Public Enemy

34

They found the village just before dusk.

Cooper encountered the first of the structures, an overgrown rectangle made of clay and dark hardwood timbers that had barely rotted at all. He almost missed it, mainly since it wasn’t the kind of ruin he was expecting to find. Not that he should have expected one type of ruin or another-but where were the Mayan stones, crumbling into dirt as the jungle overtook them?

Soon he saw another such structure. Then another. The three of them had been working about fifty yards apart, covering as broad a swath as possible while still remaining within earshot, if not within eyesight. Cooper whistled.

“Got something,” he called out. “Not sure what, but it’s something.”

“Same here,” Borrego said, his voice arriving from somewhere off to Cooper’s left. Cooper heard Madrid, or some large animal in any case, approaching from the right.

It was getting hard to see, but not that much harder than it had been to see the whole time. The canopy of wide-leafed trees kept out most of the light. Everything was wet, and it was hot, maybe eighty-five or ninety degrees. Four or five times during their march through the woods, Cooper had heard, more than felt, rain showers, pelting the trees at the top of the canopy, the frequent rains seeping their way through over time, basically creating one giant soupy mud puddle underneath.

Madrid arrived and, along with Cooper, examined the small buildings.

“Not too old,” he said.

In the one Cooper was currently examining, there were cooking utensils, a wooden table and bench, two pots-worn out and dirty, but made, it seemed, of gold-and, up against one wall and aside the bench, two sets of human bones. Cooper poked his way over to the structure Madrid was looking through and found it nearly identical to the one he’d been examining, only it was slightly bigger, and featured three sets of bones rather than two.

When Borrego didn’t swing by, Cooper made his way over to the place from which he’d heard the Polar Bear answer his whistle. Madrid followed. It took them a few minutes-darkness was upon them now-but after shouting his name a couple times they found the big man crouched down on one knee. He appeared to be examining some bushes.

“You find your share of skeletons over here?” Cooper said.

Borrego rotated his flashlight from the bush he was looking at. Even pointed at the ground, it was nearly blinding because of the way their eyes had adjusted to the rain forest twilight.

“I did,” Borrego said, “but I found this too.”

He shone the flashlight out ahead of where he was crouched, where Cooper saw there appeared to be some kind of road. It was partially overgrown, but as Borrego worked the flashlight beam along the ground, Cooper could easily see tire tracks through the thin cover of brush.

“My guess,” Borrego said, “is this is where they dragged the artifacts out. Those are mechanized wagon tracks, kind of a specialized minitank today’s tomb raiders utilize as their excavation vehicle of choice. I’d bet we’ve circled back a ways-the edge of the crater closest to Belize isn’t far from here. There’s probably a steep mountain face a few miles from here at most, where they could have passed the artifacts down the cliff with ropes and pulleys.”

Cooper flicked on his own flashlight and walked around for a while, taking a look at whatever he could see that wasn’t a tree, bush, insect, or snake. He heard Borrego and Madrid fall in behind him, and they marched around that way in the dark, examining some additional structures, including one made of more traditional-looking stones. He found a few fire pits too. Everywhere they wandered, the sounds of the jungle were overwhelming-screaming insects, frogs, or some other creature, Cooper had no idea. There was the rustle of snakes, rodents, and maybe birds, plus the occasional, more intimidating growl. Cooper didn’t know what the sounds were, but he did know he hated them. He hated almost everything about this place-the look of each leaf, the width of the vines that wound up the tree trunks, the scents of rotting things and new, green growth. He found he had to clamp his jaw to keep the insanity and fear-an instinctive desire to run-from overtaking him.

He knew the reason: it seemed there existed no difference between this jungle and the one through which he’d fled-the one in which he’d been held, and into which he’d stupidly, arrogantly jumped.

His jumpy need to bolt came in waves, between which he paid close attention to what he saw-and what he saw, besides a reasonably primitive Central American Indian village, were more bones. Skeletons-lots of them.

Or, as the tomb raider in the chop shop had put it, all of them.

It was becoming rapidly clear-particularly given the positioning of the skeletal remains in their many different, seemingly casual angles of repose-that every single inhabitant of this village had died, or been killed, at almost the same time. Some had been attended, some not, but it seemed pretty obvious everyone had died fairly quickly.

Curse, indeed. Christ.

A wave of fear and nausea overtook him briefly and he set his hand against a tree to steady himself. As he did, he heard her. It was faint at first, just another part of the jungle sounds, but then her screeching, singsong tone ramped up in volume and he knew who it was. It was that goddamn golden idol of a priestess, calling out to him across the Caribbean. Her voice was deeper now, distorted, throat dry and scratchy-

Oh, yeah, Cooper, you come to find us, and now we been found.

You come to free us at last. So take us away, you dumb old paramilitary goon. Let us escape our damnation. An escape arranged by a soul as damned as we…

Cooper bent down and squatted beside one of the skeletons and had a closer look. This one was reclined partially against the wall of the structure it occupied and partially on the floor, as though the person, in life, had been sitting against the wall when he or she died, the bones collapsing somewhat over the course of the body’s decay.

“Why don’t we set up camp,” Borrego said. “There’s a clearing back a hundred yards or so, seems like a decent place to do it. We can use a fire as a home base and take a look around in spokes-out and back, out and back, so we know where we’ve been and where we haven’t, with the fire as our compass.”

Madrid cleared his throat.

“Might just be better,” he said, “to wait for morning. Then have a look around.”

Borrego chuckled.

“What,” he said, “and wait around all night? If you can stand to wait another ten hours to peer around every nook and cranny of this little city-hell, if you can get any sleep in this racket-you’re a better man than I.”

“All right,” the velociraptor said, lacking Borrego’s enthusiasm for matters. “I’ll get going on setting things up.”

Borrego tossed Madrid an enthusiastic thumbs-up and turned to lead the way.

Working in tag teams, with one of them manning the camp-usually Madrid-they had a look at the entire village, or at least what appeared to be the entire village, examining everything within range of the flashlight beams while they headed six or seven hundred yards out and back on each “spoke.” It was about three-quarters of the way around the wheel where Cooper and Borrego, about a hundred yards east of the fire, found the stairs going down.

There were two stone columns that had recently been knocked to pieces, but had obviously once marked the entrance to wherever the stairs went. Stone slabs composed the stairwell, which, upon illumination, revealed itself to lead down beneath the rain forest floor. Cooper counted thirty stairs and estimated the level of the passageway visible at the base to be twenty feet below ground level. Dirt, leaves, sticks, fallen stones, and broken slabs of rock were strewn across the stairwell and the passageway beneath. There were also footprints, straight-line depressions, and, on the surface, near where they stood, the tire tracks again.

“I’m guessing this’d be where they found the goodies,” Borrego said.

“And maybe the curse.” Cooper felt queasy at the prospect of heading underground.

“Oh, hell, no,” Borrego said with a chuckle. “You get the curse over where we set up camp.”

“Very funny.”

“After you.”

“Even funnier.”

“I could get Madrid,” Borrego said. “Send him in ahead of us. Maybe he can set off the booby traps.”

“Thought you were an experienced spelunker?” Cooper said.

Their dual flashlight beams remained trained on the base of the stairwell.

“I am.”

“So?”

“You’re the canary,” Borrego said, “aren’t you?”

Aw, what the hell, Cooper thought, and started down. He turned so he could keep an eye on Borrego as he went. He didn’t do it for any reason other than instinct-you just never knew. Borrego started down behind him cautiously, some of that spring he’d shown along the way missing from his step.

In the passageway, some of the stones and beams that held the walls together had broken apart and fallen. There were mounds of dirt where the earth had caved in, but most of the cave-ins appeared to have happened prior to the raid-tire tracks, footprints, and scrape marks evident on the mounds of dirt too.

Protrusions from the wall were visible at shoulder height every ten steps or so, on alternating sides; looking more closely at them, Cooper realized they were there to hold torches or lanterns. As with the rest of the architecture, they didn’t seem particularly old.

The hall turned to the right, and Cooper first saw darkness, and then, as he rotated the flashlight beam into the blackness-vastness. Borrego came up alongside him, and between their two flashlights they were able to partially illuminate the room.

It was a massive, stone-walled chamber, with a number of benches built in rows along the floor. The benches were made of the same dark hardwood as the structures on the rain forest floor. Along the two longest walls, rectangular cavities had been carved out at regular intervals, the flashlight beams revealing the cavities to be empty. Because of the way the spiderwebs, dust, and dirt were patterned within the cavities, Cooper caught the distinct impression of something recently taken.

A similar emptiness of grime and dust showed itself under their beams in a rectangular shape along the shorter back wall of the room; Cooper thought immediately of the gold tapestry he’d seen on display in Cap’n Roy’s Marine Base Barn.

“Looks to me,” Borrego rumbled from Cooper’s left, “like a church.”

There were a pair of doorways, one on each side of the place where the tapestry had hung. Cooper took one of the openings at the back of the room and Borrego the other. They wound up in the same room-this one much wider, with a shallower ceiling. As he watched his flashlight beam illuminate the features of this particular chamber, Cooper felt an icy tingle inch up his spine.

“Or a funeral home,” he said.

Stretching away from them, in multiple rows, stood a sea of caskets. These too were made of the same hardwood. They looked more weathered than the timbers used to build the shacks-older, Cooper thought.

“This is their cemetery,” he thought out loud.

“So it seems,” Borrego said.

Most of the caskets appeared to have been opened and re-closed; their lids were mostly a little bit askew but remained on the coffins despite the disturbance they’d endured. There were cavities built into the walls of this room just as in the other, and these-along with the boxes beside the coffins, Cooper and Borrego examining a few of them-were also empty.

“Your boys did a pretty thorough job of cleaning house,” Cooper said.

“Told you they were good.”

“Not that this comes as any great surprise,” Cooper said, “but I’m not exactly feeling like Sherlock Holmes here. Everybody’s dead-okay-that makes the place no different from every other Mayan ruin, except it’s pretty obvious whatever killed these people killed them quickly. Then we’ve got the thorough cleaning job by your tomb raiders-other than these evident facts, we ain’t exactly stumbling across an explanation behind the multi-continental snuff-out currently being conducted by persons unknown.”

Borrego’s flashlight beam moved bumpily around the walls of the room; Cooper took a look at him and saw that the Polar Bear had entered into a massive, slow, ecstatic kind of stretch. As though to emphasize the satisfaction the full-body stretch gave him, he opened his mouth and undertook a wide, trembling yawn.

When he’d finished, Borrego said, “Guess you could see it this way: either it’s got something to do with the whole village being dead, or this trip was one big waste of time. Other than good exercise and great lobster, of course. Let’s head up top-see if Jesus has the tents up.”

Cooper shrugged, said he didn’t see why not, and followed the Polar Bear up and out.