Anyway, right now there was one thing he did know.
The answers to all their questions lay over the mountains, somewhere in the jungles of Guatemala.
He floored the gas.
Chapter 13
The highway south of Villahermosa wasn’t as good as the one they’d come in on. It shrank from four lanes to two, with no shoulders, and the pavement was cracked and buckled in places. Traffic was sparse. The Mexican state of Chiapas was one of the most dangerous places in the country. Some farming went on there, but the roving gangs that called themselves rebels filled the region, as Cierra had pointed out. Down here in the southernmost part of Mexico, lawlessness was the main industry.
This was where the rusty old pickup would come in handy, Gabriel thought. As long as they were driving it, they wouldn’t look like they had much worth stealing.
Cierra didn’t say anything more about Mariella Montez, for which Gabriel was grateful. She talked instead about General Fargo.
“According to what Señor Montez told us, the general didn’t come down here simply to find a refuge from the Union troops. He was looking for something specific, something valuable.”
Gabriel nodded. “Any ideas what it might be?”
“Guatemala was the birthplace of the Mayan Empire,” Cierra said. “It spread from there into Chiapas and the Yucatan. Archaeologists have found gold and jeweled artifacts in the abandoned Mayan cities, but nothing fabulously valuable, at least not that I ever heard of.”
Gabriel tugged at his earlobe and then ran a thumbnail down his jawline as he frowned in thought. “Let’s assume there really was some sort of treasure that Fargo was going after. How did he hear about it? He was all the way up there in Florida fighting the Yankees.”
“Could he have visited Guatemala before the war?”
“I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t recall seeing anything about a trip to Guatemala in the biographical sketch of him at the battlefield.”
“There might not have been a mention of it.”
“I got the sense that he was a Georgia boy born and bred; a trip down south for him would’ve meant Tallahasse or Jacksonville.” Gabriel thought about it some more, then said, “I don’t think he’d been here before the war. And I think we can assume he drew the map on the flag before he came down here after the war. He’d have chosen some other place to hide it if he’d drawn it after the war ended. Hiding it on the flag only makes sense if he was still using the flag, if it was a natural thing for him to be carrying around with him.”
“I suppose,” Cierra said.
“And if it was a map of a place he’d never been, he couldn’t have drawn it from life or from memory—he must have copied it from another map. Of course, that raises the question of why he didn’t just take the other map with him.”
“Maybe he preferred a hidden map to one out in the open that someone else could find and steal from him. Maybe he destroyed the other map after copying it onto the flag.”
“Maybe,” Gabriel said. “Or maybe he couldn’t take the other map with him for some reason.”
“Like what?”
Thinking once more of the Mugalik Emperor’s tomb, he said, “It could have been painted on a wall. For instance.”
Cierra nodded. “So at some point during the war he found this other map, and he copied it onto the flag, either because he couldn’t take the original with him or because he didn’t want to. Where does that leave us?”
“In the middle of Chiapas,” Gabriel said, “with a hundred-forty-year-old map to follow and no idea what we’ll find at the end of it.”
As they wound through the mountain passes that afternoon, other vehicles became even more scarce. They saw more mule-drawn wagons and carts than they did other trucks and cars. The road was only intermittently paved, with long stretches of it now being gravel or plain dirt. There were plenty of places where Gabriel could look around and see no signs whatever that they weren’t still in the nineteenth century.
That wasn’t all that unusual to him, though. He had spent much of his life in far-off, out-of-the-way places where modern civilization was a rumor at best. People liked to think that the entire world had been tamed, that modern technology now reached to all four corners of the globe. They didn’t know just how wrong they were.
Bluish gray mountains rose around them as they neared the border crossing from Mexico to Guatemala. Smoke curled from a few of the summits, indicating that those peaks were active volcanoes. They were entering the territory depicted in the map hidden on General Fargo’s flag, Gabriel thought. So far they hadn’t had any trouble.
Naturally, that couldn’t last.
They had just rounded a sharp bend in the road where a steep slope dropped off to the left and another slope rose to the right. Gabriel had to hit the brakes to bring the pickup to an abrupt halt before it ran into an old truck parked across the road. He had time to guess it was a deuce-and-a-half, military surplus, before men came out from behind the rocks at the side of the road and pointed rifles at him and Cierra.
“I knew it!” she said. “I knew we couldn’t make it without—”
“Take it easy,” Gabriel advised in a low voice. “It’s all right to let them see that you’re scared, but don’t panic. Maybe they’ll see that we don’t have anything they want and let us go.”
“They’ll take our supplies, at least.”
“We can get more supplies. What matters is coming through this alive.”
“Out of the truck, amigo!” one of the men said, gesturing curtly with the barrel of his rifle for emphasis. The weapon was probably military surplus, too, but it wasn’t a modern assault rifle—not unless you considered a World War I–era boltaction Springfield modern.
None of the roughly dressed men were well-armed, Gabriel saw as he opened the driver’s door and slid out with his hands up. Several of them had old rifles, a few brandished revolvers, and a couple seemed to be armed with nothing more than machetes.
He motioned for Cierra to follow him out the driver’s side rather than opening the passenger door. That kept the pickup’s body between them and most of the bandits. The steep slope down was at their backs. They might be able to make their way down it if they had to, Gabriel thought, but they’d have to go slowly and could easily be picked off if they tried.
“Come on around here where we can see you,” the spokesman ordered. “And don’t try anything funny. Keep your hands where we can see them.”
“We don’t want any trouble,” Gabriel said in Spanish as he moved to comply with the command. “My wife and I are going to her family in Guatemala.”
The leader of the bandits shook his head. “She don’t look Guatemalan.” He squinted at Gabriel. “Nor do you. And I don’t think you’re Mexican, either. I think you’re a damn gringo.”
Gabriel bit back a curse. He hadn’t seriously expected to pass for Mexican, but he knew that the bandits would be even less likely to let them go now that they knew he wasn’t. They might think he was a good candidate to hold for ransom, simply because he was American.