Lost Empire (Fargo Adventures 2)

iced tea, Sam dialed Selma. Above their heads, a sixty-inch ceiling fan churned the air while through the French doors a cool offshore breeze billowed the gauze curtains.

Despite it being four A.M. in San Diego, Selma Wondrash picked up on the first ring. Sam and Remi were not surprised, having come to believe Selma slept only four hours a night, save Sundays, when she slept five.

“The only time you call me when you’re on vacation is when you’re in trouble or about to get into trouble,” Selma said over the speakerphone without preamble.

“Not true,” Sam replied. “Last year from the Seychelles we called—”

“Because a troop of baboons had broken into your beach house, destroyed the furniture, and made off with all your worldly goods, and the police thought you were burglars.”

She’s right, Remi mouthed from across the kitchen island. Using the tip of her knife, she tossed Sam a chunk of fresh pineapple. He caught it in his mouth, and she applauded silently.

“Okay, that’s true,” Sam told Selma.

A former Hungarian citizen who’d never quite lost her accent, Selma Wondrash was the stern but secretly softhearted head of Sam and Remi’s three-person research team behind the Fargo Foundation. Selma was widowed, having lost her husband, an air force test pilot, in a crash ten years earlier.

After finishing her degree at Georgetown, Selma had managed the Library of Congress’s Special Collections Division until Sam and Remi lured her away. More than a research chief, Selma had proven herself a superb travel agent and logistics guru, getting them to and from destinations with militaristic efficiency. Selma ate, drank, and lived research: the mystery that stubbornly refused solution, the legend that showed the barest spark of truth.

“So what is it this time?” Selma asked.

“A ship’s bell,” Remi called.

They could hear the fluttering of paper as Selma retrieved a fresh legal pad. “Tell me,” she said.

“West coast of Chumbe Island,” Sam said, then recited the coordinates he’d locked into his GPS unit before heading for the boat. “You’ll have to check—”

“Boundaries of the reserves and sanctuaries, yes,” Selma said, her pencil rasping on paper. “I’ll have Wendy look into Tanzanian maritime law. Anything else?”

“A coin. Diamond-shaped, about the size of a U.S. half-dollar. We found it about a hundred twenty yards north of the bell . . .” Sam looked to Remi for confirmation of this and got a nod in return. “We’re going to see if we can clean it up a bit, but the face is obscured right now.”

“Got it. Next?”

“There’s no next. That’s it. As soon as possible, Selma. The sooner we can put a hook on that bell, the better. That sandbank didn’t look all that stable.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Selma replied and hung up.

CHAPTER 2

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

QUAUHTLI GARZA, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED MEXICAN States and the leader of the Mexica (pronounced in the traditional way, Meh-SHEE-kah) Tenochca Party, gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows and down into the Plaza de la Constitución, where the Great Temple had once stood. Now it was nothing more than beautified ruins, a tourist attraction for those who wanted to gawk at the sad remains of the magnificent Aztec city of Tenochtitlán and the great twelve-foot-diameter, twenty-ton Calendar Stone.

“A mockery,” Quauhtli Garza mumbled, watching the milling crowds.

A mockery he’d so far been able to correct with only marginal success. True, the Mexican people had since his election gained a better understanding of their lineage—had come to understand the true history of their country that had been all but obliterated by Spanish imperialism. Even the name, the Aztec Party, which so many news reporters used to describe Mexica Tenochca, was an insult, a nod to falsity. Hernán Cortés and his bloodthirsty Spanish conquistadors had named the Mexica peoples Aztecs, bastardized from the name of the legendary home of the Mexica—Aztlán. It was a necessary artifice, however. For now, Aztec was a term the Mexican people both understood and could take to their collective hearts. In time, Garza would educate them.

It was, in fact, a ground surge of pre-conquest nationalism that had swept Garza and the Mexica Tenochca into power, but Garza’s hopes for Mexico’s widespread and immediate embracement of its history were starting to fade. He’d come to realize they’d won the election partly because of the previous administration’s incompetence and corruption and partly because of Mexica Tenochca’s “Aztecan showmanship,” as one political pundit had termed it.

Showmanship indeed! It was absurd.

Hadn’t Garza years ago renounced his Spanish Christian name, Fernando, for a Nahuatl one? Hadn’t his entire cabinet done the same? Hadn’t Garza renamed his own children in the Nahuatl tongue? And more: Literature and images of Spain’s conquest of Mexico were slowly being weeded from school curricula; street and plaza names had been changed in favor of Nahuatl words; schools now taught courses in Nahuatl and the true history of the Mexica people; religious holidays and traditional Mexica festivals were celebrated several times a year. But still, all the polling showed that the Mexican people saw all of it as novelties—excuses to miss work or drink or misbehave in the streets. Even so, that same polling suggested real change could be instituted if they had enough time. Garza and the Mexica Tenochca needed another term, and to get that Garza needed to have the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, and the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation more firmly under his thumb. As it stood, the presidency was restricted to a single term of six years. Not long enough to accomplish what Garza had planned, not long enough to accomplish what Mexico needed: a fully realized history of its own, free of the lies of conquest and slaughter.

Garza stepped away from the window, strode to his desk, and pressed a button on the remote. Shades descended from the ceiling, muting the noonday sun; in the ceiling, recessed lighting glowed to life, illuminating the burgundy carpet and heavy wooden furniture. Like the rest of Garza’s life, his office reflected his Mexica heritage. Tapestries and paintings depicting Aztec history lined the walls. Here, a twelve-foot-long, hand-painted codex detailing the founding of Tenochtitlán on a marshy island in Lake Texcoco; over there, a painting of the Aztec goddess of the moon, Coyolxauhqui; across the room above the fireplace, a floor-to-ceiling tapestry showing Huitzilopochtli, the “Hummingbird Wizard,” and Tezcatlipoca, the “Smoking Mirror,” in union, watching over their people. On the wall above his desk was an oil painting of Chicomoztoc—“the Place of Seven Caves”—the legendary source of all Nahuatl-speaking peoples.

None of these, however, kept him awake at night. That honor belonged to the artifact standing in the corner of the room. Perched atop a crystal pedestal in a cube of half-inch-thick glass was Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of the Aztecs. Of course, depictions of Quetzalcoatl were commonplace—on pottery and tapestries and in a multitude of codices—but this representation was unique. A statuette. The only one of its kind. At four inches tall and seven inches long, it was a masterwork carved by unknown hands a millennium ago from a chunk of nearly translucent jade.

Garza walked around his desk and sat in the chair before the pedestal. Quetzalcoatl’s surface, lit from above by an inset halogen bulb, seemed to swirl, forming mesmerizing shapes and pools of color that were at once there and not there. Garza’s eyes drifted back along Quetzalcoatl’s plumes and scales until coming to rest on the tail—or where the tail should have been, he corrected himself. Instead of tapering to a traditional serpent’s tail, the statuette widened for a few inches before ending abruptly in a jagged vertical line, as though it had been cleaved from a larger artifact. This was, in fact, the theory Garza’s scientists had put forth. And a theory he had worked hard to suppress.

This Quetzalcoatl statuette, this symbol of the Mexica Tenochca, was incomplete. Garza knew what was missing—or, more accurately, he knew the missing piece would not resemble anything in the Aztec pantheon. It was this thought that kept him awake at night. As th