He remembered when he had gone round the building outside how the narrow alleyways had run far back. This building had a lot of depth, and the internal space must be used to store something, but what? It had to be really important, because only a privileged few gained access to this second stage of security—you had to have the correct fingerprint. How could he get round that?
Sayid watched the man move back toward the lift. He stood in front of the doors for a moment and studied the framework next to where the call button was located. His fingers seemed to trace the area around the stainless steel, and then he took something from his pocket. Sayid changed camera angles, choosing one that sat high in the corner of the corridor and included the lift doors. He used his mouse to pinpoint the camera’s control panel that sat on his screen and tweaked the direction of the lens. Sayid zoomed in. Now he could see that the man had a square of what looked like acetate in his hands. He peeled the back off it and pressed it against the frame, then lifted it off carefully. Keegan turned and moved back down the corridor.
Sayid changed camera angles again. He was just to one side, and high up, but he could look down at what the man was doing—placing the sheet on a small screen. It was a fingerprint swipe. Clever. He had lifted a fingerprint to gain access. These guys were good, Sayid thought. No wonder they were MI5.
The opaque wall panel slid back, exposing a broad, tiled room. Immediately to one side were stainless-steel coat stands, purpose-designed to hang a biohazard suit on—and
there were four of them suspended now, just like the ones Sayid had seen worn in the Underground tunnel.
But the man had barely glanced at the suits, because set square in the middle of this room was a glass cage with a stainless-steel table in the middle. Like a postmortem examination room. The glass cage was a completely sealed unit, and if Sayid could have viewed the room from another angle, he would have seen that there was a special entrance built through an air lock at the back of this cage, where a medical team could enter and exit safely once they had hooked up the oxygen line for their biohazard suits.
Sayid watched as the man pressed some console buttons on one wall. A series of screens appeared, half a dozen individual frames, as if they were an integral part of the wall, just as a hospital examination room would display images from a scanning machine. Sayid could not see what the images were, but he watched as the man put a hand to his face in horror and then staggered back a few paces, banging into one of the biohazard suits. He spun round, completely disoriented, and then bent over and vomited on the cold tile floor. Whatever was on those screens must have been horrific.
Sayid saw movement on his monitor. Someone else was in the building. He quickly keyed in different camera angles. Two men he had never seen before. They were in the downstairs area stepping into the lift. Another angle—they pressed the button. The first floor. They knew there was an intruder in the building. Sayid couldn’t see the faces yet; they kept their chins tucked low. They knew there were cameras. Sayid keyed to his angle back in the examination room; the man was leaning against the wall, wiping his face with his sleeve.
He seemed weakened by what he had seen. Why didn’t he get out? If what was on those screens was so terrible, why didn’t he get out?
Sayid shouted at the images, “Run! Get out now as fast as you can! Hurry!
Hurry
!”
A warning flash bleeped loudly on Sayid’s computer. It was insistent, demanding his attention. The men were getting closer to that examination room; the doors of the lift were opening. Sayid pressed the key that highlighted the warning signal. It was from his White Hat group. The text was in capital letters: they were shouting a warning at him.
SHUT DOWN, MAGICIAN. SHUT DOWN. THEY’RE TRACING YOU! WE CAN’T HOLD THEM OFF. THESE GUYS ARE POWERFUL. SHUT DOWN. GET OUT NOW. GET OUT!
Sayid felt a wave of terror engulf him. He clicked back to the screens. The man was backing against the glass cage, his arm raised as if trying to shield himself; then he went out of sight, because one of the two intruders stood in front of him and was extending his arm, pointing at him. Pointing or aiming?
Helplessly, Sayid yelled at the screen. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!”
Suddenly his vision was blurred. A hand had reached up and pulled the camera lens downward. One of the intruders looked right at him. Right into his eyes. He pointed a finger. And smiled. The screens went haywire. Sayid ripped the power cable out of the wall.
And then there was nothing. Sayid sat in stunned silence
for a couple of seconds. With a surge of fear, he pushed the chair back from the desk. It felt as though the man were in the room with him. What had happened in that building was connected to Max, and so were those images that Keegan had seen.
What were they? What horror was Max facing?
Faces with gaping mouths screamed in silent terror. The clay pottery masks with their empty eye sockets gazed blindly into Orsino Flint’s hut from where they hung on the walls. Animal skins were stretched across the wall and floor; rare and exotic plants, dripping with moisture, were tucked into corners, competing for space with a collection of spears, shields, bows and arrows. It was a museum of jungle living. More face masks, but this time of wood, crudely carved and decorated with brightly speckled garish paint, hung on another wall as if in a gallery. They looked like representations of various jungle animals.
Flint pointed to a place on the floor. “Sit there,” he said as he began to rummage in a corner where rolls of maps and charts were stacked like a woodpile.
Max could barely curb his impatience. Where had his mother disappeared to before she died? He could not rush this strange character; he was there because of Orsino Flint’s goodwill. His own fate had not yet been decided. One thing was certain: Max could never escape from this jungle hideout. He needed Flint on his side. He did as he was told. “What are all those masks?” he asked, trying to divert his attention from the more pressing questions he had.
Flint kept his head down, looking at the rolls. “The Maya call him Balam. Jaguar. Don’t you know anything? The jaguar is revered here.”
Max’s heart thudded. Instant recall. The memory of the big cat in the jungle as its eyes met his own, penetrating the depths of his consciousness—a moment of raw power when the two entities, animal and human, met.
The image broke as Flint unrolled two old maps on the floor, holding the corners down with a selection of rocks, pots and a monkey skull.
“People like you and your parents come here, and how much do you know about the Mayan culture? Not a lot, is my guess. You come here to save them; they don’t need saving. They are the people of the earth and sky—and the jaguar. Thousands of years ago, they were plotting the stars and planets; their temples were built in position so that precise observations could be made. They worked out that there were 365.24 days in the year. Not bad for a Stone Age people, eh? They were craftsmen, farmers; they traded jade across Central America. They were warriors who fought fierce hand-to-hand battles. They took prisoners and they sacrificed them—that was their way. Dying under the knife was a privilege. Bloodletting was essential to appease the gods: it brought rain and good harvests. Even the kings and queens pushed sea-urchin spines through their tongues to collect blood. And then along came the Europeans and showed them what barbarity really was: slaughtering them with muskets and disease.”
Flint sat back on his haunches and made a roll-up cigarette.
Max was not going to be bullied. “I’m not taking responsibility
for the downfall of a civilization. I’m a schoolboy looking for his mum, so don’t lay a guilt trip on me. And as far as I know, they died because there were too many of them—there wasn’t enough food to feed them all. Isn’t that right? They lived off corn? The seasons changed and they couldn’t feed themselves. Fat lot of good slaughtering people did.”
Flint stared at Max. “You got a mouth, son. Just like your mother. Maybe you should bite your tongue once in a while, eh? OK, so you’re a smart kid. You think you’re educated, do you? I didn’t go to school, but I’m the only man who can spend months in the jungle and get out alive, right back to where I started. I’m still the king of plant thieves. Who finds the ghost orchid? Me.”
“And my mother stopped you. I’m glad she did that. She hated thieves and people who hurt others.”
“I don’t hurt nobody. I save things,” he said as he puffed on the cigarette and gazed down at the sweat-stained maps and drawings. “I saved you, didn’t I? Why do you think I was near the river? I was finding the ghost. You cost me time and money, boy. You’re damned lucky, ’cause if I wasn’t a plant thief, you’d be croc bait.”
Max knew it was foolish to antagonize him. He softened his tone. He needed the man on his side.
“I’m grateful, Mr. Flint, but I don’t want to hang around here any longer than I have to.”
“Son, no one calls me Mister. You keep it simple—Flint will do. And I want you and that drug merchant out of here. You could bring me big trouble.”
“Xavier tried to get away from all that. He wanted a new life.”
“Aha. Listen, boy. If you don’t ever take on board one single word I say, you remember this: that kid out there is a drug merchant. He and his kind kill untold numbers of people with what they do. If he made a deal with the devil to save his own skin, then that’s what he’ll do again. He will betray you at the first opportunity he gets. Don’t you ever forget that.”
Flint returned his attention to the maps on the floor, his finger tracing a line through the jungle. The maps were old and probably something Flint never needed to use anymore, but he touched a large darkened shape that looked to Max like a mountain range. “You don’t know how bad this jungle can be. I reckon your mother went into the most forbidden place of all.”
“Where the illegal logging is being done?” Max said.
“That’s one of the most
dangerous
places. What I said was
forbidden
place. Get those pictures of your mother out,” he said.
Max eased the photos from the folder. They were dry and hard to the touch, the colors faded by the water, but other than that, there was little damage. Flint’s grubby hands took them carelessly and threw them down in front of Max like playing cards, but he had thrown them down in some kind of order.
“This one here,” he said, stabbing one of the pictures, “this is called Xunantunich. This whole area was once heavily populated, a huge city, but it means nothing—it’s where the tourists go, so why would your mother be there?”
“I don’t know. I suppose she was just taking some time out.”
“Aha,” Flint said, and then pushed the other photographs
into place across the maps. “This second one here, you see this stone relief she is standing in front of? That’s an ancient Mayan king, and next to him is what?”
Max studied the photograph more carefully. He had seen the pictures so many times, and although he had understood that the stone carvings on the lintels were similar to those he had seen in the British Museum, he had not identified the creature. It was a dragon-type monster with a crocodile head, but it had the ears of a deer, and where its claws should have been were deer hooves.
“I don’t know. It’s bizarre.”
“Only to those who can’t see beyond the ordinary. That’s called the Cosmic Monster.” Flint kept his finger on the photograph. “It represents the planets across the star fields; it’s the path between the natural and the supernatural worlds. And that figure there is the jaguar sun god.”
Max took the picture from him and looked at the fine detail of the carvings, something he had simply not comprehended before. “So does this mean something?”
There were four more photographs laid out on the maps, but Flint ignored them for the moment and kept the first one taken at Xunantunich. “Did you have any other pictures from the jungle?”
“No,” said Max. “These were all I ever had of her on her last field trip.”
“I think she was pretending to be a tourist in this one,” Flint said, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “In case anyone was following her, because someone like your mother would have known these places. In each of these photographs, your mother is moving to different
ancient sites. Most of these are not known to outsiders. Maybe a few archaeologists and the local people who have ventured into the jungle as their guides, but these places are not where tourists go. She was going deeper and deeper into the jungle.”
Max was fascinated more than ever by the pictures of his mother, because now she was telling him a story. “Do you think she was trying to tell me, or somebody else, about where she was going?”
Flint shrugged and flicked the soggy, extinguished cigarette away. A rattling cough accompanied the shake of his head. “I don’t know.” Then he went through the remaining pictures, touching each one as he explained their location to Max and the meanings of the cut-stone panels. “These carvings with the bird feathers, they’re priests, shamans. They did all the blood sacrifices. These here, these are Serpent Warriors.”
“Serpent Warriors?” Max said. The image of twisting snakes coiled about their victims leapt into his mind. “Did they use snakes when they fought their wars?”
Flint reached out and took a spear that leaned against the wall. “No. That’s just what the warriors were called, but you spend time out here and you’ll see boa constrictors take wild animals, crush them and swallow them whole. You’d better hope you don’t tangle with one of those.” He handed the spear to Max. “This is one of the weapons the warriors used.”
Max felt the weight of the spear and fingered the flint head—a heavy blade, its edges flaked to slice into the enemy’s flesh.
“They were called teeth of lightning, those spears. And
they also had stone knives cut into the shape of a jaguar paw. It was a mean way to fight, but they were warriors who fought face to face—you have to admire that. Fight or die. Simple choices.” He held the photograph up. “See these carvings?”