Adrian D'Hage - The Maya codex

‘The train goes in twenty minutes. Is there time?’

O’Connor smiled. ‘Always assume you’re being tailed. The train leaves from Platform 6, but we’ll get on at the last minute. That way it’s harder for someone to organise a ticket – although the Austrians are so efficient you can buy them on board these days,’ he added, his smile fading. ‘And stick this in your bag,’ he said, handing Aleta a new cell phone. ‘From now on, I want you to assume everything you say on your cell phone is being monitored, and that includes texts.’

‘Won’t they be tracking yours?’

‘They will. But as we speak, it’s bound in bubble wrap and making its way out of the Imperial’s toilets into Vienna’s main sewer. Hopefully it will confuse them and buy us a little more time.’

They rode the escalator to the departure floor. Below them, the tall, thin man in the black overcoat entered the lower floor of the station.

The train sped quietly and smoothly westwards towards Linz, the capital of Oberosterreich, the city where Hitler attended high school with the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; a city from which the Mauthausen concentration camp was less than twenty-five kilometres away. The fields and distant forests were blanketed in a fresh covering of snow and the sun struggled to penetrate the low clouds scudding across the border from Italy.

‘‘You don’t slum it, do you?’ Aleta sank back into one of just four leather seats in their business-class compartment. They had the compartment to themselves.

‘Not if the CIA’s paying. In about three hours we’ll cross the German border near Passau. From there it’s another three hours to Wurzburg, where we’ll change trains for Kassel-Wilhelmshohe. Once there, we’ll change again for Bad Arolsen.’

Aleta shivered at the thought of what she might find.

‘How well do you know Monsignor Jennings?’ O’Connor asked, picking up on her distress and changing the subject.

‘Well enough, unfortunately, although I’ve never worked with him. It’s always been a mystery to me why he’s held in such high esteem in archaeological circles.’

‘Overrated?’

‘A self-opinionated, arrogant twit. He’s very close to the Vatican, and they seem to have an unhealthy influence on him.’

O’Connor grinned. ‘He speaks very highly of you, too.’

Aleta made a face. ‘He’s also rumoured to be fond of little boys.’

O’Connor’s grin evaporated.

‘‘That’s the problem with the Vatican – most of them are hypocrites,’ Aleta continued. ‘Pius XII didn’t lift a finger to help my grandfather or any of the millions of other Jews slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis, and nothing’s changed. Now Benedict’s given his blessing to a bishop who’s denied the gas chambers even existed! What was his name -’

‘Williamson,’ O’Connor said simply.

‘Richard Williamson! How could I forget? And Benedict, who in his time as Cardinal Inquisitor amassed detailed dossiers on everyone from Hans Kung to Teilhard de Chardin, now claims it was all a simple misunderstanding? That he should have consulted the internet? Give me a break!’ Still angry at the injustice of being targeted by powerful institutions and finding herself on the run, Aleta was not about to cut O’Connor any slack. ‘As for you Americans, you’re the most powerful country in the world, and you throw your weight around so everyone knows it. You say you stand for freedom, yet when it suits your purpose, you think nothing of shipping people off to secret torture prisons around the world – prisons that you bastards in the CIA run – and most of these people just disappear. And as for that last idiot you elected to the White House, I doubt he’s ever even read the Geneva Conventions. He picks a White House legal counsel who thinks water-boarding and leaving people out in the open to freeze in temperatures below zero are just fine. What did he say? “Terrorism renders obsolete the Geneva Conventions’ strict limitations on the questioning of prisoners”… That’s the sort of thing the Nazis did to my grandfather, and you bastards are no better. You trained the death squads who killed my father!’

‘In other words, torture is okay,’ O’Connor interpolated quietly. ‘You’re absolutely right: the Vatican and Washington have both lost the plot, and I’m not going to defend the indefensible. I can understand your anger at American foreign policy, too. Half the world hates us at the moment.’

‘You flatter yourself if you think only half the world hates you. Where I come from it would be hard to find someone with a good word for an American, and don’t kid yourself it’s much better over here. I don’t think you’ve got any idea how much damage your government’s policies have done, Mr O’Connor.’ Aleta reverted to formality. ‘Or should that be Agent O’Connor?’

‘That’s the Hollywood version. It’s actually “Officer”, although when you’re ready, Curtis will do just fine.’

‘What I can’t understand, given your views,’ Aleta said, speaking more softly now, ‘is why you’re still working for the CIA?’

‘Well, once they tumble to what happened back in your apartment, I’ll be off the payroll. But despite what you think, with a few notable exceptions, the CIA is made up of basically decent human beings trying to serve their country.’ O’Connor paused, trying to order his own emotions. ‘I joined the CIA because I thought I could make a difference. Unfortunately it hasn’t turned out that way. Although who knows? If we can recover the codex, that might redress the balance a little. Do your grandfather’s notes throw any light on things?’

‘I haven’t had a chance to go through them in detail, although when Levi was in Tikal in the 1930s, he unearthed a stone carving.’ Aleta opened the notebook at the page on which Levi Weizman had attached a photograph of a stela he had named ‘Stela D’. ‘The alligator represents the Milky Way,’ she said, pointing to her grandfather’s notations on his drawing of the intricate carving, ‘and in Mayan hieroglyphics, the alligator’s mouth is the Milky Way’s dark rift or Xibalba be. The hieroglyphics surrounding the alligator all depict the December solstice sun of 2012.’

‘Yet Jennings plays it down. Would he be aware of this?’

‘He should be, because that stela is still in Tikal. It’s similar to the Izapa stelae, which were excavated near the Guatemalan-Mexican border in the 1960s by archaeologists from Brigham State University and decoded by the noted Mayanist scholar, John Major Jenkins.’ Aleta turned the page in Levi Weizman’s notebook, now yellowed with age. ‘I am convinced,’ she said, reading from her grandfather’s notes, ‘that the hieroglyphics on Stela Delta indicate that this rare alignment of our planet and solar system with the centre of the Milky Way galaxy will be accompanied by a dramatic decrease in the earth’s magnetic field and an equally dramatic increase in sunspot activity.’

The train slowed as the plough on the forward engine sliced through an unusually heavy autumn build-up of snow on the tracks. Both O’Connor and Aleta were totally absorbed in Levi Weizman’s notes, and neither noticed the tall, thin man make his way along the corridor outside. He glanced into their compartment as he passed.

Aleta continued to read from the old notebook: ‘I have discussed this with Albert, and he is of the view we should take this seriously.’

‘I gather your grandfather was a friend of Einstein’s.’

Aleta nodded. ‘Both of them detested the Nazis with a passion. You’re probably aware that by the time my grandfather had unearthed Stela D at Tikal, Einstein had already published his paper on the theory of relativity.’