Assassin's Honor (9781561648207) Read Online Free Page A

XX
    Converting the message into English, a chill went through me. I repeated the entire procedure three times to make sure I had it right.
    Unfortunately, I did.
THE KILLING HAPPENS DECEMBER SIXTEEN XX
IT WILL END WAR XX
    Next I turned to the small section of chart. The coastline on it was oriented vertically, with the sea to the right, or east. Depths were in meters. Perusing my large area chart of the Venezuelan coast, I narrowed the north-south coastal possibilities to the western shore of Lake Maracaibo; the Caribbean coast northwest of Puerto Cabello; or the west coast of the Gulf of Paria, across from Trinidad. However, there were no Venezuelan places on my chart titled
Dzul
or
Xel-ha
, and nothing geographically matched the fragment.
    Again consulting the German dictionary, I found the word
Verabredung
meant “rendezvous” or “appointment.” Next I looked up
Dzul
and
Xel-ha
, but neither were in the book. They didn’t sound French or Spanish to me, but for some reason they seemed vaguely familiar. I wondered if they might be Dutch, for that country had island colonies off the coast of Venezuela.
    Then I remembered, and cursed my stupidity. Because of the admiral’s report about Simon Drake, I’d been thinking aboutVenezuela, but was completely wrong. Those words weren’t European, and they weren’t even from that part of the Caribbean.
    In fact, they were from an area almost a thousand miles away from Venezuela. Dredging up memories from a cruise along the Caribbean coast of Central America the previous September, I remembered Xel-ha was a village on the Mayan coast of Mexico, the Yucatán Peninsula. It was only a couple days steaming from Key West.
    Now that I had the correct location, I recalled the other word’s meaning. Dzul wasn’t the name of a place, it was the name of a man—the current leader of the Mayan independence army, which had been fighting the Mexican national army for the last fifty years in something called the Caste War. It was a simmering conflict few outside of Mexico knew about. Occasionally, it would boil over into a pitched battle, but even then the U.S. press didn’t deem it worthy of American readers.
    Now, however, there were outside players in Mexico. Porfirio Díaz, president of Mexico, had enjoyed good relations with Germany’s chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, for some time. Díaz and Bismarck had signed an immigration agreement several years prior, after five decades of immigration had already brought thousands of Germans to Mexico, mostly around the Gulf coast. More Germans were heading there. Two communities of them were in Yucatán, near Mérida.
    Bismarck, ironically, was in retirement and out of the equation, sacked by the young Kaiser Wilhelm for being not aggressive enough internationally. Now that Wilhelm had no one to restrain him with wise counsel, German naval and commercial efforts were quickly expanding around the world, causing conflicts with other countries.
    I recalled that the Mayan warriors had bought weapons and supplies through traders in neighboring British Honduras. Did this message and chart mean the German navy was going to rendezvous with Dzul, form some sort of alliance, and take over supplying him? For what purpose? Was it to secure an areafor the Caribbean naval base they had wanted for years? Or was Dzul the target of the killing, at the bidding of the Mexican government?
    The chronometer on the bulkhead showed I had less than an hour before I was to give Admiral Walker an idea of what was happening. In the meantime, another pair of eyes was needed to look over this problem. Turning to the row of speaking tubes beside my desk, I opened the lid on the tube connected to the wheelhouse. “This is the captain. Pass the word for Bosun Rork to report to my cabin.”
    I knew someone would be assassinated in six days, but three crucial questions were still unanswered. Who? Where? Why?

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