CHAPTER THREE FBI HEADQUARTERS—J. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING WASHINGTON, DC

FBI HEADQUARTERS—J. EDGAR HOOVER BUILDING

WASHINGTON, DC

January 8

Roth’s stomach took another lurch. He kept taking hits, and he wasn’t sure how many more he could absorb. The death game. His wife’s diabetic coma. The FBI raid on their house in Bozeman. Hiding out in a prepper cabin to protect his kids from Calakmul’s men. Then, worst of all, his friend Moretti’s betrayal. Calakmul had his daughter and possibly his wife, and he still wanted more. He’d never be satisfied until the Roths were all dead, the way he’d thought they would be after the death game just over a year ago.

Monica put her hand on his shoulder, her expression sympathetic. She knew the whole story. She believed him.

“Mr. Roth,” Carter said, giving Monica a disapproving frown, “I don’t believe that Jacob Calakmul truly expects us to hand you over to him. It’s not the policy of the US government to negotiate with terrorists, let alone turn over civilians for them to kill or torture.”

“What does he want, then?” Roth asked.

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Brower said.

Roth looked at Monica and then back at the stone-faced FBI agent. “And I’m supposed to know ... how?”

“Jonathon,” Monica said to Roth, “Calakmul doesn’t fit the profile of regular serial killers, organized crime bosses, or drug lords. Remember the recording you made at the Beck cabin?”

“Yes,” Roth answered. Jordan had zip-tied Monica to the kitchen chair. They’d believed, because of Moretti’s lies, that she wasn’t trustworthy. While she was tied up, he’d recorded his family’s story about the Mexico trip. She’d been skeptical at the time, but then she’d witnessed firsthand what a jaguar priest could do. One of them had taken out an FBI helicopter and a sniper team before transforming into a wild animal in front of them. It was the kind of thing that didn’t leave room for disbelief.

“We’re parsing through every word you said. Our analysts, as well as the CIA’s, are trying to connect the dots.”

Carter held up his hand. “You’re telling him too much, Agent Sanchez.”

“We need his help, sir. That’s why he’s here, isn’t it? It was his idea to research the institute at UC San Diego. It might have been weeks or months before anyone thought of it—if they did at all.”

“It hardly matters now, Sanchez. They would have contacted us about the attack regardless, and—”

“Mr. Roth,” Brower cut in. Roth determined the man’s rank was much higher than Carter’s when the SAC quickly became tight lipped. “Were you aware that your home was bugged before we executed the search warrant?”

Roth looked into the man’s stern eyes. “I suspected it. Yes.”

“Why didn’t you notify law enforcement back then?”

“Because they had my wife as a hostage,” Roth answered darkly. He glanced at the boys, who were staring at the adults with frightened looks. They were just kids. Maybe he should have left them at the hotel, but Roth didn’t want to let them out of his sight. Not after Suki’s abduction.

“And I advised him not to,” Lund added. He’d been so quiet, standing with his back to the door, that Roth had almost forgotten he was there behind him. “I thought, at the time, that Calakmul was just a drug lord looking for money. I didn’t realize this was bigger than that until recently. We got a Vivint security system for the house—door locks, motion sensors—but didn’t clean the ducts. That’s not standard install protocol for a company like that anyway.”

Carter pursed his lips. “But if you suspected—”

“We wanted Calakmul to believe that his surveillance wasn’t compromised,” Lund interrupted. “I provided burner phones and new equipment. All of Jonathon’s research into the ancient Maya happened on those devices. That’s when he decided to make a trip to Germany to test his theory. As you already know, he wrote a book about his experiences in the death game, changing the names to ensure it didn’t show up on any of Calakmul’s searches, and published it under a pseudonym. He was sharing information to try and help—to see if anyone else found it and came forward—but in a way that wouldn’t compromise his wife or the rest of his family.”

Brower’s eyes crinkled just slightly. “And so you went to Germany to see this Dresden Codex. The director spoke to the head of the German BND, who was asking questions we’re not ready to answer yet. You should have been more open with us about all of this, Steve.”

“You and I both know why I wasn’t,” Lund answered defensively.

There was a story behind it. Roth didn’t know what it was, but he could feel half the people in the room bristle.

“Can I tell him about the equipment we found in his house?” Monica asked.

Brower nodded.

“It’s the same equipment the NSA uses,” she said. “High-end stuff. Stuff that even the movies get wrong. The director confronted the NSA about it and learned there was no active investigation happening with your family. No FISA court. Nothing. So we cross-referenced Agent Garcia’s cell phone and found a number for a guy who used to work for the NSA. A crackerjack hacker. Mexican American from the Bay Area in California ... where you used to live.”

Roth nodded, interested. “Calakmul’s been recruiting people from Silicon Valley.”

“Obviously,” Carter said. “I think we’re nearing the boundary of what we can share with Mr. Roth. In the recording, you mentioned seeing people at the death game. Celebrities. Business leaders. Even politicians. Are you prepared to name names?”

Roth glanced at the boys and then at Lund, who shook his head no.

Carter slammed his fist on the table. “We don’t have time for games, Lund!”

Brower leaned back in his seat, folding his hands in his lap. He looked patient, unbothered, but his eyes were fixed on Lund.

“You mentioned a ransomware virus,” Lund said in a measured tone. “What about the deadly one that’s spreading from those cruise ships? Mighty suspicious the way it’s spreading. Doesn’t seem natural.”

Carter’s mouth twisted into a snarl. “That is classified information. How did you hear about it?”

Lund shrugged but said nothing.

“I’m missing some context,” Roth said. “Look, I know I don’t have security clearance or any of that. But I do know some stuff from my experiences with Calakmul. He warned that violence and disease were coming. Soon. It’s possible this virus is his doing. Likely, even. I might be able to help, if you let me, but I need information in order to do that.”

“Let me just say,” Monica added, “that your cooperation has been useful. Remember the FBI radios in Bozeman, how they were compromised because Garcia was listening in? Someone who used to work for the NSA is feeding Calakmul information. It’s like a chessboard, only we can’t see all the pieces in play. That’s why we need your help.”

Brower tilted his head slightly. “Why would Calakmul ask us to turn you over in exchange for removing the crypto lock on the servers? What do you think he expects to come of it?”

Roth leaned back in his chair, and it squeaked loudly. He was uncomfortable and still sweating. “It’s probably a magician’s trick.”

Brower’s eyebrows slanted toward each other in confusion.

“Misdirection,” Roth said.

“So what is he trying to misdirect us from?”

“Doesn’t the server have a backup drive? Any server manager worth anything keeps a backup.”

“Of course it does. It’ll take three days to recover the data.”

“In which time, the hacker will compromise the backup servers too, if he hasn’t already,” Roth said. “I’m a history teacher, not an IT guy, but it seems logical.”

“I am an IT guy,” Brower said with a tone of anger. His composure was beginning to crack. “If we’ve lost that backup, there’s no way we can find Calakmul’s hidden temple. Dr. Estrada flew over it, but he’s no pilot. That jungle is too vast for him to pinpoint a specific location like that.”

Roth rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know what else I can do to help.”

“You can give us the names of who you saw,” Brower said.

“Off the table for now,” Lund countered.

Roth trusted Lund’s instincts. “Look, those people are probably back down in Mexico. It would be safer down there right now, especially if he’s behind the virus spreading from the cruise ships. Can’t you look into who’s flown down there over the past couple of weeks?”

“We know Moretti’s family is there,” Lund said. “Who else is on your list of suspects?”

“We have a meeting with the director in an hour, and you haven’t told us anything useful!” Carter snarled. “You’re wasting our time.”

“Tell me more about the virus,” Roth demanded. “Is it like smallpox? What is it? I haven’t seen anything about it on the news.”

Brower looked at Carter and then gave a curt nod.

“If this information gets out, there will be a mass panic,” Carter said. “The president has been meeting with his national security team in the Situation Room every Friday to get updates on it and plan a strategic response. The virus may have started spreading on cruise ships, but it’s been infecting people in major cities around the world. It’s spreading exponentially. These meetings are only going to get more frequent as time goes on.”

“What’s the source?”

“Unknown, but it’s spreading through the European tourist community.”

“It started in Cozumel,” Roth whispered.

Brower frowned and leaned closer.

“Cozumel,” Roth said more loudly. “Do you know how many cruise ships dock there during the holiday season? Calakmul controls that island. The virus was started by a ... a glyph, probably.”

“A GIF?” Brower asked, his nostrils flaring.

“No, a glyph. Mayan hieroglyphs.” Roth pulled out his burner phone and brought up one of the images he’d taken from the Dresden Codex. He zoomed in on it and then showed the phone to Brower and Carter. “In Maya mythology, diseases could be inflicted by the gods through their magic.”

Carter looked skeptically at the screen and then back at Roth. “You want us to tell the FBI director to tell the president of the United States that a drawing of a squatting man with a headdress is causing a global pandemic?”

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.’”

“And what’s the point of this?” Carter sighed. “We need to prep for our meeting with the director,” he said in an undertone to Brower.

But Brower was looking keenly at Roth, his gaze not wavering. “Do you know what exponential curves are, Mr. Roth?”

“I’m a historian, but I also like math.”

“They too have tipping points,” Brower said. “What we’re seeing with this virus is just the beginning of an exponential curve. Once we hit that tipping point, it’s going to spread so fast it’s almost impossible to imagine what real life is going to be like in the very near future. Like the smallpox epidemic in the sixteenth century. It’s difficult for the human mind to grasp exponential things. If we’re dealing with a rampant virus that affects every person not immune—which will be nearly everyone on earth except a few elite—then when we hit the tipping point and the curve goes vertical, we’ll be helpless, our healthcare system overrun, and our military and law enforcement apparatus disabled.”

“Exactly,” Roth said. “What you’re saying is we don’t have much time to counter Calakmul’s plan before we can’t.”

Brower nodded. “If Jacob Calakmul believes he’s fulfilling this prophecy and has been acting accordingly, he may be trying to duplicate historical events. Even if the prophecy isn’t real, he seems to believe otherwise.”

“There is plenty of room to believe Calakmul has deluded himself.” Roth had shared Illari’s translation with Monica and knew she’d forwarded it to certain officials.

“In my opinion, he’s more than a person of interest. He’s public enemy number one. We need to find him. Now.”

“Hunting Jacob Calakmul is virtually impossible,” Monica said. “He doesn’t use modern technology like smartphones or computers. When the SEAL team went to Cozumel, they found the place abandoned.”

“You sent a SEAL team to the resort?” Roth gaped.

Monica smiled. “Well, the Department of Defense did. We haven’t been sitting on our hands, Jonathon.”

“That’s classified!” Carter snapped with irritation.

Roth chuckled in relief. Brower was on board. So was Monica. Carter was a holdout, but maybe Carter didn’t matter.

“In 1519, Cortés was a nobody,” Roth said, tapping the desk. “He was in trouble with the Spanish crown. His own men didn’t like him. There’s a legend he burned the ships after arriving in Mexico to send the message to the crew that there was no turning back. Just a legend, mind you, and probably a distortion of history. But by all accounts, Cortés and his wife were about as dysfunctional as the Real Housewives families. He wasn’t liked, and he’s only famous because he succeeded. The turning point was when they tried to assassinate Montezuma.” Roth felt the pieces begin to click into place in his mind. He stopped talking, his mind whirling.

Brower was staring at him too. He’d also made the connection. “You’re thinking of history repeating itself.”

“Like John Wilkes Booth?” Lucas asked from the end of the table.