The Accused (52 page)

“But the warrior says, ‘I am the Captain of the Host…' ” he drew a long breath—“ ‘I am the Captain of the Host of the Lord! And where you're standing is holy ground.' ”

He glanced over at Will and kept talking—almost shouting—with the moaning tempest rocking their car.

“The Captain of the Host is going to be there with us today, Will,” he said. “I know you think that maybe this has all been about my getting
revenge—the big payback. I'd be lying if I said this wasn't personal. But it's much more than that. And no matter what happens…
no matter what
…because the Captain of the Lord is there with us—we're going to be on holy ground.”

Then they spotted the top of the tall Mayan pyramid off in the distance, over the waving jungle treetops.

Marlowe bulleted out a quick spoken prayer, ending it by saying, “As in the battle of Ai, Lord…”

As they pulled up to the grounds of Chichén Itzá, a green Ministry of Tourism emergency vehicle blocked their path. Two uniformed officers, who were standing behind a temporary barricade across the entrance to the Mayan archaeological site, ran to the car, holding their hats on. Marlowe rolled down the window, greeted the men and seemed to be explaining something to them in rapidly spoken Spanish. After a moment they waved the two Americans through. Marlowe pulled in and parked the car just out of sight of the entrance. He grabbed a briefcase out of the trunk of the car—the trunk lid almost blowing out of his hand—and signaled for Will to follow him—past the towering stairs of El Castillo, past the Temple of the Warriors, down the path that led to the mammoth, gaping hole in the jungle floor,
El Cenote Sagrado
—the Sacred Well of Sacrifice.

A man stood alone at the rim of the abyss.

He was a Mexican with a neatly trimmed beard and short black hair, which was blowing wildly in the mounting storm.

When the two Americans were about a hundred feet away, Marlowe turned to Will.

“You stay here.”

He strode through the wind over to Vega, who had his hands thrust into his wildly flapping raincoat. The Mexican was nervously glancing from Marlowe to Will, then back to Marlowe again as the colonel approached.

“I want to see the contents of your briefcase first,” Vega snapped loudly.

Marlowe laid the briefcase on the ground, unsnapped it, opened it slightly, and showed the contents to the other man, being careful not to let the wild winds catch the contents.

“You have some information for me?” he shouted out.

The Mexican said nothing at first. He chuckled, and then spoke.

“You think you really know who I am?”

“I know who you are,” Marlowe said, now shouting above the roaring wind of the storm. “You're a Muslim sympathizer with the AAJ. And before that, you were a bloodthirsty member of the military who killed and persecuted the Mayan population down here in the Yucatán. I know who you are. And I know
what
you are. But worse than any of that—you are the gutless snake that planned the death of my friend Carlos Fuego and his family.”

Vega laughed, and shook his head.

“Do you have no sense of history?” he bellowed with amusement. “My ancestors can be traced all the way back to the Spanish
conquistadores
who came and slaughtered the Mayan chiefs. So you see—history does repeat itself!” And with that, he began to laugh again.

“The information,” Marlowe snapped. “I want it now.”

“Is this what you're looking for?” Vega asked, taking his hand out of his raincoat pocket and lifting a small card in the air, which vibrated in the wind. His motion, as he raised the card over his head, was obvious enough for Will to see.

It was also obvious enough to be seen by another set of eyes. Vega had just given the signal. An armed band quickly burst out from the edge of the jungle, into the clearing—running toward Will, Marlowe, and Vega. There were three Middle Eastern–looking men, each carrying an automatic weapon. In the lead, however, was a Caucasian man with a bald head. The three Middle Eastern men scurried over toward Marlowe and Vega. But the man with the shaved head strode directly toward Will. It was Damon Lynch. He lifted his weapon and pointed it directly at Will's face, and then screamed out an order.

“Over there! Over there!” Lynch screamed, motioning with his weapon for the other man to join Marlowe and Vega at the edge of the well. As Will walked over, the wind was whining and whistling through the jungle, blowing with such force that it was difficult for Will to go in a straight line over to Marlowe's position.

Through the roar of the storm he could hear Lynch screaming profanities at him as he walked. Will had a momentary thought that this was how it would end—a bullet in his back from the man who had watched his first wife die. But he knew he couldn't dwell on that. He couldn't think about it.

“You are such a gutless wimp!” the man behind him screamed. “You could have had me—turned me over to the feds. Now look at you! So here it is—this is my payday. I helped do your wife. Now I get to do you. Man, oh, man. This is so sweet!”

Will's eyes searched the surroundings—he looked at the thick growth encircling the dark, abysmal hole in the jungle floor to see if there was a rescue in place, to see if there were American troops who were going to come and save them…some glimmer of hope in what now appeared to be a suicide scenario.

Will stopped just a foot away from Vega, who was now between him and Marlowe.

The Mexican official was still holding the small white card in his right hand, over his head.

Abu Adis, with his scraggly beard and wild eyes, stepped away from the other two terrorists and yelled out something Will could not understand—perhaps in his native tongue. Then Adis started to laugh, and was joined by the other two terrorists and by Damon Lynch.

“You go first—I get to take you,” Lynch shouted at Will. “I wanted to do it slow, and have some fun—but we're busy guys. I got things to do.”

And then he raised his weapon and pointed it at Will's forehead. Lynch's face had a twisted, demonic look—not like pleasure—or even pain—but something beyond that.

The near-gale-force winds were so wild that Will was having a hard time keeping himself standing, as he looked down the barrel of the automatic weapon.
This is holy ground
, he muttered out loud in a frantic prayer.

Then there was a crack. A sound. From somewhere. Lynch, for only a millisecond, gave Will a dazed, blank look. Then he dropped to the ground like a bag of bricks. Blood was surging from the sniper shot to the side of his head.

Adis and the other terrorists whirled instantly, only to be struck by a hail of bullets from the edge of the jungle, which cut them down before they could get off a single shot.

Within seconds, Master Sergeant Rockwell and the members of the BATCOM unit charged onto the site with guns poised at Lynch and the three terrorists, whose bodies were sprawled on the ground.

Then another group came running up behind the BATCOM squad—a small group of Mayan rebels being led by Juan Oxla Tulum, who had aided in the assault.

Caleb Marlowe then turned to Vega and reached his hand out toward him.

“Give me the card, Vega. This is the end of the show,” he shouted, steadying himself against the near-hurricane winds.

But Vega only sneered, and with the small card flapping, he stepped backward toward the gaping edge that opened on the black, watery depths below.

His left hand was still raised above his head with the card, his right hand still in the pocket of the raincoat that was whipping in the storm.

As Rockwell and his men checked the bodies of Lynch and the terrorists to make sure they were dead, Juan Oxla Tulum ran, head down against the wind, directly toward Vega, lifted his revolver, and pointed it at the other man's heart.

“Put it away, Juan,” Marlowe yelled. “Put it away now. This is not your operation. We're taking this man in. We're doing this our way.”

“No—I'm sorry, Colonel Marlowe, but this man belongs to me. He's tortured and killed my people. And now he's going to die.”

The American held a hand out to stop the Mayan leader. His voice was barely audible over the roar of the wind.

“This is not the way we're doing this,” he pleaded loudly.

“You should talk!” Tulum shouted above the tempest blowing through the jungle. “You—the professional killer backed by the American government—
you
should lecture
me
on killing?”

“I kill only when I must—and only when I can justify it before God.”

But in his plea to Tulum, Marlowe had turned away from Vega, and in so doing had opened up an opportunity. Vega squeezed the trigger of the revolver that was hidden in his left pocket—there was a flash of fire out of his coat, and the colonel was thrown to the ground by the impact of the bullet fired at him from a point-blank range.

Tulum's eyes had never deviated from Vega, and he quickly put two rounds into the other man's heart, throwing him backward off the edge and down into the black waters that lay at the bottom of the Sacred Well of Sacrifice. In the raging roar of the hurricane, no one heard the splash as Vega's body hit the depths below.

But the hand holding the card had released it as he fell, and the wild wind had picked it up and slammed it against Will's chest. He grabbed frantically at the small piece of paper, as if he were wrestling some invisible force—falling to the ground as the card began to fly off into the air. He snatched at the card with both hands and then caught it, closing his hands around it.

Rockwell and Staff Sergeant Baker were already huddled over their commander's body, and Rockwell was yelling into his headset, calling for medivac. Marlowe's face was white, his eyes dull.

Chief Petty Officer Dorfman raced up to Will, reached over to unclasp his hands, and retrieved the small card. Will could see a picture of a tomb prominently displayed…perhaps a card from a Mexican cemetery.

“I'll take care of this, sir,” Dorfman shouted at the top of his voice, after he had extracted the card from the other man's grip.

“Marlowe—what happened to Marlowe? How is he? Is he badly hurt?” Will was yelling at the top of his voice as the approaching hurricane reached its full cacophony.

“I'm sorry, sir,” Dorfman yelled back, shaking his head. “You're going to have to come with me.”

He quickly escorted Will to a helicopter waiting in the clearing. Then he yelled into his headset. “We have the code—but the coral snake is dead. And Marlowe's down.”

As he climbed in, Will saw two medics racing from their helicopter back toward Marlowe's position, where he lay terribly wounded.

As their aircraft lifted off, it was buffeted violently by the high winds. But soon they were high over the undulating canopy of the jungle, and as they traveled due north, the winds—though still powerful—began subsiding.

Will did not know it then, but he would not see Colonel Caleb Marlowe again before the funeral, which would be held ten days later.

81

T
HERE WAS MUCH THAT
W
ILL
C
HAMBERS
would never learn. Like the meaning of the small card with the tombstone that Vega had been holding—and that Marlowe and the American operatives wanted so frantically to obtain.

Its deeper meaning was lost on Will. He was just glad he had caught it in the hurricane-force wind. He had been an outfielder in his high-school baseball days, but here he could claim no athletic talent in the save. The catch had been nothing short of divine intervention.

However, by the time Will and Fiona, Tiny Heftland, Professor Redgrove, Jacki Johnson, and the rest of Will's law-office staff would attend Colonel Marlowe's funeral in his small hometown in the panhandle of West Virginia, some facts would have surfaced in a major splash of headlines and television talk shows.

The news would electrify and shock the American public. A plot against the United States Supreme Court had been foiled…

On a day scheduled for Supreme Court oral arguments, a man in a small, dingy apartment in DC rose very early. This man's left leg had been amputated, and taking its place was a prosthesis, which the man strapped on. He had an important day ahead of him.

His plan was to attend the oral arguments. He intended to obtain a visitor's pass using forged Supreme Court bar credentials. He was to seat himself as close as he could manage, to the front row of seats just behind the counsel tables that faced the bench. Then he was to detonate the prosthesis, which contained deadly VX gas. If all went as planned, several of the sitting justices would be exposed, at a minimum—and would die within twenty-four hours.

The man had not known—until the day before Vega's death at Chichén Itzá—what his target would be. Manuel Abdal Vega had communicated it to Abu Adis, who in turn had informed the man which site had been selected for the poison gas attack.

“The tomb” is what the message had said. It had been transmitted by passing on one of the cemetery cards—like the one carried by Vega. That was the cryptic denotation for the white-marble Supreme Court building…