01-01-00 (44 page)

“That's all I can remember, but obviously not enough to get us in there.”

“Get us in where?” said a female voice from behind. All three turned around. Jackie Nakamura regarded them with slanted, sleepy eyes.

“Good morning, dear,” said Ishiguro, standing, giving her a hug.

The petite Japanese-American woman rested her head on her husband's shoulder and closed her eyes. “So tired,” she mumbled.

Cameron and Susan also stood.

“Can we get you anything?” Susan offered.

“Maybe some water?” Jackie asked.

Cameron reached in one of the SEALs' backpacks, which the terrorists had gathered next to their own supplies, and produced a canteen, handing it to the female astrophysicist.

“Now,” Cameron said. “Why don't you join me on the terrace for a bit of ancient lock picking? Susan, bring your laptop. I think we're going to need it.”

2

On the terrace, Cameron stood in front of the mosaics. Susan sat cross-legged just to his right, the PC on her lap. Ishiguro and Jackie walked about, admiring the reliefs.

Susan magnified the decimal version of the matrix to fill the entire screen. Cameron didn't need the conversion, being proficient with the Mayan numbering system.

“All right,” said Cameron, flipping through his notes, excitement straining his voice. “The center of the array shows the number twenty, which also expands to divide the matrix into four quadrants, each almost identical mirror images of the others, but not quite.”

“That's right,” replied Susan, looking at the center of the array, dominated by the number twenty. Just to the left of this cluster of identical numbers, Susan spotted the number twenty-one. On its mirror image location on the upper right quadrant, it became twenty-two. “Going clockwise from the upper left quadrant, the number goes from twenty-one, to twenty-two, twenty-three, and finally twenty-four on the lower left quadrant. All other numbers in each quadrant are an identical mirror image of each other along the vertical and horizontal axis. What does that tell you?”

“A sequence. Remember, the Maya lived and died by sequences, but mostly geometrical ones. This tells me that the first number of our combination comes from the upper left quadrant.”

“How can you be so sure?”

The archaeologist shrugged. “I'm never sure, Susan. Archaeology is not a sure science. But I do have another clue. The number twenty in Mayan mythology represents the Hunab Ku.”

“The galactic core.”

“That's right. The Maya also believed that the universe moved in a clockwise motion. That matrix represents part of that universe, with the Hunab Ku at its center radiating its energy across the galaxy, defining the four form-giving principles of energy, according to the Maya.”

“Attraction, radiation, transmission, and receptivity,” Susan said.

Cameron grinned. “I'll make an archaeologist out of you before this is over.” He knelt by her side and gave her a kiss on the lips, short, but certainly meaningful. Although they had cuddled in bed the previous night, they had not really kissed beyond a good-night brush of the lips. Susan tasted him, feeling like a woman again. But she quickly forced her hormones to remain put so that she could give Cameron her undivided attention. Half blushing, half smiling, running a hand through his long hair, she said, “I'll take it that was the right answer, Professor?”

“You're even getting the extra credit,” he said, kissing her forehead before standing, opening his weathered notebook, thumbing through yellowish pages. “Anyway,” said Cameron, turning businesslike, “those subtle hints, combined with the known fact that Mayan codices read from left to right and top to bottom, suggests the order of the combination.”

Susan's engineering mind returned with amazing clarity. “I want you to think things through before you start dialing the combination, which, by the way, we have not really discussed exactly how that might be done.”

“We'll get to that in a moment, though I've got a pretty good idea. Now, this temple, which we have come to learn and love, was constructed in memory of Pacal Votan.”

“Right.”

“All of the glyphs that I have been able to decode tell me this.”

Susan nodded.

“Two dates are crucial in Pacal's life, aside from his birth in
A.D.
603 and his death in
A.D.
683. They are the start of his earthly rule in
A.D.
615, and the start of his galactic rule, in
A.D.
631. Those dates constitute our first clue in figuring out the combination. I should have noticed that earlier when I first inspected the numbers, but at the time I'd been too preoccupied with the murals. However, the murals did point me straight back to this matrix of carved mosaics, for here lies the clue to entering this temple, where we hope to find further insight into this puzzle.”

Ishiguro and Jackie now flanked Susan, still sitting with her PC on her lap. Cameron addressed his small audience, which grew to four when Joao approached the temple, remaining standing beneath one of the corbel vaults.

“
A.D.
615, the beginning of Pacal's earthly rule,” he repeated, flipping through his notebook, “represents 1,366,560
kins,
or days, since the beginning of the last Great Cycle, which will come to an end on December thirty-first.”

Jackie raised her hand, as if she were in school. Susan and Ishiguro grinned.

“Yes?” Cameron asked.

“What is the Great Cycle?”

Cameron spent five minutes explaining to the Japanese-American team how the Maya kept time using the Long Count calendar, and how that system was used to keep track of thirteen
baktun
-long cycles, or 5129 years on the Gregorian calendar.

“So,” he continued, having brought his audience up to speed, “the Maya were so obsessed with numbers that they oftentimes assigned them to their chiefs, according to their birth date. Furthermore, they would break up the numbers to make them easily represented in their numbering system. Pacal then became 13 66 56 0, a number with great harmonic resonance.”

Jackie raised her hand again. “Harmonic resonance?”

“In simple terms, a number is considered to be harmonically resonant when it can be converted to other significant numbers with simple mathematical operations. Just to give you a taste of this, 1,366,560 divided by 360, the number of days in a year according to the Maya Long Count or Haab calendar, minus the vague 5-day period, yields 3796. The same number divided by a full 365-day period yields 3744. The difference between 3796 and 3744, is 52, the exact number of years of Pacal Votan's galactic rule, from
A.D.
631 to his death in
A.D.
683. Now, the Maya had a second calendar, called the Tzolkin, which consisted of 260 days. This calendar, derived by multiplying the number of the Hunab Ku, 13, by another familiar sacred number, 20, was used for a variety of religious purposes. Now, if you align day one of the Tzolkin with day one of the Haab, you will start what the Maya called the 52-year cycle, meaning that fifty-two 365-day years will go by before day one in both calendars line up again. That's what I meant by a number that has harmonic resonance, and Pacal Votan's number is by far the most resonant of all Mayan numbers.”

Everyone remained silent, grasping the significance of Cameron's words, of his incredible explanations.

“Now,” he continued, obviously quite used to speaking to an audience, “look at Susan's screen, at the matrix.”

Susan's eyes returned to her screen, as well as the astrophysicists'.

“Pacal's number is the secret to this mysterious sequence of numbers. The sequence of 13 66 56 0 is everywhere, once you know how to look for it.”

Susan felt a chill. The archaeologist was correct. She immediately spotted the sequence not just starting at each corner and moving inward in a diagonal line, but also across, where the sum of certain adjacent numbers would yield the magical sequence.

“This is amazing,” said Ishiguro. “In all my years, I never imagined such harmony.”

Cameron nodded. “The Maya were indeed amazing. And in the middle of Pacal's sequences, the Hunab Ku, the number twenty, also symbolizing zero one, zero one, zero zero, gloriously spreads its wings, dividing the galaxy according to the four form-giving forces.”

Susan set her laptop down and stood. Ishiguro and Jackie did the same. “All right, Professor. What's the next step?”

“Simple, I hope, for my sake anyway. You start clockwise. Four numbers, four quadrants.”

“But which of the numbers do you use?” asked Jackie.

Cameron grinned. “Yet another puzzle within the original puzzle. To answer that you must understand the sense of extremism that the Maya had when it came to order, to harmony. Upper left meant
radical
upper left, meaning that the first number of the sequence must be the upper left-most thirteen in the upper left quadrant.”

Susan nodded. “The same applies to the other quadrant. Upper right, lower right, and lower left.”

“Exactly.”

“How do you dial it in?” Susan asked.

Cameron pointed at a hair-wide gap between the mosaics. “You wouldn't know they were there unless you knew what to look for.”

“So you just press them?”

The archaeologist nodded. “But just in case, why don't you all back off to where Joao is, by the steps.”

Ishiguro and Jackie exchanged glances and complied. Susan remained by him.

“You too, Susan. Don't want anything to happen to that little face.”

“You should have thought about that before hugging me last night, before kissing me just now. Now we're in this together one hundred percent, so start pressing. I'm staying right here.”

Cameron shook his head. “Do you know how irrational this is? If something were to happen to me, at least you would survive to—”

Susan Garnett put a hand to his lips. “Don't go there, please. I've
been
there.”

“But this is not very logical, Susan. We can't afford for both of us to—”

“I've always been a little on the reckless side of life,” she interrupted, drawing a heavy sigh from Cameron, who cupped her face, kissed her, and turned around, facing the ancient array of mosaics.

The archaeologist placed the palm of his right hand on the ancient relief of the upper left-most mosaic, two bars beneath three dots identifying it as decimal number thirteen.

“The stone's cold,” he said, before planting his left foot back and leaning into the rock. The mosaic gave, caving in almost six inches, its grinding sound, echoing lightly inside the terrace, reminding Susan of large clay pots being dragged over concrete.

She held her breath, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. The mosaic remained depressed. Cameron stepped to the right side of the array, placing his palm on the next number in the sequence, sixty-six. Again, he pressed, and again, the stone gave.

“Two more to go,” he said, positioning his palm over the correct mosaic in the lower right quadrant and pressing hard, pushing it back.

“Now for the last one,” he said, locating the lower left-most mosaic with the number zero in it and placing his hand on the shell-like carving of the Mayan numeral.

He turned to Susan. “Last chance to get away.”

She stepped up to him, holding his left hand. “I lost someone I loved dearly. This time I'm going with him, anywhere.”

Cameron regarded her for a brief moment, his dark eyes deep, absorbing.

Then he pressed the stone.

3

Cameron and Susan stepped back as the massive slab began to recede into the wall, like the mosaics, but rumbling much farther back while pivoting on its left side, revealing not just the cavernous hall that Susan remembered from the other night, but also the incredible thickness of the exterior wall, almost six feet of solid limestone.

“And you wanted to blast through this?” he muttered to himself, cool air streaming out of the ample room, swirling his hair as he peered at the dark interior, Susan by his side, still holding his hand. “We're going to need lanterns.”