Moore had heard this speech before. And while he agreed with Gibbs’ assessment as to the magnitude of the changes that a working cold-fusion system would bring to the world, he continued to disagree with the man about the effort needed to get those results.
At Moore’s silence, Gibbs exhaled in frustration. “This is what we pay you for. To run around and gather things up that will keep the country ahead of the competition. This one just happens to be in a hole in the ground somewhere instead of in a lab or on a database. And it also happens to be the big one, the Manhattan Project of our time. I’m not giving that up, but we damn well can’t have an army running around down there, now, can we?”
“No,” Moore said. “But you can send me back before anything else goes wrong.”
Gibbs’ mind was not one to be changed by argument or persuasion; he would only dig in further out of pride. Moore knew this, but had been unable to check himself. He watched as Gibbs took the folder back from Blundin and closed it. The discussion was over.
“You don’t want to do this for me?” Gibbs said. “Fine, don’t.” He leaned forward, the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks suddenly menacing and evil. The Rodent possessed. “But you’re not going back and your partner is still out there. And she will be in danger until we find out who’s shadowing us.”
Moore refused to look away, but he could say nothing. He stared at the director in a dead silence and watched as the jagged smile returned—the deal was done.
CHAPTER 9
Professor McCarter stepped out of the service elevator with Susan Briggs and William Devers at his side. They entered a narrow, angled hallway that ran beneath the hotel toward the chosen meeting room. Bundled pipes and electrical conduits ran overhead and the floor was solid, unadorned concrete. Odd surroundings that left McCarter quietly surprised. His surprise changed to concern when they passed a stocky man with a radio bug in his ear and the bulge of a weapon clearly visible under a dark windbreaker.
The man waved them around a corner, toward their destination.
“Security,” Devers said. “We always have them when we’re overseas. Remember that Russian job I told you about? We had a bunch of ex-paratroopers following us; strangely enough, most of them had no teeth.”
Susan laughed. “Gross.”
“Good people, though,” Devers said. “Very willing to share their vodka. Just didn’t have the best dental plan.” He turned around and studied the man behind them. “We’ll have to see how these guys turn out.”
McCarter glanced over his shoulder. “At least this one has his teeth.”
The hallway dead-ended at Parlor A, and the group entered to find Danielle standing with Mark Polaski.
McCarter chose a spot both front and center, like all his best students. The roll reversal amused him.
As they settled in, Danielle walked to the entrance, signaled the man at the end of the hall and shut the door. “Sorry about the accommodations,” she said, turning back to the group. “I didn’t want to do this in a big hall and this was the only small room available—now I can see why.”
Danielle dimmed the lights and clicked a remote. A picture of a Mayan temple appeared on the screen at the front of the room. “We’re about to embark on a great adventure,” she began. “As some of you already know, we’ll be searching for a branch of the Mayan culture that certain scholars believe may have existed in the Amazon. But to say only that is to sell ourselves short. Our goal is far more ambitious. We’re looking for a place that the Maya considered the land of their own genesis, their Garden of Eden—a city called Tulan Zuyua.”
Susan Briggs turned to McCarter as she realized what Danielle was suggesting. “Are they serious?’ she asked.
McCarter nodded. “I think so,” he said.
Danielle clicked the remote and a photograph of a colorful mural came up. The mural depicted four men in native garb walking fearfully under a midnight sky.
She addressed Professor McCarter. “Feel free to correct me if I get any of this wrong.”
He nodded, expecting to be busy.
“According to Mayan legend, there was an age before the first sunrise, a time when the world was dark, lit only by a gray twilight that lingered on the edge of the horizon. Into the darkness of this pre-dawn world, the Mayan gods created the first humans and then called them to a place named Tulan Zuyua, where they presented each tribe with a patron god. The Quiche Maya, from whom the story comes, received the god Tohil, the creator of fire. And in a world of darkness, this gift set them apart, as they alone now possessed the power to create light and heat.
“Secure in this knowledge, the forefathers of the Quiche tribe set out from Tulan Zuyua in search of a place to call their own. As the legend goes, they left the city transporting their patron deity with them, his spirit contained in a special stone. After a trek across both land and sea they settled in Central America, in areas that became Guatemala, Belize and Mexico, never to return to Tulan Zuyua.”
She clicked the remote and brought up a new photo, a Mayan ruin somewhere in Central America. “Many in the academic world consider Tulan Zuyua to be a myth,” she explained. “And that we’re as likely to find it as we are to locate Atlantis or the Garden of Eden itself. And if it is real, most experts believe it will be found buried under some other Mayan site, the way old San Francisco is buried under the present-day city.
“We, on the other hand, expect to find the great city here in the Amazon, thousands of miles from where anyone would have even thought to look.”
Danielle clicked to the next slide. It displayed a weathered stone with raised markings on it, fronted by a tape measure for scale. “This artifact came to the NRI several months ago, though it was recovered from somewhere in the Amazon some time before that.”
Another click, another photo: a picture of the stone from a different angle. McCarter found himself squinting to make out any details.
“As you can see,” Danielle said. “The surface of the stone is extremely weathered and most of the markings are almost invisible. But through a type of computer-assisted analysis called a micro-density relief, we were able to reconstruct some of the patterns, and the results were surprising.”
The next slide displayed the same stone, this time with a computer-generated outline overlaying it. “These patterns are consistent with only one known writing system: Mayan hieroglyphics. And these two glyphs are well known. One is the name of a person, Jaguar Quitze, one of the original Mayan humans. The other, which was only partially reconstructed, is believed to represent Venus, the morning star.”
McCarter studied the pattern formed by the computer-drawn outline. Clearly Mayan in style, but the underlying rock was so worn down he wondered how they could derive anything from it at all. Well-meaning guesswork perhaps.
While McCarter considered this, Danielle explained more of the NRI’s theory. “Eight months of work has put us in possession of several other items that seem to confirm the existence of the Mayan writing system within the Amazon, but none of them offered proof quite so dramatically as the one stone we do not possess.”
The next image was different from the others, a scanned copy of an old, sepia-toned glossy, complete with a crease running diagonally through one corner and brown discolorations along the edges.
The photo showed two men beside a large rectangular stone. One man had his arms folded across his chest and a foot up on the block. The other man crouched beside it, pointing to something on its face. The image brought to mind a pair of fishermen posing beside a prize catch.