Shadow of the Jaguar

by Steven Savile

  “I spent sixteen months in the Basque region, so some of the words are still up there,” he said as he tapped his temple.

  “What were you doing in Spain?”

  “Ah, if I told you, I’d have to kill you,” Blaine said, winking.

  The woman bustled around the table, with Blaine translating the drink orders, before disappearing into the back room. A moment later what sounded like piped Pavarotti drifted into the small room. Nessun Dorma.

  “And there’s the final nail in the coffin of history,” Cutter said.

  “How so?” Stark asked, his expression curious.

  “Here we are, a million miles from what the West would call civilisation, and what are we listening to? Bottled opera watered down and made palatable for the masses, be those masses Italian, Chinese, or in this case, Peruvian. Globalisation is killing individuality across the world, my friend. We ought to be listening to the music of the Andes, pipes and chimes and all the things that make this part of South America unique. Instead we’ve got dead Italians to entertain us in the blandest of ways.

  “It’s the end of history. We’re turning the Earth into one big conglomeration of chain stores and brand identities. The Third World War’s been going on silently for years, and the corporations have already won it. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find the golden arches of a certain fast food giant waiting around one of the corners, and see locals riding Vespas and wearing Levi jeans and Nike trainers. The world is going to hell, and our obsession with fine things is helping it on its way.”

  “And you get all this from one Pavarotti song? You’re a bitter and cynical man, Professor Cutter,” Stark said, shaking his head.

  “At least it isn’t James bloody Blunt,” Connor joked. “Now that really would be hell.”

  “Well, we may be on our way to a global empire, but we’re not there yet,” Jenny said. “I tried to use my mobile phone to call home, and can’t get a signal. It’s downright irritating.” With that, she turned her attention to the menu.

  Connor took one glance at the offerings, and looked disappointed that there weren’t pictures to make his decision easier. Rather than ask for Blaine’s help, he reached into his pocket for a PDA. He quickly translated some of the meals and their ingredients, and opted for something that ought to have been braised lamb with fried potatoes, but turned out to be baby goat.

  He didn’t care, he said, since the meat was so soft and tender it almost melted against his tongue.

  Midway through the main course the newspaper reader came through the door and took one of the tables in the centre of the room.

  A few minutes later a woman came in to join him, and like any other lovers in any other restaurant, they ordered, ate, and shared small talk, and for a moment Connor wondered if Stark wasn’t just being paranoid.

  That notion was dispelled when they returned to the hotel.

  Stark stood in front of the door to the room he shared with Connor, his hand on the handle, but he did not open the door.

  At least not at first.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Get behind me, and keep quiet.”

  Connor nodded. He had no idea what had spooked the SAS man, but he wasn’t about to argue. Then he saw the paperclip lying on the floor. Stark had slipped it into the jamb as he closed the door when they left.

  Someone had been in the room.

  Connor felt a coldness steal beneath his skin. This was a different world from the one he usually occupied. Guards with sub-machine guns, watchers in the street, and now this. He looked left and right along the landing.

  Blaine and Lucas were likewise stood in front of one door each, Abby and Jenny behind Blaine, Cutter and Stephen behind Lucas. Stark gave the signal, and all three burst into their respective rooms.

  Stark reappeared a moment later, shaking his head.

  “Empty,” he said.

  He turned on the light.

  Connor looked over his shoulder into the room. It had been thoroughly ransacked. Their gear was tossed everywhere. Whoever had done it hadn’t been bothered about being found out. Clothes were strewn all over the place, the steel equipment crates open, the contents rifled.

  “Anything missing?” Cutter asked. They had gathered in the room he shared with Stephen.

  “Not that I can tell,” Jenny told him.

  “So what the hell did they want?” Cutter fumed, stalking the cramped room.

  “No idea.”

  “Whatever they wanted, they didn’t get it,” Stark said.

  “How do you figure that?”

  “The mess. If they had found something, they would have stopped looking. Everything was tossed. They didn’t find whatever it was they wanted, trust me.”

  Cutter nodded — that made sense.

  “So what do you suggest we do?”

  “Business as usual, for now,” Stark said. “There’s not much else we can do. Like Chaplin said, they’re watching our comings and goings. They’ll expect us to react to their invasion. If we bring in the local police, what are they going to do? Nothing is missing. Complaining to the hotel isn’t going to get us anywhere, either. This wasn’t down to bad housekeeping.”

  “So we just sit tight?”

  Stark nodded.

  “We get some sleep, and in the morning we start to deal with things. They’ll still be watching us, only now they know that we know they are. It changes the nature of the game. More than ever, this needs to look like a genuine scientific expedition, Professor. You need to make contact with your man, and make arrangements to transport your stuff to the eco-reserve, and while you’re doing that — and making sure our watchers are seeing what we want them to see — Miss Lewis and I will make a trip to the hospital to see Bairstow.

  “And before you object, they will be watching you. I’m just a grunt, as far as they’re concerned, but I’m a grunt who knows how to make himself invisible, which is a handy skill when you’re being followed. From your team, Miss Lewis is the logical choice of companion. She’s here as public liaison. Chaplin is an embassy man, so her meeting up with a government official is unlikely to raise too many eyebrows.

  “You — on the other hand — need to be seen gearing up for whatever it is you intend to do out in the jungle.

  Cutter didn’t like the idea, but he couldn’t find a decent argument.

  “Are you okay with that, Jenny?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “But Cutter,” she said, “if they hit us already... what about Cam in the hospital? We need to find out he’s safe.”

  “Well, then I guess we need to use the telephone. Not ideal, but beggars can’t be choosers.”

  Connor took Cutter to one side.

  “Do you think they were after this?” he asked, holding out the PDA.

  “Why would they be?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m trying to think of what we have that wasn’t in our rooms, and this is all I can come up with.” Connor shrugged.

  “Again, why would they be interested in a PDA? What’s on it that’s worth breaking into our hotel rooms to recover?”

  “Nothing, just stuff from the Internet. Anything and everything I could find out about Madre de Dios, the eco-reserve, food, culture, superstitions — nothing that isn’t available in any decent library.”

  “Then I think you’ve just answered your own question. Good night, Connor. Try to get some sleep.”

  Jenny made the call in to the hospital, and spoke in her schoolgirl Spanish to a ward sister who refused to give her any details about Cam. She did, however, sound quite unworried, so it seemed unlikely that there had been a murder committed. Jenny had to content herself with that.

  It didn’t occur to her until the middle of the night that the woman dealt with death every day, and would hardly have been reduced to a weeping mess, no matter what had occurred.

  The hours until dawn stretched on, shredding her nerves.

  He slept like the dead and the damned, but that didn’t stop Cutter
’s body clock from waking him abruptly at four in the morning. It jarred him out of a dream.

  He couldn’t fall back to sleep because his mind was racing. Instead, he lay on his back, the bedclothes uncomfortably damp with sweat, the sheet tangled around his legs where he had kicked it off while he slept. He watched the blades of the fan turn in and out of the shadows on the ceiling.

  The trace memories of his dream still lingered.

  He had been tormented by thoughts of Helen, reliving again the moment when he had stepped out of the anomaly and asked Lester, “Where’s Claudia?” He had dreamed the dream every night since he had lost her. But the familiarity did not make it any more bearable. On the contrary, it brought back the sense of grief and loss all the more intimately. Her face and her smile and the taste of her lips all the more real, the more of a ghost she became.

  She was never coming back. Jenny Lewis’ existence proved that. It wasn’t as though she had simply stepped through an anomaly like Helen, all those years ago. She had been removed from history itself, reformed as another woman, given a new life and new memories from the same primordial clay of life. Jenny was so similar, and yet so different at the same time.

  He lay awake for hours, taunting himself with memories that he could no longer be sure were even real. Memories that only he possessed.

  It had been different with Helen. Finding her had become an obsession, but it had been an obsession he could share with others.

  Yet he didn’t want the dreams to leave him, because as long as he dreamed them they stopped Claudia Brown from dying.

  Watching the lazy cycles of the fan, he couldn’t bring himself to let go.

  Not yet.

  Come sunrise he felt like one of Romero’s walking dead. It was as though he didn’t fit within his own skin; his flesh crept and crawled as though infested with bugs. He watched the sun drape shadows on the floor, and felt its warmth as it slowly moved across the room, across his body, bringing with it the beginning of the new day.

  Cutter rose quietly, so as not to wake Stephen, and dressed. He pulled on a light white cotton shirt and a pair of cargo pants. He caught his reflection in the full-length mirror and saw a washed-out middle-aged tourist looking back at him. He slipped out of the room and went downstairs, deciding to go for a walk to stretch his legs.

  He needed to pull himself together. It was one thing to grieve, but it was quite another for it to strangle his life. He had a team that looked to him for leadership, and that needed his wisdom and guiding hand. He had to be the father to this motley little crew.

  The walk would clear his head. When he got back, he’d freshen up and put on his braver face.

  The two sentries were no longer guarding the hotel door, a fact which made him wonder if they had been stationed there with no other purpose than to observe his team. Perhaps after the rooms had been ransacked, they had left, having fulfilled their duty. It wasn’t out of the question.

  Someone didn’t want them here, that much was certain, but why that might be was far from clear.

  He needed to start thinking straight. Jet-lag had left him muzzy and lethargic. Cutter crossed the plaza, then took to the side streets, moving away from the touristy areas into narrower and narrower alleyways and passages. Mangy cats, all slack skin, fur and bone, followed him along the low rooftops. He felt the moisture being baked out of the air as the sun rose.

  The locals were already up. The smell of unleavened bread filled the back ways of Cuzco. He found a small bakery selling warm loaves and bought a flatbread, using currency Jenny had provided. He tore strips off it and ate as he walked, smiling and nodding to those who smiled and nodded at him.

  And for a few minutes at least, it was as though the weight of the world wasn’t resting on his shoulders.

  Those few minutes would have to be enough.

  He saw a small kiosk selling tobacco and news. He bought a paper that he assumed was their local version of the National Enquirer. The headline read ‘El Chupacabra?’ and there was a grainy black and white photograph of the ‘black dog’ beneath it. The image had obviously been doctored. Folding the paper under his arm, he headed back to the hotel.

  SIX

  They gathered in Cutter’s room and locked the door.

  “Right, we need to make plans,” he said. “We can’t just wander around playing tourists. Jenny, this morning you and Stark need to go and get Bairstow out of that hospital. We can’t keep him here, not if we’re being watched, but there’s no way I am prepared to leave him in there like a sitting duck. Get onto Chaplin. He’s got to have access to a safe house of some sort.”

  “Will do,” she replied.

  “Once we’ve got him out, we’ll worry about babysitting. We’re going to need to transport the gear, then set up a base camp in the forest. And there’s something else we’re going to need to worry about.

  “Tell me what this says,” Cutter said to Blaine, holding the newspaper out for him to read.

  The SAS man skimmed through the article, and shrugged.

  “Mostly wild superstition, by the looks of it.” His eyes narrowed. “And yet...”

  “Go on?”

  “Someone seems to be claiming that there have been other deaths, elsewhere in the rainforest,” he said, scanning the page. “One witness blames the greed of the scientists and the government for bringing the wrath of El Chupacabra down upon the heads of the natives. But the predominant opinion seems to be that Bairstow himself was responsible for the killings, including his brother’s murder.”

  “What a nightmare,” Cutter said, rubbing at his jaw. “This is exactly what we didn’t want happening. Do you think Bairstow actually spoke to the press?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Almost certainly not,” Jenny said. “This isn’t good, Cutter. We need to talk to Chaplin. If this plays out the way I think it’s going to, we’ve got some serious trouble on our hands.”

  “What are you thinking, Jenny?”

  “You want the truth?” she asked rhetorically. She was sat perched on the corner of an intricately painted laundry chest beneath the room’s only window. The sun on the side of her perfectly made-up face made her look like a vengeful goddess. “South American territories have always been a hotbed of lies and violence, Cutter. It’s the way of the world down here. There’s a reason the military parade about with their guns. If they want to keep anyone from investigating further, it would certainly explain the attempt on his life.”

  From the other side of the room Stark grunted in support of the notion. The soldier looked grim.

  “My God, do you seriously think they’d murder him in cold blood?” The thought chilled Cutter to the bone.

  “If he’s being used as a fall guy, then it’ll be easier if he’s not around to defend himself. And there’s nothing to suggest he isn’t already dead,” Stark said bluntly.

  “One thing in our favour is that the report appeared in a small-town paper, rather than the national press,” Cutter noted. “It’s not as likely to attract international attention, but it’ll sure scare the hell out of the locals.”

  “If there were other killings, who’s to say it wasn’t the poachers themselves?” Jenny added. “We already know what big business it is. Chaplin was pretty clear about that. What’s a little more death to preserve a multi-billion pound industry? It makes the job of trapping those endangered species and smuggling them out of the country that much easier, if no one dares enter the forest, don’t you think?”

  Connor, sat cross-legged on Stephen’s bed, looked up with surprise at her words. There was a certain ruthlessness to that way of thinking that Connor had never imagined a woman — any woman — capable of showing.

  “What the hell have we walked into the middle of?” Cutter said.

  “But what about the, ah...” Connor glanced instinctively at the SAS men, his head spinning with all of the wild and frightening possibilities that had been put into it. Then he remembered that they had been fully briefed
.

  “Well, I mean, aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves here? We know there’s an anomaly out there, don’t we? You said yourself that Cameron described seeing diamonds in the sky. What else could he have seen?”

  “As much as I hate to admit it, Connor’s right,” Cutter said. “It’s easy to let our paranoia run away with us, and get all wrapped up in politics and schemes. After all, it isn’t every day we are shadowed, or have our rooms broken into, but we can’t ignore the possibility that something really did come through. That’s got to be our real concern. Anything else is just jumping at shadows.”

  “And if it came through, the odds are it’s still here,” Stephen said, giving voice to the one thought they were all sharing.

  “Right, so let’s stick with what we know, shall we?”

  “There must be a million places out there in the rainforest a cunning predator could hide,” Abby said. “It could be a paradise for an invasive species.”

  “That depends very much upon the creature,” Cutter mused thoughtfully. “It’s going to try to find something approximating its natural habitat, if it can. Let’s work out what we’re dealing with, and that’ll narrow our search down. Meanwhile, where are the maps?”

  Abby retrieved a detailed contour map of the region and spread it out across the bed. Cutter leaned over to study it, then took a red marker-pen and circled a particular spot.

  “That’s where Nando’s based. He’s reported strange behaviour in the animals under his care. That’s our jumping-off point. Blaine, where’s this village that’s supposed to have been attacked?”

  The soldier studied the map for a moment, looking at the contour lines and symbols. “Hard to say, Professor. The article doesn’t really reference any local landmarks. If Bairstow was supposed to have passed through, though, it has to be somewhere between the outskirts of Madre de Dios and Cuzco, so it’s probably somewhere along this path.” He drew a line with his finger above the two points on the map.

  “Good. Now, what other information do we have? Let’s stop thinking like alarmists and start thinking like scientists. Thought, reasoning, extrapolation and evaluation, ladies and gentlemen. What else do we know?”