Assumed Identity

19

THE YUCATAN PENINSULA

McIntyre, the sunburned, leathery foreman of the demolition crew, lay feverish and helpless on a cot in the log building that his men had constructed when they’d first arrived at the site. Dense trees and shrubs had still covered the ruins back then. The ruins themselves had still been here. Sanity had still prevailed.

Now, as it took all of McIntyre’s strength for him to use his good arm to wipe sweat from his brow, he wished from the depths of his soul that he had never agreed to his damnable contract with Alistair Drummond. The considerable fee-a greater sum than he’d ever received for any assignment-had been irresistible, as had the equally considerable bonus that Alistair Drummond had promised if the project was successfully completed. McIntyre had worked all over the world. In the course of his career, his nomadic existence had resulted in two divorces, in his being alienated from two women he loved and two sets of children he adored. All because of McIntyre’s urge to conquer the wilderness, to put order where there was chaos. But this assignment had required him to destroy order and create chaos, and now he was being punished.

The earth itself seemed infuriated by the obscenity that McIntyre and his crew had caused to happen here. Or maybe it was the gods in whose honor the ruins had been constructed. An odd thought for him, McIntyre realized. After all, he had never been religious. Nonetheless, as his death approached, he found that he was increasingly thinking about ultimates. What he would once have called superstition now seemed to make perfect sense. The gods were angry because their temples and shrines had been desecrated.

Destroy the ruins, Drummond had commanded. Scatter them. His word be done. And with each dynamite blast, with each crunch of a bulldozer, with each hieroglyph-covered block of stone dumped into a sinkhole, the earth and the gods beneath had protested. Periodic tremors had shaken the camp. Their duration had lengthened. And with the increased tremors had come a further horror, myriad snakes escaping from holes and fissures in the ground, a pestilence of them, only to be controlled by spraying kerosene and scorching the earth, further despoiling it. A pall of smoke hung over the devastated ruins.

For a time, the snakes had seemed everywhere, but as the tremors had stopped, the snakes had simultaneously vanished. No longer disturbed, they’d returned to their underground nests.

Not in time, however. At least for McIntyre. The previous day, just before sunset, he had reached into a toolbox to get a wrench and felt a sharp, burning pain just above his right wrist. Compelled by fear, rushing toward the medical tent, he barely had a glimpse of the tiny snake that slithered from the toolbox and into a hole. The camp physician, an unshaven man who always seemed to have a cigarette in his mouth and whiskey on his breath, had injected McIntyre with antivenom and disinfected the puncture wounds, all the while assuring McIntyre that he’d been very lucky inasmuch as the fangs had missed the major blood vessels in his arm.

But as McIntyre had shivered from fear and shock, he hadn’t felt lucky at all. For one thing, different snake toxins required different types of antivenom, but McIntyre hadn’t been able to get a good enough look at the snake that had bitten him in order to identify it. For another, even if he had been given the correct antivenom, he still desperately needed emergency care in a hospital. But the nearest major hospital was in Campeche, 150 miles away. A road had not yet been built through the jungle to allow a vehicle to leave the ruins. The only way McIntyre could be taken to Campeche in time for the medical treatment he urgently needed was by helicopter. But two of the camp’s helicopters were much farther away, in Vera Cruz, getting supplies, and weren’t expected back for twelve hours. The third helicopter was in camp but disabled. That was why McIntyre had been reaching into the toolbox when the snake hidden there bit him-he’d been helping a mechanic to fix the chopper’s hydraulic system.

As he lay on a bunk in a corner of the camp’s office, his mind seemed to float while death spread slowly through his body. Death felt suffocatingly hot, squeezing moisture from his body, soaking his clothes. At the same time, death felt unbearably cold, racking him with chills, making him wish fervently for more blankets.

McIntyre’s vision clouded. Sounds were muffled. The roar of bulldozers, the blast of explosions, the din of jackhammers seemed to come from far away instead of from the remnants of the ruins outside his office. But the one thing he listened for, the one sound he knew he couldn’t fail to hear no matter how far away, was the rapid whump-whump-whump of a helicopter, and to his despair, he still had not detected it. If the chopper in camp wasn’t fixed soon, if the other choppers didn’t return soon, he would die, and it occurred to him, making him furious despite how weak he was, that adequate medical care in camp was one of the conditions that Alistair Drummond had guaranteed. Since Drummond had failed to make good on that promise, perhaps none of the other promises would have been fulfilled, either. The bonus, for example. Or the fee for the job. Maybe Drummond would have all kinds of reasons for not being able to complete the terms of the contract.

This suspicion had obviously not occurred to any of the surviving workers. They were so eager to get out of here that they attacked the job with relentless fury. Their impatience filled them with greater anticipation of the reward they’d been guaranteed. Nothing discouraged their greed, not the tremors, not the snakes, certainly not McIntyre’s impending death. They had persisted despite efforts by Indians in the area to scare them away. Those natives, descendents of the original Maya who had built these monuments, had been so outraged by the obliteration of the ruins that they had sabotaged equipment, poisoned the camp’s water, set booby traps, attacked sentries, and in effect waged war. Responding, calling it self-defense, the workers had hunted and killed any native they found, dumping the corpses into wells in unconscious imitation of the human sacrifice once practiced by the Maya. In this region untouched by civilization, the struggle had reminded McIntyre of what had happened four hundred years earlier when the Spaniards had invaded the region. The area was sealed. No outsider would ever know what had happened here. Certainly no outsider would be able to prove it. When the job was finished, all that would matter would be the results.

Delirious, McIntyre heard the office door open. From outside, bulldozers crunched past. Then the door was closed, and footsteps crossed the earthen floor toward this area of the office.

A gentle hand touched his brow. “You’re still feverish.” A woman’s voice. Jenna’s. “Do you feel any better?”

“No.” McIntyre shivered as more sweat oozed from his body.

“Drink this water.”

“Can’t.” He struggled to breathe. “I’ll throw it up.”

“Just hang on. The mechanics are working as fast as they can to fix the chopper.”

“Not fast enough.”

Jenna knelt beside his cot and held his left hand. McIntyre remembered how surprised he had been to learn that the camp’s surveyor/cartographer was female. He’d insisted that this was no place for a woman, but she’d soon overcome his chauvinistic attitudes, proving that she could adapt to the jungle as well as any man. She was in her forties, the same as McIntyre. She had honey-colored hair, firm-looking breasts, an appealing smile, and in the three months they’d been working together, McIntyre had fallen in love with her. He had never told her. He’d been too afraid of being rejected. If she did reject him, their working relationship would have been intolerable. But as soon as the job was completed, he had intended to. .

Stroking his left hand, Jenna leaned close, her voice interrupting his thoughts. “But I’m betting there’ll be a chopper here quicker than we can repair the one we’ve got.”

“I. .” McIntyre’s mouth was parched. “I don't know what. .”

“Drummond will be here soon. We’ll put you in his chopper to get you to a hospital.”

“Drummond?”

“Don’t you remember?” Jenna wiped a damp cloth across his forehead. “We talked about this when I used the radio a half hour ago.”

“Radio? Half hour ago?”

“We found what Drummond wants.” Jenna spoke quickly, her voice taut with excitement. “It was here all along. Right under our noses. We had the instructions from Drummond’s translation, but we were too clever. We made the search too hard. We thought the instructions were using figures of speech, but all along, the text was meant to be taken literally. The god of Darkness. The god of the Underworld. The god of the Pyramid. It was so damned easy, Mac. Once your men leveled the pyramid, it was so obvious why the Maya built it where they did. We found what Drummond wants.”