“Didn’t you see all those hotels along the beach?” Danielle said.
Hawker didn’t reply; he just switched on the radio. After scanning through a group of Spanish language channels he found one that was broadcasting in English. The announcer was British.
Danielle guessed it might have been the BBC Worldwide.
… they’ve come here by the thousands to celebrate this Mayan milestone. Serious scholars, curious travelers, and New Wave crystal worshippers searching for something called the vortex. Above all, tens of thousands of vacationers, mostly Americans and Europeans expecting a party that should be a cross between Mardi Gras and New Year’s Eve, with much nicer weather.
Until recently, that’s exactly what they’d gotten. All enjoying themselves and eagerly awaiting that ultimate moment when the Mayan calendar hits its end and rolls over to begin again. Most just smile and laugh when any talk of a cataclysm is raised. At least that was the case, until midday yesterday when an unexplained shock wave plunged half the country into darkness.
Hawker turned the broadcast up just a bit.
Officials insist the blackout was caused by an overload from the U.S. grid, after a mishap in the top-secret Groom Lake air base. But many insist a shock wave was felt here and was particularly strong along the coast. This, combined with what might have been a terrorist attack at one of the hotels earlier today and the sudden uptick in tensions worldwide, has the vast majority of these travelers trying desperately to get home.
End of the world or not, most of the travelers I talked to aren’t in the mood to stick around and find out.
Hawker shut off the radio and Danielle stared through the traffic up ahead of them. They were a mile or so from the entrance to the airport. She could see units of the Mexican army and riot police around the gates. Every car that passed was being checked and rechecked.
“They may have our description,” she said. “Not sure I want to chance making it through security.”
“I wasn’t planning on buying a ticket,” Hawker said. “I was planning on borrowing a helicopter.”
“You mean stealing one,” she replied.
“It’s not stealing if you bring it back.”
She laughed. Perfect Hawker logic.
“This is too hot, though,” he said. “Too many people. Too much security.”
McCarter seemed pleased. “I can’t say I’m completely disappointed.”
“Me neither,” Danielle said.
He smiled at them. “Might want to hold off on that,” he said. “You haven’t seen plan B yet.”
With that, he turned into a gas station, waited for a few moments, and then accelerated calmly back out onto the street, moving opposite of the traffic and away from the airport.
CHAPTER 44
Kang’s warehouse in Campeche had become a command center to rival Mission Control at NASA. On one side were scholars he’d hired to translate the glyphs from the submerged temple; on the other were banks of computers, dozens of screens, and groups of trained men working the equipment like air traffic controllers.
It was a face-to-face search with a twenty-first-century twist. Kang had teams scouring the various towns, villages, and archeological sites that he suspected the NRI team might visit, including the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. All in all two hundred men were running about, carrying cameras and other remote sensing equipment. They simply wandered around, scanning faces, moving from section to section, through plazas, airports, restaurants, and hotels, wandering up and down streets and avenues. His men did not have to find the NRI team; in fact most of them had no idea what they were looking for. They just had to execute the simple orders they were given. Kang’s computers would do the rest.
Behind him, racks of high-powered servers hummed as they absorbed and processed the data. Facial recognition software running at blazing speeds examined every image. A man moved down one street, and five hundred faces were scanned and ruled out. Another man wandered the airport from gate to gate, and in thirty minutes Kang could be certain that the NRI personnel were not there.
In this way his two hundred men could scour the countryside like a veritable army of spotters.
Kang checked the readout. His artificial intelligence system had initially predicted a 31 percent chance that the NRI team would access one of these points for additional information.
But that prediction was updated constantly based on the rate of progress. As Kang checked the readout, he saw a diminishing likelihood of finding the Americans at any of the known Mayan sights. And with all the additional faces that had been scanned and rejected at the university, that probability was falling as well.
The current analysis graded the possibilities in the following manner:
Probability that
NRI party has been captured or incapacitated: 3.27%
NRI party no longer in Mexico and heading for the United States: 9.41%
NRI party will use McCarter’s remote access to New York University mainframe: 11.74%
NRI party has sufficient information to locate precise point of next site: 14.69%
NRI party will access a local university or museum for data: 28.91%
NRI party has sufficient data to begin generalized search for next site: 31.08%
Possible other outcomes: < 1%
Kang considered the data. The most likely category, that the NRI party now had sufficient information to begin a generalized search, had been the second least likely category twenty-four hours before. He had watched with both concern and hope as it rose steadily in the rankings.
If the NRI party was truly out in the jungle somewhere, they were much closer to finding the next stone than he’d hoped. On the other hand, that was what he needed them to do eventually. And by leaving the metropolitan areas and entering the jungle they played into his hands. Out there Kang had ways of finding and tracking them that were not feasible in the crowded streets of urban civilization. And when he found them, he would deal with them away from the harsh light of any witnesses.
He turned to the project leader. “Prepare to launch the drones.”
CHAPTER 45
The plane was a Lake Renegade LA-250, an amphibious, single-engine aircraft that floated on a boatlike hull instead of pontoons with struts. They’d found it at a tourist trap called Sea & Air Tours, where for a hundred and fifty dollars vacationers could go up on a forty-minute ride and see the coastline. A few more dollars arranged for a two-hour trip and a landing at a secluded bay, where the passengers could have a romantic picnic on an uninhabited beach. The NRI team had no time for such luxuries.
After casing the dockside and the small building that acted as Sea & Air’s offices, Hawker had decided this was the plane they needed.
And then they’d waited until almost midnight, partly because they needed the dockside to be deserted but more importantly because they needed the stone to finish its energy wave and reenter the lull phase before they took off in a small aircraft.
This time Danielle had taken it in the car out into the hills. Again she had found a spot in the middle of nowhere, dug a deep hole, and placed the case containing the stone into it. It was not exactly glamorous duty, and as she dug, she waited for a federale to arrive and ask what the hell she was doing. It never happened.
Forty minutes later, she’d dug the stone out and driven back to where Hawker, McCarter, and Yuri waited.
“Anything happen?” McCarter asked.
“Nothing,” Danielle said. “Even the radio still works.”
It concerned her, actually. Perhaps the stone had blown a fuse when it had flashed the day before.