“No. It just seems she was heading that way. People die out here. Snakebite, injury, disease, it doesn’t have to be anything more suspicious than that. Maybe that’s what happened to your mother,” Flint said a little more kindly.
Max tried to remember everything he knew of his mother’s disappearance. Why had his father run away? Was it because he had been frightened of something? As far as he knew, his mother had died and been buried somewhere in the jungle. What was it that was so terrifying it had made his father run away?
“Have you ever been in there?” Max asked.
“Not me. There are stories of people who tried-they never made it. In or out. They were destroyed by the hummingbird god. There are so few ways to get inside there. I’ve been close, maybe a couple of Ks, and on a calm day you can hear him. Those mountains are like an island-I’m talking thousands of square kilometers-and I tell you something else. There’s a logging strip round half of it, and there are armed guards. Private. That place is bad news.”
“I bet there are some amazing rare plants in there,” Max said.
“You’re crazy. You’re not going to get me anywhere near the place. Nowhere near.”
“Then can you get me close? I have to find out what happened. I have to, Flint, don’t you see? It’s why I’m here. How long do you think it’ll take those men chasing me to finally come to this place? If they’re that determined, they are going to check in an ever-wider circle. As you said, I could bring you big trouble.”
Flint stayed silent for a few seconds, shaking his head as if discounting his thoughts, but then he sighed, giving in to the inevitable. “There is one way in, maybe. The Cave of the Stone Serpent. None of the locals would ever go near it.” Flint got up and took down a carved figure from the wall, a skeleton draped in ornaments of bone and skin covered in black spots.
Max pointed to the necklace on the carving. “What are those?”
Flint handed it to him. “Eye sockets, a symbol of the underworld. The cave is where Ah Puch lives.”
“Who is Ah Puch?” Max asked.
“The Mayan god of death.”
19
Max sat with Xavier, who was still in the cage. He handed the cigarette through the bars, and Xavier took it like a thirsty man grabbing a bottle of water. He smelled it and muttered something in Spanish, then said, “You’re a good friend, Max Gordon. But you would be like my family if I could light it.”
Max held up a match. He struck it against a rough piece of bamboo and held it for the boy, who sucked the smoke into his lungs, then coughed until finally he eased himself back against the bars. “You can be my cousin,” he said, smiling. “My first cousin.”
Max sat with his back to the cage, upwind of the smoke that funneled out of Xavier’s nose, as if he were a baby dragon. “Flint is going to get me out of here. He knows that whoever was searching for me will come looking sooner or later. But I don’t know how far you want to go along with me.”
“I go with you as long as you want me to go. Maybe I can help you when we get to a town. People know me. I know people. We can get away and never be seen again.”
Max could see Flint and another man talking. Flint was pointing to the fan-driven powerboat; the man was shaking his head, obviously not wanting to go to the notorious cave.
“Listen, Xavier. I’m not going into any towns or villages. I’m going into the mountains. I still want to find out what happened to my mum.”
Xavier nodded. “OK. Then I go with you and I help you.”
“Maybe you’d better think about it.”
“I no need to think,
“I’m going to the Cave of the Stone Serpent.”
Xavier choked. He leaned forward, grabbing Max’s arm through the bars. “Max, amigo, don’ go there. I heard about that place, man. They been telling stories about that cave since forever. There’s a snake in there bigger than a river. It takes you and it swallows you, and that is not a nice way to die.”
Max could see that Xavier was really frightened. “That’s just a legend. It’s a story to keep people away,” he said, trying to convince himself without much success.
“Then it works. Maybe I’d better think about it.”
Max knew he would be going in alone. It was probably better that way. There were fragments being drawn together in his mind. He had remembered the name Zaragon. When he had once visited the London office of Angelo Farentino, the man who had betrayed his father, there was a sign on the building next door-ZARAGON. Was there a connection even way back then? Farentino, once an influential supporter of the frontline eco-scientists, had sold his soul to a mysterious organization that wielded enormous influence. It now seemed likely that on other adventures, Max, without realizing it, had faced their terrifying power. Somewhere in the background, like a spreading stain of evil across the face of the earth, greater forces than Max could imagine were wielding power, manipulating governments and multinational corporations.
A small cog shifted in his mind. When Farentino had told Max that his father had run from his mother, how could he have known that? Max’s dad would never have confessed such guilt to anyone. So, Angelo Farentino had information from someone involved in this area. Max did not believe in coincidences. Zaragon, those faceless men and women, must be the power behind many of the international eco-disasters his mother and father had fought so hard against in the past.
Were these the people Max’s dad had run from, leaving his mother to die?
There was never any question in Max’s mind of turning back, of going home to the safety of school and friends. He was getting closer to finding the real reason behind his mother’s death and his father’s cowardice.
He shuddered, his own fear of going through the Cave of the Stone Serpent tormenting him like a small devil on his shoulder, whispering its terrifying warnings, embedding them like fishhooks in his mind.
He stood up and called to Flint. “I’m ready!”
Charlie Morgan’s 250cc motocross scrambler bike, which she’d bought in a broken-down garage, had taken her a few hundred kilometers north of the city, over red clay tracks, through villages that were little more than shacks on stilts, where scattered banana trees were the main source of income. And then she had reached the City of Lost Souls, which was little more than a frontier town with dirt streets, a couple of bars, some rough accommodation and a small marketplace where worn-out diesel buses choked the air as they brought people in from the surrounding countryside to sell what little produce they had grown. It was a bleak, forbidding place and aptly named.
What she wanted was a cold beer, and what she did was go into the roughest-looking place in town. She never gave a thought to the fact that she was a woman traveling on her own. She had always been able to look after herself, no matter what the circumstances. The tattooed men with bandannas pulled across their heads could barely believe their eyes when she pushed into the dimness of their bar. She ordered a beer and drank straight from the bottle without pausing for breath. The heat prickled her skin and sweat ran down her back, but the sharp point of a knife at the base of her neck felt like a small wasp sting. Everyone was looking at her. And then the man with the knife moved round to the front of her, holding it under her chin. He was shorter than she was and had stained teeth, bad breath and pockmarked skin. He pouted his lips-he wanted a kiss.
Charlie did not flinch. “You understand English?” she asked.
He had not taken the knife from under her chin. “I speak it. I understand it. I went to school. You think we are savages here?”
Everyone in the room laughed.
“Then tell me why a handsome man like you would need a knife to get a kiss? All you have to do is ask politely,” she said.
The man smirked at his friends in the bar, then lowered the knife and looked at Charlie. “OK. I would like to have a kiss, please, pretty lady.”
Charlie smiled at him and lowered her face slightly. “This is called a Liverpool kiss,” she whispered quickly,
