The Crypt Trilogy Bundle

by Bill Thompson

  Within a few days Maya and his crew had established a camp on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico at a place where the Olmec ruins of La Venta lie today. There were nearly a hundred people, including the Phoenician boat captain and his African crew. Maya’s own men waited patiently to learn why they’d come here, but he said nothing.

  One morning when they rose, they saw Paltibaal’s mighty ship far in the distance. The god Amun had spoken to the high priest, assuring him this was where he should hide the vase, so here they would stay. Maya had sent the vessel back, keeping twenty of the African laborers to help establish a colony. These men were basically slaves, beholden to whoever paid them. They adapted to Maya’s leadership and in turn he treated them as fairly as his Egyptian servants. None of those who remained would ever see their homelands again.

  Maya explained to his men why they had to stay – to fulfill a secret mission entrusted to them by the pharaoh of Egypt. Even he himself would never return. The men were comforted by this news. There was no question they would obey. They were accustomed to following orders, but the fact that the highest priest in their land was staying too made them understand they were part of something important – a secret mission ordered by their pharaoh and accomplished by Maya.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The state of Chiapas, Mexico

  Present day

  As the bus rolled down the highway, Ted reached across the aisle, tapped Mark and said, “We need to feed everyone. Ask him if I can pass out the lunches.”

  The masked gunman replied, “Do it quickly. Give me and my man a lunch also.”

  Ted and Mark took box lunches from the overhead storage areas. They went down the aisle, giving lunch and a bottle of water to each passenger. When he got to Gavin Michaels’s seat, Ted whispered something. Without a glance at the author’s face, Ted moved on down the aisle. Finally he returned to his seat as Gavin started to write a note.

  There were settlements – tiny communities – along the road they were traveling. Most were a few shacks, a mangy dog or two, some cows or goats and maybe a horse for transportation. Sometimes you’d see a couple of rickety tables and a few chairs, the local version of a restaurant with authentic down-home cooking.

  Gavin opened the window.

  “What are you doing?” Dick Mansfield grumbled from the seat behind him. “You’re going to let out the air-conditioning!”

  “One sec,” he whispered.

  In a few minutes a cluster of shacks appeared. Locals were standing just off the highway, holding up fruit for sale, in hopes the fancy tour bus would stop and make their day. They could sell more to the people on one bus than they’d otherwise make in a week, but most of the buses were on their way to one ruin or another. They almost never stopped.

  Gavin tossed something out the window. It landed on the ground near a little girl in a tattered brown dress as the bus sped on down the highway.

  He shut the window and hoped Ted’s plan would work.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ted had to let the outside world know they’d been hijacked. Someone had to write a note; it couldn’t be him because he was in the first row, right next to the kidnappers. Someone else had to do it.

  When he’d been allowed to walk down the aisle, Ted asked Gavin to toss a note out the window the next time they saw people on the road. “Put some money inside,” he suggested. “Maybe that’ll make them feel obligated to help us.” He also gave Gavin a phone number.

  Gavin’s note was in English. Spanish would have been better, but his Spanish was limited to a few words, none of which could convey the predicament they were in. He was succinct but got the message across.

  We have been kidnapped by rebels who cut our driver’s head off. There are two kidnappers on the bus and thirteen of us. We don’t know where we are being taken or why. Call this number and tell them to call the police. Please help us.

  He wrote down the phone number Ted had given him. It was the direct line for Ted’s boss back in Colorado.

  He pulled a rubber band from his backpack. He put the note around a tube of lip balm, wrapped a US twenty-dollar bill on the outside, secured it with the rubber band, and opened his window. Soon the bus slowed for a set of speed bumps in a settlement. There were people selling things beside the road – he tossed the note toward them.

  There was no way he’d know if it was successful or not until … unless … the police showed up somewhere down the road. It was a real long shot since they didn’t even know where they were headed.

  None of the people selling fruit and vegetables paid any attention to the little bundle tied with a rubber band that was lying in the grass. Litter was a constant thing in this country. Everybody threw stuff all over the place. Obviously a rich person on the bus had decided to throw his trash out the window.

  For hours, the little Mexican family had walked to the edge of the pavement every time a vehicle passed by. Each time they hoped to sell something, but no one stopped. The father finally gave up – they never sold much, but today it was nada – nothing. The little girl had gotten tired of lifting fruits up to each passing car, so she set them on the ground. Her father stooped to pick them up and noticed something. It looked like a folded-up piece of American money with a rubber band around it. He picked it up and unwrapped it.

  What he found made his day. There was a twenty-dollar bill – more money than they’d made in a week! There was also a piece of paper with words on it and a tube of lip gloss. He looked inside and then tossed the tube on the ground. The note meant nothing to the man because he was illiterate. He didn’t even know the words were in English. Thrilled at his incredible fortune, he put the money in his pocket and threw the note on the ground. The wind picked it up and whisked it away.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As the pickup drove away, the masked bandit ordered Julio to drive the bus. It became the guide’s unpleasant task to unbuckle Manuel’s body and drag it into the bushes. The head was next – the bandit kicked it off the bus like a soccer ball, and Julio vomited as he respectfully picked it up by the hair and laid it next to the man’s corpse. He’d known this driver less than two days, but nobody deserved to die like this. He resolved to think of a way out of the hostage situation. He’d wait for the right time. It would come. Their captors would make a mistake eventually.

  Mark was astonished at the situation they were in. He’d always felt comfortable in this area of Mexico; it was very familiar to him. The archaeologist had been to this area dozens of times in the past five years, guiding tours or leading university digs. He’d never seen even one act of violence by the Zapatistas. Now and then they would set an old car on fire or block a highway with barbed wire and concrete blocks, but that was child’s play compared to today. This morning he’d witnessed an execution.

  He thought this looked more like the action of Guatemalan guerrillas thirty years ago than the Zapatistas of today. This could have happened during the brutal terrorist attacks of the 1980s, but incursions into Mexican territory by Guatemalan terrorists just didn’t happen anymore. He had no idea who these men represented or what they wanted. What was the motive of this cold-blooded killer who stood three feet in front of him with an automatic rifle, watching the passengers closely through the eye slits of his mask? Was ransom what he wanted? Was he seeking publicity for his cause? Or was there something else behind the murder of one person and the kidnapping of thirteen others?

  As the hours passed, the passengers stayed remarkably calm, each lost in thoughts of the day’s horrific events and what might lie ahead for him or her personally.

  The bandits took turns, one standing and watching the passengers while the other sat on the step. After they’d been driving for two hours, Julio asked the leader for a bathroom break. A few minutes later he was ordered to park the bus. The passengers were allowed off three at a time. Both rebels stood outside and watched as everyone, male and female, was forced to urinate together on the ground beside the bus. Julio thought briefly about tryi
ng to flag down a passing motorist but decided it was too risky to bring more people into the equation. They could be murdered too, and anyway he’d seen only three cars in the past two hours on this desolate stretch of road.

  Once they were back on the highway, Mark asked the leader in Spanish, “What should we call you?”

  “Call me Rolando,” he replied with a smirk.

  “As in Rolando Moran?” Mark had studied the politics of terrorism in Central America and knew well the history of the border skirmishes between Mexico and Guatemala over the past fifty years. He knew about Rolando Moran, a pseudonym adopted by the head of a Marxist Guatemalan terror group called the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, or EGP. Moran had died in 1997.

  “Ah, an educated man, I see. You know about our region. Yes, call me Rolando. What is your name? Are you the leader of this group?”

  Mark said he was a university professor and an archaeologist. He pointed across the aisle and said, “This is Ted. He’s the tour director, but he doesn’t speak Spanish. It would be best for you to communicate through me.”

  “Thank you for telling me what is best,” the man replied sarcastically.

  “So your mission is to hold us for ransom?”

  Rolando’s eyes turned fiery. “My mission is not your business, Dr. Linebarger. You will learn my goals only when I am ready to tell you. Now it is best for you to shut up. I’ve had enough questions.”

  About an hour later Rolando told the driver he would be turning left soon. Once they left the main highway, several people on the bus understood where they were going. They were on a side road that went only one place – the Usumacinta River, the border between Mexico and Guatemala. It appeared they were going to the tiny river town called Frontera Corozal.

  The twenty-mile trip took nearly an hour on the poorly maintained road. Dense jungle encroached on both sides. Massive trees reaching to the sky blocked the late afternoon sun. Julio turned on his headlights, slowed to a crawl and maneuvered around potholes.

  A green hand-lettered sign welcomed them to the town and its one wide street paved with concrete. Dirt side roads led to crude houses with smoke curling from pipes in their roofs. Makeshift shacks along the main road offered fruits or vegetables or cerveza for sale. Men sat outdoors smoking and drinking, and lazy dogs lay on the warm pavement. The local people waved as the bus passed, unaware that this wasn’t a typical group of tourists. These people were hostages.

  Frontera Corozal was a fairly new town created with one purpose – to facilitate boat traffic. Many people crossed the Usumacinta River every day, heading from Mexico to Guatemala a quarter mile away to work, shop or for some other reason. A similar town was on the Guatemala side, equally poor and equally uninteresting, and boats from there made the same crossings. Even when the river flooded, the crossing took less than ten minutes. All day long boats big and small ferried goods and people back and forth. There were no border guards, no customs inspectors, no records of who came and went from one country to another.

  The river also supported one other industry – tourism. Boats carried tourists on a forty-minute ride to see the ancient Mayan site of Yaxchilan. The imposing ruins, situated right along the river on the Mexico side, were beautiful but rarely visited due to the remoteness of both the docking facility and the site itself. Thirty longboats that resembled wide canoes with engines were tied up to a dock that looked as if children had thrown it together. To get to the boats, tourists maneuvered down a cliff high above the water, using a conglomeration of concrete stairs that were started but never finished and sandbags tossed here and there, presumably to help facilitate foot traffic. At last passengers crossed a swinging bridge to get to a rickety dock.

  Each boat carried fourteen tourists, who boarded and sped downstream forty minutes to the ruins, seeing imposing jungles and the occasional monkey or crocodile along the way. It was a pleasant ride and provided a good income for the boat jockeys, who sometimes managed fifteen round trips a day.

  It was nearly nine p.m. when the bus pulled into a parking lot high above the river. Three hundred yards away was the only sign of activity in the area, the lights and sounds of people at a rustic lodge called Escudo Jaguar. It served as the only rest stop for tourists headed to Yaxchilan. Once you got to Frontera Corozal, you had to spend the night either before or after your visit to the ruins. The town was simply too remote to fit in a day trip and have time to go anywhere else for the night. Escudo Jaguar was the only place for a hundred miles to get a mostly clean room, a functioning private shower, a decent meal and a cerveza or two.

  Rolando and his partner ordered Julio off the bus and told him to start unloading bags. As soon as their captors were outside, Mark asked Ted, “You know where we are, right?”

  “Sure. Frontera Corozal.” They were here together last year, taking a group like this one to Yaxchilan. That time they’d spent the night next door at Escudo Jaguar.

  The archaeologist pointed to a truck sitting in the parking lot nearby. “There’s the old pickup two of them drove off in this afternoon, but there’s nobody in it. What do you think these guys are up to?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on. Coming here makes it even crazier. Why would they bring us here?”

  Others in the bus heard them talking. “Where are we?” one asked anxiously. “Where are they taking us?”

  “We’re in a settlement called Frontera Corozal. Just in front of us down a cliff is the Usumacinta River.”

  Bart Free shouted in desperation, “The Usumacinta? The border with Guatemala? What are we doing here?” Free was an anthropologist from UNLV – four years ago while on a backpacking trip his group had crossed the river here.

  “Holy crap! Are they taking us to Guatemala?” Alison Barton moaned, her stomach churning with fear. She hadn’t wanted to come to Mexico in the first place. She was a computer guru working at the Apple Store in Waco, Texas. Her boyfriend, Win Phillips, invited her to join him on an adventure in the jungle, all expenses paid. He was a psychology professor at Baylor and he knew the power of persuasion. Even though she’d met him just a few months earlier, she impetuously agreed on the spot to come with him. But as the weeks passed and the departure date grew nearer, she began dreading everything about this trip even before it started.

  You? In the jungle? Are you insane? she’d said to herself after agreeing to come, but she decided to stick with her commitment. He’d already paid the fees for both of them, so he’d be out three thousand dollars if she didn’t go. That didn’t make her any less apprehensive. She was a city girl, born and raised in San Francisco, and she’d settled in Waco after graduation. She didn’t belong in the jungle – she’d known it from the beginning, and now that she was a captive, she realized what an awful mistake she’d made in coming here. She was terrified and began to cry softly. Win tried to put his arm around her, but she pushed him away. She just wanted to be home. By herself. Without Win and without the sickening feeling that she could be the next one to die.

  I only met this guy six months ago and I agreed to let him bring me here to this godforsaken place to be murdered? What was I thinking? Dear Lord, just get me out of here and I promise I’ll never do anything this stupid again.

  She quietly spoke words she hadn’t thought of in a long, long time.

  “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Rolando barked instructions to Mark, who translated for the others. As Julio unloaded suitcases from the underbelly of the tour bus, the others picked up their bags. In the darkness and confusion, no one noticed a man retrieve his suitcase and backpack, toss them under the bus, and duck behind it.

  Paul wriggled his way underneath the bus from the opposite side, pulled his luggage out, and disappeared into a thicket of trees at the edge of the dimly lit parking lot. There was no doubt Rolando was taking the hostages to the river. There was really no place else to go, and that was exactly what he did. Pulling and dragging their
suitcases, the twelve hostages stumbled down the concrete stairway to the dock far below.

  The bus engine started up suddenly and Paul ducked down, watching Rolando’s lieutenant, Diego, pull out of the parking lot. In less than ten minutes he was back. He’d parked the bus somewhere nearby, probably out of sight of curious passersby.

  Diego went down to the dock with the others, and the parking lot was deserted. Paul left his luggage in the brush and skirted around to the cliff, avoiding a couple of overhead lights and hugging the darkness. He memorized the numbers on two longboats that were backing away from their slips, loaded with people. Within minutes they had rounded a bend and were gone. He hadn’t been missed. He’d observed Rolando all day long and never saw the rebel count hostages. Whatever Rolando was, he wasn’t a professional. He didn’t even know how many prisoners he’d taken.

  The professional in this situation was Juan Carlos himself. He’d assumed many identities in the past. Paul Silver was the latest and the one he’d hoped to use from now on. This one was easy; on a tour bus people tended to take others at their words. His fabricated tale about a guy from the Northeast working for the oil company Pemex in Villahermosa was accepted without question. And if anyone did a cursory check, they’d see Paul Silver actually was what he claimed. He knew how to create new personas. He’d done it a lot in the past, and this time he’d done it perfectly. Paul was an accomplished linguist, fluent in several languages. His flawless American English made his new identity believable. He not only sounded like a New Yorker, euphemisms and all, he appeared to be one in every respect.

  Paul Silver was his name, at least for now. He’d been born Slava Sergenko, a Ukrainian child prostitute turned multimillionaire. That was long ago and that was a name he’d never use again. There was nothing about Slava’s life he cared about. Except the money, of course.