Black Sun: A Thriller

by Graham Brown

  In the Mayan towns like the one McCarter had temporarily resided in, a different festival was being celebrated, one that focused on the winter solstice and combined it with the looming end date on the Mayan calendar.

  Scenes of joy and happiness everywhere. Hawker wondered what they would think if they knew what he knew.

  Watching the party from a distance, Yuri saw him and smiled. Hawker waved and Yuri swirled away with the other kids, running and playing like a normal child.

  A town like this would probably be paradise for the kid. It had electricity, but not all that much ran on it: small bulbs strung across the street to give a little public light, a few radios and televisions and phones, but nothing like the cities.

  Maybe when it was all over they could just leave Yuri here, let the family that was caring for him adopt him, and allow the little guy to actually live for once. To some extent Hawker wouldn’t have minded staying here himself.

  He put the thought out of his mind, picked himself up, and made his way across the street. He entered the church intending to check on McCarter and was surprised to find Danielle lighting a candle by the altar.

  She wore a cotton, flower print dress of red and black. It fit like it was made for her. Her chestnut brown hair spilled over her shoulders in long, straight locks. He almost didn’t recognize her.

  “Danielle?”

  She turned.

  “Look at you.”

  She actually blushed slightly, then glanced toward the door as firecrackers went off outside at the party.

  “You like it?”

  It was so different. “I’ve never seen you like this.” He couldn’t stop smiling.

  “I borrowed it from the woman who is taking care of Yuri,” she said.

  “I just saw him,” Hawker said. “He’s enjoying himself.”

  Her smile faded. “At least for now.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Moore thinks Yuri will die when the stones release their energy tomorrow.”

  “What?” Hawker said, shocked. “Why?”

  “Because the object buried in his cerebral cortex isn’t a medical device; it’s a shard from the Russian stone.”

  She went on to explain what Moore had told her, what it meant. Hawker looked away. It was like they just couldn’t win.

  Danielle turned back toward the altar. She took the candle she was holding, whispered a prayer, and placed it beside the others.

  If ever there was a time for it.

  “Maybe he doesn’t have to die,” Hawker said.

  She looked over her shoulder at him.

  “The wine cellar downstairs,” Hawker told her. “The one our mad scientist professor won’t leave until he’s found the secret formula. It’s twenty feet belowground. It might shield him, the way the temples in the Amazon and under the gulf shielded those stones. The same way the tunnel at Yucca Mountain is keeping that one from linking up with ours.”

  She looked up at him.

  “As someone reminded me awhile ago, this is a sanctuary,” he said. “So why not let it be one?”

  Her eyes were locked on his, and he felt as if she were reaching out to him.

  “I don’t know how you can say you have no hope,” she said. “Because you bring me hope whenever you’re around.”

  The statement caught him off guard. The look in her eyes and the tone of her voice touched him deeper than he would normally allow. He thought instantly of the way his life had progressed, of lost friends, lost battles, some of which had been caused by his reckless, arrogant choices. He thought of the day Moore had come to meet him, when he’d been sitting in Devera’s church in Africa, unable to sleep or speak or think.

  “The last time I was in a church, I was literally covered with blood,” he said. “I kind of felt like Pilate, you know? At some point it doesn’t come off.”

  “Might be the only trait we share. I feel guilty for everything. For McCarter, for Yuri, for Marcus … for you.”

  “Me?”

  Her eyes tracked him. “I don’t know what it is that haunts you so deeply,” she said. “But that’s the past. And today I’ve come to realize that we can’t change that. No matter how hard we try. No matter what we have in our possession. Including these stones.”

  There was something in her voice, a partial resolution of her own issues, he guessed.

  “All we can do is fight for a better future,” she added.

  “With the stones,” he said.

  “With everything we have,” she replied. “For everyone we love.”

  She continued to gaze at him and he again had a sense of her searching him, as if he were hiding something and she was unwilling to let him continue.

  “What would you decide,” she said, finally, “if it was up to you?”

  He held her gaze in the quiet of the church. He’d long since lost faith in most things: governments, churches, himself. The thought of having this decision rest on his shoulders had not weighed easy on him before. Since arriving in San Ignacio that feeling had grown worse.

  “You’re the only one who hasn’t been affected,” she said.

  “Let’s see what McCarter finds,” he said.

  “I just spoke with him,” she said. “It’s not going well. And he didn’t look particularly good, either, so I don’t know how much we are going to get out of him.”

  Hawker didn’t like the sound of that. Without McCarter’s translation they would be left with little more than guesswork.

  “So if you have to decide,” she said, pressing him.

  He felt more than a sense of ambivalence toward the stones; he felt anger. They were like some kind of blank piece of paper to him, letting everyone see what they wanted to see.

  “Most of what I’ve seen from humanity is brutality, selfishness, and greed. You want me to trust in mankind?” He looked toward the crucifix, the image of Christ battered and bleeding. “This is what we do.”

  He stared into her eyes. “Better hope McCarter figures something out, because if using those stones means harm to you, or him or Yuri …” He shook his head. “Then the hell with them. I’ll smash that stone into a thousand pieces. And if the world burns around us, so be it.”

  Her eyes were locked on his. She didn’t blink or move or speak. She just stared at him in the silence. And he didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  He looked around the church, feeling out of place, much as he had in the simple wooden building in Africa. “I should go,” he said.

  “I’ll go with you,” she replied.

  She looked back to the altar, crossing herself, and then turned and walked with Hawker to the church door. Together they stepped out into the cool night air.

  For the briefest second, as they stepped outside, Hawker thought he heard the sound of a small plane. But he tilted his head and couldn’t pick it up. A moment later the musicians in the street began to play and Danielle led him off to where the town folk were dancing.

  Three hundred miles away, at Kang’s command center in the warehouse, Kang’s men processed the incoming data. The foot patrol units with their networked cameras had scanned nearly two hundred thousand faces with no sign of the NRI team, while the aerial drones surveyed the terrain along the line that led into the mountains. They probed the jungle with a combination of infrared cameras, magnetometers, and a specialized receptor designed to pick up the faint signature of medical-grade radioactive material.

  So far they’d found several parties of hikers, a crashed military trainer that had rusted to pieces in the trees, and three possible sites of undiscovered ruins. But there had been no sign of his quarry, at least until now.

  One of the drone operators received an alarm. He sat facing a pair of large computer screens displaying what looked a great deal like a modern military cockpit. And indeed it was similar. The readouts on his screens were created by remote telemetry from the sensors and instruments in the drone. Three hundred miles away, sitting on the ground in Campeche,
the “pilot” controlled the drone and he had taken this one to the very end of its range, before picking up a signal.

  The strength of the signal faded rapidly and he decided to risk one more pass before turning the million-dollar machine for home. This time the signal came in stronger.

  He pressed the intercom switch, which buzzed Kang’s office. “I report contact from drone number five. I repeat we have contact. I’m locking the location in now.” He typed the coordinates into the computer and hit ENTER.

  The computer ran the sensor analysis and confirmed the signal.

  “San Ignacio,” he said, looking at the map. “They’re hiding in San Ignacio.”

  CHAPTER 56

  Arnold Moore remained at Yucca Mountain deep into the night, running simulations on a program his technicians had put together. The simulation had confirmed Stecker’s theory. The stones and their energy waves were intrinsically linked to the weakening magnetic field, but no matter how Moore tinkered with the variables, the numbers did not match up. Close, but slightly off.

  Using assumptions the NRI had come up with, he changed the inputs several times. The numbers skewed slightly high.

  He changed them again.

  The numbers were off to the low side.

  Frustrated, Moore ordered the simulation to do a reverse analysis, to take the actual data and back out to what the numbers should be.

  He waited. The screen flashed.

  Operational parameter invalid.

  Something in the equation was preventing the operation, like dividing by zero.

  Moore typed. Suggested parameter adjustment?

  The computer ran through a series of calculations and then offered its best guess.

  Parameter with highest likelihood of successful adjustment: Number of Magnetic Fields.

  Moore stared at the blinking cursor. Number of Magnetic Fields. What the hell could that mean?

  Sliding a pair of reading glasses back onto his nose, he clicked over to the input page and scrolled through all of the preset parameters. Among them he found a box to input number of magnetic fields. It currently was set at 1.

  Moore looked around, feeling foolish. Could there be more than one magnetic field? The program came from the North Pole survey group; it was designed to calculate the speed and magnitude of future changes. Moore’s people had modified it to assess the impact of the stones.

  The stones.

  Could they be considered their own magnetic field? Moore looked over his glasses and changed the number to 2. He then designated the output for field number two to match the believed power level of the stones. Hitting ENTER, he ran the reverse query again.

  The screen blinked. Operational parameter invalid.

  “Damn,” he cursed.

  He went back and changed the number to 3. The computer asked for the strength of the third field and Moore had no answer. He typed “X” and hit ENTER.

  The computer began to think. It was connected to a group of mainframes and networked through an advanced system of processing that one of the NRI’s former member companies had developed. Working together, the mainframes had the power of a supercomputer. But by entering “X,” Moore had created a massive need for calculating power. And as he stared at the nonresponsive screen, Moore wondered if he’d crashed the system.

  After several minutes, Moore sighed. He was about to give up when the screen flashed. A series of numbers came up relating to field strength, where the pole was, and where it should be. Moore studied the numbers. They matched exactly.

  If the computer was right, they were dealing with not one earthbound magnetic field but three.

  CHAPTER 57

  Professor McCarter found himself struggling once again. Beneath the exposed bulbs in the church’s wine cellar, he found he could not focus.

  He sat back and looked at the notes he’d written so far, from glyphs he’d already translated. These were the words of the Fallen Jaguar, the last of the Brotherhood. I write them in the language that is no more.

  He guessed that this was the author of the scroll, and that the language he referred to was the hieroglyphics of the Maya.

  McCarter glanced at his next line of notes. He could see his own handwriting deteriorating. He noticed his hand shaking visibly now, but it must have been doing so even then.

  In their wisdom the gods gave the four stones to the first people, the Wooden People. After the great storm, the falling of the Black Rain, only the Brotherhood remained to carry the secret.

  McCarter was certain that this referred to the Mayan creation story, in which the gods of the Maya tried to bring forth the human work. After several failed tries they used wood as the catalyst in the effort and succeeded, creating beings that looked somewhat like humans but were more like stick people, with deformed bodies and dry cracking faces.

  Some scholars said these people were actually monkeys who ended up living in the trees, but McCarter had always rejected that notion, as the Wooden People were never described to have fur, or tails, or any type of grace or athleticism. Instead they were said to be ungainly and weak. Much more like the body they had found in the cave below the Amazon temple. The body of a human from the future.

  And if he was right, after the Wooden People were killed in the storm and the flood, the regular people, whom they seemed to have exercised control over, left, fleeing the Amazon and heading north. Most of these people, and indeed the legend itself, gloried in the destruction of the Wooden People. But the Brotherhood, perhaps a group of priests or acolytes, knew better. They had taken the stones that were accessible and brought them on a journey, several journeys to be exact, and placed them as they’d been told.

  The Sacrifice of the Heart remains at Zuyua.

  This was the Brazil stone, which he and Danielle had found two years earlier.

  The Sacrifice of the Mind has followed the sun, over the great sea.

  McCarter guessed this was the Russian stone. The one they had yet to look for.

  To the Temple of the Initiation was taken the Sacrifice of the Soul, and the last went to the mountains. Here I have placed it: The master stone, The Sacrifice of the Body lies beneath the Mirror, in the Temple of the Jaguar.

  The Brotherhood, the regular humans from the current time period, stretched all the way back to the original shrine in Brazil. It made sense. The travelers from earth’s future appeared weak and deformed; they needed help, assistance. They could not be expected to do the task alone. They must have recruited certain members in secret, and thus the Brotherhood was formed.

  McCarter gazed at his notes, pleased that the past made sense now, but he realized that nothing he’d found would tell him what they really needed to know: what they should do now.

  Feeling dizzy, he went back to translating.

  He leaned over the hieroglyphic book and a drop of sweat fell from his face and hit the parchment. He dabbed the parchment with a towel, wiped his face, and studied the next group of symbols.

  One for the earth, the land. One that represented healing, and another that he’d come to realize indicated the stones.

  Would the stones heal the earth? And from what?

  He leaned forward again, studying a glyph that represented men or mankind or the human kind. Another glyph represented nature, the earth in a sense, and a third glyph represented darkness. He had seen glyphs before that signified that nature would destroy man, as when a volcano erupted or an earthquake flattened a village, but here the order was reversed. Could it mean what he thought it meant? So much of the prophecy, especially as it was treated today, seemed to indicate nature destroying man, but this was different: The parchment in front of him suggested that man destroys nature. Was the catastrophe not natural in origin but in fact man-made? Or was it his liberal prejudices coming out? He remembered a debate with a conservative friend who told him he put trees ahead of people. He could not be sure, but the words were there.

  His eyes blurred suddenly, watering and burning. His body ached. He w
rote his notes and looked to the next set of glyphs. They seemed familiar to him, in fact he was certain he knew them, but he could not divine a meaning. It was an odd sensation, like not being able to recall the name of someone you knew well. He traced the outline of the first one with his finger, hoping it would jog his memory, but nothing came to him. He drew it with his shaky hand but still his mind was blank.

  A jolt of anger and frustration hit him. It was almost impossible to do what he was trying to do without a database, or at least his old notebooks or an anthology of known glyphs. But he had nothing to work with, nothing but his failing memory.

  He sat back again. Despite the warmth of the wine cellar he now had the chills. He was running a fever and as often happened to the patient whose temperature rises rapidly, he’d begun to feel as if he were freezing.

  He held the towel to his face. He felt as if he might throw up.

  He put a hand to his leg and touched the outlines of his wound. It was hot, burning with infection once again, swollen and painful to the touch.

  What had he done?

  In a vain, desperate effort to hear his wife’s voice again, he’d stopped taking the medications Danielle had been giving him. The sickness had brought his wife to him once, or so he’d thought: the sickness and the stone, the conduit through time. But as he’d become well, her face had vanished; her voice no longer touched his mind. It was like waking from a dream and wishing only to go back to sleep and find it somehow. And McCarter could not bring himself to let that happen.

  In response he’d shunned the antibiotics in hopes of seeing her again. But the only result was a growing fever and a cloudy mind just when they all needed it to be sharp.

  CHAPTER 58

  At the celebration, Father Domingo made a great fuss over Hawker and Danielle. The women of the town found it hard to believe Danielle could be happy in her thirties without having a husband. They insisted she dance with a few of the men, and then, realizing she had come with Hawker, they made it a point to get them dancing and drinking as much as possible.