Death and Deception Read online

  I said, We’re just dreaming about the future, that’s all.

  Mercury said, A hundred aurei says she has you whipped in a week.

  I said, We’ve been over this. No one’s used aurei in two thousand years. It’s dollars now.

  Mercury said, Whatever, brutha. She’s gonna take your manhood and stuff it in a jar. You’ll be painting pink polish on her toenails before you know it.

  Oh. Hold up. I might have left something out. See. Most guys come home from the wars and reintegrate into civilian life with minimal problems. But. Some guys come home and live in mortal fear of open spaces. Other guys come back wound up tight like a grenade with its pin pulled. A few guys self-medicate their way back into society. There’s a US Army study known as Red Book that says soldiers serving three or more combat tours are a “growing high-risk population.” I pulled eight.

  But I didn’t have any problems. None at all.

  Because I had a god on my side.

  I’m not talking about some mute and invisible deity that preachers and rabbis and imams talk about in hushed tones. I’m talking about a black, toga-wearing, foul-mouthed god in the flesh who smacks the back of your head when you don’t listen. I’m talking about a god revered for thousands of years by millions of people. A god who helped me out when I most needed it. Don’t go shaking your head like that. Open your mind. Expand your reality.

  Why am I so special? Because he and his buddies—Jupiter, Saturn, Minerva, Juno, Venus, the whole lot—fell on hard times back in 390 AD when Emperor Theodosius decreed everyone had to worship Nicene Christianity. Mercury’s temple, the biggest in Rome, was trashed that year. Terrible way to treat the gods. He and his buddies have been trying to sell tickets to their reunion tour ever since.

  I know what you’re thinking: Jacob’s insane. You’re not alone. My caseworker back in the Army said the same thing. He and a bunch of fancy psychiatrists labeled me “problematic” and “a catastrophic nightmare waiting to happen.” Their diagnosis? PTSD-induced schizophrenia. The fact that Mercury’s black and tries to talk street sends them over the edge. I don’t know why. It says right there in the Bible, Genesis 1:27, “God created humankind in his image.” And we all know homo sapiens originated in southern Africa, so there you have it. God is a black African. Spelled out in the Good Book whether or not it upsets your religious sensibilities.

  Apparently, no one else can see or hear him. I’m the only one blessed—or cursed—with his heavenly oratory.

  Lost in thought like that, I missed where Jenny had taken the conversation. Something about how we could make our marriage last.

  “That’s what I love about you,” she said. “You’re the order to my chaos. The yang to my yin.”

  “Is that a good thing? Chaos? And who’s yang?”

  “Of course, it’s a good thing,” she laughed. “Yin and yang are the Chinese concepts of duality. I’m talking about balance. The forces of order and chaos are not in conflict; they create a balance. You keep me balanced.”

  I kill bad guys for a living, I don’t get all that stuff about duality. When I hear that word, I think of books without pictures written by dead Germans. But I’d sure as hell figure it out for Jenny. I want my marriage to last a lifetime. Like my parents, not hers.

  “We were both in the military, that’s an orderly world.” She stopped hiking to face me. “You thrive on that. I didn’t. I made it work, but I thrive on chaos.”

  She didn’t like the way I was squinting at her, confused. She added, “When I say chaos, it’s not the kind you’re thinking of. Not like a terrorist throwing a bomb in a bazaar. It’s chaos as in unstructured creativity. Like when you’re solving a problem. You need chaotic thoughts to discover a unique solution. Or as Nietzsche said, ‘One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.’ There are other times when you need order. Like. Hmm. Like when you drive down the street, everyone has to obey the rules of the road or else you have …” She tried to come up with an analogy.

  “Rome?”

  “Exactly.” She laughed and resumed the trek. “You are my balance. Yin and yang, negative and positive, male and female. We fit together.”

  “Oh, I get it. Like tunnels and trains?”

  “Jacob! Is that all you think about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nine more miles to the professor’s site,” she said. “Then, if you’re a good boy, and we can find a secluded spot … did I mention you have to be a good boy?”

  “How about a bad one?”

  CHAPTER 3

  Three hours of hiking later, we entered the dig site of Professor Benito Hidalgo. We walked along an ancient shoulder-high wall with piles of recently stripped vegetation at its base. Anywhere else, it was a beautiful spring day in early March, but in this part of Central America, it was hot and humid.

  As we approached the center of activity, an older rich lady came out and stood in the middle of the path. You can tell rich people in the jungle because they look like they stepped out of a Hemingway safari, only with modern fabrics and colors. A man with a rifle slung on his shoulder stepped out of the brush behind her. She crossed her arms and said, “Whoever you are, I’m Carlotta. This is my dig. Turn around and get out.”

  “We’re here to see Professor Hidalgo,” I said. “We called ahead. I thought it was his dig.”

  “I’m paying for it. Who did you call?”

  “His office at the university. They said they’d reach him on the satellite phone to tell him we’re coming.”

  The guy with the rifle said, “Si, we get your call. Follow me.”

  “No one told me,” Carlotta said.

  We marched past her and her scowl. Her frown was so fierce, my grandmother would love to borrow it for special occasions. We came to the main clearing, a quarter-acre plaza of excavated paving stones, broken and tossed around by tree roots. On two sides, large military tents staked out the plaza’s edge.

  Mercury floated out of the heavens and landed beside me. You are not doing this, homie.

  I said, Why not?

  Mercury said, Dude, do you get paid to help the meek? Look at them. Grad students. They don’t have a peso between them. Leave them to Jesus.

  I said, I’m not doing this to get paid. The thing belonged to the Mayans at some point. These guys should decide which museum gets it.

  Mercury said, Did somebody forget who quit his cushy job at Sabel Security? Did somebody forget he set up his own company? Did somebody forget he has a commission from Mikhail-Caesar-Yeschenko to find Yuri Belenov?

  I said, This’ll only take a couple days. You’ve been bitching about this trip from the beginning. Leave me alone.

  Mercury said, You’re telling god to leave you alone? Nice. Did you forget Yeschenko offered you an advance and instead you came here? You’re gonna run outta cash and then you’ll be calling for divine intervention—again. Happens every time.

  Did I mention it’s a difficult relationship? I’d rather be a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu—anything else. But those gods never show up when I need to kill people. Bunch of pacifists.

  So. He’s all I’ve got. Most of the time he’s right about things. But where money’s concerned, the Roman god of commerce has strong feelings. Although, he had a point. The wedding planner had maxed out my credit cards (Jenny wanted what she wanted, and her dad thought I was a gold digger, so no love there). Very soon, I’d have to get that advance out of the notoriously tight—not to mention murderous—Mikhail Yeschenko.

  An American woman approached us. Early thirties, wearing a dirty plaid shirt and equally dirty khaki shorts that showed off mud-covered knees. After a shower, her jet-black hair would frame her deeply tanned face nicely. She said, “Are you Jacob Stearne?”

  One by one, grad students and volunteers appeared out of the trees. A dozen crammed the clearing and stared at us. One guy helped me out of my pack. I laid my artifact on a table and started to open the blanket I’d used for padding. Then I realized it
would be better to wait for Hidalgo. Unwrapping for the expert would be more dramatic.

  “How did you know his name?” Jenny slid in front of the woman. One of the rocks we’d overcome in our early relationship was her excessive jealousy. I hoped we weren’t regressing.

  “He’s the Hero of Paris, right?” the woman asked. “Everyone knows him. Didn’t the French President give him the key to the city?”

  Jenny’s mood switched to excited. She chatted with the woman. It turned out her name was Cherry. With a self-conscious laugh, Cherry took the initiative to point out she was working on her PhD in Mayan history and had never been a stripper.

  PhD or not, she was wrong. The president of France hadn’t given me a key to the city. He tossed a medal at me in a short ceremony set up by Sabel Security’s marketing department. Neither he nor I wanted to be there. When you save a couple hundred church goers from a mass shooter, you just want to go home and chill, not make a big deal out of it. And no president gets excited about giving national medals to a foreigner. But they dragged us together for the awkward photo op. It was one of the many reasons I’d decided to leave Sabel Security and open my own firm.

  A short, older man with a lean and weathered face, gray hair, and a confident ease appeared from the gathering crowd. Up close, the depth of the lines on his face made him look older than I’d first thought. He offered a hand and said, “It is a pleasure to meet you, Señor Stearne. I am Professor Rafael Tum of the University of Guatemala. Thank you for undertaking the arduous journey to our remote and humble dig.”

  His accent sounded like an upper-class Englishman with just a hint of Spanish. Yet his short, muscular build, and dark, ruddy skin looked as Mayan as anyone I’d met on the trail.

  I said, “You’re welcome.”

  Rafael searched my eyes as if he’d lost something. “Dr. Hidalgo will be along in a moment. We are honored that you chose to shoulder the responsibility of the Freedom Stone. Not everyone would ignore the dangers and make such an arduous trek.”

  Mercury stepped between us. Not everyone, my brutha, because most mortals would listen to the voice of god and toss that damn thing back in the ocean.

  I said, It’s historical. It’s archeologically important. I think.

  Mercury said, It don’t bother you that this fancy-ass professor of whatever just used the words dangerous and arduous while talking about it?

  I said, Why did he call it the Freedom Stone when you’ve been telling me it’s the Poison Stone?

  Mercury said, Some people see it differently. Some see blue and others see yellow. Don’t matter. The damn thing is Pandora’s box. Toss it back in the ocean.

  I said, We’re here. We’re giving it to the descendants of the Mayans who wrote on it. It’s the right thing to do.

  Mercury stomped off.

  Rafael Tum kept his suspicious gaze on me. I rewound where we’d left the conversation.

  “No big deal,” I said. “Hardly dangerous at all. A long walk but worth it to return it to the right people. Say, what was that you said about responsibility?”

  The gathered students and volunteers parted. A tall middle-aged guy made his way through them. He looked European with pale skin and dark brown hair. He stepped close to peer down at me. He wanted me to know he was in charge. At six-one, I’m bigger than most but not always the tallest. This guy had a couple inches on me.

  The tall man pointed at me and spoke with a light accent of perfectly articulated vowels and consonants. “You are Jacob Stearne, Señor? My office says you have something for me.”

  Professor Tum slipped behind Hidalgo and the others. He came to rest with his shoulder against a tree yet kept his gaze on me. Cherry tracked around until she pulled up next to Rafael. They whispered to each other while watching me.

  I pulled back the blanket and let the alabaster shine. Hidalgo glanced at me, then leaned in close and turned the box so the Mayan glyphs faced him. In unison, the others leaned in with him.

  “Very interesting find, Señor Stearne.” He tapped his chin in thought. “You are familiar with the myths about the Poison Stone, yes?”

  All eyes rose to me, waiting for an answer.

  I’d expected a larger scale of gratitude. Something like what ol’ man Tum said. Instead, I felt like a mouse surrounded by bobcats. Mercury had told me his version of the artifact. It had sounded strange and unreliable. I coughed. “Uh. No. What myth is that?”

  Hidalgo straightened up and pointed at the artifact. “There are rare but detailed stories in the oral tradition of certain Mayan tribes about an alabaster box. You have not heard these?”

  I raised my hands at my side, palms up.

  Hidalgo harrumphed and turned back to the box. His examination grew more intense. “Tell me, Señor, why did you post twenty-eight pictures of this on Instagram if you have not heard the tales?”

  Mercury face-palmed and shook his head. He had told me not to brag about Jenny’s prowess as an underwater salvage operator. She was the one who found the San Andrés. She was the one who figured out it was a thousand miles from where it was supposed to be. She was the one who found the captain’s logbooks that identified the shipwreck. I thought she should get props for that. But we promised the Cubans we wouldn’t tell anyone about the treasure.

  Lots of things had gone wrong for her since she got out of prison, and this was the first thing to go right. She had discovered a major archeological treasure. I was bursting with pride for her. Since the Cuban captain thought the box was a fake, I felt it would be OK to talk up that part of her find to our friends—as long as I left out the location and the stuff about caskets of gold and silver. I’m proud of my fiancé. So bite me. But I didn’t tell Hidalgo all that. Instead, I trimmed it down to the essentials. “I figured it tied the two continents together a thousand years before Columbus. That is, if it’s real. I thought you’d be the guy who would know.”

  “Where did you find it?” he asked. There was a chuckle under his question. As if he thought I would lie.

  In my peripheral vision, I sensed Jenny shaking her head. I said, “In the Caribbean. I’d rather not say exactly where because the locals weren’t interested in treasure hunters storming the area.”

  “I see,” he said with some snark.

  Everyone stared at me for a long time. Then a few snickers rippled between them. Like people trying very hard not to laugh. I got the impression they didn’t believe me. Maybe Mercury was right—I should’ve left this thing alone.

  “Excuse me, Benito,” Carlotta said. She pushed him aside with her hip.

  She examined the box, placed her hands on either side, and pressed buttons I hadn’t noticed before. There was an audible click. She pulled the top off and set it aside. Inside was a black chunk of glass a little larger than a football, shaped like a couch pillow, and smooth like a river rock. It looked almost like obsidian, but clearer and with gold flecks embedded in it. Carlotta grabbed it and raised it with great difficulty as if it were heavy. She held it to her chest, staring at it as if it were a baby. She rubbed her cheek on the surface.

  Everyone stared at her in disbelief.

  She carefully laid the rock back in the alabaster box and replaced the lid. It clicked again. She turned to Hidalgo, then glanced at the volunteers and students. She said, “So many people are hungry. Uneducated. Helpless. I … I have to help them. I must leave. At once. There is so much to do. So many in dire need of help. I’m so sorry for the way I’ve treated you, Benito. Everyone, for that matter.” She made eye contact with the group, one at a time. “I’m sorry.”

  Everyone watched her run to her tent. She grabbed what she could carry and came back out.

  No one said a word. I got the feeling they couldn’t wait to see her leave town. I’d only known her for ten minutes and I was glad she packed. But her last apology sounded out of character and that had the group speechless.

  Carlotta didn’t wait for a response. She disappeared down a trail in the jungle.


  A moment of stunned silence followed. Someone said, “Alrighty then.”

  Hidalgo shrugged and turned back to the box. He turned it to the Roman side and examined it in detail. It was a bas-relief carving depicting an important event. Commemorating stuff was something the Romans loved to do.

  After a long and awkward silence, he pointed at it and said, “Have you any idea what this is about?”

  He was making fun of me. Obviously. It was written in early Medieval Latin, a variation of Classical Latin that evolved when the Christians took over Rome. It’s not as well-known as the other forms because so little of it survived. But when you have the Roman god of eloquence following you around like a stray dog, you can perform a miracle now and then. Maybe they would be impressed and take me seriously.

  My other option was to wrap up my package and walk away. Which was clearly what Jenny wanted. She thought the mood of the crowd was getting ugly. She shook her head gently and moved her gaze to the trail.

  I turned to Mercury. How about it, can you help me out?

  Mercury leaned over my shoulder. Hey homie, think he already knows what it says?

  I said, He’s the world’s leading authority on the Mayans. How would he know Latin?

  Mercury said, Open your mouth and I will speak through you. They will be in awe of your brilliance.

  I said, No tricks?

  My used god’s ventriloquist act had produced mixed results in the past. He thinks it’s funny to make me evangelize for the Roman Pantheon. Which is even more embarrassing than you might imagine. Other times he comes through with articulate Churchillesque speeches that make me proud.

  I started talking and Mercury filled my mouth with words.

  “It commemorates the Romans putting this box on a boat and sending it off the edge of the world.” Heads tilted my way out of curiosity. “The guy on the left is Stilicho, Regent for the underage Emperor Honorius. The date translates to the winter of 408 AD. The map on the right shows what the Romans considered the edge of the flat Earth. Today we know that’s where the Canary Current travels from Gibraltar to Africa’s West Coast. From there, conceivably, the raft could’ve been swept into the North Equatorial Current—same thing happened to Christopher Columbus—and carried into the Caribbean.”