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

  Down in the yard, the men with knives broke into a sprint toward the brothers. Don’t bring a flick-knife to a heavy machinegun fight, Carlos thought. He could only guess how much money these men had been paid to kill him if they would continue their mission in these circumstances. Yet this was no time for complacency; those blades would slice him open just as fast whether there was a helicopter above him or not.

  “We must go, brother!” Miguel said, tugging at his brother’s arm.

  “I know.” He curled his lip and shouted at the men. “You will die for your attempt on my life. Dogs!”

  Carlos and Miguel sprinted across the yard toward the chopper. As they drew nearer, the terrific noise of the whirring rotors combined with the electric-motor driving the Minigun’s rotary breech to produce an almost impossibly loud roar. Carlos ducked his head as he reached the helicopter. As he stepped up onto the skid, a hand shot out of the cool, dark interior and grabbed him, pulling him up into the cabin. Miguel was next, deftly hopping up over the skid.

  Carlos laughed. “It’s good to see you, Luis!”

  “And you, Los.”

  When both men were inside, Luis called through the comms. “All onboard, get us out of here.”

  Carlos felt the Bell JetRanger lift up and then lurch over to the right as it caught a gust of wind coming off the high desert to the west. The pilot levelled off and pulled up sharply, crossing the yard and swooping over the main prison wall. Below, the guards emptied their weapons at the chopper, but the man at the Minigun raked them once again, cutting their bodies to ribbons.

  “Good work, Héctor,” Carlos said. “I see you have not lost your sense of purpose.”

  Héctor shrugged. “I just like killing people.”

  “I know you do, my old friend. I know you do. But now I need to use your toy.”

  “Be my guest.”

  The three assassins had aborted their mission when the brothers had reached the chopper, and now they had dropped the knives and were sprinting across the yard with their hands in the air, desperate for the guards not to take them out.

  The surviving guards were focussing on the chopper but Carlos had the assassins in his sights. Swivelling the powerful Minigun around, he opened fire. The bullets ripped into the ground behind the fleeing men, effortlessly catching up with them, the rounds pocked the yard and kicked up tiny clouds of dust. Seconds later, the bullets found their target and ripped all three men to pieces, punching great, thick bloody holes in their backs and legs.

  Carlos swung the gun around, took his hand off the trigger and called out to the pilot. “Go.”

  The chopper lurched away and swooped down over the outer wall.

  Turning to his brother, he said, “Are you scared, Mico?”

  Miguel shook his head. “Are you?”

  “No. I am excited.” He held out two gnarled, leathery hands. “Soon, Tarántula will have the power of the gods in his grasp and we will be right there beside him. Then, entire governments will fall to their knees and beg us for mercy.” He licked his lips and watched the high desert scratch past beneath the speeding chopper. “But I am sad, Mico, for I have no mercy to show them.”

  Miguel looked at his brother, and felt his skin crawl.

  2

  Yuriria Convent, Guanajuato, Mexico

  Professor Selena Moore of the London Museum of Archaeology stepped out of the day’s blistering heat and into the shade of the convent’s shadowy porteria. Slipping off her sunglasses, she dropped them in her pocket, loosened her linen blouse and glanced up at the crumbling plaster above her head.

  Every inch of the honey-colored stonework around her was a testament to the quality of the four-hundred year-old religious building’s quality and grandeur, as were the flagstones she walked on, worn smooth by centuries of use. Turning to her father, Professor Atticus Moore, the two of them shared an excited smile.

  “I can’t believe this is happening, Dad.”

  “Believe it, Lena,” he said. “And you deserve it, too. You’ve worked hard for this moment.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “So have you.”

  “We’d better hurry along,” he said, quickening his pace. “Otherwise poor old Pepe will have another attack of the vapors.”

  She giggled, looking ahead at Dr Felipe Acosta as he rushed one of the convent’s officials along the barrel-vaulted cloister. To their right, a bright green central courtyard surrounded by flourishing tropical pot plants was filled with the chatter of exotic, colorful songbirds.

  “There are two floors,” Acosta said casually. “On the ground level are the common rooms and then above them are the living quarters.”

  Selena gazed about at the sunlight on the far side of the Gothic arcade. “It’s beautiful.”

  “The weather helps,” Atticus grumbled. “I checked the BBC before we came out and there’s another week of rain planned for London.”

  “I like the rain,” she said defensively. “But this really is beautiful.”

  “Like a paradise on Earth,” Acosta ventured. “And remember, much of this place was badly affected by a great fire in the early nineteenth century, including much of the interior. Many of the murals were ruined forever at the time, so what you see is only a part of the true magnificence that once was. Come, the best is through here!”

  With the rich call of a mockingbird behind them in the courtyard, they moved inside the monastery and Selena was struck by the beauty of an enormous fresco adorning the far wall. Acosta had finished talking with the official and now turned to her and Atticus. Seeing their interest in the fresco, he took a step back and joined in their admiration.

  “It depicts the Slaughter of the Innocents.” His mellow Mexican accent echoed in the large stone room. “As originally described in the Gospel According to St. Matthew.”

  “This place just gets more and more amazing,” Selena said.

  Atticus nodded dreamily. “Indeed.”

  Acosta clasped his hands in front of him. “It is a shame we must break through it to reach the chamber.”

  Selena and her father had the same reaction. “You can’t be serious?” Atticus said. “Surely the convent authorities would never allow such destruction! I know I won’t be party to it.”

  Acosta laughed. “Relax, I am just making a joke. How is it you say – I am pushing your legs?”

  “It’s pulling,” Selena said. “And by the way – ha, ha, ha.”

  “Sorry, just my little sense of humor,” Acosta waved the moment away. “According to the official I was speaking with moments ago, we can access the chamber through the vestry, which is just around this corner. I promise there will be no need for hammers, chisels or any type of explosives, but we will have to lift part of the floor.”

  “Thank heavens for that,” Atticus said, with his traditional full eyebrow raise. “If there’s one thing I hate more than excitement, it’s noise.”

  “You can imagine what his parties are like!” Riley Carr said with a smirk.

  Hearing her ex’s voice, Selena turned and saw him walking up behind them. The rest of the crew were beside him. Mitch Decker, her boyfriend, Charlie Valentine and Diana Silva. Dressed in summer shirts and straw hats and wearing sunglasses, they looked like they were on vacation.

  A final corner and they stepped inside the cool, dark vestry. Acosta led them across the smooth flagstone floor until they reached the entrance to the cellar. Acosta now turned a handle hidden behind a large religious screen for centuries, and walked inside. They followed him down some narrow stone steps and at the bottom, he made a generous sweeping motion with his arm as he indicated their arrival. “We are here! Years after he narrowly escaped with his life during a sacrifice ritual, this is the place where Friar Alfonso Montesino hid from a major attack by local Maya warriors. He was quite an adventurer.”

  Selena gazed into the cellar. Amongst piles of rubble and debris from the ancient battle, she saw the grim, hopeless place where Alfonso Montesino had
hidden all those centuries ago. It was a real privilege, she knew, to see where the friar and his small entourage had hidden and prayed for their lives during the onslaught.

  “It’s hard to imagine a place this peaceful as once being in the middle of a warzone.”

  “And not just once, Selena,” Acosta said. “There were several occasions when the settlements in this area, including this very convent, came under attack. It is with good reason that these places were built more like fortresses than churches or cathedrals. It’s fair to say that many of the local forces did not respond well to Spanish evangelization attempts.”

  Atticus raised a sardonic eyebrow. “That’s putting it mildly, Pepe.”

  “Indeed it is, my friend, and yet over nine million native people were converted to Catholicism in less than a century.”

  Riley whistled. “That’s a lot of Bibles. Who got the publishing contract?”

  Acosta gave him a disapproving look. “As you know, the Franciscans worked mostly in the northern parts of Mexico, and also partly in the central regions, but the southern regions were generally controlled by the Dominicans.” He paused and looked around the cellar. “Montesino was a good Dominican.”

  She followed Acosta and her father further down a temporary ramp and stepped into another world, where the politics of sixteenth-century conquest had wiped out a modest contingent of friars, but also several dozen local warriors. This was a time riven by hatred and the brutal conflict between empire and tribal nation.

  In the damp gloom of the cellar, she heard her father speaking quietly. “This is astonishing, Pepe. Truly remarkable. It seems morbid to mention it, but some of these human remains are in very good condition. Their clothes are almost as they must have been on the day of the battle.”

  The man from the University of Veracruz nodded sadly and brought his hands up to his hips as he surveyed the remains littering the flagstone flooring. Leathery skin stretched taught over skulls by the dry, stable conditions of the cellar, skeletal hands reaching out from the musty-smelling monks’ robes, as if begging for help. “They will, of course, all be identified and returned to their families for a proper burial.”

  “Yes, and quite right too,” Selena said. “Heaven only knows what these people must have gone through in the last few moments of their lives.”

  “And yet Alfonso managed to escape with his life?” Decker said.

  “Yes, he did,” Acosta said. “He saw an opportunity to flee and he seized it, leaving his personal possessions behind here in this place. He was subjected to a great deal of criticism when he returned to Spain. Some accused him of being too aggressive with the local tribes, and his journey into the Belize jungle was considered by many, perhaps even the King of Spain, to be a serious mishandling of his original brief.”

  “And your opinion?” Decker asked.

  Acosta grinned at him. “I think he was a very brave man, perhaps even a little foolhardy, to do what he did. After all, if it weren’t for his exploration of the deeper jungles, we would never know about all of the treasures and artifacts and rituals he described.”

  “And talking of which,” Atticus said, slapping his hands together and greedily rubbing them back and forth with barely contained jubilation. “I think it’s time we went down inside the new part of the excavation and took a look at it, don’t you?”

  Neither Selena nor Acosta could think of a single reason to disagree.

  3

  The large flagstone tiles were harder to lift than they had thought, so after another short debate about the ethics of desecrating a four hundred year-old church, Dr Felipe Acosta eventually got his way and the decision was made to break and lift one of the tiles. Both he and Atticus Moore knew it was the easiest way of accessing the crypt below the cellar, but they had disagreed about the best way forward.

  “Okay, then let’s do it,” said Acosta. A few moments passed while a pickaxe was sourced and then Riley went to work. Half a dozen swings later, the Australian was pulling the broken flagstone segments away from the floor to reveal a flat, dusty wooden trapdoor.

  Acosta gasped. “This is the door Montesino described in his memoirs!”

  Atticus looked like was falling in love all over again. “Then we found it. We finally found where he left his possessions behind. Somewhere in here we should find the Montesino Codex, including untold information about undiscovered archaeological sites all over the region. This truly would be the greatest find of all!

  “Think of the implications!” Acosta said. “This is a very special moment, my friends.”

  They opened the trapdoor to reveal a small chamber, no larger than a modern elevator. Inside was dumped a hessian sack. Riley sat down and swung his feet over the edge, then lowered himself down and reached for the sack. Holding it at arms’ length, Decker took hold of it and placed it on the ground.

  “Professor?” he said, looking at Selena. “I believe the pleasure is yours.”

  Selena opened it up and gasped when she looked inside. Pulling out a large, leather-bound book, her hands began to tremble with excitement.

  Acosta swallowed hard and a bemused smile crossed his lips. “My God, this really is the Montesino Codex!”

  Atticus hadn’t heard the Mexican professor’s words; he was too mesmerized by the dusty leather-bound book in his daughter’s trembling hands. “We actually found it.”

  Selena looked at him, the look on her face told the world she was as excited about the discovery as her father. “We found it, Dad.”

  “May I?” he asked.

  She handed him the book and he ran his fingers over the old, worn leather binding. “And what superb condition, as well! It’s hard to believe this is almost five hundred years old.” He began to chuckle.

  “What is it, Dad?”

  Slowly, Atticus started to do a little ad-libbed dance of joy on the spot. “I beat Danvers! I actually beat Danvers to the Montesino Codex.”

  “Who the hell is Danvers?” Decker asked.

  “Nathaniel Danvers,” Selena said. “He’s a top-flight Canadian archaeologist working at Harvard University. Also, very rich thanks to a massive inheritance he received a few years ago and some very canny private investments. He’s been looking for the Montesino Codex for ten years.”

  “And I beat him to it!” To everyone’s relief, the dance had now ended, leaving a red-faced Atticus Moore clutching the old book to his chest as if it were a newborn baby.

  “I guess he’s not going to be too happy about it, am I right?” Decker said.

  “Not too happy?” Atticus laughed again. “He's going to be absolutely livid! The silly sod’s been searching in the wrong places all these years. First in the cathedral in Tlaxcala and then in Spain, thousands of miles away!”

  “Why?” Charlie asked. “That doesn’t sound top-flight to me.”

  “His earlier research led him to believe that after his time spent in Tlaxcala, Alfonso Montesino returned with the Codex and the rest of his belongings to his hometown of Terrassa in Catalonia. Poor old Danvers spent years trawling through the archives in the cathedral vaults in Tlaxcala until he found evidence suggesting Alfonso had indeed returned to Spain and taken the Codex with him.”

  “Then he arranged an extended sabbatical with Harvard to go and work in Terrassa to continue his search,” Acosta said.

  “And the stupid bugger is still there to this day,” Atticus said, still glowing.

  Acosta was more sympathetic. “His determination to find the Codex is legendary in the academic community. He is completely convinced Montesino witnessed some kind of supernatural act somewhere in Mexico and left clues about it in his memoirs. He claims the friar wanted to tell the world about what he had seen but was so terrified by it, he created some sort of cipher which he included in this Codex. Our discovery of this today will upset him a great deal.”

  “Danvers has a large and vivid imagination,” Atticus said. “The truth is the real value of the Codex is that it should reveal a great ca
che of Maya relics and treasures which Montesino also referred to in his memoirs when safely back in Spain.”

  “Either way, our discovery of this today will upset him an awful lot!” Acosta said.

  “Upset him?” Atticus said, setting the Codex down on top of the bag. “It’ll break him! Lena dear, would you please take a picture of me holding it and then send it to him on that little phone of yours?”

  “No.”

  “Pretty please?”

  “No.”

  “Mitch?”

  “Leave me out of it.”

  “Anyone?”

  “Maybe later,” Riley finally said. “But I think right now we have more important things to worry about than you breaking poor old Danvers.”

  “Riley’s right,” Decker said. “It’s costing money to park the Avalon at Francisco Mujica Airport. You do realize that, right?”

  Selena said, “I thought you said they waived the fees if we were refuelling there?”

  “I did. We’re not refuelling there.”

  “Ah.”

  “We refuelled in Barbados. Remember?”

  “How could I ever forget Barbados,” she said dreamily. “That night on the beach was…”

  Atticus clamped his hands over his ears. “All right, keep it down – Father Alert.”

  “Sorry, Dad.”

  “Yeah, and ex-boyfriend alert too,” Riley said. “Keep that stuff for your alone time, kids.”

  During the banter, Diana Silva had quietly picked up the Montesino Codex in her usual discreet way and was gently turning the fragile pages. As the others traded barbs and jokes, her eyes danced over the faded writings of the long-dead friar. She had little problem understanding the text; most was in Latin, in which she was fluent, and the rest was in slightly archaic Spanish. Being a first-language Portuguese speaker this also presented only a small challenge but after a few moments, a frown darkened her slim face.