01-01-00 (32 page)

“Something happened last night,” she said, glancing at the limestone slab blocking the temple's entrance.

“What?”

“I—I don't know where to begin,” she said, suddenly unsure of herself.

He tapped her on the arm. “How about starting at the beginning?”

Susan regarded this rugged, yet gentle man, his brown eyes warm, welcoming, encouraging. She told him everything she remembered, to the last detail, including the intricate stone carvings, the plumaged headdresses, the way they communicated without words, the swirling smoke. She took almost ten minutes to do so, also describing the curious binary code defining the land. Cameron listened intently, an intrigued look on his square face.

When she finished, he walked over to the large slab and inspected the floor around it. “If I had to guess, I'd say this stone has not been moved since yesterday, at least not according to the surrounding layer of dust on the floor. There are no track marks.”

Susan frowned. “Then how in the—”

“But,” he added. “That doesn't mean it didn't happen. Though that would mean that Lobo's men fell asleep at their post.”

“Maybe it was a dream, but it sure feels that it was real.”

“Why didn't you wake me up?”

“I almost did … but something made me not want to do it.”

“What?”

“I'm not sure. It just didn't feel right for me to wake you. And the voices … they kept luring me into the temple … and, well, you know the rest.”

Cameron crossed his arms, his gaze on the floor, obviously considering what he had heard. “The men who greeted you … describe them to me.”

Susan stared off in the distance. “Aside from the deformed skulls … they were fairly old, maybe in their sixties, with wrinkled skin and bald heads. They all wore these blue and green loincloths, and their hats were quite elaborate.”

“Any special markings? Tattoos? Body piercing?”

“Yes. One of them had several earrings, but just on one ear. He also had the tattoo of a jaguar. Another man had one of a quetzal.”

“Anyone else?”

“I don't remember.”

“The smoke. What did it smell like?”

“Can't remember. It just made me feel very relaxed.”

“Probably a hallucinogen,” he said, leaning forward and taking a good whiff from the same gear vest that he had given her yesterday. “Smells like the Camels we smoked last night. And you said you had your sneakers on this morning?”

“Yep. And I do remember taking them off last night.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Strange, Susan. Very strange.”

Her headache began to recede, a mix of the coolness of the terrace plus the Excedrin. Her logical mind gathered momentum. “There's one thing that may prove if this really happened.”

He lifted his eyes.

“Follow me.” She stepped outside and headed down the steps with Cameron in tow, walking around the cenote, still veiled in haze, but much lighter as the morning sun burned it off.

They reached her stowed gear. Cameron helped her set it up, including hooking up the main battery connected to the solar power generator.

Sitting on the stone floor, her laptop on a portable bench, Susan powered it up.

“You going to tell me what you're doing?” Cameron asked, sitting next to her, his right shoulder against hers as he peered at the screen.

Susan pulled up the file containing last night's digitized version of the electromagnetic activity.

“Look familiar?” Susan asked.

“Yep.”

She typed
Y
and kept looking at the large file, reaching the end.

“Why are there spaces?” Cameron asked.

She shook her head. “Don't know. I never did look at the bottom of this file. It doesn't make sense. It's also separated in eight-bit sections, or bytes. Strange that the disassembler didn't decode that. They look like a simple string of numbers.”

Cameron stared at the five blocks of numbers. “It is a string of numbers … but in
Maya.
”

“What?”

He pointed at the first block.

11011011

00000000

11111111

00000000

11111111

“That's three dots over two horizontal lines. Remember what I told you the other night about their numbering system.”

Susan nodded. “Each dot represented a one. Each line a five. So this number is a thirteen?”

“Correct,” he said.

“What about the other blocks? They're all the same.”

“The Maya understood the concept of zero and used a large oval-shaped symbol, or the shape of the shell of a slug or hermit crab to describe it. I've seen their symbology for so long that it comes very naturally. But if you use your imagination, you can see the ones in the block taking up that shape.”

00011000

00111100

00011000

00000000

00000000

“If that is the case,” she said. “Then we're looking at a string of five numbers.” She wrote them on her engineering notebook, also separating them by spaces.

13 0 0 0 0

“That's a Mayan date,” Cameron offered. “And I don't have to look it up to translate it to our Gregorian equivalent. It's the end of the Mayan thirteenth
baktun.
”

In spite of the humidity and the rising temperature, Susan felt a chill sweeping through her as she remembered the discussion she had had with Cameron the night they had met. The end of the thirteenth
baktun
coincided with …

“Zero one, zero one, zero zero,” she said.

“We better figure out the rest of this message, and quick. I get the feeling that we're being told what is going to happen at one
A.M.
on January first.”

“All right,” she said, controlling her excitement to remain focused. “According to the experience I had last night, this file could be a contour map, with the hills represented by concentrations of ones and valleys by concentrations of zeroes.”

“Interesting. When you look at the array that way, you can almost begin to see a pattern forming in front of your eyes,” Cameron said, staring at the binary code above the Mayan date. “You can follow the terrain, with the zeroes representing flatland and the ones peaks.”

“Let's see if we can clean it up a little.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Run an averaging program to sharpen the edges and filter out some of the noise inherent in the translation of EM to binary code.” She typed several commands and the system churned away for around twenty seconds, finally displaying:

She went to the bottom.

“Amazing,” Slater said while looking at the filtered image, after the averaging program had eliminated some of the noise.

“The technique is pretty common in the photo enhancing industry. The military also uses it quite extensively to improve the quality of its images.”

“It also looks as if the averaging program didn't change the Mayan date.”

Susan regarded the screen for a moment, considering the possibility of blank spaces. The way her software detected the end of the string was by finding three or more blank spaces. She placed the cursor on the blank line and tapped on the right arrow key of her laptop, counting ten spaces before the cursor reached the end of the blank line and dropped to the beginning of the Mayan date.

She explained that to Cameron, also adding, “That's why my software never detected the Mayan date. It thought that was the end of the file.”

“Well, it certainly looks like there's an image in there, and I can see how it could be interpreted as the topography of a region.”

Susan agreed. “
Now
you believe me?”

“Why do you think there are still some ones sprinkled in the valleys?” Cameron pointed at a few ones among zeroes. “Boulders?”

“Could be. Or maybe it's just noise. First thing we have to do is find the region of the land that matches it.”

“How are you going to do that?”

Susan grinned. “Trade secret.”

3

“I think they're on to something,
hermano,
” came the voice of Celina Strokk through his earpiece.

Antonio Strokk, one hand battling a bloodsucking parasite having a feast on his groin, kept the other clutching a pair of binoculars. “Did she say that last night's event resulted in a binary map of some piece of land?”

Celina nodded beneath the moss. “Correct. Now she will try to find a match.”

“A match? How?”

“Most likely by either E-mailing the file to the FBI headquarters to get them to run it against a 3-D contour map, or by downloading the 3-D map software on her system and doing the comparison here.”

“I see,” he said, finally snatching the insect between his index and thumb and crushing it, exhaling with relief. “Which way is faster?”

“Depends on how extensive the search needs to be. The hardest part will be finding the correct region. Then they have to run it against that area while making allowances for scaling differences between the binary image and the 3-D map. That could take a while if the search area is, say, the entire American continent. But if they can narrow it down to a small area of a few hundred square miles, then the task becomes much simpler and capable of being handled in any good laptop, like the one she has down there.”

Strokk watched the scientists confer with the SEAL commander, Lieutenant Lobo, before making the cable connections to the satellite gear. Strokk hesitated about giving the order to strike now. The more he waited, the better the chances of the scientists making a breakthrough, but at the same time, the more the FBI back in Washington learned about how to defeat the virus, which was exactly what he was trying to prevent. However, if he was to strike too soon, eliminate the SEALs, and force the scientists to feed misinformation to Washington, he could actually slow down the investigation because the scientists might be unwilling to put up a real effort just to have him profit from their research.