The Doomsday Cipher (An Avalon Adventure Book 3) Read online

  THE DOOMSDAY CIPHER

  (An Avalon Adventure)

  Rob Jones

  Other Titles by Rob Jones

  The Joe Hawke Series

  The Vault of Poseidon (Joe Hawke #1)

  Thunder God (Joe Hawke #2)

  The Tomb of Eternity (Joe Hawke #3)

  The Curse of Medusa (Joe Hawke #4)

  Valhalla Gold (Joe Hawke #5)

  The Aztec Prophecy (Joe Hawke #6)

  The Secret of Atlantis (Joe Hawke #7)

  The Lost City (Joe Hawke #8)

  The Sword of Fire (Joe Hawke #9)

  The King’s Tomb (Joe Hawke #10)

  Land of the Gods (Joe Hawke #11)

  The Orpheus Legacy (Joe Hawke #12)

  Hell’s Inferno (Joe Hawke #13)

  Day of the Dead (Joe Hawke #14)

  Coming Soon: Shadow of the Apocalypse (Joe Hawke #15)

  The Avalon Adventures

  The Hunt for Shambhala (Avalon Adventure #1)

  Treasure of Babylon (Avalon Adventure #2)

  The Doomsday Cipher (Avalon Adventure #3)

  The Hunter Files

  The Atlantis Covenant (The Hunter Files #1)

  The Revelation Relic (The Hunter Files #2)

  Coming Soon: The Titanic Mystery (The Hunter Files #3)

  The Cairo Sloane Series

  Plagues of the Seven Angels (Cairo Sloane #1)

  The Raiders Series

  The Raiders (The Raiders #1)

  The Harry Bane Thriller Series

  The Armageddon Protocol (A Harry Bane Thriller #1)

  The DCI Jacob Mysteries

  The Fifth Grave (A chilling Wiltshire crime thriller)

  Angel of Death (A chilling Wiltshire crime thriller)

  The Operator

  A standalone action-thriller for fans of Jack Reacher and Jason Bourne

  Visit Rob on the links below for all the latest news and information:

  Email: [email protected]

  Twitter: @AuthorRobJones

  Facebook: http://bit.ly/RobJonesNovels

  Website: www.robjonesnovels.com

  For Boo

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Other Books by Rob Jones:

  The Hunter Files

  The Joe Hawke Series

  The Cairo Sloane Series

  The Avalon Adventures

  The Raiders Series

  The Harry Bane Thriller Series

  The DCI Jacob Mystery Series

  The Operator

  PROLOGUE

  July 1559, Mayan Empire

  The Dominican friar from northern Spain struggled against his bonds, desperate to free his trembling hands from the leather straps that held them behind his back. The horror unfolding before his eyes, high in the temple at the top of the pyramid, had shaken him to his core. Thousands of miles from his homeland and surrounded by the strange and mysterious Mopan tribe, he knew this time there would be no escape from the violent and bloody fate that awaited him.

  He muttered another prayer. But for all his prayers, Fray Alfonso Montesino still had his doubts about the afterlife and his place within it. When he heard the mangled screams of Fray Juan Lopez at the top of the pyramid’s vertex, he knew any doubts either of them had about the hereafter would soon be settled once and for all.

  All around him, Maya warriors screamed and whooped, and above their cries, a sinister, primal music began thumping in the murky twilight. Still trying to wrench his hands apart, Montesino looked over to the eastern base of the pyramid and saw the musicians. They were walking in single file, playing wooden flutes and clay trumpets and banging kettle drums and shaking golden pellet-bell rattles for the god of death. A man with a flint knife joined them, and led the sombre procession toward the pyramid.

  One by one, they made their way up the wide stone steps leading to the top of the colossal pyramid where burning torches lit the temple. The sound of the sacrifice song and the cries of the revellers mingled with the calls of some exotic birds high in the canopies of the ceiba trees behind him. Seeing his friend and colleague screaming for his life as the ritual drew nearer, Alfonso fought hard to keep his last meal down, but failed. Leaning over, he threw up all over the sand at the base of the giant structure.

  As the men ascended the steps, drawing closer to the top, the musicians played faster. The flutes chirped and yelped, and the drums banged harder and harder. The pellet-bells rattled like angry snakes. They stripped Juan of his clothes, leaving him totally naked in the low evening light. Working to the meticulous rhythm of the drumbeat, the men dipped crude brushes into clay pots and began painting their victim a rich, vibrant blue. They made this azul maya color from crushing the leaves of the añil, a kind of indigo, and mixing them with clay. Alfonso had seen it used many times before, including for sacrifices, but never had he dreamed it might end up being painted on him and his old friend and mentor.

  “Por esta santa unción y por Su bondadosa misericordia te ayude el Señor por la gracia del Espíritu Santo para que…” The hurriedly whispered words fell from Alfonso’s lips like dead leaves blowing on the levant winds back on his Spanish farm. He had uttered the Last Rites more times than he was able to remember, but this was the first and last time he would say them for himself, and his dying friend. As he finished the sacred words, the moment overcame him and he began to sob. “…libre de tus pecados, te conceda la salvación y te conforte en tu enfermedad.”

  The men tied his friend down on the sacrificial altar and stepped away from him. Then the priest began to chant and cry a mantra over and over, arms raised to the heavens and the flint knife gripped in his hand. What happened next, Alfonso saw with his own eyes, but he did not believe it. When a religious man saw a heathen priest summon a god to make the clouds swirl in circles, and raise the wind, and pelt a tropical landscape with hailstones, he knew believing in his own god was for fools.

  The Maya priest chanted louder, raising his hands further into the heavens. Imploring his pagan sky god to accept the sacrificial corpse on the altar, he waited for an answer. When it came, the young Spanish friar swallowed his doubts and prayed louder to his own god to spare him from the barbaric horror he was seeing on this terrible day.

  Then the priest plunged the sharpened stone blade into his friend’s stomach and ripped it open. Juan screamed, but his terrified cries were muffled by the blood flowing up through his throat. The priest tore at his body again and again, slicing thick, rugged gouges into his painted flesh as the storm grew wilder around them.

  Alfonso was horrified. He witnessed the evil, depraved chanting and crazed dancing in circles, and in the sky the storm grew stronger. The hailstones grew in size, almost as big as a man’s fist. The power of the wind increased tenfold, scratching at the tops of the palms and tearing their leaves off. To save
themselves, the men around the altar dropped to their knees and grabbed hold of its thick, stone legs. As they fought the strength of the storm, it increased yet again.

  This time, the palm tree trunks were wrenched from the earth and flung like pinewood splinters across the complex. Some smashed into sculptures and others ripped through the thatched roofs of the villagers’ dwellings. Above, the sky darkened further, churned by the growing violence of the divine storm. Alfonso had never seen anything like it, but the men around him knew what it was and had a name for it.

  It was a warning from Hurakán.

  A hurricane.

  The god of storms was angry. Their offering was clearly not good enough and they had enraged him with their disrespect. Perhaps increasing the offering might appease the great sky god of storms? Alfonso’s skin crawled when he saw the men turn and look at him. The priest screamed from the top of the pyramid in the howling gale.

  The words were in Mayan, but Alfonso knew they could mean only one thing.

  “Bring him!”

  They grabbed his arms and dragged him over to the steps. This time, there was no dancing or singing or music. This time there was only a desperate fear in the faces of the tribesmen around him, and perhaps the faintest glimmer of hope that sacrificing the second friar might be enough to appease mighty Huracan.

  He summoned all his strength and screamed for his life. “No!”

  Looking up the steps, he saw the priest, arms still raised to the sky and muttering a hypnotic mantra up to the racing black clouds above his head. Hailstones smashed down, one striking Alfonso’s shoulder and making him cry out loud in pain. Then another hit the head of one of the men dragging him and broke open his skull. He crashed down to the ground and the other men screamed in terror and fled, desperate to escape the brutal vengeance of the storm god. The priest screamed at them to stop, but his pleas fell on deaf ears and they scattered into the forest like frightened rabbits, leaving Alfonso unguarded in the chaos.

  He knew his shoulder had been badly wounded by the massive, sharp hailstone, but that was the least of his worries. Standing alone at the base of the pyramid, he looked up and saw only the priest. He was taking cover from the hailstones beneath a stone overhang above the altar, and Juan’s savagely desecrated body was hanging off the altar, his broken limbs jutting out at awkward, sickening angles.

  There was no hope for his old friend from Salamanca, but Alfonso still had a chance. If he acted quickly. With his hands still tied behind his back and pain throbbing in his shoulder, he turned and ran down the bottom few steps of the pyramid’s south side. He scanned the area and saw the rainforest was the best place to disappear completely from the terrified tribe behind him.

  Dodging the hailstones, he weaved through the huts and alleys until reaching the jungle and then ducked inside the treeline. His chest burned with the strain of the sprint, but he was out of sight and safe for now. He fought to control his breathing and slow his pounding heart, but then he saw something that made it beat even harder in his chest. Something which made him question all over again everything he believed about the world and the heavens above it.

  As the priest’s chants grew louder and he raised his tattooed arms, still dripping with Juan’s blood, high into the air, the hailstorm intensified again in strength and power. The old shaman began twirling his bloody arms in a circle above his head, and as he did so a giant twister appeared in the sky above the temple, as if in response to the priest’s will, as if the storm were obeying his mystical chants and movements.

  The storm was now more powerful than anything Alfonso had ever witnessed. A vast, swirling gray maelstrom of flashing thunderbolts and howling winds and hailstones like fists rained down all over the complex. The priest stood at the top of the temple, calm now, almost serene as he hummed his mantra with his eyes closed and directed the raging tempest as if it were his puppet.

  The storm obeyed. When the priest moved his arms one way, the eye of the storm followed. When he moved them back, it followed again. When he screamed, the winds intensified.

  “Dios, ayúdame…”

  But Alfonso didn’t wait to see if God would help him or not. He sat down and pulled his bound hands under his backside to bring them around to his front. Then, he made the sign of the cross over his face and chest, turned on his heel and scrambled away into the jungle. He had to get away from whatever hell he had just seen behind him, and he would run until his heart burst if that is what it took to escape this work of the devil.

  1

  Colorado, USA, Present Day

  The dry desert air of the southern Colorado highlands moved quickly across the landscape. Warmed by the Chinook winds blowing over the eastern side of the Rockies, locals sometimes called these winds the snowkillers, because their dry, warm air melted airborne snow before it even had a chance to settle on the ground.

  Carlos Mercado felt the wind on his face as he glanced up at the prison walls and watched the sky. Some looked here for evidence of God, but not this man. Today he had put his faith in something far more prosaic, but there was still no sign of his salvation anywhere in the clear blue sky, and time was getting on.

  Just like his chances of getting killed. Standing here, surrounded by killers, he knew he was living on borrowed time. He had enemies. Lots of them, and they knew how to reach him, even here. The idea of fighting to stay alive for the rest of his life frightened even him, the big man. Not that he would ever tell anyone that. He tried to work out exactly what to call a place that did this to you. He decided hell, but it didn’t matter what he called it. The United States Government called it Florence ADX, the highest security prison in the country.

  This was his first year of a life sentence for murder and drug trafficking. Both him and his brother Miguel Mercado had gone down at the same trial. At least they were together, but he wasn’t a young man; whatever life he had left sure as shit wasn’t going to be spent in this hellhole. As the second in command of one of Mexico’s most dangerous cartels, he had become accustomed to a certain way of life, and a certain standard of living. He had discovered that the US prison service didn’t care about any of that. Here, he was just another inmate.

  With whatever privileges he could get out of certain guards and nothing more.

  One of which was paying for access to the roof, where he now stood out of sight of the watchtowers and gazed out across the Colorado horizon. Out to the west, across the plain beyond Coal Creek and over to the Wet Mountains, he watched a fat red sun sinking into a silky ribbon of ink-colored clouds.

  But still no sign of his delivery from this hell.

  “They’re not coming. They screwed us over.”

  Carlos sensed his brother’s fear and raised a hand. “Patience, Mico. They’ll be here. We have been loyal to Tarántula and he will not forsake us.”

  “I hope you are right, Los.”

  But what if his brother was right, and they had been double-crossed? What if this was just an elaborate ruse to coax them out of the safe places they burned up their time in, and out into the yard, out into the open? Could Tarántula really be trusted? They had kept quiet at the trial and protected him, but they still knew enough to lock up their notorious boss for a hundred years. Maybe he had decided to have them silenced forever?

  He scanned the faces of the other prisoners out on exercise time. Most were tattooed, some almost completely. Many had thick scars on their faces. Some looked almost normal, just like the man who laundered their money for them back in Mexico City.

  But they all had murder in their eyes.

  As if his will had moved them, three men from the corner of the yard turned and walked in his direction. He nudged Miguel in the ribs. “You know those guys?”

  Miguel shook his head and took a step in front of his older brother. “No, they’re nothing to do with me. They’re pulling knives. I think this is the end, brother. Tarántula has ordered our executions to protect himself from the law. But we fight all the way down.” />
  “It’s the end all right, Mico, but not for us.” Carlos nudged his chin into the sky behind Miguel. “Our ride is here.”

  “Really? I don’t see it.”

  A tiny speck on the horizon grew larger until it slowly turned into a helicopter. It descended until it was barely a few feet off the ground, but still flying at full-speed. A spiralling wake of peach-colored dust billowed out behind the aircraft as it raced across the arid highlands to the west of the prison.

  “I told you Tarántula would not betray us. Our loyalty to him is being repaid.”

  Up on the wall, just outside one of the watchtowers, a guard saw the chopper rapidly approaching the prison and ran inside to hit the alarm. The siren screamed out across the yard and the prisoners were ordered inside. Most turned and walked toward the main building, but Carlos, Miguel and the three men with knives ignored the order.

  “The assassins are still coming for us, brother,” Miguel said. “Whoever they are.”

  “Then they are fools.”

  The chopper flashed over the prison’s western perimeter and hovered above the yard. Guards were now all over the outer walls, backed-up by other officers armed with more powerful rifles on the roof of the main building. They opened fire on the chopper, but they were badly outgunned.

  The helicopter spun around and a man wearing a bandana, sitting behind an M134 Minigun sprayed a brutal burst of fire at the armed guards now taking up a defensive position on the roof, cutting them to shreds. The guards gasped, dropped their rifles and clutched their chests. The wounds were fatal. They tumbled over the railing at the top of the watchtower and smashed into the ground face-first.

  Across the yard on the outer wall, the other prison officers never flinched, but their weapons were no match for the rotating barrel-assembly currently spitting bottlenecked rifle rounds at them from its six barrels. Hell delivered to your doorstep at nearly three thousand feet per second. The barrage cut through the guards at the front of the platform, chewing holes in their bodies and blasting them over the railing.