Costas was already seated at the computer beside the chart table. “Okay. We’re on line. Address?” Ben read it out and Costas tapped the keyboard. “Password?”
Ben hesitated, then glanced at Jack. “Menorah.”
Costas let out a low whistle. “Well, that gives the game away.”
Jack’s knuckles were white as he gripped Costas’ chair, and his voice was hoarse. “We guessed who we were up against. This confirms it.”
“It’s addressed to you, Jack.” Costas leaned aside to let Jack read the short email that had appeared on the screen.
To: Jack Howard
You and Kazantzakis will arrive by Zodiac at 2300 this evening at the beach landing point you visited this morning. Bring cave diving equipment. You will blindfold yourselves and await our arrival. Any attempt to involve security or make contact with an outside body and your colleague will be executed.
“Maria’s alive,” Jack breathed. “Thank God.”
“The beach landing point,” Ben murmured. “Doesn’t surprise me they knew where we were. Probably the Mexican police. If it’s Reksnys, he’ll have prying eyes everywhere along this coast.”
“And cave gear,” Costas murmured. “What the hell’s that all about? I’m not going cave diving while it’s raining. All the air pockets will flood.”
“They must have found something,” Jack said.
“That password?”
“I truly hope not.”
“Maria’s somewhere here, near us,” Ben said. “They must have flown her in from Iona. Reksnys has a private jet, and his own runway in the jungle. It’s one of the few things you can’t disguise from satellite surveillance. And he must have known Seaquest II was on the way here even before they hit Iona.”
“My guess is the hit was a one-man show,” Jack said bleakly.
“Loki.”
“We’ve been sent a photo. Better prepare ourselves.” Costas clicked on an attachment below the message, and a picture began to download. It had been taken with a flash inside some kind of chamber with an irregular stone floor and old walls covered in green growth. As the image opened they could see a figure slumped on the floor, a woman. It was horrifying, an image of torture, the kind of image that leaked out of Iraq and untold Third World hellholes. She was filthy, wearing a clinging T-shirt partly ripped open over her breasts. Her dark hair was matted to her neck, and her arms were streaked with green from the floor. She had been trying to look at the camera but had flinched in the flash. Her eyes were puffed up and closed, her mouth flecked with white, and she had an ugly abrasion over her cheekbone which was oozing blood and pus.
Jack felt a lurching shock of recognition. “Maria.” He felt physically sick. His hands slipped off the back of the chair and he sat down heavily on the bench beside it. As he looked at the image again, his horror turned to anger, to seething rage.
The captain appeared at the door. “Message from Iona. There’s a police forensics guy who’s been allowed to talk to us.” He saw the screen, faltered.
“Coming.” Jack’s voice was cold, emotionless.
Ten minutes later Jack was back in the control room. It was empty except for Jeremy; Macleod and Lanowski had left for the bridge deck a few minutes before. Jeremy was still at his screen, working quietly, printing images from the web and bookmarking pages of Toltec art. Above him the window was flecked with the first lashings of rain, and Jack could see that the weather was deteriorating rapidly. He paused, feeling utterly drained from what he had just heard, looked again at Jeremy, then made his way through the consoles. He did not know how to break the news. He pulled up a chair and flipped it round to sit with his back to the window, then looked intently at Jeremy’s images.
“Good work,” he said quietly. “I could never have interpreted this stuff. I didn’t do Mesoamerican archaeology like you.”
“I’ve made one really interesting discovery.” Jeremy passed Jack a sheet of paper. “You remember the ancient Aztec prophecy about the return of the god-king Quetzalcoatl? When the Spanish arrived in Tenochtitlan in central Mexico in 1519, the emperor Moctezuma thought Cortes was Quetzalcoatl. It’s one reason the Spanish conquest happened so quickly.”
“Go on.”
“Well, Quetzalcoatl was a Toltec, a semi-legendary king. According to Aztec legend at the time of Moctezuma, he’d been exiled from their kingdom five centuries before, and promised to return from the land of the rising sun.”
“Five centuries before,” Jack mused. “That puts it in the eleventh century, smack in our period.”
“Right. The land of the rising sun, due east from the Aztec heartland in the vale of Mexico, was almost certainly the Yucatan peninsula. There’s some historical corroboration for this, because that’s about the time the Toltecs invaded Chichen Itza.”
Jack looked hard at Jeremy, began to speak, then decided to let him carry on.
“It gets really intriguing when you look at the Maya sources,” Jeremy said. “What we know of the final years of the Maya comes mainly from the Books of Chilam Balam, the Jaguar Prophet, mostly written down by local scribes in the Latin alphabet after the Spanish conquest. The books were hidden away and jealously guarded. Each one relates to a different community in the north Yucatan, a bit like the Norse sagas in Iceland. One of the most extraordinary prophecies concerns the arrival of bearded men from the east.”
“Bearded men?”
“You follow me? A lot of scholars have dismissed this as a later embellishment. Some of the books weren’t written down until the eighteenth or even nineteenth century. But another book’s just come to light, in the Vatican archives in Rome, of all places. It looks like the earliest of them all, partly written in Maya script, apparently confiscated by the first Jesuit missionaries in the Yucatan in the sixteenth century. It contains the legends and prophecies of the Maya community north of Chichen Itza. There’s the same story of bearded men, but with a twist. In this one they have a king, and he fights a great battle with the oppressors of the Maya, presumably the Toltecs. Then he disappears into the underworld, and the Maya await his return. It may be the origin of the Quezalcoatl prophecy of the Aztecs, except in the Maya story he’s called Wukub Kaqix, the monstrous bird-diety, the eagle-god.”
Jack glanced at a picture of the jade pendant pinned beside the monitor. “Pretty standard image around here.”
“But also the name of Harald Hardrada’s ship, the Eagle. In the Norse sagas there are some hints that when the Vikings burnt their boats, went to war with no intention of returning, they sometimes cut off the stems of the ships and carried them forward like battle standards. It was a signal that they would fight to the death, that they were on a one-way trip to Valhalla. It was a way of striking fear into the hearts of their enemies. Maybe that’s what happened here, and the local Maya saw it.”
“Fantastic. This is fantastic, Jeremy. This is just what we’re looking for.” Jack suddenly leaned forward and put his head in his hands, all pretence at bonhomie gone. He could keep it from Jeremy no longer. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. We’ve had news from Iona.”
“I know.” Jeremy spoke softly, and put down the book he had been holding. Jack gazed up at him. He looked a world older than the ebullient graduate student he had first met the week before. “I knew from the moment I heard O’Connor had been murdered. He spoke of it, prepared me for it. I know what happened in Iona.” Jeremy paused, tried to speak, then the words came out as a hoarse whisper. “The blood-eagle.”
18
I T WAS WELL PAST MIDNIGHT, PROBABLY PUSHING ONE in the morning. It had already been dark when Jack and Costas had slipped away from Seaquest II and driven the Zodiac ashore, reaching the beach rendezvous point well before the appointed time. All Jack could hear now was the incessant drumming of the rain, the sound rising in a crescendo and falling again as each downpour swept over them. The humidity was stifling. He knew he was in a small vehicle, a four-wheel drive by the sound of it, hunched in the backseat beside Costas. For what seemed an eternity but was probably only half an hour they had been jostling and bouncing along a rough track, heading somewhere into the jungle from the beach. The injury to Jack’s thigh was throbbing. They had followed their instructions scrupulously and waited blindfolded beside the Zodiac with their diving equipment. Their captor had come without a word, bustling them into the vehicle without revealing anything about himself, about where they were going. It was unnerving, but Jack felt reassured having Costas bumping along beside him cursing every rut and pothole.