The Annihilators (16 page)

“Sure,” I said. “But the people who’d hidden those munitions were presumably keeping an eye on them. They must have known you’d learn their secret once they saw you find the cave.”

She hesitated. “They’d apparently thrown up that concealing wall of rubble when we started work in the area, hoping that even if we found our way down there, we wouldn’t look behind it; but of course, being so oddly new, it attracted our attention immediately—well, as soon as we started looking around a bit. At first we were simply stunned by the magnitude of the find: the calendar wheel and all the ceremonial artifacts and the
cenote
itself, the underground pool that we just knew would yield all kinds of treasures. They used to throw their sacrifices into those pools, you know—sacrifices human and otherwise. Many of the great archaeological discoveries in this part of the world have been made by divers working the
cenotes…”

She sipped from her coffee cup thoughtfully, remembering the moment of discovery. She went on, smiling faintly: “At first we were just like kids on Christmas morning, running from one marvelous object to the next, but after a while we got organized—and there was that peculiar wall. Naturally we couldn’t be satisfied with what we had, we wanted more. So we had the men clear away some of the rubble. As soon as they’d made an opening, Archie crawled through and then called to me in an odd voice not to come. Well, I knew what he’d found, of course, some nasty-looking skeletons or mummified bodies—something like that—and he was protecting his tender little wife from the horrible sight, and to hell with him. So I crawled right in after him, and got to my feet beside him, and we stood there with our flashlights, staring in a sick way at all those lousy weapons and crates of ammunition that, we both realized, were going to spoil our wonderful discovery.”

“Did you ever learn where the stuff came from?” I asked when she paused.

Frances nodded. “We knew right away. There had been a bandit raid on a government arsenal just before we came. Of course the official word was that the subversive gang of vicious criminals had met with no success and had been slaughtered to the last man… The possibility of danger didn’t really occur to me at first, although I guess it had been in Archie’s mind when he told me to stay back. I was simply grief-stricken and furious at having that beautiful ceremonial cave
—our
cave—tarnished, contaminated, spoiled, by the presence of all this ugly modern murder equipment.” She swallowed hard. “Then a couple of powerful lights blinded us and a voice told us to put our hands up and suddenly there were armed men all around us. What’s the time?”

I said, “A quarter of eight. Sanchez will get the bus driver here on time. And today neither of us has to worry about Dick Anderson.
Mas cafe?
”

She nodded. The little girl stationed at the nearby coffee-maker—her white
huipile
was prettily embroidered in blue—was alert and eager for business; she filled both cups and gave us a gentle smile and went back to her post.

“Go on,” I said.

“That was how I first met Lupe of the Mountain,” Frances said. “He searched me for weapons as well as Archie. Ugh. Then there was a long debate, in Spanish, of course. I couldn’t follow all of it, it went too fast; but I gathered that the question wasn’t whether or not to kill us. It was merely how we could best be killed without attracting too much official attention. An accident was indicated; but it would not be well to have the inquisitive gringos caught by a rock-fall inside the cave, so close to the hidden munitions. A collapsing ruin a respectable distance away, however, could be made to appear quite convincing; and somebody knew just the right precarious ruin. And then of course there was the question of whether or not the woman should be utilized, in proper communal fashion of course, before being killed. Unfortunately, it was decided, such a thing could probably be determined by the medical people even on a badly crushed female body, so proper prior utilization would have to be foregone.
Que lastima
, what a pity.”

Her voice was quite steady; but I noticed that she sipped her coffee a little too fast, forgetting that her cup had just been refilled. She winced as the hot stuff burned her mouth, and set the cup down hastily.

“Fun and games,” I said.

“Yes, indeed,” she said. “I don’t mind admitting that I was… rather frightened. But just as they were about to take us away, there was a kind of gravelly rattling sound in the hole through which we’d come; and there was Cortez. Later we heard that when our workmen fled, hearing us taken prisoner like that, they’d run straight to him with the news. As he stood up and put his hat back on and brushed himself off, Montano gave the order to seize him, but nobody moved. He just looked at Lupe, and Lupe didn’t repeat the order. Cortez started to speak. It was a long speech, and his Spanish is strongly flavored by the ancient language, so I couldn’t really follow it, fast as he was talking, haranguing them. Then there was a question-and-answer period. At last Lupe came forward… What’s the time now, darling? After all the things I’ve said about being punctual, I don’t want to be the one to keep the bus waiting.”

“Still not quite eight o’clock,” I said. “You don’t have to build up the suspense artificially, Frances.”

“Is that what I’m doing?” She smiled faintly. “Anyway, Lupe said that he understood from Cortez that we honored the ancient people and their gods and their places of worship, particularly this sacred cave. Most particularly this cave. This cave was very important to us gringos, to our scientific work, was it not? We would seriously like to preserve it, would we not? So there might be an alternative to killing, if we could be trusted. He would like to show us something… He took us around and showed us.” She swallowed. “It was booby-trapped, Sam. That whole gallery was mined, loaded with explosives ready to be fired. If the government forces learned about the place and tried to take back their materiel, they’d be blown sky-high. And of course, when the charges went, all that ammunition and stuff would go, too; and those limestone caverns aren’t very solid. The explosion would almost certainly bring the whole thing down, the entire roof of the cave, obliterating the underground chamber and the
cenote
and destroying everything we’d found… We couldn’t bear to think of it, Sam. After all our work, after coming so
close
, to have it all wiped out before we could record it, study it… And of course there was the fact, the very minor fact, that if we didn’t come to an agreement with Lupe, he would undoubtedly have us killed.”

“So you made a deal?”

Frances nodded. “It was the only thing we could do. Of course it was really a very good deal for Lupe, as Cortez had pointed out to him. Killing us would have been risky, no matter how well the ‘accident’ was staged. It would have brought all kinds of government investigators snooping around. Having us simply keep our mouths shut and continue our work made everything look respectable. Lupe didn’t have to worry about somebody discovering the tracks of modern vehicles, for instance, in unexpected places in the jungle, because we had our own vehicles in there by then and everybody knew those foolish gringos were chopping trails, and snooping everywhere.
Loco, muy loco.
” She drew a long breath. “He couldn’t have asked for better camouflage for his secret weapons cache; and of course once we’d agreed, we were stuck with him and his damned revolution. We
had
to do everything possible to help him keep his secret. If it were discovered now, we’d be in terrible trouble for not having reported it earlier.” She grimaced. “I know you’re remembering the speech I made in Chicago about not offending the local authorities. It’s all right to laugh, Sam. I laugh myself, sometimes. But rather bitterly, and not very often.”

I watched her closely. “I see. So that’s why you were willing to go so far to obey his orders, and to hell with pride and honor, if there still is such a thing in this dishonorable world.”

“Yes, Sam,” she said, meeting my eyes very steadily. “That’s why. That’s the whole story. I knew you’d understand.”

And she was lying again, at least to some extent. I knew those too-candid, too-honest, too-steady gray eyes by now. Well, I told myself grimly, if she ever told the truth, all the truth, she wouldn’t be my Frances and I’d miss her.

“Understand?” I said. “Sure, I understand. So let’s talk about these calendar conjunctions. When is the next one due? Have you figured it out?”

“Yes, of course.” She spoke quickly, obviously happy to change the subject. “But first there’s an interesting coincidence you should know about. Perhaps you could call it a confirmation. A totally different line of research seems to indicate that the Mayas, who came much later of course, believed that the decadent peoples of the world would be destroyed in their sins once every thirteen
baktuns
, a
baktun
being their longest measure of time. A
tun
was a year, a
katun
was twenty years, and a
baktun
was four hundred years. Thirteen
baktuns
works out to fifty-two hundred years. So according to them, Armageddon or Götterdämmerung or what have you, would come around cyclically every five thousand years and a little, sweeping the world clean for a fresh start. However, at the end of the thirteenth Great Cycle of the Long Count Calendar, the whole world and all creation would cease to exist, period.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” I said. “We’re in this thirteenth Great Cycle now.” When she nodded soberly, I asked, “And it ends when?”

“If you follow the Thompson correlation, the year of total annihilation will be 2013 a.d.”

I drew a long breath and took a sip of my cooling coffee. I cleared my throat. “And what do you and your husband come up with, working it out from your three-calendar business?”

“We come up with almost the same length for the Great Cycle, well, actually a hair less than five thousand years. Close enough, considering that we’re still working from very rough preliminary data. And the Melmecs ran their chronology from a different base date from the one used by the Mayas, determined by Thompson—and I must say I would never stick my neck out as far as he did by trying to pinpoint it with such precision. Not within a single year. You’ve got to remember that all these calendars supposedly run back to dates almost contemporary with the dinosaurs. Those old priests played their religious calendar games with very large numbers, probably for astrological reasons, not historical ones. And we know the time intervals they used, all right, but the problem is trying to figure out the dates they started counting from. Like our calendar runs forward and backward from the birth of Christ. If we didn’t know exactly when the star shone over Bethlehem, and if it all took place tens of thousands of years ago, we’d have some trouble writing down an exact date for the Declaration of Independence, wouldn’t we?”

I grinned briefly. “Okay, professor. That’s enough scientific background. When’s the end of the world going to be?”

She licked her lips, unsmiling. “We give ourselves fifty years’ leeway. Well, twenty-five either way. In round numbers, according to the Melmec calendar, the world should be due for cleansing again—unlike the Mayas, they do not predict total cosmic annihilation, merely the end of existing civilizations—some time between 1980 and 2030.”

After a little, I signaled the girl again, and she filled our cups again. I said, “I’m going to have the caffeine jitters.”

Frances said, “I’ve really got to go and see that things are properly organized.”

But she didn’t move, and I said, “So we’ve just come into the danger zone. The world has. If your theories mean anything. If your Melmecs actually knew something.”

“Yes, Sam.”

“But you don’t know what’s going to kill us, assuming that the curse, or whatever you want to call it, is still operative.”

“No. But the answer is here, somewhere; and we have to find it while there’s still time to do something about it.”

“Assuming something can be done.” I frowned thoughtfully. “Would you say it involved a weapon or something that can be used as a weapon?”

“To destroy an entire civilization?” She shook her head dubiously. “I don’t know, Sam. The Mayas apparently thought the job would be done by earthquakes; but there’s no archaeological or geological evidence that it ever happened that way. There are no indications of seismic cataclysms coinciding with the Great Cycle; we’ve checked that out carefully. Nor can we find any suggestions of plagues or other diseases, although that would be harder to determine after thousands of years. Nor does the evidence to date indicate that the Melmecs expected to be wiped out by overwhelming enemy attacks; although of course these were all warlike peoples.” Frances frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know about a weapon, but whatever it was, they expected it to be quick and thorough. Their wall paintings, their carvings, their records as far as we can decipher them, all indicate that the Great Court would be knee-deep in dead bodies on that final day. Nobody would be left alive except a few priests and priestesses sheltered underground—selected to keep the ancient knowledge alive—and a few peasants trembling in the more distant fields.”

“I suppose Cortez is a descendant of those selected survivors,” I said. Frances nodded. I asked, “Have you published any of your findings yet?”

She shook her head. “Not really. We wanted to wait until the… the problem here was solved. The Montano problem. If it ever is. Archie did make a speech at the Center for Mesoamerican Studies a few months ago that outlined the general nature of our discoveries…” She stopped and looked at me sharply. “Why did you ask that?”

“Because there seem to be some gents snooping around who are sometimes employed by Moscow to investigate scientific rumors that could indicate discoveries with possible military applications. These boys aren’t the first team or even the second, just a freelance operator named Rutterfeld presumably working under contract with a couple of helpers, whose job in Costa Verde could be to determine if you’re picking up anything here that might be of practical military value.”