The Mayan Codex as-2

by Mario Reading

  ‘We’ll deal with them later. They won’t be able to get out of the country without their passports. We can pick them up anywhere. They have to eat. They have to sleep. They have to take a shit.’ Emiliano raised his chin in the direction of the cenote. The pupils of his eyes were enlarged out of all proportion to their original size. ‘Constipation? That damn fool doctor. I told him to give me some more morphine. You heard me. Don’t people obey orders around here any more?’

  ‘Yes, Jefe.’

  ‘The Hummer. It’s got a Snooper on board, hasn’t it? So when it next sends a text, we can fix its position by satellite?’

  ‘Yes, Jefe.’

  ‘Okay. Now you and your men go and explain the situation to the floaters. With sound effects.’

  ‘Yes, Jefe.’

  Half a dozen of Emiliano’s men spread themselves out just shy of the cenote lip. Then they stepped forward in unison and began spraying the walls and surface of the cenote with bullets. After about a minute, they stopped.

  Abi, Rudra, Dakini, and Nawal were still floating in the water. They hadn’t been hit, just as Emiliano had intended, but they were confused and disorientated.

  ‘Now explain to the floaters that they have to let their weapons and their cell phones sink. In full view of us up here. If they don’t, we’ll bombard them with hand grenades. It’ll be like a butcher’s shop down there. If they’re not killed, they’ll be permanently deafened by the concussion.’ Emiliano snatched at something in front of his face. Then again. His cheeks were numb from the new hit of morphine. Mosquitoes were beginning to seem like hornets to him.

  One of his men called down the instructions. Then there was a pause. ‘They’ve done it. They’re just floating there.’

  ‘Now tell them not to go near the edge of the cenote. Not to try and climb up the sides. That if they do so, my snipers will kill them.’

  ‘It’s impossible to climb up the sides, Jefe.’

  ‘Say what I told you to say.’

  The man did as he was instructed.

  ‘Now carry me to the edge. And bring me a chair.’ Emiliano held out his arms and two of his men lifted him to the very lip of the cenote. Two other men brought him a fold-up director’s chair. One of the men held the full weight of Emiliano’s shattered foot in a loop made from another man’s shirt.

  Emiliano sat down. His foot was settled with fastidious care in front of him. After a brief lacuna, in which he stared across the cenote pit as if his eye had been caught by an unknown variety of flower, he leaned forwards and looked down at the pool below. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand.

  ‘You see. You’ve got all your friends down there with you now.’ He counted with his fingers. ‘One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.’ He snatched at the air again. ‘Eight Little Gringos who’ve destroyed five million dollars’ worth of my product. The question is, are you going to be able to repay me in some way? Right the wrong you have done me? With interest, of course. Two million dollars. And also two million dollars for my foot, let’s not forget that. We’ll call it an even ten for the sake of argument. Can you manage this? If so, I will winch one of you out of the pool to arrange it. If you can’t, you will all stay in there until you drown. The pump hose has already been drawn up. And there is no other way out of the cenote. The walls are sheer. We’ve done this before, you know. It takes between two and three days, as a rule of thumb, for the will to live finally to evaporate. Give or take a day or two. And depending on sex, of course. Women float for longer, usually, having more natural buoyancy.’ He lashed out at another mosquito.

  Some of Emiliano’s men were beginning to look a little concerned. But none of them wished to emulate the doctor.

  ‘I’m going to the hospital now. Call out, if you want to take me up on my offer. Otherwise there will be ten guards stationed here at all times. If you try and swim for the walls, they will shoot you. If you try and use the floating bodies as buoyancy aids, they will shoot you. Do you get my drift?’ Emiliano threw up one hand in an imperial gesture. ‘Drift. Did you get that? A pun. A very good pun indeed, in the circumstances.’

  112

  Oni had been wounded twice early on in the fire fight. Once through the groin, and once through the right buttock as he turned to follow Abi’s party towards the cenote.

  It was for this reason that he had repeated the trick he had used at the Balancanche caves. It was more difficult when you were wounded and when you had no one to help you, of course. But Oni knew without a doubt that he would die if he didn’t achieve it.

  So he crawled in amongst the agaves and dug himself a trench with the stock of his pump-action shotgun. Then he sank into it, levering the earth out of the way with his hands. When he was satisfied, he pulled the earth back in on top of himself. It didn’t need a heavy covering. He wasn’t about to move anytime soon. Fortunately, the earth in the agave plantation had been burned and turned over recently. It was as soft as thistledown. More or less.

  He lay facing upwards, with the shotgun tight to his side. His hip area was numb, and growing more so by the minute. He had left himself a small air-hole through which to breathe. He only hoped that nobody would actually tread on him. He didn’t think he could maintain silence under those circumstances.

  He lay there for so long that he started to go to sleep. His whole body closed down on itself like the quiet time at the end of his hatha yoga class. Oni managed to get his breathing so well under control, that, by the end, he was only taking about three breaths a minute. His yoga teacher would have been proud of him.

  He heard the explosion at the warehouse. Then his cell phone vibrated. He ignored that for obvious reasons. Then he heard the stun-grenade attacks on the cenote. He knew exactly what was happening. He didn’t need them to draw him a picture. The nine of them had bitten off more than they could chew. It was as simple as that.

  After a further quarter of an hour, Oni stood up and brushed himself off. There was another flurry of gunfire from over by the cenote. Using his shotgun as a crutch, he limped past the burnt-out remnants of the warehouse and over to where he knew the Stoner had been positioned. It was still there. But Vau had gone. There was blood on the Stoner and sprinkled over the surrounding dirt. He’d liked Vau. He hadn’t been the brightest button in the bag, but then Oni knew that he was no Einstein either.

  Oni looked around for his stash of spare magazines. There were two drum belt containers left. He unclipped the existing magazine and replaced it with one of the drum belts. He put the other drum belt inside his shirt – 300 rounds – 150 rounds apiece. It wasn’t a lot, in the circumstances.

  He thought for a moment, and then picked up the used drum belt he’d discarded earlier and tapped it against his arm. Maybe another 50 rounds. Better than nothing. He put that inside his shirt too.

  He began to limp in the direction of the cenote.

  113

  Pretty soon Oni could hear someone shouting. It was a man sitting in a director’s chair at the very lip of the cenote. Oni shook his head in disbelief.

  The man and about thirty other men were all clustered in a bunch and staring into the pool. His remaining brothers and sisters must be down there. It seemed obvious to him.

  He raised the Stoner and hitched it under his arm. Oni was nearly seven feet tall. The three-and-a-half-foot long Stoner looked like a child’s toy in his hands.

  The man in the director’s chair raised one of his hands triumphantly.

  Oni began to shoot.

  The first drum was exhausted in a little under twenty seconds. He replaced it with the second drum. He got through that in under fifteen seconds. Then he felt around inside his shirt for the half-used drum.

  Most everybody was dead. The lip of the cenote had crumbled away where they’d all been clustered together. Shooting them had been a little like playing one of those arcade games he’d been fixated on as a child. The one where the cowboys keep coming at you and your only chance of beating them is to keep on shootin
g.

  He burped the Stoner at a moving man. Then at another. Not much left in the drum now.

  He walked to the edge of the cenote and looked down. The water was littered with bodies. Some were still thrashing around. Others were just floating, face down.

  ‘Abi? Are you down there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Who else is alive?’

  ‘Rudra, Nawal, and Dakini.’

  ‘Oh, I’m glad. I thought I’d lost you all.’

  ‘Can we come up?’

  ‘Yes. You can come up now. I’ll throw down the hosepipe for you. Everybody left up here is dead.’

  Oni hurled the Stoner to one side and limped across to where the pump hose was neatly furled at the very lip of the cenote.

  There was a noise behind him. He turned, just a few feet short of the hose.

  Emiliano was on his knees. The morphine had temporarily numbed him to the Stoner bullets that had ripped through his body.

  As Oni watched, Emiliano snatched at a mosquito that was hovering in front of his face.

  Then Emiliano raised his pistol and shot Oni in the head.

  Oni toppled over the lip of the cenote. There was a pause. Then a mighty splash.

  Emiliano smiled. He glanced down into the cenote. Abi, Rudra, Dakini and Nawal were floating fifty feet below him, watching. There was no way out for them now.

  Emiliano looked down at his wounds. There was no way out for him either. He touched the pistol barrel to the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  PART THREE

  1

  Lamia de Bale was feeling the weight of the world on her shoulders. It was as if the futility of everyone else’s life was accruing to – and therefore being encapsulated by – her own. In deciding to leave Sabir without speaking to him, and without any attempt at an explanation, she was aware that she had closed an opened door. Now, three miles above the Atlantic Ocean, she felt the loss of its possibilities without fully understanding why.

  She waited until half an hour into the Iberia flight before getting out of her first-class seat. She had chosen the premium seat to ensure that she both entered and exited the plane after all the other passengers had cleared the terminal – airlines, she knew, made exceptions for their first-class passengers, and catered to their whims. It also gave her access to business class and economy class, without giving either of those two areas access to her.

  She had lied back in France when she had told Calque that Madame, her mother, had confiscated her money and her credit cards, and that only at the last minute had she had the providential foresight to conceal her passport inside her underwear. In point of fact she had hidden her passport, credit cards, and cash money in a traveller’s pouch looped onto the back of her belt and neatly flipped over to lie flush along the inside edge of her slacks – a loose blouse had completed the picture, and had served to protect her from the customary stares men give to young women’s bottoms. Even young women with catastrophic birthmarks.

  She had then, at the first possible opportunity, cached the credit cards beneath the base of her powder compact, and rolled her folding money inside a number of Kotex Super Plus tampon tubes, which she had then re-wrapped and re-glued so that they looked fresh from the shop. If either Sabir or Calque had gone through her things, they certainly hadn’t found either one of her secret stashes. Men had an in-built reluctance to sniff around women’s private knick-knacks – it was as if they didn’t want to know what artifices and grimy little realities lay behind the surface appearance they valued so much.

  And Lamia, of course, knew all about surface appearances. She had spent her life trying to avoid acknowledging the effect of hers on others. It was hard being a woman with a damaged face. People responded to you in one of two ways. They either showed their repulsion by avoiding you – or they overcompensated for something they were relieved not to be suffering from themselves, and sickened you with their pity.

  Madame, her mother, had tried to sweeten the pill a little – financial security counted for a lot when you felt vulnerable in other areas. And Lamia was physically better off, when push came to shove, than all three of her sisters, and at least four of her brothers. So she was in the upper quadrant of the population as regards financial security, and the middle quadrant as regards disabilities. But until she had met Calque, and then, later, Sabir, she had found it impossible to respond to men without suspecting them of hypocrisy – they pretended to want the whole of you, when in reality they only wanted the hormonally charged areas they were hardwired to seek out.

  The truth of the matter was that Lamia had secretly craved being sought after and pursued – just like any normal, unmarked, woman – but her face and attitude had either put men off or obviated their interest in her altogether. Lamia shrugged at herself in the powder-room vanity mirror – well you couldn’t have it both ways.

  Joris Calque had genuinely seemed to see beyond the surface of her face, however, and Adam Sabir had astonished her with his capacity for blinkered sensuality. She was convinced that Sabir truly believed he loved her, and a part of her sincerely loved him. But she was her mother’s daughter, and she had entered into the arrangement to leave all sides in ignorance of where she truly stood – and by that she meant both Laurel and Hardy (aka Sabir and Calque) and the Corpus – with her eyes wide open. The fact that she felt sympathy, affection, and even love for the two men she had always intended to betray, was beside the point. She had a duty to perform, and perform it she would.

  She eased herself through into the business-class section and began a steady perusal of all the passengers. Whenever she reached one of the lavatories she waited until it was vacated before continuing with her search of the plane. It took her a full thirty minutes to convince herself that none of her brothers and sisters were anywhere on board – if they had been, she would have escaped back to the first-class section and relied on the stewards to do the rest.

  She had been made aware, of course, by Madame, her mother, that the Grand Cherokee might at some point be seeded with a tracker, and so she was labouring under no delusions as regards Abi’s eventual ability to pinpoint her whereabouts at the airport. Her only advantage over both him and Sabir had lain in the speed with which she had made her decision to depart from the touj. Madame, her mother, wanted her to remain a free agent, and a free agent she would remain.

  She returned to her seat and adjusted it to the flattest possible position. She needed to sleep. The past ten days had taken their toll on her, and she felt physically as well as mentally wrung out. She closed her eyes.

  She was immediately met by the image of Sabir pushing her gently down onto the bed back at the Ticul motel. Of the feel of his hands on her body. Of the gently invasive pressure as he had first made love to her. Of her response to his lovemaking, at first tentatively, and then willingly, enthusiastically, ecstatically.

  She shook her head in a violent effort to clear it of the unwanted images, but still they remained, like the fragments of another life.

  2

  Lamia arrived at Madrid Airport in good time for her connecting flight to Paris. She ignored the transit lounge, however, and after purchasing some clothes, a carry-on bag, and a few essential items at the airport shop, she descended to the taxi rank and told her driver to take her to Madrid’s Atocha railway station.

  Whilst on the plane she had used Iberia’s in-flight internet service to book herself a Gran Clas private cabin on the Elipsos Francisco de Goya ‘Talgo Night’ Trenhotel, leaving from Madrid at 6.15, and due to arrive in Paris’s Austerlitz train station at 8.27 the following morning. She was the only one of her brothers and sisters who knew the location and identity of the Second Coming, and she was certain that if she could only evade both them and the French border police – in the unlikely event that Calque had managed to milk some of his old connections for a favour – then she would be home clear. Explanations would come later.

  She knew that the ‘Talgo Night’ train made a sh
ort stop at Blois, in the Loire Valley, before reaching its final destination in Paris, so she had decided to alight there and bribe a taxi driver to take her straight to Samois. What was it? A hundred kilometres door-to-door? She’d be at the camp in time for breakfast.

  She had flirted briefly with the idea of using a public telephone box to call her mother and tell her that everything was still on track, but she had just as quickly discarded the idea. The logic behind all her past actions had been that only Milouins, Madame Mastigou, and Madame, her mother, would ever be privy to her hidden agenda. There were numerous other outside-the-loop servants scattered throughout the Domaine de Seyeme household capable of listening in to a conversation, and who was to say that the French police, given their notoriously cavalier attitude towards personal privacy, weren’t still bugging the house in unconscious mimicry of Joris Calque?

  No, blanket secrecy and telephone silence were the only way in which Abi, Vau, and the others could ever have been tricked into keeping all their concentration on Sabir and Calque – and for this they truly needed to believe in Lamia’s role as a fellow traveller in the enemy camp.

  Sabir and Calque had had to be won over in the same way. The pair had been justifiably suspicious of Lamia from the very start. Only via the most rigorous self-discipline had it been possible for Lamia to manoeuvre herself into a strong enough position to build up a sufficient reservoir of knowledge about Sabir to be certain of getting the information she wanted – and when she got it, of being able to use it with impunity.

  Lamia allowed herself to relax in the comfort of her ‘Talgo Night’ stateroom. It was nice being able to pamper herself again. She’d order an early supper to be brought directly to her suite, and then she’d take two sleeping pills and attempt to sleep a clear eight hours without ever once thinking about Sabir. She could count on the steward to wake her up well before Blois with her breakfast.