The Mayan Conspiracy (17 page)

“In what way?” Kaufman asked.

“The first night we heard sounds in the forest. Weird little scuffling noises and bird calls. The next day we found some poor bastard covered in dried-up mud and all slashed and cut. Looked like they tried to burn him but it only caught on his arm and his neck and part of his head. You should have seen his face, frozen in agony. He might have been alive when they burned him, I don’t know.”

“What do you mean some poor bastard?” Kaufman asked, concerned.

“Not one of us,” Dixon replied. “Don’t know who he was. But the next night we heard these screeching calls, like a carrion bird, only a hundred times louder. And then one of my men disappeared. Went out to take
a piss and never came back. We looked for him, but we never found him.” Dixon shrugged, as if he was still baffled by the disappearance. “No sign of struggle or anything. Then we started hearing the natives, a different tribe from the guys who led us there. I think they called them Chollokwan or something. They started hounding us at night.

“We planned to break out the next day, but by dawn two more of my men were gone. I found a trail this time. Me and a guy named McCrea followed it, while the others held tight.” He looked up at Kaufman. “You don’t want to know what we found.”

“Dead?”

“Torn apart,” he said unevenly, “and stuck up in the trees.”

Kaufman listened, concerned with the man’s state of mind. Dixon’s voice had begun wavering, changing pitch and cadence.

“That was it,” Dixon said. “Time to fucking go. Only your little friend had already made that decision and by the time we got back to that clearing he’d bugged out with the last of my people. So we got on his trail and hauled ass until we caught up to him. Seems we interrupted something making a meal out of him, and then … well, then it came after us.”

Kaufman had heard from the doctors that this patient was unstable. They’d warned him not to ask too many questions, but he needed more information.

“What the hell are you talking about? What came after you?”

Dixon looked out the window, the light filtering through the leaves seemed to calm him. It was a strange
sight, a man of Dixon’s background and reputation, gulping at a lump in his throat, trying to fight off what seemed like waves of fear.

“I don’t know what it was,” he said finally, turning back to Kaufman. “We heard those calls in the mist and I stepped forward to take the point. There was something moving out there. I couldn’t see it, but I heard it, sensed it. I moved forward to take a shot, but it went for McCrea. It moved so fast. Like a barracuda in the water, or that spider that jumps out of its hole to get you. Bang!” He slammed his hand against the wall. “Now you’re dead.

“I took off running, but one of them caught me. I blasted the damn thing dead center. But it didn’t fall, it just changed direction a bit, snapped my leg and left me there for the natives to finish off.”

“And yet you’re still alive.”

“I couldn’t tell you why,” he said. “A squall line came through a little while later and I crawled out of there in the downpour. Maybe they couldn’t follow my trail. Maybe they figured I was as good as dead, why not let me suffer.”

“Interesting story,” Kaufman said, leaning back. “Sounds a little strange, don’t you think?”

“I didn’t say it made sense.”

Kaufman shook his head. He decided to be direct. Either the patient would crack or he might be jolted back into reality. “What really happened to you out there, Mr. Dixon?”

“I told you.”

“You’ve told me gibberish. Animals and natives killed eight armed men? Ex–Green Berets like yourself?”

“It’s the truth,” Dixon said.

“Is it?” Kaufman asked. “The doctors don’t think so. They think you cut your own leg. That the gash was so clean it was done with a blade.”

Dixon shook his head. Looking at the ground he mumbled, “It was one of them.”

“Them what?”

“I don’t know!” he shouted. “I don’t know what they were. Why the hell does it matter? Why the hell do you care?”

The man was bordering on a nervous breakdown. If he went over the edge he might never return. “Maybe you don’t know,” Kaufman offered. “I’ve seen your toxicology report—your body’s chemical levels were so far off you were hallucinating when they brought you in. Your temperature was one hundred and six degrees, high enough to cause brain damage. You had a massive infection where your leg had become septic and you’d lost a lot of blood.”

Dixon looked away.

“You screamed at the doctors,” Kaufman added. “Do you remember that? Do you remember calling the nurses demons, threatening to kill them if they put you under?”

Dixon shrank back slightly. “I didn’t … I didn’t want to sleep.”

“Terrors,” Kaufman guessed.

Dixon turned slowly toward Kaufman and when he spoke this time, his eyes were flat, unblinking, his voice gravelly and low. “My men,” he said. “I see them when I sleep. Their faces, their bodies.”

Kaufman paused. Whatever had happened, Dixon
seemed to believe it. And for certain the NRI had taken preparations against the possibility of a native attack. Perhaps he could turn Dixon’s fear to his advantage. “Then maybe you want revenge?”

Dixon looked up at Kaufman. “What?”

“Take me back there,” Kaufman said. “I’ll bring an army with us. And we’ll wipe those natives from the face of the earth.”

Dixon blinked a few times but remained silent. “I’m not going back,” he said finally.

“If you want a big check, you will,” Kaufman said.

“No. I’m not going back,” Dixon repeated, sounding more like a man admitting to a newly discovered reality than one making a conscious decision.

“You’ll be safe. I promise you. We’ll all be well protected.”

Dixon started to laugh, but it was a sad laugh, a nod to the irony of life. He looked Kaufman in the eye and shook his head: the shipwreck survivor, unwilling to reenter the sea.

“I hope you understand what you’re throwing away,” Kaufman said.

The emotion drained from Dixon’s face and when he spoke again his voice had dropped. “Most people are born afraid,” he said. “But some of us only learn how to fear along the way. I spent half my life spitting on the weak and gutless. But now … it’s worse for me than it is for any of them, because I remember what it was like to be different, I remember a time when I didn’t know what it was like to be afraid.”

He choked back the lump in his throat once again. “I don’t eat much and I never sleep. And sometimes, even
when I’m wide awake, I hear those things calling to one another, stalking us.” He shook his head emphatically. “I’ll sell you what I have, the crystals and the rest of the artifacts. But it don’t matter how much money you got. It ain’t enough to get me back out there.”

Frustrated, Kaufman glared at the man. “Then you can give me the location,” Kaufman said. “The spot on the map. That might be good enough for a partial payment.”

Dixon hesitated for a moment and then turned his gaze to the floor and Kaufman began to realize the truth. “You don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”

“It’s not clear,” Dixon whispered. “The natives took us there. The GPS went out.”

As Dixon answered, he seemed like a different man from the one who’d greeted Kaufman so glibly from the doorway. Kaufman sensed overwhelming disappointment from him, directed mostly at himself, at what he’d become: fearful, weak.

“I can give you the general area,” he offered.

“How general are we talking about?”

Dixon did not quickly reply and Kaufman knew it would be all but worthless. Perhaps it was the fever, the blood loss and the trauma; and if not the physical pain, then perhaps the mental damage he’d incurred had done the trick. But it seemed as if the facts had been erased from the man’s brain.

Kaufman pitied him, but also focused on his own concerns. He felt the opportunity slipping away. Despite all his efforts, despite having two moles in the NRI’s operation, despite hacking into their database and now
grilling one of their former employees who had actually been there, the temple’s location still eluded him.

Time was running out. If the new NRI field team was on the right track they would soon find the temple and the prize, if it existed. And in that case all of Kaufman’s efforts would be for naught.

He stared at Dixon and realized there was only one option left to try, one that would be far more dangerous than any move he’d made yet.

THE NRI DISCOVERY
of the Wall of Skulls had been the result of information combined with hard work. The discovery of the pit had been pure luck, a result of Hawker and Verhoven chasing the natives through the jungle. Both proved fruitful.

The Wall appeared to be a natural stone embankment with shelves carved out for the skulls and other bones that had been wedged and cemented into place. Glyphs and decorative markings populated its base and capstone.

And while it was true that the Wall matched Blackjack Martin’s description aesthetically, his calculations of its dimensions left something to be desired. At ninety feet in length and seven feet tall, the Wall was almost exactly one fifth of Martin’s boast. It made McCarter laugh. In Martin’s business, in the early twentieth century, a little exaggeration went a long way.

As he dangled over the gaping pit, suspended in a harness, McCarter wondered what Martin would have written about it. It was almost thirty feet from the ground level to the surface of the muck at the bottom, but McCarter guessed that Blackjack would have claimed a
depth of at least fifty feet, or a hundred, or perhaps even called it bottomless.

Twisting on the rope and looking down, he decided it didn’t matter, thirty feet was enough.

“Lower me down,” he said, “before I change my mind.”

The porters released some of the tension on the rope and McCarter began to drop. This was his fifth trip to the bottom. In fact, he’d spent more time down there than anyone, but he had yet to get used to the voyage in or out.

As the pulley creaked and he dropped below ground level, McCarter’s attention was drawn to the stone slab that made up a large portion of the pit’s eastern wall. A great face, five feet across, dominated the slab. It had sad, round eyes from which stone tears ran, highlighted by dripping condensation. Its thin lips were closed tight and a spiked barb passed through each ear, drawing rivers of blood. Stylized torches burned on either side of the face, while beneath it, what appeared to be a massive crocodile head had been carved, complete with something bloody lying in its open jaws.

Danielle and Susan waited beneath it, looking silly in their oversized fishing waders.

McCarter touched down in the cloying muck, his feet stretching for the bottom. Never a fisherman himself, he hadn’t gotten used to the odd feeling of cold mud and water pressing against him through the thin rubber skin of the waders.

He released the harness, sloshed his way over to Danielle and Susan and pulled two printed photographs from his breast pocket, handing one to each.

“It’s a match,” he said to Susan.

The photos contained an image from the database of Mayan glyphs. The image was a representation of a name.

Danielle and Susan examined the photo, comparing the image to the glyph on the stone wall above them.

“I think you’re right,” Susan said.

“I’m not sure what I’m looking at,” Danielle said. “How about a little help?”

McCarter pointed out the matching sections. “This is Seven Macaw,” he said. “The name of an exalted being from Mayan prehistory. From a time even before Tulan Zuyua.”

“Before?” Danielle asked. “I thought Tulan Zuyua was their Garden of Eden.”

“It is,” McCarter said. “In a manner of speaking. But their version of Genesis runs differently than ours.”

She gave him a sideways glance, which he took as a request for more information.

“Let me put it this way,” he said, “in the Judeo-Christian version of Genesis, we begin with God creating the heaven and the earth. The second and third verses tell us that the earth was in darkness and then God created the light. By verse twenty-six, we’re on the sixth day and God creates man. But there was nothing before this, nothing before these six days.

“Now,” he said, “in the Mayan version, history stretches back from the creation of man as well as forward. It goes back to a time before Tulan Zuyua, before mankind even existed, to a race that preceded us, a race the Maya called the wooden people.”

Danielle’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve heard the name. How do they relate to this?”

“In the Mayan view of creation, it took the gods four tries to successfully create the human race. On the first attempt they ended up with things that squawked and stuttered but didn’t speak. Seeing some value in these things the gods kept them around, letting them become the animals of the forest and going back to the drawing board once again. The second time, they used mud as the medium and it was more or less a complete failure. The creation kept dissolving into sludge and muck. So they let it die and tried again. On their third try, they used wood to create with and they brought forth the wooden people: a sort of a prototype for mankind.”