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He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, thrusting it at Brillante. Roth’s legs lost their strength, and he couldn’t run. He couldn’t even stand.
“Dad!” Lucas shouted. “Run!”
“Hide!” Roth urged his boys. “Hide! Don’t let him catch you!”
His body was overcome with spasms.
“Dad!” Brillante roared, staring at the phone that had been shoved into his hand.
Roth tried to speak, but he couldn’t say anything. The drug had immobilized him, but he was fully alert. He could hear the screams of his boys and the crowd. Could feel the twins trying to drag him away.
He tried to warn them again, but no sound came through his lips. He slumped down on the marble floor of the rotunda, unable to scratch the itch that was radiating from the back of his neck where the needle had struck. Helpless. He was totally helpless.
Brillante looked back and then grabbed Lucas, who was sobbing, and the twins raced away. Roth watched them go, relieved when they joined the crowd of students because surely, they’d blend in. He felt the shuddering of the stone floor from the stampede of people. But vibrations, heavy ones, were coming toward him. A very strong man heaved Roth up onto his shoulder without even a grunt of effort.
“FBI! Freeze!”
The jaguar priest turned, and Roth, dangling from the man’s back, saw their FBI jackets. At least a dozen agents were there. They were all unarmed but in fighting stances, encircling Roth and his abductor.
The jaguar priest pivoted again, looking at the officers. Then he swung Roth off his shoulder and set him down on the floor.
“You sure bullets don’t work against this guy?” one of the agents said.
“You know what happened the last time someone tried,” said another. “Take him down.”
Roth could hear the sounds of fighting, the groans of pain, but he could only see what was in front of him—the elephant statue. A body skidded past Roth and struck the base, the man’s eyes still open even in death. Roth stared at him, unable to move, to speak, to scream for help. He hoped his boys were outside by now. He hoped they were tucked into the crowd and would keep their heads down and keep running.
“Backup! We need more backup!”
A shot was fired. Out of frustration or some other reason. But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered. It only took a few minutes before they were all down, dead or incapacitated. Roth thought about Jordan and Monica. Were they dead? He hoped not. The last he’d seen, Monica was bleeding, and Jordan had been incapacitated. Had the priest broken his neck too? Roth didn’t know.
His heart clenched with dread as the jaguar priest hoisted him up again over his shoulder. He heard a word whispered in ancient Mayan, and then his captor began to walk. Bouncing against his back, Roth saw a SWAT team storm into the rotunda with assault rifles. What good were they against such a man? Even knowing that weapons were useless, they couldn’t quell the learned instinct to use them. It would be the same way with the military too.
Roth saw more SWAT teams rush in from the other direction. In fact, the jaguar priest must have walked right past them. They were converging in the rotunda.
“Where is he? Where’s the target?”
The jaguar priest kept walking, moving past escalators and the café entrance, and Roth couldn’t do anything as he bounced against the man’s muscled back like dead weight. They entered another exhibit. One marked “Hall of Human Origins.”
There was no one left inside. No, Roth saw a mom with two kids and a stroller, huddled against the wall in the corner, shivering in fear. The jaguar priest either didn’t see them or didn’t care. He just kept walking. Roth heard echoes from the SWAT team as they continued their search of the building. They wouldn’t find him. He was invisible to them. Cloaked in a magic that was thousands of years old.
Roth didn’t know what happened next. One moment, he could see the floor bouncing, and then suddenly they were engulfed in odorless black smoke. He felt a tugging inside him, a premonition of dread, and then they were in a darkened room. It was humid and smelled of stone.
Roth saw an arrangement of black obsidian mounted on the walls. The pieces were circular, rough cut, and gilded in gold embedded with jade.
Other men were gathered in the room, and they began to chant in Spanish, almost gleefully. “Mataré. Mataré. ¡Mataré!”
Roth knew the word. It meant something about killing.
The jaguar priest carried Roth out of the chamber. There was a grinding of stone, and then the priest had to crouch to get past a barrier of some sort. Roth saw a final glimpse of the room with the obsidian mirrors. His mind shot to the legends of Kukulkán’s brother. How images of him showed an obsidian mirror for a foot. Now Roth understood. The followers of Huracán, the wicked brother, could travel between the mirrors. That was how Jacob had reached Washington, DC, and other capitals around the world. It wasn’t just a random teleportation, but a connection from mirror to mirror, bound through the magic.
That meant they were back in the Yucatán. Roth was so disoriented from being carried on the man’s back that he couldn’t tell which way they’d gone, only that they were in a maze, perhaps within the great pyramid of the Jaguar Temple itself. He was in enemy territory. And the US military was about to attack.
Roth realized that he was going to die. And not just any death. He’d be sacrificed on an ancient altar in front of a crowd.
Jacob Calakmul would have his revenge at last.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
