The Mayan Conspiracy (43 page)

McCarter was relieved. “At least I’m not crazy,” he said.

Danielle put on a pair of latex gloves and pulled out a scalpel blade.

“What are you going to do?” Hawker asked, sounding slightly nervous.

She looked up at him. “You wanted information, right?”

“Are you a surgeon or something?”

“No, but one of my degrees was in microbiology. We dissected all kinds of things.” Without waiting she sliced into one of the bubbles. It split open with a pop and a small amount of blood squirted out. Hawker stepped back.

Danielle looked up. “Are you all right?”

“Just trying to stay out of your way.”

As Hawker stepped back, Danielle repositioned the man’s arm; it moved freely. “That’s strange,” she said. “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet.” She looked the body over. Like the man in the river, there appeared to have been little decomposition at all.

With a hypodermic needle she drew blood and deposited it in a test tube. Next she examined the damage done by the punctures; they went through a rib and deep into the chest but not out the other side. A controlled punch. Again, just like the man they’d found in the river. She began to think that Verhoven’s guess might have been correct; perhaps the Chollokwan had tied the Nuree man up as a sacrifice to the animals. But then why hadn’t he struggled against the rope? And why, after throwing him in the river, did they tie stones to his feet and a floating log to keep him from sinking? Had the Chollokwan really dragged him there and sent him down river as a warning to the Nuree?

She went in for another sample, and spotted something moving in the remnants of the blister she’d just lanced. She pulled back, watching. “That’s strange,” she said.

“There’s not a lot here that isn’t strange,” Hawker said, “so maybe you could be more specific.”

She smiled but didn’t reply; instead she used a pair of tongs to extract a slimy, gray object from the man’s chest cavity. It resembled a leech, but with two long tendrils trailing that remained attached to something in his chest.

She put the parasite down without cutting the tendrils and went for the connection point, a major blood vessel just above the man’s heart. Cutting out a section of the artery, she pulled the bloodsucker free.

The leechlike parasite wriggled impatiently against the grip of the tongs. The tendrils released the section of artery and began snaking back and forth, curling in on themselves like a pair of miniature fire hoses that had broken loose. They seemed to be searching for something.

“What is that?” McCarter asked.

“I’m guessing it’s the reproductive form of those animals,” she said.

Hawker looked even less enthusiastic than before. “A larva?”

She nodded. “Deposited as a parasite.”

Hawker’s face wrinkled in disgust. “Are you sure?”

“No,” she said. “But it seems likely. Many species reproduce through parasitic means, insects especially. Wasps in particular. They sting other insects, paralyze them and deposit their eggs. In such cases the host lives while it is consumed from the inside.”

“More insectlike traits,” McCarter noted.

Danielle pointed out the thin, veinlike tendrils, which were longer than the larva itself. “I’d bet it’s been feeding off the nutrients in his bloodstream. Its own waste gasses probably caused those bubbles.”

She held it toward Hawker for a better look.

He stepped back again. “Take it easy with that thing.”

Laughing, she turned to McCarter, who seemed more interested.

“What about the other welts?” he asked.

She placed the grub in a container and went back to the body. Sure enough, each dark bruiselike blister contained another larva.

“I’m going to study this thing,” Danielle said. “It might tell us something.”

Hawker looked unhappy. “I knew you were going to say that. Just don’t lose track of it, all right? I’d hate to wake up with that thing in my foxhole.”

As she placed the last of the larvae in a jar, Hawker used his radio to call Verhoven. “Bring out some of Kaufman’s C-4, a handful of fuses and some wire,” he said.

“What are you going to do with that?” Danielle asked.

“I’m going to booby-trap it,” Hawker said.

“What?” Danielle and McCarter asked the question simultaneously, shock and disgust in their voices.

“Look,” he said. “They took the bodies we buried. They’re going to get this poor son of a bitch anyway. Going to get him again, apparently. I’m going to use it to our advantage.”

There was something vile in the thought of using a dead human body as bait for a trap, but at this point survival was all that mattered, and neither Danielle or McCarter questioned him further.

While Danielle finished taking samples, Verhoven arrived with the explosives. Hawker rigged the body and then climbed the trees to do the same here. The others waited for him to come down and then they walked back to camp together.

McCarter turned to Hawker. “Did we learn what we needed to know?”

“More than we even wanted to,” Hawker said.

McCarter nodded, thinking Hawker meant the body and the larva, and indirectly, he was right, but Hawker was concerned with more than the body of one dead soldier and the grubs that had come from it. At the top of the trees he’d seen cocoons of all sizes spread out among the branches, dozens of them, like an orchard of rotting fruit. Some appeared to be new, with dark mud and smooth sides, while others were older and dried out and still others were only broken husks, the larvae—and whatever else had been inside—long since gone.

He now understood why they’d seen no wildlife to speak of. The animals had been clearing the forest of every living thing. The proof hung rotting in the trees.

AS SOON AS
he made it back to the camp, McCarter began searching for the things that had been taken from them, his notebook and drawings in particular. He dug through piles of Kaufman’s supplies and equipment, violently slinging aside anything that wasn’t what he was looking for. And feeling triumphantly empowered as he did so.

A cough from behind him put a stop to it. “Professor?”

He turned to see Susan, dirty-faced, her rifle slung over her shoulder.

“Shouldn’t you be resting?” he asked.

“I can’t sleep,” she said. “Every sound makes me jump, and I’d rather not sleep than keep waking up like that.”

He could understand that, he’d found sleep hard to come by himself.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “I mean, it looks like fun but—”

“Ah yes, I’m looking for something,” he said. “Trying to take back what’s ours, actually.”

She held up his old leather-bound notebooks. “I
didn’t want you to forget them when we got out of here,” she said.

McCarter could almost feel his eyes welling up with tears. She was just a kid. He couldn’t imagine how she was dealing with what she’d been through. What they were all going through. “And your family didn’t think you could hack it out here,” he said.

“Can you believe it?” she said, tears welling up in her eyes just a bit. “I turned down Paris for this.”

McCarter took the notebooks from her and sat down. “We’ll get you there,” he said. “In the meantime, you want to help me with what’s basically a pointless academic question?”

She unshouldered her rifle. “Sure, maybe it’ll help me feel normal again.” She sat down next to him. “What are we trying to figure out?”

“Hawker asked me a question about this place,” he said.

“Hawker?”

“He’s quite smart,” McCarter said. “Despite what he’d have us think. He notices things. And of all people, he noticed that the Chollokwan have an unexplainably strong interest in an abandoned temple that has nothing to do with them. Any thoughts?”

She took a moment, looking around at their surroundings. “Only that he’s right,” she said.

They discussed the question for a while, talking the subject around and bouncing thoughts off of each other, but no real progress was made, until they considered a different question, one that had been with them from the beginning: Was this temple or city Tulan Zuyua?

“It all starts there,” McCarter noted.

“We can’t prove it either way,” Susan said.

“No,” he agreed. “But it does seem possible. Seven Caves, the Place of Bitter Water, glyphs that reference things that occurred before the original Maya left Tulan Zuyua.” He scratched his head. “If we were to assume it to be true, would that help us? I mean, what do we know about Tulan Zuyua that might tell us something?”

“Humans were given their gods there,” she said. “And they left in an exodus, of sorts.”

“Right,” McCarter said. “And from what we’ve found—or rather, what we haven’t found—it doesn’t seem like this place was occupied for very long.” He was referring to the lack of everyday items that formed the bulk of any excavation: the pottery for cooking and carrying water, the tools, the bones of animals consumed for food, all of which piled up in ancient garbage dumps. Nor had they found extensive writing.

“We saw glyphs on and inside the temple, as well as one of the smaller structures—the beginning of something, but not a body of work like the gardens of stone at the classical Mayan cities. And in certain places, the work seems to have been cut short, like half-finished sentences. All of which suggests a sudden exodus to me.”

“You think they fled,” she guessed.

“Abandoned the place,” McCarter said. “A little different than the orderly departure described in the
Popul Vuh
, but even there the imagery of them trudging through the darkness and rain evokes the look of refugees.”

She seemed to agree. “What else do we know?”

McCarter rubbed the sandpaper stubble on the side
of his face and then reached for his notes. He began to flip through the pages once again, going backward this time, starting from the most recent and moving toward the beginning of the expedition. It was a trick he’d learned long ago, one that forced him to review the written pages, to study the words, instead of just scanning what he knew to be coming next.

Page after page moved through his hands—drawings he’d made, notes he’d scribbled that seemed almost indecipherable now. He squinted at the chicken scratch and racked his brain and then continued to backtrack. The pages flew by one at a time, until finally he stopped and held his place.

His fingers rubbed at the paper, the tactile sense of its fiber familiar to him, the half-circle stain from a coffee mug reminding him of the day he’d written on that particular page.

He stared at his own writing and the glyph he’d transcribed, one that he’d copied not in the clearing or at the temple but back at the Wall of Skulls. His eyes scanned it repeatedly as his mind made a leap it would not have been capable of just days before. He’d found his key.

He marked the spot in his notes, and began to riffle through the rest of them in search of a drawing he’d made at the base of the altar inside the temple.

He told Susan what he was searching for. She produced a printout of a photo she had taken with her digital camera, before it and the printer had succumbed to the electro-magnetic degradation.

McCarter thanked her and took the photo. He scrutinized the image for a moment and then referred back
to his bookmark. Firmly convinced, he turned the picture in Susan’s direction.

“This set of glyphs,” he said, pointing to the left side of a photo that had been taken inside the temple. “Do you remember what we decided about them?”

Susan examined the picture briefly, mumbling to herself as she translated. “The offering to the one for whom the temple was built. Which would be the Ahau: the king.”

“Correct. And this is the point of all that deference,” he said, moving his finger to the right side of the photo and pointing out another more opulent, yet unreadable glyph—unreadable because it was damaged, smashed as if by a hammer or a stone. It wasn’t the only glyph that appeared to have been damaged in that way but it was the only one on that particular section. It had left McCarter with the distinct impression of vandalism. The fact that it was probably the Ahau’s name only made the feeling stronger. He thought of the Pharaohs erasing the name of Moses from all the obelisks in Egypt.

Susan examined the photo again and sighed.

“Unknown,” she said. “The glyph clearly represents a name, but being damaged and this far from the rest of Mayan civilization, we might never find a matching symbol, in which case we would have to assign it a name ourselves.”

As always, McCarter thought, a textbook explanation. “That’s what we assumed at the time. But in fact, we already know who this is, though the answer will surprise you.”

She looked at him with suspicion.

McCarter folded the page of his notebook over and
handed it to her. On the page in front of her was the drawing he’d made at the Wall of Skulls. The undamaged portions in the photo were identical to his markings. Next to it McCarter had scribbled a name, an English translation: Seven Macaw.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “Seven Macaw was one of the wooden people. Part of their pre-history, their pre-human mythology.”