Past the Sleeping Sons of God

By Alfred Coppel

Newly discovered, never-before published novel from a master writer!

Flor Ortega has lived many lives. She has been the estranged daughter of an American former CIA agent, a secret sister, a poet, a lover, a passionate revolutionary.
She strikes passionate loyalty into the hearts of some, and hatred into the hearts of others, but one one thing is certain: No one who crosses her path is left unchanged.
Her ailing father orders two of his people to retrieve her from Mexico, archeology professor Thomas Bryan Avila and lawyer Caroline Warren--who find her missing, taken by a military squad calling themselves "La Noche Triste."
The two soon find themselves entangled in the complex political, religious, and geographic history of the region. For one it is home, the place of his birth and of his beloved archeological dig. For the other it is a land more foreign than she had imagined. Together they must find Flor Ortego before it's too late, but to do that they must answer an important question: Who is Flor Ortega? Or, perhaps more importantly, what is she?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alfred Coppel was born in Oakland, and served as a fighter pilot in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After his discharge, he started his career as a writer. He became one of the most prolific pulp authors of the 1950s and 1960s, adopting the pseudonyms Robert Cham Gilman and A.C. Marin and writing for a variety of pulp magazines and later "slick" publishers. Though writing in a variety of genres, including action thrillers, he is known for his science fiction short stories and novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReAnimus Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463478912

Alfred Coppel

Alfred Coppel was born in Oakland, and served as a fighter pilot in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After his discharge, he started his career as a writer. He became one of the most prolific pulp authors of the 1950s and 1960s, adopting the pseudonyms Robert Cham Gilman and A.C. Marin and writing for a variety of pulp magazines and later "slick" publishers. Though writing in a variety of genres, including action thrillers, he is known for his science fiction short stories and novels.

Book preview

Note...

A small group of Internet familiars try to keep the faith and fuel the fire, but they do not succeed. There are other, uglier wars to hold the world’s attention.

The dark rituals glimpsed in this novel are not the rituals of modern revolutionaries. There is little in this land called ‘the Isthmus’ that seeks guidance from Europeans or the Twenty First Century people far to the North. Instead the Isthmus seeks its own truth among the mysterious, often cruel, old gods who have lived in this land, in the air above it and in the earth below it for thousands of years.

The Isthmus seems a land created for archaeologists and mystics. And so it might be forever.

Here I add a personal note. Some readers may find the lines of poetry I have included obscure, even irritating and digressive. To those who do I offer my apology and a plea for indulgence. The quotations interspersed throughout this novel are my way of offering to my reader a personal path to truth that the poets quoted have shown me.

PART ONE

1. A dream of a burial in Cauac...

Since the first day her menses flowed she had been groomed and prepared for this holy day. But she had not imagined the agony she would endure. The magical mushrooms had muffled her screams at the first cut of the obsidian blade but not the pain.

They stretched her naked upon the blood-caked stone, held her frail limbs and reclaimed Chac’s ceremonial ornaments. That done, they had stripped the skin from her body with great skill so that it might be worn by a priest of Chac to deceive the rain. Olmec priests had become rare but their requirements remained precise.

Now no voice was left her save the sucking sounds she made breathing in the steaming, bloody air inside the teocalli atop the steeply stepped pyramid. But she heard the people chanting outside and knew that Chac was coming at last.

When all of her had been flayed except for her face, hands, nipples and feet there came an end to the cutting and pulling at her skin. She sank more deeply into narcosis but her jerking and trembling continued. Blood pooled in her eye-sockets so that when she was moved out of the teocalli into the sunlight she saw only the color red. As from a great distance she heard a priest of Chac attempting to comfort her —enumerating the honors she would receive from the Lord of Rain in the Otherworld. The priest was young, hardly more than an acolyte, handsome and learned, but without true faith. She knew that he was terrified because he did not believe his own words of comfort. She felt pity for him.

The touch of the first jade plate upon her torso caused a resurgence of the agony she had already borne. The plate was followed by another and another and another. The thin stones were sewn together one after another she could feel the weight and shape of each searing her flensed body.

With great care and reverence—for Chac’s presence could be felt by everyone—the girl was covered in jade. The last plates covered her face and darkened her eyes. The bead of death was put in her mouth and her lips sewn together.

The Otherworld was very near now. She was lowered down the steps of the pyramid, and lifted to her ceremonial palanquin. She was carried through the throng, past the priest-king of Cauac who crouched to honor her as she was carried to the waiting, limestone-lined pit. She could now only faintly hear the people’s chanting. And Chac whispered to her. He said, Soon, very soon, Chosen One.

The air touched what remained of her nakedness. She heard the mass whispering chant of the people, led by the king.

She was lowered into the open crypt, her door to the Otherworld. The priests of Chac placed her reverently within an open sarcophagus carved with her religious name and the Olmec king-list. She lay listening to the people, among whom she had spent her short life. The sun burned into the open crypt. Courage began to fail her again. Chac, she thought wildly, spare me shame. I can bear no more.

The Water Lord heard and covered the sun with clouds.

The people stirred and gave thanks as the first drops of rain fell on the parched land.

The girl in the jade armor spent the last of her spirit in praise of the lord of rain and rivers. The last thing she heard was the scrape of the carved stones enclosing her as the priests, their naked brown bodies glistening with Chac’s Spring rain, closed the tomb around her.

2. The Noche Triste at Tiburon

The attack came suddenly out of the moonless fall dark. Two dozen young Zapatista sympathizers had settled on the beach two kilometers from the fishing village of Tiburon to play music, make love, smoke marijuana and argue politics. Most were students from one or another of the state universities and gravid with the theories of Mexico’s passionately leftist professors.

Almost a century after the death of Emiliano Zapata, general and hero of the last great Mexican Revolution, the Zapas were still demanding land reform. The movement was as native to Chiapas as were mysticism and maize.

The current insurrection was browser-bait, known across the world through the efforts of its supporters on the Internet. Politically it was no more successful now than it had been in any of its previous incarnations since 1910.

The night was pleasantly cool. A pair of bonfires blazed. There was some sex in the shadows. A portable DVD played the latest popular music from the United States, and a young Spanish Jesuit, aflame with his recent discovery of liberation theology, had just completed an impassioned sermon on sainthood for Emiliano. Some had listened, others had found pleasanter occupations.

The group had been working its way south. It had reached the edge of the Sierra del Sur and decided it was time to break for music, sex and grass.

A newly-joined member of the band, a young, red-haired woman who looked North American but claimed to be Nicaraguan, sat on the sand at the edge of the group. She had come from the north, looking for a comandante of the EZLN—the military arm of the movement—who would enlist her. Her name was Flor Ortega, and she was made welcome among the would-be Zapas because she was knew the history of the Maya, and could speak Nahuatl, the native language of the Isthmus.

Flor Ortega was tired and discouraged. Finding Zapas was not easy for a female foreigner. She still had money in her knapsack, and she was silently considering a break in her search. Tiburon looked a likely place. It had Puerto Vallarte’s climate and beach without Puerto Vallarte’s inflation and Americans.

Ortega was athletic in the style of her peers. Because she had green eyes and reddish hair the Spanish priest had assumed that she was of Celtiberian descent, as he, himself, claimed to be. She said no, that despite her appearance she was a New World mestiza. The group had accepted that with tolerant doubts.

This small troop was unlikely ever to find any serious members of the EZLN. Zapatismo was on the decline in Chiapas. The farmers were weary of promises and killings. It was common knowledge that the cadre the group sought, the last in Chiapas, based itself in the Lacandon Jungle, a rainforest that stood on the southeastern littoral of the Isthmus, two hundred kilometers away from the dark beach at Tiburon.

The army made periodic forays into the Lacandon, but without enthusiasm. An encounter with undisciplined students playing at revolutionary was another matter. And the soldiers of a Yucateco battalion had gone to ground in a half circle pinning the students, unknowing and unaware, against the sea a kilometer north of Tiburon.

The mountains brushed the Pacific at Tiburon. Sparsely inhabited in this part of Chiapas, they were a massive dark presence—’fuliginous’—the Jesuit called them, proudly displaying his classical Castilian vocabulary. If the word meant what he seemed to take it to mean, the green-eyed young woman thought, then it was well used. The Sierra lay like a great sleeping animal, out of whose dark back the stars rose, constellations ablaze, into the moonless sky.

The night, the firelight, the sound of the surf on the sand, and the Jesuit’s musical Castilian voice conveyed a sense of timeless well-being to those who had listened. The notion of Jesus of Nazareth as a proto-Marxist was appealing. But the non-violence of Jesus found no agreement in one of the students from a technical college in Torreon. He had brought with him an automatic pistol stolen from his wealthy father’s collection. He believed that possessing his own weapon would recommend him to the Zapas. Emiliano Zapata had been, after all, a man of war as well as a man of the people.

From time to time the Torreoneco would display his militancy by firing a shots into the air. It annoyed his companions, but this was a group that avoided making rules.

From a nearby field, dug-in soldiers watched. The soldiers were using night-vision goggles, devices which made body heat visible and exposed the people on the beach in glowing, surreal green images. They watched a couple who stole away into the darkness make love. They watched a naked dance. They noted the presence of the young Jesuit.

The surveillance was of particular interest to a special squad of men who called themselves ‘Compañeros de la Noche Triste.’ Companions of the Night of Sadness. The Night of Sadness was the name given to a battle on a causeway between the Spanish adventurers led by Hernán Cortéz and Aztec warriors from Tenochtitlan, the Aztec city on the islands in the lake of Tenochtitlan. Only a handful of Europeans survived the fight against a thousand Aztec—properly called Mexica—warriors seeking revenge for the murder of their king and First Speaker, Montezuma, and the desecration of their bloody temples.

Defeat would have meant terrible death as sacrificial victims, but the Spaniards defended themselves through the night and survived. The Spanish were too skilled in war to be defeated. The Mexica, whose victory would have resulted in a parade of naked men to the sacrificial stone, spent themselves on steel swords and armor.

There was not a Mexican alive who did not know the story of La Noche Triste. And there was not one Chiapaneco who did not fear the death squad who had appropriated the name. History is never long ago in Mexico.

The press of northern Mexico and the capital called the La Noche Triste a death squad. The soldiers called themselves warriors, and the farmers of Chiapas called them ‘colzeros’— rapists—after what they did best.

The soldiers were tired, and their officer, a lieutenant named Fontana, was angry because the army was late in airlifting his unit to their quarters at Candelaria, in Yucatan, where they might expect rest and rotation out of hostile Chiapas.

Fontana was new to the unit and anxious to prove himself. But the ragtag group of truants on the beach did not impress him as worthy of his attention. He took note of the presence of the Jesuit and recalled approvingly the way the former commanding officer of the company had boasted of dealing with liberation theologists when the war was considerably hotter. He had fed them to the sharks which were plentiful along this warm coast.

The ‘battle’ Fontana secretly wished for came upon him unexpectedly. His unit’s discipline was not what it had been under former commanders.

The men with the night-vision glasses had observed the young person on the beach firing shots out to sea. But when he suddenly re-loaded and fired a half-dozen rounds in the approximate direction of the field where the soldiers lay hidden, the men responded like Spartans at Thermopolylae. Before Fontana could shout an order to cease fire, M-16 muzzle flashes formed an angry front as the troops raked the beach with automatic weapon fire. The affair was over in five minutes. In less, if one discounted the shots the soldiers fired into the air like excited Arabs while they ‘occupied’ the ‘Zapa encampment.’

The spoils of war Lieutenant Fontana wished for were sixteen badly shot up dead men, three dead women, a mortally injured priest and one terrified foreigner.

This was not an engagement, Fontana decided. What he had on his hands was a massacre that he dared not describe accurately in his after-action report. A half-dead priest on his hands was a problem, but the old commander’s way was still open to the new. That would account for the Jesuit.

But the frightened girl trussed, taped and shivering against the wheel of one of his vehicles—might easily be a North American, which made her a special problem. There were red-blondes—rubias—in Mexico, but true redheads were rare. Fontana had no intention of attempting to explain a North American witness to the slaughter to his colonel across the mountains.

He radioed for a helicopter from the bivouac below Tiburon. It was time, as the old commander used to say, to offer the sharks communion.

When the helicopter arrived, the young priest was hauled into the yanqui Blackhawk, flown three miles off shore and dumped into the sea. As it happened, only some of him went to the sharks. The part that was consumed included the weights fixed to his legs. His weightless upper torso drifted ashore some time later to dismay a party of Japanese tourists from the town of Kamawabi, Tiburon’s sister city in Kyushu. The Inspector General of the National Police would hear within a pair of days of the grisly discovery.

The other survivor of the slaughter on the beach was a more delicate case. The Americans were indulging one of their periodic passions of political virtue. Special consideration was required. For this Fontana chose his most reliable noncoin, a brutish man named Francisco Garcia, leader of the Noche Triste squad, and instructed him carefully. You will take the 4x4 truck. You will drive across the south spur of the mountains to our base at Candelaria in Yucatan.

"The roads are almost impassable, Teniente," Garcia protested. It was common knowledge that the company was properly moved by helicopters, large troop carriers provided by the Yanquis. This was far preferable and easier than driving two hundred kilometers of badly maintained, unpaved roads.

"I know about the roads. That is why you will have five men with you. Go by way of Sonrisa del Sol. But do not, repeat, do not stop there. Fontana paused and studied his subordinate by the light of his pocket torch. I want you to take that one." He indicated the slender woman sitting hunched over and shivering on the ground, her eyes and mouth taped, her arms bound by the elbows with wire.

Take her and lose her. Is that clear? I want her gone, not to be found. We have turned up a foreign whore running with Zapas. No more, no less, Fontana said carefully and distinctly. Do you understand? And take the new recruit, Carlitos, with you. Use him. Toughen the little shit up.

Sergeant Garcia studied the slender female figure sitting against the wheel of the vehicle. He nodded and said, "Si, mi Teniente. Understood." There were worse jobs than this, even in the army, he thought, and turned away to select the men who would accompany him across the mountains. For this task, only Noche Triste men would do.

Three hours later, the woman rode sitting on the floor of the 4x4. The wire still bound her arms and tape still covered her eyes and mouth. Each time the truck made a sharp turn or struck a bad patch in the road she toppled helplessly to the corrugated steel of the cargo bed and had to be propped up again by one of the men who rode with her. Her shaking grew worse as she smelled the dust rising behind the vehicle and the rankness of the men around her.

The soldiers drove into the mountains in the direction of the pueblo of Sonrisa del Sol—Smile of the Sun —and the scrub forest of the Sierra de Sur. As the military truck negotiated the rough-surfaced road, the girl heard no other traffic. She knew fear, had always known it. It was very bad now.

The sergeant rode with the driver. She could hear his hoarse voice. The men near her were acrid with the smell of field soldiers. The sweat of fear had dried on her. She was grimy. She had no shoes. She wore a T-shirt with the name of a computer company on it and faded jeans, worn through at the knee. Her knapsack was gone, lost on the beach.

A soldier said to one of his fellows, This will be an initiation for you, Carlitos. Here, you had better begin. A tobacco-stained smile showed under his steel helmet. He ran his hands up the girl’s leg and unbuttoned the fly of her jeans. She gasped and recoiled, but one of the others held her by the arm and twisted it. The pain made her strain against the tape on her mouth. A hand caught her chin and tore away ripped the gag.

"Please, let me see...!"

It’s dark. There is nothing to see. A laugh.

Besides, we are ugly. More laughter. "Don’t be troublesome, putita," a soldier said. Think of this as your contribution to the national defense.

A soldier cut the wires holding her elbows lashed together and looped the ends around the steel posts holding the benches on either side of the troop compartment. She was almost grateful to stretch her cramped back on the steel floor of the 4x4’s troop compartment. Then she guessed what was coming and pressed her knees together.

Look, now, Carlitos, the older soldier said. "Así. Thus." He hooked his fingers in her waistband and pulled the tight-fitting jeans down to mid-thigh. She wore no undergarments. A second soldier shone an electric torch on her. Her naked belly was white in the light. Someone pushed the shirt above her breasts. Perversely, her nipples stood erect.

Someone had bloodied her earlobes tearing off her earrings. Now the soldiers noticed that she had had the rim of her navel pierced and wore a gold ring in it.

One of the men pulled the ring free to pocket it.

She kicked, and was struck. Hard.

She likes to fight, this one. A soldier put his knee between her thighs, caught her legs against his side and pulled the denims off one ankle. She was now naked except for the denim trousers bunched around one leg and the T-shirt bunched under her chin. Her pudenda was spread and open.

The oldest soldier, a man in his forties, lowered his trousers and exposed a large, tumescent penis. Hold her goddamn legs, he said.

Without further preamble he knelt between the girl’s legs and raped her. He filled her, ground her bare back into the dirty rivet heads securing the floor of the truck. She heard herself wailing in despair.

The sergeant in the front seat looked back through the window. He laughed as the road grew rougher. We are driving through Sonrisa. Is she smiling? He was pleased with his play on words.

The girl, out of breath, stopped struggling. As the military truck moved through the predawn pueblo, a second soldier took his place between the girl’s knees. He was swift. She had begun to make choking noises.

On the road away from town and deeper into the mountains, the soldiers in the rear encouraged the one called Carlitos to penetrate the girl. It was a very short business. He ejaculated at once. Scoffing, the old soldier mounted her again. He ground the dust and dirt adhering to his penis into her most tender flesh. He, himself, seemed unfazed by the scraping. When he had finished, he made her sit up while he removed her soiled shirt. He fondled and squeezed her breasts appreciatively. The Noche Triste might be known as ‘colzeros’, but it was not every night a soldier ended up with something this good. He caught a nipple and rolled it between thumb and forefinger while she moaned.

You see, Carlitos, they like this.

The truck climbed farther into the mountains. Then with a first light in the sky, Sergeant Garcia ordered the vehicle parked, so that the business of rape and recreation could begin in earnest.

A day and a night later, under a gray morning sun, the sergeant called a halt. He ordered Carlitos, the recruit, who was drunk on mescal, to drag the naked and senseless girl deeper into the woods. Carlitos did as he was told. Sergeant Garcia, somewhat less drunk than his men, followed the recruit carrying a massive forty-five caliber automatic pistol.

The woman was scratched bloody by the rocky soil and the brambles on the forest floor. She had not eaten since her last meal on the beach at Tiburon. The soldiers had given her water, but they had also forced a few mouthfuls of mescal upon her and she had thrown it back up and was smeared with vomitus.

Put her down, the sergeant said.

The girl lay cut, bruised and dirty on the ground, her eyes open but unseeing.

The sergeant took his sidearm from its holster and handed it to the young Carlitos.

The games are over. Shoot her. I am going back to the truck. This was the routine. It gave the noncom what the politicians called ‘deniability.’

Carlitos, with only a month’s service, and suddenly panic-stricken at what he was being ordered to do, watched his sergeant go down the road to the 4x4. The hand that held the pistol shook as though in spasm.

The girl’s eyes were open wide. Staring blankly at him.

He looked away from her, pointed the pistol at a tree and fired. Once. Twice. Three times. Then he turned and ran away down the slope to his comrades.

3. Bryan Avila

Professor of archaeology Thomas Bryan Avila transferred his battered bag from the sidewalk to the rear deck of the shiny new Range Rover. The young woman from the Foundation office surrendered the keys and he climbed into the driver’s seat. He had not been in a car on a paved road for months, but he wasn’t sure he could have survived Bayshore Freeway as a passenger.

He thought he detected the smell of eucalyptus smoke in the air. Unlikely. California was a charter member of the clean air at any price states. The smell of burning eucalyptus leaves would have been a remembrance of his undergraduate days at Berkeley. Insistent nostalgia was a sure sign of aging, he thought wryly.

Bryan drove out of the airport maze and onto Bayshore Freeway. He turned north toward San Francisco. The girl from the Foundation, an intern specializing in archaeological and anthropological grants, was silent, stealing admiring glances at him as they joined the heavy traffic flow.

Have you been in the field for long, Professor? she asked.

Three years, Bryan said. If you count Lathrop, New Mexico the field. A mild academic joke. Lathrop was thought part of the western wilderness by anyone who lived near Stanford and the University of California. Since the turn of the new century the Bay Area had lost much elegance, but no self-love. Even the barbaric attacks on New York had left San Francisco sympathetic but self-possessed.

Bryan had been born in the Republic of Santa Elena and had spent much of his life in time-forgotten places, but his formative years had been spent here. Part of him still regarded San Francisco as home. His mother had ended her days in this city, rather like royalty dying in exile.

Lawton Kelleher had once said almost exactly that about the widow of his best friend, Bryan’s father, and had been known, when challenged, to call Eliana Maria ‘la infanta’—what Spanish royals used to call their heiresses.

It was the urgency of the needs of the dig at Cauac that drove him. The Maya had always been thought an exclusively lowland people and no city had ever before been discovered so high in the Santaleñan Sierra del Sur. Bryan was still compelled by the whispering mountain wind among the eroded stones. Cauac was austere; one could stand among the ancient, weathered ruins, looking down at the ocean of trees that was the Lacandon—the last great rainforest in North America, and most importantly, there were clear indications from the geological scans that suggested pre-Maya artifacts at Cauac, far outside the accepted sphere of Olmec influence.

But now that the discovery looked so promising, funding for the work at Cauac was nearly exhausted. He had left his team there, twenty of them—hoping and waiting for him to send word of rescue for the Cauac dig by the Kelleher Foundation.

Bryan’s father had been a soldier-diplomat, the Military Attache in the Embassy of the United States in Ciudad Elena. In the Nineteen Fifties Lawton Kelleher had been posted there as chargé. The two men had been close friends and competitors since their days at Princeton. In Ciudad Elena rivalry had continued as they competed for the attention of Eliana Maria Avila-Santana, the daughter of a President to be, a princess of the Treinta, the thirty families who had ruled Santa Elena since the days of the Conquest.

Colonel Thomas Bryan won that battle, but his triumph was cut short. He was killed in an air crash soon after Bryan was born. Lawton Kelleher had been a loyal friend to Colonel Bryan’s widow, and later to his son, walking the fine line between Eliana Maria’s pride and her willingness to accept help. Bryan well knew how difficult that had sometimes been.

He permitted himself a wry inward smile. There was a sort of Occam’s Razor to personal relationships. No matter how complex the situation, the simplest resolutions were usually the successful ones. Bryan, at the University of California, had been a wellborn but impecunious schoolboy. A career later, he was again in San Francisco, returning as a successful field archaeologist back from a major discovery. But still impecunious and ready at last to ask for help from Lawton Kelleher and the Kelleher Foundation.

But this could be no surprise to the Foundation staff. Professor Thomas Bryan Avila, full Professor and recently Chairman of the Department of Archaeology at Lathrop University in New Mexico, might impress an intern, but the reason for his appearance in San Francisco would be no mystery to anyone associated with the top level of the Kelleher Foundation. Lawton surely knew that Bryan came as a supplicant.

Would you drop me at the Foundation office? the girl (her name was Tiffany, which to Bryan placed her parents in time) asked. Everyone is working overtime for the Ambassador these days. It’s on your way to the big house.

The Big House. Bryan had been there often when he was growing up. And so the staff still called him ‘The Ambassador.’ Actually, Lawton had never been an ambassador. He had made too many enemies in the State Department for that. But his long-ago posting to the Republic of Santa Elena had focussed his career primarily on Central America and its constant turmoil. It was only a step from there to a career in State Department Intelligence, one which suited him well.

On Montgomery, isn’t it? Bryan asked. The girl looked surprised, and he added, I used to know San Francisco well, a long time ago. But you may have to give me directions.

The girl relaxed in her seat and began to chatter on about how much she loved her work, stealing a glance at Bryan every so often to see what effect her words were having.

Bryan smiled and nodded at proper intervals, listening to Tiffany and thinking about Lawton Kelleher. What would Lawton want in return for the Foundation’s financing of the dig at Cauac, he wondered. Lawton was not given to extravagance. The Kelleher Foundation under his guidance could be a horn of plenty—but in return Lawton expected results. That was as it should be, but Bryan had always hoped that he would never have to ask Lawton for money. What bargain could he strike? A very large grant would be needed to keep the work at Cauac going, since the University funding had run out. And despite Bryan’s blood ties with the thirty families who ran Santa Elena, money from the Department of Antiquities in Santa Elena was limited.

But Lawton had obviously anticipated his decision to beg (that was how Bryan thought of his turn to the Kelleher Foundation). Bryan’s Mexicana Airlines flight stopped in Los Angeles, and as he boarded his connecting flight to San Francisco, Bryan received a message that he was to come to Lawton’s home on Outer Broadway as soon as possible, not to the Foundation office, and that transport and accommodations were being provided.

Traffic was heavy when Bryan emerged from the Broadway tunnel after dropping Tiffany off at the Foundation Office.

A golden orange sun shone through the tinted windshield and into Bryan’s eyes as the day waned. He gripped the steering wheel with care, making his way through the heavy traffic.

The cell phone in the center console of the Rover buzzed. He poked the proper buttons and answered automatically, ‘Tom Bryan here’. Everywhere save in the classrooms at Lathrop, he used this version of his name, one his father would have recognized. Professionally he was known as Thomas Bryan Avila, with his mother’s surname last, in the Central American manner. It had been his mother’s wish, and he accepted it without complaint. But for all of his adult life, he had contrived to be called simply ‘Bryan’ by his friends and peers.

The soft Spanish voice of Lawton Kelleher’s houseman said, Hola, Don Tomás. Aquí Ramón Salcido. Where are you?

Just out of the Broadway tunnel, Ramón. Traffic is getting worse. I’ll be there as quickly as I can manage, Bryan said.

I shall tell the patrón so, Ramón said and rang off.

Salcido was a legacy of Lawton’s days as head of a diplomatic mission to Sandinista Nicaragua. For some reason never explained to Bryan, Lawton Kelleher’s entire diplomatic team had been expelled from Managua in the winter of 1978.

Lawton, by this time a very senior Latin American specialist, had returned to the United States with at least twenty staffers, dependents, and what were quaintly called indigenous associates.

Managua was the last government mission Lawton undertook. He remained in Washington until he retired, then returned to San Francisco to manage the foundation that bore his family name.

Bryan’s patience almost snapped when traffic came to a complete stop at Van Ness Avenue, the product of a minor fender-bender in the middle of the intersection. He was trapped, and could not escape the jam. He waited fruitless minutes, only inching ahead, and then used the car phone to call Ramón Salcido.

Ramón, tell the patrón that I have been delayed. Bryan’s exasperation rang in his voice.

"I will tell him, Don Tomás. Abogada Warren is just arriving. El Patrón wants to see the two of you together."

Bryan replaced the phone impatiently. He knew of ‘Abogada’—attorney—Caroline Warren, the daughter of one of Lawton’s lawyers, but he had never met her. Her father, John Rockland Warren, had died recently. John Warren had been another of Lawton’s school friends from Princeton days.

Bryan found himself oddly displeased. Considering that he had come, hat-in-hand, to ask for money, he would have much preferred to see Lawton alone. It would change the atmosphere to have a lawyer present.

He realized that he had been expecting something more personal and private from his meeting with Lawton. Like an adolescent seeking approval, he thought wryly, he had been looking forward to boasting a bit about the work at Cauac. Lawton could, and would, appreciate such esoterica. It was unlikely that Caroline Warren would be interested.

Bryan shook off his irritation. Bryan knew Lawton well enough to realize that the project would not receive a penny of Kelleher Foundation money unless Lawton believed that Cauac was an important site. So much depended on convincing him. Think positively, he thought wryly.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, traffic began to move again, and Bryan headed the Rover across Van Ness and up Broadway towards the Kelleher mansion. Bryan grinned to himself. Here I am, under Lawton’s spell, and I haven’t even reached his house yet. But Lawton had always had the ability to come into a room and fill it, dominate it, not just with his wealth, but his presence.

As he drove the Rover into the driveway of the great brick house, he still had not made up his mind just what to do. Lawton was the last individual of a once numerous California family of Kellehers. He had led a life that was the stuff of which popular legends were made. As a young man he had served in the big war as a commissioned officer in the Office of Strategic Services. But even before war’s end, he had been seconded to the Department of State, and because the Kelleher family had long-standing close connections with the political clans of Central America, he had done much useful work in the nations south of Mexico. There had even been talk that he was on an inside track; that one day, given the proper political circumstances, he could become Secretary of State.

He had never married, and as far as anyone could tell, his private life had been submerged in his public life. He was an enigma to his colleagues at the State Department, and for one so prominent in political life, to the press as well. So for all of his career, Lawton had simply ignored the press and the rumor-mongers. He went about his business and his life in his own way. His ability to do this was one of the things Bryan most admired in Lawton. At the same time, Bryan recognized that same trait could cause