“Good. Listen carefully.”
The 1970s style gray building was three stories high with an unusually long overhang above the main entrance. The double automatic doors were locked, and the only visible light was glowing from a few small fixtures left on throughout the night for maintenance purposes.
The University of Puerto Rico was founded in 1900 as the first higher education center on the island. It had since grown to become the best University system throughout the Caribbean. But at four in the morning, most of those University buildings were closed. The three-story Mayagüez Campus Library was no exception.
What was an exception was that for the first time in twenty-three years, Superintendent Jose Mignucci had been awoken in the middle of the night and by the governor of Puerto Rico himself. Fifteen minutes later, Mignucci stood in front of the library building, waiting patiently and wondering what the hell it was all about.
In the distance, a single pair of headlights turned onto the main street, which wound around the vast lawn and eventually passed the library on its way to the campus admissions building. The revving of the car’s engine could be easily heard as it sped around the gradual curve and braked hard upon approach to the intersection. With a hard right turn, the small Toyota squealed around and up the driveway toward the library where it finally skidded to a stop.
Mignucci watched with curiosity as a man jumped from the driver’s seat and sprinted up the long walkway toward him.
“Good morning.” Mignucci greeted the man with a dose of sarcasm.
Juan Diaz waved briefly and bent over to catch his breath. “Morning!”
Mignucci calmly spun around and inserted his key into the lock. With a quick turn, the bolt within the steel frame dropped, allowing him to manually pull one side open. He held it open and waved Diaz in.
Juan spotted the library’s directory computer and ran to it while Mignucci turned on all of the interior lights. Juan barely noticed when the entire floor lit up behind him. Instead, he scanned the screen, found the search option and typed in “archeology and hieroglyphs.” The result listed dozens of books. He printed the list and took off again, this time up the wide carpeted stairs heading for the second floor.
Thirty-five minutes later, Diaz burst through the administration office of their team’s research lab across town, struggling under an armful of heavy books. He crossed the room and dropped them onto the long wooden table next to their digital scanner. He quickly picked up the nearest book and flipped through the pages as if pretending to speed-read. He immediately stopped when he spotted the first page of pictograms, along with their translations.
Diaz turned it over and pressed the book down flat against the scanner’s clear glass, then hit the large green “scan” button. After the machine saved the image into memory. Diaz picked the book up again and continued flipping through.
There were several open-source computer code algorithms commonly used for telling a computer how to distinguish between pictures and text on the same piece of paper. But none of them were working. Lee Kenwood growled in frustration, looking for the error in his code. After changing some syntax, he clicked the “compile” button on his screen and waited for the result. Another error.
Damn it, what am I missing? He pounded on the table and opened up his coding window again. Finding the line causing the problem, he made another change. Still no dice.
“Come on!” He slapped the metal desk next to him with his palm and the pain instantly reminded him why that was a bad idea. Lee rubbed it and leaned closer to his screen, examining the list of variables he had added. He made another change and saved it, then clicked “compile” again.
This time there were no errors.
Lee thrust a fist in the air. “Yes!” He quickly scanned the local data repository and found the hundreds of graphic files Juan had uploaded. Now done with the books, Juan had already begun adding website links to the list. All were resources that IMIS would use to find patterns and cross reference against one another and lastly against the satellite image that Will Borger had sent them.
Taking a deep breath and with fingers crossed, Lee uploaded his computer code into IMIS’ server cluster and launched it.
Alison was still sitting in front of Borger’s laptop three hours later, studying the rock shapes in the image. She glanced up when she heard rain begin to fall onto the roof of the helicopter’s cabin. It started slow, quickly increasing until it became a veritable downpour. She moved to the window but couldn’t see the men outside.
Clay, Caesare, and Borger were over a half mile away, surveying the ongoing fire as dawn broke over the distant mountains. Fortunately, the dampness of the jungle had finally won out over the raging flames. Now, rather than expanding, the ring of fire was quickly fizzling out. The rain was the final straw.
They were soaked by the time the three made it back to Alves’ giant helicopter, and the sun had already risen whole into the morning sky. DeeAnn was still asleep with one hand wrapped tenderly around Dulce’s curved back. The men passed by them quietly and surrounded the nearby table where Alison sat.
“How’s the brushing up going?” Clay whispered.
“Okay.” She leaned back and briefly rubbed her eyes. “I wish I could talk to one of my professors.”
“Find anything out?”
“The shapes definitely share some characteristics with Mayan pictograms, maybe even Olmec. But there are only three symbols, which isn’t much to go on. It would be nice if we knew how old they were.” She pointed to one of the three. “This one is most similar to a Mayan bird. And this other one is clearly a circle with inward facing arrows, but I have no idea what it means. I haven’t found anything even remotely similar. And the third shape is anyone’s guess.”
“So we don’t know if it’s Mayan or not.”
Alison didn’t answer.
“Ali?”
She looked up at them reluctantly and then exhaled. “It’s hard to say. Without knowing their age…” She paused. “The Mayan’s were amazing. They knew some things that are beyond current explanation. For example, they calculated the length of a day down to two one-thousandths of what our modern atomic clocks calculate it to be. And that was two thousand years ago. Their understanding of astronomy and mathematics were… well, inexplicable. The problem is… they didn’t come this far south.” She crossed her arms. With a look of frustration, she began to say something but stopped.
“What is it?”
“This is going to sound crazy, but if these shapes are old enough, they may not have been influenced by the Mayan or the Olmec languages at all. Instead, those languages may have been influenced by this.”
“Whoa,” said Caesare. “That’s heavy.”
The buzzing of Clay’s phone interrupted them. He quickly fished it out of his pocket. He examined the number and handed it down at Alison. “It’s Lee.”
She accepted the call and held it to her ear. “Hi, Lee.”
“Hey, Ali,” he replied. “I think I have something for you. IMIS thinks it has translations for two of the symbols.”
“Two?”
He shrugged. “It seems to think so. Are you ready?”
Alison glanced at the three men surrounding her. “Go ahead.”
“IMIS believes the middle shape, the one that looks like a bird, means ‘large’ or ‘strong.’ The one below it, and more to the right, means ‘weak.’”
Alison jotted it down. “Large and strong… and weak. Is that it? Nothing on the third one?”
“No, nothing on the circle.”
“Any idea as to accuracy?”
“Fifty-four and fifty-eight percent. So not great.”