Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

  “Who will be there?” she asked.

  “Miller has recalled the original team,” said the voice. “Except for you and Bowerdale. You should expect the rest to be there: Porfiro Aguilar, Krista Rayburn, Chad Rylands, Reese the British agent, and at least two from the CIA.”

  “The CIA?” she said, surprised for the first time. “Why?”

  “Not sure. Something to do with the jewels as weapons. The man who killed the boy, James, and kidnapped Alice, the man who shot at Miller the night Eustachio died, is some kind of arms dealer.”

  Marissa frowned, staring at the road ahead. So this arms dealer was the one complicating things. She recalled the surprise she’d felt at the sudden burst of gunfire from above that night she’d been in the tomb. How she’d doused her lamp and waited quietly while the shooter hunted Miller in the cenote. How she’d waited to make sure the gunfire was over before returning aboveground, leaving behind the body of the Mayan in the tomb and the copper tang of his blood in the air.

  “Perhaps...,” said the voice on the phone.

  “What?”

  “Maybe it’s too risky. There are too many people involved. Perhaps we should just...”

  “No,” she said. “I will call when I get there.” She moved her thumb to the power button, but then stopped and asked one more question. “How is she?”

  “No change.”

  Marissa nodded, and for a moment her eyes prickled with tears so that the road swam. Then she hung up and checked the rearview mirror and considered the long, irregular bundle that filled the entire back seat. It was draped with a wide knit blanket in bright colors and was quite still.

  No change.

  Well, there would be. There was power here. She patted the canvas bag on the seat next to her, as if the bag and its contents—its polished wooden log inlaid with gems, its twisted metal fragments, and the gold ring nestled among old bones—was a favorite pet. She knew what these artifacts were worth, now more than ever. Had the king himself worn them when he interrogated the witches? Had he worn them when he laid his hands on the people to cure them of scrofula? The hands of the king had healing powers, said Charles and his father, who had revived the old ritual of laying hands on the sick to show the rightness of his claim to the throne.

  The king was the right hand of God, and in him lay power beyond that of mere parliaments and counselors, politicians and jurists. And the sign of kingship was the crown and royal regalia. What power the king wielded was bound to them, seared into the stones themselves. But it could be accessed. She was sure of that. There was a way to draw the power forth, and since they had lain in the Mexican earth so long, she thought that the way to that power was as likely to be through the Maya as it was through the English. The gems were of the earth and they knew no nation. They were as at home in the new world as in the old, more so, perhaps, because the old world had smashed its rituals, sacked its chambers of magic and ancient power, struck the heads from saints and kings. The world as the Maya knew it was still a place of magic and mystery, a place of sacrifice, of power. The Maya understood what the English had forgotten, that there were superhuman forces that could be tapped through ritual and that sought to echo the essential symmetries of the world.

  And Mayan magic required Mayan blood.

  Marissa Stroud glanced from her watch to the rearview mirror as she pulled over and stopped. She climbed out of the car and opened the rear door on the driver’s side. On the floor under the driver’s seat was a zippered pouch, which she opened and from which she withdrew a syringe with a long needle whose cap she removed. Then she pulled back the colorful blanket and considered the girl.

  Adelita Lucia del Carmen Lacantun lay half turned toward the rear window, her hands and feet bound, her eyes closed. She looked smaller than when she was awake, thinner, more frail. What was she, twelve? Thirteen? Something like that. Stroud had barely spoken to her before she had returned to the village to pick her up and knew little about her. She had known the girl was bright and would recognize her, but that only made it easier. She had mentioned Deborah Miller’s name and offered her hand and the girl had taken it guilelessly, as kids in the States would never do. She was an innocent, and that, as the ancient Maya had known, was all to the good. Marissa considered the sleeping child, stroked her cheek, and picked a fragment of clay from her tangled black hair. She felt her pulse and checked her breathing, then turned the girl’s left forearm until she could find the vein.

  The child had already told her more than Miller could possibly know: stories entrusted to her by her dead grandfather, whose life Marissa had taken when he wouldn’t tell her where the stolen grave goods were. She didn’t regret it. His death had been a respectful sacrifice to the magic that protected Mayan tombs. He, of all people, should have known that.

  Adelita had told her all about their family’s ancient promise to Edward Clifford. His dying wish had been to lie undisturbed with the treasures he had brought with him, that they should not adorn any new king. More important was Marissa’s certainty that once on site the child would be able to guide her to the bones and the rest of the jewels. That would be half of the girl’s purpose fulfilled. One more act of symmetry and all would be well.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  “They could use your help, you know,” said Chad Rylands.

  Deborah looked up from her laptop, remembering where she was and what she was supposed to be doing.

  “I’ll be right there,” she said, scowling. Rylands, Nick Reese had revealed, had been paid to send him information while Deborah had been in England.

  They had erected a makeshift shelter with a tarp on the ground with nylon tent fabric pulled tight over poles, and Deborah was sitting under it. It kept the sun off little besides the computer screens, but she kept coming back here while the others did the real work of surveying and clearing the ground. In a way, she was hiding. She didn’t like feeling responsible for the success or failure of their search now, didn’t like the eyes of the agents on her, watchful, expectant. But she wasn’t just hiding. Something was bothering her. The picture still felt incomplete.

  She had borrowed Jones’s satellite phone to call Hargreaves again and pump him for all he knew about the sale of the Malkin Tower stone, but he had nothing beyond what he had already told her. At the time, it had been an insignificant little gem with some kitschy appeal because of its link to the 1612 witch trials. Those who fancied themselves latter-day witches—redrawn in largely benevolent Wiccan tradition—valued crystals and precious stones, so one with possible links to famous witches of yore had immediate appeal. It had changed hands twice but there was no record of who owned it now.

  She had called Powel in Chicago to update him on their situation—he was, after all, paying their bills—but he had been out. Deborah had spoken to his hawkish secretary, Mrs. Pickins, and left a message as to where they were and what they were doing.

  “He’ll be back within the hour,” the secretary had said.

  “Gone to see his daughter?” asked Deborah.

  Mrs. Pickins coughed, then said in a formal tone that reprimanded Deborah for the inquiry, “I really couldn’t say.”

  She hung up and was about to leave the shelter when something occurred to her, a possibility, albeit a strange one, an unreasonable one. It came into her mind as the memory of an ornately framed photograph, a photograph of a beautiful blonde girl...

  Surely not.

  She turned back to the laptop that Jones had wired through his satellite transmitter. She opened a search engine and typed in “Angela Powel,” then, as an afterthought, added “skater.” Almost half of what came up was clearly irrelevant, but several seemed to point directly to her benefactor’s daughter. Two of them were on competition sites where she was listed as senior champion, but a third was a Chicago Tribune piece from six months earlier. Deborah stared at it and her heart sank.

  “No,” she said aloud. She closed her eyes, willing the story to change: “Local Skater Hospitalized i
n Accident.” Beneath the headline was a picture of Angela Stroud in her sparkling gold necklace with the garnet-colored pendant.

  Her lucky charm...

  The article told of a collision on the ice during practice, just the kind Rachel had always dreaded. A young man was executing a double axel jump as Angela, skating backward, was launching into a double lutz. They hit each other in midair, and the man was badly gashed by Angela’s skate. He landed on her. She had no time to brace herself for the fall, and hit her head on the ice. She convulsed and was rushed to hospital for emergency brain surgery.

  The girl, said the article, was the daughter of local philanthropist Steven Powel, who had raised her alone since separating from his wife shortly after Angela’s birth. The story ran out of steam and was filled out with accounts of other skating accidents.

  She scanned the rest of the search results and found another story, this one only a month old, which revisited the story of the talented local girl and Olympic hopeful who still lay in a coma at one of the University of Chicago hospitals. “Her father rarely leaves her bedside,” one of the nurses said. “At this point, I guess we’re hoping for a miracle.”

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  It was like they had gone back to the beginning, Aguilar thought. All this laying out of tools and equipment, the hurried surveying of the site and sectioning off of the areas to be cleared. Except that this was not Ek Balam, this was Kabah. There was no swaggering Bowerdale to oversee everything, because Bowerdale—Aguilar could still not quite believe it—hadn’t turned up yet, though why he was on the run, no one seemed sure. The work proceeded in an anxious hush while the norteamericano agents watched. Miller stalked about looking concerned and urgent. Last night she had briefed them on what had happened, or part of it, and he was still wrestling with the idea that their poking around in the dirt could actually be bound up with all this other stuff: international espionage, intrigue, and murder. Aguilar thought of Eustachio often these days, but now he also thought of the graduate student, James. He wanted to know what was going on, and that was why he had come when Miller called, but he also wanted it over, closed and done, so that he could go back home.

  With Krista?

  Perhaps. He wasn’t sure yet. Wasn’t sure she would come if he asked her.

  Kabah was a Puuc Maya site in the Chenes style, and its grand feature was the palace of the masks, adorned with countless regular faces of the hook-nosed rain god. The palace contained alcove chambers where swallows nested, and the air was full of the swooping birds, chittering and calling, but the place was otherwise almost completely deserted. Of the few tourists who came to Kabah, none made it across the highway where a great Mayan arch marked the sacbe route to Uxmal ten miles away. There was a pyramid, but it was unrestored and overgrown, its edges rounded off by time and weather, and the so-called Witch’s House where they were now was set back along a dirt track that wound through dense woods.

  Work had been done on the structure before, as was clear from the numbered blocks that sharpened the corners of one building, but the reconstruction had never been completed and the site was turning back into jungle. Aguilar had done all he could to get detailed excavation reports, but they were moving too fast. Again. He had said as much to Miller but she had barely acknowledged his concern, and he had seen in her face that this was not really archaeology anymore. Perhaps it never had been.

  He shouldn’t be surprised then, he supposed, to find metal detectors among the site equipment. That was a first, looking for metal in a Mayan dig. Miller said they were looking for a grave, one that had not been disturbed by previous excavations but that would be marked by filler earth that was only about three hundred and fifty years old. Unless it was a very shallow grave, the metal detectors would be useless, so he had suggested they begin by probing the ground for signs of less compacted earth. It still felt like they were looking for a needle in a haystack, and Aguilar was surprised to find he wished they had Bowerdale with them.

  Even in daylight the Witch’s House gave him the creeps, and the sun would be down within the hour. In Ek Balam the site had been largely open with only isolated trees breaking up the grassy expanses between structures, but Kabah on this side of the highways was a dense forest of thin, stunted trees, with vines and brambles encroaching from all sides. Aguilar hated the jungle: the humidity, the flies, the constant fear of finding a fer-de-lance poised to strike each time you moved a log or a stone. Aguilar had a morbid fear of snakes, and knew the place was alive with more than the big lumbering iguanas. One of the locals said there really were jaguar in the woods: rare, but out there. As if they needed something else to worry about.

  The Witch’s House itself was little more than a stone chamber on an unexcavated mound a little farther up the path. They had swept the sides of the mound, trimming back the undergrowth with machetes so that they could see what they were dealing with, but it was hot, slow work, and their lack of progress was starting to annoy them. It hadn’t been reasonable to expect that they would make the find on the first day, but he had been hoping for it anyway, and now the light was starting to fade.

  He drank from the cooler constantly, but they couldn’t keep the water cold for more than a few hours, and it was evening, so the “coolers” had been warm since lunchtime. If this had been a real dig they might have had a generator, but the only power they had came from the van batteries, and they couldn’t squander that on refrigeration. So he drank the warm water and scowled, and was about to pour himself another cup when Krista shouted, and suddenly everyone was running.

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Dimitri paced while Bowerdale stared at the map for the thousandth time. Alice was curled up on the back seat, as she had been for at least two hours. It seemed like days since Dimitri had been asleep, and even his naps had been scarred by the dream. “Well?” he said.

  Bowerdale shrugged, putting one hand to the bruise that stretched from his jaw up to his blackened right eye, and smiled in what was supposed to be a reassuring way. But Dimitri knew he was scared. So he should be. They wouldn’t be in this situation if Bowerdale hadn’t involved that idiot James, packing him off to Coba to dig up the bag. Dimitri knew Bowerdale had been trying to cut him out of the deal, trying to partner with some kid who would do as he was told. Well, the kid was dead, though Bowerdale hadn’t known that till he wandered into Uxmal looking to find his little errand boy. Finding Dimitri instead had freaked the archaeologist out, and Dimitri had given him a beating for emphasis.

  “I’m not sure,” Bowerdale said. “It would help if I knew why they had gone to Kabah.”

  “How should I know?” spat Dimitri. “You think they call and tell me? I just follow them, but now they have CIA with them. We have to know where they are going and we have to take it before they get it. That or we let them get it, then take it from them.”

  Bowerdale flinched, nervous in his rumpled seersucker suit. Dimitri hated that suit and Bowerdale’s dandified airs. He couldn’t imagine why any man would dress like that, especially out here where there was no one to impress.

  “Take it?” said Bowerdale, his eyes flashing about. “How?”

  Dimitri drew the gun, the CZ 75B, a decent Czech 9mm, with the ten-inch silencer, and considered it significantly. He didn’t like using the silencer. It felt wrong when the gun fired and it increased the chance of jamming. Most of all, though he couldn’t explain why, he missed the sound of an unmuffled weapon, the crack of it, the flash from the muzzle. The silencer made the gun absurd, apologetic, with its polite cough. He missed the authority, the command of the thing.

  “You can’t,” stuttered Bowerdale, staring at the gun. “There are too many of them.”

  “Then you’ll have to figure out where the stones are before they do,” said Dimitri.

  It had been like this in Bosnia, he thought. When things had gotten bad—really bad—when there were only those who would do what was necessary and those who would not. Lots of them had balked. He had
not. You put your mind to it and did it, and any fear or anxiety was squeezed to nothing so that it only bubbled up in dreams.

  The bulletproof women and children hemming him in against the back of the truck, their eyes locked on his so he couldn’t see to shoot...

  He had grown what they called a thicker skin, though the skin was around his brain, enclosing his mind so that he felt nothing except the desire to get it done and move on. He sensed this would be like that. The girl was falling apart, and the man, though he pretended to still care about the stones, had already given up, unwilling to do what was necessary and only there at all because he was terrified of what Dimitri would do to him if he tried to run. As he should be.

  Earlier, the three of them had climbed one of the palaces in Kabah and he had scanned the area with binoculars, but Miller and the others were nowhere to be seen, and the deep gold light was fading. The map showed other ruins on the west side of the highway, but the only one you could see from here was that rough, moldering pyramid, and there was no one there. If they were at one of the more remote sites, it might be impossible to get close without being seen, and whatever he said to Bowerdale, Dimitri didn’t want a firefight with the CIA. He needed a diversion, or darkness, which was why they were now waiting in the car for the last rays of light to go.

  He was thinking about this when he saw another car pull into the lot. He trained his binoculars on it and watched as a familiar woman got out.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Krista Rayburn just knelt where she was and stared, the cry still on her lips.

  It was a slab of limestone about halfway up the mound and covered with about six inches of soil. She had been probing the earth as they cleared the weedy undergrowth, and her rod had struck something hard. She tried it twice more, mapping the size of the stone. She scrabbled at the dirt first with a trowel and then with her hands, pulling up the grass and vine so that the covering mat of vegetation tore free like a rug, green on one side, a thick tangle of roots on the other. Once she had started to pull, it had come up almost in one piece, revealing a stone the size of a small door.