Black Sun: A Thriller (15 page)

Certainly McCarter couldn’t blame them, and their presence had made it easier to hide among the crowds while he and Danielle conducted their research. But now he worried who else might be hiding among those crowds.

The American couple looked his way; the man stared at him. Suddenly McCarter needed to get out of there.

He gathered his papers, logged off the computer, and handed ten dollars to the clerk. Hobbling out into the street he glanced back at the shop. The clerk and the other patron were watching him and for a moment a wave of paranoia swept uncontrollably over him.

Getting into a rhythm with his walking staff, McCarter moved quickly, albeit awkwardly, down the edge of the street. So what if they were watching him. They were nobodies, university-age tourists. They’re not with the enemy, he told himself.
They’re not with the enemy
.

He could hear the thoughts reverberating through his mind, thoughts that seemed to grow stronger the harder he fought against them.

“Help me,” he whispered to the air around him, in search of the spirit of his deceased wife. “Olivia, if you can, please help me.”

Hearing no reply, he rushed forward, seeking the only place he felt marginally safe: his small room at the guesthouse. He needed to get there and sit down and study the printouts and the data. There he could make notes undisturbed and try once again to make sense of the inscription he’d seen on the Island of the Shroud.

But as he hobbled along a new thought occurred to him. His notes would be extremely valuable to their competitor. A treasure that could be found or stolen. Of course the very act of making notes and conclusions in the first place would endanger him, perhaps even make him superfluous if he were caught.

If they had my notes, my very thoughts, what would they need me for?

He tried to calm down. Needing his mind to stop whirling, he considered finding a bar and drinking himself into oblivion. But instead he slowed his pace and deliberately slowed his breathing. Somewhat calmer, he changed direction, heading down a random alley.

What he really needed was a way to make notes and then destroy them instantly: a shredder or a fire, or something he could scribble on and erase over and over again without leaving any evidence of his conclusions.

He needed a chalkboard. It was so simple but it was perfect. That would protect both himself and the mission. But unless he broke into a school somewhere, he wasn’t likely to find a chalkboard in the sleepy fishing village of Puerto Azul.

The thought loomed like a giant roadblock. And then he looked up and found himself at the end of the alley, one narrow street from the edge of the sandy beach. With the tide going out, the sand was still smooth and flat and packed hard enough to draw in with ease.

McCarter had found his chalkboard.

H
awker could feel things beginning to move. Not just in the physical sense, as the freighter began to push toward open ocean, but in a more personal sense as well.

Danielle had finally disconnected from Moore and slid the phone back into her bag. She was moving toward him with that purposeful look in her eye; on a mission once again.

“You guys okay?” she asked.

“We’re fine,” Hawker said. “I’m teaching the kid to fly.”

He held his arm out like a wing once again and Yuri copied him.

“I—” she began.

“You don’t even have to say it,” he told her.

“I have to go back,” she said. “McCarter’s still out there and he won’t come in.”

Hawker could not believe what he was hearing. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy?”

“Everybody changes,” she said.

Hawker could not imagine McCarter changing that much, but obviously the professor felt strongly about what they were after.

“You’re both OCD on this deal. You realize that, right?”

“I guess,” she said. “Care to hop on the crazy train with us?”

“You want me to come along?”

She looked out to sea for a moment, hesitating as if she didn’t know what she wanted.

“I don’t want to lie to you,” she said. “This mission is as odd as the last one. Maybe stranger. I don’t know where it’s going, but I know McCarter’s in deep.”

“And you feel responsible,” Hawker said.

She nodded. “I owe you a lot, too, though. So no arm-twisting.”

Hawker exhaled. For the first time in a decade he had within his grasp a free pass to a new life: Moore’s money sitting in the numbered Swiss account. He could disappear, become someone else, and leave the darkness of his own world behind. He pictured a beach in St. Tropez, with a cool drink, warm sand, and beautiful women gallivanting about. In the ultimate fantasy, Danielle would join him. The two of them could travel the world on Moore’s tab. Even if they were wasteful, the money would last for years.

But the fantasy would become a guilt-ridden nightmare if McCarter were to stay out and get himself killed or if Danielle were to go after the professor and both of them were to be harmed.

Knowing himself, Hawker could foresee spending the rest of his life and all of Moore’s money seeking to punish Kang or Saravich for what they’d done. Not the kind of outcome he was looking for.

“I think you and the doc are both insane,” he said to
her. “This doomsday thing, end-of-the-world prophecy, it’s too far out for me to grasp. I promise you, if mankind’s going down for all the things we’ve done, quick and clean is too light a sentence.”

“I understand,” she said, looking as if she were expecting him to say no.

“But I can’t let you go alone,” he added. “When you found me in Brazil, I promised I’d see you through, right to the end. I thought getting back to Manaus safely was the end, but obviously we were all wrong about that.”

She smiled. And he loved that smile. He loved the fact that she wouldn’t leave McCarter out there on his own, even though she’d almost been killed once trying to protect him.

“I’ll go with you,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to help you find McCarter and to keep you safe. That’s my quest. As far as these stones and everything else, that’s your problem. The way I see it they’re either some huge cosmic joke or some kind of Pandora’s box we should never have messed with in the first place. But since you two are crazy enough to keep pursuing them, then I’ll do what I can to keep you out of trouble.”

“So
you’re
going to be the voice of reason?” she asked, barely holding back a laugh.

Hawker put a hand on Yuri’s shoulder. “Me and the kid here,” he said. “We’ll keep you guys on the straight and narrow.”

Yuri looked up. He didn’t say anything but his eyes were bright. He seemed to like the attention.

She looked incredulous but pleased. “Sounds like asking the fox to watch the henhouse. But … thank you.”

He saw the gleam in her eye. “Just remember. When this is over, assuming the world hasn’t blown up, I wash my hands of you two. You guys decide to go on another crusade somewhere, then go. I’ll have a beach waiting for me somewhere.”

A crooked smile crossed her face. “You retiring or something?”

“Actually I am,” he said. “I’ve recently discovered the benefits of a 401(k). Not my own exactly, but those of others.”

She looked at him with suspicion but he decided not to explain.

“Hmm …,” she said, playfully. “I guess that makes two of us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When this is over,” she said, “assuming the world hasn’t blown up, I’ll be done with the NRI and all of this myself.”

Her voice was higher than usual, as if she were playing. And yet in a way it seemed like a contest: who could quit first or best. And if there was one thing he knew about her, it was that she loved to win.

“Believe it or not,” she said, “I had a normal life for a while. And I liked it.”

He could barely contain the laughter. “Really?” he said, more surprised than ever.

“What? You don’t think I could have a normal life?”

“Baking cookies and running errands?”

“Try lobbying for millions of dollars and thinking about running for Congress someday,” she said sharply.

Her indignation amused him. “First off,” he said, “that’s not a normal life. And second, it’s not that I don’t
believe you could have one. I just can’t see you liking it for too long.”

She laughed and shook her head as if she was greatly disappointed in him but her smile faded just a bit more than it should have, and he wondered if what he’d said had rung too close to the truth.

W
alking down to the sand, McCarter thought about the way he’d stumbled upon the beach. He and his wife had often traveled by car, and among the joys of those travels were the countless times he’d gotten them lost and she’d eventually gotten them back on track.

He wasn’t sure he could chalk this up to some kind of spiritual intervention, but if there was anyone who knew he wouldn’t stop and ask for directions, it was his wife.

“If that was you,” he said, “thanks.”

The sand near the top of the beach was soft and loose. McCarter stumbled a little as he walked in it. But he made his way past it, down closer to the surf. He stopped just beyond the reach of the waves, where they peaked and exhausted themselves before falling back toward the Gulf of Mexico once again.

The sand there was firm and he was soon drawing lines in it with his staff.

He started with what he knew from the statue that had been stolen out from under them. Its sculptors had been among the earliest Mayan artisans of the area and
McCarter had connected them with the tribe that had emigrated here from Brazil. The glyphs on the statue had been confusing to him when he’d viewed them. The vast majority were numbers, a long series of them that made no sense to him at the time.

Of course, the Maya had been obsessed with numbers; their calendars were only the most visible result of that. They had also been among the first cultures to discover and understand the importance of zero. They’d used mathematics in laying out their cities and building their pyramids. And some calculations, inscribed on stone at various cities, appeared to have been done for the sole purpose of proving they could do it. It was an ancient equivalent of trying to find the largest known prime numbers or calculate
pi
to more decimal points than anyone had done before.

A mathematician friend of his had once suggested that perhaps the Maya were numerologists and that the elite among them truly worshipped numbers in and of themselves. McCarter could not go that far, but he knew that a calculation of some kind held the answer to his current question.

He liked to work on the problem at night. So far he’d tested various theories and discarded them. The numbers did not seem to represent any specific place, or stand in for a name. Nor were they indicating time in years or months or some other permutation of the various Mayan calendars. They were just numbers, a long series of them without commas, he noted.

Then, in one of his sleepless nights, McCarter had stumbled to the bathroom, where he kept an antiseptic lotion he used to fight the lingering infection in his leg.
The antiseptic was concentrated and designed to be mixed with fresh water to form a solution. With the infection lingering, McCarter had decided to make the concentration stronger. He looked at the bottle for instructions.

What he’d found was a series of numbers designating specific mixing strengths: one for ophthalmic use in the eyes, another for topical use on the skin, and a third for treating broken skin or other open wounds.

The numbers had been in a series, in a ratio of water to medicine. It was 50:1 for use in the eyes, 30:1 for use on the skin, 10:1 for use on wounds.

McCarter had then mixed it at about 2:1, poured it into the festering bullet wound, and grimaced in agony as it burned. But as he flushed out the foaming mixture and the pain subsided, the truth had suddenly hit him.

The numbers on the statue were written in the same manner. They were ratios, with the second number always being the same: 90. And as he thought about them he suddenly realized what they were trying to tell him.

The first of the number sets stood for the east-west demarcation line. The other two were angles off it, angles that could be drawn from certain ruins and places the Maya considered holy. If he was translating things correctly, the lines would converge in an arrowlike shape. The Tip of the Spear—which would lead them to the Temple of the Warrior.

On the beach with his printouts and the numbers burned into his mind, McCarter had only to figure out which ruins, of the dozens in the area, the lines were to be drawn from.

Looking at his papers, McCarter continued to make his marks in the sand. He drew an east-west line as straight and accurately as he could and then began to fill in the surroundings. He used small piles of pebbles and shells for the bigger ruins that could be seen with the naked eye, and then scooped out divots of sand with his hand for the ruins that could only be seen on the IR scan and were still buried beneath the jungle.

He worked like this for an hour. Back and forth he went, hobbling around his diagram, crawling here and there to make changes. A couple walked by casting a disparaging look at McCarter and his masterpiece, but he didn’t care; he wasn’t building sand castles.

He drew in a river, and then adjusted the positions of certain landmarks until he was certain he had everything in the right place and in the right scale.

Stepping back, McCarter looked down on the layout and had to smile. To an onlooker it might be the scribbling of a madman, but to him it was the same as the satellite photo, and better yet, one that he could draw on and then erase.

Looking around to make sure he was still alone, McCarter began to work on the next stage of his project: deciding which ruins to draw the lines from.

The first line was to begin at the Great City by the Mouth of the Well. McCarter knew this to be the Yu-catec Mayan name for Chichen Itza.