Eli shook his head in awe. ‘‘You’re spooky, Guido—you know that?’’
‘‘Dankzegging.’’ The big skin-headed Netherlander smiled with a little bow. ‘‘You would like me to continue, yes?’’
‘‘Yes,’’ said Finn.
‘‘Dankzegging,’’ Guido repeated, and went on. ‘‘Although it is said by most geologists that it is a natural formation, these people following the predictions of Mr. Cayce are sure it is a road.’’
‘‘Anybody ever find anything other than this so-called road?’’ Eli asked from the couch. ‘‘Any other evidence?’’
‘‘Alas, not,’’ said Guido.
‘‘Where exactly is this place?’’
‘‘Half a mile off North Bimini Island off Paradise Point,’’ put in Finn. ‘‘It’s a popular dive site for tourists. Glass-bottom boats, that kind of thing.’’
‘‘Pardon me for asking,’’ said Run-Run McSeveney, his small face twisting into a scowl, ‘‘but it was my impression this wee venture was to find bits of gold and other valuable trinkets. Doubloons and pieces of eight and the like. What do these bluidy stones have to do with that, might I inquire?’’ As always, the thick Glasgow brogue coming from the definitely Chinese face was enough to make Finn smile.
‘‘There’ve been some recent theories that the Bimini Road might be the remains of an offshore coffer dam or dry dock. The kind of thing that might have been used in an early attempt to salvage or refloat a sunken ship.’’
‘‘Thirty feet’s not a lot of water,’’ said Billy. ‘‘They raised the Tudor ship Mary Rose from forty feet below the Solent. The technology for that sort of dry dock is hundreds of years old.’’
‘‘There’d have to be something valuable aboard for it to have been worthwhile,’’ said Finn.
‘‘Doubloons and the like,’’ said Run-Run, licking his lips, his black eyes glinting.
‘‘We think it may be the site of an attempt to refloat a ship called the San Anton, a Spanish ship from the sixteenth century.’’
‘‘A treasure ship?’’ Run-Run asked.
‘‘A small trader, a dispatch ship,’’ answered Billy. ‘‘But a ship with a secret all its own.’’
‘‘Surely that area’s been gone over with a fine-tooth comb by now,’’ said Eli.
‘‘Probably,’’ agreed Finn. ‘‘But by people looking for big treasure galleons, not smaller ships. The San Anton was less than a hundred tons. Even with side-scanning radar and all the newest bells and whistles it would be hard to spot.’’
‘‘So what gives us the advantage?’’ Eli asked.
Billy smiled. ‘‘We know exactly where to look.’’
James Jonas Noble, head of Noble Pharmaceuticals, sipped a Grant’s Ale Cask scotch and looked out the porthole as the Cessna Mustang business jet ripped up into the pale blue sky over Miami and headed due east. Across from him, in another one of the cream-colored leather club seats, his son, Harrison, gripped his glass of diet Coke and sucked on the half lemon slice it came with. He hated flying and his old man knew it, which was why they were making the fifteen-minute flight to their private estate on Cat Cay rather than the two-hour trip in the Noble Dancer, the company boat they kept at the house on Fisher Island just off South Beach.
‘‘They found it?’’ Harrison Noble said to his father, talking around the lemon slice.
‘‘So I’m told.’’
‘‘On Bimini?’’
‘‘Offshore. Somehow they managed to find the exact location,’’ said the gray-haired man across from him.
‘‘What are we going to do now?’’
‘‘Deal with it. Negotiations have reached a critical phase with our friend in Mexico.’’ He looked toward the closed door leading to the cockpit. He lowered his voice a little. ‘‘We can’t let anything stand in our way. The second-quarter earnings aren’t what I expected.’’
‘‘What about the new drug?’’
‘‘I can’t announce it before the Mexican deal is completed, and that means getting this Englishman and his little American girlfriend out of the way. We have to seal things up. Tight.’’ The older man sipped his drink. The plane hit a patch of turbulence and Harrison Noble gripped his diet Coke even harder.
‘‘I won’t let you down, Dad.’’
‘‘You’re damn right you won’t,’’ his father snapped. ‘‘If you screw this up we’re both dead and don’t you forget it.’’
The biz jet flew on.
Pierre Jumaire looked down the dusty aisle and frowned. It was getting late, dusk turning the street outside into gloomy puddles of shadow between the streetlamps. He wanted to close up. Only one customer remained, a man in his thirties, thin with glasses and a studious expression. He was wearing a black suit that was frayed at the trouser cuffs. He’d been reading the same volume for the last ten minutes. He didn’t look like a buyer. Maybe a book thief. The book he was reading was a first edition of Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais in a nice leather binding.
‘‘Monsieur,’’ he said loudly, ‘‘this is not a lending library. It is a bookstore. I wish to close. Buy if you will, but whatever you do, please do it quickly.’’
The man looked up and smiled pleasantly, clearly not taking offense at the old man’s tone. He closed the book carefully and came up the aisle. A buyer after all. Appearances could be deceiving.
‘‘I like Voltaire,’’ said the man.
‘‘So do I,’’ replied Jumaire. ‘‘I believe that particular volume is two hundred and fifty Euros.’’
‘‘I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil,’’ the man answered.
‘‘The multitude of books is making us ignorant, ’’ responded Jumaire. ‘‘We have now proved that we can both quote Voltaire. The price, however, is still two hundred and fifty Euros.’’
‘‘You won’t take anything less?’’ the man asked.
‘‘This is not the Marche aux puces, monsieur, ’’ Jumaire responded with a sigh. ‘‘I never bargain.’’
‘‘You do today.’’ The man reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a Russian-made Stechkin Automatic Pistol. He shot Jumaire in the face. It made a cracking sound like a balloon bursting. Jumaire slipped behind the counter. The man put the weapon back into the inside pocket of his jacket and walked out of the store, taking the copy of Voltaire with him.
10
Arkady Cruz bounced through the jungle in the passenger seat of the bastardized Suzuki Jeep. Originally an old Jimmy 4X4, it now had solid axles, long travel coil springs, and the wheels were jacked up more than eighteen inches above normal. There was a roll cage but no roof and the bumpers were made out of spare tires front and back. A .50-caliber machine gun poked up above the roll cage. As well as the uniformed driver, there was another man on the machine gun and a third crouched in the back armed with an FX-05 Xiuhcoatl short-barreled assault rifle, the same general infantry weapon used by the Mexican army. Guzman might be a homicidal megalomaniac, but he was a well-equipped one.
The jungle buggy moved quickly down the narrow pathway through the surprisingly light foliage. The ground was dry, open to the sun with large stands of narrow trees and twisting vines. The trails were well defined and old, most of them in use by animals and man for hundreds of generations.
An hour’s journey brought them to a clearing at the foot of an old Mayan temple, crumbled and almost nonexistent. The clearing had been laid out like an old Roman fort with the small ruins in the center. An earthen berm had been thrown up and topped with a bamboo palisade. Within the rectangular space were three dozen huts laid out in neat rows and a central building directly in front of the ruins. The huts were all raised on posts, the roofs made from flattened fifty-gallon drums. In a heavy rain the roofs would sound like a steel band playing, thought Arkady.
There were uniformed men everywhere: marching in the narrow streets, practicing drill, standing guard on the bambo
o palisade, manning the machine guns in the towers at the four corners of the compound, and doing various bits of domestic camp business like cleaning latrines, preparing food, and even hanging laundry.
The camp was a small town, all men, all in uniform, and all with hard expressions on their long-nosed Mayan faces. They had the serious look of Castro’s old comrades from the early days of the revolution. That’s what Guzman was promising, a return of Mayan rule to Mayan land. Drugs and money under the guise of revolution. An old story.
At the far end of the compound was an old-fashioned metal Quonset hut, roughly camouflaged with netting threaded with bits of foliage. There was a large generator humming beside it, and the Cuban submariner could see several large air-conditioning units poking through the curving walls. The factory.
Somewhere in the nearby hill territory farther inland there would be camouflaged plantations of opium poppies, and closer in to the camp there would be an airfield. Guzman produced very little opium base on his own, preferring to import it from elsewhere, mostly Venezuela and Guatemala. The opium base would be refined into morphine in his little factory, then sent to Cuba with Arkady for final processing into heroin.
The stripped-down Jeep pulled up in front of the large building under the shadow of the temple ruins. Guzman was waiting for him on the shaded porch of the headquarters building. He was not your average Mexican drug lord. He looked more like a middle-aged accountant.
His black hair was thinning, his eyes were distorted behind large, square-framed glasses, and he was at least fifty pounds overweight, a definite beer belly slopping over the waistband of his uniform trousers. The uniform itself had no sign of rank or status. There was an ink stain on the breast pocket of his shirt and more stains on his fingers, which were short and stubby, like a butcher’s. Guzman smiled as Arkady climbed out of the jungle buggy.
‘‘Capitaine Cruz, good morning to you!’’ The man’s voice was sharp, almost feminine.
‘‘And to you, Jefe,’’ answered Cruz.
‘‘A good trip?’’
‘‘I prefer the sea.’’
‘‘Good!’’ Guzman answered. He gave a braying laugh, once again almost girlish. ‘‘You will rule the waves, I shall rule the jungle.’’ His plump lips parted, showing off a very expensive set of capped teeth. ‘‘A good accommodation, don’t you agree?’’
‘‘Whatever you say, Jefe.’’
‘‘Come in to my parlor, have a drink,’’ said Guzman. He turned without waiting for an answer and marched back into the headquarters building. Cruz went up the steps. The driver of the jungle buggy lit a cigarette and waited.
The interior of the headquarters was sparse. The single room was large, the floor covered with a thin straw mat. There was a cot and a chest of drawers at the far end of the room, a desk, several chairs, and a wall map of the Yucatán Peninsula behind the desk. There was also a bar made from a small washstand and a huge Victorian plush velvet couch with three matching chairs arranged in a little social grouping around a cold woodstove. The velvet on the couch and chairs was a worn whore-house red.
A thin, pale-faced man in a white jacket appeared out of nowhere carrying a tray with one hand. His other hand and arm were missing, the sleeve of his jacket pinned to his shoulder. There were two cups of coffee on the tray, a silver sugar bowl, and a cream jug, also silver. The cups were Meissen Blue Onion porcelain. The one-armed man placed the tray on the top surface of the woodstove, then disappeared.
Guzman came back from where he’d been standing at the washstand bar carrying a squat, dark bottle of Azteca de Oro brandy. He filled his coffee cup to the rim, then gestured with the bottle toward Arkady, who shook his head, declining the offer.
‘‘Milk, sugar?’’
‘‘Black.’’
‘‘Of course. You are Cuban.’’ The drug lord tucked the brandy under his arm, picked up both cups without their saucers, and handed the nonalcoholic cup to Arkady. He sat down on the couch. Arkady settled into one of the velvet chairs and waited. Guzman swallowed half his adulterated coffee in a single gulp, then filled it again from the brandy bottle.
‘‘What do you think?’’
‘‘Of the coffee?’’ Arkady took a sip. ‘‘It’s quite good.’’ In fact it was bitter, only half roasted and probably local.
‘‘It’s shit.’’ Guzman grinned, showing off his American teeth again. ‘‘That’s why I put the brandy in it.’’
Arkady smiled. Anyone who drank that much brandy before noon wasn’t using it to disguise the taste of bad coffee.
‘‘I see,’’ said the Cuban, keeping his tone neutral.
‘‘No, you don’t. You don’t see anything. That’s why you’re here.’’
Arkady shrugged and said nothing.
‘‘I meant what do you think of my little camp?’’
‘‘Very efficient.’’
‘‘Roman.’’ Guzman nodded. ‘‘Identical to the kind that Caesar designed for his legions.’’
Arkady knew that Julius Caesar had never designed a military camp in his life and used a design that had been invented several hundred years before, but he said nothing. Silence in the presence of a madman seemed like the most prudent course.
‘‘You’re wondering why I had you brought to the camp.’’
‘‘We generally meet on the beach.’’
‘‘You were surprised?’’
‘‘Intrigued.’’
‘‘Why do you think I asked you here?’’
‘‘I have no idea, Jefe.’’
‘‘Perhaps I want to kill you. Perhaps I have decided to make an example of you to your masters. Perhaps I think I have been cheated out of what I feel is rightfully mine. Perhaps, as the Americans are so fond of telling the press, I am a raving madman who wants nothing more than to take a machete and take off your head or rip out your heart on a stone altar.’’
‘‘A great many ‘perhaps,’ Jefe.’’
Guzman laughed. ‘‘Aren’t you the cool one, Capitaine Cruz.’’
‘‘Just practical.’’ Cruz shrugged. ‘‘If you did any of those things my submarine would go back to Cuba, never to return. Your pipeline to the United States and your source of high-quality heroin refining would vanish overnight. As would the revenue you need to finance your revolution.’’ The madman was insane but he wasn’t stupid.
‘‘Quite correct, Capitaine.’’
‘‘So there has to be another reason.’’
‘‘There is.’’ Guzman showed off his teeth again.
Arkady let a small simmering hint of his exasperation reveal itself. ‘‘I have a large submarine waiting for me offshore, Señor Guzman. My men are breathing canned air and keeping silent to avoid detection by the sonobuoys the Americans scatter around the coastal waters of the Yucatán to stop men like you from plying your trade.’’
Guzman ignored the not so thickly veiled insult. The smile remained. He leaned forward on the couch and crooked a meaty forefinger at Arkady. The Cuban leaned forward.
‘‘I have something to show you,’’ the drug lord whispered. ‘‘Come with me.’’
Guzman put his empty cup on the floor and stood, still carrying the brandy bottle. He grabbed a battered and stained red beret from the desk, jammed it on his head at a rakish angle, and went outside again. Arkady followed him. They went down the steps to the jungle buggy, and Guzman dismissed the driver with a flick of his hand and a grunted order.
‘‘I’ll drive,’’ he said to the Cuban. Cruz climbed into the passenger seat once again. Guzman fired up the Jeep, jammed it into four-wheel drive and roared off through the camp, leaving it through the far gate. He slewed onto an almost invisible track and battered his way into the jungle.
‘‘In 1962 I was a young boy living in a village near here called Nohcacab. It was a small place of no account in the middle of the jungle. Once, in the nineteenth century, some Dutch and German settlers tried to farm the land. Most were slaughtered in the Caste Wars in 1848, but the
re was some small amount of intermarrying of which my family was the result.’’
‘‘You seem to know a lot about it.’’
‘‘It is my heritage, my legacy. I did a great deal of research, Capitaine.’’ He took a sharp turn onto an even narrower track, underbrush pressing in on either side of the Jeep as it bullied its way through the jungle.
‘‘In 1962, you were a young boy,’’ Cruz reminded the man.
‘‘In 1962, on Christmas Eve there was a terrible storm in the skies above our village. The elders thought it was a bad omen. We were Catholics, but in the jungle the old ways survived under the surface. Somehow Chac, the god of thunder and lightning, had been offended. To confirm this there was a sudden blaze directly above the village, clearly visible. An explosion. I saw it myself. I remember it clearly. We all thought it was the end of the world.’’
‘‘What happened?’’
‘‘The burning man,’’ said Guzman. ‘‘A figure hurtling from the sky wreathed in fire, like a comet coming to earth. He struck one of the houses, igniting the roof thatch even though it was soaked with rain. For a moment the people of the village did nothing, but eventually an elder stepped forward and went into the hut where the burning man had struck. I remember that everyone was very frightened but no one looked away.’’
A burning man, thought Arkady; he really is out of his mind. The Jeep came out into a clearing in the jungle. It seemed like it was a natural formation, a sloping meadow leading down to a narrow crease in the forest floor. Just at the head of the crease was a mound, fifty or sixty feet high, and a long cigar-shaped uplift of foliage behind it like a vine- and earth-covered trail left by some enormous digging animal. After Guzman’s little speech Arkady had imagined they were going to the remains of Guzman’s old village, but there was no sign of that here. The mound was regularly shaped, four-sided, and impossibly abrupt: the classic pattern of a small buried Aztec pyramid, obviously untouched by the curious hands of modern archaeologists. The mound was a blaze of golden blossoms and large leathery leaves, almost obscenely glossy, that grew on long trailing vines, thousands of them twisted together to form a woody, impenetrable barrier.
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