Authors: Paul Christopher
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Archaeologists, #Women Archaeologists, #Suspense Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Detective and Mystery Stories, #cookie429, #Kat, #Extratorrents
The Aztec Heresy
Table of Contents
THE NEXT MOVE
The young man in the white shirt panned around the plaza a second time . . . and put the camera down on the table in front of him. He took a cell phone out of the pocket of his shirt. He dialed the international telephone code. . . .
‘‘Yes?’’ The language was Italian, the tone careful and considered. A voice with power behind it.
‘‘I have them,’’ the young man in the plaza answered. ‘‘Our contact in the archives said they have been looking for references that include information about the Codex. . . . What shall I do?’’
‘‘Nothing. Keep them under surveillance for the time being.’’
‘‘Yes, Your Eminence.’’
‘‘The opening moves have begun,’’ said the voice. ‘‘If they become too curious, remove them from the board. Keep me advised.’’
Remove them from the board,
thought the young man.
In other words, kill them.
The cell phone went dead in the young man’s ear.
ALSO BY PAUL CHRISTOPHER
Michelangelo’s Notebook
The Lucifer Gospel
Rembrandt’s Ghost
SIGNET
Published by New American Library, a division of
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First Printing, July 2008
Copyright © Paul Christopher, 2008
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To Geoff and Deryldene Tucker,
Good Friends from the Rock,
Last of the Old Breed
THE PAST
1
Sunday, the fifteenth of July, A.D. 1521
Cayo Hueso, Florida
Friar Bartolome de las Casas of the Ordo fratrum Praedicatorum, the Order of St. Dominic, heard the giant wave before he saw it. The surging breaker came out of the storm-wracked darkness like a howling beast, a savage, climbing monster that suddenly appeared behind the treasure-laden galleon
Nuestra Señora de las Angustias.
The wave’s belly was as black as the night around it, the huge, driving shoulders a livid sickly green, its ragged, curling head white and torn with ghostly tendrils of wind-whipped spume and spindrift.
It rose like a toppling wall above the stern of the groaning ship, pushing the galleon ahead of it like a chip of wood in a rain-swollen gutter. The seething wave rose until it could rise no more, filling the dark sky above the terrified monk, then reaching down for the ship like some malevolent screaming demon of the seas. Seeing it, Friar Bartolome knew without a doubt that his life was about to end.
He waited for death helplessly crouched in the waist of the vessel with the other few passengers who had come aboard in Havana, including the boy, Don Antonio Velázquez, the governor’s son, who was on his way home to Spain for the education appropriate to a young man of the nobility. Some of the crew were desperately trying to unship the
Nuestra Señora
’s small boats from the skid rails over the main hatch cover while the rest of the men huddled by the fo’c’sle deck. No one stayed below in such desperate weather; better to see fate approaching, no matter how terrible, than to seal yourself blindly within a leaking, unlit coffin.
Above them the rain came down in torrents and the remains of the fore staysail and the foresail hammered in the terrible wind, the lines and rigging beating like hailstones on the drum-heads of torn, ruined canvas. The rest of the sails had been ragged to tatters and the jib-boom was gone entirely and the bowsprit splintered away.
There had to be a hole somewhere deep within the hull because the
Nuestra Señora
was moving more and more sluggishly with every passing moment and taking water in the stern. The sea anchor was gone, forcing them to run before the wind, any remnant of control long since vanished. The mainmast groaned and creaked, the hull moaned, and the seas pounded mercilessly at the schooner’s flanks. Everyone knew the ship wouldn’t last the hour, let alone survive the night.
Turning his head in time to see the deadly, bludgeoning wave, Friar Bartolome had a single heartbeat to take some measure to save himself and his precious cargo. With barely a conscious thought he dropped to the sodden deck and wrapped his arms tightly around the anchor chain that lay between the capstan and the bitt, holding on for dear life as the breaking monster pummeled him.
The wave struck with a thundering roar, and an even more terrible sound emerged from within the belly of the ship: a deep, grating screech as the keel scraped along a hidden line of reef and then stuck fast, hard aground, wedged between two invisible clutching jaws of coral. The
Nuestra Señora
stopped dead in the water. There was an immense cracking sound and the mainmast toppled, carrying the yards and spars along with it into the raging sea.
The wave, unhindered, swept along the deck of the schooner, swallowing the cowering crew, demolishing the ship’s boats and burying Friar Bartolome beneath tons of suffocating water. The wave surged on, the suction pulling at his straining arms and heavy cassock, but he managed to keep his grip long enough for the great green wall to pass. He came up for air and saw in an instant that he was the only one left alive on the deck. Everyone else was gone except the boy, Don Antonio, who now lay broken like a child’s doll, tangled in the pins and rigging of the foremast fife rail. His head was crushed, and gray matter oozed wetly from beneath his cap, his eyes wide and staring toward the dark heavens, seeing nothing. There would be no school in Spain after all.