Gibbs looked surprised. “Whose entries were they?”
“Your junior achiever down there in Brazil, Laidlaw.”
Gibbs waited. “And …”
“Well, does she know what the fuck she’s doing?”
Gibbs’ face relaxed a bit. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “It’s accounting’s fault. They’ve screwed that up before, because she’s outside of her sector. Let me guess: the funding codes belonged to one of her other projects.”
“Yep.”
“See,” Gibbs said, “accounting. I’ll chew their asses for it tomorrow. You just find the son of a bitch who hacked us.”
“All right,” Blundin said. “I figured it was something like that. I’ll give you the file numbers in the morning.”
Gibbs nodded and Blundin gave a half-assed wave as he ducked out through the door.
With Blundin gone, Gibbs was left alone to ponder the situation. He sat quietly for several minutes, silently rejoicing at the limits he’d placed on Moore and Laidlaw, limits that had saved him from dumping the most important information into the database, including the location of the recently discovered temple. That was good news, and it eased his mind considerably, but other news was less pleasant. He stared hard at the doorway through which Blundin had just departed, his eyes burning from anger and lack of sleep. In some ways, things had just gone from bad to worse.
CHAPTER 20
Danielle stood atop the roof of the newly discovered Mayan temple, gazing out over the clearing around her. She could see the remnants of a procession of small buildings aligned directly with the temple’s stairs and a causeway that ran between them and off into the jungle to the west. She could see outcroppings of stone and sunken areas that had once been buildings and plazas. The clearing covered at least ten acres, but the temple was the center. In her heart she believed the source of the crystals would be found here, but they needed to hurry.
There were many reasons to push; openly, she worried about the rains. They would only hold off for so long, and when they did come, work would have to cease for several months. But the real problem was their as yet unknown competitor.
Gibbs’ latest satellite call had informed her of the computer breach, and though he insisted that the temple’s location remained secret, Danielle could not shake the feeling of an enemy growing closer with each passing moment.
She glanced over at Professor McCarter, who was working with Susan and the porters. Their lives were in danger, and they didn’t know it in the least. Certainly, they watched Verhoven and his men patrol, listened as Hawker flew in with a load of defensive equipment, including motion sensors, computerized tracking devices, lights, flares and boxes of ammunition—and the pack of trained dogs Verhoven had insisted upon—and in all likelihood they considered it only a precaution. A little bit of the government’s heavy hand when a lighter touch would have been fine.
Danielle knew better. Somewhere out there an enemy sought them, and despite the time they’d bought by racing up the river, eventually that enemy would find them. She wanted the civilians long gone when it happened. To make sure that happened, she had to keep pushing.
She looked to Professor McCarter, crouched on the rooftop, running his finger down a seam in the stonework and explaining to the group what he’d found.
“Tell me again what this means,” she said.
“You see how precise the fit is?” he said, pointing. He waved the others closer and then used his knife to scrape at the moss. The stonework was so tight that the moss hadn’t grown into it, just covered it over like a tarp. “You couldn’t get cigarette paper between these stones. All the great sites that have stood the test of time show this type of craftsmanship. In the Yucatan, in Egypt, in Mongolia.
“This structure must be remarkably stable to look like this, perhaps built onto some bedrock like the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan. I have seen some damage on the north side,” he admitted. “But the foundation itself can’t have subsided too much or these seams would be loose and jumbled. I’m quite excited about that.”
“You said you might have found a way inside,” she reminded him. “Can we skip ahead to that part? That’s what
“You’re not one for slow cooking,” McCarter replied, only slightly bothered.
“Microwave,” she replied. “Or faster.”
He smiled and moved to another section of the roof, waving the group over. “This stone tells us another story. The connection here is less precise, the workmanship less exacting.” He dug at the moss, pulling it loose where it had burrowed into the cracks, clearing the seam all the way to its corner. The exposed edge was gouged and chipped, dozens of hairline fractures revealing damage yet to come. He looked up. “Of all the stones on this roof, only this one appears in such condition. That can mean only one thing—this stone has been moved … repeatedly.”
“If there is one,” he said. “Most Mayan temples have nothing inside except an earlier temple.”
Puzzled looks came his way.
“The kings and Ahau of Maya wanted monuments to themselves like all the other leaders of the ancient world. But in a surprisingly pragmatic twist, they would often commission a new structure to be built over the existing ones, a sort of pre-Colombian municipal rehabilitation project, one that enabled them to leave behind a greater temple than their predecessor. The result is something like those Russian nesting dolls, where each larger doll covers the smaller one. At places in the Yucatan some temples have half a dozen underlying layers.”
He returned to his original thought. “But other Mayan temples are stand-alone structures, some of which contain inner chambers, rooms for the kings and the priests to meditate and communicate with their long-passed ancestors. A process usually accompanied by the letting of blood, as they passed barbed ropes and stingray spines through their lips and their earlobes and, um … through other parts considered more sensitive.”
Hawker winced. “Kind of puts a damper on that whole being a king thing.”
Danielle laughed and looked back at McCarter. “So you think this is one of the latter types?”
“It looks that way,” he said. “And that could help us determine if this place is Tulan Zuyua or not.”
“How?” she asked.
“Remember how Tulan Zuyua had other names,” he said. “The stone Blackjack Martin found contained one of those names. Seven Caves. Other Mayan writings refer to it as the Place of Bitter Water.”
“Seven Caves,” she said, running the scenario through her mind. “So you think there might be a cave under here or a group of them?”
“Possibly,” McCarter said. “But I’m thinking on a less dramatic level. Other Mayan sites linked to the word ‘cave’ have been found to contain inner chambers. And why not? After all, what is a cave? A dark place with walls of stone. It’s only semantics that differentiate a stone-walled chamber from an actual stone cave. Spelunkers even call the open chambers of a cave a room. The Mayan description probably follows a similar line of thought. And if this temple was to have a set of inner chambers, seven of them, then that would support our theory that it is Tulan Zuyua.”
“Our theory?” Danielle said.
“I’m co-opting it,” McCarter said, smiling. “Besides, there’s another reason to go inside as well, a more important one perhaps. Anything that’s inside will have been protected from the sun and rain for all these years. The walls out here have been worn smooth by the environment, but in there, we might find writings, murals or pottery. Even ritual objects with information on them. The best and quickest way to gather information is to get inside, and that means we start here.”
It would take the better part of four hours, a rash of strained muscles and one broken pulley, but eventually the slab was dislodged and forced upward by the leverage of the pry bars. A nylon rope was passed beneath it, and with a jerry-rigged tripod they managed to raise the stone and move it backward an inch at a time. It had traveled
