Shadow of the Jaguar

by Steven Savile

  She nodded. “It’s a mess, Nick.”

  “What were you thinking? You can’t just kidnap a suspect from a hospital. It doesn’t matter whether you think he is innocent or not. You just can’t do it, Jenny. Lester’s going to explode. And as much as I like the image, an exploding Lester isn’t what we want.

  “It’s not like we can even claim plausible deniability. In the morning your face is going to be all over the news. Hospitals have surveillance cameras you know. An employee of the British government, kidnapping a murder suspect. How the hell are we going to explain that one away?”

  “There’s something going on here, Nick. Something bigger than us.” She wasn’t apologetic. She was frightened. That realisation quelled the anger he felt.

  “There always is, Jenny.”

  “I think we were brought here to cover for something else.” She looked over her shoulder to be sure they were alone.

  “I’m sure we were, but we’re here now, and we have to stop playing into their hands — whoever they are.” Cutter reached across the table and took her hand, and for a minute he wasn’t looking at two women, he was looking at one. Jenny Lewis. For all that she looked like Claudia Brown, she wasn’t. She was a completely different woman with different strengths and different vulnerabilities.

  “It will be all right,” he promised. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  “I think they know,” she said, the words barely a whisper. “I think they know about the anomalies.”

  Chaplin coughed politely as he entered the room behind them. Cutter didn’t remove his hand from hers. He had no idea how long Chaplin had been standing there, or whether he had heard. He had to hope not.

  “Where is he?” Cutter asked, doing his best not to appear startled or suspicious. “Where’s Bairstow?”

  “Upstairs, sleeping.”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “That can wait, surely. Moving him has put quite a strain on young Cam.”

  “I don’t think it can,” Cutter said. “We need to be seen heading out to Madre de Dios tonight, and we have no idea how many pairs of eyes will be looking. Something happened to Cam out there, and I need to know what it was.”

  “We know what happened, Cutter. His brother was murdered, and he barely escaped with his life. My sole priority is sending him back to London alive. That’s what Sir Charles has entrusted me to do.”

  “I understand, but I really need to talk to him.”

  “You need a lot for a scientist, Professor.”

  “I’m not the enemy here, Chaplin,” Cutter said, doing his best to sound reasonable. Something about the man irked him. Hell, something was off about the entire situation. He wouldn’t have put it beyond Chaplin to have engineered the whole thing, manipulating Jenny into this impossible corner.

  He was glad he had had the presence of mind to send Jack Stark along.

  “We’re on the same team,” he said firmly, “And we both need to remember it.”

  “Yes, yes, of course we are. The boy deserves to rest, that’s all. You can talk to him later and ask him questions to your heart’s delight. Right now, I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry. Let’s eat.”

  Cutter let it drop for the moment.

  Chaplin had the cook, Marta, prepare a meal for all of them, setting a table for five in the dining room. While the preparations were being made, Cutter took the opportunity to explore.

  The house itself was quite old. He wasn’t sure how he would have described the décor — colonial chic perhaps? The wealth on display was positively vulgar. In the main foyer he found a huge Incan stone, fourteen feet in diameter.

  Every inch of it was carved with gods, rivers, rituals, and impossible animals beautifully rendered by the mason all those hundreds of years ago. Each image in the stone was haunting and stylistic. The stone itself was almost certainly a unique relic, a priceless part of the nation’s heritage. That it was hidden away in an official residence, like some piece of stolen treasure, was criminal.

  Cutter traced the lines with his fingertips, wondering what memories were locked away within the ancient object. Had the Incas prayed to it? Had they pledged themselves in its shadow, becoming man and wife? Had it been used to mark off the seasons, recording the triumphs and tragedies of a people who had no words of their own for history? It could easily have been all of these things, or none of them.

  Marble stairs led up to the first floor, worn down by the shuffling of the household’s feet over the decades since the house was built. Earthenware vases sat in sconces measured out evenly along the rise, each filled with bright flowers that must have been changed daily, regardless of whether or not the ambassador was present.

  The rooms were all similarly opulent, hiding away their own unique treasures. Cutter found himself admiring pottery and figurines, and reading along the spines of books lined up regimentally on shelves. The tapestries hanging from the walls were thicker and the colours more vibrant than the replicas hanging on the walls of their hotel in Cuzco.

  He moved from room to room. The ambassador obviously had a taste for the written word. The library was filled with first editions of M.R. James and, under glass, faded copies of the Penny Dreadfuls that had first printed Dickens. There was a separate smoking room, with neatly folded newspapers and a rack of magazines from across the world. Surprisingly, the dominant language appeared to be German, with Das Spiegel taking pride of place on the table.

  The study was unlike any other room in the house — a small slice of Regency England transported to the Americas. The room was dominated by dark wood. The central desk looked like something out of a Dickensian drama, the green-glass shade of a banker’s lamp angling the light down onto a leather blotter. The books in this room were decidedly less fictitious in nature, consisting mainly of biographies of the rich and famous, from the diaries of Pepys to more modern recollections of David Niven and the various actors who had played James Bond.

  He found a small box radio on the windowsill, and out of curiosity tuned it in to 87.6 on the FM dial. There was none of the tell-tale interference that would have suggested an anomaly in the vicinity. Of course, that didn’t mean the anomaly had closed, only that it was out of range of the receiver.

  The desk diary listed a number of appointments for the coming week, including the Israeli cultural attaché and a representative from the World Bank. There was only one name Cutter didn’t recognise: Mannfred Eberhardt. It was ringed in red, a few pages back. The entry pre-dated Nando’s e-mail to him by almost a full week, which would place it right around the time Cam and Jaime were attacked.

  He closed the book and headed back down stairs.

  The SAS men had returned, and were sitting with Chaplin and Jenny. Cutter looked at his watch. By rights, the others ought to be on their way to the eco-resort now, but they would almost certainly still be waiting in the hotel for their return.

  “I need to make a phone call,” he told Chaplin.

  “By all means.” Chaplin indicated the handset on the wall, beside the huge industrial refrigerators.

  Cutter took the receptionist’s card from his pocket and dialled the hotel. She answered on the first ring.

  “Hotel Del Prado. How may I help you?”

  “This is Nick Cutter. I am staying at the hotel with the scientific expedition.”

  “Ah, yes, Professor. How may I help you?”

  “I need to talk to one of my colleagues, Stephen Hart, if you can locate him.”

  “One moment please.”

  Her voice was replaced by more of that interminable Muzak meant to soothe the savage beast. Mercifully, Stephen answered quickly.

  “Hello?”

  “Stephen? It’s me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Something’s come up. I need you to make sure everyone gets out to the Madre de Dios reserve. Nando’s expecting us this evening, and I don’t want to raise any more alarm bells than we already have. We’ll take a car o
ut later tonight.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Far from it, but we’ve got to make the best out of a bad job. I’m trusting you, Stephen.” Then he remembered a loose end. “Have the guide and translator shown up?”

  “No sign of them, but don’t worry about it. I’ll keep things together at this end. All this cloak and dagger makes you long for the old Permian era reptile, though, doesn’t it?”

  Cutter chuckled. “Yes, it does. How could you tell? On second thoughts, don’t tell me.”

  “All right, I won’t.”

  “Stephen, have Connor dig up everything he can find on black dogs. Use those gadgets of his for something useful.”

  “Will do. Are we still thinking borhyaenid?”

  “Until it’s proved otherwise. I’m going to talk to Bairstow. I’ll fill you in when we get to the reserve tonight.”

  “Great. Travel safe.”

  “You too, Stephen.”

  He hung up. The others were looking at him expectantly.

  “We’ll meet up with them later. If we’re going to keep up the pretence of being a scientific expedition, we’d better keep to our schedule.”

  “Makes sense,” Chaplin agreed.

  A little while later Marta the cook came through to tell them that the food was ready. To everyone’s surprise, Cam came down to join them in the dining room. He was accompanied by a small man who introduced himself as Pilo, the ambassador’s physician. Cutter couldn’t help but wince at the extent of the young man’s injuries. Pilo helped Cameron sit, then left them.

  “Do you mind if we talk while we eat?” Cutter asked.

  “Not at all,” Cameron said. He moved uncomfortably in his seat, no doubt trying to find a position where one set of stitches or another wasn’t been pulled apart. Half of his face was purple with bruises. In the candlelight it almost looked like the umbra of shadow, but it didn’t shift even as the small flames flickered. “But who are you?”

  “Sorry, sometimes I get too wrapped up in things. Cutter. Professor Nick Cutter.”

  “Do you work for my father?”

  “Not really. I work for a branch of the Home Office. But I’m here on his behalf.”

  “Really? You’re a long way from home, Professor.”

  “Likewise, Cam. Now, I understand that this might be painful, but I need to hear exactly what happened out there, in your own words,” Cutter said.

  Cam’s bruised face twisted, at least until the pain made him stop. The memory was obviously one he would rather suppress. Where it sat on the table, his hand — Cutter saw — was clenched so fiercely that the knuckles had blanched bone white.

  “Take your time,” he said soothingly.

  “I’ve told Alex everything already,” Cameron said hoarsely, and clearly he hoped that would put an end to the questions.

  “I know, and I am sorry, but sometimes just the simple act of repetition can bring back a detail that you thought you’d forgotten.”

  “A detail that would help a government scientist?”

  “I’m sorry, Cam,” Cutter said, genuinely. “But you’ll just have to trust me.”

  “Fine,” the young man said. He paused for a moment, breathing heavily, then continued, “We had made camp beside a ruined temple; we’d found it that morning but hadn’t had time to explore it properly. It was so much bigger than any of the other temples we’d encountered. The earthworks beneath it had been excavated into a number of passageways and chambers. It was huge, so we thought it might be one of the main places of worship for the Incas, yet it had been so utterly reclaimed by the forest that it was hard to imagine anyone had set foot in it in a hundred years, at least.”

  “That must have been quite something to see,” Cutter said, surprised at how genuinely excited he was becoming at the young man’s words.

  “It was incredible. It was why we came out here. Jaime was always into the buildings. He used to tease me because I was always more captivated by the social archaeology, reconstructing the lives of the people and the time, than I was in the old stones. This one might have been dedicated to Supay, judging by the pictorial representations carved into the crumbling walls. The rainforest is filled with these unexplored ruins that have been swallowed by the vines, the huge trees, and simply lost. So, we hadn’t explored more than a quarter of it, if that, when our lights started to fail. We had other supplies back with the tents so we decided to make a few days of it, really explore the temple.”

  “I can understand that,” Cutter said, and he could. It was precisely the same sort of curiosity that motivated so much of his life.

  “We went back to the camp, cooked some food, joked about, you know, and then I had to go for a piss; curse of the small bladder. It was weird, though. I noticed how quiet the forest had become. I can’t explain it — the rainforest is never truly quiet, there are always a dozen sounds out there, but suddenly there was nothing.

  “No, that’s not true, there was the sound of the rain, and something prowling in the underbrush. And then Jaime was screaming.

  “I was too far away. I couldn’t help him. By the time I got back to the fire he was dead.”

  Cam closed his eyes. For a full minute he didn’t say another word. He was reliving his brother’s last moments, Cutter knew. He had no choice but to leave the boy there, hoping that something would come back to him.

  Something that would help them.

  “Can you describe the creature that attacked you?” He had to resist the urge to feed the description to Cam. He needed him to remember, not to have a memory fashioned for him, then made real by the trauma.

  “I don’t... It all happened so quickly. I came back into the clearing. I remember seeing the fire scattered. It was very dark. I heard it before I saw it, turned and then it hit me.”

  “Can you describe it?” Cutter pressed.

  “It was big. Powerful. A big cat or a dog. A jaguar or a panther maybe. I don’t know. I only saw it for a moment, these huge teeth bared, snapping down toward my throat.”

  “That’s good, Cam. That’s good. Do you remember what the teeth were like? Were they small? Sharp? Long?”

  Cam’s eyes flared wide at the memory.

  “They were too big for its mouth,” he said, “more like tusks than teeth.”

  “And what colour was it, Cam? Can you remember?”

  The young man shrugged, then winced against the flare of pain the careless gesture earned him.

  “Like I said, it was dark. The fire was out. Black? Dark brown? I don’t know. It wasn’t the same, if that makes sense?”

  “You mean it was mottled, or that there was some kind of pattern to it, like a leopard or a tiger?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Cam said awkwardly, obviously unsure. Cutter decided to let it go for the moment.

  “Thank you, Cam. That’s great. You’ve done really well.” But the young man continued.

  “Its jaw was weird.” The intonation of his voice shifted with the nature of his remembering. His eyes focused on something far away.

  “Weird? How so?” Cutter asked.

  “It was droopy, like it had a huge handlebar moustache.”

  Cutter nodded. He had what he needed — he was certain of it. The rather clumsy description had more in common with a Thylacosmilus, or pouch blade, than any jaguar or panther the pampas had seen in the last couple of million years. The creature was akin to the more common sabre-tooth cat, but not truly its kin, more an example of convergent evolution. Thylacosmilus was neither a cat, nor of the feline genus. It was actually a pouched marsupial. Indeed, it was more closely related to the opossum or kangaroo than it was any placental mammal.

  And tellingly, the Thylacosmilus had left no known progeny. If it had indeed been a Thylacosmilus that had attacked Cam and his brother, it could only have come through an anomaly. There were no other explanations.

  Cutter pushed his chair back and made to leave the table, then paused, mid-movement, and asked, “Just one last thing, Cam
. You described seeing diamonds in the sky. What did you mean by that?”

  “I don’t know how else to describe it. It was as though the sky was filled with shimmering crystals, like it was a sheet of mirror that had just been shattered, and the shards hadn’t fallen. They just spun lazily in the air, round and round, catching the light. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I wanted Jaime to see it, but when I took him back there, it was gone, as if it had never existed. That was what he was teasing me about before I left him to go for a piss. You know what the last thing he ever said to me was? He teased me about being a coward because I didn’t dare touch it, and made some crack about me gearing up for a career in politics instead of archaeology. It just feels like... after everything, he didn’t know me.”

  “Or perhaps he knew you too well, Cam,” Cutter said, gently. “None of us are our fathers. We might share some genetic traits, but we’re not clones. You’re not necessarily genetically predisposed to be a pompous arse.”

  “You know father, then?”

  Cutter chuckled despite himself.

  “I know his type, and I know your type, Cam. You aren’t your father’s son, not in the way you fear. Your brother knew that, too. He knew you better than you know yourself. He was just teasing you. It’s what brothers do. They prod the sensitive spots on our psyche because they get a laugh out of it.”

  He sat back down and finished his meal.

  After a while, Chaplin and Pilo gently saw Cam back up to his room. Cutter drew Jenny, Stark and Blaine aside and spoke to them in an urgent whisper, “He saw an anomaly. There’s no other explanation for it. Best guess, the creature is a Thylacosmilus, a Plio-Pleistocene predator. Nasty. Similar in many ways to Smilodon, the sabre-toothed great cat. It’s not a cat though, there’s no shared ancestry at all. Thylacosmilus was a marsupial. Still absolutely lethal. It was lord of the pampas for two million years.”

  “Which means we need to find that temple,” Jenny said.

  “Cameron’s not fit enough to travel, so Stark, I want you to stay here and keep an eye on him. I trust this Chaplin character about as far as I can throw him.”

  “Okay, Professor.”