Adrian D'Hage - The Maya codex

‘Let her! She won’t win, and we’ll clean out the bitch’s bank balance in the process.’

‘She wouldn’t win, sir,’ Davis persisted, ‘but the peaceniks would be all over us like a rash. So far, they haven’t been able to stir up much media interest in HAARP, but this would give them air time, and the director will be more pissed than he is already.’

‘So what are you suggesting?’

‘The chief of station in Guatemala City’s just resigned. Why don’t you send Rodriguez down there in his place?’

‘As chief of station? Are you out of your mind, Davis?’

‘Think about it, sir. Guatemala’s an armpit and we were short-staffed down there even before this codex thing came on the radar, let alone now the chief of station’s resigned. Rodriguez will be working like a dog from the day she arrives. You can claim it’s a promotion into the field; it gets you off the hook with the equal opportunity wankers and gets her out of our hair. And if it all turns to custard, you can remove her, and she’ll probably resign.’

‘It’s a pity we don’t have anyone at the North Pole,’ Wiley grumbled. ‘She could freeze her tits off up there. All right, make it happen,’ he said finally. ‘In the meantime, what’s the word on Tutankhamen and that other bitch?’

‘We’re still checking. We’ve traced them to Hamburg, but they may have left by train.’

‘I want them found – and fast!’

‘ Guten Abend.’ O’Connor flashed a smile at the two officers approaching along the dock.

‘ Abend,’ one of them replied.

‘Who were they?’ Aleta asked, breathing a little easier after the two men had passed.

O’Connor shrugged. ‘Don’t know, but Merchant Marine, not customs or police. Watch your step,’ he said as they reached the gangplank.

‘You’re cutting it fine,’ the ship’s steward observed haughtily as they reached the deck. ‘We sail in twenty minutes.’

‘Sorry about that,’ O’Connor apologised.

‘The captain’s on the bridge,’ the steward sniffed. ‘I’ll show you to your cabin and then he’ll want to see your passports. Follow me,’ and he minced his way down the port companionway.

‘Opening bat for the other side,’ O’Connor whispered.

‘Stop it!’ Aleta whispered back, suppressing a fit of the giggles.

Aleta and O’Connor stood at the rail of the port wing of the bridge. Aleta watched the two tugs herding their charge away from the dock towards the middle of the Elbe. Powerful lights lit the for’ard decks of the MV Galapagos as the crew worked to get the heavy mooring hawsers aboard. O’Connor scanned the docks up to Buchheisterstrasse, searching for any signs of anyone on their trail.

‘The captain didn’t seem too interested in the paperwork,’ Aleta observed as the MV Galapagos moved slowly out into midstream.

‘One of the reasons I timed our arrival to just before sailing: he’s got a lot of things on his plate right now, and he won’t relax until he’s clear of the English Channel and out into the Atlantic.’

‘Slow ahead,’ the captain ordered. Below decks, a single gleaming steel shaft, driven by the massive Hitachi-Man marine diesel engine began to turn.

Howard Wiley looked into the biometric security scanner outside the door of the Operation Maya ops room. In an instant the powerful system computed the algorithms and analysed the pattern on Wiley’s iris. No two irises were the same; even identical twins had different irises. The security Wiley had installed on Operation Maya was far tighter than fingerprint recognition. The light glowed green and he stepped into the room, just as a message alert from the Berlin station pinged on Larry Davis’s computer screen: Information just to hand indicates Tutankhamen and Nefertiti departed Hamburg by sea. MV Galapagos, a 15 000-tonne container ship, left Buchheisterstrasse docks nine hours ago, bound for Havana and then Puerto Quetzal on Pacific coast of Guatemala.

‘Fuck! Can we get someone on board?’

Davis shook his head. ‘She’ll be clear of the mouth of the Elbe and into the English Channel by now.’

‘Tell Rodriguez that when she gets to Guatemala City, her first task is to organise for one of the crew to fall ill in Havana and arrange a swap. Tutankhamen and Nefertiti can simply disappear over the side, and the sharks will do the rest.’

‘The ship’s steward is not such a bad guy once you get to know him. He even keeps a half-decent cellar,’ O’Connor said, extracting the cork from a bottle of Alsace riesling. They had been at sea over a week, and O’Connor had made it his business to speak to every member of the crew. He now felt reasonably confident they’d got out of Hamburg without a tag… for the moment. Initially the MV Galapagos had made good progress. They were now well out into the mid-North Atlantic, to the west of the Azores group, but rising seas had forced the captain to slow to ten knots. Dinner over, O’Connor and Aleta had repaired to their cabin just below the bridge, with its view over the for’ard decks through the big square portholes.

‘Cheers.’ O’Connor raised his glass. Aleta raised hers, and gripped the table as the Galapagos rolled to starboard and buried herself into a massive wave. White water exploded over the bow and foamed over the for’ard containers before streaming back through the scuppers.

‘They lose about 10 000 containers a year in seas like this,’ O’Connor observed idly, savouring the delicate citrus flavours of the riesling. ‘One washed up on a beach in Somalia last year full of thousands of bags of potato chips – made the kids’ day.’

Aleta smiled and turned to stare at the dark mountainous seas ahead. The wind moaned in the rigging of the ship’s cranes and tore at the foaming crests beyond. She looked back at O’Connor. ‘You know, if someone had told me that one day I’d be sitting in a cabin with an Irishman, guarding two priceless figurines and sipping riesling – which is very nice by the way – while on the run from a bunch of hitmen, I would have thought they’d lost their marbles.’

‘This is life and we’re living it, but unfortunately your life’s not going to be the same for a while, at least not until we find the codex.’ O’Connor paused, weighing up how much hurt his next question might cause. ‘What happened in San Marcos? If that’s not too painful a question.’ O’Connor was still puzzled as to why some of the most powerful men in Washington wanted Aleta dead.

Aleta sighed. ‘No, it’s not too painful, although I still want those responsible brought to justice.’ She gripped the table again as the Galapagos ploughed into the base of another massive wave. The whole ship shuddered, her bow disappearing from view in another explosion of white foam. ‘I was only eight at the time. My father was a lay preacher in the little Catholic church at San Marcos.’

‘Yet he started out life as Jewish?’

Aleta nodded. ‘Papa was Jewish through and through, but as I mentioned to you at Mauthausen, Archbishop Angelo Roncalli, who later became Pope John XXIII, helped my father escape the Nazis. Roncalli used to sit up until three in the morning forging Catholic baptism certificates for Jewish children.’ Aleta’s eyes were moist. ‘Papa said that Roncalli was everything a priest should be. My aunt Rebekkah drowned during their escape, but Papa never forgot Roncalli’s kindness. My grandparents were both Jewish, and they had great faith, but I think Papa practised his own faith as a Catholic out of respect for Roncalli. Papa was occasionally asked to preach at the bigger Catholic church in San Pedros, fifteen minutes by boat from San Marcos.’ Aleta took O’Connor back to 1982 and the north-west shores of the beautiful lake.