Invisible City (8 page)

“They could.”

“Maybe they read my e-mail to Montoyo?”

“Who's Montoyo?”

I look at Ollie for a few seconds, wondering. She's looking at me, her expression eager. Should I tell her? I can feel it all bubbling up inside me. It feels so good to actually talk to someone about this. Now that I've started, I don't want to stop.

So, I fill Ollie in on the e-mails I found between my dad, Carlos Montoyo, and that Peabody Museum guy, Martineau. I tell her all about the hunt for the Ix Codex and finish off with my discovery of the Calakmul letter in Dad's college room. I carry it with me at all times now, still wrapped in its tissue paper. When she sees the manuscript fragment, her eyes widen; she's impressed.

“That is so cool.”

“I know.”

“But it's torn.” Suddenly she looks disappointed.

“Yeah. The right-hand side of the message is missing. But Mayan writing goes up and down, in columns. So I'll be able to decipher the first part of the letter at least.”

“Where do you think the rest is?”

I frown. “I don't know … I sort of assumed that this is all that Dad found.”

“Hmm,” she says thoughtfully. “Do you think it is part of the Ix Codex?”

Dad's e-mails to Montoyo and Martineau don't suggest that. But then, I wouldn't know what a real Mayan codex looks like.

“Not sure,” I tell her. “Maybe it's about the codex. Where to find it, perhaps.”

She asks, “What's Montoyo's story?”

“He seemed to know all about this Ix Codex,” I say. “Told Dad that people had disappeared looking for it. Funny really, because I've read lots of stuff about Mayan archaeology since this thing started. And I've never heard a single mention of the Ix Codex.”

“That is weird. So how did Montoyo hear about it?”

I pause, thinking. “No idea. And he asked to meet my dad. I e-mailed Montoyo to ask if he ever actually did.”

“What did he say?”

“Never replied.”

“Did it ever occur to you that he might be the one who really killed your father?”

“Of course,” I lie. Okay, maybe I'd had a background-level suspicion. Ollie's questioning is crystallizing all sorts of ideas I'd put out to dry.

She warms to her theory. “He knew your dad was onto the
codex. So he pretends to help him. Then he meets up with your dad and gets rid of him.”

“And this guy they've framed for murdering my dad?”

“That's a bit more tricky,” she agrees eventually. “The CIA could frame a person for murder. And they could have your house burglarized.”

“So you really think it's the CIA, then?”

“I don't know, Josh. I'm just trying out some theories here. Isn't that what detectives do?”

I haven't thought of it that way. The main thing, for me, is to prove to Mom that Dad wasn't murdered for messing around with another woman. And to prove it to myself.

The codex thing has me intrigued, definitely. My father was looking for it. Now I seem to be picking up on the trail. There's a connection with his disappearance—I just know it. And something else, something weird I can't quite put my finger on. It feels pretty thrilling to be following in my father's footsteps. Thrilling—and a little dangerous.

“You know what you have to do?” says Ollie. “Decipher that inscription. Maybe even find the codex. I could help you. You up for that? We'll be like Mulder and Scully.”

I grin. “If you're Scully and I'm Mulder, then shouldn't
you
be the skeptical one?”

“What's the difference? In the end they were both believers.”

Ollie's theories spark one of my own. Maybe the woman in Chetumal has something to do with Dad's search for the codex.
It would explain why Dad had spent so much time with her. She might know something about the codex. Maybe framing her husband was their way of keeping her quiet.

No two ways about it; we have to talk to Chetumal Lady.

I ask, “Are you a university student?”

Ollie laughs. “Not yet! I'm a sophomore at St. Margaret's.”

I know the school. Some of those girls have modeling contracts. It isn't, after all, so surprising that Ollie seems so glamorous. I'm used to a more everyday type of girl.

“So you really think we should try to find this codex, then? Assuming it's still out there.”

Ollie's smile is a thing to behold. “It'd be amazing.”

“Seriously, though. It sounds dangerous.”

“Aren't you even a little curious?”

“Me? Sure, but I've been warned off.”

“Don't you want to get back at the people who killed your dad?”

“By finding the codex?”

“Yes,” she says. “By beating them at their own game.”

Ollie's blue eyes shine with excitement.

I don't know how much of what Ollie has said I actually believe, but her offer is tempting. All I know is that if this codex is still out there, other people will want it. And the codex will buy all sorts of things. Including the answer to the question
Who killed my dad?

If I had the codex, they'd have to negotiate with me.

“Well, to be honest,” I say, “I could use the help.”

That's how we team up. All because of Ollie's powers of deduction.

I've never met anyone like her. She. Is. Amazing.

There are a couple of reasons for today's blog entry. It's a secret record that I dare not leave on paper, or on the hard drive of any computer I'm known to access.

But no one knows about the blog. I haven't even told TopShopPrincess/Ollie that I've started the blog again. I'm kind of embarrassed about what I might write about her.

Jeez. Ollie! What a turnaround. I stopped being angry with her about ten seconds after she apologized. Thing is, I'd always kind of thought of her as a slightly weird, kooky type of girl. She's anything but that. She looks like a goddess, with the brain of an uber-geek.

Ollie and I couldn't work together at Summertown Library—we were getting too many angry looks and warnings to be quiet. Tyler, an old friend from capoeira, owed me a favor. I turned up on his doorstep with Ollie and told him, “Debt collection time. I need you to let me use your computer for the rest of the night.”

I didn't have to say anything. With Ollie in tow, he'd have given his living room over to us, even if there was a big game on TV. When he
offered to help out with the decipherment, we accepted. I figured there was safety in numbers: the more of us who knew, the harder it would be for Them to silence us.

Them. Now I'm really talking like a conspiracy buff.

We cracked open the drinks and the Pringles and put Batman Begins on the DVD player as a decoy for Tyler's parents. Then we started on the inscription.

I quickly showed the other two what I knew about reading Mayan hieroglyphs. Mayan inscriptions were written in a grid format. According to the how-to book, the first glyphs give the date of the document. Then the writing proceeded in a two-column grid that could be labeled in reading order: A2, B2, A3, B3, A4, B4, etc. until the end of the page. Then it continued in the next two columns: C2, D2, C3, D3, etc.

We started with the easiest part—the date. My dad taught me how to read Mayan dates years ago, to stop me from whining with boredom. I still remember how, but I can't do it without a dictionary.

In Mayan, the date was 9.11.0.4.8 16 Pax 9 Lamat.

In English, that translates to Jan 8, 653 AD.

This letter was written in the seventh century!

Then we got started on the main part of the letter. We each took one glyph apart at a time. First we'd look up the whole glyph in case we got lucky. Sometimes a whole glyph can mean something—like the name of a place.

When we'd solved as many of those as possible, our eyes were getting blurry from looking at all the different glyphs. We took a little break.

By then we knew the inscription included the words Cancuén, Yuknoom Ch'een, Calakmul, Bakab, Itzamna, servant, sacred, book, Ix, and the phrase “it will occur.”

Then came the really tough part. We crunched through the rest of the glyphs syllable by syllable. When we thought we had a possible solution, we'd search for the word on the Web and find out all we could about it. That's how we made sense of the translation.

Six hours later we were still at it. We ordered pizza, kept going. It was like each one of us was daring the others to be the ones to wimp out. I kept asking, “Shall we stop now, go to bed?” but they'd go, “No way, we're almost there!”

And as the dawn light filtered through the blinds, we had the whole thing deciphered.

K'inich K'ane Ajk of Cancuén writes to Lord Yuknoom Ch'een of Calakmul

I am your servant

From Chechan Naab he emerged, from the Great Temple of the Cross

The Bakab was defeated

This sacred Book of Ix speaks of the end of days

13.0.0.0.0 it is written in the Sacred Books of Itzamna

It will occur

I stare at the inscription for a few seconds and let out a slow “Wow.”

Tyler asks, “What does it mean—‘end of days'? Is that like …?”

“… the end of the world?” I say. “Yeah. My dad told me about all that years ago. The Mayan calendar ends on the date 13.0.0.0.0—Thirteen Baktun.”

Tyler stares, expectant. “Um … when's that, then? In our calendar, I mean.”

I try to sound calm. “Well … it's pretty soon, actually.”

“When?”

“December twenty-second, 2012.”

Tyler's mouth opens, as if he's trying to think of something funny to say. But nothing comes out.

“People have been trying to work out what that date—Thirteen Baktun—means for
ever
. No one knows.”

Tyler stabs a finger at our translation. “This ‘Book of Ix' seems to know!”

“Book of Ix—that must mean the Ix Codex,” Ollie says thoughtfully.

“I can't see any mention of Ek Naab here …,” I mutter.

“Can we talk about this end-of-the-world thing a bit more?” Tyler says, his voice rising.

“It's not
literal
,” I say. “Not
literally
the end of the world. More like the end of an era. That's what my dad told me.”

“Good thing you're so sure about that!” Tyler says. “I've never heard of it until now, but it seems pretty worrying to me! I mean—I've got plans, you know!”

I say, “This is about a rare Mayan book—some book that maybe finally explains just what the Mayans meant by ending their calendar in 2012.”

“Yeah,” Tyler says, emphatically. “And what if it really is about the end of the world?”

Could it really be?
The idea is so far from what I've been brought up to believe about the Maya that I can hardly take it in.

I can't answer Tyler's question, so I look again at the Calakmul letter.

The manuscript consists of two sets of two columns. The final sentence is incomplete.

Not only are we missing part of the letter, we can't make
sense of the final sentence. The final glyph is a verb, the beginning of a sentence:
utom
—“it will occur.”

Everything to the right of that is ripped away. Without the second half, we can't even make sense of the first. Without it, we have no hope of picking up the trail of the codex. And without that second half, my dad wouldn't either. So if he thought he'd found the codex—he must have hidden the second half of the Calakmul letter somewhere else. But where?

“There's that word again,” Ollie says. “Bakab. Wasn't that in your dream? The one you blogged?”

“I dreamed
Bakabix
.”

“That's right,” says Tyler. “
Bakab, Ix
. They're both in this inscription.”

The possibility that my dream might have some connection to the inscription hits me like a kick to the stomach. It's all too weird. For a second, I imagine myself back in the leaf storm of my dream. There's a flash of memory, a curtain of fragrant smoke behind which a stranger chokes to death.

I suddenly need to be alone, to think. I manage to say, “I really need to get back now.”

I drag myself back to Jackie's just as the paper-route kids are hitting the street. The dream is still with me. It isn't so much what I actually witnessed in the dream but the feeling of utter foreignness. Nothing about it felt familiar.