by Meg Cowley
“My colleague emailed me what he found, but it’s not good news. The plates trace to a dormant shell company. It’s a ghost. We cannot find out who really owns it.” He scowled and spat a word I didn’t understand, but I knew from his tone it would be a curse.
“So we’re at a dead end, huh?”
“Yes. I have to ring my boss, let him know. I don’t know where to go from here.”
“Sure. Give me the plate number again. I have a friend who might be able to help.”
“Zoe, I already ran them.” Juan’s voice bore an edge of frustration.
“I know, but I have contacts in the intelligence services. They may be able to do some digging. It might help. What do we have to lose?”
Juan sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Fine.”
In a couple of minutes, I’d forwarded the information on to my contact, one roguish Magicai named Jamie, who used less than legal ways to recover dangerous artefacts. If he couldn’t find out who the owner of the shell company was, that was it; we’d failed… But I’d bet the Skull of Kukulkan itself he’d turn something up. I hoped I was right.
Chapter Five
Juan’s glum face spoke volumes as he hung up his phone.
“What’s up?”
“Trouble.”
I waited for him to explain.
“I must visit the head of the Secretaria de Cultura at once — Senator Ricardo Gonzalez. I think I’m to be disciplined from straying from the jurisdiction of my duties. The morgue was a step too far.”
“You can blame me for that, though, surely? It was my idea.”
Juan shrugged. “Either way, we have no leads for now, and no way to recover any of the artefacts, much less the Skull of Kukulkan. Senator Gonzalez is not a patient man, nor an understanding one. He does not tolerate failure.”
“I’ll make sure he doesn’t blame you,” I insisted. I hated the kind of men Juan described this senator as. To them, little people like us were throwaway pawns. Juan had already proven to me how clever and committed he was to his work. A person like that didn’t deserve punishment on my account. He had tried his best.
“We shall see.”
“Where is he?”
Juan snorted. “In another world from us. He’s taking a retreat at the most expensive hotel on the Riviera Maya.”
We soon pulled off the highway, though I could see no hotel, just jungle stretching for flat miles into the distance, and the grandest gatehouse I’d ever seen. It stretched into the sky four storeys tall, and as wide as the cenote we had swum in what felt like an age ago. It was entirely out of place. We were admitted through the barrier with a security escort on a motorbike, who led us for a mile through the jungle along a road bordered by manicured lawns and well-tended flower beds. That was my first clue at the opulence of the place. I needed little more by the time we pulled up to the modern lagoon-side villa that was bigger than most houses in England and certainly any I’d seen in Mexico.
It was ringed by a black-suited security detail, who confirmed our details before letting us into the gated property. The two of us — grimy from head to toe — and the dusty truck did not belong here. On the artificial, raked sand beach that led to the lagoon, a model reclined in what could have been a magazine photoshoot scene.
“The senator’s wife,” Juan muttered to me as we walked past — she ignored us — escorted by the senator’s security.
Senator Gonzalez awaited us inside the air conditioned villa. I hated coming to places like this. Every floor gleamed, every accessory was pristinely placed, every surface white and clean. Safe to say, I felt like a stain upon it. Nevertheless, Juan strode forwards to meet the senator, who stood in a crisp pinstripe suit despite the heat of the day outside.
Senator Gonzalez did not offer to shake our hands, and his glance lingered on us; no doubt taking in our delightful state, and probably the smell that accompanied it. His introductions were brusque and businesslike, and I could see Juan’s opinions of him were well-founded from his manner.
“I hear you have failed to recover the stolen relics,” he said in English, for my benefit, and with an American accent.
“Yes, sir,” answered Juan, but Gonzalez did not allow him to explain further.
“This is unacceptable.” His face was as blank as his words; no heart, no empathy. “You have a lead, though, yes?”
“The truck plates were untraceable.”
Gonzalez glared at Juan. “What do you intend to do now, then?”
“I’m not certain, sir. If you could give me more time to investigate.”
I opened my mouth, but Gonzalez cut me off, too.
“No. No more time. You realise how this makes the Secretaria de Cultura look? Fools! Señor Santiago, I will not entrust the reputation of my department, and the fate of what could be our greatest Mayan relic find to date, in your incompetent hands. No more. You are dismissed. Return to your customary duties at Chichén Itzá immediately.” Gonzalez turned away, sat at his desk, and began his work again as if we had disappeared.
Juan’s mouth was pursed shut, as though he had much to say but did not dare to. I felt just as indignant as he looked.
“Sir,” I stepped forward, ignoring Juan’s warning glance. “I ask you to reconsider.” That was about as politely as I could put it.
He looked up to glare at me. “Miss?”
“Stark.”
“Miss Stark. You are new here. I know you have a reputation for finding lost things; that is why we called you. It would appear you have failed. Your time with us is at an end.”
“But what now?” I wasn’t going to let this drop. It wasn’t right. “You’re just going to leave these artefacts to fall into the wrong hands?”
Gonzalez slammed his pen on his desk. “No, Miss Stark,” he replied in a tone so brittle it could have shattered. “I do not answer to the likes of you. Perhaps, you do not have this in your United Kingdom. Now, I will handle it. I will use my finest to find these relics. I will ensure the security forces leave not one stone overlooked until they are recovered. And I will do so without your help or the incompetency of Señor Santiago. Goodbye.”
He gave me one last venomous glare, as if to ensure I would not reply, before turning to his work again.
I didn’t answer. What could I say to that? A tingle of unease ran through me. Where did we go from here? I looked at Juan. His slumped shoulders and downcast eyes said it all. “Thank you, Senator.” His words were hollow.
Juan jerked his head towards the door, and I followed him out, pushing past an officer who entered as we left. I paused for a split second as I recognised him. He was the guard we had talked to at the site, I realised. What was he doing here? The Senator greeted him with a handshake, and then his attention snapped to me once more. I slipped through the door at once, and his security shut it behind me. Gonzalez watched me leave, his expression inscrutable.
“Did you recognise that guy?” I hissed to Juan as we were ushered back to our truck hastily.
“What?”
“The soldier who came as we left.”
“Oh, yes,” Juan said, and then his head snapped to face me. “Yes,” he said, in full realisation. His mouth fell open and his eyes widened. “What..?”
“Not here.”
We left as quickly as we could, escorted away from the complex by security. When we were free, Juan turned onto the highway and hit the gas.
“Why was he there?” I said. “Do guards normally have direct contact with the senator?”
“No,” said Juan, frowning. Some of his defeated shell had disintegrated as he had a puzzle to solve. “Diaz isn’t a high enough ranking officer to contact Gonzalez in person.”
“Something’s not right.”
“I know. I don’t know what.”
“We need to go some place safe,” I said. I had the strangest feeling like there was a puzzle before us with all the pieces so very perfectly laid out that all we had to do was join the dots before it was too late. A premonition
of danger lurked amongst the swirling nausea in my stomach. “Where can we go?”
“My friend has a holiday let apartment outside Cancun. It’s being refurbished, so it’s empty. He’ll let us crash there as a favour.” One phone call later it was arranged, and Juan pushed the truck as hard as it would go up the highway whilst we pondered in silence what all the disconnected clues meant.
The ring of my phone startled us both, and I scrambled to answer it.
“Yes?”
“Zoe?”
“Jamie.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “Please, give me some good news, I need it.” I flicked him onto speakerphone.
“I’m all yours, Zo.”
“Zoe,” I snapped. I hated when he called me Zo. “Can it, Jamie. The plates, tell me you traced them?”
“You bet I did, Zo.”
I grated my teeth. I hated his over-familiarity and downright arrogance, but I put up with it because he was amazing at his job. The only problem was, he knew it.
“So, they traced to a shell company, and I had to do some digging to find out who owned them. Plenty of digging, in fact. You owe me a drink for this, Zo-”
“Get to the point, Jamie.”
“Jeez, no need to hurt my feelings so bluntly, Zo. Anyway, long story short, there’s a complex setup of holding companies, shell companies and all sorts going on here. I traced it all the way back to one ‘Enviro Holdings Enterprise’ which is owned by an arm of a well-known Mexican environmental company called ‘Yucatan Environmental Resources Management and Consulting’”.
“Great, thanks. Do you know anyt-”
“YERM Co?” Juan interrupted me. I glanced across at him; why was he frowning?
“Ah, yes, it’s also called that,” replied Jamie after a moment’s silence.
“Hmm,” replied Juan. What did he know?
“Erm, Zo?” Jamie said, distracting me. “Could have told me you had a beau? I’m hurt, sweetie.”
I growled. “Jamie, for once in your life, put a sock in it! We — you and I — are not a thing, have never been, and never will be. When will you get that into your thick head? This is Juan, my Mexican colleague.” I stressed the last word.
“Oh, what a relief, Zo. You had me worried there.” As usual, he ignored my ‘we’re not an item’ rant. “We can catch up for that drink then?”
“Look, is there anything else? I’m kinda busy here.”
“Not until you get back home and can buy me that drink.” I could hear the insufferable smarm on his voice.
“Ugh.” I hung up.
Juan looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Don’t ask.” I scowled. “What’s up anyway? You know this company?”
“I do.” He looked troubled again, and returned his attention to the road. We were almost at Cancun. “YERM Co is the biggest company in Mexico for handling environmental issues, amongst other things.”
“So?”
“Its president, and leading shareholder, is one Senator Ricardo Gonzalez.”
We sat in silence as the ramifications of his words sank in.
“What are you saying?” I had to ask; I had to know.
“I’m saying that the car used to remove the artefacts from the huecheros’ truck was owned indirectly by the senator.”
“If he controlled the company that owned the truck, what does that mean?” I frowned. “Could he have known? Would he be involved? Would they act without his direction?” I shook my head. This was confusing.
“I don’t know, Zoe. He could be completely innocent. The vehicle could have been used without the company’s consent; without his. It wasn’t registered as stolen when I ran the plates, so maybe another member of the company is to blame. But who? How?
“Or, it could be much worse than we fear, and he is organising the whole thing.”
Juan pulled into a small car park behind a block of flats and we gathered our meagre belongings and went inside. The key, as promised by Juan’s friend, was concealed in the maintenance cupboard on the fifth floor, two doors away from the flat. We let ourselves inside. It was a sea of dust sheets and the smell of fresh paint, but it was silent and away from prying eyes. Juan peeled the sheet off a couch and flopped upon it with a sigh. His eyes shut as he rubbed his face and tipped back his head.
I plugged my phone in to charge, and googled the company Jamie had named. Their website was nondescript: corporate, bland, and full of the usual stock photos of model employees. My eyes glazed over as I read the ‘About Us’ page, until I saw the smiling photo of Ricardo Gonzalez at the bottom. He looked different when he smiled, but no more kind, for the smile did not dispel the coldness in his eyes. On the wall behind him, a priceless Picasso hung; a mess of facial features and colour, and yet it triggered something in me.
“Juan, look at this.”
Juan shrugged. “I don’t understand.”
“The Picasso on the wall… doesn’t it remind you of the graffiti on the stela?”
Juan tipped his head to one side. “I suppose, but the huecheros were no master artists.”
“Dos ojos, dos caras…” I said slowly. “Two eyes, two faces, that’s what the huecheros said, right?”
Juan nodded, but his face was still blank.
“So, maybe it’s one set of eyes — one person — but two faces; two personas. Ricardo Gonzalez, Senator, and Ricardo Gonzalez, criminal mastermind?”
Juan started to scoff, but stopped, and a frown crept over his face. “But that would mean, all this time…”
“That he was betraying your organisation from within, like a Trojan horse.”
“He’s a well-respected man. He’s often in the press advocating for conservation and environmental issues.”
“A facade?”
Juan did not answer.
“He’s not a nice man; we can both see that. Why would he be so considerate about the environment and archaeological conservation unless he had a vested interest? You have to admit, he was quick to get rid of us both.”
“I’m not convinced. He was angry, and rightly so; we had lost the trail to what was most likely the most valuable haul of the modern age.”
“Sure, but Officer Diaz.”
The name hung in the air between us. Juan paced to the balcony doors, looking out over the city and beyond at the azure blue of the Caribbean Sea. Out there, the world moved apace, with no idea of the imminent threat the skull posed to them. If the Kukulkan Skull held as much power as Juan feared, as the legends suggested, they were all in danger.
“Does Gonzalez know what he possesses? Is he Magicai?” The thought struck me. We could be dealing with a criminal, or worse, a magical mastermind. I didn’t know which was worse: someone who knew the damage they could inflict with the Kukulkan Skull, or someone who didn’t.
“I can’t be sure, but he’s a smart man. Perhaps, if he doesn’t know, he’ll figure it out.”
“And exploit it,” I added darkly. “We’ll have to be extra careful.”
“Suppose you’re right, then,” Juan said. “What now?”
“Then the van will most likely be storing the artefacts at the company premises.”
“We can hardly break in on the chance they’re there. We’ll be arrested before we can even find them. If they are even there.”
“Do you have any friends in the police you could trust with your life?”
“Yes, why?”
“Ask them to track the van on the traffic cams. There must be some that will show where it’s been and where it might be going.”
Juan rang his contact at once. “He can track the van,” said Juan. “And it looks like it’s headed to an industrial estate. Beyond that, he couldn’t tell. I asked him to cross reference properties on that estate with companies owned by YERM Co, and there is a hit. It’s as good a starting place as any, but chances are it’ll be guarded.”
“Not heavily, I’d bet. He won’t want to draw attention.”
“We have to leave now, in any case.” Juan thr
ew his phone on the floor as hard as he could, and crushed it beneath his heel.
“They’re tracking us?”
“Yeah. My friend tipped me off. A trace went out on my mobile signal an hour ago. We have to move.”
He didn’t need to tell me. I grabbed the crushed remains of the phone and we sprinted out of the apartment and down the stairs as fast as we could. As we left, I flung it into a bush, and Juan started the truck, giving me just enough time to jump in before he screeched away.
We drove to the industrial estate twenty minutes away in silence. Juan’s nervous eyes flicked between his mirrors and scanning the road ahead. I didn’t feel much better. If they were tracking us, they meant to bring us in, and that cemented my hunch even further, as far as I was concerned.
Ricardo Gonzalez was the mastermind behind it all. I was here to help with the cover-up; bring in an expert, ensure she fails, declare to the world the artefacts are lost forever. What could go wrong? Well, Gonzalez hadn’t betted on us figuring it out, I suspected; even if I hadn’t convinced Juan.
The downside to that was, Gonzalez clearly wanted to ensure there were no loose threads to give him away, and that meant us. He couldn’t be sure we knew, of course. Perhaps, it was my own fault. He’d seen something in me when I had paused at the door to glance back. Maybe he had realised I recognised Officer Diaz. Maybe he thought, however tenuous a threat, one existed in us. He was a bold man to go so far to silence any who might hinder him, that was for sure. I hoped I wasn’t right, but I had a feeling I was more on the mark than I liked. I didn’t intend to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Chapter Six
The sun set as we approached the warehouse address that Juan’s police contact had given us. Floodlights on auto-timers kicked into life across the compound as we cruised to a halt on a poorly lit access road. Juan killed the engine and we sat for a while, surveying the property.
It was lights, camera, and action. Black-clothed guards crisscrossed the site in two-man patrols, under the watchful gaze of a surveillance camera system. There was no way we could walk up to the door without getting shot. The men bristled with weapons.
