The Aztec Heresy (20 page)

‘‘Okay,’’ said Finn, unable to hold back the fury in her tone. ‘‘Enough of this. Tell us just what’s going on here, Garza. And don’t try to feed me any crap about being an archaeologist. Just who the hell are you?’’

20

The sun was rising, bringing hot mists rising from the jungle’s humid floor and sending blinding stabs of light through the heavy canopy of ceiba trees and thatch palms. Eli and Guido had ventured back to the old camp to see what could be salvaged.

A bed of palm fronds and huge lurid green leaves from the elephant ear plants that grew beside the cenote had been made by Finn and Garza for Billy, who seemed to be sleeping comfortably now, the swelling in his lower leg gradually subsiding. They’d built another fire, this one well out on the limestone shelf.

The surface of the water was still clogged with huge floating masses of the dead bullet ants sacrificed for the common good of the swarm. The air was still filled with the formic acid stink of their passage, but the smell seemed to be keeping the mosquitoes and other bugs away, which was a relief.

A green jay, which was actually bright yellow except for its black-feathered head and neck, scolded them from the twisted branches of a calabash tree, and a tyrant flycatcher made a reconnaissance pass over the cenote and the masses of drowned, half-submerged ants that floated on the surface. Somewhere in the forest a mot-mot bird let out its croaking, far-reaching call. Every now and again the surface of the water splashed as curious fish tasted the free breakfast above them.

‘‘Is your name even Garza?’’

‘‘Yes, Ruben Filiberto Garza.’’

‘‘But you’re not an archaeologist.’’

‘‘No. I am an operations officer with CISEN, the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional, the Center for Research on National Security. Like your own Central Intelligence Agency.’’

‘‘Well, that makes me feel a whole lot better. ’’ Finn grimaced. ‘‘How come you know so much about ants? Doesn’t seem like much of a subject for study by a spy. And what does it have to do with me?’’ She glanced over at Billy on his makeshift bed of greenery. He seemed to be stirring.

‘‘Almost ten years ago an entomologist named Esteban Ruiz from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México campus in Merida noticed an upswing in mutations among several species that seemed to be concentrated in the Yucatán Peninsula.’’

‘‘Not just ants?’’

‘‘No. Spiders, mosquitoes, several kinds of beetle. Many. The same thing had been noted in the cenotes, except it was not insects, it was fish and small crustaceans. And there was degradation of some fungi and bacteria as well. It was very perturbing because it seemed to have no source.’’

‘‘Ten years ago?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘And nothing was done about it?’’

‘‘In Mexico it sometimes takes a great deal of time for these things to rise to people’s attention.’’

‘‘Not just Mexico,’’ said Finn. The Internet had been invented in 1973 by a computer scientist named Vinton Cerf and an engineer named Robert Kahn, but no one really paid attention for the better part of twenty years. Einstein figured out the famous E=MC
²
equation in 1905 but it took another forty years to invent the atom bomb. ‘‘What happened?’’

‘‘At first the mutations were seen as singularities, perhaps caused by sunspots or the degradation of the ozone layer.’’

‘‘But?’’

‘‘The mutations persisted. Not only that, they seemed to regularize, useful mutations weeding out the bad. This seemed to point to a large, central point of origination.’’

‘‘Two-inch bullet ants,’’ said Finn.

‘‘And their massive colony size. Prior to these mutations the ants were local foragers with very little social organization; now as you have seen they’ve developed the mass hunting traits of army ants.’’

‘‘Could it have been some kind of inbreeding between the species?’’

‘‘They say at the university that such a thing is possible but very unlikely.’’

‘‘And this is the reason your men were all wearing radiation badges?’’

‘‘You knew?’’

‘‘Billy was curious.’’ Finn turned to her friend again, then turned back to Garza. ‘‘His curiosity may have been what got him bitten. He was on your side of the camp just before.’’

‘‘Too bad.’’

‘‘What exactly were you doing up at that time of the night?’’

‘‘Satisfying my own curiosity. It seemed far too much of a coincidence that your destination was so close to what we consider the center of the mutation effect. Ground Zero, if you will.’’

‘‘We told the government officials the exact truth, Dr. Garza. . . .’’

‘‘Colonel, actually.’’

‘‘Colonel Garza then. We didn’t try to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. We discovered a copy of an ancient Codex that indicates, mostly by way of astral navigation as the Mayan people knew it, that there was a hidden temple close to the GPS point we indicated.

‘‘We checked with remote-sensing arrays and with the geophysical people at both my own university in Ohio and with the people at NASA. According to available satellite data there are a number of anomalies in the area— remains of old roadways and trails, thin spots in vegetation, regular shapes including one that might be a temple site, all of which add up to the probability that there’s something man-made out there in the jungle.’’

Garza turned away for a minute and began digging around in his knapsack. Behind her Billy was sitting up.

‘‘Wha’ hap’ned?’’ he asked froggily. He cleared his throat and tried again. ‘‘What happened?’’

‘‘You were bitten by an ant.’’

‘‘One ant?’’

‘‘Just one.’’

‘‘Good Lord!’’

‘‘You were lucky. The one that bit you had a few million friends.’’

‘‘Miss Ryan?’’

Finn turned back to Garza. ‘‘Yes?’’

The colonel handed her a stiff piece of photographic paper. There was a multicolored image on it with one glowing yellow spot in the center, a vague oblong.

‘‘It may surprise you to know that Mexico operates its own satellite fleet. This is a blowup of the sector in question taken by Satmex Seven. The satellite was only launched three months ago, which is why we didn’t notice it before.’’

Finn saw from the coordinates that the oblong glow was within a thousand yards of her objective, perhaps even closer.

‘‘What is it?’’

‘‘A radiographic satellite image of the GPS coordinates you gave to the museum people.’’

‘‘What’s the hot spot?’’

‘‘Plutonium-239, very small traces.’’

‘‘Could it be natural?’’

‘‘Plutonium-239 does not exist in nature.’’

‘‘Which means that what you see in that photograph is man-made.’’

‘‘Bloody hell!’’ Billy murmured, getting weakly to his feet. ‘‘A bomb?’’

‘‘Indeed so, Your Lordship. A hydrogen bomb.’’

‘‘Crikey!’’ Billy whispered. He staggered forward and looked at the picture over Finn’s shoulder.

‘‘That’s impossible,’’ said Finn.

‘‘I’m afraid it’s quite possible,’’ said Garza.

‘‘Explain.’’

‘‘On Monday, December 24, 1962, in the early-morning hours a B-47 bomber was flying reconnaissance patterns on the edge of Cuban airspace. This was only two months after the Cuban missile crisis, you must remember. No one remembers it today, but there was a large tropical storm front over the Yucatán that night.’’

‘‘The aircraft went down?’’ Finn asked.

‘‘Presumably into the gulf. Our American friends didn’t see fit to tell their allies to the south about it.’’

‘‘The plane was carrying nuclear weapons?’’ Billy asked.

‘‘Yes. Two B-43 MOD-1 hydrogen bombs.’’

‘‘Our government didn’t ask for Mexico’s help?’’ asked Finn.

‘‘Relations were somewhat strained back then. As now, Mexico supported the United States in matters of foreign policy but at the same time refused to break off diplomatic relations with Castro. We weren’t to be trusted, certainly not with information like that.’’

‘‘So the U.S. government chose to assume that the plane crashed into the sea?’’ Billy asked.

‘‘It would seem so. They probably sent a few U-2 flights over the area but clearly they found nothing.’’ He shrugged. ‘‘The jungle is very jealous of her secrets. She does not give them up easily.’’

‘‘So why not simply inform them now?’’ Finn asked.

‘‘Relations are not much better today than they were in 1962. All this talk of illegal immigrants, drugs. It would be a terrible embarrassment to both countries. The United States interfering with Mexico, Mexico keeping vital information from America. There is also another possibility.’’ Garza paused. ‘‘A much more dangerous one.’’

‘‘Such as?’’ Finn said.

‘‘We are well aware that Cuba has been trading with the drug cartels for a very long time. Drugs are a source of hard currency for them. Revolutions cost money and they can’t be paid for in bananas or sugarcane. What if the Soviet Union had brought atomic warheads into Cuba in 1962 and simply removed them to the Yucatán for safekeeping while Kennedy and Khrushchev argued? If such warheads were discovered and were found to be of Soviet origin, it would be a disaster. It might even provide the stimulus for an American invasion of Cuba.

‘‘Kennedy promised that would never happen, didn’t he? Publicly?’’ Billy interrupted.

Garza smiled coldly. ‘‘He did. He was also assassinated within a year. Kennedy is long dead. The present administration does not feel bound to honor promises made more than forty years ago. They seem not to honor promises made five minutes ago. It is a pragmatic age we live in. Money is power. We would very much like not to be put in the middle of this problem.’’

‘‘So what do you intend to do?’’ Finn asked.

‘‘Find them, dispose of them. If there are no bombs there is no problem.’’

‘‘What’s to stop you?’’

‘‘A man named Angel Guzman.’’

21

Angel Guzman sat behind the desk in the headquarters building of his jungle camp smoking a cigar and listening to the rattle of rain on the tin roof over his head. The plump little madman sipped brandy from his personal Starbucks coffee mug and eyed the young, handsome figure of Harrison Noble tied to the plain kitchen chair next to the woodstove. The stove had been banked with kindling and the surface of the cast iron was steaming as errant drops of rain leaking from the roof hissed and danced on the hot metal. Harrison Noble was naked. There were circular boils on most areas of his exposed skin where Angel Guzman had applied the hot tip of his cigar.

Harrison Noble had been crying. He had also been screaming for most of the night. It was early morning now. Angel Guzman wasn’t trying to extract information from the young man; he knew everything worth knowing. He was simply torturing him as an exercise in power. It was the kind of thing his people expected of him. He was known for inflicting unceasing pain on anyone who became his enemy. Angel Guzman was not the most astute politician in the world, but he knew that power not exercised was not power at all and could very well be considered its opposite: weakness.

Like most megalomaniac psychotics, Angel Guzman was not a man who saw his life as a sequence of well-ordered events based on a series of logical steps, but rather as a series of brilliantly clear images of himself in various situations.

As a child he’d regularly seen himself as Christ, sitting astride a donkey, glowing faintly as he rode through his village, just like the brightly colored picture in his Sunday school book. This had nothing at all to do with the other things the priest had him do in the little church vestry after mass, but the image remained: he was the savior of his village. Other images included riding in a limousine up to the Imperial Palace in Mexico City in the uniform of a general, pictures of himself with various movie stars, sipping champagne on a private jet, and one, a special favorite, of himself greeting the Pope and the Pope kissing his ring rather than the other way around. Right now, watching Harrison Noble squirming in the kitchen chair on the other sides of the room, Guzman was seeing himself in the Oval Office of the White House enjoying a photo opportunity with the president. It seemed very realistic.

‘‘Why is it,’’ said the man with the little pot-belly, ‘‘that Americans think they are smarter than anyone they perceive as speaking with an accent?’’

‘‘What?’’ the younger Noble asked numbly.

‘‘Your president cannot pronounce the name of the country he has invaded, but he thinks Mexicans are lesser beings because they do not speak English well. You are very arrogant, you Americans. There were people speaking Spanish when your ancestors were living in thatch-roofed huts on the coast of Ireland.’’

‘‘Don’t understand,’’ muttered Harrison Noble.

‘‘No, of course you don’t. You thought you and your hired thugs could come into my jungle, steal what you wanted and perhaps kill me in the process, isn’t that right.’’

‘‘This wasn’t what we agreed,’’ said Noble.

‘‘No,’’ said Guzman, smiling.

‘‘You broke your word.’’

‘‘What did you expect?’’ Guzman laughed. ‘‘After all, I am nothing but a peasant living in the jungle, not an honorable upstanding man like James Jonas Noble.’’

‘‘We had a deal.’’

‘‘So we did. Your father’s company wanted the rights to any pharmaceutical plants it discovered in the sector of the Yucatán that I control. In return I was to get a portion of the profits. An equitable arrangement. On the surface.’’

‘‘You agreed,’’ croaked Harrison Noble.

‘‘I wasn’t aware at the time that you already knew what you were looking for, nor how valuable it was. You told me Noble Pharmaceuticals was looking for an over-the-counter medication for constipation. Another one of America’s endless elixirs to move their bowels. What is this new drug your father wishes to bring to market next year?’’

‘‘Celatropamine.’’

‘‘A drug that allows you to eat as much as you want and still lose weight, correct?’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘A gold mine. Better than Viagra.’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘And?’’

‘‘With the extract from your plant it becomes incredibly addictive.’’

‘‘So the gold mine becomes a diamond mine.’’