Ice Shock (17 page)

“They are terrified of the real world outside. They believe someone's going to kill them or rob them the minute they step out of the place.”

“And you don't?”

“I never believe things just because people tell me,” she says with a little toss of her ponytail. “I like to see for myself.”

We leave her room in a hurry, make straight for the bus station. She buys two tickets on the express to Villahermosa,
in Tabasco. I remember my lonely bus trip last summer, and I'm relieved to think I'll have company this time.

Ixchel and I take two seats somewhere in the middle of the bus. She lets me have the window seat, “since you're the tourist here.”

Typical.

We decide to phone Benicio right away, while the bus is still in the streets of Veracruz. Ixchel tells him that she's abducting me to show me something of the “real” Mexico. When she passes her phone to me, I can hear the anxiety in his voice.

“Josh, I'm not kidding. Tell her you're coming back with me. Montoyo will kill me.”

“Then don't tell him. We'll be back the day after tomorrow. Just tell him that everything's fine, that we're hanging out together.”

Benicio goes silent. “If anything happens to you guys, I'm toast. You understand? I'm finished as a pilot.”

Ixchel takes the phone. “Don't be ridiculous, Benicio. You're the best pilot we have. Just be calm. It'll be fine.”

But Benicio doesn't seem to agree and hangs up, cursing us both.

Ixchel giggles, embarrassed. “Gee. Now I feel really bad.”

“Don't. We're only going to find out what Madison is up to. Okay? When we find out, they'll thank us.”

Ixchel glances at me and seems to mull something over.

I also use her phone to call Tyler. It turns out he hasn't left Oxford after all.

“My mom drove me past Ollie's,” Tyler tells me. “And her house has a ‘FOR RENT' sign. I looked through the windows—it's empty. The neighbors said she moved out yesterday. I called her on her cell phone—it was turned off.”

I ask him to check my house for any more of those postcards. He's already been to the house and found another two. I ask him to read out the messages.

They are:

KINGDOM'S.LOSS.

QUESTIONABLE.JUDGMENT.

Ixchel copies this down, as well as the rest of the messages. All together, in date order, the message so far is:

WHAT.KEY.HOLDS.BLOOD.DEATH.UNDID.HARMONY. ZOMBIE.DOWNED.WHEN.FLYING.KINGDOM'S.LOSS. QUESTIONABLE.JUDGMENT.

She asks, “You know what this means?”

I glumly fix my eyes on the message. “Not the faintest idea.”

But the latest messages seem to tie in with my theory.
Zombie downed when flying
. Sounds like a nasty reference
to my dad's corpse being in the plane.
Kingdom's loss, questionable judgment
. Could that be a reference to Ek Naab?

“Maybe you need the whole message to decipher the code,” suggests Ixchel.

“That's not how deciphering works,” I tell her.

“Oh, so you're a deciphering genius now, are you?”

“Hey, I figured out that the Ix Codex is written in English!” I say.

Oops
.

“It's in English … ? But how?”

“I'm kidding,” I say. “‘Course it's not in English. As if!”

Ixchel says nothing more for a few seconds, instead looks at me closely. I try to look relaxed, but I can actually feel my cheeks burning. Time to change the subject.

I put the message aside and I tell Ixchel all about my adventure last summer, how I found the Ix Codex, and some of what's happened in the past few weeks. Every time I come to a part about what I read in the pages from the Ix Codex, I have to stop.

“Gosh … sorry … I can't tell you about that …”

Eventually she tells me to shut up about the Ix Codex. But of course she wants to know. And of course I want to talk about it. We can't, so we change the subject again.

She tells me about how she left Becan by bus the morning after she saw me. She headed out to Playa del Carmen, where
she spent a few weeks waitressing in bars on the beach. From Playa she went to Merida, from Merida to Veracruz.

“I wanted to see Mexico. And not just from a beach. I want to see the whole world too, one day. Might as well start here.”

I'm full of admiration, but I can't really understand how she can stand to live that way. I think of my own comfortable life in Oxford. Not much would persuade me to abandon that.

We reach Villahermosa just in time to catch the overnight bus to Chetumal. I can't help thinking sadly of poor Saul there without Camila. I wonder if he stayed. Without her, he'd only have the avocados and their beautiful house. Still—it beats being in jail.

These thoughts turn over and over in my head. I clench my jaw, trying not to let bad memories get to me. I turn to Ixchel to see if I can get her talking again. But she's asleep, breathing quietly, leaning against the window. Outside it's pitch-black. The interior lights of the bus are switched off, the video screen blinks into action, and a film begins to play. It's one I've seen before—
Memento
. I plug into my dad's iPod. It's mostly classical music, jazz, and prog rock. Wondering if I'll have the dream about my dad, I select
Kind of Blue
and try to sleep.

It's still dark when we arrive at Chetumal. We have to wait a few hours to catch one of the buses that take tourists to Becan, Chicanna, Xpujil, and Calakmul.

At Becan, we get out, behind a group of six German tourists. The minute we arrive, Ixchel strolls ahead of the other visitors, who move in that slow, bewildered touristy way. We quickly leave them behind, near the thatched entrance hut. She takes me straight past the main plaza and to a set of buildings to the west in the central plaza, labeled on the map as Structure X.

Apart from the German guys, we have the whole site to ourselves. I turn away from Structure X for a moment and peer behind the curtain of spindly trees. There, looming above the plaza, is the enormous pyramid I climbed last summer: Structure IX. There's absolutely no sign of the secret entrance to the gateway of Ek Naab on the western wall of Structure IX. I'm still amazed that the entrance even exists.

The recently cleaned stones are a cool grayish white in the even light of the morning sun. The air is still fresh, slightly misty and mercifully free of mosquitoes. The site is thick with skinny trees that shade everything but the temples.

I haven't even broken a sweat. It isn't like this in summer. My mom and dad and I used to visit Mayan ruins in August. In summer, you bake, and the mosquitoes eat you alive. Sweat pours off you, rolls down your face, stings your eyes, and cracks your lips; bugs land on any part of you that isn't drenched in insect repellent.

We walk around Structure X, a broad temple with two towers and one main staircase, looking for an opening in the wall. We find a three-foot-wide gap in the middle of the eastern side. We climb inside, turn on Ixchel's flashlight and squirm through on hands and knees. We continue crawling straight ahead until the tunnel makes a left turn. Then quite suddenly, we emerge into a system of rooms and linking passageways, all inside the temple.

I turn to Ixchel. “Which room did Madison disappear into?”

She closes her eyes, concentrating.

I gasp. “You don't
know
?”

“Give me a minute … I'm visualizing it …”

“We came all this way and you're
guessing
?”

Ixchel snaps open her eyes. “Stop hissing at me and let me think!”

I'm silent, chewing on my lower lip. Ixchel pokes her head from room to room. She turns back to me.

“Okay, I didn't exactly see which room he went into, obviously …”

I blurt, “Obviously?!”

“I didn't go inside at the same time as him—what are you thinking? He would have seen me. I'm trying to remember where I saw the scraped floor.”

Ixchel decides that it's one of two rooms. We crawl into the first, a dank hole of a room, about eight by ten feet. There's no sign of scratching on the ground. In the second room, however, shining the flashlight into the corner, I immediately see what Ixchel means. Part of the floor has been worn away. The wall next to it even looks different from the others—it's much less crumbly.

We try leaning on the walls, pushing stones, pressing our fingers into any depression, but nothing happens. We're about to give up when we hear the unmistakable sound of someone else in the passageway.

We look at each other, eyes wide with astonishment. Ixchel flicks off the flashlight. We crawl into the adjacent room and hold our breath.

“You're just gonna have to build a better way in, Marius,” drawls a woman's voice, her accent from somewhere in the South. “‘Cause I sure don't see myself as an Indiana Jones.”

“All in time, my dear professor,” comes another voice—a man's. He has a lofty, distracted way of speaking, like he's got some better place to be. His accent sort of sounds like an American trying to sound British. The next time he speaks, his voice comes from the other side of the wall we're leaning against. Ixchel and I stand as stiff as boards.

“You have no idea the favors I've had to call in to keep this structure from being further excavated. And to keep the tourist traffic down.”

The woman's laugh sounds like church bells.

“Oh, sure. I'm guessing you owe dinners to politicians in all the best parts of Mexico City.”

He answers with a dry chuckle. “Indeed …”

“But I'm being serious now, Marius. We gotta have an entrance we can properly guard. Right now any dumb old tourist could just wander in.”

“If they had the key, perhaps,” the man replies drily. “Fortunately, dear lady, they do not.”

“Well … we'll all need to suit up,” says the woman. “With all that ancient Erinsi technology around, who knows what might be deadly to touch if you don't have the Bakab gene. Even the men, as a precaution.”

“That makes sense. We can't be too careful.”

“I've sent a team down to prepare.”

We hear a sound, like metal scraping heavily against rock. The couple's voices continue, becoming fainter as they walk
away from us. Then we hear the rock beginning to scrape again.

I grab Ixchel's hand and whisper, “Let's go for it!”

We dash into the next room just in time to see the secret door closing. The entire back wall swings slowly. We have just enough time to squeeze in before the door seals us inside.

Neither of us dares to breathe a word, but each knows what the other is thinking.

They've got their own way into Ek Naab. They've found another piece of ancient technology protected by the Bakab curse.

Have we stumbled across the Sect of Huracan? If so, then we're probably already too late
…

The entrance in Structure X leads to a sloping tunnel. It's wide enough for two people to walk abreast, and meanders deeper and deeper underground. The first few yards of the tunnel seem to be recently cut. After that the walls look exactly like those of the limestone tunnels around Ek Naab. My guess is that the entrance is part of the same system.

We walk just far enough behind “Marius” and the woman he calls “Professor” to be able to benefit from the light of their flashlights. At times it's hard to believe that they don't hear us. But they don't stop yakking loudly for a second. The more I hear, the more uneasy I become.

Now I remember where I've heard the name “Martineau.”

Marius Martineau
—the Mayanist from the Peabody Museum in Connecticut. The guy who replied to my dad's e-mail about the Ix Codex, telling him that he was too busy to get involved chasing what was probably a hoax.

Yeah, right
.

The NRO told me that Simon Madison sometimes uses the name Martineau.

In the house in Saffron Walden, Madison talked to Thompson's niece about his father, and then
she
mentioned the Peabody. Coincidence? I doubt it.

Is Marius Martineau actually Simon Madison's father? If he is, then it looks even more certain that Martineau and this “Professor” lady are also part of the Sect.

I have my suspicions, but I don't have to wait long before the couple ahead of us confirm them.

“My son arrived last night. The boy, Josh, almost broke Simon's wrist. As it is, he's got a nasty sprain.”

The woman sighs. “We're going to have to do something about the boy.”

“But what? I've always warned Simon not to kill him. If the boy's death is traced back to me, it could be disastrous for the Sect.”

“Simon probably shouldn't do it,” she agrees. “For a job like that, we need a professional. Simon's never actually killed anyone intentionally.”

“Well, that's partly the problem. Perhaps we should train him.”

“He doesn't have the temperament, Marius. You ought to know!”

“You're right, of course,” says Marius with a little sigh. “Now the girl, we
should
have trained to kill.”

“No, she was right for the job she did. She's an excellent agent. I wonder how the boy broke her cover?”

They both take their time to ponder that one.

The woman says, “It's high time we started graduating some of the students at Ticino.”

Ticino? Wasn't that one of the places on that document?

“They aren't ready. They've had barely half the time it takes the CIA to train an assassin.”

“And they need to be a lot better than the CIA,” she remarks.

“Hire someone from outside the Sect?”

“Never. We must stick to our own rules, Marius.”

“Yes, my dear, you're right.”

“We'll get Simon to bring the boy to us. Even if he really is there now, he won't stay in Ek Naab forever.”