Spy School Goes South Read online

  “So how did these bodies even get here?” I asked. “If someone laid them to rest, they didn’t drop them in through a hole in the ceiling.”

  “There must be another way in!” Zoe deduced. She pointed down the length of the island we stood on. “Mike! Aim the light over there!”

  Mike did as ordered. Sure enough, in the depths of the cave, there was an even darker passage.

  “Erica!” I yelled. “There’s a tunnel down here!”

  “Great!” Erica said. “I’m going to throw down my flashlight. You guys take it and follow the tunnel.”

  “You’re not coming with us?” Zoe asked.

  “No,” Erica replied.

  “Why not?” Mike asked.

  “Because there’s always a chance that the tunnel has collapsed or is impassable for some other reason, and if that’s the case, then we’ll all be trapped down there together, I won’t be able to mount a rescue, and we’ll ultimately die a horrible death by starvation.”

  “Good point,” Mike said. “You should definitely stay up there.”

  Zoe looked at Murray suspiciously. “I’ll bet if that did happen, you’d try to kill us and eat us to make your own pathetic life last a little longer.”

  “Hey!” Murray cried, offended. “I might be a terrorist, a thief, and a traitor, but I’m not a cannibal!”

  “Anyhow, heads up,” Erica said. “Light’s coming down. Be careful with it. This is my only one.” She dropped a small headlamp through the hole to Mike.

  Mike caught it, then flung the reflective circle to me, Frisbee-style, and slipped the elastic straps for the light around his head.

  The beam from the headlamp was quite powerful, given its small size, and yet it barely made a dent in the darkness around us. Mike swam to the island and joined Zoe and me there, as did Murray.

  “Head on down that tunnel!” Erica called to us. “Hopefully, it will lead to some sort of exit. I’ll find you when you emerge.”

  “How?” I yelled back, but Erica didn’t reply. She was already gone.

  “This is great,” Murray griped sarcastically. “First we’re in a plane crash. Then crocodiles try to eat us. And now we get to go down a spooky underground tunnel full of bats and skeletons. We’ll probably end up in a school of piranhas next.”

  “Stop whining, you pinhead,” Zoe told him. “We’re only in this mess because of you.”

  “Here goes nothing,” Mike said. He started along the island toward the tunnel. Zoe and Murray fell in line behind him.

  I took one last glance at the ancient skeletons piled on the island behind us, worried this cave might end up being my last resting place as well. I shivered at the thought, then hurried after the others, following them into the dark.

  8

  ARCHAEOLOGY

  Unexplored Cenote

  Somewhere in Quintana Roo

  March 29

  1400 hours

  I had imagined that working our way through a half-flooded subterranean burial ground with only one tiny headlamp would be awful.

  It was worse.

  Most of the time, we were up to our armpits in water, if not swimming. The heat quickly drained from our bodies, leaving us shivering. The tunnel often constricted around us: The walls would close in, or the ceiling would dip down, leaving us only narrow, claustrophobic passages to squeeze through. In the dim light, I repeatedly whacked my head on stalactites. And yet, even that far from sunlight, there was plenty of life in the cave. If I had been a biologist, I might have been thrilled. But I wasn’t a biologist, and it turns out, nothing that lives in a cave is cute or cuddly. Instead, everything is nightmare inducing. In addition to the weird blind fish, there were gobs of freakish insects, some of them disturbingly large, scuttling along the roof of the tunnel.

  I began to feel nostalgic for our slog through the jungle. Yes, we had nearly died from dehydration, but at least it had been sunny and warm.

  At some point, shortly after we started, Zoe and I ended up holding hands. There was nothing romantic about the gesture: We were in a dark, potentially deadly tunnel, and it made sense to stay in physical contact. And yet, Zoe and I had never held hands before. In fact, despite how good friends we were, I couldn’t remember if we had really touched each other at all, except for that morning with the grenade launcher and the occasional sparring in self-defense class, none of which was very romantic.

  I didn’t say anything to Zoe about it. She didn’t say anything to me, either. None of us said much at all as we worked our way through the cave, save for the occasional “Watch your heads!” to warn the others about dangling stalactites and the inevitable “Ow!” as someone whacked their head on one anyhow. We just kept moving silently, our hands clasped together until long after our fingers had become waterlogged and pruney.

  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we saw daylight in the distance.

  Mike, being in the lead, was the first to spot it. He gave a whoop of joy that startled all of us and shouted, “Look up ahead! There’s sunlight! We must be near the exit.”

  “And the water’s getting warmer too,” Zoe put in.

  “Um . . . actually, that’s because of me,” Murray said sheepishly. “Mike really frightened me with that whooping.”

  “Ick!” Zoe shrieked. “Murray! You’re disgusting!”

  We would have all been in a hurry to get to the exit anyhow, but now, thanks to Murray, we evacuated the water even faster. Ahead of us, a flight of crude stone steps was hewn into the rock, leading up to a good-size hole. The steps had obviously been there a long time; thick, ancient tree roots snaked down them to the water. We clambered up them, emerging into the jungle once again.

  Only, this jungle was different. The land we had trekked across that morning was flat and featureless. Now there were small hills and mounds all around us, thick with trees and brush. I got the strange sense that something was odd about the landforms, though I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

  There were also iguanas everywhere. Tons of them. It was as though we’d arrived in downtown Iguanaville. They were lounging on rocks, clinging to trees, lurking under ferns. As far as I knew, they weren’t dangerous, but they still looked mean, with sharp claws and bad attitudes. All of them stared at us disparagingly with their beady little eyes.

  “Erica!” Mike yelled at the top of his lungs. “We’re out! Can you hear us?”

  His words echoed off all the hills and mounds, but no response came.

  Mike yelled for her again, but the result was the same.

  “Where do you think she is?” Murray asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

  “I don’t know,” Zoe replied. “There’s no way she could tell where that tunnel was heading from up on the surface. She could be miles away from here.”

  While that was disconcerting, it was still nicer to be out in the sun without Erica than it was to be in a spooky, damp cave without Erica. It was blazingly hot now, but that was a blessing after being in the chilly tunnel.

  I looked back toward the entrance to the cenote. Even though we had emerged from it less than a minute before, I had trouble spotting it. The jungle was so thick, the entrance was almost invisible. It was only a shadow amid a tumult of trees and ferns.

  Right above it, however, was a strangely squared-off block of stone.

  I might have missed it if I hadn’t known the cenote was there. It was covered with tree roots. But now that I was looking at it, I realized it wasn’t a naturally formed rock. Its edges were too even. I ran over to it and pulled some of the roots aside, revealing a pattern of ancient markings and a faint trace of red on the white stone.

  “That’s a shrine!” Mike exclaimed. “A Mayan shrine! They probably built it there to mark the entrance to the cenote!”

  I returned my attention to the hills and mounds around us, seeing them in a new light. I now realized what was unusual about them:

  They didn’t rise gradually from the ground, the way real hills did. Instead, they
tilted upward too abruptly.

  I ran to the closest one, pulling away the underbrush. Beneath it were more square-cut stones with crumbling ancient mortar between them.

  “Those aren’t hills,” Zoe gasped. “They’re buildings. We’re in an ancient city!”

  All of us took in our surroundings with new eyes. Every feature around us was man-made, but had been swallowed by the jungle over the centuries. Even the strip of flat ground we stood on turned out to be made of crushed stone, rather than a solid slab of bedrock. “This is a road,” I said.

  “Of course!” Mike exclaimed. “According to the special I saw, scientists think there could be hundreds of Mayan cities in the jungles around here. No one’s had the time or money to excavate them all.”

  “This is so cool!” Zoe announced, her eyes glittering with excitement. “We’ve found a piece of an ancient civilization!”

  “Big whoop,” Murray said sourly. “Unless there’s an ancient hotel with room service somewhere around here, none of this helps us at all.”

  “Maybe it does.” Mike started following the road, taking care to avoid the many iguanas splayed out on it. “The Mayans didn’t construct all their buildings out of stone. Only the most important ones. Which means we must be in the center of town, and at any town center, there’s probably going to be . . .” He trailed off, pointing dramatically through a gap in the trees. “A temple.”

  Sure enough, another mound rose in the distance. This one was significantly taller than the others around us. It was bedecked with trees and plants, but was obviously a stepped pyramid.

  “So what’s the plan, exactly?” Murray asked blankly. “We go to the temple and pray that someone rescues us?”

  Zoe swatted Murray on the back of the head. “No, you idiot. We climb the temple and see how close we are to civilization. Plus, maybe we can spot Erica from up there.”

  “Oh!” Murray said. “Good thinking.”

  The ancient road led directly to the pyramid. Lots of trees and brush had grown on the road over the past few centuries, but it was still easy to follow. Now that we’d had plenty of water to drink and were warm again, we were in good shape. Except for my wet shoes squelching on my feet and my wet underwear riding up my butt, I felt better than I had in hours.

  We reached the base of the pyramid and worked our way up the stepped exterior. Like the other buildings, it was constructed of rough-hewn limestone held together with mortar and covered with centuries of dirt and plant life. There were also dozens of iguanas basking in the sun on it. Everywhere I looked, there was an iguana, many of them the size of lapdogs. It was like a display case for an iguana store. They watched us warily as we climbed past them, but didn’t seem too threatened by us, as they rarely bothered to move out of our way.

  The pyramid angled up sharply. Murray, being in the best shape, made his way up it the fastest, though the rest of us weren’t far behind.

  The heat and the humidity, originally so refreshing after our time underground, quickly grew oppressive. I had to stop halfway up the pyramid to catch my breath, taking care not to sit on any iguanas. Zoe stopped as well, her eyes fixed on Murray above us.

  Mike came up alongside us. “Are you checking out Murray’s butt?” he asked Zoe.

  “No!” Zoe exclaimed, horrified. And yet her face turned so red, it seemed she might have really been caught in the act.

  “There’s no shame in it,” Mike assured her. “The guy’s pretty hot.”

  “He’s Murray!” Zoe hissed. “I don’t care what he looks like now. The guy’s disgusting. He once found a piece of leftover cookie between two rolls of fat on his stomach and then ate it!”

  “He’s hot now,” Mike said.

  Zoe shivered at the thought of this and then continued climbing the temple.

  Mike gave me a devilish grin, pleased with himself for getting under Zoe’s skin, then followed her.

  I resumed the climb, wondering if Zoe really had been checking Murray out. Even before we knew Murray was evil, Zoe had regarded him with borderline disdain, but maybe that had been a front. Maybe she had always thought he was cute, and now that he had transformed into Hot Murray, she was really attracted to him.

  I realized I was jealous. I had always been so distracted by Erica that I had never thought of Zoe as anything other than a friend, but the truth was, she was impressive in lots of ways: She was smart, she was fun, she was always supportive—and she was cute. An adorable, girl-next-door sort of cute. And she had a crush on me. Or, at least, she’d had a crush on me. For all I knew, she had shifted her attention to Murray.

  I now found myself feeling ashamed for having romantic thoughts about Zoe, rather than Erica, like I was betraying Erica somehow. But Erica had told me that we could never have a relationship, because relationships complicated spying, and Erica didn’t want any complications. That had upset me, but I understood her argument. Which meant that I really should have been free to think about other people and shouldn’t have felt bad about it. Only, I did. And I also felt weird for thinking about Zoe as anything more than a friend. And annoyed at Murray for being potentially attractive to Zoe.

  And then I found myself amazed that I was thinking about this at all, rather than focusing on survival. Here I was, climbing an undiscovered Mayan temple in the middle of the jungle in Mexico, and I was getting all hung up on girls. I needed to be thinking about how to get to civilization and thwart SPYDER, rather than how cute Zoe looked. I needed to be thinking about where Erica was, and how to contact her, rather than whether she’d be upset with me for thinking that Zoe looked cute. And if anything, I should have been annoyed at Murray for double-crossing me and getting me stranded in the wilderness, rather than being a potential rival for Zoe’s affection. After all, Murray was the enemy. Zoe couldn’t possibly like him.

  Unless she had a secret thing for bad boys. Yes, she had been telling me to let Murray die a lot lately, but maybe that had been a front for more conflicted feelings about him.

  I shook my head, trying to clear all the thoughts of Zoe and Erica out of it and focus on the task at hand. As it was, I had reached the top of the pyramid.

  There was a surprisingly large platform at the top, with a small stone hut in the center. The pyramid had been abandoned for so long that a copse of trees was growing around the hut. It was like a tiny forest in the sky.

  We were at the highest point for miles in every direction. It was only about the height of a ten-story building, but the rest of the Yucatán was as flat as land got. The small forest prevented us from being able to take in a sweeping 360-degree view, but if we peered through the trees, we could get glimpses of the surrounding countryside.

  For the most part, everything was an endless carpet of greenery, marked by the occasional spot of blue. There was a large lake not too far away that I thought might have been the one where we had crashed the plane, although I wasn’t completely sure which direction we had come from, or how far we had managed to get through the jungle.

  “Hey!” Zoe yelled. “Check it out!”

  She was beside the stone hut, looking through the trees in the opposite direction from the lake. I hurried over and joined Mike by her side. Zoe pointed into the distance.

  About fifteen miles away, the carpet of green ended abruptly, and an expanse of blue began. The coast. And when I looked the way Zoe was pointing, I could see three buildings along the beach. The tallest was about the same height as the temple we stood on, ten stories or so, and it looked vaguely like a Mayan temple as well. It was a stepped pyramid shape, but it was obviously much more modern. Sunlight glinted off windows in it.

  “It must be a resort,” Zoe said.

  “I think it’s Aquarius,” Mike announced.

  We both looked at him curiously.

  “You guys haven’t heard of Aquarius?” he asked. “It’s supposed to be amazing. Like, the best resort ever. It even has its own water park. Jemma wanted her parents to take us there, but they didn’t think it would l
ook good for the president of the United States to go on vacation in Mexico when there are so many resorts in America.”

  At the mention of the president, something occurred to me. “Speaking of Jemma, how did you get out of going to Hawaii with her?”

  Mike’s eyes went wide. “Oh nuts. With everything that was going on last night, I kind of forgot about Jemma.”

  “You forgot to tell your girlfriend you weren’t going to Hawaii with her?” Zoe asked, upset.

  “I couldn’t tell her we were going on a secret mission!” Mike said defensively. “And she’s not my girlfriend.”

  “You should have told her something,” Zoe insisted. “She’s probably worried sick about you!”

  I suddenly realized that we had an even more pressing concern than Mike’s girlfriend issues: I had no idea where Murray was. It seemed strange that he wasn’t with us at the moment. If anyone would have been excited about civilization—in the form of a luxury resort, no less—it was Murray. I spun around, searching through the tiny forest at the top of the temple, wondering where he had gone off to. He was nowhere to be seen.

  That wasn’t good.

  I ran back through the trees, rounding the small stone hut to the rear of the temple.

  Murray was there. My fears that he’d been trying to escape immediately faded. He was merely scanning the jungle below, perched at the edge of the platform. “Hey, Ben!” he said. “I was just about to call you. I think I see Erica!”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Over there.” Murray pointed to a thick clump of trees a quarter mile away. “You might need to stand over here to see her.”

  I came to the edge of the platform. This side of the temple was much steeper. There were no stairs, like the ones we had come up. Instead, there was only a precipitous drop down into the jungle below. Murray was clinging to a tree to steady himself at the edge. He stepped aside so that I could take his place.

  I stood where he had been and gazed into the jungle, where he’d seen Erica.

  However, even from where I stood now, the mass of trees seemed completely impenetrable.