The Accused (14 page)

Pancho led Will across the grounds. To their left was the mammoth El Castillo, and to their right was the Temple of the Warriors, a large, square, stone structure with carved images and glyphs around its base, shapes that were still mostly recognizable, though rubbed almost smooth by one hundred thousand rains over fifteen hundred years.

“There—there!” his companion shouted, pointing to the top of the temple. He pulled out a small pair of binoculars and handed them to Will.

“Chacmool—the god Chacmool!”

As they walked by, Will looked up at the platform at the top of the temple and saw a stone image—reclining, with its head turned sideways toward the viewer—the god Chacmool, in whose lap was a flat, stone surface.

“Do you see his lap?” Pancho asked.

The lawyer nodded.

“The hearts of victims—human sacrifice—were placed in the lap of Chacmool.” Pancho then gave Will a grin that exposed several of his missing teeth.

As they walked between El Castillo and the Temple of the Warriors, Will saw the large open area where the helicopter must have landed. He glanced at the diagram he had drawn after his conference with Colonel Marlowe.

Then he surveyed the area. He concluded that the commandos, after being dropped off from the helicopter, must have run straight ahead to the edge of the jungle, along the left side of a large open area about a hundred yards down from his position.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing ahead to a vast opening in the jungle floor off in the distance.

“
Cenote sagrado
—the sacred well of sacrifice,” Pancho said as they walked quickly toward its edge. Then he added, “I give you this tour of the Mayans free of charge!”

They walked over to the edge of the mammoth, gaping chasm. It was ringed with stones, like the teeth of a dark and forbidding mouth—a natural well hundreds of feet across. Will peered down into its dark abyss, a black hole that defied the light.

“Did they use this for sacrifices?” he asked.

“Yes—tie the victims down with weights and throw them in. There is deep water at the bottom. But it is spring-fed from way down in the earth. So they cannot drain it. Many artifacts—many old things brought up. Skulls. Skeletons. The Mayans believed if they threw you in the well and you lived, then you were a god—or maybe a very powerful leader.”

“How deep is this?” Will pointed down into the dark, airless depths.

His companion shrugged. “Hard to say. But very deep—very dangerous.”

Stepping back from the gaping hole in the earth, Will wondered at a culture that was based on the sacrifice of innocent human life.

As they left the well and headed for the edge of the jungle, Pancho pointed over to a spot beyond the Temple of the Warriors.

“Sometime you should look over there at the ball court. There they played games—very much like jai alai, but a little bit like basketball too—and if you lose the game…” He took his thumb and quickly
struck it across his throat from side to side. “They would cut your head off!” he said with a smile.

When they entered the deep undergrowth, heading toward the house that lay on the outskirts of the village of Chacmool, Pancho started using the machete he had brought along. At first he was able to pick a moderately open path through the jungle and only occasionally had to cut through vines.

“It's good that you have boots,” he said. “Watch where you step, and don't put your hands on the trees—the snakes like to sleep there.”

Occasionally Will glanced at his compass to make sure they were still taking the same direction that Marlowe and his commandos had taken.

The colonel had said that there had been a near full moon that night, but even so, with the thick jungle canopy above, Will wondered how they had been able to navigate so quickly. Marlowe had told him they had small flashlights attached to their headgear. But even so, it must have been rough going by night.

Here and there Will heard the screech of a jungle bird and caught sight of a flamboyantly colored cockatoo on a tree. He was drenched with sweat from the damp heat of the jungle and was taking increasingly large gulps from his water bottle. The foliage was getting thicker and more intense, and the vines were now almost impenetrable. Pancho was working hard, chopping and clearing the vines ahead with the machete. He was panting, and his pace was getting slower.

They felt a suffocating, almost strangling sensation, being surrounded by the hot, damp walls of vegetation.

And then, quite suddenly, they broke through to a dirt road. Will glanced down at his diagram and pointed over to the right. There, about a hundred feet from the edge of the road—which was walled by jungle on each side—was a small structure. He knew this was it. And beyond the little house, approximately two miles further down, was the beginning of the village of Chacmool.

He took out his diagram, which was damp with sweat, and glanced at it to make sure this was the location. The two men walked over to the front of the little yard, which was filled with weeds and scrub brush.

“You stay here,” Will said to his guide. There were several sawhorse barricades set up around the perimeter of the house, with a sign in Spanish.

“Hey, Señor,” Pancho yelled. “The sign says no trespass—by order of police.”

Will nodded but walked ahead toward the front door. As he approached he was able to see the full extent of the destruction that had been rained down on this little house. The windows had all been shot out, and the cement base, wooden walls, and tin roof were perforated and blasted open with an infinite number of bullet holes. Some of the sunlight piercing through the jungle canopy found its way in through a few of the bullet holes and streamed out again in shafts. At the door there was a small concrete slab which was stained with red.

The front door had a padlock on it, so, after putting on his gloves, Will gingerly took a few of the remaining jagged pieces of glass from the window and stepped through the opening. He turned on his flashlight and glanced around the room.

There was a putrid stench, as if he had entered a tomb that had not been opened for centuries. Even with only his flashlight to illuminate the inside, he could tell that the blood everywhere had never been cleaned up. There were several scattered chairs and a cheap wooden table in the center of the room. In the middle of the floor there was a wooden trapdoor, which he lifted. He cast the flashlight beam down a rough-hewn ladder that rested on a dirt floor at the bottom.

He climbed down the ladder until his feet hit the dirt. At first he could see no opening that led from the small space. Then he saw a tunnel, perhaps two-and-a-half feet square, leading away from the ladder. Squatting down and shining his light into it, he saw an occasional piece of wood reinforcement on the inside of a roughly cut earthen passageway. There were vines hanging down here and there from the earthen roof.

Satisfied that he had located the escape route of the al-Aqsa Jihad terrorists, he scampered up the ladder and closed the trapdoor behind him.

Will experienced a vast feeling of relief when he finally climbed out of the window of that sweltering, oppressive place. Pancho was waiting for him, smoking a cigarette.

“We go back on the road this time?”

“Right,” Will answered. “We can take the road back.”

“The jungle—much thicker—much more work than I thought,” his guide said, opening his hand toward Will.

The lawyer dug in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. He was going to thank Pancho for bringing him, but something stopped him. How could he be thankful for a trip into this jungle nightmare…where the stench of death still hung in the air like a poisonous cloud.

On the way back the two were quiet. Then Will asked his companion a question.

“Have you heard anything about what happened back at that house—the gunfight with the terrorists?”

Pancho shrugged.

“Have you heard any information about the terrorists—the banditos—or about who was killed inside?”

The other man turned toward Will, but he was not smiling.

Thrusting his hand into his pocket, the American pulled out a wad of twenty-dollar bills.

But Pancho shook his head, put both hands up as if to ward something off, and then quickened his pace to go ahead of Will, down the dirt road.

21

O
N THE WAY BACK TO THE
Y
UCATÁN COAST
, Will had Pancho pull over when they reached the town of Valladolid. He found a phone in a hotel lobby and called Tiny, who was nervously waiting for him in his room at the airport motel.

“Will, buddy, glad you called.” The large private investigator was fanning himself with the room-service menu. “Listen,” Tiny continued, “I feel like a sitting duck here. After I met with Hermán, I noticed that I was being followed by a couple of creepy-looking guys. I think I need to split the airport area here and head inland until we fly out tomorrow.”

Will suggested that Tiny make his way to Valladolid—to the Hacienda Montejo, a hotel a few blocks down from the old San Bernardino Church. He agreed, and said he thought he could give his trailers the slip.

By the time Tiny arrived, the sun was going down and the jungle heat was subsiding. They met in the hotel restaurant, a whitewashed, partly open veranda with shuttered windows that split the last glimmer of sunset into gold and yellow shafts of light as it streamed through the slats.

Outside, the banana trees were swaying in a gentle breeze that had just come up. The big investigator was halfway through his plate of
pollo pibil
when he started reciting the results of the meeting with his contact.

“Okay, first,” he said with his mouth half-full, “my guy said that the word was out about the commando strike against the safe house before it ever happened. But he was vague about it—that's all he could say. So it's very possible that your marine guy was being set up.”

“What about the federal police—what role did they play in this?”

“Not sure—I mean, kidnapping and drug-running is like a cottage industry down here, and a lot of the Mexican cops are in on it. Hermán acted real jittery about giving me the lowdown on the role of the government in this, except to say that the political buzz down here is maximum stinko when it comes to the U.S.A.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Tiny said, wiping his mouth with his napkin, “he says all the government bigwigs are talking trash against America. Especially our military. Which—you know—ticked me off, as a proud veteran myself.”

“Where's this coming from?”

“A lot of talk about the popular power of the Independent Revolutionary Party down here. Actually, it's building up a lot of steam up in Mexico City and also down in the south, around Chiapas, where the IRP has the backing of a militant radical group called the EZLN—the National Liberation Army. But the IRP isn't exactly the hometown team here in the Yucatán—where they've got all the Mayans. The Mayan Indians have been fighting the Spanish and the Mexicans—for hundreds of years. So they're not buying into any of the pro-Mexican nationalism—regardless of the party.”

“So, how does al-Aqsa Jihad fit in?”

“Oh, that,” the detective said, leaning back from the table. “Yeah, well, it's like…how can I put it? It's like a heavyweight championship—picture Blackbeard the Pirate meets Saddam Hussein. I mean, who do you root for, you know? The Jihad cell group is down here running drugs to keep their movement in the money and also to get closer to the American borders. At the same time, Mexico has not done much to kick them out. In fact, there's some talk about sympathy for the Jihad—but Hermán didn't give details.”

“So the terrorists are dealing drugs?” Will asked.

“Big-time. Hey—just remembered—there's an American drug guy in on this. I wrote his name down.”

With that, Tiny pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Will.

After glancing at it, the lawyer raised an eyebrow and threw a smirk at the other man.

“ ‘Victor Viper'? That's his name?”

Tiny laughed out loud.

“Yeah. Not likely to be the name that mommy and daddy gave him. Obviously an alias. According to my contact, this guy is not nice. Anyway, he has sort of disappeared from the scene recently. Bottom line, Hermán thinks that the Jihad cell is still operating down here.”

Will had been listening carefully, but wasn't sure what he thought of Tiny's information—certainly nothing sounded groundbreaking. “Anything else?” he asked.

“One thing—now take this for what it's worth.”

“What?”

“Well,” Tiny said, “my guy says there's something big and very bad…that's going to happen.”

Will looked at the detective with bewilderment.

“What are you talking about?”

“That's all he could tell me.”

“Bad—in what way?”

“Bad, like being dead is bad.”