It had just come to her. Deborah seized this and stood up. The ground seemed to roll around her and she had to steady herself, but she was vertical and alert.
Stroud.
And there was something else elbowing into her memory.
Adelita.
Deborah checked the grave, but even from here she could see the child was not there. Another hallucination. But Stroud had taken Adelita. That was true. Why?
Deborah ran, stumbling, to the dark rectangle in the earth of the Witch’s House, forcing herself to slow before she fell, but the woman was gone. She had been there though. That had not been a hallucination. Deborah knew because the bones had been disturbed and most of what had been in there with them was gone.
Chapter Eighty
Marissa Stroud carried the duffel bag over her shoulder and walked quickly along the track through the forest without a lamp. There was just enough light to see by, and she felt lit from within by a sense of purpose. There was a rightness to it all, a symmetry. The ease with which she had doctored the water coolers while they stared at the grave proved it.
The universe aligns for those who know its rules.
Then there was a light coming along the path toward her. It was erratic, flashing about, like whoever was carrying it was running and didn’t know where he was going.
Without pausing for thought she moved right, stepped off the path and into the trees: four long strides and then she dropped into a crouch, the bag and its sacred contents shrouded by her skirt, her head down so that her hair fell over her face. Then she became still and silent.
She could hear them coming toward her but she did not look up. She already knew who it was. The student—Alice—and the thug with the guns. And Bowerdale. As they got closer she closed her eyes to focus her hearing, and she could tell which was which, the girl sobbing and whining, the thug’s rough curses, and Bowerdale’s labored breathing as he struggled to keep up. She listened, half seeing the flash of the light, red through her eyelids, but they did not pause, and in another second, they had gone on ahead to the site. She counted to ten slowly, then returned to the path, thanking her gods once more without surprise. It would happen as it was meant to. She could almost sense their hunger for the sacrifice to come.
Chapter Eighty-One
It had all gone wrong. Bowerdale wasn’t sure when it had started: probably when Dimitri first arrived. He had, he supposed, been warned during that first phone call when his usual artifact buyer had backed off like there was a gun to his head. But hindsight was no consolation whatsoever, especially now that he could no longer see how he might get free of the situation. He was—or had been—a respected archaeologist, a top man in his field. Now he was being pushed around by this European Neanderthal, forced to keep hold of the girl who had flouted his advances and had become a whining wreck. He didn’t know why Dimitri wanted to keep her around, but he was pretty sure that if he let go of her arm, she wouldn’t run.
He would.
He had known long before he heard what the Serb had done to James. He had been stupid to think he could just walk away from a man like Dimitri, that he wouldn’t still be waiting when he got out of jail. Involving James had been a mistake too. He saw that now and regretted it bitterly. If he could wipe out everything that had happened in the last weeks, Bowerdale thought fervently, he would, but that wasn’t possible. All he could do now was try to make sure he got out of it alive.
Right now Dimitri thought he was useful, and that would stay true as long as they were picking around Mayan ruins. The moment they stopped, or the moment Dimitri realized that Bowerdale’s specialist knowledge meant precisely damn all, then he would become both unnecessary and inconvenient. Bowerdale was under no delusions about how someone like Dimitri dealt with people he thought were in his way.
So as the big Serb strode down the forest track with that overlong pistol in his hand, Bowerdale held Alice close as he had been told but took the opportunity to mutter into her ear.
“We have to get out of here,” he said. “We have to stop him.”
She had been sobbing, but she stopped suddenly and gave him a wild look, her face inches from his so that he could tell she wasn’t breathing. Then her eyes flashed guiltily to Dimitri, and when she turned back to Bowerdale, she shook her head, fast and small like a terrified child.
“Keep up,” roared Dimitri.
And suddenly it struck him that it hadn’t been Dimitri’s arrival that had made everything go wrong, hadn’t even been his own boneheaded pursuit of the stones and his clumsy inquiries about their possible applications. It had not even begun when they had found the tomb. It had begun years ago, perhaps decades, at some point when he had forgotten why he had gone into archaeology in the first place, some moment when career and salary and status had drowned out the raw wonder he had once felt when confronted with the remnants of the past. Somewhere out there in the night were places where people had once lived and worshipped, places that would once have filled him with awe and reverence, sensations he had not felt for decades. Now he was a ghost, a shadow of the man he had been, drifting purposeless in the footsteps of his former self, a mere echo...
“I said, keep up,” Dimitri spat.
As they scuffled along after him, Bowerdale felt the woods open up, and around them to their right were stone structures. Up ahead, he could hear strange noises: shrieking and laughing, he thought, but also howling and crying.
What the hell was going on there?
Dimitri reached into his shirt and drew another pistol, this one smaller and with a barrel so short you could hardly see it, and walked toward the Witch’s House with his arms cocked, a gun on each side at shoulder height.
Then someone was coming toward them, sprinting hard down the dark path, panting and sobbing as they ran from the ruins. Dimitri hesitated fractionally then he raised the larger pistol in front of him and fired. In the darkness you could see the flash of the gun, but there was almost no sound beyond the sort of noise you might make by hitting a potato with a pin hammer. There was smoke after that, more than he would have expected, so that for a moment the woods smelled like the Fourth of July, and only after he had processed that did he realize that the man who had been running toward them was gone.
Dimitri kept walking, barely glancing down to where Chad Rylands lay crumpled half in the woods, his legs sticking out onto the trail. Bowerdale stooped to him, releasing Alice, who went immobile again, but Dimitri barked at him without turning, “Keep up,” as if nothing had happened.
It was too dark to see much of the Witch’s House itself, but a light had been left by the grave site. There were people scattered around, some of them lying on the ground, some of them running about. It was chaos. They were whimpering and shouting. Krista Rayburn was screaming from the top of the mound as if she was being assaulted from all sides. Alice’s knees gave way and Bowerdale let her fall.
Dimitri stood staring at the grave. He stirred the bones with his foot, then turned, his face dark with fury.
“They’re gone,” he bellowed. “They’re fucking gone. Who has them? Where are they?”
He turned, pistols raised, shouting at the first person he saw. It was Aguilar, who was standing with his feet close together on a stone, his body twisting as he stared at the ground around him.
“Where are they?” Dimitri demanded, and he put the muzzle of the silenced pistol to Aguilar’s temple.
“He doesn’t know,” shouted Bowerdale. “Look at him! He doesn’t even know you’re there.”
“Where are they?” Dimitri repeated.
Aguilar continued to scan the ground as if it was alive with something terrible, and Bowerdale, seeing the flash of fury in Dimitri’s face, knew he had less than a second to decide.
It was easy to blame Dimitri for all that had gone wrong, but Martin Bowerdale knew that that was a dodge. Dimitri would be nowhere without Bowerdale’s hunch that Eustachio had ridden the motorbike to Coba to bury the gems. Bowerdale wished he�
��d never returned the call after Dimitri had first contacted him. That seemed like a long time ago now. That was when Bowerdale thought he was calling the shots, that Dimitri was reasonable, that they could split the find and the money that came from it. Back then, Dimitri had made it sound like that was the way it would work. But it was more than obvious now that Dimitri was not capable of sharing.
It was only after the gems had disappeared that Eustachio had been murdered in that gruesome fashion. And who had done it? Not him or Dimitri—even though the thug was responsible for chasing Miller into the cenote and nearly killing her. No, Bowerdale still didn’t know who’d murdered Eustachio or why. But one thing was certain: he’d opened the door for Dimitri. If he hadn’t, James and Chad Rylands might still be alive.
He might still be able to atone for it.
He ran at the Serb, head lowered, arms spread, and launched himself. He made contact just as the pistol coughed and spat its smoke and flame and the shot went high into the jungle night.
Bowerdale was a big man, but his fighting days were long over. The weight and surprise of his attack sent Dimitri sprawling, but the Serb was up on his feet before Bowerdale could get to his knees. He didn’t see the kick coming till it connected with his cheek, and the shock of the pain blindsided him utterly. He thought something snapped, but his hands went not to his face but to the ground for something—a rock, a pick, something he could wield as a weapon—though his fingers found only grass and dirt and air.
Then Dimitri was looming over him and Martin Bowerdale found himself looking into the black eye of the pistol.
For a moment nothing happened, but the screaming confusion of the site seemed to fall away, and Bowerdale, catching the scent of the jungle in his flaring nostrils, suddenly saw in his mind the Mayan city of Palenque as he had seen it as a boy visiting with his parents. He must have been no more than eight. He had not thought of that moment for years and had never thought of it as important, but he remembered now standing at the foot of the Temple of the Inscriptions, gazing up the monumental staircase to where his mother, wearing a blousy white shirt, was gazing out, eyes shaded with one hand. He saw his little boy’s hands as they thumbed the film advance on his tiny Kodak Instamatic, and he remembered the awe and the sudden, surprising thought that people made a living by exploring such places.
And just then, between the tightening of the trigger and the flash of the muzzle, Martin Bowerdale smiled.
Chapter Eighty-Two
Deborah had seen them march into the site—Alice and Bowerdale and the big, pale man who must be Dimitri—and she had thrown herself down in the grass and vines, dragging Nick down with her. He had struggled against her, still delirious with panic, and for a second that had attracted the beam of Dimitri’s flashlight. She held her breath, but then the light went back to scanning the site till he found the grave. He had only stayed there a few moments, and then he was shouting.
What happened next took only seconds, but it seemed agonizingly slow, and she almost thought she could get up and run over to them before the inevitable shot came. That was, of course, nonsense. She would have covered maybe half the ground before Bowerdale died, and then the Serb would have shot her too.
So she lay, facedown in the dirt, Nick babbling beside her, and she waited for them to go, wishing there was something she could do, hating the feeling of weakness and ineptitude that threatened to drown her like the cool waters of the river beneath Ek Balam.
When Dimitri left, still shouting at a sobbing, broken Alice, she had got up slowly, first checking to see that Aguilar had not been shot. He hadn’t, but he was completely incoherent. Nick reacted badly to the Mexican’s terror, drawing his weapon and waving it unsteadily.
“Give it to me, Nick,” she said, firmly, getting right in his face. “It’s me. Deborah. Give me the gun.”
He seemed bemused but had not resisted as she gently reached up for the pistol and pried his fingers from the grip.
Bowerdale was dead. She had known that before she checked the body, but the fact of it calmed her somehow, steeled her resolve. There was no sign of Rylands. She tried to get some sense out of the CIA men, but, like Aguilar, they were too far gone. Krista Rayburn was still standing on top of the mound, shrieking like a banshee.
Which leaves you.
“Give me your phone,” she ordered Nick. “I have to go.”
He stared at her, blank.
“Nick,” she said. “Listen to me. I have to go.”
“Where?” he managed.
She thought. This was no longer about the gems. It was about the life of a little girl that was to be taken, sacrificed, to save another.
“She’ll go to a ritual space,” said Deborah, thinking aloud. “Not in Kabah. There are too many agents around here and likely to be more as soon as you get word to the police or whatever government agencies can get here first. But she’s in a hurry, so she won’t go far.”
She paused, then, knowing she was gambling, said, “Uxmal. It has to be. And she’ll make either for the Pyramid of the Magician—the dwarf—or for the Great Pyramid. I’m going. Now.”
“Wait,” he said drowsily. “I’ll come with you.”
“No, Nick. Try to look after the others till the police arrive.”
“Right,” he said, still vague.
“Where am I going, Nick?”
“What?”
“Where am I going? Come on! Keep it together.”
He seemed to search her face for the answer.
“Kabah!” he said. “You’re going to Kabah.”
“No!” she shouted back, stung with frustration. “I’m going to Uxmal.”
“Right,” he said. “Uxmal. OK.”
“Right. I’m going now.”
“Deborah,” he said, catching her by the shirt and pulling her face toward his.
“What?”
“Be careful.”
And he leaned in to kiss her.
“Look after the others, Nick,” she said again, pulling back. “And remember: It’s not real. Anything you think you see, it’s just the drug.”
As she walked away she dialed the phone and summarized what had happened, first in clunky Spanish, then in fast, insistent English to the police dispatcher. Then she hung up, knowing it would take too long for them to reach her, knowing that it was all on her now.
And then she ran down the forest path, thrusting the pistol into her waistband, running hard past the ruins to the side, through the trees to the great arch that marked the sacbe to Uxmal and the van that sat alone in the parking lot. She had a set of keys in her pocket and snatched them out as soon as she saw it squatting there, toad-like, in the dark. Her thinking was almost completely clear, but she still felt unsteady and anxious. What had Nick said about the bufotenin: it instilled “a paranoiac sense of impending death.” Considering she was chasing a gunman and a woman bent on human sacrifice through darkness and jungle, that seemed only appropriate.
Deborah turned the engine over and snapped on the headlights.
She drove fast, barely touching the brake except at junctions, putting her foot down hard the rest of the time so that the engine raced and complained. Beside her on the passenger seat was the heavy black pistol, and her right hand kept straying to it, fearful of the thing, far from sure how to use it, and desperate that it would not come to that. Nick would send word. She was only five minutes from Uxmal now, but the place would be crawling with cops and US agents when she got there.
At first, she thought her wish had come true. Cars and buses crowded the parking lot, though the site had closed hours ago. But none of them were official vehicles, and the truth hit her as she ran into the site, shouting at an attendant to call the police and ignoring his attempts to stamp her ticket.
The famous Uxmal sound and light show was tonight. That was why people were still filing in to the seats overlooking the Quadrangle of the Nuns beside the Pyramid of the Dwarf Magician. And it meant that either Stroud would have gone s
omewhere else—in which case all was lost—or that she would make for the Great Pyramid.
So Deborah ran away from the carefully lit path, as she had when she had needed to phone Hargreaves, pounding her way toward the ball court, the house of the turtles, and the governor’s palace, behind which sat the Great Pyramid itself. She was halfway there before she heard the booming sounds of the PA behind her, the Spanish voices relaying high points of Uxmal’s ancient history while the buildings around her lit up red and yellow and green, the banks of lamps below them belting out enough power to saturate the massive structures with color.
The great pyramid itself was in darkness. Deborah pushed the gun she had been carrying back into her waistband and then cautiously began to climb the steep, ladderlike steps up to the temple at the top on all fours. She seemed to have been doing the same thing ever since she came to the Yucatan.
Back in the Quadrangle of the Nuns there was a crash of symphonic music, the lights shifted, and the pyramid she was climbing was suddenly bathed in cool, blue light. Deborah looked up and saw at the top, against the backdrop of the frieze wall with its recessed alcoves and masques of Chaak, a human figure half in silhouette, half splashed with the turquoise glow.
The shape was wrong, the head somehow distorted.
A mask? With some kind of headdress.
Deborah thought the figure was speaking, but then the PA from the sound and light show cut out all other sound as a chorus of voices spoke in unison, a long slow and echoing chant of the rain god’s name:
Chaak!
Deborah hesitated, unnerved by the sound and the silence that followed it. She felt for the gun at her back, and then started up the stairs again, too late realizing that her touch had dislodged the pistol. She felt it sliding out as she took the next step, reached hurriedly round to catch it, but the motion threw her off balance. She flung herself against the steps to keep from falling, and knew the gun was gone before she heard it clattering off the steps below her.
Tears of the Jaguar Page 31
