Shadow of the Jaguar

by Steven Savile

“Jenny, Blaine, we’re leaving tonight. With a bit of luck we’ll not be too far behind the others.”

  “It’s not exactly God’s own country out there on the roads, Professor. It can get pretty hairy in the more remote territories, especially after sundown.”

  “I didn’t think it was Surrey, Stark.”

  “Just drive safe, okay? You get lost and it’s me who’s got to sort out the search and rescue, when I should be wrapped up warm at home in bed, if you catch my drift.”

  “Consider it caught, but you do realise that it’s not us who’s shacking up with a suspected murderer?”

  ELEVEN

  Jenny excused herself and left the boys to it.

  She went out into the garden with the handset from the cordless phone and dialled through the international router back to a number in England. She listened to the dial tone and the chirrup of the nocturnal insects out in the long grass beyond the patio, each vying for her attention.

  “Lester,” that faraway voice said.

  “It’s me,” Jenny said.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is? No, of course you don’t — you’re off gallivanting with Indiana Cutter, so why would you possibly worry yourself with the niceties of time zones?”

  “We’ve got a problem here.”

  “Well, there’s a surprise. What has the good Professor gone and done now?”

  “It’s not Cutter. It’s Bairstow.”

  “Tell me, though I am quite sure I don’t want to hear this.”

  “There’s no doubt it was an anomaly he saw. Cutter thinks he might have been attacked by a Thylacosmilus, which, the best I can tell is a —”

  “I’m well aware what a Thylacosmilus is, Jenny. Spend enough time with the geeks and some of their geekiness can’t help but rub off on you. So we have a prehistoric big cat on the loose.” She suppressed the urge to correct him. “We’re talking needle in the proverbial haystack. One animal in thousands of square miles of trees. I fail to see the problem.”

  “Well, it’s not quite as straightforward as that,” Jenny said, wondering how to broach the subject. In the end she could see no alternative but to wade in. “There was a newspaper this morning, with the story of a village not far from where Cameron was attacked. The entire village had been wiped out. The locals are blaming El Chupacabra, but the local press is blaming Cameron. It was almost certainly a creature attack.”

  Silence, then Lester sighed down the long-distance line.

  “It gets worse,” Jenny said.

  “Don’t sugar-coat it for me, will you?”

  “We couldn’t leave Cameron in the hospital, Lester. After the attempt on his life, it just wasn’t safe for him there. But we didn’t have time to clear it properly.”

  “Hold on, Jenny. When I sent you with Cutter, what was the one thing I asked you to do?”

  She knew full well what he had said. It was what he always said: Keep it low key, keep it out of the press, hide the truth. Obfuscate.

  “Keep it low key,” she said.

  “Keep it low key. Exactly. What part of that order makes you think that kidnapping a suspected murderer from a hospital would be a good idea?”

  “He didn’t do it,” Jenny objected.

  “I don’t care if he shot their Queen Mum, assuming they have one out in that heathen wilderness. Guilt has nothing to do with it. Just tell me they don’t know you are responsible.”

  “Sir Charles’ man on the ground claims he is taking care of it.”

  “Meaning they might know,” Lester intuited, reading very much between the lines she was trying to blur.

  “It’s possible,” she admitted.

  Another silence.

  “You disappoint me, Jenny. I expect this kind of thud and blunder from the Nutty Professor, but not from you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “We are at the ambassador’s summer house. We’re heading out to the reserve tonight. Cutter’s got the bit between his teeth now.”

  “I should call you home immediately,” Lester said, and his voice was cold.

  “There’s an anomaly out there, Lester. No question. And there’s at least one murderous creature out of time. Cutter’s not about to pack up and come home now. And frankly, nothing screams diplomatic incident like turning tail and running. We’re here as part of a zoological exploration. There is nothing to link it to Bairstow’s disappearance. To come home now though, well, that not only leaves the anomaly wide open, it points the finger of blame squarely at us.”

  Lester sighed audibly. Clearly he was far from impressed with the options she had laid out for him. “Well, I suppose there’s no real alternative, but for God’s sake, low key, Jenny. Understand? Low bloody key.”

  Lester hung up. She did the same.

  TWELVE

  Chaplin wormed his way into the driver’s seat.

  When the guide and translator hadn’t shown up, he had apologetically offered his own services, and found a dozen other reasons they needed him, right down to the fact that it was hiscar and they couldn’t get out to the reserve without him.

  “How very noble of you,” Cutter had said, his Scottish accent laced with cynicism. More than ever he didn’t trust the man, and he was certain Chaplin’s motives included little or no thought of actually helping. “We’re good though. We’ve got all the maps we could need, and Blaine’s a dab hand with Spanish, it seems. So there’s really no need for you to worry yourself.”

  But Chaplin wouldn’t have it.

  “Ah, well, I’m sure I can help in a dozen other ways,” he said stubbornly. “Procedure and all that. I have irreplaceable experience using my silver tongue to get around the local authorities, should we encounter them.” And as the discussion dragged on, they were losing valuable time. So Chaplin turned the key, and they departed through the gates.

  It was almost eleven. Away from the compound, the night was absolute, the sky around them so very different to London, where it never truly seemed to be dark. Not like this, at least. Jenny gazed out of the window in the back seat. Blaine was propped up next to her, his eyes closed. Like all soldiers, the man seemed capable of falling asleep if ever there were five minutes of downtime. Cutter envied him that. He still had that hung-over-haven’t-slept muzziness in his head.

  Chaplin adjusted the rear-view mirror against the glare of the headlights of a car that had appeared behind them. Though there were still occasional dwellings alongside the road, proving that they hadn’t left civilisation entirely, there were no streetlights, no cat’s eyes in the middle of the road, nothing indeed to say where the road ended and the grassy ditch began. The further they travelled from Cuzco and the main commuter routes that led to the ruins and Lake Titicaca, the more inhospitable the terrain became.

  They drove with the windows down. It made a pleasant change to have the night winds on their faces after the constant battering of daytime heat. It was a strange heat, quite unlike a hot day in London because of the humidity, which was up around 100 per cent at times, the air thick enough with moisture that Cutter could simply reach out to touch nothing, and bring his hand up to his face peppered with moisture.

  After that, the night was blessed relief.

  The quality of the roads changed, too. Fifty miles outside of Cuzco they were jouncing and juddering along dirt tracks that had no right to be called roads. These were strips of hard-packed dirt with the skeletal limbs of trees dragging down across them to form tunnels in the gathering forest, or narrow winding lama paths cut into the side of towering hills. Every few miles the track climbed, curving up the side of a slope to reveal the stunning vista below. With the sun down, the pale glow of the low moon — nearly full — bathed the tree tops with its silver, holding back the true dark of the night as long as it could. Occasionally clouds scudded across it, and the world around them disappeared. The black then was complete and utter.

  The headlights barely penetrated twenty feet ahead. The car behind them fel
l further back, but still followed, and turnoffs became fewer and fewer.

  The terrain edged beyond remote.

  Stark’s earlier wisecrack about God’s own country couldn’t have been further away from the reality; if there was anywhere on the planet that humbled a man more with its majesty and beauty, Cutter had never seen it, at least not in this epoch. It was untouched. Unspoiled. In some ways it was exactly like stepping back through time to a place before cars and skyscrapers, trains and roads and factories and pollution. It was a glimpse of something pure.

  He could only imagine what it would be like in the full glory of the day. The scale of it was daunting, the huge expanse of trees spread out like another world beneath them.

  Cutter leaned forward and turned on the radio, turning the dial through the frequencies. He let it linger a moment on 87.6 FM, then turned it off. He didn’t need to hear anything more, the vague, haunting pulse of static was there. Somewhere out in that vast wilderness there was at least one anomaly.

  “You’ll get no reception out here,” Chaplin said, adjusting his mirror again. The car had been with them for ten miles or more, occasionally annoying them with its full-beams lighting the inside of the SUV. All side roads seemed to have disappeared, though, so they were going to be travelling together for a while yet.

  “I’ve got a few CDs in the glove compartment. Nothing stellar, some Creedence, Springsteen’s The Riverfor when I am feeling suicidal, Buena Vista Social Club, not sure what else is in there. Feel free to have a rummage if you want something to listen to.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Cutter said, content with the sounds around them already: the wheels on the makeshift road and the rush of the wind through the open window.

  After a few more miles, the headlights disappeared from the side-view mirror. Nevertheless, Cutter refused to be reassured, and kept watch as best he could.

  All of the paranoia that surrounded Cam Bairstow’s current predicament had begun to distract him from the root cause of it. He had heard a story once about a woman standing in a river when a dead fish floats downstream. She takes it up onto the riverbank because she doesn’t want it poisoning the water. A few minutes later a dead sheep floats by. She drags its carcass out of the water for the same reason. A little while later it’s a cow, and the cow is followed by a dead horse. All day dead animals come floating by, and she’s frantically dragging them out of the water, struggling to keep pace with the rotten corpses. A man comes by and asks her what she’s doing and she tells him she’s trying to keep the water pure so people in the villages downstream can drink it without getting sick. She asks him if he will help and he says yes, but instead of getting into the stream beside her and dragging all of the rotten carcasses out of the now red water, he walks off. She shouts after him, demanding to know where he’s going, and he tells her he’s off to find out who is throwing the animals in the river, and stop them.

  It was a simple story, and so fitting of the way Nick Cutter lived his life. He wasn’t interested in the corpses in the river; he was interested in how they got there. That was what mattered — the cause, not the effect.

  Everything that was happening to Cam now was because of what had already happened — finding the anomaly and being attacked by the creatures that had come through it. Without that instigating event, he would never have been in the hospital, there would never have been the attempt on his life, and they would never have had to kidnap him for his own safety.

  It all came down to the anomaly. If it had never opened, none of this would have happened. The rest of it was distraction.

  The boy would always have to live with what he had seen. Cutter couldn’t change that. Likewise, he couldn’t resurrect the dead. All he could do was try to protect the living and stop any more corpses from being thrown into the river. That was where he needed to focus his attention, not on silly games of espionage. He was a zoologist, not a spy or special ops. He wasn’t the kind of man who stood in the centre of the river, fishing out bodies.

  “Come on Cutter, get a grip,” he mumbled to himself. He knew what he had to do. That steeled his resolve.

  From time to time, he thought he saw a gleam in the right-side mirror, but never enough to indicate that their travelling companions had reappeared.

  The road eventually curved down through enough twists and turns to level out on the valley floor. In the glare of the headlights Cutter saw a signpost pointing the way to the Madre de Dios Reserve. Jenny was asleep in the back seat, now, her head lolling occasionally with the rhythm of the road. He watched her through the rear-view mirror. She had her arm across her stomach as though hiding the most intimate of treasures. Watching her felt wrong on so many levels, but he couldn’t stop himself — and he didn’t want to.

  She was living proof of just how fragile “reality” could be, how every action they took had ripples and consequences. Only he understood that fully, yet he couldn’t allow it to deter him from his path. That way lies madness, he knew.

  Beside her, Blaine snored slightly.

  Chaplin yawned, but kept his eyes on the road.

  An hour passed without any conversation, each preferring the solitude of his own thoughts.

  He saw lights up ahead, and the silhouettes of a number of cars parked between the dark shadows of fabricated huts and supply sheds. The dirt road doubled back, opening out into a driveway that led up to the main office building — though it was nothing like the modern offices of London. Quite the opposite, he realised, as it was caught fully in the glare of their headlights. Unlike the outbuildings, it appeared to have been reclaimed from the forest itself. With ample wood everywhere it was obvious that they had built the reserve’s offices from the most abundant building material to hand.

  There were six smaller Terrapins, four to the left of the main block, two to the right, though beyond those two lay the dark line of a large storage facility. From the brief glimpse he saw of it, Cutter assumed it was fashioned from sheets of corrugated iron, like an old World War Two aircraft hanger.

  The lights were on in the main block, transforming its façade into a jack-o’-lantern face with a wide leering mouth and little beady eyes.

  “Wakey wakey, sleepy heads,” Cutter said to Jenny and Blaine as they swept around the driveway and pulled up beside the other SUV. The rest of the vehicles were a mixture of ancient Land Rovers and Range Rovers held together by duct tape and a prayer.

  Nando stood in the doorway, an idiot grin on his backlit face.

  Abby and Connor stood silhouetted behind him, both easily recognisable, Connor for his slight slouch and Abby for her waifish form. Lucas and Stephen, he assumed, were inside.

  Chaplin killed the idling engine and the lights went out.

  Cutter opened the car door.

  As the dome light came on and he placed one foot on the gravel, he saw that Nando and the others had moved and were standing a few feet away from the car, their poses identical. It was almost as though he had blinked and — like some game of standing statues — they had rushed to their new positions.

  He smiled. His bones were tired, deep through the tissue and into the marrow. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t slept in days, or that he had travelled six thousand miles from home. Cam’s recollections of the ruined temple haunted him. The static hum on the car radio was just one more spectre to the army of ghosts that kept him awake.

  He swung his other leg around and clambered out of the car.

  The humidity here was worse by far than back in the city. The air was so thick as he breathed that he could have choked on it.

  Nando stepped forward and clasped Cutter’s hand, pumping it hard.

  “It is good to see you, Professor.” There was genuine gratitude in his voice, and relief and excitement and worry, all tumbling together. Cutter thought he sensed a note of desperation, as well, but couldn’t put his finger on it.

  “You too, Nando.” The rear door of the car opened, and he turned. “This is Jenny Lewis, she’s part of my team;
Alex Chaplin, who works with the British ambassador in Cuzco; and Andy Blaine, a soldier alongside Lucas. So,” Cutter said, brushing all niceties aside, “did you find something for me?”

  “You better come inside, Professor. There’s something I’d like your opinion on.”

  THIRTEEN

  The ‘something’ was a single plaster cast of a print taken from the region where Nando had last noticed the peculiar silence.

  It was no bigger than the bottom of the whisky tumbler Nando handed him, but it was far more potent a thing. Cutter took it and ran his fingers over the contours of the cast, lovingly feeling out the raised areas which corresponded with the pads of the Thylacosmilus’ paw. A slow smile stole across his face. He looked up at Nando, who hovered over him.

  “Talk me through it.”

  “It was out on an area we call Kon Ridge, after the god of the wind and rain because it is so exposed; the elements are all heightened there. The wind bellows and the rain lashes down. It is not an area for moderation in weather, or in anything. We were tracking the area, looking for anything out of the ordinary, like you asked, when Xavier, one of the more experienced rangers, found a carcass in the undergrowth. It wasn’t the animal that interested us; it was the tracks that circled its body. As you can see by looking at the cast we made, it isn’t a jaguar, though it appears to be some species of big cat.”

  Cutter peered at his old student trying to superimpose the boy he had been ten years ago over the face of the man he had become. It was difficult, but it wasn’t impossible. That was one of the things about being a teacher, especially fitting when it came to dealing with the past; the brain had a way of fixing the lives of those you came into contact with into a single space and time, and didn’t allow for the notion of ageing. In his head Cutter still saw the nineteen year-old Fernando Estevez, not the man nearing the end of his third decade. Salt-and-pepper grey had crept into his temples and his stubble, and there was a darkness around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, but it was easy to see how the boy had become the man.