Kane rolled to his knees gun up, reacquiring…nothing. The opposition was down and very dead, laying a few feet away from where he’d been standing, thrown back from the close range shot.
Standing and trying to wipe off some of the dead-mud, Kane walked over to the body and kneeled next to it, holstering his weapon. He patted the man down, in the hope of finding any information linking him back to Frost.
Finding nothing of use on the would-be executioner's upper body, he moved to his pants and felt the outside of Ronin’s left front pocket. A rectangular lump protruded from the material, a phone maybe.
Kane dug his hand into the pocket and produced what felt like a cell phone. Yep. He tried to unlock it, but couldn’t, it had a standard four-digit passcode just like any other smartphone did.
“Todd, you there?” Kane asked, staring at the dead man’s phone.
There was a short silence, but then the tech expert answered, “Yes sir, what do you need Kane?”
“I have a phone that I need unlocked and searched. I want everything that’s on it and I need it ASAP.”
“What kind of phone?” Todd asked.
“IPhone 6,” Kane replied.
Silence, as Kane could hear the other man typing furiously on the other end.
“Did you try unlocking it already?” Todd asked, still typing.
“No, it has the standard lock screen engaged. There could be thousands of combinations—”
“Ten thousand to be exact,” Todd interrupted. “Did you try 1, 2, 3, 4?”
Kane looked down at the dark screen of the phone. He then slid the lock bar and punched in the recommended password.
It unlocked.
“How the—” Kane began to ask.
“It’s the number one password used worldwide. A lot of people forget them and opt to use something simple like that to keep from getting locked out.”
“Huh,” Kane answered. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Hopefully not. What’s the cell number?”
Kane pulled up the devices number and rattled off the sequence to Todd.
“Figure out where this guy was getting calls from. He just tried to Ginsu me and I’d like to know where his employer is so I can find him and stomp his head in.”
“I bet you would. Hang on a sec, will you?” There was a pause and the sound of rapid clicking. “Okay, I’m in. I’ll call you back in a jiff.” The line went dead as the hacker extraordinaire did his thing.
Kane stood, “Speaking of Ginsu…” He strolled back over to the felled Katana and picked it up, a broad smile forming on his face. Then, he went back over to the bloodied body of Ronin and unhooked one of the dead man’s sheaths from his back, the one that didn’t have a ragged hole blown through it.
Kane smiled broadly, reattaching it, but around his own shoulder. He then lifted the gleaming polished blade and slid it into place in the scabbard that was now between his back and his Tactical Backpack.
He smiled at the thought of having the sword and his beloved hand cannons. Hot damn! Look at me now.
* * *
“Human skin?” Olivia asks in horror.
I hold up the book for her to see. “No way to know for sure,” I say. “At least, not until we run the necessary tests, but I’m willing to bet it is. I wouldn’t put it past a culture that was as brutal as the Aztec were.”
Seeing the slightly nauseous look on Olivia’s face, I lower it and slip it into a ziplock bag, sealing it. Nicole carefully sifts through the rest of the coffin, looking for anything else important, but finds nothing. We stand and turn back towards the entrance.
“What do we do with him?” The archaeogeneticist asks, looking over to Dr. Weaver’s body.
“There isn’t much we can do for him right now,” Nicole says, keeping her tone calm and soothing. It’s the same voice she uses on me when I’m having one of my episodes. She continues, “Once the clean-up crew arrives, they’ll know what to do and how to handle it, but until then we have a job to do ourselves.”
Standing behind the solemn woman, all I can see is her head nodding in agreement. She then heads towards the room’s exit, without saying another word. Olivia kneels and begins her low crawl back through the graves, where she will eventually make her way out into the empty excavation site.
Nicole turns back to me before exiting herself.
“You think she’ll be okay?” I ask her, motioning to Olivia’s feet.
Nicole shrugs. “Does she have a choice?”
She has a point. We don’t have time for the proper steps of mourning the loss of someone we love, or in this case, someone Olivia respected.
“You’re right,” I answer. “She will have to push it aside for now. Then when the time is right, she can take all the time she needs. But until then…”
Nicole gets it, “No problem. I’ll keep her on track.”
And with that, we exit one-by-one, following the path we took to enter the tomb.
Last to exit, I hear voices up ahead. Thankfully, they are voices I recognize. Apparently, Kane met the ladies at the tomb entrance and is now having an animated discussion with them.
I crawl out and stand, taking in the big guy.
“Why do you have a katana?” I ask, looking at the Japanese blade he’s now wielding.
What the hell happened out here? I think to myself, confused.
“He was just telling us,” Olivia remarks. “Some guy attacked him up in the weeds at the edge of the clearing—an assassin.”
My eyes dart up and meet Kane’s. The look on his face tells me it’s true. So does the soaked and disheveled appearance of his clothes.
“Tell me.”
“I was up on a hill overlooking the excavation,” he says, pointing towards a rise at the end of the dig. “I was doing some recon, trying to figure out who was here that shouldn’t have been.”
“Who attacked you?” I ask.
“Some asshole hibachi chef with a damned katana, that’s who!” He exclaims. “Bastard tried to take my head off a couple times, but I got inside his reach and put a hurtin’ on him.”
“Where’s he now?” I ask, taking a step in the direction he pointed.
“Dead,” Kane answers, halting my advance.
“Dead?” I ask, a little disappointed, the tone of my voice making it pretty obvious how I feel. I would have liked to have questioned the man.
“Hey, look, man, it was either him or me. After I disarmed the guy he pulled a peashooter on me and tried to put a bullet in my head.”
I slowly nod my head in agreement. Kane really didn’t have a choice.
“You find anything out before you shot him?” I ask a little hopeful, getting back to it.
Kane’s face goes white.
“What?” I ask not understanding.
“It’s Frost,” Kane replies. “Who?”
“Ronin—the killer—was working for John Frost, formerly of the Army Rangers, or more specifically, of my old unit.”
“What?” I ask, shocked. One of Kane’s former teammates is behind all this. But why?
Kane answers for me. “I didn’t get to ask him why Frost is doing what he’s doing. I was about to but then…”
Then the Ronin-fellow pulled a gun on Kane and he paid for it with his life.
“Anything else?” I ask.
“Yeah, I found the guy’s phone. Todd is going through it right now. Hopefully, he should be getting back to us soon.” He rubs his neck. “What about you guys? You find anything worthwhile in there?”
I smile a little, reaching around my back.
SHINK.
“Actually, yes. We found this.” I draw the gleaming blade out from behind my back, watching the early morning sun’s rays reflect on the pristine surface.
Kane’s eyes go wide at seeing the ornate weapon’s design. But then, his eyebrows furrow in confusion as he draws his own blade.
SHINK.
“Where’d you get that?” I ask.
He answers,
looking up at me, the corner of his mouth curling into a slight smirk. “Why do I suddenly feel like a musketeer?”
23
Isla de Jaina, Campeche, Mexico
“That’s disgusting,” Kane says, handing the diary back to me, his face scrunched in revulsion. I guess the fact that it’s made of human skin doesn’t sit too well with him. And honestly, it shouldn’t.
I accept the book, once again running my fingers over the cover, closely inspecting the symbols that appear to have been seared into it. The charring around the edges of the hieroglyphs is a good indication that they were in fact branded into the skin. Hopefully, the person was dead before they were branded, I think. Just the thought of someone being branded and skinned to make a book makes me nauseous.
I flip open the cover, examining the first page. It’s then I see very distinct and recognizable Aztecan glyphs, mostly depicting what I think is the major gods. Well, that solves one mystery.
“It’s definitely Aztec,” I say aloud for everyone to hear, confirming our previous suspicions.
We sit inside Olivia’s research tent, the one she hit her head in and passed out face down on her cot. We cleaned it up a little before making ourselves comfortable around the main examination table.
“Okay, but why was it there to begin with?” Nicole asks, sitting next to me, staring at the page.
“No idea,” I answer, flipping to the next page.
“Anyone read Aztecan hieroglyphs?” Kane asks rhetorically.
“I may be able to help you with that,” announces a voice over the collective network.
I look up to Kane with a raised eyebrow, questioning the speaker’s claim.
“Since when can you read Aztecan glyphs, Todd?” Kane asks.
There’s a beat of silence, along with some faint clicking then Todd speaks up. “Oh, I can’t. But TransPro can.”
This time, Kane gives me the questioning look back. “What the hell is TransPro?” He asks.
“TransPro is a simple translation program I’ve modified and have yet to test in the field,” Todd explains. “Basically, it takes whatever image is currently being seen through an NVS2 camera and plugs it into its vast database. Once installed, it immediately starts decoding the text into English, making it perfectly legible to me.”
Kane and I give each other impressed looks and matching shoulder shrugs telling one another, “Eh, what the hell.”
But before I can question the tech, he continues, “Hank, would you mind turning on your specs video feed please?”
I comply, flipping on my glasses camera. As soon as my feed goes live, Todd begins typing furiously on the other end, no doubt setting up TransPro.
“Okay, here we go,” Todd says, for sure having his fingers crossed. It is his program’s trial run after all.
“How long?” Kane asks, looking at his watch.
“Um, should be just a few minutes at most for the first page,” the tech wiz says. “But every successive page after that should be quicker and quicker as TransPro learns the language. It will also learn the author’s habits and tendencies like a voice command program does with its speaker. It becomes more efficient with every page analyzed.”
“Very impressive, Todd,” I say, blown away.
“Only if it works, Hank,” he answers while typing in what can only be commands.
“Anything on the cell phone yet?” Kane asks.
“Not yet, Kane. Should be any minute now,” Todd answers. “The only thing I can tell you is that the Ronin-guy you were talking about only got phone calls from domestic numbers within the last seventy-two hours. We are currently trying to figure out where they came from, but it looks like whoever is behind this lives state-side.”
Kane’s eyes go blank.
“What?” Olivia asks, noticing Kane’s demeanor changing.
“It’s him,” Kane answers after a tense silence, confirming it to himself. “It’s Frost.”
“Who?” Todd asks over the network.
“Search John Frost, US Army Rangers,” Kane says, snapping back into the real world. “Ronin said he was behind it, but we still can’t take any chances.”
“Will do—okay here comes the first page—listen up. Oh and Hank, keep flipping the pages. Once they are recorded, the computer won’t need them again.”
The four of us lean in as if getting close to the actual book will help us hear better.
“Alright, well the book is definitely a diary and it was written by an Aztecan priest named Iyah…Iyoh…I mean Iyach…never mind. The name isn’t important, but what is important is that it starts the night Teotihuacan fell.”
“Wait—what?” I ask, dumbfounded. “Did you say the night Teotihuacan fell? It’s completely unknown to this day why almost 200,000 people disappeared from a very prodigious kingdom. The strangest part of it all is the fact that no one took the time to record why they left, which was very unlike the Aztec. They, like the Maya, were very good at documenting major events in their respective cultures.”
I stand and start to pace the room, but get stopped by a strong yet calming hand.
“Hank, calm down.”
I stop and glance down into Nicole’s eyes, instantly understanding the worry in them.
Whenever I’ve gotten myself worked up recently, I’ve had slight panic attacks. Well, slight would be a nice way of putting it. Lately, they’ve gotten to the point to where it feels like I’m going into cardiac arrest.
I breathe deep and squeeze her offered hand, sitting back down at the table.
“Okay, Todd,” I say, getting myself under control. “Go ahead.”
“Way ahead of you Hank,” Todd says with a little bit of a pep in his words. “TransPro is 4 pages through and moving fast.”
“Okay then,” Kane says, slightly snapping at the man. “What do you have?”
“Keep your pants on big guy, hang on,” Todd replies with a hint of a laugh.
I can see Kane is about to boil over, the news of his former comrade leading the assaults against us clearly eating at him.
I meet his eyes and gesture for him to cool down and thankfully he understands me and does. The last thing we need right now is Kane on the loose and at odds with our eye-in-the-sky.
“Alright, first-things-first,” Todd begins. “This priest-fellow, the one whose name I butchered early.” There’s another short silence, but this time there is an even tenser vibe in the air. “He followed around a prince by the name of Xiuhcoatl.”
24
Isla de Jaina, Campeche, Mexico
“Shy-wha-co-tl,” I say, annunciating the name carefully for Kane, stressing the L at the end. He isn’t very good at these things.
“It means fire serpent or weapon of mass destruction,” Todd adds.
“Sounds like a real sweetheart…” Kane says, shaking his head.
“He was also the prince of Teotihuacan around the time of the famed city’s collapse,” Todd continues. “His father, King Meztli, ruled for quite a while for that time period if the stories are accurate—about thirty years to be precise.”
“Tell me more about the prince, Todd,” I say.
“Okay, well, Xiuhcoatl lived his life the way you would think someone of that time would. He was brutally efficient with his tactics—very Roman of him. Except, he truly believed himself to be the human form of Huitzilopochtli’s atlatl—the war god’s spear, his weapon.”
“So he was a freakin’ nut job,” Kane comments, stating the obvious. “He actually believed himself to be the war god’s WMD?”
“Quite so,” Todd says. “The prince took it upon himself to protect his kingdom and to also invade and take his enemies land. He would even sometimes defy his father and was feared by everyone.”
“But what does that have to do with the happenings of the past few days?” Olivia asks, eyes closed, rubbing them with her palms. The woman looks utterly overwhelmed by everything.
“I’m getting there,” Todd says. “Give me a minute to explain.�
�� He types at warp speed, no doubt pulling up more of the page’s information. “So, on the night Teotihuacan fell, the prince had just returned from a raid in the western Yucatan—Jaina Island actually.”
The four of us look up to each other, shocked.
“Hank—eyes on the pages please,” Todd commands.
After a nervous glance to Nicole, my eyes settle back on the tome as Todd continues.
“There was a legend of a weapon buried on the site you’re sitting on now. It could lay waste to anyone who opposed the person wielding it.”
“Which would be perfect for the god-prince to obtain,” Nicole adds, putting some of the pieces together.
“I agree,” Todd says. “If you believed yourself to be a weapon of death, what better way to show it by brandishing something that could quite literally destroy everyone?”
“Okay, so,” I interject, putting what we’ve learned so far out there. “Against his father’s wishes, Xiuhcoatl took a war party east to Campeche to acquire a legendary weapon—one he wanted to use against his kingdom’s enemies. Sound about right Todd?”
“Sounds good to me,” he replies.
“But how did the weapon—which I guess we all agree is what killed everyone here—find its way back to Jaina?” Olivia asks.
“That’s where it gets interesting,” Todd replies, typing as he talks. “When Xiuhcoatl returned to Teotihuacan he marched through the empire, along the Avenue of the Dead, right to the foot of one of his people’s most sacred structures, the Pyramid of the Moon. It’s then the priest goes on to explain that the two men feuded at the steps of the pyramid, King Meztli being furious at his son. He basically banished him until he returned the artifact back from where he got it.”
Todd takes a deep breath and continues, “Xiuhcoatl was embarrassed and livid at his father’s berating of him and did something a little reckless.”
“He didn’t?” Nicole softly says aloud, sitting up straight.
“He did,” Todd says, confirming Nicole’s suspicion. “He released the…darkness—it’s the word used by the priest who apparently witnessed, and obviously, survived the ordeal.”
Mayan Darkness (A Hank Boyd Adventure Book 2) (The Hank Boyd Adventures) Page 12
