“Cute, but I’m not sure I’d get very far with that recommendation based on what little actual evidence we’ve got. But if you can get me something concrete, I’ll send in the Marines and a great big bucket of napalm.”
He sighed. “I’ll talk to Bell. Maybe there’s something we missed.”
“I’ll have Kasey stick with you for the duration. I’m sorry I can’t do more.”
“Right. But just so we’re clear, you—”
The phone beeped in his ear, indicating that Tam had hung up.
“Owe me one,” he finished, shaking his head.
Bones shook his head in mock despair. “She suckered you in again, didn’t she?”
Maddock ignored him and turned to Bell.
“I heard you mention ScanoGen,” Bell said. “They’re one of my most generous sponsors. Is that a problem?”
“It might be,” Maddock admitted. “When you wrote your grant proposal, did you share your theory about the Lords of Xibalba representing a plague?”
“It’s the central thesis of my work.”
“Well, that explains why you had no trouble getting them to fund your research. It sounds like Alex Scano is trying to find a way to weaponize the Shadow fungus.” He threw a glance in Bones’ direction. “You might get your Maya apocalypse after all. Just a few years late.”
“Please, tell me you didn’t just volunteer us to go looking for it,” Bones replied.
“We just need a location.” He turned back to Bell. “The exact location of Xibalba.”
“So you can destroy it?” Bell put a hand on Maddock’s forearm. “There’s more to the story of Xibalba than just the plague. In the myth, the Hero Twins journeyed to the Underworld to defeat the Lords of Death. And they escaped alive.”
“Defeat?”
“Xibalba isn’t just the source of the Shadow. It’s also where we’ll find the means to stop it.”
Maddock felt as if a light had just been switched on. “Now it all makes sense,” he murmured. “Scano already has his bioweapon. The only thing he’s missing is the cure. We have to find it first.”
Angel made a face. “Does that mean we’re going back in there?”
“We must have missed something yesterday,” Bell said, nodding. “According to the Popol Vuh, after passing through the three rivers, a person seeking to enter Xibalba would reach a crossroads — four roads that would try to confuse and trick the pilgrim. And once past that, they would enter the council place of the Lords of Xibalba.”
“The stelae?”
“That’s what I thought at first, but maybe we made a wrong turn somewhere without realizing it. In the legend, the Lords tried to trick travelers with lifelike effigies. Maybe that’s what those stelae were — false choices.”
“Crossroads,” Miranda murmured.
Maddock turned to her. “You got something?”
“Maybe.” She knelt and took out her laptop computer. “I noticed this when I was reviewing the footage from my GoPro. It didn’t seem important at the time, but… ”
She trailed off as the video file began playing. She fast-forwarded to the moment where they descended the stairs into the courtyard with the ten stelae, and then slowed the replay to one-quarter speed. After a few seconds of this, she stopped and reversed back a few frames. “There.”
Maddock studied the frozen image, which captured all ten of the statues representing the Lords of Xibalba. “The stelae. What am I supposed to be looking for?”
“Not the stelae,” she said. “The floor. Don’t you see it?”
Maddock shifted his focus to the shadowy textures of the decorated floor. At a glance, it looked identical to the repeating patterns they had seen in the other chambers of the pyramid. Bell however immediately saw what his daughter was talking about.
“It’s a map!”
Maddock squinted, but it wasn’t until Bell traced the image with a finger that the outline of a landmass came into focus. It was subtle, and impossible to see except at a distance, but it was there, filling up the entire vast chamber. “That’s the Yucatan.”
Bell nodded enthusiastically. “Not just the Yucatan. Most of Mexico and Central America is represented here. This is unprecedented. There are no known examples of cartography in pre-Columbian antiquity.”
“No maps at all?” Bones said. “How did they know where to go?”
“They obviously did have maps,” Bell said. “The Spanish must have destroyed them all. But as far as getting around is concerned, the Maya, like the Roman Empire, built roads. They called them sacbeob: ‘white roads.’” He shifted his finger, tracing lines on different parts of the image. Against the backdrop of the map, the enormous stela, seemed small and insignificant. “The white roads connected the major commercial and religious centers. Here’s Copán.” He tapped more spots on the screen, which Maddock now recognized as distinctive glyphs like the star sign they had seen in the El Caracol observatory at Chichén Itzá.
“I’ve seen ancient maps,” Angel said. “They don’t look anything like what we have today. How did the ancient Maya get such an accurate picture of the Yucatan?”
“Just like the Nazca lines,” Bones said. “It’s easy to see from up in the sky.”
“The Maya were expert mathematicians and astronomers,” Bell said, patiently. “They had centuries to make precise observations and calculations.”
Miranda rolled her eyes. “Please don’t tell me you guys buy into that ancient alien astronaut crap.”
Angel’s face tightened as she fought to hold back laughter. Maddock just grinned. “Do the stelae mark our present location?”
Bell ran the video forward several minutes to the point in time where they had examined the carvings up close, then froze it again and pointed to a tile near the statues. “There. That’s the glyph for Serpens. The Serpents Maw.”
“Also known as Ciudad de Sombre.”
“If this is accurate, they’re actually marking a spot a bit to the south of where we are. And there’s a second road system leading directly here from each of the capitals.”
“Black roads?” Maddock suggested.
Bell nodded. “It’s as good a name as any. And here… ” He traced another line leading into the circle of statues. “This is the route to Xibalba.”
“Wait, so now you’re saying the City of Shadow isn’t the entrance to Xibalba?”
That took Bell’s enthusiasm down a notch. He ducked his head in embarrassment. “Evidently, I misinterpreted the legend in that respect. Ciudad de Sombre is the gateway to the Underworld in a figurative sense, but not the literal entrance.”
“Sort of like St. Louis is the gateway to the west,” Bones muttered. “So where do we go next?”
“Not far, I should think.” Bell tapped the image of the stelae. “This is somewhere in the Petén region, south of Tikal. A hundred miles or so. Unfortunately, this could represent an area of several hundred square miles.”
“So the map really isn’t going to help much.”
“Unless I’m mistaken, the purpose of this map was to instruct travelers to follow the black road. I’d be willing to bet that road starts right where we came out of the temple yesterday.”
“Only the road is completely overgrown now.”
“The white roads were discovered and mapped by NASA, using remote sensing and GIS technology,” Bell said, hopefully. “Perhaps we can do the same.”
“It’s gonna take more than Google Earth,” Maddock said. “Looks like I’m going to owe Jimmy a whole case of Wild Turkey.”
“One case?” The long distance Skype connection in no way diminished the disdain in Jimmy Letson’s nasally voice. “Maddock, you’re so far in debt to me that I’ll die of alcohol poisoning if I let you pay me in booze.”