“I suspected the guide glyphs were leading us here,” Bell said. “We’re in the section called the Cave of the Underworld. The Naj Tunnel leads out of here and back to a cavern called ‘the Quiet Way.’ But this… ” He gestured to the vertical shaft. “This was the sacrificial well. A cenote of sorts. A passage into the Underworld.”
“A regular highway to Hell,” Bones muttered.
“I suppose if you were at the bottom of it, you’d call it a stairway to Heaven. The Maya thought of caves as both. They believed that at night, the sun descended into a cave in the west, traveled underground and then emerged from another in the east at dawn. As you can imagine, it’s not a place where mortals are exactly welcome. To the best of my knowledge, only one expedition has reached the bottom, and they were only able to spend a few minutes down there.”
“Why?” Angel asked.
“I believe one of their team members was injured, forcing them to hasten their exit. There was also a problem with the air. High carbon dioxide levels, possibly from some decaying organic matter.”
Maddock had anticipated this problem when Bell had first mentioned the five hundred foot deep shaft earlier in the day. In addition to all their other gear, he had brought along a low-tech CO2 detector — a cheap disposable cigarette lighter he’d picked up in Belize City. He took it out and spun the wheel with his thumb, producing a bright yellow flame. “Old caver trick,” he said. “As long as it’s burning yellow, there’s enough oxygen in the air. If the flame burns blue, we might have to turn back.”
Angel leaned out over the shaft and made a face. “You know, we probably shouldn’t have left poor Kasey all by herself at the airport. Is it too late to change my mind about this?”
Maddock just blew her a kiss.
They had brought along two SCUBA rigs and a single bottle of compressed air, just in case it proved necessary to swim through flooded passages. In a pinch, they could buddy breathe, just as they had done in the City of Shadow, but the supply wouldn’t last long enough for a prolonged excursion. If they ran into befouled air, they would probably have to cut their investigations short. Maddock doubted it would be a problem as long as the was air moving up from the depths.
With help from Miranda, who had almost as much rope training as a SEAL, Maddock and Bones rigged up a fixed line — the first of several pitches that would be required to reach the bottom. There was a reason the passage had confounded earlier expeditions. They would be descending about forty-five stories — half the height of the Eiffel Tower — and getting down would be the easy part. They had brought along over a thousand feet of rope, which when combined with the rest of the climbing equipment and the SCUBA gear, represented a lot of weight. Fortunately, they wouldn’t have to pack it any further.
He just hoped Bell’s remark about mortals not being welcome in the Underworld would not prove too prophetic. Descending the shaft might well prove to be the easiest part of the day.
CHAPTER 25
If Angel had chosen to rejoin Kasey Kim, she would not have had to go very far. Kasey was still by herself, but she was not at the airport. She was, in fact, racing up the mountain road toward Naj Tunich.
Just thirty minutes after Maddock and the others had set out for the remote archaeological site, a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron had touched down at the airstrip. Kasey had watched with only mild curiosity as the plane taxied down the gravel runway, but decided it might be worthwhile to call Tam with the plane’s tail numbers, just in case. While she was waiting for the ID, an SUV drove out to meet the plane’s lone occupant, an attractive dark-haired woman that kind of looked like Penelope Cruz. What piqued Kasey’s interest however was the woman’s attire; she wore tigerstripe pattern camouflage fatigues. So did the men who got out of the SUV to meet her.
To the best of Kasey’s knowledge, no army or law enforcement group in Central America was using tigerstripe camo, but it was readily available on the civilian market, and sometimes used by agencies and organizations with the freedom to pick their own gear — the CIA for example.
The plane belonged to a shell company with an address in Wilmington, Delaware, which Tam informed her was believed to be a front for the Yucatan-Gulf Cartel, and the woman who looked like Penelope Cruz was none other than the Cartel’s current leader, Isabella Beltran. She was definitely not one of the good guys, but as far as Tam knew, she had no connection to ScanoGen.
Nevertheless, Kasey’s curiosity was growing. All were dressed up for action and in a hurry, and that was enough to make her want to know more. She took the parabolic microphone from her surveillance kit and decided to listen in on their conversation. The portable eavesdropping device had a range of up to three hundred feet, but she only managed to catch a few words before they all got in the SUV and took off.
One word had stood out from the rest.
Cueva.
Cave.
The descent was tedious, but not as difficult as Maddock had anticipated. He let Miranda play mother hen to her father, and focused on making sure the pitches were securely anchored to the limestone. This far from the surface, they couldn’t afford any mistakes.
The last hundred feet or so were the hardest, with the shaft narrowing to an uncomfortably tight squeeze between walls slick with mud, but at the bottom, the cavern opened into a bulb-shaped chamber. The floor was covered with an ankle-deep layer of thick mud. If, as Bell had suggested, the Maya had thrown sacrifices into the shaft, then there were probably hundreds of shattered skeletons compressed into the sediment beneath him, not to mention a fortune in gold jewelry. Maddock however was more interested in the opening at the back of the cavern, and the barely discernible guide glyph etched into the damp stone.
After everyone was down, and Bones had made the obligatory joke about naked mud wrestling, they headed into the passage, which meandered up at a gentle incline for about a hundred feet before emptying into a round chamber, and an apparent dead end.
There were no visible exits, but a quick look around suggested there was a lot more to the room than was evident at first glance. The chamber was almost perfectly circular, and the circumference was adorned with several high relief carvings of very familiar looking figures seated on thrones.
“The Lords of Xibalba,” Bell said, confirming what Maddock had already deduced.
“There were ten Lords in the City of Shadow.” Maddock swept the room, performing a quick head count. “I count twenty here.”
“This is the Council of the Death Lords. It was a test for travelers wanting to enter the Houses of Xibalba. The Lords sat alongside mannequins designed to confuse the arriving supplicants. The only way to gain entry to the Houses was to greet the Lords by name. They also tried to trick the travelers into sitting on a bench that was actually a hot cooking stone.”
“Nice,” Bones remarked. “And why exactly did the Maya worship these guys?”
“To get the cure to the Shadow disease,” snapped Miranda. “I guess you haven’t been paying attention.”
Bones tilted his head to look down at her. “I ask a lot of rhetorical questions. I guess you haven’t been paying attention.”
Maddock ignored their exchange and brought both his flashlight and his attention back to the recess with the low shelf, directly opposite the passage through which they had entered. “That kind of looks like a bench,” he said.