The Maya codex, page 24
‘Bienvenido a Ciudad de Guatemala, Senor Jennings.’
‘You’re free tonight, Reynaldo?’ Jennings’ voice was thick. His eyes roved lustfully over the boy’s slender form.
Reynaldo nodded, a glazed look on his handsome young face. It was a face devoid of humour; the joy of living once evident, extinguished. The authorities had tried hard to stamp out the child-sex trade, but as in any of the world’s large cities it still flourished, if you knew where to look.
Once they were in the back of the taxi, Jennings’ pudgy, sweaty hand wandered across Reynaldo’s taut brown thigh.
The morning heat was already oppressive and Jennings gratefully entered the cooler surrounds of the pink low-set 1930s building that housed the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnologia. Jennings waddled past the softly lit glass cases, his dirty runners squeaking on the highly polished tile floor. The first cases held rare blades, knives and spearpoints the ancients had carved from obsidian, the hard black glass formed when volcanic lava cooled without crystallisation, enabling it to be ground to molecular thinness, many times sharper than a modern surgical scalpel. Priceless milky-green jade masks, eyes inlaid with mother of pearl and obsidian, stared lifelessly from the next cabinet, secured amongst red-and-blue statues and pottery that had been recovered from the royal tombs in the pyramids of Tikal and Palenque, but Jennings didn’t spare them a glance. He was intent on finding his contact. At that moment a guard signalled Jennings towards a corner of the exhibition hall devoid of exhibits, a corner that both men knew was blind to the CCTV cameras. Carlos was stocky, with jet-black hair and a square brown face. His dark eyes shifted nervously around the room.
‘Doctor Weizman. You said she was here two months ago?’ Jennings inquired, wiping the sweat from his pink forehead.
‘ Si. She had permission to visit the storerooms. She was quite excited, senor.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘I think it was one of the stelae, a smaller one that has always been stored in one of the back rooms.’
‘I need to see it.’
Carlos shrugged apologetically. ‘That would be difficult, Senor… without permission.’
Jennings thrust a dirty hundred-quetzale note into the guard’s hand.
Carlos smiled. ‘Follow me, senor, but stay close to the wall.’
Not long after, Jennings examined the small limestone stela with excitement. ‘This is from Tikal. How long has the museum had this?’
‘I think it dates from the Nazi expedition to Tikal in the 1930s. The Nazis are not popular here, senor, so it has never been on display.’
‘And the museum records?’
Carlos shrugged again. ‘Copying records is strictly against the rules, senor.’
‘I need the records quickly, Carlos, understand? Prontamente! ?Entienden?’ Jennings demanded irritably as he pressed another dirty note into Carlos’ hand.
Monsignor Jennings reached Lake Atitlan in the late afternoon and by the time he reached the northern town of Panajachel, the last ferry had departed for the southern shore and San Pedro.
Jennings was tired and irritable and was in no mood to pay the hundred quetzales the old boatman was asking.
‘Fuel is very expensive, senor. You have to pay for my return trip.’
‘Cuarenta quetzales,’ Jennings insisted, gesturing rudely with four fingers. The old man shrugged, took the key out of the ignition of his small fibreglass runabout and walked towards the shore, leaving Jennings fuming beside the boat.
‘ Sesenta quetzales. Sixty. That’s my final offer,’ Jennings shouted.
The boatman shrugged and kept walking. Jennings looked around but the lake shore was deserted, empty boats rocking gently against the other jetties. ‘Ochenta!’ he yelled.
The boatman paused, turned and walked back along the shaky jetty. Eighty quetzales might only be a little more than US$10, but even after the cost of fuel, it would put food on the table for his grandchildren.
The boat rocked alarmingly as Jennings obeyed the boatman’s instructions to move to the bow. The old but meticulously maintained forty-horsepower Evinrude started first time. The boatman cast off and the little launch gathered speed across the cold smooth waters. The sun was sinking behind the mountains above San Marcos, bathing the coffee plantations on the three soaring volcanoes of Atitlan, Toliman and San Pedro with an orange glow, but Jennings was oblivious to the scenery. He sat just back from the bow, absorbed in the single page of acquisition notes from the Museo Nacional.
The stela had indeed been acquired as a result of the expedition Himmler had ordered to the jungles of Tikal in 1938, although the details of the transaction seemed shrouded in mystery. Of greater importance to Jennings was the appearance of the Greek letter?. It was the first time the Mayanist scholar had seen the letter inscribed on a stela. Was there a link between the Maya and the Greeks? And what did the numbers on the stela mean? Jennings understood well the ancients’ use of bars and dots in a vigesimal or numeral system that was based on 20 rather than the decimal system based on 10, but the bars and dots on the small stela had been hard to make out.
Three hundred and twenty kilometres to the north-east, the last of the sun’s rays struck the top of Temple III above the jungle canopy in Tikal. The rays almost lined up with Temple IV. The winter solstice was drawing closer.
41
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
W iley took the call in his office. ‘They’re being held in the city watch-house.’ The encrypted telephone connection to the US Embassy in Berlin was unusually clear, as was the message from the chief of station, Brandon Gray. ‘The heat from the media is red-hot -’
‘Not least because, like me, the media are mystified as to why two men in balaclavas would attack a fucking garbage truck!’
‘Their instructions were to follow the cell phone and assassinate Tutankhamen and Nefertiti,’ Gray said defensively. ‘There’s little doubt the cell phone was on board the truck, but there was no sign of either of the targets.’
‘Has anyone tumbled to anything that might link us? What about the cell phone?’
‘No, sir. The fire was intense, and the cell phone would have been destroyed. I’m worried about the assets, though. Germany abolished the death penalty in 1949, but the feeling here is overwhelmingly in favour of its reinstatement for cases like this. Either of them might talk.’
‘That can’t be allowed to happen! Terminate them both.’
‘Even if we can find someone who’s prepared to do it and able to get access,’ Gray replied, hesitating, ‘it’ll be very expensive… ’
‘I don’t give a fuck what it costs. Find someone on the inside!’ Wiley slammed the receiver back onto its encryption cradle, got up from his desk and paced his office. The German Chancellor was already describing the crash as a massacre and she was demanding answers. He contemplated briefing the new director but immediately dismissed the notion. The old regime would have simply denied any involvement, but if the CIA connection surfaced on this new President’s watch, Wiley knew he’d be finished. Four floors below, a heated argument between Larry Davis and Ellen Rodriguez was in full swing.
‘Jesus Christ, Larry. I don’t know what O’Connor or Weizman have done to get so far up the administration’s nostril, but this is way out of control!’ Rodriguez’ green eyes were blazing. ‘Ten people are dead, including two babies, because we’ve got a bunch of thugs out there. Amateurs firing at anything that moves!’
‘If you’re not up to this, Rodriguez… ’ Wiley strode into the room. ‘What’ve we got, apart from this clusterfuck in Gottingen?’
Davis mopped his bald pate. ‘It appears the targets were not in Gottingen, but Bad Arolsen,’ he said, glancing at Rodriguez. ‘We got a look at the visitors’ book and Nefertiti used her own name to sign in.’
‘Why would she use her own name?’
Davis shrugged and Rodriguez stepped in. ‘Probably because you have to book to search documents well in advance, and at the time Weizman made the phone call to the International Tracing Service, she wouldn’t have been aware we had her in our crosshairs.’
‘Was Tutankhamen with her?’
‘She was accompanied by a man fitting his description,’ Davis replied quickly.
‘So where are they now?’
‘Not sure, but we’re sending more assets into Bad Arolsen,’ said Davis.
‘Which I think is a mistake.’
Wiley wheeled on Rodriguez. ‘Why?’
‘Firstly, Germany is not some third-world country where murders are part of everyday life,’ Rodriguez replied evenly. ‘Everyone from the Chancellor down is demanding answers to our latest effort in Gottingen and the police will be on high alert across the country. If we start pouring assets into a little village like Bad Arolsen, that’s only going to draw the crabs. Secondly, the targets are highly unlikely to still be there.’
‘And why is that?’
‘I’ve worked with O’Connor before. He is, or was, one of our best agents. He hopes for the best and plans for the worst, so he’d expect us to be close on his heels. He won’t stay exposed a moment longer than he has to.’
‘So where do you suppose he might be now?’
‘O’Connor already knows what we’ve got planned for Weizman, and knowing O’Connor, he’ll be on to us – you,’ she added, ‘having exactly the same plans for him. Our contact in Bad Arolsen has reported that Weizman asked to see the documents for the Mauthausen concentration camp. They may be headed there, although just why O’Connor has sided with Weizman, I’m not sure. Perhaps it has something to do with that Mayan conference.’
‘I’d stick to finding out where they are if I were you, Rodriguez,’ Wiley responded, a menacing edge to his voice. He turned to his chief of staff. ‘Get Vienna to stake out the border crossings to Austria, and I want observation on the trains and airports. Get hold of the rental car hirings in the area and get someone out to the Mauthausen concentration camp. I want these two on toast.’
42
MAUTHAUSEN
O ’Connor parked the car outside Mauthausen’s forbidding stone walls behind which, during the war, over 120 000 people had been murdered by the Nazis. With the exception of some of the cramped, squalid barracks, which had been torn down, the camp had remained as it was when Aleta’s family was interned in 1938. The camp was maintained now as a memorial to the innocent souls who had been taken.
It was early, and a Sunday, so the car park was empty. The tourist buses would come later. O’Connor and Aleta walked towards the main gate in silence. Aleta’s long dark hair trailed over her shoulders, moving gently in the light morning breeze.
Rusted iron bars protruded from the granite archway, the big eagle which they had once supported torn from its mount by prisoners when the camp was finally liberated by the US 11th Armored Division in May of 1945. The heavy wooden doors in the centre of the archway were closed. O’Connor and Aleta entered through a side arch beneath the observation towers and passed into the SS assembly compound, where the prisoners had been stripped naked and left for hours in the hot sun or freezing snow while their clothes were disinfected.
Aleta had researched the camp thoroughly before arriving in Austria, but even that had not prepared her for the grisly reality that confronted her when she entered the gas chambers. The chambers at Mauthausen could accommodate up to 120 prisoners and the Nazis had disguised them as shower rooms. Aleta choked back tears as she walked through the white tiled rooms, the shower heads and water pipes still in place. Each room had its entry through a heavy iron bulkhead door. The doors, now rusting, were made to be sealed and locked from the outside and were equipped with a centre peep-hole. The SS guards would observe the prisoners falling to the tiles and fighting for their lives, blood streaming from their ears and other orifices as deadly Cyclone-B hydrogen cyanide was vented into the room.
O’Connor and Aleta walked silently into the adjacent rooms, which contained the ovens used to incinerate the bodies the SS guards dragged from the ‘shower rooms’.
‘I need some air,’ Aleta said finally, her face pale. They climbed the steps that led out of the gas chambers and walked past the barrack blocks and the brothel that had been set up for prisoners who collaborated with the Nazis. They passed through the massive granite ‘prisoners’ gate’ and walked towards the quarry, where thousands of prisoners had died, whipped and worked to exhaustion digging out rocks with their bare hands.
The car park now hidden from view, neither O’Connor nor Aleta saw the Audi pull in and park at the far end. The CIA asset noted the blue strip with the white ‘D’ for Deutschland beneath the twelve gold stars of the European Union on the registration plate of the rental Volkswagen Passat. He transmitted the number to the chief of station in Berlin in a secure burst from his cell phone. Ten minutes later he received his instructions. ‘Car hired in Kassel-Wilhelmshohe by male fitting description of Tutankhamen. Nefertiti likely to be with him. Once confirmed, follow and terminate both targets at first opportunity.’
‘Given what happened here,’ Aleta said thoughtfully, ‘it’s surprising Israel doesn’t show more compassion towards the Palestinians.’
‘Some might argue the Israelis have the right to defend themselves against rocket attacks.’
‘Yes. But the Israeli attacks in Gaza and Lebanon have been ruthlessly disproportionate: they’ve even bombed schools and UN posts.’
‘That can hardly be compared to the Holocaust,’ O’Connor suggested gently.
‘Every life is precious. When you flatten places like Gaza, the most populated area on the planet – where one and a half million people are crowded into a tiny area that even the Vatican calls a concentration camp – you’ve made a decision to kill innocent civilians. If it were any other nation raining cluster bombs and white phosphorous on women and children, your people in Washington would be outraged. White phosphorous! A compound that clamps to the skin and keeps burning deep into the body. How do the Israelis justify that?’
O’Connor didn’t reply, surprised by the ferocity of Aleta’s views. Was it an Arab or a Jew, he wondered, who had said, ‘A man without a country is a man without dignity. And our dignity is more important to us even than our life.’ O’Connor was convinced the awful killing would continue on both sides until the Arab Islamists recognised Israel’s unequivocal right to exist, and the Israelis withdrew from their illegal settlements and returned the land they had occupied since 1967 so a Palestinian state could become a reality.
They reached the ‘staircase of death’ and Aleta looked towards the cliff. ‘There are 186 steps to the top,’ she said. ‘The prisoners were made to carry huge rocks up these stairs on their shoulders, as punishment.’ Tears welled in her eyes. ‘I think if my grandfather were alive today, he’d be urging the Israeli government and people to take a different course. I’m not blaming the Israeli people – they want peace just as much as the ordinary Palestinians – but the hardliners in the Israeli government will never rest until all Palestinian land is taken by force, and the Islamists will never rest until Israel is wiped off the map. It’s madness, the same mindless madness that gave birth to von Hei?en and Mauthausen.’ She wiped her eyes and looked at O’Connor. ‘It’s time we went. There’s less than three weeks to the winter solstice. If we’re going to have any chance of finding the third figurine, let alone lining them up by 21 December, we’ll need to move quickly.’
O’Connor nodded. It would be touch and go. Together, they walked in silence across the deserted quarry, a quarry where Jews and others had been murdered in their thousands. Their hands touched briefly, and Aleta made no effort to pull away.
‘The big question now, I suppose, is how we get to Guatemala?’ she asked as O’Connor pulled out of the car park.
‘You’ve just won the job of navigator,’ he said, handing the road map to Aleta. ‘We’ll head back along the Danube to Mauthausen town proper, then north on Route 123 to link up with the E55 into the Czech Republic.’
‘Why the Czech Republic?’
‘Wiley trusts no one, so he’ll resist taking the German and Austrian police into his confidence, but he’ll still have CIA assets watching the major border crossings. The Czech Republic won’t be high on his agenda as he’ll expect us to exit from either Vienna or one of the big German cities like Frankfurt.’
‘So, Prague?’
O’Connor shook his head. ‘The airports and train stations will be under heavy surveillance, and the CIA chief of station in Prague will have mobilised his own assets. But even the CIA doesn’t have the resources to watch all the docks, and I have a contact in Hamburg. If we can bypass Prague and head back across the border through Dresden and on to Hamburg undetected, we’ve got a chance.’ O’Connor glanced in the rear-view mirror. He’d mentally photographed the cars in the parking lot, and the black Audi that had been parked at the far end was now following at a discreet distance. ‘We’ve got company again.’
The driver of the Audi waited until the road disappeared into a series of small hills before he closed the gap and lined up the Passat in the sights of his Brugger amp; Thomet MP9.
‘Get down!’ O’Connor yelled. The rear windscreen of the Passat shattered under a withering burst of sub-machine-gun fire. O’Connor swerved from side to side and another burst of fire crackled past the offside of the car into the pine forest. O’Connor floored the Passat, racing up the narrow twisting road, but the black Audi was gaining. Whoever he was, he wasn’t leaving any doubt about his intentions, O’Connor thought, drifting sideways into the next corner, only to be confronted by a massive B-double tanker coming the other way. The mountains reverberated to the blast from the truck’s triple air horns as O’Connor spun the wheel, missing the tanker by centimetres.
