Serpent nf-1 Read online

  "Your mother has my husband, Paul, to thank for her little boy's success," Gamay said, "but congratulations anyhow"

  "Thank you. My mother thanks you, too. Shall we enter the hallowed precincts?" he said with a gallant sweep of the hand that was entirely in keeping with his character.

  For indeed it was Trout's summons to his NUMA colleagues that brought them to Cambridge that morning. Trout had arrived at the museum by a round-about route that started in the Yucatan jungle. After the reunion with his wife Trout and the others hitched a ride back to the Nereus aboard a Mexican helicopter. While they waited for the choppers to arrive they took a closer look at the looted antiquities stored in the cave.

  Chi had led the way, moving down the line of crates and shelves, sadly shaking his head as he explained the significance of the artifacts and the damage that had been done by their random exhumation. Pausing in front of the inscribed stone panels, Chi lamented, "I know these stones tell a story, an important one. But because of the way they were carelessly dug up and thrown into this place, it could be months, maybe years, before we will know what it is."

  Chi's words echoed in Trout's ears as the helicopter flew him and the others to the Nereus. Gamay was checked out and found to be rundown but otherwise in good health. With his wife in a real bunk and enjoying the gourmet treats of the vessel's galley, Paul hitched a ride back to the chicleros' camp, bringing with him a case of photographic equipment.

  The army had established a camp to guard the artifacts and mop up stray looters. Chi had stayed on to inventory the stolen goods. When. Trout outlined what he had in mind the professor gave him an enthusiastic go-ahead. Trout made hundreds of digital photographs of the stones and their inscriptions. Then he packed up and returned to the research vessel to rendezvous with Gamay and fly home. Back in Washington, Paul worked the data into his computers.

  As a deep ocean geologist Trout had developed a high degree of skill using computer graphics for his undersea projects. His work went beyond simply probing the ocean bottom with electronic eyes and ears. His arcane findings on strata or thermal vents had to be presented so that a PhD wasn't needed to understand them. Archaeology was already using computer imaging to reconstruct everything from ancient cities to skeletal remains. He conferred frequently by phone with Dr. Chi, who had returned to Mexico City. After his analysis he called Austin and said, "I know this sounds crazy, but this stuff I've been doing for Dr. Chi may tie in with the assignment we've been working on."

  Austin didn't need any coaxing. He gave Nina Kirov a brief telephone rundown on Trout's findings and asked if she could match Paul with a Mayanist. Nina immediately recommended Dr. Orville. Trout took his computer disks to Cambridge and set up shop at the Peabody.

  The museum's small reception area was dominated by an Eskimo totem pole whose grotesque faces looked down at the young college woman at the front desk. Austin gave their names to the receptionist, who punched the intercom button on her telephone. An equally attractive guide appeared and led them up the metal staircase, past the scowling sculpture of a seated Mayan warrior, to the fifth level.

  Their guide kept up a running commentary. "The Peabody is one of the oldest museums in the world devoted to anthropology," she said. "It was established in 1866 with a $150,000 gift from George Peabody. Construction on the five-story main building began tit 1877. The museum has fifteen million items within its walls, but we're giving much of the material back, particularly artifacts from E. H. Thompson's work at the sacred cenote of Chichen Itza where they used to sacrifice virgins."

  "I can think of better things to do with a virgin," Zavala murmured.

  Fortunately the guide didn't hear his comment. She ushered them through a door into a lecture hall. Nina stood next to the lectern talking to a thin man with wild red hair. She smiled brightly when she saw the others, especially Austin, he was pleased to note, and quickly came over to take his hand. Austin felt his blood quicken whenever he set eyes on Nina's lush mouth and the bold curves of her supermodel's body. He vowed to himself that he would take her where they weren't surrounded by their friends and colleagues.

  Nina introduced the new arrivals to Dr. Orville. Austin had learned long ago that looks didn't count, but he wasn't sure in this case. The Mayanist wore a rumpled high-button tweed suit even though the day was warm. His widely unfashionable thriftshop tie was decorated with old food stains. The manic gleam in the hazel eyes was magnified to incredible proportions by the thick glasses, but a burning intelligence kept the creeping shadow of madness at bay Just barely. Austin expected the orbs to spin around at any moment like those of a crazed cartoon character. He decided to contemplate the thin line between genius and derangement another time.

  "Paul is putting the final touches on the presentation and should be with us in a few minutes," Nina announced.

  The door opened. Gamay had expected her husband's usual head-ducking entry. Her mouth gaped in surprise, then widened in a smile. Extending her hand to the short, slight figure, she said, "I hardly recognized you without your machete, Professor."

  The professor's change in appearance went beyond a simple sugar cane knife. He had on a custom-tailored Armani suit of bullet gray and a yellow power tie which he wore as naturally as he had his peasant's clothes.

  Chi's classic Indian face was as stony as a gargoyle, but his dark eyes danced with amusement.

  "When in Rome . . ." he said with a shrug.

  "This is a wonderful surprise, Professor. You look well," she said.

  And you, too, Dr. Gamay"

  The last time she saw the professor he was waving from the ground as she ascended into the skies in a helicopter. Chi appeared none the worse for their river adventure. Gamay by contrast didn't feel her normal self until she got back to Washington. The assault by the blistering Yucatan sun had taken its toll on her fair skin. The trail mix diet and sleepless nights haunted by snake dreams hadn't helped.

  The lecture hall began to resemble a fashion spread from GQ when Trout stepped through the door. Befitting his Ivy League surroundings, Trout was in a pseudo-English mode,. wearing a hound's tooth custom sports jacket tailored in London to fit his tall frame, razor-creased olive slacks, and the inevitable bow tie. He apologized for the delay, and while the professor took over the lectern Trout went to the table and slipped a floppy disk into a laptop computer connected to the projection screen. The setup was similar to that used at NUMA headquarters by Hiram Yaeger. Nina sat at the table, and the rest of the NUMA team settled into the front row of seats like eager freshmen on the first day of class.

  Orville opened the meeting. "Thank you all for coming. Nina will tell you that I have a reputation for making wild assertions in the local press." His mouth stretched into a strange lop-sided grin. "But I'll have to admit even my fertile imagination would be hard put to come up with a story more fantastic than the one you are about to hear. So without further ado I will turn the meeting over to my esteemed colleague and dear friend, DL Josh Chi."

  The lectern dwarfed Chi as he stood beside it with his hands behind his back.

  "I would like to thank Dr. Orville for arranging this meeting and allowing us to use space at this institution where I spent many happy hours as a graduate student," Dr. Chi said in a voice as crisp as dry leaves. As you know, Dr. Gamay and I discovered a horde of hundreds of stolen antiquities. The artifacts included some intriguing carved stone blocks and stelae cut from temples and buildings with no regard to origin, and many were damaged. While I would have preferred for the antiquities to have lain undisturbed in the ground and cataloged in situ, the people who removed them may have inadvertently been helpful in resolving what I understand from my friends at NUMA to be a situation of some urgency."

  Chi raised his finger, and 'Rout punched a computer key. An aerial photograph filled the screen.

  "This is the looted site," Chi said. "The mounds you see are the remnants of buildings clustered around what was once the central square of a Mayan city. Next, please."<
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  Another picture came on the screen.

  "This is an observatory. Please note the details on the frieze. Next. Construction wasn't confined to the ground level. This is a subterranean temple. It is only one of the features that make this a highly unusual site."

  Austin leaned forward in his chair as if he were trying to put himself into the scene. "Unusual in what other ways, Dr. Chi?"

  Gesturing toward the image behind him, the professor said, "Most Mayan cities are combinations of administrative, religious, and residential uses. This center was devoted entirely to science. Primarily the study of time and astronomy. Ultimately Mayan science tied in with religion in much the same way as religion was tied to political power. But I have the feeling that more pure science was practiced here than usual. It's Mayan name is Sky Place. For our purposes I am calling it MIT"

  "Like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?" Zavala said. The world-renowned research and teaching institution was only a few miles from where they sat.

  "Yes," Chi replied, "but in this case MIT stands for the Mayan Institute of Technology."

  Like a standup comedian in a Borscht Belt hotel, Chi waited for the laughter to die down, then turned the meeting over to Trout and took his place at the table.

  In contrast to the professor, Trout had to lean onto the lectern to use it.

  "From the start Dr. Chi was convinced that the pictures and glyphs inscribed on the stones described a narrative," Trout said. "Our problem was that everything was jumbled up. It's as if you tore the pages out of a novel and shuffled them. Actually several novels, because the stones came from different sources. This was even tougher because the `pages' were heavy stones. So we made dozens of photographic images and fed the data into a computer where we could rearrange the pictures on a' monitor. We used common sense and information provided by the Mayan writings, which Dr. Chi and Dr. Orville translated. Then we organized the stones into a sequence, similar to the story board used for a television commercial. The tale they tell, as Dr. Orville implied, is indeed a strange and unbelievable one."

  Trout went back to the projection controls, and Orville took his place. "It was fairly easy to categorize the images. We simply concentrated on pictures of boats like those on the MIT observatory you saw earlier and went from there. This is the first one in the chronology."

  Austin, studied the busy scene for a moment. "It looks like the Spanish armada .setting off to sea."

  "Yes, from the number of boats it is definitely a fleet rather than random shipping activity at a port. The activity is frenetic but organized. Here you see boats lining up, being loaded, then standing by with cargo aboard."

  The photo was replaced by a series of scenes showing the fleet at sea.

  "Here we have a rather fanciful voyage with all sorts of strange sea creatures," Orville continued. "Many of these scenes differ only slightly in detail. Probably an artistic device to give a feeling of time passing."

  Any idea how much time?" Gamay said.

  "The Mayan writings say the voyage lasted one moon cycle. About thirty days. The Maya were precise timekeepers. Here is the last in the series. The boats have arrived at their destination. They are being greeted as they unload. There is an easy familiarity to the operation which suggests they were known to the inhabitants of this land." He turned to Trout and said, "It is time, my friend, to perform your computer magic."

  Trout nodded. The blinking computer cursor selected three figures from the scene, framed their faces in a heavy white outline, then enlarged them. One face was that of a bearded man with an aquiline profile and a conical hat. The next was wide with full lips and a close-fitting skullcap or helmet. The third was a man with high cheekbones and elaborate feathered headdress.

  Trout moved the images to the left of the screen, arranging them top to bottom. Three new faces appeared to the right.

  "Looks like they were separated at birth," Zavala observed of the pairings.

  "The similarity is pretty obvious, isn't it?" Orville noted. "Let's go back to the full scene again. Dr. Kirov, as our marine archaeologist, we would be pleased to have your opinion."

  Using a laser pointer Nina highlighted first one ship then another. "What we have here is basically the same vessel used for dual purposes. The features are identical. The long and

  straight flat-bottomed hull. The absence of a boom; the brails or napes used to lower and raise sail hang from a fixed yard. The lines sweep back to an overhanging stern. Three decks.. Fore and aft stays. The carved bow." The red dot lingered for a second. "Here is the double steering oar. The protrusion at this other end is a ram. This is a row of shields along the deck."

  "So it's a warship?" Zavala said.

  "Yes and no," Nina said. "On the top deck of one of these ships are men with spears. Obviously soldiers or marines. There are lookouts in the bows and space for lots of rowers." The laser flicked to another ship. "But here the deck is reserved for a person of quality. See this figure of a man reclining in the sunshine. The staff has a crescent on top, indicating the admiral's flagship. This thing hanging off the stern could be a decoration, a rich carpet maybe, that indicates the admiral is in authority."

  "How long would this ship be?" Austin asked.

  "My guess is that they're somewhere in the range of one to two hundred feet. Maybe longer. That would put them at around. a thousand tons."

  Orville interjected. "Nina, could you mention that comparison you used with us landlubbers?"

  "I'd be glad to. This ship is much longer than an English ship of the seventeenth century. The Mayflower, for example, was only one hundred eighty tons."

  Orville asked, "So in your opinion, Nina, what are we looking at?"

  Nina stared at the images, as if she were reluctant to vocalize what was in her brain. The scientist won out, however, and she said, "In my opinion as a nautical archaeologist, the ships shown in this rendering reflect the characteristics of Phoenician ocean-going vessels. If that sounds a little vague, yes, I am hedging my bets until I have more evidence."

  "What sort of evidence would you need, Nina?" Austin said.

  An actual ship, for one thing. What we know about Phoenician ships we learned mainly from their pictures on coins. There have been some reports that they were as long as three hundred feet. I'd take that with a grain of salt, but even if you cut that length down by half you still have a substantial vessel for its day."

  "Substantial enough to cross the Atlantic?"

  "Without a doubt," she replied. "These vessels were a lot bigger and more seaworthy than some of the minuscule sailboats that have made the crossing. People have rowed across the ocean in a dory, for heaven sakes. This vessel would have been ideal. You can't beat the square sail for an ocean passage. With a fore-and-aft rig you've always got the possibility of a dangerous jibe, the boom swinging violently over with a shift of the wind. With the brails they could shorten sail in a brisk wind. They'd get a roll with that shallow keel, but the rowers could help keep her steady, and the length of the ship would help. A trireme like this could sail more than a hundred miles a day under ideal circumstances.

  "Short of an actual ship, what would you need to convince you this is Phoenician?°

  "I'm not talking about convincing me," Gamay said. "I'm already convinced. Could we go back to those fares again, Paul?" The six carved heads came up on the screen again. The laser dot touched on one depiction of the bearded man, then flicked to his twin. "The pointed hat on these gentlemen is consistent with those worn by Phoenician mariners."

  "Which should come as no surprise," Orville interjected, "because the picture on the right came from a Phoenician stela discovered near Tunisia. The gentleman below him is identical to African-type faces found at La Venta, Mexico. The third physical type is from the Mayan ruins at Uxmal."

  "I hear a conclusion lurking in there," Austin said.

  Orville sat back in his chair and made a tent with his fingertips. "Basing conclusions on pictorial matching is fine if y
ou're a pseudoscientist trying to sell a paperback book, but it's not good archaeology," Orville said. He took a deep breath. "My colleagues would drag what's left of my tattered reputation from one end of Harvard Yard to the other if they heard me say this. Marine

  archaeology is not my forte, so I can't assess Nina's statements. What I do know is that the inscriptions on these rocks show Phoenicians, Africans, and Mayans together in one place. Furthermore, Dr. Chi and I have translated the glyphs together and independently, and we've come, up with the same results each time. The stones say that those ships arrived in Maya country after fleeing a disaster in their homeland. What's more, they were greeted not as strangers but as old acquaintances."

  "Did the glyphs indicate a date?"

  "Knowing the Maya's obsession with timekeeping, I'd be surprised if there weren't one. The ships arrived in what would be 146 B.C. in our calendar."

  Nina stared at the projection and whispered in Latin.

  Seeing all eyes turned in her direction she explained, "It's something you learn in first-year Latin. 'Delenda est Carthago.' Carthage must be destroyed! Cato the Elder ended every speech he made in the Roman senate with the phrase. He was trying to whip up public sentiment in favor of a war against the Phoenician city of Carthage."

  "It worked, as I recall. Carthage was destroyed," Austin said.

  "Yes. In 146 B.C."

  "Which means these ships could have been escaping the Romans.

  A date is a date," Nina said, digging in her heels before she got dragged too far into Austin's theory. "I simply pointed out the coincidence. I made no conclusion. As a scientist I'd be irresponsible to make a statement like that," she added, but she couldn't hide the excitement building in her gray eyes.

  Austin said, "I understand why as scientists you can't come out and say what you're thinking without more solid evidence. But from what I've seen here today I'm convinced the inscriptions on these stones suggest that ancient voyagers arrived in America long before Columbus. You know the Phoenicians were capable of making the crossing.