Blood Sun

18

Sayid watched Keegan skirt the building. Heavy steel doors barred his way, but then he made his way down the ramp to where the van had taken Maguire’s body. There was a keypad there, and Sayid watched as Keegan, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that no one was around, swiped a card and then stepped back as the door moved upward. Keegan ducked under quickly when it was only a meter off the ground, and then Sayid saw it roll back down to its original position. He quickly fingered the keys to select another CCTV camera from the dozen or so others on his screen. By the way the man acted, inspecting the building first and then finding a way in, Sayid realized that this man had to be from MI5 and that they were responding to the surveillance files that had been sent to them.

Sayid manipulated the lens of the camera inside the first area. No natural light found its way into the tomblike building. Sayid watched as the man turned on a small but powerful torch, searching the walls for a light switch. That was going to be very helpful to Sayid, but he thought that maybe it wasn’t a great idea for the man himself. How did the man know that the torch was not going to set off a light-sensitive alarm? Maybe he was inexperienced. Or scared. Did MI5 people get scared? Sayid felt nervous enough being a fly on the wall as the camera lens tracked the man down the corridor.

All the walls inside the building seemed to be made of brushed stainless steel or thick opaque glass, and Keegan edged along warily, hands moving across the walls, trying to find a doorway or an opening of any kind, because where there were frames within the glass, there seemed to be no handles to indicate that a door or entrance of any description could be there.

There was an uncanny silence in the corridor and a chill that reminded Keegan of a mortuary. It was not his imagination-even the walls felt cold. There was an elevator at the end of the corridor. He pressed the button and the doors opened; there were only two floors to choose from. First floor and work up? Second floor and work down? He pressed the first-floor button, noticed that his breathing had become more ragged, more fearful, but could not deny the thrill of danger that squirmed in his stomach. The doors closed on him.

He would never see daylight again.

Sayid was as edgy as Keegan. He watched a dozen cameras on-screen, but they all seemed to be focused on corridors, empty and cold-looking, bare and unwelcoming. He could see the MI5 man standing in the lift, gazing up at the camera lens-right at him. Sayid suddenly felt a tremor in his hands as he manipulated the camera. It was as if the man knew he was there, but then he glanced back down. Obviously this camera was behind a panel and not directly in view.

It was like being a ghost, standing right next to someone, almost able to touch them, going with them on their journey but being invisible. Sayid thought he seemed very young to be a spy and looked to be in his early twenties. As if he had not been out of university for long. He looked cool. Jeans, shirt hanging loosely, black jacket and canvas trainers. His hair was chopped in a modern style. Just an ordinary-looking bloke you wouldn’t glance at twice in the street. Exactly what a spy should be, Sayid reasoned.

The lift doors opened.

The low-lit area Keegan had stepped into was ultramodern. A number of small screens were strategically located along the wall, evenly spaced, as if there were rooms behind those thick, dull panels. Fingerprints were required to access whatever lay behind these opaque glass screens. As he stood at the end of the corridor and gazed along it, he realized it was wide enough for him to reach out both arms and almost touch the walls on each side. Wide enough for what? A hospital trolley maybe? A full-sized wheeled bed? Was this some kind of private hospital or clinic? It smelled like it.

He remembered when he had gone round the building outside how the narrow alleyways had run far back. This building had a lot of depth, and the internal space must be used to store something, but what? It had to be really important, because only a privileged few gained access to this second stage of security-you had to have the correct fingerprint. How could he get round that?

Sayid watched the man move back toward the lift. He stood in front of the doors for a moment and studied the framework next to where the call button was located. His fingers seemed to trace the area around the stainless steel, and then he took something from his pocket. Sayid changed camera angles, choosing one that sat high in the corner of the corridor and included the lift doors. He used his mouse to pinpoint the camera’s control panel that sat on his screen and tweaked the direction of the lens. Sayid zoomed in. Now he could see that the man had a square of what looked like acetate in his hands. He peeled the back off it and pressed it against the frame, then lifted it off carefully. Keegan turned and moved back down the corridor.

Sayid changed camera angles again. He was just to one side, and high up, but he could look down at what the man was doing-placing the sheet on a small screen. It was a fingerprint swipe. Clever. He had lifted a fingerprint to gain access. These guys were good, Sayid thought. No wonder they were MI5.

The opaque wall panel slid back, exposing a broad, tiled room. Immediately to one side were stainless-steel coat stands, purpose-designed to hang a biohazard suit on-and there were four of them suspended now, just like the ones Sayid had seen worn in the Underground tunnel.

But the man had barely glanced at the suits, because set square in the middle of this room was a glass cage with a stainless-steel table in the middle. Like a postmortem examination room. The glass cage was a completely sealed unit, and if Sayid could have viewed the room from another angle, he would have seen that there was a special entrance built through an air lock at the back of this cage, where a medical team could enter and exit safely once they had hooked up the oxygen line for their biohazard suits.

Sayid watched as the man pressed some console buttons on one wall. A series of screens appeared, half a dozen individual frames, as if they were an integral part of the wall, just as a hospital examination room would display images from a scanning machine. Sayid could not see what the images were, but he watched as the man put a hand to his face in horror and then staggered back a few paces, banging into one of the biohazard suits. He spun round, completely disoriented, and then bent over and vomited on the cold tile floor. Whatever was on those screens must have been horrific.

Sayid saw movement on his monitor. Someone else was in the building. He quickly keyed in different camera angles. Two men he had never seen before. They were in the downstairs area stepping into the lift. Another angle-they pressed the button. The first floor. They knew there was an intruder in the building. Sayid couldn’t see the faces yet; they kept their chins tucked low. They knew there were cameras. Sayid keyed to his angle back in the examination room; the man was leaning against the wall, wiping his face with his sleeve. He seemed weakened by what he had seen. Why didn’t he get out? If what was on those screens was so terrible, why didn’t he get out?

Sayid shouted at the images, “Run! Get out now as fast as you can! Hurry! Hurry!”

A warning flash bleeped loudly on Sayid’s computer. It was insistent, demanding his attention. The men were getting closer to that examination room; the doors of the lift were opening. Sayid pressed the key that highlighted the warning signal. It was from his White Hat group. The text was in capital letters: they were shouting a warning at him.

SHUT DOWN, MAGICIAN. SHUT DOWN. THEY’RE TRACING YOU! WE CAN’T HOLD THEM OFF. THESE GUYS ARE POWERFUL. SHUT DOWN. GET OUT NOW. GET OUT!

Sayid felt a wave of terror engulf him. He clicked back to the screens. The man was backing against the glass cage, his arm raised as if trying to shield himself; then he went out of sight, because one of the two intruders stood in front of him and was extending his arm, pointing at him. Pointing or aiming?

Helplessly, Sayid yelled at the screen. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!”

Suddenly his vision was blurred. A hand had reached up and pulled the camera lens downward. One of the intruders looked right at him. Right into his eyes. He pointed a finger. And smiled. The screens went haywire. Sayid ripped the power cable out of the wall.

And then there was nothing. Sayid sat in stunned silence for a couple of seconds. With a surge of fear, he pushed the chair back from the desk. It felt as though the man were in the room with him. What had happened in that building was connected to Max, and so were those images that Keegan had seen.

What were they? What horror was Max facing?

Faces with gaping mouths screamed in silent terror. The clay pottery masks with their empty eye sockets gazed blindly into Orsino Flint’s hut from where they hung on the walls. Animal skins were stretched across the wall and floor; rare and exotic plants, dripping with moisture, were tucked into corners, competing for space with a collection of spears, shields, bows and arrows. It was a museum of jungle living. More face masks, but this time of wood, crudely carved and decorated with brightly speckled garish paint, hung on another wall as if in a gallery. They looked like representations of various jungle animals.

Flint pointed to a place on the floor. “Sit there,” he said as he began to rummage in a corner where rolls of maps and charts were stacked like a woodpile.

Max could barely curb his impatience. Where had his mother disappeared to before she died? He could not rush this strange character; he was there because of Orsino Flint’s goodwill. His own fate had not yet been decided. One thing was certain: Max could never escape from this jungle hideout. He needed Flint on his side. He did as he was told. “What are all those masks?” he asked, trying to divert his attention from the more pressing questions he had.

Flint kept his head down, looking at the rolls. “The Maya call him Balam. Jaguar. Don’t you know anything? The jaguar is revered here.”

Max’s heart thudded. Instant recall. The memory of the big cat in the jungle as its eyes met his own, penetrating the depths of his consciousness-a moment of raw power when the two entities, animal and human, met.

The image broke as Flint unrolled two old maps on the floor, holding the corners down with a selection of rocks, pots and a monkey skull.

“People like you and your parents come here, and how much do you know about the Mayan culture? Not a lot, is my guess. You come here to save them; they don’t need saving. They are the people of the earth and sky-and the jaguar. Thousands of years ago, they were plotting the stars and planets; their temples were built in position so that precise observations could be made. They worked out that there were 365.24 days in the year. Not bad for a Stone Age people, eh? They were craftsmen, farmers; they traded jade across Central America. They were warriors who fought fierce hand-to-hand battles. They took prisoners and they sacrificed them-that was their way. Dying under the knife was a privilege. Bloodletting was essential to appease the gods: it brought rain and good harvests. Even the kings and queens pushed sea-urchin spines through their tongues to collect blood. And then along came the Europeans and showed them what barbarity really was: slaughtering them with muskets and disease.”

Flint sat back on his haunches and made a roll-up cigarette.

Max was not going to be bullied. “I’m not taking responsibility for the downfall of a civilization. I’m a schoolboy looking for his mum, so don’t lay a guilt trip on me. And as far as I know, they died because there were too many of them-there wasn’t enough food to feed them all. Isn’t that right? They lived off corn? The seasons changed and they couldn’t feed themselves. Fat lot of good slaughtering people did.”

Flint stared at Max. “You got a mouth, son. Just like your mother. Maybe you should bite your tongue once in a while, eh? OK, so you’re a smart kid. You think you’re educated, do you? I didn’t go to school, but I’m the only man who can spend months in the jungle and get out alive, right back to where I started. I’m still the king of plant thieves. Who finds the ghost orchid? Me.”

“And my mother stopped you. I’m glad she did that. She hated thieves and people who hurt others.”

“I don’t hurt nobody. I save things,” he said as he puffed on the cigarette and gazed down at the sweat-stained maps and drawings. “I saved you, didn’t I? Why do you think I was near the river? I was finding the ghost. You cost me time and money, boy. You’re damned lucky, ’cause if I wasn’t a plant thief, you’d be croc bait.”

Max knew it was foolish to antagonize him. He softened his tone. He needed the man on his side.

“I’m grateful, Mr. Flint, but I don’t want to hang around here any longer than I have to.”

“Son, no one calls me Mister. You keep it simple-Flint will do. And I want you and that drug merchant out of here. You could bring me big trouble.”

“Xavier tried to get away from all that. He wanted a new life.”

“Aha. Listen, boy. If you don’t ever take on board one single word I say, you remember this: that kid out there is a drug merchant. He and his kind kill untold numbers of people with what they do. If he made a deal with the devil to save his own skin, then that’s what he’ll do again. He will betray you at the first opportunity he gets. Don’t you ever forget that.”

Flint returned his attention to the maps on the floor, his finger tracing a line through the jungle. The maps were old and probably something Flint never needed to use anymore, but he touched a large darkened shape that looked to Max like a mountain range. “You don’t know how bad this jungle can be. I reckon your mother went into the most forbidden place of all.”

“Where the illegal logging is being done?” Max said.

“That’s one of the most dangerous places. What I said was forbidden place. Get those pictures of your mother out,” he said.

Max eased the photos from the folder. They were dry and hard to the touch, the colors faded by the water, but other than that, there was little damage. Flint’s grubby hands took them carelessly and threw them down in front of Max like playing cards, but he had thrown them down in some kind of order.

“This one here,” he said, stabbing one of the pictures, “this is called Xunantunich. This whole area was once heavily populated, a huge city, but it means nothing-it’s where the tourists go, so why would your mother be there?”

“I don’t know. I suppose she was just taking some time out.”

“Aha,” Flint said, and then pushed the other photographs into place across the maps. “This second one here, you see this stone relief she is standing in front of? That’s an ancient Mayan king, and next to him is what?”

Max studied the photograph more carefully. He had seen the pictures so many times, and although he had understood that the stone carvings on the lintels were similar to those he had seen in the British Museum, he had not identified the creature. It was a dragon-type monster with a crocodile head, but it had the ears of a deer, and where its claws should have been were deer hooves.

“I don’t know. It’s bizarre.”

“Only to those who can’t see beyond the ordinary. That’s called the Cosmic Monster.” Flint kept his finger on the photograph. “It represents the planets across the star fields; it’s the path between the natural and the supernatural worlds. And that figure there is the jaguar sun god.”

Max took the picture from him and looked at the fine detail of the carvings, something he had simply not comprehended before. “So does this mean something?”

There were four more photographs laid out on the maps, but Flint ignored them for the moment and kept the first one taken at Xunantunich. “Did you have any other pictures from the jungle?”

“No,” said Max. “These were all I ever had of her on her last field trip.”

“I think she was pretending to be a tourist in this one,” Flint said, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “In case anyone was following her, because someone like your mother would have known these places. In each of these photographs, your mother is moving to different ancient sites. Most of these are not known to outsiders. Maybe a few archaeologists and the local people who have ventured into the jungle as their guides, but these places are not where tourists go. She was going deeper and deeper into the jungle.”

Max was fascinated more than ever by the pictures of his mother, because now she was telling him a story. “Do you think she was trying to tell me, or somebody else, about where she was going?”

Flint shrugged and flicked the soggy, extinguished cigarette away. A rattling cough accompanied the shake of his head. “I don’t know.” Then he went through the remaining pictures, touching each one as he explained their location to Max and the meanings of the cut-stone panels. “These carvings with the bird feathers, they’re priests, shamans. They did all the blood sacrifices. These here, these are Serpent Warriors.”

“Serpent Warriors?” Max said. The image of twisting snakes coiled about their victims leapt into his mind. “Did they use snakes when they fought their wars?”

Flint reached out and took a spear that leaned against the wall. “No. That’s just what the warriors were called, but you spend time out here and you’ll see boa constrictors take wild animals, crush them and swallow them whole. You’d better hope you don’t tangle with one of those.” He handed the spear to Max. “This is one of the weapons the warriors used.”

Max felt the weight of the spear and fingered the flint head-a heavy blade, its edges flaked to slice into the enemy’s flesh.

“They were called teeth of lightning, those spears. And they also had stone knives cut into the shape of a jaguar paw. It was a mean way to fight, but they were warriors who fought face to face-you have to admire that. Fight or die. Simple choices.” He held the photograph up. “See these carvings?”

Max took it from him. The picture showed his mother standing next to the remains of a temple where the jungle had swallowed most of the building, but she held her hand against a stone carving, her face turned toward the camera. Max looked hard at what her hand rested against. One of the images was of a figure Max took to be some kind of holy man or chief. He sat on a stool, emblems on his arm, and he wore a headdress, but his elbows were bent, offering something in the palm of his hands. It was a severed head.

“The stool is made from the bones of sacrificial victims,” Flint told him. “That’s where the head came from.” He pressed his finger onto the map. There was no sign of any village or town or anything that could be called a settlement. It was in the middle of nowhere. And it was very close to the dark, shaded patch on the map.

Max was uncertain if what he felt was nervous excitement at finding the route his mother took into the jungle or an increasing sense of doom. Were these pictures shot shortly before his mother died, or had she gone on alone, deeper into the jungle, to meet her fate?

“These must have been taken by her guide,” Max said. “Do you think we could find him?”

“Perhaps. He’d be Maya, and there wouldn’t be too many who could go that deep into the mountains. And not this place. Nobody goes in-or comes out. I believe in the old ways. There are wayob in there. I’d bet my last dollar on it.”

“Wayob?” Max asked.

“Jungle spirits. Shamans can create animal forms. Wayob. You can’t kill them, but the bad ones-they can kill you.”

Max had learned from his time in Africa never to deride ancient beliefs. There was no reason to doubt that shape-shifting could serve evil purposes as well as good. One of the photographs showed his mother standing next to carved images of a sacrifice. Danny Maguire had told him that on the khipu. OK. Think it through, he told himself. Danny Maguire could not have been with his mother-his mother’s death had happened too long ago-but he might have met the guide. Maybe that was where he got the information that he sent to Max. Danny was doing his own research and came across the guide and heard the story of his mother’s disappearance. That had to be it!

There were other carvings: young children, bound together like slaves. “Was this a war party? Were these the children of the people being sacrificed?” Max asked, remembering Danny’s message.

“You’re beginning to get pretty good at this, son.”

“It had to be a dangerous place for one reason or another. Someone I knew sent me a coded message. I don’t understand why she is there, or why she is touching this particular stone carving.”

Flint pointed at an area on the map. “Twenty years ago a vast biosphere reserve was created to help save the rain forest and the animals and plants, but that’s always under threat because of oil pipelines and the need for slash-and-burn farmland. That’s where environmentalists have been killed. Illegal logging and oil both bring wealth to a poor country and power to a few.” Flint began rolling another cigarette, busying himself, spilling tobacco into the paper, but he had one eye on the boy. Waiting.

Max studied the map and saw a dotted area colored light green, the small word biosphere barely visible.

“My mother was involved in trying to protect the rain forest and plants for medicines-I know that. She was really brave, my mum. Could she have got into trouble there?”

Flint stayed silent and laid the last photograph on a dark, shaded area. The picture had a plume of smoke curling upward in the background. Max already believed this to be near a volcano. His eyes sought out the contour lines on the map. The dark mass was nowhere near the biosphere. He pointed at an area. “Is that where this photograph was taken? There’s another reserve, isn’t there?” Max asked.

Flint smiled. The boy had a brain, and he knew how to read a map. Maybe there was hope for him after all.

“Aha.” Flint licked the edge of paper, smoothing the wonky roll-up. Max plucked it from his fingers and put it behind his ear.

Flint was surprised. “Bad habits stay with you a long time.”

“I don’t want a lecture, Flint; I want answers. My mother went here, didn’t she?” he insisted, touching the dark mass that spread like a virus across the paper, its edges creeping into the forests. “What is it?”

Flint gave up cigarette making and circled the darkened area with his hand, as if drawing out mute information from the creased paper. “No one really knows, but it was established as a place of special scientific interest, whatever that might mean. It was the same company that set up the biosphere reserve, so their intentions were good.”

“Who are they?”

“Zaragon.”

Max knew that name! It resounded in his memory-but from where? He could not place it. It would come, in time, and that might give him another clue to the mystery surrounding his mother’s death.

“The area is prone to earthquakes,” Flint continued. “An active volcano sits in the middle of the reserve, and every now and again it bursts through the lower cracks in the mountain. Lava spills down through the ravines but then gets swallowed up by the huge underground caves. There are old, hidden ruins, but no one’s been in that jungle for thirty years, maybe more. It’s a place where the Maya are allowed to live as they have always lived, without outside interference. No one else is allowed in. It’s a forbidden zone,” Flint said.

Max felt the shiver of anticipation. He was sure this was where his mother had gone. He almost whispered, Why?

“They say it is the place of the jaguar god of the underworld,” Flint said.

Max looked at Flint, who averted his eyes. What was he thinking? What was he unable to say to Max’s face? If his mother had gone into this forbidden zone, was Flint telling him that she may have been sacrificed? The thought sickened him, images too appalling to even think about flashing through his mind. He shook his head. “You can’t be sure she went in there.”

“No. It just seems she was heading that way. People die out here. Snakebite, injury, disease, it doesn’t have to be anything more suspicious than that. Maybe that’s what happened to your mother,” Flint said a little more kindly.

Max tried to remember everything he knew of his mother’s disappearance. Why had his father run away? Was it because he had been frightened of something? As far as he knew, his mother had died and been buried somewhere in the jungle. What was it that was so terrifying it had made his father run away?

“Have you ever been in there?” Max asked.

“Not me. There are stories of people who tried-they never made it. In or out. They were destroyed by the hummingbird god. There are so few ways to get inside there. I’ve been close, maybe a couple of Ks, and on a calm day you can hear him. Those mountains are like an island-I’m talking thousands of square kilometers-and I tell you something else. There’s a logging strip round half of it, and there are armed guards. Private. That place is bad news.”

“I bet there are some amazing rare plants in there,” Max said.

“You’re crazy. You’re not going to get me anywhere near the place. Nowhere near.”

“Then can you get me close? I have to find out what happened. I have to, Flint, don’t you see? It’s why I’m here. How long do you think it’ll take those men chasing me to finally come to this place? If they’re that determined, they are going to check in an ever-wider circle. As you said, I could bring you big trouble.”

Flint stayed silent for a few seconds, shaking his head as if discounting his thoughts, but then he sighed, giving in to the inevitable. “There is one way in, maybe. The Cave of the Stone Serpent. None of the locals would ever go near it.” Flint got up and took down a carved figure from the wall, a skeleton draped in ornaments of bone and skin covered in black spots.

Max pointed to the necklace on the carving. “What are those?”

Flint handed it to him. “Eye sockets, a symbol of the underworld. The cave is where Ah Puch lives.”

“Who is Ah Puch?” Max asked.

“The Mayan god of death.”