Her wrath.
She had never felt more helpless in her entire life.
She had, almost single-handedly, wrestled control of the Gulf Cartel from men whose reputation for cruelty would have made the Lords of Xibalba quake. She commanded a veritable army of lieutenants and foot soldiers, and what she could not take by force, she could always buy. But there was not a single thing she could do to help her uncle.
Carina!
Isabella recognized the name immediately. Carina Rivera, a few years her junior, was one of Hector’s acolytes. Isabella recalled how, as a young girl, Carina had been singled out for persecution because of her red hair — a visible sign of mixed blood — but once she had embraced the ancient religion of her ancestors, joining the Serpent Brotherhood, that had all changed. She had become part of an honored tradition among the people of Maya heritage, even those like Isabella who mostly only paid lip service to the old ways.
Evidently, the prestige of being part of the Serpent Brotherhood was not enough for Carina. She wanted more. Power. Revenge, perhaps against the world that had tormented her.
Her motives did not matter to Isabella. The bitch would pay for what she was doing.
After Carina’s cold declaration, there was silence for a few seconds, and then the sickening crunch of someone — Isabella’s beloved uncle — being beaten to death. The sound of blows falling went on for a while, and she again heard the male voice — almost certainly an American — shouting, “Seriously? What’s with you people? He’s dead, and we’ve got places to go.”
“Bastante!” Carina shouted in Spanish.
The blows ceased immediately. For a few seconds, Isabella heard muffled voices, then all was silent.
Isabella’s eyes clouded over with tears as she stared at the screen of her phone. It displayed the elapsed time of the call, ticking forward relentlessly, one second at a time. She kept expecting the call to drop, but after a full minute, she realized that Carina and the others had gone, evidently unaware of the open phone line. Now there was nobody left to hang up.
It occurred to Isabella that, she would have to be the one to end the call, but she couldn’t bring herself to sever that final connection to her father’s brother.
Then she heard something. A rustling sound, movement, and then, a rasping voice. “Bella.”
The word sent a chill down her spine. “Uncle!” she sobbed. He was still alive!
“Bella. Shadow.” The words trickled out, separated by agonizingly long gaps as Hector fought to draw the breath to keep talking.
“Hang on, Uncle,” she cried out. “I’m going to call for help.”
“Too late. Stop her. Only you can. Priestess.”
“No, Uncle. Don’t say that.”
She listened as he struggled to breathe, waiting for him to tell her something more, to assure her that everything would be all right, but then he gave a long sigh and the silence returned.
CHAPTER 24
As Kasey set the helicopter down near the gravel runway of the Poptun Airport, Maddock spied a beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser emblazoned with the logo of a regional adventure-tour company. The vehicle would normally have been driven by a guide in the employ of the company, but it seemed wise to keep involvement with the locals to a minimum. Naj Tunich was a tour destination, but the cave itself was off limits to the public. Trying to arrange for permission to explore the cave would have been time-consuming and expensive, not to mention very public, so the best option was sneaking in. Not surprisingly, for the right price the tour company operator had been willing to negotiate a “self-guided tour” option. As long as Kasey and the CIA were picking up the tab, Maddock wasn’t going to complain.
Kasey stayed behind with the helicopter, standing by in the event that Maddock and the others needed a quick extraction. The cave was only about ten miles away — on the map at least — but it still took more than an hour of navigating rugged dirt roads up into the Maya Mountains to reach their destination, which was marked with a blue sign that read “Bienvenido. Sita Arqueologico: Cuevas Naj Tunich.” Because the site was relatively close to a populated area, flying directly there would have attracted unwanted attention, so driving in seemed a prudent decision, especially since their cover as Red Cross aid workers wouldn’t stand up to rigorous scrutiny. The wisdom of this decision was manifest when, as they were making the short hike into the forest to the cave entrance, Maddock heard the distinctive thump of helicopter rotors beating the sky overhead. The jungle canopy blocked his view of the sky, but he paused to listen as the sound grew louder and then gradually diminished as the aircraft passed by and continued on its way.
“That sounded close,” Angel said.
“And big,” Bones added. “Like a Chinook.”
Maddock had been thinking the same thing. Chinook was the NATO designation for the Boeing CH-47 military cargo helicopter. The two former SEALs had taken more than a few rides in the back of Chinook helicopters which were frequently used to ferry troops to and from their mission objective. With a fuselage that looked a little like a city bus under its tandem rotors, the bird had enough room for fifty passengers, and could even transport vehicles if the situation demanded.
“There’s a Guatemalan special forces training facility near Poptun. That’s probably all it is.”
Yet, despite this seeming dismissal, Maddock’s thoughts kept going back to Copán, and the red-haired woman who had somehow arrived there ahead of them. It seemed likely that she was working for Alex Scano, and Tam’s revelation that ScanoGen was operating in Honduras, at least partially explained her presence at the site, but it still seemed a little too coincidental.
The entrance appeared abruptly, rising out of the forest floor with almost no warning, a gaping shadowy fissure in the limestone, a hundred feet high and about five times as wide. Millennia of tropical rain had eroded the stone into freestanding pillars that seemed to erupt from the ground, and the hanging wall above was studded with thousands of dangling stalactites, all of which gave the impression of teeth in the gaping jaws of an enormous leviathan.
This similarity was not lost on any of them.
“The Serpent’s Maw,” Bell murmured.
Bones just shook his head. “Here we go again.”
The helicopter that had passed overhead was not technically a Chinook, but a civilian variant — with the rather prosaic designation of Model 414—one of several leased to ScanoGen Pharmaceuticals for use in their “humanitarian” mission to Honduras. The 414 was a workhorse, with none of the luxury that Alex Scano was accustomed to, but there wasn’t enough room in the executive helicopter for everyone, so just this once, Alex was riding coach. It wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat.
The security contractors were okay, if a bit intense. Carina’s men, with their teeth filed to points and their tattoos gave him the heebie-jeebies, but what was really going to give him nightmares was the way they had tenderized that old Maya dude in the jungle.
Carina had the tattoos as well, though they were mostly covered by her blouse and military-style cargo pants, but at least she hadn’t filed her teeth down. He kind of dug chicks with ink and piercings, but a mouthful of shark teeth would have been a bridge too far.
The rear cargo ramp was down, which not only allowed air to circulate through the cabin, keeping them relatively cool, but also gave the passengers a panoramic view of the landscape as it passed beneath them. For the most part, it had been an unbroken sea of green, but as they approached their destination, Alex noted a patchwork of fields and roads, and then as the helicopter made its approach to the airport, the neighborhoods of Poptun.