Ruins (27 page)

"Yeah, I can see how you're much more admirable," Mulder said.

The slope was steep. He continued backing down, kept talking. Barreio followed, confident, watching his victim proceed deeper and deeper into the trap. "But why kill the archaeologists?" Mulder continued. "You just called attention to yourself. They were Americans on a visit sanctioned by the central Mexican government."

Barreio shrugged again. "The government knows nothing of the problems of Quintana Roo. We have our own land, our own history. We should be our own coun-try like Honduras, like El Salvador, like Belize."

"Don't you have a brochure or something I could read?" Mulder said. "Instead of giving me the whole speech?"

"We had intended to take the Americans as hostages. That is all. Political hostages."

Mulder raised an eyebrow. "I suppose they were shot trying to escape? And then you had no choice but to throw them into the cenote?"

"Some of our revolutionaries still believe in sacrifices to the old gods,"

Barreio said, shoving the revolver closer. He shone the flashlight directly into Mulder's eyes. Mulder blinked and held up his hands to ward off the bright beam, stepping back toward a corner. "We all have to make sacri-fices,"

Barreio observed.

Mulder backed around the corner, unable to believe that Barreio kept stringing him along, kept playing him.

The police chief followed him, closing the distance for the last time. Barreio grinned, flashing white teeth in the dimness. Mulder knew his time had run out.

As the burly man rounded the corner, Cassandra Rubicon stepped out of the shadows, holding one of the metallic plates that had fallen off of the walls.

She hefted it over her head and brought it crashing down against the side of Barreio's skull. His policeman's cap toppled to one side; his body toppled to the other.

Still barely able to see, Cassandra dropped the plate with a loud clang, amazed at what she had done. Carlos Barreio grunted in pain and shock, reeling, stumbling into the wall. He was not dead—not even unconscious, just stunned for a moment.

Mulder did not want to risk grabbing for Barreio's revolver. He snatched Cassandra's arm as she blinked her eyes. He yanked her after him. "Come on, we've got to run!" he said. "That was one of the men who shot at you." She jogged after him, hustling back down toward the con-trol bridge.

"That man killed Cait and John, Christopher and Kelly?" she said, her voice icy.

"Yes, I'm afraid he did," Mulder said.

"Then I should have hit him harder," Cassandra answered.

Mulder helped her as they both ran down the slip-pery slope. Moments later, with a bellow of rage, Carlos Barreio came charging after them. He fired his revolver twice, and the bullets plowed gouges along the walls, ric-ocheting into the darkness.

Gasping for breath, Cassandra said, "Men shooting guns. This was what led me down here in the first place. I still can't see ... my eyes—they burn!"

They ran back into the tunnel, whose walls still siz-zled with a faint light that grew dimmer by the minute. The corroded, half-collapsed metal-and-crystal outcrop-pings gave a drastically anachronistic counterpoint to the Maya glyphs carved on the exposed limestone in the walls: symbols that ancient priests had added in hopes of restoring the damaged or pilfered artifacts removed from the derelict.

Mulder led her along, guiding her as she tried to clear her vision and find her way. He guided her behind one of the glistening metallic mounds. "Stay down here," he whispered.

"Do you actually have a plan?" Cassandra said. "Or are we just running?"

"Running seemed like a good idea at the time." Mulder swallowed and came to a stop in the confusing but awesome control chamber.

Then Carlos Barreio staggered onto the bridge, weaving unsteadily on his feet.

His eyes seemed unfo-cused, and he blinked repeatedly, as if to stop his ears from ringing. Blood poured from a gash in his scalp, wetting his dark hair, dribbling around his ear and down his cheek. He had left his policeman's cap back in the outer tunnel where it had fallen.

Leaving Cassandra huddled behind the shelter, fight-ing to regain her vision, Mulder backed away in another direction. Carlos Barreio caught the movement.

He swung his revolver and fired spasmodically, but his aim was off. Several bullets ricocheted off the metal wallplates. One struck inside the dark lifeboat chamber holding the mummified remains of what Mulder believed to be Kukulkan.

"Where are you?" Barreio croaked, wiping blood out of his eyes, smearing it on his cheeks. He roared with pain as he inadvertently touched the wound on his head. "What is this place?" The burly man seemed barely able to focus on his amazingly unexpected surroundings. Mulder won-dered if Cassandra had given him a concussion.

Barreio staggered forward and swiveled the revolver around, shooting blindly.

The bullets struck the central mound of metal shapes and crystals, sending up sparks and blue-green fire that rippled out in icy cold flames.

Hoping to distract the police chief somehow, Mulder grabbed a small, broken lump of crystal from the rough floor and hurled it, hoping to strike Barreio in the head—but he missed. Barreio caught the swift motion past his face and whirled, hearing the chunk strike the wall inside the narrow alcove—the chamber that had held Cassandra suspended. The police chief charged toward the sound like a five-hundred-yard-dash runner, waving his pistol.

Barreio fired once and strode into the lifeboat chamber.

Suddenly a flood of light poured over the police chief like a waterfall of lightning.

Instinctively, Mulder shielded his eyes.

Barreio thrust his hands out, trembling, his jaws clenched, his eyes opened wide. Dazzling, ethereal gel suddenly congealed around him, as if solidifying from the air itself. His nostrils flared—then he froze exactly in place, pinned by the lifeboat's automatic stasis systems. The amber hardened.

Barreio hung motionless, like an exhibit in a museum, one breath half indrawn, his eyes still hot, though dazed, the blood petrified along his cheek.

Mulder heard the dull throbbing begin again inside his head as the derelict's signal thrummed once more from within the wrecked ship—the SOS, the reactivated homing beacon.

But whom it meant to summon, Mulder could not guess.

Cassandra picked herself up from the floor, panting. She brushed herself off, looking satisfied. She shook her head to clear her thoughts. Creeping forward, she stood just in front of the glowing light wall, squinting slightly, trying to focus her eyes.

Mulder took his place beside her, staring in, feeling his heart pound.

The young woman shook her head and directed a cool smile at Barreio. "At least I'm on the right side of the wall this time," she murmured. "I like it better this way."

Xitaclan ruins, Pyramid of Kukulkan Wednesday, 3:51 a.m.

When the thunder started from above, Mulder turned up to see the control chamber's ceiling vibrating, trembling. As a second pounding thump reverberated through the walls, he feared another volcanic quake might be striking Xitaclan—and this time he was trapped inside a crum-bling underground derelict that did not look as if it could withstand such severe stresses.

With another loud, discrete boom, he hunched down. Dust pattered from above.

"Those sound like explosions," Cassandra said, crouched beside him.

"Yes," Mulder agreed. "It's bombs exploding. I think Major Jakes's military tactics have heated up just a little bit—and I don't know if this old ruin is going to take much more pounding. I'm not too keen on the idea of being buried alive, are you?"

Cassandra's face turned pale and she shook her head. "My goal in life is not to become a specimen for some future archaeologist."

"Let's try this again," Mulder said, leading her toward the upper exit. "We'll make our way to the pyramid levels. If Barreio could make his way down here, the passage must be open."

"At least for now," Cassandra said.

Together, they scrambled up the steep ramp, leaving the murderous police chief trapped in his coffin of light. If everything turned out all right, Mulder could always come back and arrest Barreio later.

Cassandra led the way upward, her hair flying all about her face. Mulder shone his flashlight ahead as the passages became dimmer, where the skeletal remains of the derelict gave way to limestone and hand-carved blocks.

Eager to escape, Cassandra pulled ahead of him as they reached the partially blocked passage where the stones had tumbled across the corridor. The barrel-chested Barreio had opened a wide enough passage for both of them to crawl through.

Cassandra scrambled up and into the dusty opening, wriggling her way ahead.

Mulder gave her feet a push, and the muscular young archaeologist disappeared into the shadows. She twisted around and returned, reaching across for his hand to help him up. With surprising strength, she dragged him across the broken stone and into the cramped opening. He pushed his way past a shard of rock and tumbled beside Cassandra, into the upper corridors of the Xitaclan pyramid.

Mulder looked around and brushed himself off.

More thunderous booms sounded from above and outside, closer now. Mulder shone his flashlight beam to see a snowfall of dust pattering down through the ceiling stones. One of the support beams began to groan from the strain.

"We'd better hurry before it gets even cozier around here," Cassandra said.

Running along the winding tun-nel, they followed the line of vitrified blocks of the inner temple that covered the entombed derelict like a shrine.

"Just a minute!" Cassandra reached into her back pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of graph paper on which she had sketched her explorations through the pyramid's lower levels. "Let's check our route. You'll have to read it—I still can't focus well enough."

"I got to this point myself two days ago," Mulder said, remembering how Scully had called him upon find-ing Vladimir Rubicon's body in the cenote. "I didn't get any farther though," he said. "I was ... interrupted."

Cassandra did not pick up on the grimness in his voice. She licked her lips and said, "Well, in my mind it's only been an hour or so. I believe it's this way." She turned down a different passageway leading upward.

Another explosion struck much closer. The pyramid floor and the thick stone walls rocked. The hand-hewn limestone blocks rattled together like chattering teeth.

"That sounded awfully loud," Cassandra said. "The good news is, we must be close to the opening."

"Let's hope so," Mulder said, then he heard another thump and whoosh of air, moments before another equally loud detonation. "Hey, those are mortars.

Somebody's launching mortars." Then he swallowed hard as he remembered Major Jakes and his covert search-and-destroy mission. "I think they're aiming to take down the pyramid."

"Nothing like respect for antiquities," Cassandra said.

They turned the corner and just up ahead saw the opening that led out into the wide plaza. Outside, the night was lit by fires in the jungle and dwindling white flares from burning phosphorus.

"I'm not sure it's a good idea to run out into the mid-dle of that," Mulder said. "Keep your head down."

Just then he saw the flash, heard the whistle, and instinctively grabbed Cassandra. He dove with her against the wall. One of the mortars hurtled into the stairstepped facade just above the doorway, detonating with a monstrous roar of fire and smoke and blasted debris. The shockwave made his ears pop.

An avalanche of rubble, rocks, and chiseled lime-stone blocks collapsed to block the entrance. The low ceiling of the claustrophobic corridor split open and fell in as Mulder dragged Cassandra deeper into the tunnels, both of them blinded by the flash and the sudden darkness.

He breathed a searing mixture of hot gases and pul-verized limestone dust, choking and coughing. They staggered back the way they had come. "This is getting ridiculous," Cassandra wheezed. "We'll never make it out of this pyramid."

"Back to the drawing board," Mulder said. "Let's try the passage I used to enter this place. Third time's the charm."

Down, down, deep underground, Mulder followed the image in his excellent memory, though he cheated a little by spotting his own footprints scuffed in the dust of the long-abandoned corridors.

"This passage leads out to the cenote," Mulder said. "Once there, we'll have to climb up, hand over hand."

"The cenote?" Cassandra said. "We must be below the level of the water. Are we supposed to swim, or what? At least I can wash the rest of this slime off."

Mulder looked at her, surprised. "Oh, I forgot to tell you—the sacrificial well is just a big empty hole in the ground now, thanks to the last tremors."

"Tremors? What tremors?" Cassandra asked.

"You've been sleeping for a long time."

They arrived at the ancient door hatch, the metal bulk-head that Mulder had reached by climbing down the cenote walls. Standing in the mysterious entrance to the derelict, Cassandra stared out at the dripping corkscrew walls of knobbed limestone. The empty well remained wet, still stinking of sulfurous volcanic gases.

"I've heard complaints about how pristine archaeo-logical sites are destroyed as soon as outsiders arrive at the scene," Cassandra said. "But this goes beyond my worst nightmares."

Up above, flashes from continued mortar fire and smoldering forest blazes lit the sky.

"Steady." Mulder reached out to take her hand as they both stepped out onto the algae-encrusted limestone ledge. "We're on our own for the first half of the climb," he said, "but from that point we can use the ropes we hung down."

"Ropes? What did you need ropes for?" Cassandra asked.

Mulder swallowed. "Well, my partner, Agent Scully, used your own diving suit to go underwater to explore. That's where she found the bodies of your team members ... and I used the ropes to retrieve your father. We found him floating here in the sacrificial well."

Cassandra's lips whitened as she pressed them together. Then she nodded. "I'm glad you got him out before all the water drained into the ground . . . though I couldn't imagine a more appropriate burial for a hard-ened relic digger like himself."