Adrian D'Hage - The Maya codex

‘Aaggghhhh!’ His opponent grasped his neck and tumbled backwards over the stern. O’Connor dived and swam through the clouding bloody water, gripping his opponent in a final choke hold. The diver’s struggles gradually weakened until they ceased altogether and O’Connor let go, watching the lifeless body sink to the floor of the lake. He clambered over the stern of the boat and retrieved the nylon bag containing the figurine. Fidel’s boat was drifting some 200 metres to the north. O’Connor sat on the gunwale, clasped the figurine to his chest and rolled back into the water in a backwards somersault.

When O’Connor surfaced, Aleta was still sitting on the ledge, trying to cut and refit her slashed breathing hose.

‘Are you okay?’

Aleta nodded. ‘Are they still out there?’

‘They’re both dead, but I think they got to Fidel.’

‘Bastards! These people don’t fucking give up, do they?’

‘No, and it’s not over yet. But if we can get to Tikal before the solstice, we might still have a chance.’ He placed the figurine on the ledge and dived back to the floor of the cave to retrieve Aleta’s face mask and the bag containing the ingots. ‘Your regulator’s stuffed,’ he said when he returned to the ledge, ‘so we’ll buddy breathe.’

‘Thank you, Curtis. You saved my life, again.’

He grinned. ‘All part of the service.’ Together, they stepped back into the now-clear, emerald waters of the cave. With the figurine and the gold safely back in their grasp, they swam slowly towards the entrance, sharing O’Connor’s regulator every three breaths. Outside the cave and about fifteen metres above them, the hulls of the two lanchas were clearly visible. O’Connor gave Aleta the thumbs up towards the one that still had a propeller.

Fidel was lying unconscious on the bottom of the boat, his shirt stained with blood. O’Connor grabbed a towel to stem the flow. ‘San Pedro will have the best medical facilities – or Panajachel?’

‘There’s a doctor at San Marcos,’ Aleta replied, gunning the motor. Jose Arana was waiting for them at the little jetty and together he and O’Connor carried Fidel to the doctor’s house, where Arana remained to wait for news.

When Jose returned, Aleta was sitting with O’Connor in the garden, explaining what she’d learned during her regression therapy.

‘The doctor said he’ll be okay,’ Arana said, ‘but if you hadn’t got to him when you did, Fidel would no longer be with us.’ He picked up the carved jade figurine, admiring the ancient craftsmanship. ‘You’ve done well,’ he said.

‘Did you know that one of us might have lost an arm?’ Aleta asked, an edge to her voice.

‘I warned you that both the last figurine and the codex itself would be fiercely protected,’ Arana replied simply, ‘but more importantly you have less than three days until the solstice.’

‘We have a little task to complete in San Pedro before we leave,’ O’Connor said. ‘Von Hei?en’s diaries contain compelling evidence of the atrocities the Nazis committed at Mauthausen… and they also contain evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the Guatemalan death squads. Jennings obviously doesn’t know they’re there, but we need to recover them to a safe place.’

‘How are we going to distract Jennings?’ Aleta asked. ‘Mass will be finished in half an hour.’

‘How do you feel about confession?’

‘What?’

‘I saw a notice on the porch of the church. Jennings conducts confessions after Mass, and if you hold him up in the confessional, I’ll have time to get the trunks out of the ceiling and down to the launch.’

‘And what if he recognises me?’

‘He won’t. Not if your face is covered by a niqab.’

‘A Muslim full-face veil? He can’t give confession to a Muslim!’

‘Pretend you’re going through a crisis of faith, and that you’re going to convert. That should give me long enough!’

‘I’ll be there for a week. Besides, I’ll stand out like a sore thumb.’

‘Not really,’ Arana said. ‘There are quite a few Muslims in the Lake Atitlan community, and we all coexist without any problems. Besides, every picture you have ever seen of the Virgin Mary depicts her in a veil. That’s just a Christian version of the hijab.’

A leta waited on the main steps outside the church until the last of the congregation had shaken their priest by the hand, while O’Connor took up a position in the gardens. Even at a distance, Jennings’ surprise and irritation at Aleta’s request for him to hear a Muslim renounce her faith in a Catholic confessional was clearly audible, and O’Connor watched as the two disappeared back inside the church. Confident that Aleta would tie Jennings up in knots, he headed for the presbytery.

Monsignor Jennings slammed the door of the little wooden confessional shut and switched on the red light above the door. Aleta closed the curtain on her side, knelt on the tattered cushion and waited until Jennings slid open the worn cedar partition. Through the holes, Aleta could make out Jennings’ shadowy figure. He was breathing heavily. It had been many years since Aleta had been in a confessional, but she remembered the tortuous procedure of a teenager’s imagined sins as if it were yesterday. She remembered, too, the lives the hypocrite on the other side of the screen had destroyed.

‘My friends tell me that unless I renounce Islam and become a Catholic I will burn in hell,’ Aleta whispered.

‘And your friends are correct. You must renounce your current beliefs and embrace the one true faith.’

‘But we both worship the one God?’

Jennings snorted. ‘God has revealed much more of Himself to Catholics than to any other faith. He is God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Those who do not take Jesus as their Saviour, or who do, but embrace other denominations of Christianity, are gravely deluded…’

Aleta listened, willing the minutes by as Jennings launched into full stride, delivering a verbal broadside against other faiths. ‘Unless you accept the Catholic faith in all of its beauty and majesty, you are doomed, my girl.’

Aleta glanced at her watch. O’Connor had estimated he’d need fifteen minutes to recover the trunks from the ceiling and get them back to the jetty. She needed to keep Jennings going for a while longer.

‘I have another problem, Father.’

‘And what’s that?’ Jennings asked irritably.

‘I masturbate… a lot. Is that a sin, Father?’ Aleta could feel the fat priest’s piggy little stare boring through the holes in the partition, and she fought to quell a fit of the giggles.

‘It is a very serious sin! Matthew makes it very clear that when your right hand causes you to sin, it should be cut off. The Catholic God is a very jealous God, and if you abuse your body for an act of self-gratification, that is sexual idolatry, a mortal sin for which you will surely burn in hell. If you don’t turn away from this false faith, and if you don’t reject sex for pure pleasure, I can’t help you.’

‘Thank you, Father. Can I ask how you manage to do without sex?’

‘How dare you? How dare you? You will leave this church now!’

Aleta slipped out of the confessional, leaving Jennings fuming on the other side of the partition.

Security around the Vandenberg Air Force Base was tighter than usual. A heavy swell was coming in across a dark Pacific Ocean, and a searchlight probed the white caps as additional guards patrolled the Point Sal beach. The specially modified thirty-tonne LGM-30 Minuteman missile was in the last stages of being readied in test-launch silo Lima Foxtrot-26. A short distance away, the technicians were carrying out a series of final checks on the equipment on board Looking Glass. The crew of the E6-Mercury command and control aircraft were already strapped in their seats. They would vector the missile into a precise position for the massive ELF attack on the Iranian tunnel systems, an attack that would penetrate as far as the earth’s core. Nearly 4000 kilometres to the north, the command and control centre at Gakona was at full strength, where the scientists and technicians were testing HAARP’s elaborate circuitry. Tyler Jackson shifted nervously in his swivel chair, weighing up his options. The countdown to H-hour had begun.