The Maya Codex (42 page)

47

GUATEMALA CITY

F
rom her office inside the secure area of the American Embassy building in the tree-lined Avenida Reforma of Guatemala City’s Zone 10, Ellen Rodriguez scanned the latest satellite information on the position of the
Galapagos
. She fed the data into the computer and reset the calculation for the
Galapagos
’ arrival. At its present speed and course, the
Galapagos
would reach Havana in three days at 1135 local time.

Rodriguez looked at her watch. It was after 10 p.m. and still there was no word on getting an asset on board the container ship. For the moment there was little she could do but wait for her counterpart in the US quasi-embassy in Havana, the quaintly named ‘United States Interests Section’, to get in contact. She prepared to head home. ‘Home’ was the Howard Johnson Inn across the road, and was likely to remain so for some time. In the week since she’d arrived, she’d been in the office before dawn, and rarely left before ten, sometimes midnight. Finding a place of her own would have to wait, she thought ruefully. Rodriguez was preparing to shut down her encrypted links when an alert appeared on her screen.

TOP SECRET

NOFORN

OPERATION MAYA

CHIEF OF STATION EYES ONLY

Asset identified. Briefed re. Tutankhamen and Nefertiti.
Galapagos
scheduled to berth Haiphong Terminal, Maritima. Estimated duration of stay, no more than twenty-four hours but expect crew to take shore leave. Arrangements in hand to manufacture requirement for crew replacement. Will advise soonest.

COS. Havana.

Rodriguez shut down her computer, torn again between her duty to the Firm and her feelings about the plan to eliminate Curtis O’Connor. In her experience Officer O’Connor was one of the finest agents ever to walk out of Langley’s doors. Even if they got an asset on board the
Galapagos
, he would have to be good. Very good. Ellen Rodriguez prepared to leave. On the other side of the Atlantic in Rome, it was now very early in the morning.

Cardinal Felici acknowledged the salute of the Swiss Guard and entered the Vatican’s secret archives, adjacent to the Vatican library. If the guard found it strange that the second-most senior cardinal in the Vatican was up and about at 5.30 in the morning, his face was inscrutable. The archives contained more than eighty kilometres of shelving, but Cardinal Felici was only interested in reacquainting himself with one document. He made his way into the vault beneath the
Cortile della Pigna
, the massive Roman bronze pinecone in the courtyard of the Belvedere above.

Felici extracted the document from the crimson cover embossed with the gold coat of arms of the Vatican State. Sister Lúcia, just a child at the time, had handwritten her account of the third warning on a small single sheet of paper. Felici reflected on the public version of the third warning of Fátima released by Pope John Paul II. That, he knew, had been a mistake and had only fuelled the controversy. Too many people had seen the original warning, including Bishop Venancio, the auxiliary bishop of Fátima; and too many people knew this warning had been recorded on a single sheet of paper. Felici had been in Guatemala at the time, and had not been able to prevent the clumsy 26 June release, which the Vatican had committed to
four
sheets of paper, passing off the young Lúcia’s vision of a city in ruins as unremarkable. Had the real identity of the city in ruins been made public, the shock would have reverberated around the world. Felici adjusted his glasses and focused on Sister Lúcia’s original account.

I write in obedience to you, my God, who commands me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leira and through your most Holy Mother and mine.

After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw Archangel Raguel, the Archangel of Justice with a flaming sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other. Seated on the scales were two younger angels, one a boy, one a girl, but the scales were out of balance, tipped in favour of the male. Archangel Raguel’s sword hilt was gold, embossed with the Greek letter phi.

As we watched, huge pyramids rose above the horizon. Warriors from the great civilisations of the past streamed from within them. The Maya, the Inca, the Egyptians, the Hopi Indians, the Cherokees, all of them formed up
en masse
behind Our Lady. Prominent amongst them were the Maya. The Mayan king was flanked by a Mayan prince and princess, each wearing a jade talisman in the shape of the Greek letter phi. Above them sat the prophets: Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and the last great prophet, Muhammad. Below them sat the seers: Cassandra, Saint Malachy, Hildegard of Bingen, Savonarola, Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce. Saint Malachy was the first to step forward.

Malachy, a bishop who was born in Armagh in Northern Ireland in 1094, had accurately predicted the reformation more than 300 years before it occurred. More astonishingly still, Malachy had arrived in Rome in 1140, accompanied by a number of monks. He had fallen into a trance on the Janiculum Hill above the old city, where he started talking in Latin. His scribe faithfully took down all his utterances; it was nearly dawn by the time Malachy had finished. When he woke, Malachy confirmed to his companions that God had given him a vision of the identity of every Pope until the end of time. The list was extraordinarily accurate, and Felici shivered involuntarily as he thought of the prediction for John XXIII: ‘Saint Malachy was holding a long scroll in front of him, and he continued to read in Latin:
Pastor et Nauta
.’

Shepherd and sailor. In 1958 the American Cardinal Francis Spellman had hired a boat and sailed up and down the Tiber with a cargo of sheep, in the hope that he might fulfil Malachy’s prediction for the conclave, but to no avail. Although it had indeed been a shepherd and a sailor whom God had chosen. The keys of Peter had been handed to John XXIII. Angelo Roncalli had previously been the patriarch of the maritime city of Venice.

The accuracy of Malachy’s predictions weighed heavily on Felici’s ambitions. Malachy had designated the second-last Pope before the end of time as
de Gloria Olivae
. Felici knew that ‘from the glory of the olive’ was a reference to the olive branch being a symbol of the order of Saint Benedict; Benedict XVI was the name Joseph Ratzinger had chosen. Aged seventy-eight at the time of his election, Benedict XVI was one of the oldest in the history of the papacy. Malachy had insisted that the last Pope would be known as ‘Peter the Roman’, bringing to an end the rock upon which Peter had built the original church, as well as the end of the world itself. Felici took a deep breath and went back to the final part of the real secret of Fátima, to Sister Lúcia’s record of the Virgin Mary’s appearance.

The Archangel Raguel spoke in a voice of great authority. ‘Penance! This is the last of your warnings!’ Then came a series of visions. Immense, uncontrollable wildfires raged across great swathes of Spain and Italy. In Australia exhausted men and women battled impossible odds to try to save their homes but to no avail. In the United States California was ablaze, as were the Balkans and Africa. Hurricanes of enormous power pounded the coastlines of the continents. Earthquakes rent the ground from beneath San Francisco, New York, Tokyo and London. The earth trembled as her massive tectonic plates ground together.

An intense white light emanated from Our Lady but it seemed strangely blocked above the Basilica of Saint Peter. Great bolts of blue lightning crackled from the tip of Raguel’s sword, reducing Saint Peter’s and the rest of Vatican City to smoking rubble. Hundreds of children swarmed over the walls, chasing the priests from where they were hiding. The Pope appeared amongst the rubble, his white robes stained with blood, until he too was cut down by Raguel’s sword.

Beyond the walls of the Vatican, the Tiber had been reduced to stinking mud. Suddenly there was a vision of three enormous interlocking toothed wheels, each larger than the other, and each tooth was designated with a Mayan hieroglyph. The two largest wheels slowly turned until the teeth meshed in an enormous flash of energy, giving a date of 21 December 2012. Our Lady, the Archangel Raguel, all the prophets and seers and the old civilisations faded back towards the company of heaven, leaving planet earth wobbling in its orbit, the changing positions of the poles and the equator devastating the entire world.

Cardinal Felici replaced Sister Lúcia’s letter in its crimson folder and sealed it in the vault, where he was determined it would remain.

48

HAVANA

T
he
Galapagos
was due to sail in three hours and all but one of the crew had returned from shore leave. O’Connor surveyed the Havana docks from his position beneath the port wing of the bridge. The traffic on
Primer Anillo del Puerto,
the main road connecting the ports on the south side of the harbour, was heavy. Containers were piled up on the concrete docks serviced by railroad and trucking companies. Beyond them, huge forklifts charged to and from three giant warehouses. The
Galapagos
was taking on cargo, and O’Connor watched as the crane operator eased a big thirty-tonne container of machinery into position.

Fifteen minutes later the last crew member, one O’Connor had not seen before, reached the bottom of the gangplank. O’Connor wandered over to the rail where the ship’s steward was standing, dragging on a cigarette.

‘New crew member, Alfredo?’

Alfredo shrugged and smiled. ‘
Sí.
One of the crew – too much fucking, too much to drink. This one’s Sicilian. He’s probably no better, and I’ve got to share a cabin with him.’ Alfredo stubbed his cigarette out on the rail and disappeared through the nearest bulkhead, leaving O’Connor to watch the new arrival negotiate the gangplank.

The Sicilian was thickset and muscled, with black hair and a thick black moustache, his face pockmarked and scarred. O’Connor was immediately on high alert.

‘We’ve got company again,’ he told Aleta as he closed the cabin door behind him.

‘Who? Where?’

‘It may be coincidence, but I don’t think so. One of the crew supposedly had too much to drink and they’ve had to replace him. It’s plausible, but it’s also a classic move in CIA asset substitution.’ O’Connor opened his bag and took out the small compact CIA toolkit he carried, as well as a heavy door-hasp. ‘High-quality hair dye is not the only thing they sell in Hamburg.’

‘What do you need that for?

‘Our new friend, if he’s one of Wiley’s buddies, will pick the lock on this cabin in an instant, but this one will be tougher to crack,’ he said, marking the spots for the heavy-duty bolts. Ten minutes later he shouldered the cabin door from the companionway outside, but it held fast.

O’Connor waited until just before sailing time. He instructed Aleta to remain in the cabin and made his way to the port bridge-wing. The last container was being loaded and two tugs were standing by, one for’ard of the bow and one aft of the stern. The captain was on the starboard bridge wing, barking orders to the deck crew through the tannoy system. The Sicilian had been assigned duty on the for’ard hawser. O’Connor made his way off the bridge, down a series of steep narrow companionways, reaching the crew quarters in less than two minutes. The door to Alfredo’s cabin was unlocked, but the Sicilian had secured his gear in one of two lockers screwed to a bulkhead in the cramped quarters. The brass padlock was child’s play for O’Connor. He chose a diamond-shaped lock pick and a small tension wrench and had it open in an instant.

The Glock pistol, complete with silencer, was in a small worn leather pouch at the bottom of the Sicilian’s kit bag. O’Connor sat on one of the bunks, quickly extracted the magazine, checked the chamber was empty, pulled the slide back, released the lock lever and removed the slide from the Glock. The countless hours of arms training at Camp Peary in Virginia kicked in and seconds later O’Connor had taken out the recoil mechanism and the barrel and put them to one side. He took a small punch from his bag, placed it between the firing pin and the firing pin sleeve and pressed down to take the pressure from the spring, allowing the slide backing plate to be prised free.

Suddenly the deck vibrated as deep in the bowels of the ship the massive drive shaft began to turn. Above decks, the crew had stowed the mooring hawsers and the Sicilian was making his way aft along the companionway that housed a maze of pipes beneath the containers. O’Connor removed the firing pin from the slide mechanism and pocketed it. He quickly replaced the slide backing plate, reassembled the barrel and recoil mechanism, replaced the slide on the pistol, rammed the magazine full of nine-millimetre rounds back into the butt and returned the gun to where he’d found it.