01-01-00 (45 page)

A couple of minutes later, armed with three lanterns, the group went in, slowly, Cameron leading and Joao trailing, their sounds amplified inside the stone chamber, echoing off the ancient walls to the rhythm of the pulsating light. A heavy feeling of dread formed in Susan's stomach as she peered at the interior. She found it difficult to breathe, feeling as if the thick walls closed in on her as she stepped away from the entrance. She forced her mind to focus, to shove her fears aside. She watched the archaeologist at work, lifting the gas lamp toward the nearest wall, shining its light onto the intricate reliefs, exposing a phenomenal mural that ran the entire length of the rear wall. The combined light from the three lamps revealed a rectangular-shaped room, roughly fifty feet wide and thirty deep.

“Hold it there,” Cameron said, the dampness chilling Susan as she stood next to him, as much surprised by the elaborate reliefs as by the serene expression on his face, on his eyes as they swept the mural, the ancient carvings. Once again, she found reassurance by being close to him.

“Dear God,” he mumbled, backing away a few steps, looking toward the left, then to the right, returning his focus to the figure in the center.

“What?” Susan asked. “What do you see?”

Cameron pointed at the far left, where a young mother was shown holding a baby surrounded by fire, flying quetzals, and feathery serpents. Common people, dressed in simple loincloths or short skirts, knelt by her feet as she held the baby toward the sun.

“That's Lady Zac-Kuk, Pacal's mother, and the famous chief himself at birth, in
A.D.
603.”

Cameron angled the hissing lantern toward the next life-size relief, showing a boy of around twelve years of age in a ceremonial gown and ornate headdress sitting on a throne, a woman with deformed features on his right. Once more commoners knelt by his feet.

“Young Pacal ruling,” Cameron said. “With mother nearby for counseling and for ratification of his power, just as described in the glyphs all around the terrace and the steps, which matches the reliefs from Palenque.”

“Why does she look like that?” asked Ishiguro, a finger pointing at the enlarged jaw and prominent brow ridge.

“Pacal's mother suffered from the clinical syndrome known as acromegaly. Her bones and soft tissue were progressively enlarged as a result of a malfunctioning pituitary gland.

“Next is an older Pacal, venerated by his people for his wisdom, fairness, and vision. Over there he is shown building the Temple of the Inscriptions. Now, this is very strange. Come,” he said, walking toward the right side of the mural.

“Pacal did die in Palenque, in
A.D.
683, as shown by this date beneath his body lying on an altar and encircled by flying quetzals. But he is never carried inside the Temple of the Inscriptions, in the tomb built especially for him and unique to all of Mesoamerica. No other Mayan edifice has ever been used as a tomb, like in Egypt, except for the Temple of the Inscriptions.”

Susan squinted, struggling to keep up with Cameron, watching the pictorials of Pacal being taken away from Palenque, away from the temple where he was supposed to be buried. “But, if Pacal was not buried there who did Ruz find in 1952? Who was in Palenque?”

Cameron nodded. “That sure explains it,” he mumbled.

“Explains what?” asked Susan.

“Remember what I told you about Mayan royalty? About how they deformed their skulls and filed their teeth?”

“Yes.”

“The mummified remains found by Alberto Ruz at the Temple of the Inscriptions had neither of those. Why was Pacal Votan, the greatest Mayan chief that ever lived, lacking the elongated skull and the filed teeth that were the norm of the day? Archaeologists have debated the question for generations. Now I finally understand why. He wasn't buried at Palenque.”

“Where was he buried then?” asked Ishiguro, standing next to Cameron now, extending the lamp toward the right-most section of the mural.

Cameron pointed at the last two pictorials, one showing a procession of men carrying a coffinlike object across the jungle, and another depicting the same group reaching a clearing in the middle of the jungle, shielded by the branches of towering trees—all surrounding a cenote.

“You mean that—”

“He's buried here,” Cameron said. “According to this last relief, and the accompanying glyphs.”

“But where?” asked Joao, stepping forward for the first time. The Mayan chief had remained in the background, but obviously listening careful. “I do not see a tomb.”

“Neither do I,” said Ishiguro, looking about, holding the lantern high in the air, washing the interior with yellow light. His wife stood beside him, also checking for a sign of a burial.

Cameron shook his head. “You got to give Pacal's subjects a little more credit than that. They wouldn't have buried him up here. If they went through so much trouble at Palenque, burying an impostor in a chamber that was four floors belowground, they certainly would have done something similar here, where apparently the real Pacal was buried—again, according to the glyphs.”

“But where?” asked Susan.

Cameron also looked about, grinning as he pointed at yet another matrix of numbers, on the far right side of the room, adjacent to the 3-D pictorial of the Maya carrying Pacal's body to this site. “There's our next safe, and its combination is probably also booby-trapped.”

Approaching it, Susan saw to her relief that the numbering sequence appeared to be the same as the one outside. “Same key for both locks?”

Cameron didn't reply, rubbing the stubble on his chin while regarding the array, also thirteen down by twenty across.

Susan jotted them down on her engineering notebook anyway, taking a few minutes to complete the array.

“Slightly different,” she said, noting that the unique number in each quadrant was shifted one quadrant in the clockwise direction. “Nifty little trick, to see if you're paying attention.”

“That's the Maya, always taxing the human mind. And if I know anything about their way of thinking, my guess is that the wrong combination will immediately shut the main door, trapping us inside. We would be dead from asphyxiation within a couple of hours. So just in case I do get it wrong, why don't you all wait outside? That way, if I get trapped inside, not only will I last longer, but you can dial the combination again to reopen the door.”

Ishiguro and Jackie nodded, stepping outside. Joao followed them out, leaving his lantern on the floor. Susan remained put, grabbing Joao's lantern.

“No way I can talk you out of it, huh?”

She smiled and shrugged. “We're a team, remember?”

He didn't reply, pressing his palm against the first number. It caved. He followed with the second, third, and fourth.

The massive slab to the side of the entryway moved back with alacrity, almost as if it were spring-loaded, giving Cameron and Susan no time to react and try to sneak out of the room. At once, vaultlike, the accurately cut stone slammed shut, a tire-deflating sound marking its airtightness, sealing the entrance, leaving the scientists staring at one another in the glowing yellow light.

The walloping sound had an air of permanency that made Susan's skin goose-bump. She rubbed her hands over her forearms. “What are we going to do?” Her voice was now amplified by the acoustic resonance of the large anteroom.

“Conserve oxygen.” Cameron immediately dimmed his lantern and switched off Susan's.

The sudden murkiness did not feel reassuring, further inciting a panic that she struggled to control, something about being locked inside hundreds of tons of ancient stone with no apparent way out. “Do you have matches to light it back up again if we need it?”

“Ex-smokers always carry a lighter,” he said, adding while grimacing, “I guess I guessed wrong.”

Susan opened her mouth to reply but was instead momentarily jolted by the now-familiar rumbling noise, like rock against concrete. “I—I don't think you did,” she said, a trembling finger pointing at the floor to their right, a five-foot square of shiny limestone began to sink, exposing a passageway.

Cameron approached her, putting a hand to her face. “Relax, would you? I'll be the first to tell you when to start praying, all right?”

She nodded.

When all motion ceased, Cameron and Susan slowly, cautiously, approached the gap on the floor, the glowing lantern leading the way.

“Steps,” she said, noticing a stairway heading down into the darkness. A dry and cool draft of air rose out of the hole. “The Maya
were
quite clever.”

“Now you're getting the picture.”

“If I really
had
the picture we wouldn't be trapped.”

He glanced at her with that scholarly-like look that always conveyed a sense of control. In her current predicament, Susan appreciated it, for it brought comfort in this cold and dead place. “Who says we're trapped?”

Susan regarded him quizzically, not certain what to think sometimes.
“Sweetheart,”
she said, “the main door is
shut.
Get it? Closed. Locked. I call
that
being trapped.”

“We're not trapped until we can't move forward anymore. That way,” he said, extending a thumb over his shoulder, toward the temple's blocked entrance, “is going
back,
not forward.”

“Have I told you how
strangely
you think sometimes, Cameron Slater?”

“Have I told you how
tempting
you look in the dim light of a Mesoamerican temple?”

She couldn't help a laugh, which brought a sense of relief in spite of her growing fear of being trapped in this place, like the ancient wives of pharaohs, buried alive to be with their husbands in the afterlife. The thought struck her as ludicrous, until she also thought of her life following Tom's death. For all practical purposes she might as well have been in the coffin with him.

Susan took a deep breath of the dead air rising out of the hole, pointing at the darkness projecting beyond the first few steps. “I'm right behind you, honey.”

“Count them as you go. I'll do the same,” he said, holding the lantern in front of him as he took the first step.

4

“They're trapped!” Jackie said, standing on the terrace, running her hands against the hairline crack between the massive limestone slab and the walls. “How are we going to get them out?”

Ishiguro turned to Joao, who shook his head. “My job was to protect the priests. I was trained for that since birth. I have no knowledge of the inner workings of this structure. I'll have one of my men go back to the village and check on the high priest. Maybe he has awakened.”

While Joao shouted something at one of the Mayan warriors guarding the site, the Japanese astrophysicist looked about him, not knowing what do to. Cameron Slater and Susan Garnett were the real experts here, and they were currently trapped inside the temple, running out of air.

He turned to the mosaics, but found the four numbers of the combination still depressed. The stone shifting back had not reset the combination lock. Checking his Casio, he clicked the digital chronograph. Cameron had estimated no more than an hour for all of them, meaning that he and Susan had probably three hours at the outside.

“Come,” he told Jackie. “Let's go set up our equipment. Perhaps we can be of help by picking up clues from tonight's event.”

“I don't like this,” Jackie said. “I feel like we're just abandoning them. Poor Susan must be panic-stricken in there.”

Ishiguro took his wife's hand. “She's in the best possible hands. If I were to be trapped inside one of these, what better friend to have on your side than a seasoned archaeologist? Now come, I got the feeling that Cameron and Susan are hard at work in there. We also have work to do. We'll come back in a half hour or so, to see if something has changed.”

With a reluctant backward glance at the colossal limestone slab blocking the entryway, Jackie Nakamura followed her husband out of the terrace.

Chapter Twenty

01-01-00

1

December 18, 1999

The walls flanking the ancient staircase came alive under the glowing light from Cameron's lantern, his archaeological eyes taking in the beauty of the intricate chiseled work that had turned vertical slabs of rock into stunning murals depicting various facets of the life of the Maya's chief ruler, atop a ceremonial altar, sitting on his throne, presiding over a game of
pokatok.

Cameron thought of Alberto Ruz Lhullier, the man who discovered Pacal Votan's first crypt in Palenque back in 1952. He thought of the excitement, of the fear, of the breathless anticipation that must have gone through Ruz's mind as he first descended down steps similar to these, toward the heart of an edifice from another time, from another culture, during a very different period in history.