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Lund chuckled. “Go for it.”
“This is ridiculous,” snapped Carter. “A joke.”
Roth looked at Brower. “Do you think it’s real? Monica does because she’s seen it. If my daughter were here, she could prove it’s real. She could levitate your coffee cup right off the table.”
“Whether or not I personally believe your story is immaterial,” Brower said. He’d smoothed his features again, regaining his self-control. “The director needs to believe it. And right now, he doesn’t.”
“What about the forensics?” Roth said. “The bullets that killed the FBI agents in Bozeman. Did they come from the guns the agents were carrying?”
“Yes,” Brower said flatly.
“So, isn’t that evidence?” Roth thundered, gesticulating wildly.
“Agent Garcia is the wild card,” Lund said.
Brower glanced at him and nodded once.
“What?” Roth said, exasperated.
“I get it,” Lund said, sighing. “The agents’ own bullets killed them. Fired from their own guns. But who’s to say that Garcia didn’t take their guns, one by one, and shoot them and stage the crime scene. You left on snowmobiles with Agent Sanchez. He stayed behind.”
“I saw it happen,” Roth said. “I saw those bullets arc back at the people who’d fired them.”
“So did I.” Monica had a haunted look in her eyes, and he knew he wasn’t the only one who’d lost sleep over what he’d seen.
“And yet, where there’s room for doubt, it will fester,” Lund said. “Now you see what I had to deal with, every day? Skeptics.”
“It doesn’t matter that we were eyewitnesses?” Monica snapped.
“Don’t get emotional,” Carter said.
“But it’s okay if you do?” she shot back.
Brower rubbed his chin. “Tell us about the Jaguar Prophecies again, Mr. Roth. The translation you got from the student in LA.”
“This?” Roth asked, wagging the phone at them. “The stuff you just got done saying you don’t believe in?”
“Humor us,” Brower said.
“The Dresden Codex contained several blank pages. It’s made of bark pulp. I thought it highly strange that it had been preserved for over five centuries with blank pages. Well, there’s a glyph that made the writing invisible. My daughter, Suki . . . ‘counteracted’ it? I don’t know the right word. She canceled it. I took photos, and the student, Illari, deciphered it and gave me the translation.” Roth swiped to another image, one of a piece of binder paper with the translation scrawled out by hand, with a few words crossed out for other ones.
“Just summarize it,” Brower said.
“It’s a prophecy of Kukulkán, one of the chief Maya gods. It predicts the Maya will be scattered by foreigners. Hint, Cortés and the conquistadors. But if the foreigners don’t repent, it says, then a remnant of Jacob—a remnant of the house of Jacob—will trample through a numerous people like a young jaguar through sheep. Sheep can’t defend themselves. So, basically, it predicts a reversal of what happened back in 1520. The prophecy was written in the codex, an almanac that helped them track future events, like eclipses and the planets’ rotations. Most of the codex is about that kind of stuff. But this prophecy was set to happen after the end of the Maya doomsday calendar. Calakmul told me himself that 2012 was the trigger. It was the beginning of the end times.”
“Again, this doesn’t help us,” Carter said. “It’s not actionable intelligence.”
Brower looked thoughtful. He leaned forward, interlocking his fingers. “How did Cortés and a few Spanish mercenaries take out the Indigenous population of that land? Was it purely a technological advantage?”
Roth shook his head. “It wasn’t any one thing, Mr. Brower. The Spanish brought gunpowder and smallpox, which ravaged the population. It’s highly contagious, and they had no herd immunity to it. Yes, the Spanish had superior weapons, but they mostly triggered a civil war within the Aztec empire.”
“Who was the ruler?”
“Montezuma. Most historians believe Cortés kidnapped Montezuma and then had him killed, triggering the massacre on La Noche Triste. Many Aztec nobility were slaughtered during a feast day. That led to the population rising up against Cortés and the Spaniards. Some say that was the tipping point.”
“You sound skeptical, Mr. Roth,” Brower said.
“Well, I’ve researched this quite a bit over the last year. Some newer scholarship suggests Montezuma—or Moctezuma, which is his real name—wasn’t afraid of the Spanish but actually lured them into his city as a sort of trophy or prize. Like exotic animals in a menagerie. They were basically under house arrest until they decided to assassinate the king and break out. And, as they say, ‘Winners write the history books.’”
