Deity (38 page)

The
curses Chac now muttered beneath his breath were not self-criticism for his
inexcusable mistake. No. It was for the mistake Peet was now making. The last
Chac saw of him were his hands, bound behind his broad, sturdy back, marching
into the darkness of the cave. He didn’t expect to see the anthropologist
again.

There’d
been no way of stopping him without triggering some rash reaction. Simply put,
Peet had fallen into Abdullah’s trap. Chac had been wary of it. Peet wasn’t. And
all it took was the bait.

Lori.

There
was no chance Lori had survived the collapsed cenote. To use her as bait was a
desperate tactic and Chac had called Abdullah’s bluff. Could he have really
found her body?
Possibly.
But he wouldn’t need the
body to use her. Abdullah had the money and resources that would make any
military envious. He always found access to some of the most impossible
information. To learn that Lori had gone to the cenote with him and Peet would
have only taken an appropriately placed spy, camera or tracking equipment. In
fact, it had been a piece of Abdullah’s captured devices that Chac had slipped
into Peet’s boot. And no doubt Matt had reported the location of the cavern to
Abdullah when he first discovered it, so it was very likely the place was being
closely monitored by the time Chac led Peet and Lori into it.

If
only he had suspected something…

Curses.

Chac
glanced at Father Ruiz. The priest’s face had paled when the screams started
coming from the cave and he had yet to regain his color. Peet and Father Ruiz
may have been convinced by the desperate cries, but Chac wasn’t. He doubted any
woman was in the cave. It wouldn’t be beneath Abdullah to have a recording on
hand to use at such a necessary time. The sounds of a distressed woman were
enough to tug at any man. Chac had learned long ago not to fall for that trap. Besides,
Chac already knew not to enter the cave no matter what the cost.

He’d
managed to avoid that. Now, for plan B…

* * * *

Tarah
paced impatiently, feeling Sonjay glaring at her from his post at the pillar. She
was aware of the stone he now rolled within his fingers, possibly waiting for
an opportunity to bean her with it. She’d be ready if he tried.

As
good of a militant leader as he was, Sonjay was continually impatient for
action and when he and Rafi entered the chamber, she could tell they’d been
sent on a mission. Sonjay wasted no time. They pounced on Lori, throwing her to
the ground and roughing her up in the ways of ruthless men—anything to get her
to make some noise.

Tarah
had seen this tactic before, even participated a time or two
herself
.
It meant something wasn’t going as planned. As Tarah watched the men work, she
knew someone wasn’t cooperating outside and now Abe was trying to appeal to the
humane side of the resistance. The only problem was
,
Lori must have figured that out too for the harder the men pressed the more
resistant she became. Even a broken finger brought little more than a sniffling
whimper out of her.

To
the girl’s credit, she wasn’t about to give them what they wanted.

“Enough
of this,” Tarah snapped as she planted a foot on Lori’s abdomen, prohibiting
Sonjay from removing the girl’s clothes. If this was the way Abe intended to
reward his men, there would be time for that later. But they were getting no further
ahead on their agenda this way.

Sonjay
was clearly unhappy with the intercession, but he was loyal enough to recognize
when his own self-glory might hinder the success of the larger mission. Disappointed,
he relented and after Tarah ordered the men to secure Lori back in the chamber,
she took matters in her own hands. It would require a little acting on her
part, but luckily, she didn’t have to scream for very long.

* * * *

As
Peet’s eyes adjusted to the darkness surrounding the light beam emitting from
Abe’s flashlight, he mentally counted his footsteps. It was more out of habit
than necessity. It was just the way his mind worked, always calculating data regarding
the ways of ancient civilizations.

It
wasn’t until he was a hundred feet in and who knew how many feet deep (for the
tunnel had taken an immediate and consistently gradual descent) that he’d come
to realize his calculations were nothing more than a mental exercise. Although
the tunnel was clearly man-made, it wasn’t at all ancient. The proof lay beyond
the layers of lava where the tunnel builders came across granite intrusions. There,
the tunnel walls were grooved, even ribbed in some of the hardest areas—the remnants
of the chisel and dynamite used to bore through the rock.

The
tunnel couldn’t have been made by pre-Columbian Maya, or Izapans.

Suddenly
doubting they would find the original Long Count Calendar at the end of this
dark underworld, Peet began to worry if he’d find anything he’d come for. The
tunnel had fallen eerily quiet since he had stepped inside. What did that mean?
Was Lori still alive? Reason reminded him that she couldn’t possibly have
survived the cenote collapse and yet, hope kept moving his feet down the tunnel.

The
dark air grew heavy with hot humidity. Peet’s clothes clung to him, whether
dampened by air or his own sweat, he couldn’t really tell. He began to worry
about deadly gases. They were, after all, burrowing into the side of a volcano.

That’s
when he heard the steady trickling of water and noticed the light up ahead. It
was the soft glow of filtered or indirect light, but it was light nonetheless. And
it wasn’t artificial. He was wondering how this could be when the tunnel opened
up into an enormous chamber that bottle-necked toward the top. Its only source
of light came from the sunlight slipping down a large vent hundreds, maybe
thousands of meters above. The darkness of the cavern seemed to distort the
true height and size of the opening overhead, but given the dim, gray heaviness
of the light that made it down to the chamber floor, the distance was
considerable. Whether the vent was natural or man-made seemed unimportant.

Peet
had never seen anything like the volcanic chamber, but it was what he saw
through the dim light inside that he found most astonishing.
Directly
across the chamber and beneath the outlet of an underground spring stood an
enormous wooden waterwheel.
The wheel was broken, or at least the water
catch was rotted out, suspending the contraption beneath a trickling baptismal
flow.

As
large as the waterwheel was, it was the second wheel, a horizontal behemoth
easily ten times the size of the
first, that
caught
him by surprise. It filled the interior as though it had carved the chamber
itself, spanning from the waterwheel, reaching far out over the pool of water
just beneath and looping all the way around to the tunnel where there was just
enough room for two men to stand around one woman.

And
she wasn’t Lori.

The
woman smiled triumphantly at Abe who returned the gesture by gently lifting her
chin to his face and kissing her squarely on the lips. Peet’s heart sank to the
deepest depths of his stomach. He’d been duped. He was suddenly afraid he’d
never make it out of this chamber alive as Abe pulled away from the woman and
said, “Good work, Tarah.”

Calendar Wheel

Abe
had never seen anything like the monstrous wheel that filled the volcanic
chamber. Its size alone was enough to boggle the mind, and then to consider the
amount of wood that had been crafted together into one massive piece was
stunning. And yet, its primitive appearance rivaled the impressive simplicity
of Stonehenge. He couldn’t even take it all in
with a single glance. To really get a feel for the panorama of the piece he had
to pull away from Tarah to allow his eyes to sweep across the dim chamber.

“Can
this be it?” he whispered more to himself than to anyone in prticular.

Tarah
answered anyway. “Judge for
yourself
,” she offered,
placing her hand on the edge of the mahogany wheel. That’s when Abe realized
the wheel was notched along its edge, like the ridges around the edge of a
dime. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them and within each little
notch there was carved a small glyph.

A Mayan glyph.

“As
best I can tell, there’s a notch for every day on the Long Count Calendar,”
Tarah said.

“So
each notch represents a Kin,” Abe said thoughtfully.
“But
what about the groupings?
Where are the Uinals and the Tuns?
The Katuns and the Baktuns?”

“I
haven’t figured all that out yet but there are thirteen arms on the wheel. I
imagine all the Kins that run between two arms amount to a Baktun. If this
wheel represents the very first Long Count Calendar, then maybe the other groupings
came later.”

Abe’s
excitement was building with every word that came out of Tarah’s mouth. Of
course the sophistication of the Long Count would have evolved over time. But
the very first representation of the calendar would have been primitive and
simple, a mere barometer of days.

Even
still, the giant calendar wheel was more than anything he had ever expected.

“The
ancient Maya must have used the waterwheel to turn the calendar wheel,” he
observed. Just above the waterwheel he realized the outlet of the spring had
been modified with stone. “They must have regulated the spring’s flow to
perfectly rotate the calendar one Kin per day.”

“I
noticed the notches align with this hole in the floor,” Tarah added, pointing
out a hole roughly two inches in diameter. “I suppose a rod or a staff could
have stood here, clicking off the days as they turned by.”

Abe
smiled. “Tarah, you’re a genius!”

But
it took the scientist to rob Abe of his excitement. “If that’s the case, then
your calendar is off,” Peet said.

Abe
scowled. “How do you know that?”

“Simple.
If today marks the arrival of the thirteenth Baktun, and assuming the spokes of
the wheel represent the first day of each Baktun, then shouldn’t the day marker
be set in line with a spoke?”

Abe
frowned. The scientist was right. As the calendar sat right now, it appeared to
be set to a day somewhere between two arms of the wheel. In other words the
calendar rested somewhere in the middle of a Baktun.

It
was set to the wrong day!

Heat
rose around Abe’s collar. All these years he’d been searching for this place. He’d
spared no expense getting there and even managed to find it on the one day that
the calendar had been created for, only to find the very item of his obsession
incorrectly dialed.

And
he had the broken waterwheel to thank for it.

Who
knew how long ago the waterwheel stopped working and thus stopped the calendar
from keeping time. The calendar could have been out of order two Baktuns ago,
for all he knew. Suddenly this marvel of primitive engineering sat before him
like a heap of useless trash.

Unless he could salvage something from it.

“Sonjay!”
he ordered. “You and Rafi grab hold. We’ll turn this damn thing to the right
day ourselves!”

“Why
bother?” Tarah asked.

Abe
groaned irritably. “The calendar must be set to the correct date for the cross
to work.”

The cross—another miracle to have this day, and
another necessary instrument to pull off his plans.
It was ironic really. Back
home he’d have been shot for having a cross in his possession, but that was
exactly the sort of radical religious thinking he’d turned his back on long
ago. He came to despise the religions as a teen when he realized they were
central to the constant unrest that plagued his world. The way he saw it, the
three great religions were to blame for some of the world’s greatest injustices
in human history, and he wanted nothing to do with any of them.

Matt
may have believed there was truth hidden within all religions but Abe wouldn’t
place faith in the Five Pillars of Islam anymore than the Cross of Jesus or the
Star of David. Their holy books may have been inspired by a perfect God, but
they’d been written, edited, translated and surely corrupted by fallible men.
Simply put, the religions all fell short of representing the true creator and
their main fault lay in theologies that looked behind themselves. They all
tried to interpret God’s divine plan through past events. But human destiny lay
beyond the future eschaton. That revelation thus sparked Abe’s study of the end
times. Understanding God’s plans for the future could only provide a guidepost
for preparations in the present. And Abe wanted to be prepared.

Perhaps
that was why the Long Count Calendar appealed to him so much. It had been
inspired by its last day, the end, and worked backwards. How did the Maya have
such insight? How could they have known to orchestrate their lives by centering
the present
around
the end? Abe knew. Surely the Maya
had received instruction straight from the creator’s mouth, and they had such
direct access through the Talking Cross.