The Maya codex Read online

  The Maya codex

  Adrian D'hage

  The Maya codex

  Adrian D’Hage

  PROLOGUE

  VIENNA, 2008

  Aleta Weizman stared at the falling snow from the window of her apartment, contemplating the future with a deep sense of foreboding. Winter had come early this year and a biting wind from across the Danube whipped the snow into flurries above the old cobblestones in the Stephansdom Quarter; but it was more than the chill winds worrying the brilliant Guatemalan archaeologist. Her studies of the ancient civilisation of the Maya had led her to believe they’d left behind a terrifying warning, one her grandfather had devoted much of his life trying to unearth. Now she had discovered another piece of the puzzle. In Vienna for an international conference on the Maya, Aleta had been browsing her grandfather’s books when she’d come across a signed copy of Erwin Schrodinger’s Science and the Human Temperament. Curious about her dear grandfather’s old friend, she’d flicked through the book and a page of yellowed notes and a small photograph of a pectoral cross had fallen out.

  The notes, written in Levi Weizman’s meticulous handwriting, captivated her.

  The Fibonacci sequence is prominent in the construction of all Mayan pyramids and temples. • Greek letter? – if you are to find the Maya Codex, look for? and the centre of the golden mean – Pacal.

  Look for?, and the centre of the golden mean – Pacal. Who was Pacal? It was unlike her grandfather to write in code, so presumably he had not solved the puzzle but simply written it down word for word as he’d received it. And why were the notes hidden in a book? Had he suddenly been disturbed? What information was needed? Aleta turned over the photograph of the pectoral cross but there was no inscription on the back. Her father had mentioned the cross to her once, when they’d been fishing together on Lake Atitlan, telling her how the priceless family heirloom had been taken by the Nazis when he was a boy. She sighed, her dark-brown eyes troubled. The loss of her father still haunted her.

  Curtis O’Connor adjusted his binoculars and focused on the woman standing near the window of the upper-floor apartment. Whatever else she might be, O’Connor thought, Dr Weizman was tall, young and very attractive. Her long black hair tumbled onto her shoulders, partly covering the fine features and tanned olive skin of her oval face. She seemed deep in thought as her dark eyes probed the night.

  O’Connor remained hidden and kept his target under surveillance. At six feet tall, the CIA agent was fit and solidly built. Originally from Ireland, he had trained as a microbiologist. His face was tanned and his blue eyes were mischievous, but deceptive. His thick dark hair fell roughly into place. Very much his own man, O’Connor had one of the sharpest minds in the CIA, and his mission to assassinate Dr Weizman had troubled him from the outset. Why, he wondered, did his superiors on the seventh floor of headquarters back in Langley, Virginia, want this beautiful woman eliminated?

  Aleta stared across Judengasse towards Saint Ruprecht’s, Vienna’s oldest church, failing to see the man in the shadows of the ivy-covered stone belltower. What must it have been like to live here under the brutality of the Nazis? Aleta knew that the narrow lanes of the old city once housed Vienna’s Jewish community; now they were home to designer-clothing shops and an eclectic collection of bars and discos, dubbed the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ by backpackers from around the world. Bar patrons had been known to disappear from Judengasse, or ‘Jew’s Lane’, in the small hours of the morning. Usually they reappeared a day or two later, a little the worse for wear but otherwise unharmed. In the more sinister Bermuda Triangle of the Atlantic, a small area to the north-east of the ancient Mayan lands of Guatemala and the Yucatan Peninsula, whole ships and aircraft sometimes disappeared without trace. Had Aleta known that her every move was being observed, she would have realised that, for her, Vienna’s Bermuda Triangle was every bit as dangerous as its Atlantic counterpart.

  She gazed past the old square tower of Saint Ruprecht’s, past the trams running on Franz-Josefs-Kai, towards the Donaukanal, one of the many canals the resourceful Viennese had built in the late 1800s to control the persistent flooding of the Danube. Aleta maintained an open mind towards the ancient Maya’s warning of impending disaster, but she found it hard to dismiss the concrete scientific evidence that seemed to support it. Many of the events the Maya had declared as precursors to the coming disaster had already occurred. She reflected on the ancient stela, the stone monument inscribed with Mayan hieroglyphics she’d discovered in the Museo Nacional de Arqueologia y Etnologia in Guatemala City. The Museum of Archaeology had many stelae on permanent display, but it was the small stela in one of the storage rooms that had excited Aleta’s interest. It was the only stela she had ever seen inscribed with?. And now she’d found the same reference in her grandfather’s notes.

  Aleta closed the heavy velvet drapes. She thought about exploring the streets of the elegant Austrian capital but decided against it, though not out of any concerns for her safety at night. The city where Mozart had spent his most successful and creative years was one of the safest in Europe. It was more that she wanted to be fresh for the opening day of the conference, which included several presentations by academics working to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics. The eminent Mayanist Monsignor Matthias Jennings would also be speaking tomorrow on ‘The Myth of the Maya’. She strongly disagreed with the pompous Jesuit priest’s views of the Maya as bloodthirsty, warmongering savages, but he was always controversial, which inevitably attracted the media and she relished the opportunity to publicly challenge his theories.

  Aleta retrieved her glass of wine from the marble mantel above the fireplace, turned and felt a floorboard move under her weight. The natural curiosity of an archaeologist might normally have prompted her to investigate, but she was weary from the long flight from Guatemala City and retreated to her bedroom. The tin box that her grandfather had hidden there in 1938 remained undisturbed, just as it had when Hitler’s Brownshirts stormed the apartment over seventy years before.

  O’Connor left the shadows of the Saint Ruprecht’s steeple, descended the short flight of icy steps to the Morzinplatz and jumped aboard an old number 1 tram at the nearby Schwedenplatz Strassenbahn-haltestelle. He settled onto one of the wooden seats and, as the tram rattled along the famous Ringstrasse, the roofs of the Neues Rathaus, the Parliament and the Opera House covered in snow, he reflected that he never tired of the dignified Austrian capital. He alighted at the Karntner Ring and walked the short distance to the Imperial Hotel, the former palace of Prince Philipp of Wurttemberg. Nikita Khrushchev, Indira Gandhi, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton had all stayed there, as had Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger and Hillary Clinton. O’Connor had heard that in the 1960s a young Rudolf Nureyev had asked for a room, but was refused – back then jeans were unacceptable in formal settings – until Lord Snowdon walked in and recognised the up-and-coming dancer. Snowdon had escorted him to the bar and Nureyev got his room.

  O’Connor headed for the very same softly lit bar, and one of the hotel’s blonde pagegirls, dressed in an elegant olive-green suit trimmed in gold, flashed him a charming smile. O’Connor nodded, but wary of any entanglement he climbed onto a soft leather bar stool.

  ‘Champagne, thank you, Klaus.’ There were two people O’Connor always got to know in a hotel. One, the head concierge; the other, the head barman.

  ‘The Dom Perignon or the Moet, Mr O’Connor?’

  ‘The Moet will be fine, thanks.’ O’Connor glanced around the smoke-filled room. In the far corner a group of distinguished-looking Austrian men and their attractive wives were in quiet conversation around a coffee table near a window that was curtained in gold and crimson.

  ‘Gold seems to feature prominently in this hotel,’ he remarked, glan
cing at the stylish gold epaulettes on the pagegirl’s uniform.

  The barman smiled, allowing the fine bubbles to disperse as he filled O’Connor’s crystal flute. ‘During the war, when my father worked in this bar, the clientele were mainly Nazis. The bunkers where they stored their gold are still in use.’

  ‘They stored gold here?’

  ‘Hitler used to stay in this hotel whenever he came to Vienna, and his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, set up an annex here for the Third Reich.’

  After the Fuhrer’s triumphant entry into Vienna following the Anschluss, the hotel’s balcony had been decorated with huge red-and-black banners displaying the swastika and the Reichsadler – the German eagle. When O’Connor reached the jungles of Guatemala, he would have cause to reflect on the irony of his choice of accommodation.

  ‘Not many people remember, Mr O’Connor, but the Nazis used reinforced concrete to construct bunkers beneath this bar. The tunnels they built led through the walls of the hotel cellars into a concealed entrance underneath Dumbastrasse,’ Klaus added. O’Connor knew that Dumbastrasse, the street on the western side of the Imperial, connected with the Karntner Ring at the front of the hotel.

  ‘Bombproof,’ he observed.

  Klaus smiled. ‘The Imperial was very lucky. The State Opera House and the Burgtheater were destroyed, and the Ambassador Hotel and the Old Bristol were bombed as well, but even if we had been hit, the tunnels beneath where you’re sitting are a metre thick. The doors are solid steel and the filtering systems were made by Drager, the same construction company that made the filters for Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. I can remember my father saying that when the SS Captain Otto Skorzeny rescued Mussolini in 1943, he brought him into the hotel through the secret Dumbastrasse entrance.’

  ‘And the gold?’

  Klaus shrugged. ‘The only gold left now is on the hotel plates and cutlery that is stored there. Still, there are rumours… My father told me that before Himmler fell out with Ribbentrop, he used to stay here frequently. My father showed me a photograph of Himmler and one of his proteges, an SS officer by the name of Karl von Hei?en. Von Hei?en finished up as the commandant of the concentration camp at Mauthausen. A terrible place. He was also involved in the disappearance of a large quantity of ingots just before the fall of the Reich. The ingots were rumoured to have been stored here, then shipped to Central America through the Vatican Bank, I think. Perhaps they are still to be found, Mr O’Connor?’

  O’Connor left a twenty Euro note with the bill, and left the bar. He climbed the narrow red carpet secured with gold strips to the centre of the long marble staircase, the same staircase that Hitler, Himmler and countless other characters from the dark pages of history had used. At the top of the stairs a huge oil painting of Emperor Franz Josef in the dress uniform of an Austrian field marshal dominated the landing. O’Connor passed a tastefully lit statue of a naked goddess and his thoughts turned to Dr Aleta Weizman.

  He locked the door of his suite behind him and checked the single hair he’d left at the bottom left-hand corner of the wardrobe safe. Satisfied nothing had been disturbed, he dialled the combination and extracted the disc containing the Weizman data. He’d already committed it to memory, but he wanted to be sure there was nothing he’d missed, and he inserted the disc into his laptop.

  The file was classified ‘SECRET – NOFORN’, meaning that in addition to the watertight security accorded CIA secret files, the information was not for release to foreign nationals. It didn’t make sense to O’Connor. The information on the combined FBI/CIA Weizman disc was sparse, and most of it could have been obtained from government departmental records in Guatemala City anyway. WEIZMAN, ALETA REBEKKAH Born: 15 November 1972, San Marcos, Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. Grandfather, Professor Levi Weizman, distinguished archaeologist. Parents and siblings deceased.

  O’Connor grimaced. The word ‘deceased’ concealed a raft of information. Physical characteristics: Height, five-foot eight; hair, black; complexion, olive; eyes, dark-brown; scar just above the right buttock. Marital status/Social pursuits: Does not appear to be in a relationship. Married an American in 1999, but the marriage lasted only eighteen months and ended in divorce. No children. Holds a PADI qualification, including high-altitude diving certification, but does not appear to dive on a regular basis. Religion: Describes herself of ‘no fixed religion’. Catholic upbringing; Jewish ancestry. Education: BSc, BArchaeol (Hons), PhD (Harvard). Political outlook: No evidence that Weizman is a member of any political party or organisation, but she can be outspoken on human rights, especially on behalf of present-day descendants of the Maya. Publications: Mainly confines herself to writing academic papers on ancient Mayan civilisations, but has also authored a paper on the science behind changes in the earth’s magnetic field and its connection to an ancient Mayan warning (see attached list at Annex A). Took a major in mathematics in her BSc.

  O’Connor paused for thought, reflecting on what he’d learned during his last posting to one of the United States’ top-secret research stations at Gakona, in the icy wastes of Alaska. Was Weizman getting close to some uncomfortable truth about the earth’s magnetic field and a possible pole shift? As catastrophic as such an event might be, she wasn’t the only one probing for answers; and even if she had linked the chilling scientific facts to an ancient Mayan warning, it didn’t remotely justify an assassination mission. O’Connor scrolled down the page. More recently Weizman has authored articles critical of US policy in Central America (full texts are at Annex B). Surveillance priority: Low.

  O’Connor scanned the remaining pages, which included the full texts of Dr Weizman’s journal articles, her academic papers, including one on a missing ‘Maya Codex’, and a few transcripts of interviews in the Guatemalan national papers El Periodico, Nuestro Diario, and La Hora. Still puzzled, O’Connor took out the disc and returned his laptop to the safe. The Weizman dossier raised many more questions than it answered.

  O’Connor stripped off and adjusted the pulse on the shower, one of the great pleasures of staying at the Imperial, he thought as he soaped his lean, hard body. But his mind quickly returned to Dr Weizman. An obscure archaeologist working in the jungles of Guatemala shouldn’t be registering on Washington’s radar. Based on what was available on her file, she didn’t even come close to the ‘clear and present danger’ test that might give the President justification to order the current mission. There had to be more to it, O’Connor thought. Much more. He resolved to break in to her apartment. Perhaps there he might discover something that would explain the mystery.

  BOOK I

  1

  VIENNA, 1937

  Professor Levi Weizman removed the priceless jade figurine from the large wall-safe in his study and placed it on his desk. The intriguing milky-green sculpture had been carved in the shape of a ceiba tree, a tree revered by the ancient Maya as the Yaxche, ‘tree of life’. The powerful figure of a male jaguar was etched amongst the tree’s buttress roots, and through the roots there was a hole in the shape of?, the Greek letter phi. At the apex the Mayan artisans had faithfully reproduced the ceiba tree’s distinctive flat crown. Long, intricately carved branches radiated horizontally in the four directions of the compass. Levi had encountered the tree many times on his field trips. In the highlands of Guatemala the ceiba soared above the jungle canopy, providing a roost for the harpy, the largest of the eagles, but for the figurine the Maya had replaced the eagle’s nest with a black-and-gold obsidian cup in which rested a large shimmering crystal.

  The Weizmans’ third-floor apartment overlooked Sterngasse and Judengasse in the old Jewish sector of Vienna’s fashionable Stephansdom Quarter. It was early evening and light snow was falling, the flakes drifting onto the cobblestones below. Deep in thought, Levi thrust his hands into his pockets. The Mayanist scholar was well into his fifties, but he maintained the fitness of a much younger man. His grey hair was brushed straight back from an oval face, and his white moustache and beard were neatly trimmed. Le
vi adjusted his square rimless glasses and stared at the figurine. The markings on it were, he knew, consistent with it being made around 850 AD, a time when the Maya had occupied the great city-state of Tikal, deep in the jungles of what was now Guatemala.

  In the summer of 1936 Levi had discovered the figurine in a secret chamber in Pyramid I, one of Tikal’s many tombs. The trip had been a sabbatical from the University of Vienna, and Levi knew that eventually he would have to make his find public; but he was convinced the figurine held an ancient secret which he was determined to unlock before he made any announcement.

  ‘ Es ist fast Abendessen. It’s almost dinnertime, sweetheart. The children are getting restless.’ Fifteen years younger than her husband, Ramona Weizman had maintained her own career as one of Vienna’s leading fashion designers and milliners. Her label was sold exclusively from her street-level boutique beneath their apartment and her ‘Greta Garbo-style’ Fedora slouch hats were the toast of Vienna, rivalling those of the Parisian milliner Schiaparelli. Tall and slim, with dark curly hair and deep-brown eyes, Ramona was a woman of warmth and charm.

  ‘You’ve been in here all day, Levi,’ she remonstrated gently, rolling her eyes as she spied the myriad mathematical calculations lying beside the figurine on her husband’s desk.

  ‘I’ve been looking at the figurine and trying to work out what it means,’ Levi said. ‘Do you remember that stela I found in Pyramid I at Tikal?’

  Ramona looked sheepish. ‘Vaguely,’ she said, perching on the only corner of the desk not covered by papers and crossing her elegant legs. ‘You showed me photographs. The stone monument with all those squiggles and dots and dashes?’

  ‘Hieroglyphics and Mayan numbers,’ Levi responded with a smile. ‘I’m pretty sure the Mayan hieroglyphics were referring to the winter solstice, and it’s occurred to me that the solstice and this figurine might somehow be connected.’