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“Illari,” Roth said gently, “I know you want the land back, but I always believed you meant to accomplish it peacefully. You weren’t a fan of Huracán. You believed in Kukulkán. My ancestors . . . my family . . . came from Germany. We endured the Holocaust. My family in particular came from Karlsruhe. I have relatives who were killed at the concentration camp at Dachau. I can’t undo their suffering, but nor would I create new concentration camps for the descendants of the men and women who made them suffer. Repeating the evil that was done to them wouldn’t bring them justice. So when I learned what Jacob Calakmul was going to do, I knew I couldn’t sleep without at least trying to stop him. Even if the prophecy isn’t about him, he believes it is.”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” Illari said. “Kukulkán wouldn’t waste a prophecy on his enemy. It’s a warning, don’t you see? The K’iche’ word used for ‘repent,’ the glyph k’ex k’u’x. It means ‘to change your mind, to change your actions.’ To change the way you breathe. It’s a warning that great destruction will come if we don’t change. That sounds like Kukulkán. Not a revenge prophecy.”
“Do we know how this virus spreads?” Roth asked Monica. “Is it like Ebola?”
Monica shook her head. “Not blood-borne. From what little we know, it’s a pathogen that spreads through the respiratory system. Settles in the lungs.”
Roth blinked. “Change our breath.”
Illari looked surprised too. “These are the end times.”
“Would Kukulkán want everyone to die without being given a chance to change?” Roth pressed.
Illari screwed up her nose and looked down. “No. No, he wouldn’t.”
“Please,” Roth said to her. “Calakmul took my daughter. My wife. We’re trying to get them back. They’re in the jungle. We need your help.”
Illari sighed, then glanced at her professor.
“I think we should help them,” he said. He turned and faced the others. “I’ve kept secrets too. When I went to the Yucatán over a year ago, something bizarre happened to me. A storm rolled in out of nowhere. We saw a man standing on top of the pyramid we found. He’d summoned the storm, I think. The one that nearly killed us. I’ve seen tropical storms down there. But nothing like this. It was more violent, more unnatural. There is something about that place that is very, very dangerous. There are secrets there.” He shifted and turned to Illari. “If you could help find it, think what it could mean to the world.”
Roth felt Lucas’s hand grab his. He looked down at his son and realized that the twins and Jordan had come closer. They’d been listening.
“I want my sister back,” Lucas said, his chin trembling as he stared at Illari.
“Me too,” Brillante said huskily.
Illari closed her eyes and then sat down at the table and pulled out her laptop. Opened it. Roth felt a surge of relief and squeezed Lucas’s hand. The screen flickered on, and with the fastest fingers he’d ever seen, she began typing.
“Need Wi-Fi,” she said briskly.
Roth was used to making his phone a hotspot, so he took his device back from Dr. Estrada, quickly enabled it, then shared the password with Illari. She logged in through a browser using a VPN, which would hide her trail. In quick succession, she logged into her AWS account and brought up some screen and data files. Dr. Estrada stood behind her shoulder, staring at the screen in disbelief.
“I’ve mirrored the Qualcomm interface,” Illari said. “You drive.” She got up out of the chair and backed away, giving him room.
“How did you afford to do this?” Estrada asked as he sat in the chair.
“With some help from a donor,” she replied sheepishly.
Roth nearly smiled because he had a feeling he was that donor.
Dr. Estrada quickly browsed the data fields that popped up. On the screen was a high-resolution map of the Yucatán Peninsula. There was so much data it was just a blob, but the coastline had been superimposed. Roth recognized it as the east coast of Belize. Data bubbles popped open, and Estrada dived into the feed, zooming across the jungle. Little red and blue icons appeared the closer they got.
Estrada typed some commands. “We started at Xmakabatún,” he said aloud. The screen showed the name and some ruins. “Then we went north. The Mexican border is somewhere here,” he said, pointing at the screen. “The data doesn’t care about borders. Now let’s peel the jungle away.” He tapped on the keyboard mouse, and suddenly the vegetation was stripped away from the screen, revealing hundreds if not thousands of square shapes. “These are all indigenous. Built by the Maya thousands of years ago. This whole peninsula was heavily occupied. There’s some research suggesting the peak of the Classic period was 200 to 500 AD. Some say it might have been as late as 900 AD. There was a big war. A genocide probably. The Postclassic period lasted until the Spanish conquest, so another five hundred years, give or take.” He hummed, still zooming across the landscape.
“There!” he said exultantly, pointing. “That’s the pyramid I saw! I only got a look at that structure and the courtyard at the base. But see how large this compound is underneath the canopy? It’s probably larger than Tikal, which was one of the major kingdoms during the Postclassic period. Larger! See? This is in Mexican territory. This is what I saw.”
He clicked on the location and then pulled down a menu. “The coordinates are 18°51'37.5"N 89°31'04.5"W. Precise GPS coordinates. This is it. This is it!”
Illari was smiling as she looked over at Roth and the boys.
“You did it,” Monica gasped. “That’s the exact location of the ruins?”
The door swung open, and Lund came in, his eyes wide.
Roth felt his stomach drop. More bad news.
“Steve?” Monica asked worriedly.