Age of Aztec Read online

  She grabbed her jacket.

  “Where are we going?” asked Aaronson.

  “Where do you think? Where he was last seen. Scene of the crime.”

  THEY SIGNED OUT a car and drove east. En route to the City of London ziggurat, they reviewed what they knew of yesterday’s incident. In his lap, Aaronson had a copy of Chief Inspector Nyman’s case report, which the detective had been typing up half an hour before his execution. Aaronson went through it, reading out salient details.

  “The Conquistador stowed away aboard the Sun Broadcasting aerodisc, hidden in a locker. He emerged and threatened the pilot at gunpoint, forcing him to descend to within jumping distance of the ziggurat. The cameraman decided to play have-a-go hero and tackled him. He came off worse. The Conquistador beat the guy senseless, chucked him out of a hatch, and followed. He also made short work of those two sergeants, by all accounts. Elite officers, and he made them look like amateurs.”

  “I’ve seen him in news footage, how he fights,” said Mal. “I’m not saying I couldn’t take him. It wouldn’t be easy, though.”

  “DCI Nyman’s theory is that he’s had training. Eagle Warrior training. What do you reckon to that?”

  “I’d say Nyman is – was – correct. The Conquistador, whoever he really is, is military. Or ex-military. You don’t pick up sword skills like those from private tuition.”

  “Not Jaguar training, then?”

  “What, he’s one of us? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Just airing the possibility.”

  Mal mimed a shudder. “Fuck me, I hope not. What’s Nyman’s verdict on the armour retrieved from the scene?”

  “New, bespoke, not a genuine antique, a copy. Somebody must have smithed it for the Conquistador, or the Conquistador smithed it himself. He was going to follow that up as a line of enquiry next. Should we?”

  “I don’t know how far we’d get. The Conquistador’s wily. I doubt he’d leave the armour behind if he felt it could be traced. Anything else relevant?”

  “Nyman reckoned the Conquistador knew the patrol disc would start shooting. He was counting on it. It was how he planned on making his getaway.”

  “His mysterious getaway. Vanishing into thin air.”

  “You sound like you know how he pulled it off.”

  “I have an inkling.” Mal indicated to turn off the Strand onto Fleet Street. A cabbie braked and politely let her through. The traffic was always on its best behaviour around a marked Jaguar Warrior car.

  “Can I make a personal comment, boss?” Aaronson asked.

  “You will anyway, even if I tell you not to.”

  “You’re taking this remarkably well. You’ve just been given the job no one on the force wants. You seem pretty cool about it.”

  “I don’t have a choice. What can I do? I can’t tell the chief super to go and stick it up his arse. I just have to make the best of things.”

  “But Nyman’s, what, the third inspector in a row who’s handled the Conquistador case.”

  “And the third Kellaway’s executed. Way I see it, he can’t go on getting rid of us at this rate, otherwise there soon won’t be a CID left. That gives me some breathing space.”

  “Do you honestly think that?”

  “No. But also, the Conquistador’s had it easy so far.”

  “How so?”

  Mal flashed a grin. “Fucker hasn’t had me to deal with yet.”

  THEY SCOURED EVERY inch of the plaza, which was still closed to the public. Mal paid particular attention to the corpse enclosure. The flagstones there bore spectacular firework-like patterns of dried blood, baked black by the sun.

  Then they climbed the ziggurat and picked their way across the shattered remains of the temple. Again, as below, it was the throwing off of the corpses that interested Mal. She squatted at the ziggurat’s rear edge and peered over. She probed the stonework below the lip of the apex, feeling with her fingers. Finally she found what she was after.

  “Come and see this.”

  “No thanks.” Aaronson felt dizzy just being this far above ground, never mind watching his superior officer leaning out over empty space.

  “Don’t be such a wuss.”

  “Still no.”

  “I’ll hold you.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  Aaronson shuffled forward and, with Mal gripping his trouser leg, craned his neck. It was a sheer drop of some two hundred feet to the enclosure below.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “See that there? In the cement between those two blocks?”

  “No. Oh. Yes. Is that...?”

  “A climber’s piton.”

  The ring-shaped head of the piton protruded out barely half an inch, and was as dark as the stonework around it. Unless you were searching for it, you could easily have never spotted it.

  “Are you a climber, Aaronson?”

  “Only career and social. Look at me. I’m shaking like a leaf. Do I look like I’ve got a head for heights?”

  “My guess is our friend the Conquistador anchored the piton in with a hammer and abseiled down on a line looped through it. Then he reeled the line in and hid himself among the dead bodies.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I don’t think I am.”

  “But surely eyewitnesses would have spotted him coming down.”

  “Maybe. But nobody hangs around close to the corpse enclosure, do they? Plus, it’s behind the ziggurat, hardly prime viewing position. The temple obscures the altar from here. And if he abseiled quickly enough, and the line was thin, he might look from a distance like just another body falling. In all the confusion it’d be an easy mistake to make. Then the retrieval truck arrives, and to the workmen he’s just another partially clothed stiff.”

  “The truck didn’t turn up until two o’clock. You’re saying he lay there for two hours in a pile of hacked-up corpses, playing dead?”

  “I am.”

  Aaronson whistled. “He is one determined fucker, that’s for sure.”

  “I’d guess, too, that he smeared himself with blood, and maybe also stuck on some bone fragments and gristle from the bodies, so that at a glance he’d appear like all the rest of them.”

  “Determined and sick.”

  “No,” said Mal, “he simply doesn’t care. He does what he has to, whatever it takes, so that he can survive and attack again another time.”

  “A madman.”

  “It can look like madness, to be that focused on your goal.” Mal worked out the piton with a pocket knife, bagged it as evidence, then stepped back from the edge, contemplating. “This man – somebody did something to him once, something that changed him. He was hurt or damaged in some way, and he blames the Empire and wants to show everyone how consumed with hate he is. Everything he does, it’s showboating, designed for maximum effect. State occasions. Public ceremonies. Priest investitures. If it’s holy, he has to desecrate it. Hence the armour and weaponry resembling something an old-world Spanish explorer would have been kitted out with. This is all about making a statement, the same one over and over.”

  “Not a fashion statement, I hope.”

  “I’m serious,” Mal snapped. Sometimes Aaronson was too flippant for his own good. He needed to rein it in if he ever hoped to get ahead. “He’s set himself up as the opponent of the Empire, its nemesis. When the Spanish invaded Anahuac, they were expecting to find a primitive culture ripe for the picking, based on their and other Europeans’ experiences in North America. They got a hell of a shock when it turned out that the Land Between The Seas had technology and capabilities far beyond their own, and was in fact readying itself to expand its territory. They fought the Aztecs hard and committed countless atrocities, but it was inevitable that they would be defeated. Conquistadores – an ironic name, in the event. It’s as if this guy, our Conquistador, wants to reclaim the title, turn it back from something vainglorious to something meaningful again.”

  “All on his own? One ma
n against the entire world – against billions?”

  “In his head, those are acceptable odds,” Mal said. “He believes all he has to do is keep hitting the Empire where it hurts, time after time, and eventually it’ll fold up and crawl away.”

  Aaronson grimaced. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you admired him.”

  “Someone that blindly, nakedly stubborn – what’s not to admire? Doesn’t mean I’m not going to do everything in my power to nail the bugger. And not just because he’s an enemy of the state and a mass murderer. Because it’s my neck or his.”

  “So,” said Aaronson as they set off down the steps, “any ideas? Are we going to wait until the Conquistador makes his next move and try to nab him then?”

  “That was Nyman’s tactic, and look how far it got him. No, I think it would be more sensible to force his hand. Lure him out. Let’s us make the running for once.”

  “You have a plan.”

  She did. A sketch of one. It would require Kellaway’s full backing, some string-pulling, and the mobilisation of considerable manpower and resources, but she doubted she would have trouble securing any of those things. The chief super was no less keen than she was to see the Conquistador dead or in custody. A commanding officer could shift the blame onto subordinates only for so long. Mal sensed she was his last throw of the dice. If she didn’t come up with the goods, Kellaway would most likely be kneeling beside her in the quadrangle at HQ, waiting for the shimmering whir of obsidian and the farewell to earthly existence.

  The galling thing was – and Mal could never share this with anyone, not even Aaronson – she had been on the point of turning in her resignation this very morning. For the past few weeks she had been trying to pluck up the courage to write her letter of notice and hand it in. Today, she’d been convinced, was going to be the day. In fact, back in the quadrangle earlier, with Kellaway, she had been close to blurting out the words “I quit”several times.

  Events had taken on their own momentum, however, and almost before she realised it she’d been assigned the Conquistador investigation. It was too late to change that now. In spite of her disenchantment with her job, the Jaguar motto still had some resonance for her: Never back down, never pull out.

  Besides, just as this case that could break a career, it could also make one.

  All the more crucial, then, that her plan got given the green light, and worked.

  THREE

  6 Vulture 1 Monkey 1 House

  (Tuesday 27th November 2012)

  THE BRITISH AIRWAYS aerodisc touched down at Palermo at 11am local time. It was a commercial long-haul flight out of Heathrow, and the yellow quadrant on the disc’s compass totem was highlighted to indicate its southerly bearing. For the onward journey east to Beijing, with recharge stopovers at Istanbul and Karachi on the way, the red totem quadrant would be highlighted, in accordance with divine precept.

  Stuart Reston disembarked with all the other business class passengers. A flight attendant enquired if he’d had a pleasant trip, and he nodded, although in truth the flying time was so brief – a little over an hour – that he felt like he’d scarcely fastened his seatbelt before it was time to unfasten it again.

  He was met in the terminal building by a uniformed chauffeur holding up a sign with his name on it.

  “Niltze,” the chauffeur said.

  Reston responded to the Nahuatl greeting with the equivalent in Italian: “Buòn giorno.”

  The chauffeur took one item of his luggage, a sturdy leather briefcase, and shortly Reston was in the back of a limousine, cruising along the A20 on the northern coast of Sicily. Beside him sat Ettore Addario, CEO of the Compagnia Coltivazione delle Minière di Mongibello, a man with something to sell and every hope that Reston would buy.

  “A pleasant flight?” Addario enquired. Like everyone else in the world of non-Anahuac origin, he spoke Nahuatl fluently as a second language, but he happened to have near-perfect English as well and hoped to impress Reston with it.

  “The usual. Quick. Boring.”

  “Ah. Like making love to my wife.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” Reston said.

  “I should hope not, signor. Not for my sake but for yours. A miserable experience. My mistress, on the other hand... Then I would have grounds for jealousy!” He chuckled at the joke. Reston looked unamused. Oh, the English. So uptight. Addario realised he wasn’t going to break any ice with salaciousness, so changed tack. “Your first visit to our beautiful island?”

  Reston nodded.

  “If there is time, perhaps I can introduce you to our native cuisine. Rabbit in chocolate sauce, for example, and pasta alla Norma. I know this wonderful trattoria in Taormina, right by the beach, where they serve the most delicious pani cà meusa. Some say a burger made from fried spleen sounds disgusting, but believe me, when you taste it...”

  “My return flight departs at four. Just show me your operation, so I can see for myself what I might or might not be purchasing.”

  “Of course, signor.” Not just uptight – businesslike to the point of being rude. Well, that was an admirable trait, Addario supposed, if you ran as large a corporation as Reston did. No one got to earn a seven-figure annual salary by being nice. Still, would a little civility go amiss?

  The Mediterranean glittered to their left. To the right, pale against the brilliant blue sky, stood Mount Etna, growing ever closer. A plume of smoke drifted from the summit of its snow-streaked cone, a smudge of grey pastel in the air. It seemed a benign thing, that plume, given the seething subterranean turmoil that generated it. The sigh of a man whose passion for life is spent.

  Etna could rage, though, if the Great Speaker willed it. Nearly every volcano on the planet could.

  The limo wound through low fertile foothills, eventually pulling into the public car park on Etna’s eastern flank. A four-wheel drive waited to ferry Reston and Addario onward to the CCMM site. They bumped along a track grooved by truck tyres and caterpillar treads, upwards through a landscape of ash and rough clinkery rock. Here on these barren black slopes it seemed like the world was constantly being rubbed out and restarted, never finished, an eternal first draft.

  Addario pointed out the fusion plant that hunkered half a mile away in the huge depression known as the Valley of the Ox. Its domes and cooling towers wobbled like mercury in the heat haze. On the Great Speaker’s say-so, the plant could send intense bursts of energy deep into Etna’s magma chambers in order to trigger volcanic activity. This might happen at any time, contingent on His Imperial Holiness’s whim. It was rare if a volcano was not erupting somewhere on earth, spewing ash and gas into the atmosphere and keeping the thermostat on the planetary greenhouse turned up high.

  “As long as we receive the standard twenty-four hours’ notice,” said Addario, “we can pack up our equipment and be off-site with plenty of time to spare. In fact, our safety record is amazing, if I do say so myself. In the past decade we have lost only thirteen workers, and all those fatalities have been due to sudden catastrophic machinery failure or individual negligence. Not a bad statistic, and well below average for a company this size.”

  “Nothing worth obtaining comes without loss of life.”

  “Well put, signor. Indeed.”

  The four-wheel drive deposited them in the thick of CCMM’s current mining site. The obsidian lode was located not far from the Piano Caldera near the base of Etna’s summit cone – a deep seam of felsic lava that had been churned up during recent eruptions and cooled under just the right conditions. A high silica content gave it the necessary viscosity to remain solid rather than become crystalline.

  Mechanical diggers were busy excavating the area, exposing the layers of volcanic glass for workmen to hew out with pneumatic drills. Addario handed Reston a pair of overboots, a hard hat and an emergency particulate respirator. Then he led the Englishman on a tour of the site.

  Conversation was kept to a minimum, as they had to compete with the roar of diesel en
gines and the staccato hammering of the drills. Addario assumed anyway that Reston already knew what he was looking at. The man’s family had been in the obsidian trade for four generations, and Reston Rhyolitic Ltd. was Britain’s largest importer and distributor of the mineraloid. It would be odd, to say the least, if the Englishman had had no first-hand experience of the noise, dust, heat and sulphur stench of a volcano-side mine, nor any understanding of the crude, brute-force methods needed to extract obsidian from where it was birthed at these rupture points in the earth’s crust.

  Work halted as Etna stirred underfoot. The ground heaved, growling louder than the drills whose chatter it had silenced. Everyone waited for the tremor to pass, poised, ready to down tools and run if need be. There hadn’t been an unscheduled eruption here in years, but you could never be complacent. The Great Speaker could manipulate volcanoes but they also had minds of their own.

  “Tlaltecuhtli is groaning,” Addario commented. Reston just gave him a curt smile. Perhaps he didn’t believe in dismembered monster goddesses writhing in agony below ground, causing earthquakes and other upheavals. Addario, who had a degree in geology and had written a thesis on plate tectonics, wasn’t sure he himself did.

  The tremor faded. Work resumed. Addario noted that Reston hadn’t blanched or betrayed a flicker of anxiety. The Englishman was a cold fish, but nerveless too. He’d been an Eagle Warrior at one time, hadn’t he? Addario had done a fair amount of research into the background of CCMM’s potential new majority shareholder. He knew that Reston had taken the unusual step of submitting himself for national service rather than go to university. Unusual in that he’d been offered unconditional places by both Oxford and Cambridge and because his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been graduates. By and large it was the less academically-gifted, or those whose families couldn’t afford the steep exemption fees, who did the mandatory three-year stint with the Eagles.