In the Courts of the Sun (74 page)

“What’s going on?” Ana’s voice asked him.
“It’s not great,” he said. “I think Tyndall is sending some scouts. Maybe they talked to the Belize base already.”
“Shit.”
“They all think we’re the other side, though.”
“Great,” she said. “Okay, what do you think?”
“I think we’re going to get our picture taken,” he said.
“Shit.” Evidently they’d still been planning to try to bring the aircraft back to the Stake.
“Gimmie a second,” Ana said. “How far to the A boat?”
“About, uh, one point five minutes. It’s at Northeast Cay.”
I widened my map window. It showed at least twelve other jets and helicopters coming in, including two British F-22 Raptors from Belize.
“We’ve got about four point five minutes,” the WSO said. He meant before the next hostile interception.
There was a short, heavy pause.
“Okay,” Ana said. She got on PAGE ALL. “All right, everybody listen up. We’re going to scuttle this craft.”
“Wait a second,” the pilot said. For once he sounded a little flustered. He probably wasn’t used to throwing good stuff away.
“This is not going to affect anyone’s salary, combat bonus, or other benefits,” Ana said. “Anyway, that’s the only option, otherwise we might as well just land in Miami and see if they get us out of jail by Christmas.”
“No, at that rate we can just forget the whole thing. Jed has to be at the Stake to interpret the data. Get LW on the phone, he’ll say the same thing.”
“Come on,” Ana said, apparently to the pilot.
“Okay,” the pilot said. “Let’s do it.”
“Right.”
“We’re getting marker from Alpha Duck, you want to hail?”
“Just scramble all of them and tell them to go for the raft beepers.
Not
this aircraft. And that’s going to be our last transmission. They’ll find us. Right?”
“Right.”
“Listen, though, it has to look like a hit.”
“Why, for the insurance?” he asked.
“Right. Why, are you telling anybody?”
“No, no. . . .”
“Great,” Ana said. We headed due northeast over Laurence Rock and then Ranguana Cay, a pair of paramecium-shaped nodes in a long chain of that limpid living green reef color.
“We don’t have a self-destruct mechanism,” the WSO said.
“But you do have detonators, right?” Ana asked.
“Yeah. Two.”
“So, just use one of those to light some gas.”
“There aren’t any fuel cells up here,” the WSO said. “Uh . . . maybe I can drill into the lube.”
“That’s a great idea,” she said. “Okay. Fine. What are the waves like?”
“Five feet,” the WSO said. “No caps.”
“Air temperature?”
“Seventy-four. The wind’s fifteen at forty.”
“Water temperature?”
“Sixty.”
“Okay. Gendo?”
“Officer?”
“Just set the auto to take us low and slow over the A boat.”
“HUA,” the pilot, whose code name, it had finally turned out, was Gendo, said.
“Don’t let the fucker get into Cuba air, though.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Uh, make sure it doesn’t come down on anybody,” Marena piped up.
“We’ll do what we can,” he snipped. He brought our speed down by two hundred kph. We crossed over the Silk Cays into the Mar de las Antillas, out toward the dark purple line of the Gulf Stream at the ceramic horizon.
“Everybody up and ready,” Ana said. “Helmets off.”
I got the thing off. It had a ventilator, but even so my head was dripping with sweat and the air felt icy on my near baldness. Marena, Lisuarte, Michael, Hitch, Grgur, and I all blinked at each other, wondering which of us had vomited. We were decelerating fast. Ana pushed past us from the back. She’d gotten a little cordless Sawzall out of a locker, and she climbed forward into the cabin next to the WSO.
“Be sure to erase the other disks,” she said to him. She started sawing into a slot in the overhead instrument panel, like she was opening a can.
I couldn’t see our speed without the helmet and looked for it on the instrument panel, but I couldn’t find it. Still, it seemed like we were down to less than twenty miles per hour.
“Everyone out of your harnesses,” Ana said over a loudspeaker. “And get into the vests. And be sure your earbuds are in.”
“Come on, Jed, let’s go, okay?” Marena said. After a few tries we got me out of my seat. She helped me into a thin yellow vest. It felt like she was changing my diaper. She handed me pair of regular sailing goggles. Finally she found a sort of bicycle-helmet-looking helmet, with a little beacon light on the top, and put me into that. I noticed that everybody else already had one on.
“Keep your earbud on, right?” Marena said. “And leave the channel open so you can talk with the rest of the team. Okay?”
“Right,” I said. “Team.” I realized that even though I was understanding things as clearly as I ever did, I wasn’t moving very well. I guess I’m just really tired, I thought. Sex, uppers, downers, an all-nighter, a fair amount of stress. Well, I’ll grab a nap in the raft. No prob. Michael—who, it now seemed, knew something about aircraft—squeezed past me, dragging two big yellow bales that would expand into deluxe life rafts with collapsible oars and even little outboard motors with a mile’s worth of fuel. Ana came back from the cockpit with what looked like a chunk of crumbly gray insulation. I guessed it was the hard drive from the flight recorder. She sat on the floor, hunched over it, dug a little plastic box out of the center, and started jabbing at it with a screwdriver. Michael maneuvered the raft bales around the collapsed loading cage and carabinered them to a handle over the port-side door, which I guessed was how we were leaving.
Ana stood up.
“Okay,” she said, “everybody hear me?”
Everybody did.
“Ready to bail? Headgear okay? Okay. The order’s going to be raft one with Gendo. Then Asuka and Pen-Pen go
immediately
after that. Then Akagi and Kozo. Then Raft Two with Zepp. Then Marduk and Shiro. Then me. That’s five in raft one and four in raft two. Got it?”
I guess everyone had it. The WSO pushed through us, heading aft. He crouched down way in the back, yanked a panel off the floor, and started fiddling with something.
“Okay,” Ana said. “Remember, even after we’re all on board we’re going to transfer to C boat as soon as we can,” she said. “So keep your gear on. Understood?”
Yes, everyone more or less indicated.
“Your vests are gonna inflate automatically when they get wet. Otherwise blow in the little dick. You all know how to drop out backward?”
Silence.
“Like on Jacques Cousteau,” she said. “Anybody have a problem with that? Pen-Pen?”
“I dive,” I said.
“He’s fine,” Marena said.
“Has anyone left any type of traceable identification on board? Anybody still strapped in? Pen-Pen?”
Everyone seemed ready.
“Okay. Remember, just sit-float. Don’t kick. We’ll pick you up.”
“We’re going to see the boat in about eighty seconds,” the pilot said. “You want to hail ’em?”
“No more transmissions of any kind,” Ana said. “They’ll see the beacons.” She hit a ceiling panel with her fist and the big port-side door slid open. The pressure increased like we were inside an over-inflating balloon. Damn, it’s bright out there, I thought. We were less than ten feet over the wave peaks and even at this speed it felt like we were still screaming over the spray. On the horizon, just above the low clouds over Northeast Cay, the white moon was digitally clear against the blue Blood Rabbitess scampering away from the Lords of the Night. Ana pitched the flight recorder out the door.
There was a hiss from the back and a wave of that WD-40 smell. I looked around. There was a little geyser of fine spray in the floor next to the WSO. He’d opened one of the lubricant arteries and now he was fiddling with something that looked like a cheap digital clock. Detonator, I thought. Hell. Time to book. Now.
“Okay, go,” Ana said.
Gendo—who now, thanks to the autopilot, had nothing more to do on board—released the first raft bundle, tipped it out the door, and disappeared after it in a sitting dive.
“Okay,” Ana shouted.
Marena grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down into a crouch. “Now. Three, two, one. Go.”
“Wait,” I said, but no voice made it out into the wind. The blurred water under us looked like it was on a belt sander. Marena pulled me backward with her and we spilled gently out the door, like a cup and a saucer tipping off a tea table onto a tiled floor.

[65]

W
e rode in a Cyrolon globe over Oaxaca. The CH-138 Kiowa was small, slow, and open, the opposite of the Hippogriff. Fifteen hundred feet below us the farmlands gave way to forests, and then to scrub, as the ground sloped up toward the altiplano. It was 9:40 A.M. on February 29, a no-name, no-saint, once-every-1,040 days day that I’d always felt was somehow lucky in a non-Maya way. It was five days since our little unpleasantness in the gulf, it was sunny and 68°C, and we were 8,400 refreshing feet above sea level. Sixteen hours ago we’d gotten the word that one of the magnetism-sensing satellites had located the lodestone cross.
It was well inside one of the zones we’d designated as safe cache locations, but it was awfully far from Ix. What had he, or rather I, been doing all the hell out here? Maybe Jed
₂
had to go to Teotihuacan for some reason. Or he tried to. And then he must have buried his notes on the Game here because he was afraid he wasn’t going to get back to Ix.
Or he knew he wasn’t going to get back.
Well, anyway, he got this far, didn’t he? That’s a lot. Maybe I’ll pull this nightmare out of the fire after all.
We banked west and headed down toward the center of a low mesa in the highlands just north of Coixtlahuaca. It was all scrub pine and ocotillos. Good tarantula country. Four big ES guys from Mexico City, dressed like ranchers in too-new, too-expensive Stetsons, hailed us from a little campsite. They had two burros with big packs, a parabolic ground-penetrating radar dish on a tripod, and a small generator and a compressor set up next to a neat four-foot-square hole. We touched down, meeting the shadow of our equipage in a cloud of gravel. Ana, Michael, Marena, and I climbed out. Ana chatted with the dudes for a minute. The rest of us looked down into the pit. They’d gotten down five feet with a jackhammer and shovels. There were two feet to go, which they’d been taking more delicately, with plastic scoops. Michael said not to worry too much and let them finish. It took forty minutes to get to what looked like a big knot of half-petrified dirt. They hoisted it up and whisk-broomed it. It was a low, wide terra-cotta bowl, about twenty inches across and four inches high, with a knob on the lid in the shape of a frog. It was cracked all over, and a few shards had come off, revealing the hard cake of brown wax inside. It was a lot bigger than it needed to be for just a letter. We loaded it into a big plastic vacuum box in the back of the Kiowa and took off. We gassed up again in Nochixtlán—which, incidentally, wasn’t too far from the Lake of Green Glass, the 2010 blast site—flew back to Ciudad Oaxaca and switched to a Cessna. Ashley
₂
(remember Taro’s favorite assistant?) was on board and she had a cardboard tray of old-fashioned Styrofoam cups and the signature charred-tar reek of Bustelo—damn, how great was it to have the real hometown sludge instead of that organic Kona peaberry bullshit you get used to in the States?—and I took two. We turned east by southeast, toward the Stake.
“So why do you think that was the only cross he left?” A
₂
asked us. “He was supposed to tell us whether he was going to be in that tomb or not.”
“Maybe he didn’t make it back to Ix,” Michael said. He looked at me. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I said. Yeah, what the bloody hell had happened? I wondered. Aside from all the other good reasons to be curious, I also wondered just because it had happened to me. Sort of.
“Besides, it doesn’t look like we’ll get a chance to crack the tombs anyway. There’s probably soldiers all over the place.”
“Yeah, but still, we’re going to have to deal with it,” Marena said. “Maybe he got the tomb going all right but then the second cross got dug up or damaged. Or he had some reason not to leave a second message. Or maybe there’s something on it in this package. Right? Maybe he didn’t leave it himself, maybe he sent somebody up here with it. For some reason.”
“Well, I’ll make sure we’ll find out about that one pretty soon, anyway,” Michael said.
And he came through on his promise. Six of his graduate students had set up a basement room at the Stake as an archaeology lab, and an hour after we got back we were already looking at the X-ray and tomograph views while the kids worked in shifts of two at a big argon-filled Lucite glove box, scraping apart the cake of wax. There were seven objects in the jar. Six of them were small-lidded clay jars. They couldn’t get much of the contents off the tomograph, but in three of them you could see a few small animal bones. The other object was an unfired clay box the size of a thick hardcover book. There were three Maya screenfold books inside it, packed in dirty-looking rock salt. Michael said they could possibly get the text out of them without opening the box, the way they’d done with the Codex Nurnburg, but that nothing was going to happen to them in the argon box so it would be faster just to dig them out and read them normally. He said it would take about eight hours.
Except for Michael we all trudged back to our dorm rooms. What with one thing and another, nobody seemed to feel like celebrating yet. I thought about knocking on Marena’s door but I decided I was still too upset, or too distrustful, rather, even though it looked like we were finally having a little of what might be a success. There was an international police investigation of the Hippogriff incident going on, and it was hard to believe they wouldn’t track it back to us. And that patrol had in fact found all our gear at Ix Ruinas, so our hopes of getting back there to try to revive Jed
₂
seemed pretty far-fetched. And No Way was still missing.
Ana Vergara had stated in the debriefing that she thought No Way had tipped off the Guates about us. “That patrol came in way too directly,” she’d said. “There’s no way they were just looking around. And all of our assets in the area were solid.” They also showed us records of a big transfer and withdrawal from his Nicaraguan account. But, as I told them, anybody could have set that up. They could have shown me a video of him taking the money out himself and it still wouldn’t prove anything. There’s no way No Way would have done something like that, I’d said. Not just because he wouldn’t, but because he was getting a bonus from us later. It had to have been one of ES’s so-called solid assets, somebody from the village. They’d been spreading too much money around, I thought. The more people who know about something, the more likely you are to get nailed. In fact, with each new person it becomes ten times as likely. In fact, I thought but didn’t say, maybe ES had put the cash in Nacho’s account just to help make him out as the villain, to cover up their own ineptitude.
Anyway, even if they didn’t push it, they were all blaming me for the screwup. I’d insisted on bringing along an outsider and look what happened. They wondered whether, besides tipping off the Guates, he might be spilling the beans on the details of the Chocula Project. I kept saying I needed to see some real proof that he’d sold us out before I believed anything. And they didn’t want to make me too upset, because I might still help figure out the Game. But it was one of those times when everybody’s looking at you a little funny. Even Marena had doubts. And I couldn’t blame her.
I tossed and turned for two hours, gave up on sleep, padded across the courtyard in my complimentary Crocs to the security desk, checked out one of their encrypted and permanently offline laptops, and flipped through a PDF of a 335-page DHI report on their money-trail investigation in the Disney World Horror. It was badly organized and heavily redacted, with “EYES ONLY” and “CLASSIFIED-LEVEL GRAY” stamps all over it, like it was a prop out of a spy movie. But the upshot was that both the 209 and 210 polonium isotopes dispersed in the attack had definitely been produced in the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Like weaponized anthrax, the particles had been ground so fine that they behaved as though they were almost lighter than air, and there was a thin hydrocarbon coating on the particles that had allowed them to bond to water droplets in the smog that day—which, incidentally, might also have been artificially seeded. All of this suggested a professional military product. The dispersion-regulation system had probably been fairly elaborate, including at least two 100-gallon pressure tanks and, probably, remote-controlled regulator valves with some kind of feedback meter. So far, though, no one had found the tanks or even pinpointed the exact center of the release, although it was certainly somewhere very near Lake Buena Vista.
The report also said that currently, Russian and Kazakh refiners produce about a hundred grams of polonium-210 per year, mainly for medical and antistatic applications. At least thirty times that amount had been released over Orlando, an amount that, on the commercial market, would cost over two and a half billion dollars. And that wasn’t even counting the larger amount of the (cheaper) 209 isotope that was released at the same time. Somebody over there had to have been producing a lot more polonium than anybody knew about. And even if they’d produced it cheaply, and even if it had been bartered for and not paid for in cash, or even if Dr. X was, say, a direct heir or successor of the original producer, a huge amount of wealth must have changed hands somewhere along the line.
Of course, this was pretty much what we knew already, with just a little more detail. And of course the DHS and dozens of other U.S. and allied intelligence services were already following the same lead. But it didn’t mean it wasn’t the right thing for us to work on. We just had to do it better.
And we would, I thought. The advantage we had—besides the Sacrifice Game—was that we were actually trying to find the real perp, which all those other agencies didn’t really care about. The only thing they actually took seriously was increasing their own funding. They needed to hire as many new people as possible, take as long as possible, and, most of all, spend as much money as possible. We were lean and efficient. Maybe Dr. X had moved some gold around, I thought. Unminted gold. I’d better go through all those mining companies again, I thought. Maybe something in Africa. I closed down the laptop—it insisted on checking out my iris print even to let me turn it off—and checked out CNN.
News wasn’t good. In the U.S., unemployment had hit 25 percent. The administration had released an official statement that God was chastising us for our immorality and secularism. States like Texas and Kentucky had made silence mandatory in the morning and at noon during the president-led prayer sessions on the South Lawn of the White House, and today thirty million people had joined in by video. As of last week the army, navy, and marines had been restructured into a single service that would respond to a single command from the executive branch, and the air force and NASA were “soon to be folded into the new system.” About two hundred thousand members of the armed services had been discharged, and their positions were being outsourced to private contractors. Moody’s had downgraded U.S. Treasury bonds to a single A. Spot gold barreled through five thousand dollars an ounce. Yesterday, in Chester, Illinois, inmates had taken over the Menard Correctional Center, and instead of trying to negotiate, a SWAT team had lobbed in incendiary grenades and burned down the buildings with everyone inside them. So far the police’s decision had received a 90 percent approval rating on YouCount.gov. Dearborn, Michigan, was now under sharia law. On the international scene, more than two million refugees had now crossed from Bangladesh into India. Our old friends Guatemala and Belize were at it again, although I already knew that, because now, on most days, you could hear them shelling each other’s suspected troop positions along the border. Bioengineers at Zion-Tech, in Haifa, were claiming to have bred the spotless red heifer. And—and I realize it’s almost getting comical at this point, at least for those with hard hearts, like mine—Hurricane Twinkie was strengthening over Cuba.
Of course, the good news for us with all this—the ill wind that was blowing us pretty good—was that with so much expletive-deleted going down, the Hippogriff incident might get lost in the shuffle. Laurence had said that the U.S. three-letter agencies—and of course the Belizean, Guatemalan, Mexican, and British Protectoral intelligence services—were working so many cases right now that they probably couldn’t spare more than a couple people to look at it. Especially when they figured it would probably turn out to be just some billionaire narcotrafico getting out of Guatemala in a hurry. As bizarre as it sounds, we might get off scot-free. Maybe the insurance companies would even reimburse us for the Hippogriff.
Just before sunrise I walked back to the lab. Marena and Taro were already there. Michael smelled like he was still there. That is, he hadn’t slept. So, less than entirely welcoming, was Laurence Boyle, who—now that we’d had some apparent success—seemed to have gone back to being a cost-begrudging corporate bean pincher. Inside the bright white world of the glove box, they’d spread out the last six pages of one of the three screenfold books. Creepily, the unbroken lines of enciphered text were in my own handwriting. The pages had been photographed by the various cameras clustered on the lid of the box, and Jed
₂
’s last letter—they were taking them in reverse order—had already been deciphered. Meanwhile, on the other side of the box, one of the sort of canopic jars had been opened, and gloved hands were scraping samples out of the scrungy-looking mass of resin inside it. In an hour they’d be getting couriered to Lotos Labs, in Salt Lake, for analysis.
“You want to read your note?” Michael asked.
I tried to think of something sarcastic to say, but finally I just nodded. He put the deciphered text up on the screen.
I felt very odd. I could imagine my own voice but not much of what my twin had done and seen. And on the one hand I felt embarrassed that he hadn’t managed everything, but on the other hand I could hardly believe that I or he had managed as much as I or he had, and I couldn’t help feeling proud of myself, even though, or maybe because, I personally hadn’t had to do any of the work . . .
[deciphered]
NEW KEY WORD: JBNNUIIDSXJWNNQOBEOOFLCOPRTXSVQCD-FEHJRMR
Jed DeLanda
On the road to Flayed Hill
(Monte Alban, Oaxaca)
Chocula Team
Ix Ruinas, Alta Verapaz, RG
Wednesday, March 31, AD 664, about 11:00 A.M.
Dear Marena, Taro, Michael, Jed
₁