Invisible City (12 page)

I'm impressed. This is much deeper than we've gone.

“How about ‘Heart of Sky'?”

“Well,” muses Camila, “the Mayan creation myth says that the world was created by the Heart of Sky and the Plumed Serpent. But there are scholars who say that it's also an astronomical thing, that ‘Heart of Sky' could mean Polaris—the Pole Star.”

Two astronomical terms together.

“Could that be some kind of astronomical event?” Ollie suggests. “The Great Dark Rift meeting Polaris?”

“In the Calakmul letter,” says Camila, “it says ‘it will be destroyed.' Doesn't that sound kind of like a prediction of some cataclysmic event?”

I feel a ripple of energy pass through me. The hairs on my arms prickle. What if the 2012 doomsday scenario is real?

“Thirteen Baktun,” she continues gravely, “December twenty-second, 2012—the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. Even nowadays it's thought that our galaxy will be aligned in a special way on that date. Maybe the Ix Codex describes what will happen then. And what if it's not some harmless shift in the
collective consciousness, or whatever these new-age types would like to believe, but a
real end
, some terrible event?
It will be destroyed
. What? The whole world?”

“Maybe not,” I point out. “The Calakmul letter mentions this ‘healer of worlds.'”

“Sure, that's also interesting,” Camila muses.

“What does it mean?”

“Well … what if it's a reference to something that could reverse the cataclysm, or protect people, something like that?”

“What, like a spell or something?”

Tyler makes a tutting sound of disapproval. “What's wrong with you? That's crazy, man!”

Camila shoots him a withering look.

I compromise: “Or something.”

“‘In the Moon it walks,'” she quotes. “Now
what
does that mean?” mutters Ollie.

She's got a point.

“Okay,” admits Camila, “I don't have all the answers. Who knows—maybe I've interpreted everything completely wrong! But I do know this: Andres believed that the Ix Codex is a true document, that it contains a Mayan prophecy about the end of the world. The Calakmul letter—it's giving only a hint of what's in the Ix Codex.”

“I knew it,” Tyler says, half angry, half smug. “This Mayan prophecy—it's for real, man!”

“Someone believes it,” says Camila. “Someone believes
that codex is worth killing for. Someone with the power to murder Andres and frame my husband.”

“Carlos Montoyo,” I breathe.

Camila seems thrown. It's clear that, to her, Montoyo isn't a suspect. “Who, the archaeology teacher from Yucatán University?”

“Dad was supposed to be meeting him. He knew all about the Ix Codex. He warned Dad off.”

“Andres did meet him—in Guatemala,” says Camila, shrugging. “He didn't seem suspicious of Montoyo. In fact, Montoyo gave him some useful information. About a small ruin not far from here, where Dad found some new emblem glyphs.”

“Emblem glyphs?” I ask. “He found some new city names?”

“You'd better believe it! He was really excited.”

“And that's all that happened with Montoyo?”

“Yeah. That was it.”

“So if not Montoyo,” I ponder, “then what about the CIA?” Camila gives me a strange look. “Why do you say that?”

I reply, “It's Ollie's theory.”

“Someone who could trace e-mails and Web searches,” Ollie says loftily. “Someone who could organize a burglary. Someone interested in extraterrestial encounters with the Maya. And the alien secrets they might have shared.”

Camila stands up, clearly troubled. “There's been something really weird about Andres's death, right from the beginning.”

“The UFO incident?” I ask.

Camila gives a wry smile. “Yeah. To be honest, we all wondered. But then my girlfriend, the one who works in the police station, she brought me a photo she took. In the plane wreckage, they found something attached to the flight controls—a small machine. My friend never saw anything like it before. Then, she told me, some gringos came. They had badges—CIA, FBI, something like that—but she didn't see which kind. And they took it away, the little machine. None of the police ever mentioned it again. It was deleted from a list of exhibits recovered from the crash.”

“A machine attached to the flight controls …,” I murmur. “Something that could have made Dad's plane crash?”

Camila completes my thought: “By remote control. No need for a pilot to jump out of the plane midflight. Just put the dead body in the plane and send it up. Then crash it—and you've got a perfect accidental death. If everything goes to plan, you don't even need to frame someone for murder. So, that only happens as an afterthought. When they inconveniently find the missing head of a strangled pilot. And that's when they start looking around for a victim to pin with their dumb story.

“These U.S. agents,” she says, “they killed Andres. It's as clear as a bell. And the reason is in this Mayan inscription.”

Camila leans back in her chair, takes a sip of tea. She picks up and stares at my half of the Calakmul letter for a few moments, concentrating. Then quite suddenly she stands up straight.

“Oh my God! I can't believe I didn't see this right away!”

We stare at her, expectant. When Camila looks at me again, her expression has gone from one of wonder to anxiety.

“There's one thing these people—whoever they are—cannot know. Something Andres only told to me. Something that tells us
exactly where Andres went before he disappeared
.”

When we met Camila Pastor—my half sister—I wanted to know everything: when Dad had first made contact with her, how he found her, what they'd done, where they'd been together, how many times she'd seen him, why he'd ignored her for so long, why he didn't tell us. That last one more than anything.

But once I'd seen the letter Dad left for her, and her half of the Mayan manuscript, the whole codex mystery dominated our minds again.

How weird was it that we'd both become obsessed with finding out what really happened to Dad and why?

Well, according to Camila, not at all. When I brought the subject up, she seemed nonchalant. “Of course. Every day I sent you mental messages, willing you to decipher the inscription, to get interested, to come over.”

“You didn't even know I had the other half of the manuscript!”

“I knew someone had it. I sent my telepathic message to him,” she countered, grinning. “And it worked!”

It sounds odd when I write it down. But in Mexico, people really talk that way.

Camila thought our half was the important part. “Andres didn't realize it, but he told me where he was going. That last day. He was all excited, because he said he'd worked out something really important. He'd worked out the real Mayan name of the ruins at Becan.”

Becan, a ruin not far from Chetumal, was named by archaeologists, just like lots of Mayan cities where the original name has been lost. Nowadays no one knows its Mayan name. But Dad thought he'd made that discovery. It was a name we'd seen before, another city named in the Calakmul letter.

“Andres found Becan's emblem glyph on a marker in the forest nearby. He told me that the name translated as ‘City of the Watery Snake Knot.'”

“‘Knotted Water Snake'—that's what Chechan Naab means,” I said.

I remembered that bizarre inscription to “Arcadio” in that book that the burglar was so eager to get his hands on, the one by John Lloyd Stephens.

“When was Becan discovered?” I asked.

Camila wasn't sure. “The 1930s, I think.”

“So not discovered by John Lloyd Stephens?”

“Hey, that guy didn't do everything, you know.”

I breathed out slowly. That inscription in the book must be a
fake—not scrawled by Stephens after all. It mentions Tikal, discovered a few years after Stephens wrote the book. I could just about believe that he'd been on a secret trip to Tikal. But Becan, or “Chechan Naab” … if it wasn't even known about until the twentieth century? Still … it was all pretty odd. Whoever really wrote that inscription—they'd heard of a Mayan city I'd seen mentioned nowhere else.

Ollie broke in then, quoting from the Calakmul letter: “From Chechan Naab he emerged, from the Great Temple of the Cross.”

“There ya go,” Camila said. “I knew you would see it too. That's what I realized when I studied your half of the manuscript. The morning he left, he was so excited you wouldn't believe it. Like he was really on the brink of something. That was June 12. I saw him leave in his plane. He flew west. Toward Becan. It has to be! To Chechan Naab—to where ‘he' emerged, according to the Calakmul letter. Can't be a coincidence.”

“But who is ‘he'?”

“It's not clear. Maybe it's K'inich K'ane Ajk of Cancuén. Or maybe it's the Bakab, the one who the letter tells us was defeated.”

“You're sure Dad went to Becan?”

“Look,” she demanded, “Becan is the only Mayan city surrounded by a moat. It goes all the way around. What's a moat but a knot of water? The archaeologists who found it—they almost got it right. ‘Be'kan' means ‘way of the serpent.' And one of the stone motifs you find in Becan is the openmouthed serpent.”

“The snake,” Tyler said.

“Exactly. The snake that swallows its tail. The circle—a moat. And
there's more. Your half of the inscription has this line—
By the Great Temple of the Cross
. Well, another motif you find in Becan is a cross made with recessed bricks. Nope, it seems pretty clear to me—the ruined city we all know as Becan was once called Chechan Naab. Which means that Becan is at the heart of this whole mystery of the Ix Codex. That's what Dad discovered, that last day before he disappeared. That's what made him so excited. I'm sure of it.”

I have to admit that my sister's done it again. She's some kind of genius. Even more than Ollie. I feel proud to be related to her.

Maybe it's like father, like son, and
like daughter
too.

A silence falls over us as we struggle to absorb all these new ideas.

“We're gonna find this codex,” Camila says. “And hold it for ransom. Get whoever's really in charge to order my husband's release, or I destroy the codex.”

“What makes you so sure it's still out there?” Ollie asks. “What if they already have it?”

“Maybe they do,” concedes Camila. “But I don't think so. They are still looking. My phone is bugged, I know it. Every so often I sense I'm being followed.”

“My house was burglarized,” I say. “And they tried to rob Dad's college office too.”

“They're looking for the Calakmul letter,” Camila says. “They know we have it. Which means that the codex is still out there,” she adds. “Somewhere. And I'm gonna get it.”

“All this to free Saul?” says Ollie.

“Sure. It's that or betray my father. These people
killed him for what he knew. You think I'm gonna let them win?”

“Let's say you do find it. If you destroy the codex,” says Ollie, “how have you won?”

“At least,” Camila says fiercely, “I'll know that those jerks will never get their hands on it. And my father will have taken his secrets to the grave.”

With a perplexed smile, Ollie tilts her head to one side and asks, “And if this codex does turn out to contain some secret to save the world?”

“Oh, I'm counting on it,” answers Camila.

Then she turns to me, looks me dead in the eye.

“So, baby brother, can I count on
you
?”

“I'm in,” I tell her. “All the way.”

Camila convinces us that it isn't safe to stay at Hotel Delfin. There, it will just be a matter of a day or two before Detective Rojas gives up waiting for me to phone him the way we agreed. And then he'll come looking for us. “And maybe not just him,” warns Camila, driving us back to pick up our stuff. “Maybe the guys he's taking orders from will finally show up.”

It's still not clear to me who she thinks these guys actually are. Like Ollie, she's mentioned the CIA/NASA/Majestic—whatever their name is—the UFO-Encounter Cover-Up guys. But then she's also going on about the narcos—the local drug barons. When I ask her, she seems annoyed.