He allowed his gaze to return to the screen. The symbols carved in gold stared back at him and he thought of the contrast: Tulan Zuyua and Xibalba, a form of paradise and the very gates of hell. He couldn’t help but wonder which one they would find.

CHAPTER 10

Pale light from the risen moon filtered through gaps in the trees, illuminating the uneven ground. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to see by, enough for the young man, a member of the Nuree tribe, to track his prey.

He cut through the forest silently, following the scuffed trail of the animal he hunted—a large brown tapir, two hundred and fifty pounds. He trod cautiously, not willing to lose the chance that lay before him. It had been a long hunt and this animal was the first major game he’d seen in weeks. If it heard him it would race back to the river, where tapirs spent their days hiding and waiting for nightfall, when they foraged for food.

He moved carefully, pausing as he detected a new scent: smoke. Not the pleasant, woody scent of a good fire, but the stale, acrid smell of soot from a dead, burned-out blaze.

A minute later he came upon the source of that smell. In a small space between the trees, what looked like a compost heap smoldered; piles of leaves and branches and the fired remnants of dried fronds lay blackened and spent. A wisp of gray smoke lingered around it, hugging the mound like an apparition.

He stepped closer to the pile. The burned mess had been compromised, one side had fallen away and the top layer had slid off. Included in that layer was the body of a human being, burned beyond recognition. He looked over the blackened bones.

“Chokawa,” he mumbled in disgust, the Nuree word for the Chollokwan people, the strange tribe that bordered them at times, attacking anyone who entered their territory. His uncle feared these people—the Shadow Men, he called them—claiming they did evil things and begging him not to go this way.

The young man was less afraid, but at this strange site he paused. For a moment he thought about turning back, but his eyes fell upon the tapir’s trail once again and he chose to push on.

Minutes later, he came within earshot of the foraging creature. He stopped, seeing it for the first time, rooting through the undergrowth for a particular type of vegetation. He tensed his body, raised his spear and flung it forward.

The weapon flew straight, hitting the animal in the side. It squealed with pain and bolted into the forest. The hunter raced after it, trees and brush whipping by on either side of him. He tracked the fleeing creature by the sounds it made, the labored breathing, the grunting and the crunching foliage.

Up ahead he heard a sharp, sudden squeal. He assumed the tapir had fallen, but he arrived at the spot to find only his spear lying on the ground, soaked with blood and surrounded by tufts of dark fur. The animal was nowhere to be seen.

He wondered if it had shaken the spear loose and escaped, but its tracks simply ended. As if it had disappeared in midstride.

He picked up his fallen weapon, examining the tip to make sure it was intact. As he did, his ears caught a slight rustle coming from the bushes ahead of him. He was still, listening. In the quiet, he heard the sound of shallow breathing. He crept toward the shrubs, raised the spear above his head and drove it down with all his weight.

The tip hit something solid and glanced off. The shaft cracked, ringing his hands as a black shape launched itself at him from the thicket. He saw the flash of jaws and knife-edged teeth, smelled the stench of rotting meat.

He flew backward at the impact, with twin gashes across his chest in diagonal cuts. He slammed into the ground, twisted and tried to scramble away. But daggers pierced his calves and he screamed.

He slid across the ground as the thing dragged him backward. Shouting in pain, he managed to grab an exposed tree root. He wrapped his hands around it, halting his slide for the moment and wrenching in anguish as his attacker pulled on him and his body drew up into the air like a rope stretched taut.

His face hit the dirt and he realized he’d been released. He pulled himself forward. But the reprieve lasted only a second, and he howled in anguish and arched his back as the teeth plunged into his legs once again, this time into thick muscles on the backs of his thighs.

Suddenly his body wrenched and his hands ripped free. He flew backward, scraping across the ground and shrieking in fear as he disappeared into the tangled brush.

CHAPTER 11

Darkness filled the lab’s interior, broken only by the pinpoints of colored LEDs and the glow of several rows of computer monitors. The room’s precise, symmetrical organization brought to mind a top-level government facility, like NASA’s Johnson Space Center or the darkened rooms of Air Traffic Control. But the lab was not a government facility, and the two men who occupied it were unaffiliated with the federal bureaucracy. That is, aside from the fact that they were studying information hacked from the database of the National Research Institute.

As the data ticked in and the numbers on the screen slowly changed, the two men reacted with opposite expressions. The first man—tall, charcoal-haired and in his midfifties—broke into a satisfied grin; a smug, confident look accentuated by his relaxed, commanding posture and an expensive, custom-tailored suit.

His name was Richard Alexander Kaufman. The lab belonged to him, as did the twenty-story building surrounding it, with its rakish, angled lines and a facade of sapphire blue glass.

Kaufman was CEO and principal owner of Futrex Systems Inc., one of the largest privately held defense contractors in the world. And while Futrex raked in a fortune from the yearly defense budget, it made neither missiles nor bombs. Instead, Futrex created power through the virtual world of zeros and ones; it designed computer systems, data networks and hyper-fast programs that relied on a type of architecture called massive parallel processing.

Futrex programs were used in the design and testing of weapons platforms; they linked AWACS aircraft and satellites to ships, tanks and men on the ground. It was said that battles were not won or lost with weapons but with information, and Futrex Systems enabled American soldiers on the street to see the same information their counterparts in the air and back at headquarters had access to. The military considered this particular data-stream so vital to national security that its contracts included a healthy premium paid specifically to prevent Futrex from adapting the technology for any other purpose. Because of this Futrex had no presence in the civilian world and, as they were privately held, no ticker on any stock market. The result was an oddity in the modern industrial world: a twenty-billion-dollar corporation that almost no one had heard of.

Two decades of such success would have been enough for most people, but not for Richard Kaufman. He wanted more. Kaufman wanted the next wave: an unconditional chance at success, a chance to change the world and, perhaps more important, to tell everyone that he’d done just that.

He was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. He had friends in high places and low places, he had the money, power and expertise to do anything. All he needed was the right vehicle, something he’d spent the better part of a decade searching for.

Kaufman looked to his left. “What do you think?”

The man beside him appeared exasperated. Norman Lang was close to forty but he dressed in the wrinkled casual way of a college student: corduroys and an untucked flannel shirt, now covered by a lab coat. His thin hair was buzzed and his goatee neatly trimmed.

Lang was Kaufman’s chief scientist in areas of unusual interest—the head skunk in the skunk-works, as it were. A brilliant scientist, Lang had fallen into disgrace when he’d been caught falsifying the data on some experiments, ending up in the academic world’s version of purgatory, until Kaufman had hired him.