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He nodded.

“Let me go get my laptop.”

“Why?”

“I can enter this sequence and then kick off a program that will go through many permutations in an attempt to find a mathematical formula that describes the ordering sequence.”

Cameron regarded the numbers with narrowed eyes. “Just remember that the Maya had very peculiar ways of arranging numbers, unlike the numerical sequences of today. They may not fit any linear formula but more a geometrical expression, so keep that in mind when trying to find a pattern, it may be more in space than linear. It's certainly worth a try, though.”

Susan shrugged. “It'll give me something to do before tonight's event, and also give the jerks the appearance that we're attempting to make progress.”

Cameron nodded and moved on to the reliefs on the opposite side of the terrace, which resembled Mayan priests dressed in ceremonial gowns praying in front of a stone wall. Next to the priests it appeared as if the earth had opened up, swallowing several men dressed like regular Maya, with simple skirts and a few feathers. He began to make notes in his field notebook, obviously more interested in the pictorial reliefs than in the numerical ones.

Puzzled by the complexity of the drawings, and rapidly developing an appreciation for the enigmatic investigative work that was archaeology, Susan left the temple, walking past Petroff, ignoring his mumbling of something in Russian that sounded obscene. Susan headed down the steps, noticing Strokk and Celina listening intently to a handheld radio.

5

Strokk heard the voice of the leader of the search team crackling through the static of his encrypted radio. Celina stood next to him.

“The trail led us to a small village.”

“What kind of village?”

“Looks very primitive. A dozen stone shacks. Some natives walking about, mostly women and children.”

“Any sign of the runaways?”

“Negative, but they could be in the shacks.”

“Search the entire place. If someone gets in your way, shoot him.”

Chapter Seventeen

010001

1

December 17, 1999

Ishiguro was the first to hear the multiple screams, ear-piercing, agonizing. He and Jackie had been inspecting their surviving gear inside one of the stone shacks, disheartened to find that over half of their equipment, although carefully packed in well-padded containers, had been damaged during the fall. The rest they had left behind during the shooting.

He rushed outside, blinking in the late-afternoon sun filtering through the trees. Jackie followed him, the shouts and screams intensifying. Four armed men dressed in guerrilla-style clothing shoved women and children aside as they inspected one of the huts at the opposite end of the clearing. Many natives rushed into the jungle. Children cried. Women screamed. Joao and his men were nowhere in sight.

The village's elders, all three of them, approached the armed strangers, shouting over the cacophony of sounds created by the women and the children. Two of the guerrillas swung their weapons at the incoming old men, firing silenced rounds into two of them, also hitting two women and a child. A guerrilla knocked the third elder unconscious with the stock of his rifle, and was about to fire into his elongated head when another soldier spotted the scientists across the dusty clearing, his features tightening.

He shouted something that sounded Russian and his comrades pointed their weapons at Ishiguro and Jackie. In that same instant one of the armed men dropped to his knees, letting go of his weapon, hands on his neck, before collapsing on his side and going into convulsions. Two more guerrillas also collapsed, victims of this invisible force. His comrades convulsing on the ground, the fourth armed man took off toward the jungle, firing blindly into the trees. He fell forward a moment later, crashing headfirst into the light underbrush bordering the jungle, his body twitching, dust boiling up around him.

“What in the hell was that?” asked Jackie.

Before Ishiguro could even speculate, Joao Peixoto entered the clearing holding a long tube. Ishiguro went up to meet him, but the Mayan warrior ignored him, kneeling by the fallen elders, the high priests, blood pooling around two of them. The rest of Joao's men materialized at the edge of the jungle, like shadows coming alive from the bush, a few of them dragging the limp bodies of three more guerrillas, piling them up on one side of the clearing. Women and children reemerged from the tree line, some cautiously peering at the clearing, others racing to the aide of the slain women and a child no older than six or seven. Three men carefully lifted the only priest who did not get shot. He appeared unconscious. They took him inside one of the shacks.

“Jesus,” Jackie said. “What do we do?”

“Nothing,” said Ishiguro, watching the Mayan warriors pile up the guerrillas at the edge of the clearing. Some of them were still alive, trembling, foaming at the mouth, glassy eyes staring at the sky. “Two of the elders have been killed, plus two women and a kid. The third elder was knocked unconscious. There will be hell to pay for this.”

The film of hate burning in Joao's eyes confirmed his comment. The Mayan chief stood in the middle of the clearing, surveying his tribe, looking at the dead women, tensing at the sight of a young mother clutching her dead child, an agonizing wail wrenching out of her lungs while staring at the sky.

Ishiguro chilled at her weeping, at her suffering. Two other women escorted her to a nearby shack.

The scientists remained still. Nothing they could say or do would make the situation any better. The soldiers had likely tracked them down to the village. In a way Ishiguro felt responsible, accountable. He wished he could do something for the dead Maya, bring them back, reverse the clock, never have come here in the first place.

Shafts of crimson and yellow-gold forked through the trees, casting a half-light gloom over the dusty clearing, over the dead. But through the mournful cries, through the hazy dust dancing in the blazing, late-afternoon sunlight, through the veil of terror enveloping the small village, Ishiguro saw Joao walking toward them, ire shimmering in his glistening stare. The scientist sensed his anger, his rage, his desire to achieve total and utter retribution.

“The sacred temple,” Joao said, the conviction in his stolid gaze fueled by the power of a hundred ancient civilizations. “Get your equipment ready. We're leaving immediately.”

2

Antonio Strokk breathed in deeply, controlling the urge to slam the radio against the rocks. Instead, he calmly handed it to Celina after three failed attempts to raise the search team, which had gone off the air minutes ago, right after Strokk had given the order to search the village. Now nothing.

Nothing!

“What could have gone wrong?” Celina asked.

Strokk didn't reply, the situation not making sense. The team was to maintain radio contact during the search. Four men would go in the village and carry out his orders while the other three remained hidden in the jungle, providing cover and also updating Strokk real time.

The former Spetsnaz officer invoked his training, his field experience, the hell he'd endured in Afghanistan, to control his emotions, to study the situation from an objective perspective, like the battlefield commander who realizes that the enemy has annihilated his first wave of attack. Strokk had to assume the worst, that the search party had been compromised, somehow. Questions piled up in his mind, one after the other. Who did this? The villagers? Were they armed? But so were his men, both in the clearing and in the jungle, providing cover from the trees. And what should be his next move? Should he stay put and wait for the enemy to come to him? Should he send another search party? Was a new team doing to him what he had done to the Navy SEALs less than twelve hours ago? Perhaps this had been the handiwork of another contingent of SEALs, sent here to reinforce the first team.

Possibilities.

Strokk considered them all and then made his decision, shouting orders, forming three assault groups with orders to fire on anything that walked on two legs. This time the Venezuelan-Russian would lead the assault, coordinating operations while also running the center team of the three-pronged attack. Celina and Petroff would remain behind to cover the scientists while Strokk pulled everyone else into the strike teams.

3

Joao Peixoto moved silently and swiftly through the dense jungle, his bare feet cold as he made his way across the dew-covered leaves, late-afternoon sunlight filtering here and there through the dense canopy.

Joao was angry, but he didn't let his emotions interfere with his focus. His mind followed a primal instinct, a single objective, the same directive that had driven him back to the jungle and away from the killing fields of southern Guatemala a decade ago: the survival of his tribe, the avoidance—or elimination—of a threat to his people.

And that threat now advanced noisily through an assortment of bonelike trees and thick underbrush, across curtains of vines and moss, moving directly toward his village. He had detected three groups of men, four or five soldiers per group. He currently followed the one to the far left.

Joao abruptly stopped and closed his eyes, letting his ears tune to the sounds of the dark jungle, listening to the language of his world. Slowly, he dropped to a deep crouch, his gaze narrowing as it landed on a giant fern hanging off the side of a twisted rosewood.

The Mayan chief remained immobile for several moments, listening, before quietly reaching for the blowpipe secured to his waist and sticking one end behind the deep green leaves.

A gaboon viper, one of the regions deadliest and most aggressive snakes, leaped through the fern leaves and landed next to Joao, who quickly stepped on its leaf-shaped head before the snake could get its bearings, applying just enough pressure to hold the poisonous reptile in place while he grabbed its head with his left hand.

The dark brown snake, roughly two feet in length, wrapped itself around Joao's forearm. The Maya tied the head to his wrist in order to free up his hand, and once again went in pursuit, stopping once more several minutes later. This time he turned over a medium-size rock next to a clump of boulders bordering a swampy creek and was rewarded by a colony of giant centipedes, their venom far more powerful than the viper's. Hundreds of crawlers, ranging in size from tiny larvae to adults measuring up to three inches in length, wormed their way through a labyrinth of holes dug in the humid soil beneath the rock.

Carefully selecting only adult males, which he identified by the red coloring of their heads, Joao used a large leaf to scoop them up. The aggressive insects nearly stood on their hind legs while exercising their deadly pincers protecting their mouths, ready to inject any intruder with the toxic contents in the sacks behind their eyes.

Joao placed a dozen of them inside a small deerskin pouch hanging off his waist. Then, just as carefully, he turned the rock back over to preserve the colony.

A deep breath and a brief scan of his surroundings, and the jungle warrior dashed forward, cutting left as he neared his quarry, quickly running a semicircle around the slow and noisy soldiers, positioning himself two hundred feet in front of them, right next to a tall ceiba with long and thick moss-draped branches protruding in every direction for fifty feet.

Joao climbed up the tree with ease and crawled across a two-foot-wide branch, the viper still wrapped tightly around his arm, enjoying the warmth of the Maya's skin. Wrapping himself with the moss, he removed the string over his forearm while once more holding on to the viper's head. Slowly, Joao uncurled the reptile off his limb and held it over the trail just as five soldiers neared, their scraping and creaking as they walked across the jungle mixing with the clicking of insects and the hissing of the snake.

Joao let go of the viper just as the soldiers marched roughly thirty feet below. In the same instance, he reached for the bag filled with the deadly centipedes, briefly shook it to anger them, and untied the knot.

Screams suddenly filled the jungle as the viper landed on one soldier and bit him in the face before slithering away. The soldier dropped to his knees as the others frantically looked in every direction. Joao, protected by the thick branch and the draping moss, emptied the bag over them.

Half of the centipedes landed on the soldiers. The deadly drop found an exposed wrist, the base of a neck, and a forehead. As pincers broke through the skin of three soldiers, tiny muscles squeezed the venom sacks, forcing the toxic liquid through microscopic channels. The paralyzing chemical reached the soldiers' bloodstreams seconds after contact.

More screams followed. The surviving soldier opened fire on the rosewood as one of his comrades convulsed on the ground from the viper's venom and the other three dropped to their knees in shock, their mouths foaming.

Joao waited until the firing stopped before aiming his blowpipe at the surviving soldier, who spoke on the radio while surveying the grounds with an automatic rifle.

From such short distance, Joao scored an easy hit to the upper back. The soldier bent like a bow while dropping his weapon and struggling to reach behind him. In seconds the powerful venom paralyzed him, and he collapsed next to his fallen comrades, two of whom were still alive but unable to move as the poison from the centipedes gained control of their motor and nervous systems.

4

Antonio Strokk was the first to reach the left team and felt his stomach filling with molten lead. The five mercenaries making up the rest of the center team caught up with him seconds later.

“Look at them,” one of his men mumbled, fear straining his words.

Four of the operatives were dead, froth oozing from their mouths and nostrils, their dead eyes staring at the solid roof of branches above them. One was still alive but convulsing, as if he had an epileptic seizure. A few moments later he too died.