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With fear shining amid the tears, she bolted away from him down the length of the bridge.
Jacob invoked the magic of his ring and turned himself into an alligator. She was terrified of crocodiles and alligators. She’d told him as much. Reptiles gave her nightmares.
He had no doubt he’d catch her before she reached the steps leading out of the cenote. Alligators were faster on land than they were in the water.
And faster than any human.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
JAGUAR TEMPLE
CALAKMUL BIOSPHERE RESERVE
January 10
In their confined cell, Roth and Brower could do no more than talk while they waited for someone to come for them. Three darts wasn’t much, but it was something. Enough to incapacitate a guard after the kem äm was removed. Roth sat by the opening, crammed in the corner. Brower was against the far wall, within sight. The plan was that Roth would use one dart to prick the guard in the ankle after the barrier was removed. Brower would lunge out of the room and attack anyone else in the hallway in the hope his FBI training in hand-to-hand combat would be enough to take out their foes. They’d try to save the remaining two darts but would use them if necessary. Then they’d free the other prisoners, somehow, and make their way to the jungle. Not a great plan, but the only one they had.
“Let me ask you this, Jonathon. Do you believe the Maya gods are real? That this Kukulkán deity is going to return like the prophecy said he would?”
“I don’t know,” Roth said slowly. “I’ve spent the last year researching it.”
“I know you have. Which is why I’m asking you. These two factions have been enemies for a very long time, I gather.”
“It’s been a stumbling block that so many historical documents were destroyed by the Spanish in the 1500s. The priests who interviewed the native Maya and Aztec interpreted what they were told through their own lens.”
“Give me an example.”
“Take Kukulkán or his Aztec version, Quetzalcóatl. A bearded god who appeared from the east, taught the people construction, to live harmoniously with each other, and to stop performing human sacrifices. Sounds a little like Christianity. Some of those priests, back in the 1500s, wondered if one of the twelve apostles had come to Mesoamerica as a missionary. Some reports even said Quetzalcóatl had holes in his hands. There was a statue found in the Yucatán, for example, that depicted him that way. There’s another statue in Oaxaca that also had holes in the hands. So was it an apostle . . . or was it Christ himself? We only know a fraction of what they knew five centuries ago.”
“It could mean all sorts of things,” Brower suggested. “A religious person would see evidence of what he or she believed. It’s the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.”
Roth smiled. He was liking Brower more and more. A smart guy. “Yeah, I know. It’s also called the recency bias or the frequency illusion. I’m glad you mentioned it because I had the same thought too at first. But here’s the weird part. Farther south, in Peru, where the Inca built Cusco and had a completely different culture and belief system, there is the legend of Viracocha. It’s strikingly similar to the legend of Kukulkán and Quetzalcóatl. A bearded man who showed up and taught the people to live in harmony and instructed them in advanced technology—oh, and Viracocha could walk on water. That was a detail the Aztec and Maya didn’t have in their legend, but a familiar tradition in Christianity, right? From what archaeologists have told us, those two civilizations didn’t interact with each other. Both have legends that talk about a great flood too, just like myths in other parts of the world.”
“I’ve never heard of Viracocha before.”
“Neither had I before I started studying this stuff. And the Inca also had a legend that Viracocha would return. Just like Quetzalcóatl in Aztec lore and Kukulkán for the Maya. Modern scholars say it’s just the Spanish influence weaving Christian myths into local culture, but I’m not convinced. I can’t explain it. And guess what—a Cherokee tribe had similar myths, and they lived much farther north. No connection with the Aztec and Maya at all.”
“How do you explain it, then?”
“I don’t know that I can,” Roth said with a sigh. “But all of these legends mean something. There’s an author who wrote a book called Fingerprints of the Gods. He tried to tie all of these legends together, from Mesoamerica and the Mediterranean. His theory is that there’s a common origin story. We can’t know that for sure, of course. What we do know is that these ancient Mesoamerican civilizations all knew the planets. That they were incredibly educated on the cosmos, even more so than European scientists back in the day, and that they left prophecies and predictions about what would happen in the future.”
“And you think Calakmul has misinterpreted those predictions?”
“I do. I think they were about Kukulkán. Or Viracocha. I think it heralds a return of this more enlightened people. The ones who didn’t want human sacrifice. The Aztec, you see, believed human sacrifices kept the universe in balance. The two sides have been at war for a long time. What if the prophecy is about the end of the Calakmul family? The end of the line?”
“I wouldn’t be opposed to that,” Brower chuckled. “I’ve never felt so helpless before. Whether it’s technology or magic, it’s more advanced than what we have.”
“I know,” Roth agreed. “It’s stumped archaeologists for decades.”
“How so?”
“How did a primitive people manage to move such huge pieces of stone, each one weighing tons, in order to build these huge temples? The wall at Saksaywaman in Peru, for example, has pieces that weigh two hundred tons. They fit so precisely and without mortar that they’ve stood for centuries, or even millennia. But there is no evidence of where this engineering know-how came from to lift such a stone, let alone slide it perfectly into place. Even in our modern cities, you can see cranes as evidence of how buildings so tall could be built. Nothing like that here, though. Some of the pyramids here in Mexico are even bigger in circumference than the pyramids of Giza.”
“Truly?”
Roth held up his hands. “There’s more that we don’t know than what we do know. And I’ve only been researching this for the last year. I realized in the arena during the death game that we were playing the game the wrong way. Instead of whacking the rubber balls, the ancients had used their kind of magic to levitate them and send them into orbit. Wouldn’t it also be possible for them to have used the kem äm in a similar way with construction? A force that amplifies force to lift the stones?”
“Just like that force field blocking the door bounces back harder than something thrown against it?”
