The driver finally looked back at Eva through the rear view mirror. “If you doan shut up, we weel shut you up.”

“What are we being arrested for?” Eva pressed.

The driver’s cold eyes only stared at her through the mirror. “I not warn you again.”

Eva scowled, but she said no more. With a huff, she sat back against the seat—as best as one could sit back with their arms bound behind them—and stared out the tinted window.

The silence was fine. By then, John had finished dialing and gently snapped the phone shut. Now, he need only be concerned with how much their freedom would cost.

Observatory

Lori thought her legs had given out again. One second she was racing after Derek and Dr. Peet, hoping for refuge within a thicket of pepper trees, and the next she was falling. But this time she didn’t hit the ground. It seemed like her tumble was suspended within an endlessly dark abyss. By the time she realized she’d dropped below the surface of the earth she landed to the sound of pottery shattering amid a shower of dirt and gravel and falling bodies.

Numbing pain quaked up the length of her legs and back down again until it slowly tingled out through her feet. She picked herself up from the crushed remnants of a ceramic bowl that had broken her fall. Dust coated the back of her throat and she could hear Dr. Peet coughing in the darkness beside her. Derek groaned somewhere nearby.

Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dim cavity they’d fallen into. The darkness was faintly penetrated by a weak shaft of sunlight filtering through the trees and brush overhead. She began to make out the shadows of rubble covering the cavern floor. A short stone pillar, some sort of altar, centered the cave.

Voices echoed from above, pulling her attention to the trickling hole in the earthen ceiling. An arm suddenly pulled her from beneath the gap, a firm hand smothering the scream that threatened to reflexively escape her mouth. A dark shadow passed over the hole but it didn’t stop to investigate.

Lori could feel Dr. Peet’s heart pounding against her back while Derek fought for control of his panting close beside them. The musky odor of sweating masculinity was a bit overwhelming, but she dared not move while the AFI officers were up there, searching through the thicket.

More details of the cave began to take shape. They’d fallen into a cavern with the stone altar standing directly beneath the bottle-necked opening. Pieces of Derek’s broken camera mingled with shards of ceramics, bone and other debris cluttering the stuccoed cave floor. From all appearances, there was no way out of this hole but up.

After what felt like hours of breathless waiting, the rustling sounds of the searching officers faded to silence. They lingered still, not daring to move until the caw of a magpie echoed down into the well. Dr. Peet finally shifted, prompting Lori to her feet. The pain in her legs was gone. No bones were broken.

“What is this place?” she asked, scanning the density of the cave.

“This looks like an astronomical observatory,” Dr. Peet said. “I think the Teotihuacanos might have used this to observe the stars, or perhaps the equinox and solstices. Maybe a beam of light lands on the altar when the sun reaches the zenith.”

“They dug caves in the city?” Lori asked.

“Why not? If I remember correctly, the Mesoamericans believed caves were portals to the underworld. But they were also the wombs of renewal and rebirth. Rulers were often portrayed seated within caves or inside animals with cave-like mouths as a symbolic position between creation and the underworld.”

“That would explain the faces on the sunstone, looking out of Xiuhcoatl’s mouth.”

“I really enjoy this classroom discussion,” Derek said smartly, “but we better find a way out of here.” He located his camera and moaned as he fingered the shoulder strap that had snapped loose from its attachment. “Damn! This was a twelve hundred dollar camera.”

“We have to find John and Eva,” Peet said, voicing his thoughts . He’d made it half-way around the cavity. Lori couldn’t see him but she could hear his footsteps and the sounds of his hands trailing along the earthen wall.

“
Find
them?” Derek blurted. “They’re in AFI custody. That’s where you’ll find them. I’m a little more concerned about
us
right now.”

“What do the police want with them?” Lori asked, ignoring Derek’s futile rant as she picked up a small bowl and carried it to the dim light beneath the hole. “What do they want with
us
?”

Dr. Peet was still searching the perimeter of the cave. “We need a ladder or a rope or something. It’d help if we had a flashlight.”

As if in answer to his prayer, a flare of firelight shocked the darkness and just as quickly receded to a tiny flame in Lori’s hand.

“Where the hell did you get the matches?” Derek asked and then jumped back, apparently startled to find himself standing over a skeleton.

“Shaman Gaspar left them in
Teotihuacan
,” Lori explained.

“The smoke within the serpent’s mouth,” Peet recited as the flame flickered out, leaving them standing in the darkness amid the lingering odor of char and sulfur.

“And here we thought we’d find it in a cave,” Derek’s disembodied voice replied. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

* * * *

It took the entire book of matches to get just enough flame burning over an old piece of wood to sufficiently light the interior of the cavern. With the darkness receded to shadows behind the central altar, the cave looked a lot smaller than Peet imagined. And, just as he feared, there was no way out but up through the bottle-necked hole they’d fallen into.

Peet didn’t like feeling trapped. As soon as Lori had her flame nursed to a moderate strength, he started looking for some way to climb out.

“If I climb onto this altar,” he said, again voicing his thoughts, leaping onto the central pillar, “maybe Lori can reach the top if she stands on my shoulders.”

“Yeah, and I’ll just sit here and watch the two of you break your necks,” Derek said snidely. He was wandering across the cave, his eyes glued to the blue screen of his BlackBerry.

Peet spotted a large tap root penetrating the cavity near the hole above, its angular length trailing down the nearby perimeter wall. He jumped off the altar and began clawing at the packed earth around it.

Derek remained glued to his phone.

“Would you put that thing down and help me pull out this root,” Peet barked. “I think it’ll be strong enough to climb out on.”

Derek was unmoved. “Just chill, professor,” he said, still glued to the screen. “If I can find reception down here, we can call our way out.”

“And just who are you going to call? The police?”

Derek sneered at him, a cynical response to a sarcastic joke. “How does the U.S. Embassy sound to you?”

“You know the number to the embassy?” Lori asked, looking over his shoulder.

“No. But I can look it up. That is, if I get reception.”

Peet started to rip the root from the wall. “We’re fifteen feet underground,” he growled. “You’re not going to get reception.”

Over the years he’d grown impatient with students and their cell phones, BlackBerries, Ipods and any number of gadgets that disengaged them from the lesson at hand. He’d come to know some of his students more by the top of their heads than by their actual faces, which left him wondering why they even bothered showing up for class. Their world,
their lives
, resided behind computer screens and digital technology. One thousand years from now, he estimated, this generation of human civilization would have to be explored by silicon archaeologists.