Shadow of the Jaguar

by Steven Savile

  The realities of age were an occupational hazard. You couldn’t live with your head stuck in the Permian or the Metazoic without some of your thoughts getting stuck there, too. Stephen had, after all, been seduced and abandoned by a woman who was technically hundreds of millions of years old. He hadn’t thought about Helen in a while, or more accurately he hadn’t thought about his own betrayal in a long time. There had been that freeze-frame moment with Cutter at the bowling alley, which seemed to condense it all down to a single look and a nod, and like typical guys, they buried it.

  It wasn’t that they were all right again, more that it had been banished out of sight, out of mind. That was centuries of evolution and the male psyche boiled down to its most essential components.

  The trust had been eroded though — he knew that. He wasn’t a fool. It would take a lot for him to earn it back. But he would.

  As they rose higher into the hills Cutter’s argument about the end of history was confirmed by the shrill crackle of Madonna’s ‘Like A Prayer’. Listening to it as he looked down upon a world seemingly untouched by time or progress, he could appreciate Cutter’s point of view. Such banal Westernness really was vastly out of place amid the natural beauty of the Andes.

  Mercifully, they lost the reception midway through the song. Straining with the steep incline, the battered car continued its ascent.

  “This is a good spot,” Eloy said a little while later. “You fly like a condor or fall like a rock now. Your destiny is controlled by the gods.” The man seemed to enjoy the prospect a little too much for Stephen’s liking. He had to admit, though, that it was a good place to launch himself. The grass fell away into a precipice that he could literally throw himself over, and surrender to the mercy of the winds.

  He clambered out of the car. Most of the plateau was bald, with more of that grey igneous rock strewn across the surface. Two conical towers stood off to the left, a little removed from the scattered stones. They had crumbled now, their walls adding to the debris on the landscape.

  “Those are Chullpas, grave towers for the powerful dead,” Eloy explained, seeing him staring at the twin structures.

  Nodding, Stephen proceeded to strip down and suited up quickly, bundling his clothes into the backpack. The suit was the most peculiar thing he had ever worn, the webbing between his legs and from his arms to his sides transforming him into something vaguely resembling a huge man-squirrel.

  “I want you to meet me at the bottom,” he said, pointing away into the middle distance. “Follow me along the road as best you can.”

  “You will not fall straight down, like Wile E. Coyote?” The Peruvian made an unnerving gesture with his hand, miming Stephen going over the precipice, plunging straight down and finishing with a cartoon-like splat.

  “I certainly hope not,” Stephen said. “The aerodynamics of the suit ought to allow me to glide up to twenty miles.”

  Eloy raised a disbelieving eyebrow at that.

  “I will follow, but if you kill yourself, it will cost more than twenty-five soles.”

  “That sounds fair.”

  He took the second backpack out of the car, and removed a compact parachute from it. He strapped himself into the harness, cinching the buckles tightly. The last thing out of the bag was a small handheld digital video recorder. He turned it on, and filmed a quick three-sixty panorama of the peaks, and then walked slowly up to the edge.

  “It’s a long way down,” he said. “Famous last words.”

  And with that he stepped out over the edge, and was falling.

  The wind became a gale around his ears as it tore at the suit. It took a moment for him to catch his breath, and then he spread his arms and legs wide to arrest the speed of his descent. The nylon pockets stitched between his arms and torso filled with air. Almost immediately, instead of hugging the sheer stone face he was powering away from it, the wind beneath his wingsuit.

  And then he was flying instead of falling. He let out a wild whoop of exhilaration as the ground swept away beneath him.

  He was flying!

  Blood pounded through his veins.

  He twisted his body, arcing in toward the hills again. The air-filled pockets acted like wings. Stephen used the momentum to hug the contours of the trees as he hurtled across the top of them, then they were gone before he could focus. The ground flashed by beneath him. His heart raced, hammering against his chest as he swooped low across the stripe of the road, so close to the stones he could almost have reached down to pluck one of them up as he skimmed the surface, and then rose again.

  The slightest error of judgement meant certain death. Unlike Wile E. Coyote, he couldn’t very well dust himself off and stagger away from a man-shaped crater in the Earth.

  Tears stung his eyes. The wind pulled at his flesh, drawing his lips apart with its ferocity and pinning his eyelids open in a mad stare. It was all he could do not to pull the chute and end the flight then and there. He had base-jumped a dozen times, but the vectors of the wind and the starkness of the earth were different here. They opened another dimension in his descent. The sensation of speed was incredible.

  He fought to keep his head up and not let go of the camera. It was difficult to judge, but he must have been skimming the Earth at fifty or sixty miles an hour, if not more.

  Stephen savoured the freedom now, knowing that too soon he would have to pull the chute and come crashing back down to Earth.

  EIGHT

  It seemed a lifetime ago since Nick Cutter had felt any sort of contentment. His world had become one of necessity and practicality, so dwelling upon what was essentially the loss of ‘self’ was pointless.

  From the window of his room, he watched Jenny leave for the hospital with Stark and Chaplin. Even the way she moved was the same...

  Jenny had arranged with Chaplin that the three of them would pick up Cam, then rendezvous with the rest at the hotel. As a group they would take him to the ambassador’s summer house, which was the safest haven they had been able to arrange. Once he was secure, they would proceed into the rainforest.

  At least that was the plan. Why, then, did he feel such misgivings?

  The fan that functioned as the only air-conditioning was barely capable of coping with the rising sun. Moving away from the window, Cutter paced back and forth. He needed to focus on the job at hand, not live his life somewhere in the past.

  The irony of that idea had him snort a single bitter laugh.

  He picked up the phone and dialled the number Nando had given him. He listened for the tell-tale second click that would betray an eavesdropper, but it never came. The phone rang through six, seven, eight cycles before it was answered by a young woman.

  “Hi, this is Professor Cutter calling for Nando Estevez. I believe he is expecting my call.”

  “Of course, Professor Cutter,” the woman said in flawless English. There was no trace of an accent to her voice. That was another aspect to the end of history, he mused, the globalisation of language. With the prevalence of the Internet and English seeping into every culture and eroding the natural need to understand smaller languages like Quechua, it was hardly surprising that call centres in India and China serviced the industries of the UK, or that people could hardly tell the nationality of those who were answering the phones.

  There were over six thousand languages in the world, and already thirty of them dominated global discussions. Soon enough, most of those thirty would be as useful as cuneiform in day-to-day life, as virulent strains of English spread.

  It wasn’t only species that were endangered.

  I’m turning into a grumpy old man.

  The line went quiet for a moment, then he was treated to more of that inane Muzak that phone companies considered soothing. Then he heard Nando’s voice for the second time in ten years.

  “Professor Nick! You are here?”

  “Landed yesterday. We’re heading out your way later today, just waiting for the two locals who are meant to be joining up with us. Look,
I want to run something by you.”

  “Ask away.”

  “You said you’ve noticed peculiar migratory patterns in the species you observe, right?”

  “Yes, most peculiar.”

  “Obviously I haven’t seen anything, but what you’ve explained sounds as though a new predator may have entered the region and is asserting its dominance.”

  “That was my initial thought, but the wildlife in the reserve is all strictly monitored. We have not introduced any new species in over nine months. Any alien species would have had to find its own way into the reserve, which is highly unlikely. New species do not simply materialise from the ether.”

  “But it’s not impossible, either. The presence of some new hunter would explain the dearth of animal life in certain regions. Have you looked for anomalies in the tracking patterns? Perhaps prints that do not belong.”

  “Honestly? No. We have thirty rangers in our team, covering several hundred square miles of territory. Looking for rogue tracks would be like hunting for that needle in the haystack. And we cannot change our priorities simply because I am curious.”

  On the face of it, Cutter couldn’t argue with the logic, but the assumptions it was based upon were not absolutes. There was another way of attacking the problem.

  “I’m not saying that you need to comb every square inch of ground, either. Let nature help you. Follow the lack of sound. Where did you last notice the behavioural peculiarities? Take a team of men there specifically with the intention of reading the land. Animals leave tracks, faecal matter — it’s all out there waiting to tell its story, each unique, genetic fingerprint that will answer all of our questions.”

  “You have a theory?”

  “I have a theory,” Cutter admitted, not willing to go into it over the telephone, despite the fact that he was fairly sure there were no unwanted listeners on the line.

  “Will you share it?”

  “Not yet. I’d rather discuss it in person. Find me some tracks, Nando. Give me something to work with that either supports or destroys the theory. The truth is out there, it has to be.”

  “I shall take a team out today, and perhaps we will find something this time,” Nando said, but he didn’t sound overly optimistic.

  “Excellent,” Cutter said. And then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “One last thing. Have any of your rangers reported seeing a frost in the air?”

  There was a silence for a moment as Nando pictured the image.

  “No, not that I have heard. Does this have something to do with your theory?”

  “No, it was just something I heard that the young Englishman who was attacked had said.”

  “Ah, well, no. Though something like that would not be uncommon in the rainforest; the mixture of the moisture and atmospherics can play havoc with perceptions. Coupled with the heat, jungle mirages are not out of the question.”

  “Really? Ah, well, I suppose there’s always a prosaic explanation for even the most fanciful idea.”

  “Always, Professor. You taught me that much, at least.”

  “And you listened to me? Why didn’t I have more students like you, Nando? Well, we should be with you this evening. Good luck with those tracks.”

  At that, Cutter hung up.

  Just because they hadn’t seen an anomaly didn’t mean it wasn’t out there. The breeziness with which Nando had dismissed the phenomenon as a jungle mirage suggested that they had been seen before though. That made sense.

  More and more, he began to wonder if anomalies were opening up all over the world, most of them unseen. As far as they knew, there was nothing that bound them to the British Isles, or even Europe. The Sahara was vast, as were the Steppes and the Veldt. For all the billions of people on the Earth, there were massive expanses of land still remote and relatively untouched, places where anomalies could open and close unnoticed.

  The notion sent a shiver through his soul.

  NINE

  Jenny Lewis and Alex Chaplin walked side by side through the antiseptic cleanliness of the hospital ward. They had left Stark out by the car.

  Here, more than anywhere else she had been, it was painfully obvious that they were a million miles from home. The linoleum floors had seen better days, as had the paint flaking away from the walls. There was, at least, blessed relief from the stifling heat outside.

  An ill-equipped crash-cart leaned against the wall. Where she expected to see defibrillators, adrenalin needles, and so much more, there were neatly folded white clothes, sealed hypodermics and other necessities — but a distinct lack of technology.

  Their footsteps echoed down the corridor.

  The wards opened up off the main corridor like ventricles off the main artery of the building. Linen curtains were drawn around steel-framed beds. Patients lay atop of the covers, their pyjamas stained with dark rings of sweat, despite the air conditioning.

  She noticed Chaplin’s hand stray to something at his waist. It took her a moment to realise it was a gun. All of a sudden she wished she hadn’t left Stark back at the car.

  They had spoken very little during the drive.

  Jenny had taken Stark aside and confided her suspicion.

  “It was Chaplin wasn’t it? It had to be him that orchestrated the break in last night. He set the guards to watching the hotel, and had us followed. It all makes sense.”

  Stark agreed that it did. An ugly kind of sense.

  Stark had confronted Chaplin in the hospital car park after they had arrived, but the man had protested vehemently. Yet there was something in the look he gave Stark that Jenny did not like or trust. It was as though his eyes were part reptilian. She had known plenty of men like Chaplin. He was hardly the last of the great liars.

  “What were you looking for? What did you hope to achieve?” Stark rasped.

  “It wasn’t me, I swear,” he repeated.

  “No, it was just a random little slice of coincidence that had all of our rooms turned over while we were being stalked through the streets. What kind of an idiot do you take me for?”

  “It wasn’t me!”

  “This is getting repetitive, Chaplin. No one but you knows why we are here, that we are anything other than a boring old scientific expedition. What did you do? Tip off the locals for a nice little cash reward? Playing both sides of the coin? Come on, you can’t tell me it wasn’t you who tipped off the newspaper,”

  Chaplin didn’t so much as squirm.

  “Read my lips, man: I did not do it.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Then you are a fool.”

  “Have you heard of Occam’s razor?” Jenny said. Then, “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the smart money is on selecting the most straightforward, because ninety-nine times out of 100 it’ll be the winner.

  “Our hypotheses are simple: either you are working for some mysterious paymaster and this is all your fault; you are working independently and this is all your fault; or you have nothing to do with any of this and some third party is playing us all. If it isn’t you, then we’ve got some fairly serious security issues here, despite all those fancy call signs and secret frequencies. Assuming you aren’t working against us, you’ve got a leak. Someone knew exactly who we were, where we were staying, and when we were out. That’s one big set of assumptions that Occam’s not too fond of.”

  Even as she said it, another worry — larger than all of the other concerns combined — entered her mind. What if they know about the anomalies?

  Stark released his grip on Chaplin’s throat and stepped away from the car, shaking his head.

  “I suggest you start at the beginning,” Chaplin said, his tone utterly reasonable and even conciliatory. That in itself disturbed her, that in the face of accusation and assault he was capable of dissembling so flawlessly. “Because you have me at something of a loss. Being that I don’t have the slightest clue what you a
re talking about.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Jenny said.

  “This is getting tedious, don’t you think? I don’t know what you are talking about, you don’t believe what I am saying, I think we’ve established the baseline, so for the sake of our sanity let’s just make like we don’t think the other is a lying piece of shit, and go from there. Now please, what are you talking about? Was there a robbery?”

  Jenny sighed.

  “Okay, I’ll play along for now. Our hotel was burgled last night. Nothing — so far as we can tell — was taken, but all of our rooms were ransacked.”

  “And you think they know who you are?” Chaplin asked.

  “Why would they break in otherwise?”

  If his troubled face was anything to go by, Chaplin’s brain was working overtime.

  “Could it have been a coincidence? I mean should we be jumping to all of these conclusions?”

  “We were followed by at least three different observers last night. That’s three that we know of. I think it’s safe to say that it wasn’t some random opportunist burglary. These people know full well that we aren’t your average tourists.”

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” Chaplin said, staring at the pavement.

  They walked in to the hospital together.

  She saw herself in the glass, a small spot growing larger and taking on shape as she neared the entrance, until she was walking straight at herself. She hit the door and burst through it, five steps ahead of Chaplin.

  He caught up with her at the lift.

  Chaplin jabbed the buttons impatiently, but the lift came in its own sweet time. The doors wheezed open. They stepped into a pocket of peculiar aromas. She smelled sickness above, between and beneath all of the other fragrances; expensive perfumes, cheap aftershave, sweat, blood, ammonia, cabbage, pheromones and fear. It was a heady mélange. Individually each might have been pleasant, or at least not unpleasant, but together they made her nauseous.

  The journey up to Cameron Bairstow’s ward on the fifth floor was interminably slow. They shared the cramped lift with three green-scrubbed nurses who chittered and babbled incessantly in their own language. Sweat trickled slowly down the curve of her back.