The Mayan Apocalypse (23 page)

“Laugh if you want. It's just another defense mechanism.”

“Ooh. Another big college word.” Lisa softened the jab with a grin. “Fine, I'll never ask again.”

“Good.”

“So how are you doing?”

Garrett lowered his head and shook it like a father dealing with an uncooperative child. “I'm frustrated. Necco's killer is still out there, and the police aren't doing anything about it.”

“I'm sure they're doing their best.”

“Ha. The whole thing is about to become a cold case file. Necco deserves better.” He paused. “So do I.”

“You know I'm with you on that. That's why we're still poking around in things. Did the police talk to you today?”

“For about five minutes. It doesn't take long to say, ‘Nothing new, kid. We'll let you know.'”

Lisa nodded. The story had been the same for months. They had run down every lead they could, tracked the case as much as the police would allow, and had no better ideas.

“So when do we let go?”

“Never.” Garrett propped his cane against the deck. “We both know it has something to do with Quetzal and his crazies.”

Lisa picked up a pencil and rolled it between her fingers. “We've been over this a hundred times since…”

“My beating? Yes we have, and I'm sticking to my guns. I owe it to Necco, his girl, and his mom.”

“Garrett, I don't know what else to do. We don't have the resources the police have.”

“I may have something better.”

“Is that a fact?” She set the pencil down. “What have you been up to?”

“Now that I'm up, around, and in my right mind, I've decided to take things in my own hands.”

“Who says you're in your right mind?” Lisa lifted an eyebrow.

“Funny. You know what I mean. Between the trauma, the pain meds, and everything else, I haven't been myself.”

“Are you telling me you're starting to remember being beaten?”

Garrett frowned. “No. Just bits and pieces, but nothing of use. The trauma, the coma, and the meds have pretty much obliterated that part of my brain. It's a blessing, I suppose, but it's also frustrating.” He set the file on Lisa's desk and pushed it toward her.

Lisa pulled it close and then opened it. Her eyes darted over the contents. Her stomach dropped like a free-falling elevator. “Garrett,
there's a good chance that this is what got you in trouble in the first place.”

“I don't care. I have to get busy. Too much time has passed. Before, there was very little I could do. Now I can at least do brain work.”

“I'm not sure I understand what I'm seeing.” The file contained only five pages, but most of it was gibberish.

“I want it to look that way for a reason. To get this, I may have stretched a few laws.”

Lisa looked up from the file. “Stretched or broken?”

“I think I'm still in the neighborhood of misdemeanors.”

“Just what am I looking at?”

Garrett leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “Before I tell you, I need to know you're with me on this.”

“Haven't I proven that to you over this last year?”

His expression softened. “You've been golden, but I need to know you're going to stand by me.”

“That depends. Are your actions going to hurt someone?”

“If God is listening to my prayers.”

“Garrett!”

“I'm serious. I don't mean physical harm. I want justice for Necco and me.”

“I don't want to break any laws.” Lisa felt as if the moral ground under her feet was shifting.

“I'm not asking you to break any laws, but you will have to trust me.”

“You know, they'll take away your cane in prison.”

“I'm not doing anything prison-worthy.”

“Is that opinion from you or the police?”

Garrett didn't answer.

A
t this latitude and at this time of year, darkness came early and stayed. The moon was in its last quarter, well on its way to being a dark new moon. It cast very little light through the clear, cold air.

The Bombardier circled an airfield situated in a low-lying valley. Two snowcapped mountain ranges bracketed the field like bookends. Snow covered much of the terrain, reflecting the moon's dim glow spaceward. As the jet descended, Morgan could see its beacons washing the ground below. Not long before, they had passed from the North Atlantic over the Kamchatka Peninsula. The pilot dutifully announced the names of the volcanoes below. Morgan forgot the names as soon as he heard them. After Mexico, he was just glad that Quetzal had been wise enough not to set up shop near several potentially active volcanoes. They were headed across the peninsula.

The field below was not well known, at least to Morgan. He and the others had been briefed on their exact destination once they left Anchorage. Below was Sharomy, a former military base in Kamchatka Krai, Russia. Once it served two roles: one, as a traffic diversion airfield for the Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky Airport, and two, as a staging area for airstrikes against the United States. Th at had been during the Cold War, when Russia was the steering wheel of the former Soviet Union. When the Cold War had permanently warmed, such bases became useless and expensive. Especially expensive to a country in the throes of economic collapse, internal problems, failing infrastructure, and major crime problems. From the first pass
over the field, Morgan could tell the runway had to be better than 10,000 feet in length. One didn't spend millions of rubles on a runway that length unless they were planning on landing big birds— like long-range bombers.

From the air, the pair of long runways with a three-sided tarmac and hardstands for aircraft formed a shape that reminded Morgan of a tomahawk—apropos for a Mayan priest.

Everyone had returned to their seat and waited for the landing gear to touch down. The sooner the better for Morgan. He had grown weary of traveling.

Dr. Michael Alexander should have been happy. After all, the news was great. He had been up all night crunching numbers, talking to key astronomers around the world, and sifting data. The 2012 GA12 asteroid had become his baby to watch over—at least at the ESA. The leaders of the European Space Agency trusted him. His credentials were impressive, and his work was without blemish. They trusted him and his calculations. For the last year, he wished they hadn't. Every night, he took the knowledge that a rock the size of small mountain had the earth in its sights. Moving at speeds measured in hundreds of miles an hour, the prospective impact was quickly branded a world killer.

Of course, there had been other such objects that, for a short time, looked as if they were on target with the earth. Each of those had missed by a wide margin, never coming closer than a couple hundred thousand miles.

But Alexander was a pragmatist. He didn't believe in luck. He was a numbers man. Even so, he caught himself slipping into sloppy math, and one math myth kept percolating to the top of his mind, especially as he lay alone in his bed. If all the rest missed, then the odds were greater that the next space rock would hit Mother Earth right on the nose. In freshman statistics, he was taught that if a man
flips a coin, the odds of it landing heads up was the same as it was for it landing tails up. If the man flipped the coin again, the odds did not change: They remained fifty-fifty. That was true for each individual flip.

But Dr. Alexander wasn't dealing with a fifty-cent piece. He was dealing with millions of tons of rock. In the face of that truth, fifty-fifty were lousy odds. Sooner or later, a near miss was going to become a direct hit.

What had amazed Alexander was the success of the conspiracy of secrecy. Although the asteroid was large, it could not be seen with the naked eye. Space and ground telescopes could locate it easily enough, but they knew exactly where to look. The populace had no clue, and no country was willing to tell its citizens. Why would they? There was still some hope that the thing would zip by and continue on along its very elliptical orbit of the sun.

Alexander and other scientists had exchanged heated views about what should and shouldn't be said. In the end, every head of government made it clear that a panicked population would not change anything. The US alone had 350 million people to worry about. The rest of the world approached seven billion. How does one safely shelter that many people? It couldn't be done, and therefore it was agreed that it shouldn't be tried.

Oh, heads of state would be fine. After all, the president of the US had his Mount Washington designed to protect him and the leaders of his country from nuclear attack and the nuclear winter that would follow. Millions would die, but the government would continue—even if it had millions fewer to govern. Other countries had similar arrangements. Those that didn't were just out of luck.

Keeping such a large secret required more than a polite request. The US and the European Union had made it clear that anyone who leaked word of the possible disaster would be held liable for any property damage, injury, and deaths that came about from a global panic. Thousands could die from such turmoil. That would be a lot of murder charges.

Then there was the bribery. Worried leaders had thought ahead and arranged safe bunkers for the people in the know who knew how to keep their mouths shut. It might be scientifically unethical, but that was a small deterrent when it came to saving one's spouse and children.

Some of his colleagues couldn't stand the strain. Over the last few months, more than a dozen astronomers, physicists, geologists, and meteorologists—all working to estimate the damage the impact would cause—had disappeared or committed suicide. At least, Alexander
hoped
it was suicide that had taken their lives.

Last year, shortly after he let his superiors know of the “Hammer of God”—a name taken from the science fiction book penned by Arthur C. Clarke in 1993—Alexander began to suspect he was being followed. Like Mary's little lamb, wherever Alexander went, the dark sedan was sure to go.

He no longer trusted his phone. That's why the next call had to be made on a special device delivered by a man named Jaz. Inside the package was the latest Iridium satellite phone. Small scratches on the back casing told him the device had been modified. He was pretty sure it could call only one number, and it had been encrypted.

It was time to deliver the good news. He dialed a number he had committed to memory and waited. His stomach twisted, and his face grew warm. Why should he be so nervous? He was about to deliver good news. The Hammer of God would miss the earth by better than one hundred and fifty thousand miles. That would make anyone happy.

Right?

“Coming?” The only woman on the trip pulled on an orange parka so bright that Morgan felt the need for sunglasses. They were all wearing them—all but Morgan. He had yet to rise from his seat. The woman had long mahogany hair, which she wore in a style
that would have looked good a few decades earlier. Her hair pooled in the hood of the parka. Morgan only knew her by reputation: She was known as the iron-willed woman who returned a faltering computer giant to a streamlined moneymaking machine. She had cut two thousand jobs, closed two overseas plants, and sued a half-dozen competitors until she achieved her goal.

“I'm coming. I'm old and slow.”

“Yeah, right. I got fifteen years on you easy, and I don't mind it. Of course, it's not one's age that matters.”

She lifted a suggestive eyebrow. Morgan looked away. Sonya Ballios, CEO of Ballios Computers, was known for aggressive personal habits as well as business ones. In the last years, she had led her company into the third spot in sales of all similar companies, and she made no secret that she would not be happy until the likes of Hewlett Packard, Dell, and Apple were her footstools. Still, she had time to marry three times, destroy those husbands, and move on to a chain of other men—each now bobbing in her wake. Morgan had no desire to join her parade.

Morgan gave a friendly smile he didn't feel, and he pulled on his parka.

“Don't you want to know what does matter?” She took a step toward him.

He had watched her hit on the other men, married or not. “No. I've got other things on my mind.”

“Me too.” The other eyebrow went up.

The booming voice of Quetzal rolled down the cabin. “Every-one suited up? It's a tad chilly out there. At the moment, it is a toasty twenty degrees.”

A chorus of groans filled the space. Morgan understood the sentiment. During his junior year of college, he had traveled to be the best man at his friend's wedding—in Minot, North Dakota— in mid-January. He had traveled to many states, but none in the extreme north of the country. He had brought a light jacket, which he donned after the plane landed. He still remembered the amused
looks on the faces of his fellow passengers, but he didn't understand it until he stepped from the plane and walked to the small, freestanding terminal. The windchill factor was thirty below. The event created a lasting respect for cold.

Quetzal spoke over the grumbling. “You won't be outside long. Just long enough to cross the tarmac to the waiting SUVs. We have about an hour's drive. The cars will be warm.” He paused. “Ready?”

There were a few grunts.

The pilot and copilot moved from the cockpit, donned their heavy coats, and then the copilot opened the door. Cold air rushed into the craft and was greeted by several obscene remarks. One of which came from Sonya. The copilot deplaned.

“Watch your step, please.” The pilot, a tall, narrow man with gray hair, was courteous and cheerful. Morgan imagined the man was looking forward to some time away from the cramped cockpit.

Morgan was the last to leave the warmth of the business jet behind, and he stepped into a lively breeze that clawed at his face with icicle fingers. Before him, the passengers stepped quickly along the concrete runway lit by the landing field lights and toward a row of three large, black, foreign-made SUVs.

“They're Russian UAZ Patriot SUVs.” Robert Quetzal stood just behind Morgan. “The Russians have a long way to go to match American or Japanese craftsmanship. Of course, considering the state of their economy, it's a wonder they can make anything. And a bad economy for them turned out to be a good thing for us.”

Morgan faced the man and saw a gleam in his eye. “Sometimes the successful man must build on the broken dreams of another,” Quetzal said.

“That's a bit harsh. Who said that?”

Quetzal grinned. “I did. And you're right, it is harsh. I didn't say the successful man should
destroy
the dreams of others. Just that he must, at times, build where others failed. The Russians need money, and we need something they have—which is why we're here. Shall we go?” He motioned down the stairway. “Parka or not, I'm cold.”

“Must be that Mayan blood.”

Quetzal nodded. “Must be.”