Public Enemy Read online

  “Yeah,” Borrego said. “The shit that came with the curse.”

  “Hell, I’ll tell you exactly where it is. I kept the map in my bag ’cause I figured there’d be more. You know, that we didn’t get it all, ’cause nobody’s been up there. Not before we went and probably not after. So I was thinking, before the curse got us, I’d be going back. Not now, though. Fuck!”

  His last F-bomb came out a little loud-a few of the ex-cons flicked their eyes in Borrego’s direction to check whether anything was developing.

  The Guatemalan lowered his head.

  “I should have known,” he said, more quietly.

  “Should have known what?” Borrego said.

  “Should have known we’d all get the curse.”

  Cooper could see Borrego’s face since he’d turned his body earlier in the conversation. He watched as the Polar Bear narrowed his eyes.

  “Why,” he said.

  “Because everybody else had the fucking curse,” the Guatemalan said, “that’s why.”

  “Everybody else where?”

  “In the place where we found it.”

  “Who?” Borrego asked.

  “All of them,” the Guatemalan said. “Could have been a thousand years ago-I don’t know. I just know they were dead. Every one of them.”

  Borrego said nothing. Madrid said nothing. Cooper continued to say nothing. From behind one of the mostly painted cars Cooper saw the figure of the heavy-jowled guy with the pitted-out T-shirt appear. It was unclear how he’d come into the building, but Cooper supposed it didn’t particularly matter. He wasn’t there to ambush them-he was there to pressure the Guatemalan to get his ass back to work. The Guatemalan felt the man’s presence and swiveled his head to take in the sight of his super.

  “You want me to get you the map, then?” he said to Borrego.

  “Be great,” the Polar Bear said, and lifted his paw from the Guatemalan’s shoulder.

  When the Guatemalan returned from his locker with the rumpled piece of paper, Borrego took it, but not before handing the cornered mouse a chunk of bills, the denominations of which Cooper couldn’t quite read. Then the man moved off and blended back into the shop.

  Without any visible prompt from Borrego, Madrid strode purposefully to the heavy-jowled super, handed the man another chunky wad of bills, then came back and led them out through the blue curtain.

  When they were situated in the Land Rover, Borrego leaned forward in his throne and clamped down on Cooper’s shoulder with that big fat paw of his.

  “Don’t know about you, amigo,” he said, “but with all this talk of curses, I’ve got myself worked up into a four-pound-lobster kind of mood.”

  33

  The Guatemalan’s map suggested a route that, on paper and highway alike, may well have been the most convoluted possible means of approach on their destination. Nonetheless this was the route they took-nearly six hundred winding miles, some of the way paved but most not, the first four hours spent worming their way out of Belize, the remaining twelve dedicated to working their way around, then up, what Cooper decided had to be one of the more treacherous mountain ranges north of the Andes.

  “They’re good,” was all Borrego had told him in answer to Cooper’s objection to the length-and path-of the line drawn on the map. “They know what they’re doing.”

  “The dead tomb diggers, you mean?” Cooper said.

  “Yes,” Borrego said.

  “You say so,” Cooper said.

  Around sunset, they hit a rebel checkpoint.

  It had been eight hours since they cleared the Guatemala border crossing. That had been fluid-show your passports, hand over some cash, and away you go, Borrego explaining nobody was looking to keep people out of Guatemala, since anybody who came in was usually a tourist ready to spend some money. Check out the Mayan ruins, drop some coin on a guide or two-there existed no reason for the authorities to concern themselves with the pesky issue of border control, at least on the immigration front.

  The challenge, Borrego explained, came at the rebel checkpoints.

  The leftist rebel groups in Guatemala had been soundly defeated by American-backed government forces in the mid-1980s, but had more or less never given up. As a sort of consolation prize they had claimed certain remote regions of the country as their own, and been allowed to do so-mainly because almost nobody lived in the areas they’d been sequestered to, and even fewer people wanted to go there. Accordingly, there was little harm in allowing the armed factions who’d once waged war on the streets of the nation’s capital to reside and rule in relative peace in the remote countryside.

  Try to do some business out here, though, Borrego telling Cooper, and you were in for some serious taxation. That, he said, was one of the main reasons he had such a skinny margin on his antiquities-wholesale business: most of the places you found original, as-yet-undiscovered artifacts-in Guatemala, Egypt, northern Africa, or anywhere else for that matter-you had enough local strife, usually inclusive of civil war, to require payoffs rivaling the profits you stood to make in the first place.

  The other part of it, Borrego said, was no matter how much you paid these guys, they still tended to want to seize whatever you had on board, and sometimes, just for the hell of it, they’d toss you in whatever sort of jail they’d been able to assemble.

  “Kind of a raw deal for anybody doing the bribing,” Cooper said.

  “Raw-or stupid,” Borrego told him between gulps of Gatorade. “Plus, the boundaries are always changing, so you never quite know who’s controlling what.”

  “So once in a while,” Cooper said, “you’ve paid the wrong guy.”

  “Most of the while,” Borrego said. “Meaning you wind up paying two, three guys before you’re through. Of course, that’s about how we do it in Caracas too.”

  For an insane moment, as they approached the two guys in fatigues, Cooper thought he recognized one of the rebel soldiers-and that the soldier recognized him. Madrid eased to a stop, and for a very real instant, Cooper caught eyes with the soldier on his side of the Defender. He suddenly knew he’d been caught-caught-the man seeing his picture on a “Most Wanted” flyer posted following his escape, the guard knowing immediately he’d found an enemy of the state-

  We know you, the soldier’s eyes telling him, and now we have you.

  Panic welled in his chest like bubbling bile, and he almost made a knifing move for his gun, thinking he could take both of them with two quick shots-

  When he remembered where he was. They were in a different Central American country-goddammit. Cooper also recognized how young the kid with the rifle was. Seventeen at best, but probably fourteen or fifteen with the tough country life he must be living out here.

  These guys weren’t even born when you were last in the neighborhood.

  The velociraptor had some words with the soldier on his side, among the words Cooper overheard being Oso Blanco and dinero-and for another instant, Cooper’s eyes locked with the kid on his side of the road.

  Then the teenage rebel dropped his look and waved them past with a relaxed, menacing swish of his rifle, and they were through.

  They camped beneath some willow trees, then set out before dawn. Two hours into a climb in the Defender up a muddy road, Cooper said, “Assuming your tomb raiders were as good as you say, and this is the easiest way to the site, then I’ve got a question.”

  “Shoot,” Borrego said, lolling back and forth, belted into his throne as the Land Rover tossed them around.

  “How the hell did they get eight crates of gold artifacts out of here-at maybe half a ton each?”

  Borrego smiled and those yellow teeth gleamed.

  “That’s the trick, isn’t it?” he said.

  Cooper waited. Madrid steered around a rut but hit another one and Cooper had to struggle to avoid taking a dashboard to the chin.

  “To be honest,” Borrego said, “I’m not entirely sure. I’ve done my share of digs in the area-at least the general vici
nity-and the places you usually find something, it tends to be the case that nobody else has been where you’re going. Lot of the undiscovered ruins are in the middle of an active volcanic range, spots that were once populated by Mayans, or whichever native set you’re pillaging-but these places have seen a few thousand landslides, earthquakes, even volcanic eruptions since. People move away, nobody goes back in but some recreational hikers, the rain forest overtakes the village, and anything of value the former inhabitants kept takes some hard labor to pull out.”

  Even with the four-wheel drive, Madrid was losing traction on the muddy slope. The road had become so steep that Cooper felt as though he were reclined in a business class airline seat.

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Getting there,” Borrego said. “Point I’m making is, nobody’s going up sheer cliffs or scaling the edge of a volcanic crater with the two or three trucks of equipment it takes to excavate the goodies, so, like us, the tomb raiders take their equipment in on the low road. But once you get your hands on the statues, or the mummies, or the bags of gold-whatever-you’re usually not too far from some pretty steep slopes. Hell-in these parts, it can sometimes be-literally-a thousand-foot sheer cliff.”

  Cooper held on for his life as Madrid rolled them around a bend at the peak of a particularly steep incline.

  “Anyway, when you’re talking slopes like that,” Borrego said, “it winds up being a lot easier going down than up.”

  When they came around the turn, Cooper observed they were now faced with a hill that looked to him the way it might if he’d been looking up an Olympic ski jump. At the two or three miles an hour Madrid was doing, there was no way they could generate enough speed to climb the hill.

  “Hang on,” Madrid said, then jerked the wheel hard left and, flooring it, sped madly for all of ten or fifteen yards before wedging the Defender into a thicket of ferns and short, stubby trees. Then he flicked off the ignition and locked the parking brake.

  “End of the line,” he said.

  The Polar Bear unlatched himself from the throne and leaped deftly, even lightly, out onto the muddy ground. Once he got his feet under him, he looked at Cooper. Even with Borrego standing on the ground and Cooper high up in his seat, Cooper had to glance up to look the Polar Bear in the eye.

  “If I read that map right,” Borrego said, “we’ve got this tall hill, some mountain climbing up above it, and maybe six or seven miles of jungle to go before X marks the spot.” He grinned. “Feel like a hike?”

  Cooper took another look up the slope. It looked to be one hell of a long way before the incline eased-and that was all in advance of the “mountain climbing,” which he didn’t really want to think about.

  “Piece of cake,” he said.

  Cooper’s feet were blistered silly by noon, and it wasn’t until two-fifteen that they crested the lip of the crater to observe, beyond its edge, a short downward slope and what looked to Cooper like an endless ocean of jungle.

  Borrego scrambled nimbly up behind him and stood beside Cooper to take in the view.

  “An unnamed rain forest plateau,” he said. “One of a few thousand such gardens of Eden found here.”

  There were mountain peaks on every side of the forest, and Cooper realized the plateau was part of a volcanic crater, or possibly a few of them decayed and overgrown together. There seemed to be two main patches of green-the first being a larger circle of forest closer to them, the second another, higher plateau. The two regions, taken together, formed a sort of figure eight. He wondered how many archaeologically important ruins, Mayan or otherwise, were buried in vines and rot in this plateau alone-then thought again, considering it would be strange for anyone to live up here, now or ever.

  Madrid arrived, hauling a little more than the others in his backpack, and stood up straight to take in the view.

  “For you history buffs,” Borrego said, “this is the kind of place Mayan Indian culture thrived for as long as a thousand years beyond the period in which they have traditionally been declared extinct. Up here, you didn’t get any visitors until recently-not for six or seven hundred years at a time. And if you know how to do it, you don’t need more than what you’ve got in that jungle out there to live as long as you want. Forever, even-except for the continued encroachment of the rest of us human beings into all corners of the planet, and the diseases we bring with us.”

  Borrego pulled the map the chop-shop laborer had given them and examined it for a while. Then he looked out at the jungle plateau, scratched his head, and pointed to what Cooper believed to be the northwest corner of the woods.

  “If his sketch is legit,” Borrego said, “that’s where we’re going.”

  Cooper shuffled his aching feet on the rocky earth of the crater’s edge.

  “So that’d be the six or seven miles you were talking about,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Yeah,” Borrego said. “Only it looks more like ten to me.”

  “Christ.”

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Borrego said.

  “What’s that?”

  The big man pointed again toward their destination.

  “That the answer to who the hell your ‘snuffer-outers’ are, and why the hell they’re doing their dirty work, might actually lie out there. In the goddamn jungle.”

  Cooper let his tired mind roam to thoughts of Cap’n Roy, and Po Keeler, and the frozen corpse buried beneath the Alaskan king crabs-seemingly so vastly distant from the time and place they’d flown, driven, and climbed to. A world away from this-how had Borrego put it?-garden of Eden. Planted square in the middle of a mostly irrelevant third world country-geopolitically speaking.

  Even the original Eden wasn’t rumored to have been all peanuts and popcorn, and he expected no different here. In fact, there was something out in that rain forest crater the chop-shop laborer and part-time tomb raider had seen that convinced him this place, and anyone who visited it, was cursed.

  Cooper didn’t really want to think much more about what they were about to find. At least not yet. He reached up-way up-and offered Borrego a friendly whack on the shoulder.

  “Let’s see what there is to see,” he said.

  34

  They found the village just before dusk.

  Cooper encountered the first of the structures, an overgrown rectangle made of clay and dark hardwood timbers that had barely rotted at all. He almost missed it, mainly since it wasn’t the kind of ruin he was expecting to find. Not that he should have expected one type of ruin or another-but where were the Mayan stones, crumbling into dirt as the jungle overtook them?

  Soon he saw another such structure. Then another. The three of them had been working about fifty yards apart, covering as broad a swath as possible while still remaining within earshot, if not within eyesight. Cooper whistled.

  “Got something,” he called out. “Not sure what, but it’s something.”

  “Same here,” Borrego said, his voice arriving from somewhere off to Cooper’s left. Cooper heard Madrid, or some large animal in any case, approaching from the right.

  It was getting hard to see, but not that much harder than it had been to see the whole time. The canopy of wide-leafed trees kept out most of the light. Everything was wet, and it was hot, maybe eighty-five or ninety degrees. Four or five times during their march through the woods, Cooper had heard, more than felt, rain showers, pelting the trees at the top of the canopy, the frequent rains seeping their way through over time, basically creating one giant soupy mud puddle underneath.

  Madrid arrived and, along with Cooper, examined the small buildings.

  “Not too old,” he said.

  In the one Cooper was currently examining, there were cooking utensils, a wooden table and bench, two pots-worn out and dirty, but made, it seemed, of gold-and, up against one wall and aside the bench, two sets of human bones. Cooper poked his way over to the structure Madrid was looking through and found it nearly identical to the one he’
d been examining, only it was slightly bigger, and featured three sets of bones rather than two.

  When Borrego didn’t swing by, Cooper made his way over to the place from which he’d heard the Polar Bear answer his whistle. Madrid followed. It took them a few minutes-darkness was upon them now-but after shouting his name a couple times they found the big man crouched down on one knee. He appeared to be examining some bushes.

  “You find your share of skeletons over here?” Cooper said.

  Borrego rotated his flashlight from the bush he was looking at. Even pointed at the ground, it was nearly blinding because of the way their eyes had adjusted to the rain forest twilight.

  “I did,” Borrego said, “but I found this too.”

  He shone the flashlight out ahead of where he was crouched, where Cooper saw there appeared to be some kind of road. It was partially overgrown, but as Borrego worked the flashlight beam along the ground, Cooper could easily see tire tracks through the thin cover of brush.

  “My guess,” Borrego said, “is this is where they dragged the artifacts out. Those are mechanized wagon tracks, kind of a specialized minitank today’s tomb raiders utilize as their excavation vehicle of choice. I’d bet we’ve circled back a ways-the edge of the crater closest to Belize isn’t far from here. There’s probably a steep mountain face a few miles from here at most, where they could have passed the artifacts down the cliff with ropes and pulleys.”

  Cooper flicked on his own flashlight and walked around for a while, taking a look at whatever he could see that wasn’t a tree, bush, insect, or snake. He heard Borrego and Madrid fall in behind him, and they marched around that way in the dark, examining some additional structures, including one made of more traditional-looking stones. He found a few fire pits too. Everywhere they wandered, the sounds of the jungle were overwhelming-screaming insects, frogs, or some other creature, Cooper had no idea. There was the rustle of snakes, rodents, and maybe birds, plus the occasional, more intimidating growl. Cooper didn’t know what the sounds were, but he did know he hated them. He hated almost everything about this place-the look of each leaf, the width of the vines that wound up the tree trunks, the scents of rotting things and new, green growth. He found he had to clamp his jaw to keep the insanity and fear-an instinctive desire to run-from overtaking him.