If Angel had chosen to rejoin Kasey Kim, she would not have had to go very far. Kasey was still by herself, but she was not at the airport. She was, in fact, racing up the mountain road toward Naj Tunich.
Just thirty minutes after Maddock and the others had set out for the remote archaeological site, a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron had touched down at the airstrip. Kasey had watched with only mild curiosity as the plane taxied down the gravel runway, but decided it might be worthwhile to call Tam with the plane’s tail numbers, just in case. While she was waiting for the ID, an SUV drove out to meet the plane’s lone occupant, an attractive dark-haired woman that kind of looked like Penelope Cruz. What piqued Kasey’s interest however was the woman’s attire; she wore tigerstripe pattern camouflage fatigues. So did the men who got out of the SUV to meet her.
To the best of Kasey’s knowledge, no army or law enforcement group in Central America was using tigerstripe camo, but it was readily available on the civilian market, and sometimes used by agencies and organizations with the freedom to pick their own gear—the CIA for example.
The plane belonged to a shell company with an address in Wilmington, Delaware, which Tam informed her was believed to be a front for the Yucatan-Gulf Cartel, and the woman who looked like Penelope Cruz was none other than the Cartel’s current leader, Isabella Beltran. She was definitely not one of the good guys, but as far as Tam knew, she had no connection to ScanoGen.
Nevertheless, Kasey’s curiosity was growing. All were dressed up for action and in a hurry, and that was enough to make her want to know more. She took the parabolic microphone from her surveillance kit and decided to listen in on their conversation. The portable eavesdropping device had a range of up to three hundred feet, but she only managed to catch a few words before they all got in the SUV and took off.
One word had stood out from the rest.
Cueva.
Cave.
The descent was tedious, but not as difficult as Maddock had anticipated. He let Miranda play mother hen to her father, and focused on making sure the pitches were securely anchored to the limestone. This far from the surface, they couldn’t afford any mistakes.
The last hundred feet or so were the hardest, with the shaft narrowing to an uncomfortably tight squeeze between walls slick with mud, but at the bottom, the cavern opened into a bulb-shaped chamber. The floor was covered with an ankle-deep layer of thick mud. If, as Bell had suggested, the Maya had thrown sacrifices into the shaft, then there were probably hundreds of shattered skeletons compressed into the sediment beneath him, not to mention a fortune in gold jewelry. Maddock however was more interested in the opening at the back of the cavern, and the barely discernible guide glyph etched into the damp stone.
After everyone was down, and Bones had made the obligatory joke about naked mud wrestling, they headed into the passage, which meandered up at a gentle incline for about a hundred feet before emptying into a round chamber, and an apparent dead end.
There were no visible exits, but a quick look around suggested there was a lot more to the room than was evident at first glance. The chamber was almost perfectly circular, and the circumference was adorned with several high relief carvings of very familiar looking figures seated on thrones.
“The Lords of Xibalba,” Bell said, confirming what Maddock had already deduced.
“There were ten Lords in the City of Shadow.” Maddock swept the room, performing a quick head count. “I count twenty here.”
“This is the Council of the Death Lords. It was a test for travelers wanting to enter the Houses of Xibalba. The Lords sat alongside mannequins designed to confuse the arriving supplicants. The only way to gain entry to the Houses was to greet the Lords by name. They also tried to trick the travelers into sitting on a bench that was actually a hot cooking stone.”
“Nice,” Bones remarked. “And why exactly did the Maya worship these guys?”
“To get the cure to the Shadow disease,” snapped Miranda. “I guess you haven’t been paying attention.”
Bones tilted his head to look down at her. “I ask a lot of rhetorical questions. I guess you haven’t been paying attention.”
Maddock ignored their exchange and brought both his flashlight and his attention back to the recess with the low shelf, directly opposite the passage through which they had entered. “That kind of looks like a bench,” he said.
He squatted down and shone the light into the space beneath it. The beam revealed a small round pit. A teepee of wood had been erected in the center, atop a bed of gray ash and black charcoal. He picked up one of the pieces of wood, half-expecting it to crumble to dust. It didn’t, but it was as light as balsa in his hand. Still, it was hard to believe that the wood had been there for hundreds of years. Maybe they weren’t the first ones to make it this far after all.
“It’s a fire pit all right.” He looked up at Bell. “So what now? Does the legend say how to pass the test?”
“You mean aside from not getting punked?” Bones said.
Bell shook his head. “In the Popol Vuh, Hun Hunahpú and Vucub Hunahpú, the father and uncle of the Hero Twins, journey into Xibalba and basically fail all the Council’s tests. They even sit on the cooking stone and get burned, but the Lords allow them to enter the Houses of Xibalba anyway because their plan all along was to sacrifice them later. The Court tests were just a joke to them. Later, when the Hero Twins arrive, they trick the Lords into revealing their names, and then when the Lords tell them to sit down on the bench, they simply refuse.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Miranda said. “There’s probably a secret door here somewhere. To unlock it, we have to figure out which of these statues are the real Lords of Xibalba.”
Maddock considered this for a moment. “I think you’re right about there being a secret door, but I don’t know if there’s a trick to opening it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Remember those three rivers in the City of Shadow? The only way to get past them was with sacrifice. And the paw prints lead right to the cooking stone.”
“What are you saying? That we have to sit on the stone?”
Maddock shrugged and then without waiting for further prompting, lowered his backside onto the shelf.
Nothing happened.
“Maybe you have to preheat,” Bones said.
Knowing Bones, it was meant as a joke, but Maddock knew his friend had hit the nail on the head. “That’s exactly what we have to do.”
“You’re not serious,” Miranda said.
But Maddock was serious. If there was one thing he had learned from his previous encounters with the ancient architects of Xibalba, it was that they were sadistic sons of bitches. He took the lighter he’d brought along as a CO2 detector, crouched down to the firepit and struck a light, holding it to the dry wood until yellow flames began rising. The smell of woodsmoke soon filled the air, but there must have been a chimney at the back of the recess, because the chamber remained relatively clear. After a few minutes. Maddock could feel a change in ambient temperature. The room was heating up. The mud on his clothes and skin was rapidly drying out, forming an itchy crust. As he stared at the stone shelf, his enthusiasm for meeting the test head-on began to wane.
“Stone takes a while to heat up,” Bones observed. “But once it does, it stays hot.” He grinned at Maddock. “Having second thoughts?”
“Second, third and fourth,” Maddock admitted. He touched a forefinger to the stone shelf. It was warm but not enough to burn him. Not yet.
Instead of sitting, he stepped up onto the shelf, reasoning that his boot soles would afford an additional layer of protection, provided they didn’t melt down. As soon as he transferred his weight onto his leading foot, the shelf shifted beneath him, dropping an inch or so. A low rumble shuddered through the stone and the back of the recess abruptly slid aside, revealing a dark passage behind the cooking stone.
“Open Sesame,” Maddock said, trying to sound triumphant, but mostly just feeling relieved.
“Awesome,” Bones said disingenuously. “We’re all going to hell.”
“Not if you don’t get moving,” Maddock said. He could feel the heat in his boots now and knew it would only get worse. “It might close if I step off, so go past me, one at a time. Bones, take point.”
For once, the big Cherokee did as instructed without comment, stepping up onto the shelf and pushing past Maddock toward the opening. He stopped at the back, shining his flashlight in to get the lay of the land, then stepped off the cooking stone and into the darkness. Maddock peered into the revealed passage, but aside from Bones’ silhouette, there was nothing to see.
Miranda went next, but lingered on the shelf to help her father move forward. She winced as the heat got to her, and began hopping from one foot to the other as Bell struggled to catch up. Maddock was sorely tempted to imitate her fire dance. The heat was well past the point of merely being uncomfortable, and he knew that soon it would actually do physical injury, but he was worried that too much movement on the stone slab might inadvertently cause the secret door to slam shut.
As soon as the Bells were past, it was Angel’s turn. As she brushed by him, she gave him a quick kiss. “Hey, hot stuff.”
“Hey, yourself.” Maddock tried to smile, but with his teeth clenched against the pain, it was more of a grimace.
He was about to follow when he saw something moving in the chamber they had just vacated. For a fleeting instant, he assumed it was just a trick of the light, that the flickering of the flames under the cooking stone was making the carved statues of the Death Lords appear to move, but it was spooky enough to prompt him to shine his light into the gloom.
It wasn’t a trick of the light.
Standing in the center of the chamber was a man, at least Maddock assumed it was a man. It was hard to know for sure, since his first impression was of reptilian scales. The figure threw a hand up to shield his eyes from the intensity of the light, giving Maddock another second or two to process what he was seeing.
It was a man all right. Beneath a layer of streaky mud, his nearly naked body was painted or tattooed with a pattern of scales. His black hair was pulled up in a sort of top-knot, similar to what was portrayed in Mayan glyphs.
Maddock recalled what Bell had said about modern Maya carrying on the old traditions and wondered if this man was the local shaman who had seen them sneaking into the cave.
Busted.
Despite the heat that was starting to cook the soles of his feet, Maddock raised a hand. “Sorry. I can explain.”
By way of an answer, the main raised a long reed to his lips, pointed the other end of it at Maddock and then puffed up his chest in preparation to blow.
Maddock ducked instinctively as a tiny projectile shot toward him, missing his cheek by scant inches.
The attack galvanized Maddock into action. He turned his back on the Maya warrior and bounded into the passage where the others were waiting. Even as he did, something clicked and he realized the significance of his assailant’s appearance.
“The Serpent Brothers!” he shouted. “They found us.”