Hawker nodded.
“So it was marginalized,” Danielle said.
“Almost to the point of extinction,” McCarter added.
“But not quite,” Hawker guessed.
“Precisely,” McCarter said. “And that’s where it becomes interesting. What we’ve found is a broken trail of evidence, linking the stones and the prophecy. It seems like this trail was created on purpose, most likely by a group of true believers who were savvy enough to keep themselves from being discovered and stable enough to pass the knowledge on without destroying themselves in an effort to prove their point.”
“Destroying themselves?”
“Doomsday cults rarely last more than a few years,” McCarter said. “Both because it’s hard to attract followers to such an idea—sane followers anyway—and because even when you do attract them, it’s awfully hard to keep them around and interested for any length of time without performing the act of self-destruction.”
“Makes sense,” Hawker said. “I’m guessing you guys haven’t found that anywhere.”
“No,” McCarter said. “But what we have found is this.” He pointed to places on the map that was spread out before him. “On a stone at the monument of Tohil, the oldest structure in the city of Caracol, we find reference to the 2012 prophecy and a group referred to as the Brotherhood Behind the Smoke, this means the hidden brotherhood. From there we tracked them to Ek Balam, city of the Jaguar, where they took the name Brotherhood of the Jaguar. Here we found glyphs that talk of them building temples and structures to protect and house the Sacrifices, which I think is a reference to the stones. That led us up into the mountains to the Island of the Shroud, where they quarried their volcanic ash to use in building the underwater temple.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’m with you.”
McCarter nodded his approval. “Now, the ultimate end of this trail is a site referred to as the Mirror. We originally guessed this was another reference to the god of fire, Tohil, since he was often depicted with a mirror in his forehead. The problem is, since the first structure we’ve found nothing of Tohil, as if that particular iconography had been left behind, in exchange for something new.”
“Which was?” Hawker asked.
“Well,” McCarter said, “before we were attacked, we found a monument that seemed to reference the Brotherhood and perhaps their leader. Ahau Balam—the Jaguar King—and the glyphs we found on this king’s monument directed us to the temple beneath the waves. And from the decidedly low-tech photos that Danielle brilliantly took,” McCarter said, “I’ve found the following.”
He looked at his notes.
“‘It is here that the Brotherhood gather, unknown and unseen. Only a few of us now remain. To go on we must find others who will understand. Others must be tested, and once deemed worthy, must let the blood of their hands and lips. And remain until the blood will not flow.’”
He looked up. “From the reliefs carved above the stones it looks like they would paddle out to that temple, which only they knew how to find, and then they would dive down upon it with a new recruit who had passed enough tests to be worthy. This journey into the water would be the ultimate test, to risk swimming to such depths, to swim into the cave and cut their hands and lips as a blood sacrifice.”
“Not to mention the sharks,” Hawker said.
McCarter had to agree; in fact, he thought that was an important factor. “Yes, now imagine them inside the temple, with open wounds, perhaps little food or water. They were trapped there until the wounds had healed; otherwise the sharks would devour them. So while they remained in the temple, they grew weak, entered a trancelike state, and went on a vision quest of sorts. And then they were allowed to place their hands on the stone, the Sacrifice of the Soul.”
“Some kind of initiation,” Hawker said. “I get it. After going through all that trouble, the person feels a part of something. You think that’s how they remained so resolute through the ages?”
“I think that’s part of it,” McCarter said. “But there’s more.” He exchanged glances with Danielle. And she took over the story.
“When we were down there, I was acting oddly,” she said. “Part of it was the oxygen narcosis but there was something else. I snapped at you to stop you from touching the stone.”
“Yeah,” Hawker said. “I was waiting for you to call it ‘the precious.’”
“That’s not too far from the truth,” she said. “One of the things we know from studying the Brazil stone is that a portion of its signal resonates in the frequency of human brain waves. The brain is nothing more than an extremely complex electrochemical processor. Thinking and emoting and deciding are the result of synapses discharging electrical pulses. When I was a med student I watched a brain surgery where minor electrical currents were applied to the patient’s brain. The subject, wide awake, could then not remember certain things, such as his name, or, when shown pictures of a dog, what that animal was called. Stimulation to other sections of the brain caused a rise in emotions: fear in one place, anger in another.”
Hawker’s look went from interest to concern. “What are you telling me?”
“We believe that this final initiation, where the candidates were allowed to hold the stone, was done to program the brains of those deemed worthy.”
McCarter could see Hawker’s mind whirling, making the connection. It took only an instant. The lead effort on this quest had been taken by McCarter, despite all reason to the contrary, despite the fact that he’d almost been killed by the NRI’s treachery, despite the fact that he was not cut out for dealing with men like Kang and Saravich. Even after being shot and losing Danielle he had still refused to give it up.
“You touched the stone in Brazil,” he said.
McCarter nodded.
“Both he and I did,” Danielle said. “But you didn’t. And I didn’t want you to touch this one, either.”
“It affected you?”
“When I was back in New York, I could never sleep through the night,” McCarter said. “I thought it was some type of delayed stress reaction to all that had happened, but as the months wore on the insomnia got worse. I started taking sleeping pills and they worked for a while, until one night in the summer a massive thunderstorm woke me up. I thought I was back in the Amazon for a second. And from that moment on, I could not stop thinking about the stone. When Moore and I finally spoke he mentioned that he, Danielle, and another technician who had handled the stone were all suffering from the same symptoms. Little sleep, obsessive thoughts, a need to do something in regard to the stone.”
“You’re saying this thing programmed you.”
“It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds,” Danielle said. “Lots of things program the human mind in subtle ways. Studies have shown that the sound of a baby crying will affect women’s thought patterns, particularly if it is the voice of their own child. Addictions do a similar thing: drugs and alcohol actually affect brain chemistry and thought patterns to where the brain of the addict has been reprogrammed to be biased toward the drug over all else. Including food, water, and sex.”
McCarter pointed to the map. “The Brotherhood’s continued devotion to the stones and their apocalyptic message, without them creating their own false apocalypse, is pretty much unheard of. We think the stones were designed to instill that type of devotion.”
“Okay, but why?”
Danielle replied. “If you were sending some very important items to people who might not have a clue what they were, wouldn’t you want to wrap them in a package that would get them accepted?”
Hawker’s eyes narrowed. “The stones generate this brain-wave-matching pulse, which creates endorphins or something within the mind of the person touching it. Is that what we’re talking about here?”
McCarter nodded.