by Rob Jones
“Matheson,” she said with a knowing look. “I presume ‘dying peacefully in his sleep’ isn’t exactly how it went?”
“I got to him in the end, Maria, and I could never have done it without you. What you told me about Liz being a Russian double agent on the flight to Luxor that day was painful, but I had to know and it was brave of you to tell me. Without what you told me about Matheson being behind Operation Swallowtail I would never have been able to avenge Liz, so thanks, Maria.” Before she could reply, he leaned forward over the desk and kissed her on the cheek. “I mean it. With me I’m either your best-friend or your worst-enemy, and we’re friends.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but seemed to think better of it when Ryan yawned and opened his eyes. She took a drink of the coffee instead.
“What are you two up to then?” Ryan asked, stepping over to them.
“We’re just talking about running away together,” Maria said, winking at Hawke.
“What?”
Lea woke and joined them at the small table. “Why does Ryan look like he needs a nappy change?”
“Maria and Hawke have been talking about running away together.”
“Close your mouth, mate,” Hawke said. “She’s joking. Now pretend like I’m a total idiot and give me all you’ve got on the Aztecs.”
“That one’s just too easy,” the younger man said. “So I’ll let it go and move straight on to you being an idiot.”
“Funny, especially coming from a human encyclopaedia.”
“I prefer Walking Wiki,” he said with a grin.
“Just get on with it and stop being a dork,” Lea said.
“Hey, leave my little Teddy Bear alone!” Maria said, running a protective hand up Ryan’s arm.
As Ryan blushed the color of a beetroot, Hawke and Lea exchanged a glance and then burst into spontaneous laughter. After a few seconds Hawke finally managed to draw breath. “Teddy Bear?”
“I thought we said that was private, Masha?” Ryan said, giving Maria a look halfway between desperation and anger.
“I’m sorry! It just came out. It’s a good Russian name for someone you love… medvezhonok. I don’t see the problem.”
“Look at their faces,” Ryan said. “Especially his face, and tell me that you don’t see the problem.”
“Yeah, leave her alone, Teddy Bear,” Lea said.
“Oh God,” Ryan said, throwing his hands in the air.
“Lea,” Hawke fixed his eyes on the Irishwoman and held her shoulders. “That’s not nice, all right?”
Ryan sighed with relief. “Thanks, Joe.”
Hawke turned to Ryan, deadpan. “No problem, Snookums.”
“Why do these things always happen to me?” Ryan asked, exasperated.
“Yeah, you’ve got it tough all right,” Lea said. “Three of our people are dead, Professor Barton’s in a morgue getting a burrito peeled off his face, and you just got called Snookums. So unfair.”
“Look at it this way, mate,” Hawke said, clapping a heavy arm on Ryan’s shoulder. “You’ve got a beautiful Russian secret agent who calls you her Teddy Bear… need I say more?”
Ryan nodded sagely. “Right… well let that be a lesson to you. So, moving on – Huitzilopochtli for idiots,” he said looking at Hawke. “It goes like this. The Aztecs were a Nahuatl-speaking people whose empire reached its primacy from the 1300s to the 1500s, much more recent than many today realize.”
“Any more coffee?” Lea said with a yawn and a wink at Hawke.
Ryan ignored her. “I was going to say that what we have to focus on is the issue of the codices and Huitzilopochtli himself…”
“But..?” Maria said.
“But… I’ve been researching the sunstone they took from the British Museum, and what I’m finding isn’t making me happy. The fragment in London was discovered by a British archaeologist in the late nineteenth century, but he never found the other half. Now we know Morton Wade and his thugs have it.”
“And what’s making you unhappy, Twinkle-toes?” Lea asked.
Ryan threw his hands into the air once again. “I give up!”
“Come on, Ry. I’m just messin’ wit’ ya.”
“I thought we’d left that behind?”
“We have – I promise.”
“You promised to love me once, so not sure how seriously to take that.”
“Let’s get back to it, shall we?” Hawke said, moving away from the subject of Lea and Ryan’s former marriage.
“What’s making me unhappy is that while the official archaeological story is that the fragment is a calendar or sunstone, there’s an unofficial narrative.”
“Are you talking about your weird conspiracy theory friends again?” Lea said.
“I mean sources of alternative research,” he said without humor.
“And what do these nutt… I mean alternative researchers have to say about it?”
“They say it is in fact part of an ancient keystone that when combined with the missing half can be used to open Mictlan, the Aztec Underworld.”
“Oh that’s a relief,” Hawke said. “For a minute there I thought it was something serious. Now we know it’s nothing more than a deranged cult leader finding the key to hell.”
They shared a look, and then Maria spoke. “So what’s this got to do with Barton’s last words?” she said, turning to Ryan. “You said Huitzil… whatever-his-name-is was the god of the sun as well as other things. Was he also the god of the dead?”
Ryan shook his head. “Nope. That delightful job belonged to Mictlantecuhtli and his worship required human cannibalism. The Underworld is named after him – Mictlan.”
“Thanks, Pookie,” Hawke said with a wink and grin combo. “But I think we have an in-coming call from Elysium.”
Ryan shook his head in despair as Lea fired up the plasma screen on the cabin partition. Moments later they were face to face with Sir Richard Eden, who gave them as full a briefing as he was able on the subject of Morton Wade and his extra-curricular activities south of the Rio Grande. Hawke listened with disgust and disbelief as Eden talked more about Wade’s missing employees and the recent discovery of the coffee plantation.
“Do we know where this plantation is?” Lea asked.
“Yes. Thanks to Scarlet, Lexi, Vincent Reno and the Americans we now know its location – it’s a cool one hundred acres of prime coffee country down in Guerrero with a large, white hacienda planted in the heart of it. Used to be a monastery. As you know, we’ve been tracking him on and off for some time now because I don’t believe his interest in Aztec archaeology is on the level. Now, there’s been local talk of disappearances and things could start to get nasty.”
“Any more info on these disappearances?” Hawke asked.
On the screen at the front of the jet, Hawke watched as Eden scratched his jaw and tipped back in his seat. “Locals talked about drug cartels or even UFO abductions, but both the Mexican authorities and I beg to differ on that score.”
“The Mexican authorities are involved?” Lea asked.
Eden nodded. “I’ve been liaising on the subject with Enrique Valles, the Attorney General. We share the view that the disappearances have something to do with Wade, but proving it’s something else. Of more concern is this WMD that’s somewhere on the horizon, and as you know, I’m also getting Jack Brooke and the Americans involved. No one knows the Mexican underworld like they do and he’s already got BDS and CIA assets on the job over there. I want a full team to raid the place. How fast can you be in Mexico?”
“We’re meeting a Professor Pavoni in the Vatican, so as long as it takes to speak with her and make sure the Codex Borgia is safe,” Hawke said. “Then we’re straight on the plane.”
“Fine, don’t dawdle.”
“Thanks, Rich,” said Lea as he cut the call.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Ah… the City of Lights,” Lea said, giving Hawke a sideways glance before kissing him on the cheek. Ryan pretended to
be sick when he saw the kiss but Maria slapped him on the back of the head and told him to grow up.
“That’s Paris,” Hawke said. “This is the Eternal City.”
Lea turned away and pretended to follow the progress of a man on his bicycle. “I knew that, Joe Hawke.”
“Of course you did,” Ryan said with a smirk.
“You’re not so damned smart, Ryan Bale. When we first met you thought an areola was a chocolate biscuit.”
Hawke burst out laughing, but Maria was less amused.
“I know what a sodding Oreo is,” Ryan said, pushing his hands into his jeans pockets.
They were walking across the Viale Vaticano and heading toward the entrance to the museum. Ahead of them the sun was shining above the ancient walls of the Vatican. Lea looked up and saw a line of umbrella pines along the top of the wall, almost yellow in the late afternoon sunshine.
They walked across the cobblestones, passing beneath the famous archway. The words MVSEI VATICANI now welcomed them inside one of the grandest museums anywhere in the world. Here were vast collections of some of the finest art and sculptures on earth, amassed by the desires of hundreds of popes over countless centuries. Ryan was mesmerized.
Inside, the general throng drifted on autopilot toward the Sistine Chapel, but Hawke and the others went in a different direction. Being one of the biggest museums in the world, they had a long walk until they reached their destination, passing on their way many of the greatest classical and Renaissance treasures known to man.
“This place is incredible,” Lea said, drinking in the treasures around her as she walked.
“You’ve never been here before?” Hawke asked.
“No, never.”
“Then maybe we should come back when we have more time?”
Lea looked up at him and smiled, but a dash of suspicion narrowed her eyes. “You mean that?”
Hawke shrugged his shoulders. “Sure, why not?”
“Because,” Ryan said. “You don’t seem like the museum type.”
“That’s not fair,” Hawke said. “And I’ll prove it by bringing Lea back here on a romantic weekend for two.”
She liked the sound of that. It had been a long time since she’d just kicked back and taken life as she found it, rather than riding it like a raft on a white water river.
“Sounds good. And if you’re good I might even let you buy me an ice cream.”
Hawke snorted with amusement. “When am I anything but good?”
They continued on their journey through the museum until they finally reached their destination.
They entered the Vatican Apostolic Library and approached the reception area. A woman with thick, black hair in a bun and chunky glasses on her nose stared up and looked as if one of them had just placed a whoopee cushion under her seat.
“Si?”
Her attitude seemed to undergo a Damascene conversion when Lea Donovan told her they were at the library on behalf of Sir Richard Eden MP and had a pre-arranged meeting with Francesca Pavoni, the direttore of the entire Vatican Museum.
Suddenly she couldn’t do enough, and asked them if they wanted coffee while they waited for Professore Pavoni.
“No thanks,” Hawke said. “We need to speak with Professor Pavoni before we get shot at again.”
The woman looked confused, obviously unsure she had translated the English correctly, and made an urgent phone call. After several high-speed Italian conversations a man in a slim-cut Prussian blue suit emerged from a panelled door behind the woman and smiled warmly as he extended his hand.
“I am Paolo Brunetti, Professor Pavoni’s assistant. Please, let me welcome you to the Vatican Museum. If you please follow me I will take you to the Director – she is waiting for you.”
The ECHO team exchanged glances and followed Brunetti from the reception area, Hawke pausing for the slightest of moments to wink at the woman on the front desk. She dropped her coffee in response and knelt to clean the carpet, cursing in quiet Italian.
Moments later Brunetti showed them into a large, plush corner office flooded with warm Roman sunlight. Professor Pavoni was sitting behind her desk but stood up to greet them as her young assistant left the room and quietly closed the heavy wooden door behind him.
Pavoni glanced at her watch and raised an eyebrow. “You’re nearly half an hour late.”
“Pleased to meet you too,” Hawke said.
Pavoni stared at him for a moment before replying. “An hour ago I received a telephone call from the Culture Minister who seemed to be of the opinion that I should give you any assistance you require.” She raised another unconvinced eyebrow before continuing. “Apparently you need to see a codex stored here at the Vatican.”
Lea nodded. “Apparently so – the Codex Borgia.”
Pavoni nodded with appreciation at the pronunciation. “What you seek is not generally available to the public, you understand. It is quite priceless and has been stored in the library archives here in the Vatican Museum since we acquired it from Cardinal Borgia himself.”
“We understand, but we’re not the public,” Hawke said.
The professor slipped a pair of Gucci eyeglasses on and peered through the butterfly-shaped lenses as she scrolled through the online internal telephone directory. “Ah – here it is.”
She picked up her phone and dialled a short number. Seconds later she was speaking into the handset in swift Italian before setting it down softly into the phone’s cradle and turning to them. “Okay, fine. We can go down to the archives now. I must ask you not to touch anything there.”
They followed the Director out of her office and along a carpeted corridor, at the end of which was a plush elevator with brushed chrome doors. Professor Pavoni keyed in a code and the doors swept open.
“Security here is paramount, naturally.”
When the doors opened, they found themselves in another corridor, but this was tiled and the pleasant atmosphere of Pavoni’s office was replaced by the harsh blue glow of surgical strip-lights.
“If you’ll follow me,” she said curtly. “We access the archives just here.”
She indicated the end of the corridor and moments later she was pushing open a heavy steel door and showing them into the archives.
Lea drank in the view with amazement. For some reason – probably the movies - she had been expecting something similar in scale and size to an aircraft hangar, but while the area was vast, the ceiling was a very low, wooden state of affairs, reinforced here and there with iron support struts. Old-fashioned lights were bolted to the ceiling beams, and they looked like they might have been the originals, installed when the Vatican converted from candle-light to electricity.
Ahead of them was an almost endless corridor formed by the ends of two enormous metal bookshelves, stacked on which were literally tens of thousands of books, journals and manuscripts. It smelled musty, but the desiccant dehumidification system used to keep the ancient documents preserved gave the room a welcoming ambience and she thought that it was the kind of place her father would have liked to visit – or maybe even work in as he did his research.
“Please, this way.”
Professor Pavoni led them along one of the many long aisles lined with bookshelves until they reached a low archway in the far wall. Stepping through the arch they found themselves in a small antechamber at the end of which was another door.
“It’s through here.”
The Director typed in another keycode and the door clicked open. Seconds later they were at their final destination – a small room that reminded Lea of the safety deposit box rooms in Swiss banks she had seen in the movies. Dozens of secured containers were locked in place along the far wall, each numbered by hand.
Pavoni took a slip of paper from her pocket and after retrieving the reference number she walked across to the relevant container. She pushed a wooden chair against the wall of drawers and standing on it to gain some extra height, she gently pulled one of them open. Then she sl
ipped on a pair of neon-blue nitrile gloves from her pocket before slowly extracting the codex from the drawer and laying it down on the viewing cabinet.
“This is the Codex Borgia,” she said with pride.
“It’s amazing,” Lea said.
“It’s made from animal skins,” Pavoni said. “Of course it’s very delicate and only authorized people are permitted to touch it… but even after all these years I am astonished whenever I lay my eyes upon it. Simply to think this was created by Aztec priests before the Spanish arrived in Mexico – it’s because of treasures like this I wanted to devote my life to museum work.”
“It’s certainly very impressive,” Hawke said glancing at his watch.
“It’s astonishing…” Ryan said, his eyes glazing over with amazement. “Hold me back, Agent Snowcat, or I might steal it!”
Maria laughed and play-slapped Ryan’s shoulder. “дурачить!” she said.
“What does that mean?” he asked, looking worried. “Is it good or bad?”
She gave him a sideways glance and kissed his cheek. “Shut up.”
“How old is it?” Lea asked, interrupting the moment.
“We’re not sure. All we can say is that this codex was a Mesoamerican manuscript predating the arrival of the Spanish in Mexico – so at least five hundred years old. As a divinatory manuscript its value is beyond measure. It is quite literally priceless.”
Hawke stepped forward. “What connects this codex with the keystone fragment in the British Museum?”
“The Codex Borgia is famous for its many beguiling astronomical references. In fact, it’s these references that many contemporary archaeoastronomy researchers have focussed upon. Also, there are many references in the codex to Huitzilopochtli – and the sun wheel features his image very prominently.”
Hawke sighed. “The common theme seems to be this reference to Huitzilopochtli.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” said Lea.
Hawke looked at her, but his reply was interrupted by the professor.
“Huitzilopochtli was the god of war and the sun, but he is particularly well-known because of the method of sacrifice that was employed when priests offered humans to him. If he is the connection and these thieves have an interest in him, then I dread to think what that might be… perhaps the sacred chants…”
