Seven Wonders (29 page)

Jack wasn’t wearing a watch, but he could tell by the way the sun was beginning to dip toward the top of the pyramid that they were pushing things very close. Sundown couldn’t be more than a few minutes away, which meant they would have to move fast.

Once Sloane was on the other side of the rope, Jack grabbed his duffel and crawled under after her, then quickly started up the ninety-one steps. Although the pyramid had been off-limits to tourists since 2006, when an eighty-year-old woman had tripped and fallen down sixty of the steps to her
death, Jack felt the architecture was much more impressive once you got up close and personal. Made up of nine limestone levels, the four-sided pyramid was perfectly symmetrical; ninety-one steps on each side, then one big step at the top, which added up to exactly three hundred and sixty-five steps, one for each day in the Mayan calendar.

Halfway up, Jack could already feel the sweat running down his back. The sun felt so low now that it seemed to be almost touching the top step.

“Faster,” Jack said—then noticed that Sloane was actually two steps ahead of him, her firm legs pushing her upward with practiced ease.

By the time they made it to the top, Jack was already working the zipper of the duffel bag. Sloane had her hands on her knees, breathing hard as she took in the view. From the top of the pyramid, it was mostly jungle, though Jack could pick out a few of the stone temples and the ant-hill shaped mounds that surrounded the nearby sinkholes. Then he turned his attention to the duffel, from which he retrieved a large black pouch, a drawstring hanging from one side.

He rose back to his feet and yanked the drawstring. The pouch unfolded with a snap, canvas material stretching across a tentlike, circular frame. Jack shifted the saucer-shaped frame, and a sudden burst of bright, golden light flashed directly upward as the embossed interior of the Sunburst photography reflector caught the rays of the rapidly descending sun.

“Portable gold,” Jack said.

He’d never been much of a photography buff, but his mother had dabbled at the art, and he was quite familiar with the various reflectors the professionals used to get the light just right. Once he’d figured out why the shadowy snake in the pictogram had been exactly twenty-three degrees off its expected mark, he’d known exactly what he needed. The Sunburst was the most powerful portable reflector on the market, and it hadn’t taken long to find one for sale through his contacts outside of Cancun.

The Sunburst unfolded, Jack took the plastic protractor from the airport
drugstore out of his pocket and handed it to Sloane.

“You’re going to have to help me out,” he said as the sweat beaded across his forehead. “We need to aim this exactly twenty-three degrees off of the angle of the pyramid.”

Sloane raised her eyebrows. She looked over the edge of the pyramid, down the long flight of steps toward the base far below. Jack could see that she was working it through in her head—and she was beginning to understand.

“You’re going to recreate the equinox phenomenon of the shadow-snake going down the pyramid’s steps, but you’re going to put the shadow in the wrong place—by twenty-three degrees, like in the pictogram.”

“Actually, it’s the pyramid that’s in the wrong place, not the shadow.”

Jack had realized what the pictogram was pointing him toward the minute he’d first read the protractor.

“The Mayans were amazing astronomers and mathematically gifted,” he said as he positioned himself at the northwest edge of the top platform of the pyramid, then carefully lifted the reflector above his head. “But when they first set out to build this wondrous temple to their snake-headed god, they made one minor error. They began their calculations by presuming that the world was round.”

Sloane got down on one knee next to him, steadying the protractor at an angle flush with the downward slope of the pyramid’s steps. Then she carefully measured her way to twenty-three degrees off the slope—exactly as the shadow-snake image had appeared in the pictogram.

“But as anyone who remembers their eighth-grade Earth Science can tell you, it’s actually not. The Earth bulges at the equator and flattens out at the poles. Because of this, as the Earth revolves around its axis—and in turn, around the sun—it has a slight wobble. Over time, this wobble shifts the sun’s progress in the sky. Eventually, you get an error—of exactly twenty-three degrees.”

“But I thought this temple was properly aligned with the sun,” Sloane said, confused, as Jack shifted the reflector a few more inches to align it with her protractor.

“It is. But this isn’t the first Temple of Kukulcan that the Mayans built in this spot. It turns out there was an earlier temple, built one century before this one; the Mayans eventually realized their error, and corrected it by simply building a new temple over the old one.”

“So beneath us—”

“Is a temple that catches the sun exactly twenty-three degrees the wrong way. Like this.”

He shifted the reflector a few more inches, then held it steady, catching the last rays of the setting sun in the exact center. The sun’s reflection hit the northwest edge of the temple—and suddenly, a dark, serpentine shape slid down the first few steps. As the sun continued moving lower, the shadow grew, sliding step by step until it was more than halfway down.

“A few more seconds,” Jack whispered as Sloane stared almost in disbelief.

The shadowy snake slithered the rest of the way down the steps, extending to a full one hundred feet, and passed directly over the head of the statue of Kukulcan at the bottom.

“Now let’s see where this leads.”

He ignored the rivulets of sweat running down the back of his neck and the heat of the low sun against his forehead as he held the disk steady for a few more seconds. The serpentine shadow continued past Kukulcan, wriggled across the tops of trees and over the low, tangled brush, then suddenly slithered up a low hill, above a stone wall—and over the lip into what appeared to be another one of the site’s many sinkholes.

“The Xtoloc Cenote,” Jack said, pulling the name from his memory. “The second largest well, after the Sacred Cenote. It would have been here at the time of the original temple. That’s where we need to go.”

“Into the sinkhole?”

Jack tried to think of something reassuring to say—but he was interrupted by a sound from behind, coming from the staircase that led back down to the front of the pyramid.

Footsteps, he realized. One of the guards must have decided to come after them—maybe looking for another bribe. Jack turned toward the noise, annoyed, just in time to see a flash of motion coming up off the last step and lunging in his direction. A woman with dark hair. In her right hand was a serrated knife.

Jack swung the reflector around and aimed the golden disk directly at her face. The last licks of the sun hit the disk and rebounded right into the woman’s eyes, and she covered her face, stumbling back. Before Jack could move, Sloane stepped forward and kicked out a leg, hitting the woman dead in the stomach.

The woman toppled backward, then hit the stone steps, tumbling down head over heels.

Jack stared at Sloane, but she was already moving down the steps on the other side, toward the Xtoloc Cenote.

Jack grabbed the duffel and followed, just trying to keep up.

• • •

“I don’t see her,” Sloane whispered frantically as they crouched at the edge of the sinkhole. “Was she the same one from the bus? How could she have followed us here? That knife—”

Jack shook his head. He hadn’t gotten a good look, but he thought this woman had looked a little older, and there had been streaks of brown in her black hair. A different woman, but with a similar military-grade knife. And again, he had gotten extremely lucky. A few more seconds, and the sun
would have been too low for the reflector to do any damage. Already, the air around them had turned a dull gray color, accentuated by the thick, blanket-like mist coming up from the sinkhole. Jack looked down into the well, which was about thirty feet across, bordered on all sides by jungle fronds. The water was murky and brown.

“Either way, we need to move fast. We’ve gotten lucky twice. I don’t want to try for a third time.”

He began pulling off his jacket.

“I wish we had our scuba gear,” Sloane said.

“It should be less than forty feet. I can free dive that far.”

“In this?”

Jack looked at the brown surface of the water again. Jack knew that it was actually worse than Sloane realized. The Cenotes provided irrigation for the town, but they were also important religious locations. Sinkholes were considered portals to the underworld; many of the Mayan rituals began with live human sacrifices being thrown into them, weighted down by heavy stones. A few years back, the Mexican government had allowed divers to do a survey of the Sacred Cenote on the other side of the pyramid, and they had found numerous human skeletal remains.

“I’ll keep my mouth closed,” Jack said. “The shadow ended exactly two-thirds of the way across. I’m going to focus my search there.”

He kicked off his shoes, then stood at the edge of the well.

Another addition to the list of stupid
, he thought to himself.

And then he dove headfirst into the murky brown water.

• • •

Down Jack swam, arms straight out in front of him, legs kicking hard against the muddy water. The waterproof flashlight in his hand was almost
useless, and he was going mostly by memory; he was pretty certain he was directly under the end point of the serpentine shadow, but after the first few feet into the Cenote, he’d lost all sense of direction. All he knew for sure was that he was going down.

As he swam, he tried to keep his mind from replaying the moment with the woman at the top of the pyramid. It had all happened so fast. Who was she? How had she found them? What would she have done if Jack hadn’t blinded her with the reflective disk?

It dawned on him that perhaps Sloane was wrong. Perhaps the woman hadn’t followed them from Peru. Perhaps she had already been at Chichen Itza, waiting for them.

If Jeremy had died because he’d found a connection between the Seven Wonders of the World, then it stood to reason that someone else already knew about that connection. Which meant that there was no need to follow them. Whoever had killed Jeremy already knew exactly where they were going.

Jack felt the water cool around him as he pushed deeper. He knew that in the Mayan perspective, diving into the pool was like entering a portal into the Underworld; he half expected to swim right into a tangle of heavy tree roots. According to the Mayan sacred book, the Popol Vuh, the first thing created by the Mayan gods was a World Tree—the Mayan version of the Tree of Life. The branches represented the heavens, the trunk the Earth, and the roots, the Underworld, a place of darkness, pain, and death. As Jack’s extended hands finally hit bottom, upending a swirl of thick mud, he didn’t feel any roots; just gravel, a few strands of silky plant life, and packed dirt. He kicked harder with his feet, digging his hands back and forth, his fingers sifting through the gravel.

Nothing. His lungs were beginning to throb, and the pressure from the water was sending shoots of pain through his ears. Still, he kept himself against the well floor, trying to use the flashlight to see through the heavy clouds of mud. As he searched the bottom, he noticed something interesting
about the plant life; it all seemed to be congregated around one spot—right around where he’d traced the end of the shadowy serpent from the pyramid steps.

He reached down and started pulling at one of the stringy plants. Just as the plant started coming loose, something flashed by his peripheral vision a few feet to his right. He instinctively swung the flashlight toward the motion but whatever it was, it was moving too fast for him to see. Maybe some sort of fish? Or a piece of floating limestone?

He went back to the plant and gave the silky fronds one last yank. Immediately, a fountain of bubbles sprang up from where the plant had been, momentarily obscuring his already limited vision. When the bubbles cleared, he saw that the group of plants were clustered around a small opening, about the size of his fist. When he reached down with his fingers, he realized that the opening was the top of what appeared to be a clay pot, sunk deep into the mud.

Excited enough to forget that his lungs were ready to burst, he dug both hands into the mud and got a grip around the pot. He braced his bare feet against the mud, then pulled as hard as he could. For a brief second, nothing happened—and then the pot slid loose, amid another spray of bubbles. Jack was so thrilled, he almost didn’t notice another flash of silver flickering above his bare right foot—

And then he felt two spikes of pain rip upward through his ankle.

He stared down at the long, slithering creature that was now attached to his skin, fangs first. He kicked his leg, but the damn thing held on, a little cloud of blood spreading from where it was digging deeper into him.

Still holding the vase, he bent at the waist and got one hand around the creature’s throat. He put a thumb beneath its jaws and squeezed as hard as he could; finally the thing released its grip on his ankle, its mouth flipping open, revealing a pair of fangs around three centimeters long.

Jack lifted the long creature to eye level, noting its long, flattened tail,
and the valves over its nostrils. He flipped it over and saw the yellow streak along its wriggling belly.
Pelamis platurus
. Venomous, of course, but that wasn’t Jack’s main concern. His main concern was that
Pelamis platurus
usually hunted in packs.