by David Wood
“Tell us the story,” Maddock said. “The whole story. We risked our lives to save you, and we deserve answers.”
“That’s why we’re up here.” Thomas would not meet his eye. “Where should I begin?”
“How much have you learned much about this place?” Bones asked.
“Quite a bit, actually. Fawcett is very talkative, and the others are fairly free with information since they know I’m no threat to escape. Kephises was founded by refugees from Carthage who escaped at the end of the third Punic War, just before the fall of Carthage itself. Those who survived the voyage made landfall far to the north, most likely near the southernmost regions of the Mayan empire. The first natives they encountered worshiped them as gods, and followed them into the jungle. Their leader was Hasdrubal, Hannibal Barca’s grandson.”
“That’s one of the things that confused me,” Maddock said. “I didn’t think Hannibal had any children.”
“History has been hazy on that topic,” Thomas replied. “I suppose that’s because his only living descendant headed off to the Americas.” His thin smile only made him look more nervous. “Anyway, Hasdrubal was on a mission, given to him by the priesthood, to protect Carthage’s greatest treasure. When they arrived in the New World, he told the others that the gods would let him know when and where it was time to stop. They journeyed deeper and deeper into the jungle, picking up some native followers as they went, but losing their fair share of people along the way. When they finally found this place, he deemed it safe and remote enough to settle.
The tunnel, the Path of Five Steps, and the pyramid all were built over the generations using combined labor of the Punics and natives. That’s why the pyramid is a bit odd-looking. The Barcids wanted something like the pyramids of Egypt, but the pyramid has distinctly Mayan features, which is why I believe their first landfall was in or near Mayan territory.”
“So, the people who live here are a mix of Punics and Mayans?” It bothered Maddock to feel like the ignorant half of a conversation with Kaylin’s boyfriend, but he wanted to hear the story nonetheless.
“Mostly. Also local natives, some of whom they collected as they went in search of this place, others they collected over the years. There seems to be something of a hierarchy here, depending on how much Punic blood one has, with the Barcids being the most pure. That’s actually how Fawcett came to find this place. I assume you found Wainwright?” They nodded. “The young man whom Percy Fawcett encountered was a Barcid who wanted to marry one of the low blood girls. That isn’t acceptable in that family. In fact, the only reason Jack Fawcett was permitted to marry into their line was because the husband of one of the women of the line had died. She was of late middle age and thought to be past childbearing years. Anyway, the young man and his lover escaped, and he took with him the secret to the five steps, and he also carved a rough map in stone. I suppose he thought they’d come back some day once they’d had a few children and it was too late for his family to do anything about it. If it hadn’t been for him, this place might still be a secret.” He lapsed into silence, gazing out across the valley.
“You said you weren’t a threat to escape,” Bones said, “are they keeping you here?”
“I’m sure if they let you go, they’ll let me go, too.” Thomas sighed. “Once they understand their secret is out, there’s not much reason for them to keep us here.”
“I’d like to see them try.” Bones grimaced, and his gaze turned flinty as he looked down on the settlement.
“The truth is, unless Salvatore Scano has told the world, which I can almost guarantee you he hasn’t, the only people from the outside world who know about this place are sitting right here.” Tam frowned. “And what’s left of the ScanoGen men, if they survived those zombie people.”
“The Mot’jabbur, they call them.” Thomas looked up at the sky. “The Dead Warriors.”
“Who are they? What are they?” Maddock asked.
“I suppose you could call them experiments that went wrong, but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate.”
“What I want to know is how you came to have any dealings with ScanoGen in the first place.” Kaylin’s voice was white hot rage. “You never told me a single thing. Then you disappear, with nothing but a picture as a clue, and leave killers after us. What happened?”
Thomas hung his head for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts, and then stood. “For you to understand that, you’ll have to see the tree.”
He led them around to the back side of the pyramid and pointed down to a clearing, in the center of which stood the strangest tree Maddock had ever seen. It resembled a baobab tree in miniature, with a thick trunk and a few root-like branches spreading out at the very top. But the similarities ended there. The bark was silver and gleamed in the orange sunset. The round leaves were concave and glossy like those of a magnolia, but they were dark on one side, nearly black in color, and a creamy white on the other. A single piece of fruit was visible through a gap in the bizarre foliage. It was the size of a cantaloupe, and it, like the leaves, was dark on one side and light on the other.
“Percy Fawcett was on to something even crazier than anyone ever suspected. Much of what he professed to believe was a smokescreen designed to throw people off the trail of what he knew would be an earth-shattering discovery. It took half a lifetime, but I pieced together, and kept for myself, enough evidence to realize what he was truly after.”
Down below, a woman was watering the tree. She glanced up at them, but paid them no particular mind, and went back to her work.
“This tree is the secret the Punics traveled her to protect. It has passed through many hands: Athenian Greeks, Spartans, Persians, all the way back to ancient Israel and beyond.”
Maddock turned a quizzical glance at Thomas, but did not interrupt.
“The leaves, when divided, have powerful properties if made into a tea and drunk regularly.”
“What sorts of properties?” Maddock asked.
Thomas gazed into the setting sun, as if uncertain how to explain. “The human propensity for violence exists on a spectrum. Some people have such a tremendous aversion to violence that they cannot abide the thought of it, and will only raise a hand to another human being in the final, most desperate defense of their life, or that of a loved one, if then. On the other end of the spectrum are those who will pull a trigger with no compunction whatsoever. Most of us lie somewhere in between.”
“That’s one of the things military training does.” Maddock thought about his own experiences. “From the beginning, you are never told to kill the ‘other man;’ everything is referred to as a target, even human targets. There are a lot of other techniques they use as well to try to get you past thinking of the other side as human, because most of us have at least some aversion to killing others.”
“When I was doing some research about an ancestor who fought in the Civil War,” Bones said, “I read that a good many soldiers couldn’t even bring themselves to fire their gun. As soon as the shooting started, they’d hunker down and wait it out.”
“Very true.” The professor in Thomas was emerging. “Those who can kill without thought make our deadliest soldiers, because they don’t flinch in the face of danger, and they never hesitate when it’s time to pull the trigger.”
“They also make for serial killers,” Maddock added, “because they have no empathy.”
“Precisely. Imagine a fighting force in which every man is completely without fear, yet preserves his intellect, and is thus able to follow orders and make appropriate decisions without fear getting in the way. It would make a difference today on the battlefield, but think of the effect it had in the ancient world, where all the fighting was hand-to-hand, face-to-face, hacking apart another human being. It was vicious and very, very personal.”
“But an army, even one that was outnumbered, that drank this tea would make for a better fighting force than a larger force filled with frightened men.” The pieces were falling into place fo
r Maddock. “Hannibal gave this tea to his troops during the Punic Wars, didn’t he?” Thomas nodded. “And the Spartans must have drunk it before the battle of Thermopylae.”
“Spies stole it right out from under the noses of Xerxes and his so-called Immortals. Took all the leaves and the sole remaining seed. Xerxes apparently intended to plant a new tree in the western half of his new empire. It didn’t work out for him.” Thomas grinned. “It passed from Sparta to Athens, which had the most success in cultivating it. They managed to build up a stockpile of seeds, which eventually fell into Punic hands.”
“So how did Carthage not win the war if they had the greatest general of his day, plus this tea?” Bones asked.
“The supply is always limited. The tree is slow-growing and produces a limited number of leaves every year. The priesthood that tended to the trees could not produce enough to keep up with the army’s demands. Only certain, special units were given the tea in any case.”
“So, when Carthage fell, they took what remained of the seeds and escaped?” Maddock tried to imagine the courage or desperation required to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an ancient sailing vessel.
“Their Phoenician ancestors had visited what is now the Americas and the priesthood held on to that knowledge. When it became clear that Carthage was going to fall, they sent a remnant to the New World. Hasdrubal and his followers found this place, settled down, and planted a new tree.”
“What does the white side of the leaf do? Mellow people out?” Bones grinned.
“Yes. White tea will pacify the drinker for a short period of time. They will temporarily forsake all thoughts of violence. In a way, it’s more deadly than the black tea. Slip your enemy some white tea and you can slaughter them. I imagine you could do just about anything you want to someone who drinks enough of it.”
A cloud of suspicion passed through Maddock’s mind. “Do you think that’s how they pacified the natives? Maybe it wasn’t that they thought the Punics were gods.”
“If that’s not how they initially gained their allegiance, they definitely have used it since then as a way of developing a servant class that won’t be quick to fight back. They even give it to the animals to make them more docile.”
“So ScanoGen hired you to bring them, what, seeds, fruit, leaves from this tree?” Maddock asked.
Thomas nodded. “They want to develop this into a weapon. Modify people at the genetic level to make them perfect soldiers.”
“And turn enemies into pacifists,” Bones finished.
“So, what about those zombie guys?” Maddock felt something was not adding up. “Did they get too much black tea or something?”
Thomas took a deep breath. “You aren’t supposed to eat the fruit, or at least that’s what legend said. But the people here didn’t heed that warning. There were natives living in the next valley, and once the five steps were in place, the Punics saw in them a potential extra line of defense. Problem was, the effects of the tea were only short-term, and the supply of leaves limited. They took a chance and used the fruit. At first it seemed like it had worked, but slowly, the people changed. They not only became killers, a threat to anyone who was different than them, but they lost the ability to feel altogether. They don’t feel physical pain, and they don’t seem to have any emotions, either. They live in caves, hunt, eat, reproduce, and try to kill anyone who enters their realm. It’s a miracle I made it through.”
“What does the white half of the fruit do?” Maddock tried to imagine the polar opposite of the condition in which those natives now lived.
“It puts them in a state of utter contentment, to such an extreme that the person no longer feels the need to do anything. They forsake all human interaction, and just sit and smile. They don’t want anything. They stop eating and drinking, and eventually they stop breathing.”
“That’s even more horrible than the Mot’jabbur.” Bitterness singed Kaylin’s every word.
“I can see why the Dominion wants this.” Tam pursed her lips, deep in thought. “Shoot, I can see why anyone would want this. Governments, terrorist organizations, the potential is unthinkable.” Her eyes grew wide.
“Wait a minute! Project Pan. The Greek pottery...” She gasped. “It can’t be.”
“Pandora’s Box.” Thomas nodded. “The Greek urn in which the seeds of the tree were kept.”
“You’re telling us that the Pandora’s Box is here?” Why this was surprising to Maddock, after everything else they’d seen, he could not say.
“It goes deeper than that.” A mysterious smile played across Thomas’s lips. “Think for a moment. Have you ever heard of a tree that bore forbidden fruit?” Maddock’s mouth went dry as Thomas went on. “A fruit that, when eaten, could cause you to be cursed. Could give you the ability to know evil and do evil things.”
“No freakin’ way.” Bones was on his feet. “That is the tree from the Garden of Eden?”
“Hardly.” Thomas chuckled. “But I suspect it is a descendant of the tree or trees that inspired the Garden of Eden story.”
Maddock stared down at the silver tree with its black-and-white fruit, and wondered if his life could get any stranger. How was it that these things kept happening to him? The others were equally silent, gazing at the wondrous sight in awed, reverent silence. As he looked at the tree, though, something else occurred to him.
“You know what that tree reminds me of? Look at the leaves and the fruit. A circle, half black, half white.”
“The Yin and the Yang,” Tam whispered. “Maybe it’s all tied together somewhere back in very ancient history.”
“All I know,” Maddock stood and looked at Thomas, “is you’ve uncovered a deadly secret, and because of you, we just might have led men here who would like nothing more than to unleash this on the world.”
“Thomas, how could you do this?” Kaylin looked angrier than Maddock had ever seen her. “You’re helping them do Lord knows what? I never dreamed you were this kind of person.”
“You don’t understand,” Thomas pleaded, dropping to his knees in front of her. He reached out to take her hand, but she slapped it away. “For me, it was always about Fawcett. ScanoGen funded my expeditions, and, yes, they paid me well. The money was going to be for us, for our future together. I swear. Once I solved the Fawcett mystery for myself, I was going to tell them I had failed. That I didn’t find anything.”
“And you thought they’d just let it go like that? I can’t believe you.” Kaylin buried her face in her hands.
“Kaylin, I…”
“Just forget it. We’ll talk about it later.” She waved him away. “Talk to them.”
Thomas stood, clearly exasperated. “You have to believe me. I didn’t intend to give the information over to ScanoGen. I was just using them to finance my work on Fawcett. I’ve been fascinated with his story all my life. The mystery grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. You,” he said to Maddock, “of all people, understand that, don’t you?”
Maddock rose to his feet and looked Thomas in the eye. “Do I know that feeling? Yes. Do I think that makes it okay to do something rash and reckless out of utter selfishness? No way.”
Thomas looked like he was about to argue, but words must have failed him. He lapsed into a sullen silence and turned away from Maddock.
“What do we do now, Maddock?” Bones asked. “I could throw this dude down the pyramid if you like.”
Tam suppressed a chuckle as Thomas’s face reddened.
“It wouldn’t help us any. We need to get our weapons back and be ready in case ScanoGen shows up. I say we give them a couple of days, and if they don’t show, that means they’re either lost or the Mot’jabbur got them. If Willis is up to it by then, we’ll make our way back home.”
He turned to Tam. “Do you think there’s any chance of keeping this,” he pointed at the tree, “under wraps? You said only one person at ScanoGen knows about it.”
“As far as I know, he’s the only one. I suppose there’s a chanc
e he shared the information, but I doubt it. Other than the Fawcett map, Salvatore Scano only knew in a very general way what it was Professor Thornton here thought he would find—an Amazon plant that would allow them to manipulate human aggression. No one dreamed of this.”
“If you’re really F.B.I., what do you plan on telling your superiors when you get back to the States?” He searched her big brown eyes, seeking whatever truth might wait there.
“I don’t know.” She didn’t look away as she answered him. “I have a duty to my country, and I take that to heart, but I’m almost as afraid of it falling into our government’s hands as I am of ScanoGen and the Dominion, whoever they are, getting hold of it.”
“I’d say we chop the thing down and get the hell out of Dodge.” Bones stood and stretched. “But I suppose they’d plant another one.’
“There’s only one seed left.” Thomas said in a soft, almost inaudible voice. “Fawcett told me. Some of what they brought with them from Carthage never took root, nor have many of the seeds the trees here have produced. The trees also don’t live as long in this place as they did in the old world. They don’t say so, but the people here are worried.”
“It would be a blessing for them if the tree had already died,” Maddock said. Of course, it was too late now. “Let’s head back down before it gets dark. I have a bad feeling about tonight.”
Chapter 28
Brian Fawcett was waiting for them when they reached the bottom of the pyramid, a nervous look painting his face. Armed guards stood nearby, eyeing Maddock and the others. He had the feeling they were not there by coincidence.
