“I have an idea where to start,” she said.

“Good,” Moore said, sounding proud of her. “What about Hawker? It might be helpful if he came with you. It’ll keep him from going after Saravich.”

“I’ll ask,” she said. “What do you want me to do with Yuri? I’m not sure bringing him along is a good idea.”

Moore hesitated. “If you send him here, I can’t promise you he won’t end up with State or the CIA. Either way he could be sent right back in Russia. If you keep him close he might be able to help.”

She didn’t like that idea, didn’t like the concept of using the young boy to aid in the search, but the thought of him being returned to Russia was unacceptable. “You’d better arrange travel for three.”

“Where to?”

“Just get us to Campeche,” she said. “I’ll take it from there.”

CHAPTER 22

Professor McCarter stepped out of a cramped, aging apartment building and limped into the heart of a tiny fishing village called Puerto Azul. He’d chosen this particular place to stay because it was not a hotel or motel, and because unlike most guesthouses in the area it had only an inside entrance that led to a set of steep, creaky stairs and a hallway with five doors, facts that he hoped would enhance his security.

But mostly he’d chosen it because it reminded him of the apartment he and his wife had stayed in on their honeymoon, which they’d spent in this very town, while McCarter had worked on a dig an hour inland.

He couldn’t be sure if it was the familiar confines or the strange vision he’d had in the sweat lodge in the Chiapas village, but he had a sense now that his wife was with him. She was helping him. Watching over him.

He’d had several vivid dreams of her, some pleasant and others closer to nightmares. And at times both in public and in the privacy of his room, he found himself speaking out loud to her without thinking, as if she were right beside him.

He’d been in Puerto Azul for three days, after a week in the mountain village recuperating. Oco’s return with a bottle of antibiotics had saved him, both from the bacterial plague spreading through his body and the care of the shaman. And though the infection was not quite gone, he’d left the village as soon as he was strong enough to walk.

At the time McCarter hadn’t known where to go. He guessed that the men who’d attacked him thought he was dead; otherwise they wouldn’t have left him. But he considered the possibility that his reporting in to Moore would be leaked, or that Moore’s subsequent actions on Danielle’s behalf would lead their enemy to believe he might be alive.

So he’d hid and let his beard grow and returned, not to the town and hotel where he and Danielle had been based (and had left many belongings), but to Puerto Azul, eighty miles from Cancun on the northern coast of the Yucatan.

The town drew only a smattering of tourists, though enough that his presence would not be conspicuous. And though it was a long way from the interior and even the coastal Mayan sites, it remained within reach of the area where he and Danielle expected to find the next of the power-generating stones.

He stepped out onto the dusty street and began his daily walk, passing the street kids who’d taken to calling him Moses Negro: Black Moses. With the overlarge walking stick he used to support himself, a notebook in the crook of his arm, and the emergent bushiness of his graying beard, he must have looked the part. In some ways he felt the part, trying to lead the NRI to a promised land of sorts. He hoped it would not be forty years of wrong turns before they got there.

To find the Island of the Shroud, he’d combined what he’d learned from the cave in Brazil with Mayan writings found in Mexico and Belize. He’d used satellite imagery, infrared aerial photography, and the whispers of villagers who still lived in the old ways. It had brought them to the crater lake on Mount Pulimundo, to the monument of Ahau Balam, the Jaguar King. McCarter had expected to find the key to his search there. But the information they’d discovered was a blur, incomprehensible at the time, and only slightly more sensible after he’d transcribed the barely readable smudges from his linen shirt.

What he’d found prior to the Island of the Shroud told him this: The path begins with spirit guide Ahau Balam. The tip of the spear reaches out from the great city to the temple of the warrior. There will be found the Sacrifice of the Soul. From there to the shining path, the footsteps of the gods and the Sacrifice of the Body. With these shall rise the Shield of the Jaguar.

What it meant he, couldn’t say. The king depicted on the stolen monolith had held no shield, and no spear. The only glyphs they’d found on it were numbers. Even if he was the king or Ahau that the legend spoke of, McCarter could not see how that would lead them anywhere else. It was like finding directions that said: “Take the road to the other road and then turn on the third road.” Frustrated at his inability to come up with a meaning to this, he’d ventured out of his sanctuary. He needed more information.

He limped down the street, leaning heavily on the staff. Halfway between the apartment and the beach he found an Internet café. After paying his money and settling into a rickety chair, McCarter logged on.

He wanted to tap into his university’s system, where he would have access to data stored on its mainframe, data that included satellite surveys of the Yucatan. He rested, waiting for the connection to go through. He had no way of knowing if his account was being monitored by anyone but Danielle had warned him against any such actions on an insecure network. The people they were dealing with were extremely sophisticated and if they were monitoring the university somehow, tapping into his account would be like broadcasting to the world that he was alive and well in Mexico.

The thought of taking a bus to another town, to another Internet café somewhere, had crossed his mind. But he was too damned tired. He remained in recovery, weakened by the injury. The heat of the day sapped his energy and night sweats and chills kept him from sleeping.

Nervously he typed in his password.

As his finger hovered over the ENTER key, another thought went through his head. Let someone else do this. Simple enough, except others had more to lose than he did and he’d begun to think he might have something to gain.

He tapped the key. The hourglass flipped a few times and then he had access.

Zooming in close he could see some of the major ruins of the area and even some of the smaller ones. But he doubted anything they found in a tourist-ready environment would be helpful. McCarter was after older ruins, structures swallowed up by the jungle long before the great cities of Chichen Itza and Palenque were even built.

Modern theory said that Mayan civilization stretched back two thousand years or so. What McCarter and Danielle had found in the Brazilian rain forest suggested it had a precursor that existed long before that, and that the people who’d lived there had abandoned the site and moved north, journeying through the Andes and up through the isthmus of Central America, eventually settling in the highlands and the jungles of the Yucatan, Guatemala, and Belize.

The descendants of those travelers eventually became the Maya. And if McCarter and the NRI were right, the story of their exodus became part of Mayan prehistory, the departure from their place of origin, a place they called Tulan Zuyua, carrying with them the absolute essence of power: the spirit forms of their gods contained in special glowing stones, items eerily similar to the one that the NRI now possessed.

McCarter guessed that any similar stones would be found among the oldest ruins of the culture. And to find such ancient ruins he needed photos that showed more than the naked eye could see.