Age of Aztec

TWO

5 Eagle 1 Monkey 1 House

(Monday 26th November 2012)

The last thing Mal wanted to hear when she reported for work at Scotland Yard that morning was the first thing her DS, Aaronson, said to her.

“Kellaway’s looking for you.”

The groan inside Mal was so loud it was almost a shout. Outwardly she confined herself to a soft oath.

“Where is he? His office?”

Aaronson glanced down the corridor. “If he was, you’d be able to hear him.”

“On the warpath?”

“Seriously. It’s been stamping and ranting ever since he got in. I know he usually has a tarantula up his arse but never one this big. He could teach Tezcatlipoca himself a thing or two about anger.”

“Well, wherever he is, he can wait a few more minutes. Here.” She handed Aaronson one of the two paper cups she was carrying.

Her DS frowned at the logo on the side. “Koka Klub? I thought you hated the big chains. You said they water it down too much.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“What about the street stand outside Victoria Station? You usually get your — ” Aaronson’s expression turned sly. “Ah. We didn’t come in that way today, did we? We weren’t home last night, were we?”

“You’ll make an inspector yet, Aaronson.”

“Come on, who was it?”

“No one.”

“That means he was young.”

“I can’t even remember his name, to be honest.”

“Bad girl! Bet he was handsome.”

“Gorgeous,” Mal said with feeling.

“Where did you find him?”

“The pub, lunchtime. We played a few games of patillo. I let him win the first. Wiped the floor with him for the rest.”

“Would I have liked him?”

“If he swung your way, definitely.”

“They all swing my way,” said Aaronson. “When persuaded.”

The two of them uncapped their cups, blew off the steam, and took a sip. The coca-leaf tea hit the spot simultaneously.

“You hear about the blood rite yesterday?” Aaronson asked. He was lisping slightly, his tongue coca-numbed.

“Of course. Why shouldn’t I have?”

“I don’t know, because you were having rampant monkey sex with a casual pickup maybe?”

“I caught the newspaper headlines on the way here.”

“Conquistador made us look like a bunch of fucking idiots.”

“Which’ll be the reason for the chief super’s mood,” said Mal. “What I want to know is why’s he after me?” She had a hunch she knew the answer. She prayed she was wrong. She took another slug of her tea. “Better go find him, I suppose. Face the music.”

“Good luck, boss. I’ll bring flowers to your funeral.”

“Detective Sergeant Aaronson, sincerely, fuck off.”

She tracked down Kellaway in the central quadrangle.

Normally you could count on there being a scratch game of tlachtli under way here, off-duty personnel running around, jostling to put the ball through the wall-mounted hoop with a shoulder nudge or thigh kick. Now, however, the quadrangle was deserted, except for the chief superintendent, two constables, and a man Mal recognised as Chief Inspector Stephen Nyman.

From everyone’s body language she could tell exactly what the situation was and what was about to occur. She started to backtrack out of the quadrangle, but too late. Kellaway spotted her.

“Inspector Vaughn. Just in time. Come on over.”

The chief superintendent was calm, no longer raging. Punishment was about to be doled out. He had something to assuage his wrath.

Mal crossed to his side, trying not to catch Nyman’s eye. The detective looked defeated, exhausted, his face pinched and fraught. He was doing his very best not to tremble. Nyman had always struck her as one of the most phlegmatic, self-effacing Jaguar Warriors on the force, efficient without being flashy, a doer, not a show-off. It was painful watching him struggle to keep his composure now.

“Chief Inspector Nyman, as you’re aware, has been the senior investigating officer heading up the Conquistador enquiry,” said Kellaway. “He was in charge of security arrangements at yesterday’s blood rite. Responsibility for the safety of His Holiness Priest Sanderson lay with him and him alone. He fell short in that duty — dismally. The entire event was a shambles. The Conquistador remains at large, having notched up another eleven murders, including those of Sergeants Gravett and Fielding. I want you to witness this, Vaughn. I want you to see what happens when someone lets the whole division down, and lets the priesthood down, too.”

Vaughn already knew the penalty for failure at such a level, and Kellaway knew she knew. This wasn’t just a display of Jaguar Warrior internal policy. This was a warning. A threat. And, also, an overture.

“Gentlemen?”

The two constables took hold of Nyman’s arms and forced him to his knees. One of them grasped a handful of hair and yanked the detective’s head back, exposing his gulping Adam’s apple. Nyman’s face reddened. The fight-or-flight instinct was powerful in him, and he desperately tried to control it.

Kellaway unsheathed his macuahitl, something he had not had to do in years other than for this purpose.

“Inspector Nyman.” His voice took on a mollifying tone, stern but kind. “You have, up to this point, been an exemplary Jaguar Warrior, and I regret the solemn duty I must now perform. Make your peace with the gods and beg their forgiveness. May the Four Who Rule Supreme — Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Huitzilopochtli, and dread Xipe Totec — welcome your soul into their arms and absolve you of all wrongdoing, so that you may live eternal in their company, as pure and blessed as they.”

Like a final punctuation mark, the sword flickered across Nyman’s throat. A crosswise thread of blood appeared, oozing into tiny beads. Nyman gurgled. His eyes rolled back and a deep red fissure suddenly split his neck. Blood gushed in fountains. His severed windpipe frothed. The constables lowered him to the ground, dancing back to avoid their boots getting splashed. Chief Inspector Nyman lay curled in his death throes. In all, from the sword cut to the last shuddering spasm, it took a minute and a half. Mal forced herself to watch the whole time, because she knew Kellaway expected her to and his scorn would be terrible if she didn’t. She would have given anything to be permitted to turn away, even just for a second.

“There.” Kellaway fastidiously wiped off the flecks of blood from his macuahitl with a handkerchief. As a mark of rank, the obsidian from which his sword blade was made was not sheer black but bore a golden sheen. Mal’s, similarly, bore a rainbow iridescence and had seemed to her, when she first took possession of it, the most beautiful thing she had ever laid eyes on. It was still beautiful, although she was not sure she felt so proud of it any more. The discolouration, after all, was caused by microscopic bubbles in the mineral — imperfections, impurities.

“Deal with that,” Kellaway said to the constables, indicating the body. And to Mal, “Walk with me.”

They circled the quadrangle in a silence that Mal found increasingly unnerving. Come on, out with it, get it over with. Kellaway just scowled to himself.

Finally he said, “I’m afraid, Vaughn, it’s a good news, bad news scenario. The good news is, you’re promoted. You’re a chief inspector now. The bad news… The Conquistador case is yours.”

It was strangely a relief, to hear the worst.

“The bastard has been making a mockery of us for months,” Kellaway went on. “He’s killed five priests, a few dozen acolytes, several civilians, and eighteen Jaguar Warriors. He’s disrupted nine major religious ceremonies and left behind a trail of carnage each time. He’s a blasphemer, an insurgent, an affront to the Empire, and the fact that he dresses up like one of the would-be conquerors of Anahuac is the final insult. He’s saying that where Cortes, Pizarro and de Alvarado failed, he will succeed. The arrogance of it is quite breathtaking. His campaign of terror cannot be allowed to go on. Do you hear me? He needs to be stopped, as soon as possible, by whatever means necessary.”

“Yes, sir.” Mal couldn’t trust herself to say anything more than that.

“The High Priest is absolutely livid. Commissioner Brockenhurst had to go and see him in person last night. Old chums they may be, but by all accounts it was no fun, and Brockenhurst made his feelings about that known to me in no uncertain terms. His Very Holiness, in turn, has been hauled over the coals by the Great Speaker himself, so we’re passing the pissed-off-ness down through the ranks, one to the next. It’s the trickle-down effect in all its glory. You understand, then, that you have to get this right, Vaughn? We’re clear on that? You can’t — mustn’t — screw up the way Nyman did.”

Just at that moment they were passing the congealing puddle of blood that marked the site of Nyman’s execution. His heels had left two parallel smeared lines where the constables had dragged his body away.

“Yes, sir,” Mal said again. She wanted to run. She wanted to scream. She wanted to kick Kellaway to the ground and stamp on his balding sunburned head, stamp on it until it was pancake flat.

“Otherwise that’ll be your blood there,” Kellaway added, unnecessarily. “You’ll be the one bringing disgrace on the Jaguar Warriors. And neither of us would wish that, would we?”

The chief superintendent’s smile was never convincing. Nor, with the tumbledown, caries-clogged teeth it revealed, was it pretty.

“I think you can do this,” he said. “I think you’re the woman for the job… chief inspector.”

Now he was trying to be consoling, ingratiating.

Both he and Mal knew he had just handed her a poisoned chalice and it was very likely that, sooner or later, she would have to drink from it.

“Shit,” breathed Aaronson. “Oh, shit. Oh, fucking shit.”

“Yes, marvellous, isn’t it?” said Mal.

“I mean, congrats on the bump-up. Richly deserved and all that. And a handsome raise, too.”

“I was just thinking I could do with a new pair of curtains in the flat.”

“I’ve got a better idea. Buy us a few rounds at the nearest pub. Because that’s what we really need to do — go out and get totally rat-arsed. This minute. Because our lives have just become about ten times harder.”

“No. No, we do not need to get rat-arsed. That is exactly the opposite of what we need to do.”

“But — ”

“Maybe later, another day, but right now we’ve been given an assignment. We have a crook to catch. We work for the criminal investigation department of the Jaguars, so we’re going to do what they pay us to do and investigate. The Conquistador is just a man. He pulls off audacious terrorist outrages and gets away with it every time, but he’s still just a man.” Mal thumped the desk. She wasn’t sure why, except that it made a loud noise and she felt better for it. “The more we know about him, the easier he’ll be to take down. So we have to figure out how he does what he does. How he chooses when and where to strike. How he gets in and out. Above all, who the fuck he is, behind that mask. Let’s get cracking.”

She grabbed her jacket.

“Where are we going?” asked Aaronson.

“Where do you think? Where he was last seen. Scene of the crime.”

They signed out a car and drove east. En route to the City of London ziggurat, they reviewed what they knew of yesterday’s incident. In his lap, Aaronson had a copy of Chief Inspector Nyman’s case report, which the detective had been typing up half an hour before his execution. Aaronson went through it, reading out salient details.

“The Conquistador stowed away aboard the Sun Broadcasting aerodisc, hidden in a locker. He emerged and threatened the pilot at gunpoint, forcing him to descend to within jumping distance of the ziggurat. The cameraman decided to play have-a-go hero and tackled him. He came off worse. The Conquistador beat the guy senseless, chucked him out of a hatch, and followed. He also made short work of those two sergeants, by all accounts. Elite officers, and he made them look like amateurs.”

“I’ve seen him in news footage, how he fights,” said Mal. “I’m not saying I couldn’t take him. It wouldn’t be easy, though.”

“DCI Nyman’s theory is that he’s had training. Eagle Warrior training. What do you reckon to that?”

“I’d say Nyman is — was — correct. The Conquistador, whoever he really is, is military. Or ex-military. You don’t pick up sword skills like those from private tuition.”

“Not Jaguar training, then?”

“What, he’s one of us? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Just airing the possibility.”

Mal mimed a shudder. “Fuck me, I hope not. What’s Nyman’s verdict on the armour retrieved from the scene?”

“New, bespoke, not a genuine antique, a copy. Somebody must have smithed it for the Conquistador, or the Conquistador smithed it himself. He was going to follow that up as a line of enquiry next. Should we?”

“I don’t know how far we’d get. The Conquistador’s wily. I doubt he’d leave the armour behind if he felt it could be traced. Anything else relevant?”

“Nyman reckoned the Conquistador knew the patrol disc would start shooting. He was counting on it. It was how he planned on making his getaway.”

“His mysterious getaway. Vanishing into thin air.”

“You sound like you know how he pulled it off.”

“I have an inkling.” Mal indicated to turn off the Strand onto Fleet Street. A cabbie braked and politely let her through. The traffic was always on its best behaviour around a marked Jaguar Warrior car.

“Can I make a personal comment, boss?” Aaronson asked.

“You will anyway, even if I tell you not to.”

“You’re taking this remarkably well. You’ve just been given the job no one on the force wants. You seem pretty cool about it.”

“I don’t have a choice. What can I do? I can’t tell the chief super to go and stick it up his arse. I just have to make the best of things.”

“But Nyman’s, what, the third inspector in a row who’s handled the Conquistador case.”

“And the third Kellaway’s executed. Way I see it, he can’t go on getting rid of us at this rate, otherwise there soon won’t be a CID left. That gives me some breathing space.”

“Do you honestly think that?”

“No. But also, the Conquistador’s had it easy so far.”

“How so?”

Mal flashed a grin. “Fucker hasn’t had me to deal with yet.”

They scoured every inch of the plaza, which was still closed to the public. Mal paid particular attention to the corpse enclosure. The flagstones there bore spectacular firework-like patterns of dried blood, baked black by the sun.

Then they climbed the ziggurat and picked their way across the shattered remains of the temple. Again, as below, it was the throwing off of the corpses that interested Mal. She squatted at the ziggurat’s rear edge and peered over. She probed the stonework below the lip of the apex, feeling with her fingers. Finally she found what she was after.

“Come and see this.”

“No thanks.” Aaronson felt dizzy just being this far above ground, never mind watching his superior officer leaning out over empty space.

“Don’t be such a wuss.”

“Still no.”

“I’ll hold you.”

“Oh, all right.”

Aaronson shuffled forward and, with Mal gripping his trouser leg, craned his neck. It was a sheer drop of some two hundred feet to the enclosure below.

“What am I looking for?”

“See that there? In the cement between those two blocks?”

“No. Oh. Yes. Is that…?”

“A climber’s piton.”

The ring-shaped head of the piton protruded out barely half an inch, and was as dark as the stonework around it. Unless you were searching for it, you could easily have never spotted it.

“Are you a climber, Aaronson?”

“Only career and social. Look at me. I’m shaking like a leaf. Do I look like I’ve got a head for heights?”

“My guess is our friend the Conquistador anchored the piton in with a hammer and abseiled down on a line looped through it. Then he reeled the line in and hid himself among the dead bodies.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I don’t think I am.”

“But surely eyewitnesses would have spotted him coming down.”

“Maybe. But nobody hangs around close to the corpse enclosure, do they? Plus, it’s behind the ziggurat, hardly prime viewing position. The temple obscures the altar from here. And if he abseiled quickly enough, and the line was thin, he might look from a distance like just another body falling. In all the confusion it’d be an easy mistake to make. Then the retrieval truck arrives, and to the workmen he’s just another partially clothed stiff.”

“The truck didn’t turn up until two o’clock. You’re saying he lay there for two hours in a pile of hacked-up corpses, playing dead?”

“I am.”

Aaronson whistled. “He is one determined fucker, that’s for sure.”

“I’d guess, too, that he smeared himself with blood, and maybe also stuck on some bone fragments and gristle from the bodies, so that at a glance he’d appear like all the rest of them.”

“Determined and sick.”

“No,” said Mal, “he simply doesn’t care. He does what he has to, whatever it takes, so that he can survive and attack again another time.”

“A madman.”

“It can look like madness, to be that focused on your goal.” Mal worked out the piton with a pocket knife, bagged it as evidence, then stepped back from the edge, contemplating. “This man — somebody did something to him once, something that changed him. He was hurt or damaged in some way, and he blames the Empire and wants to show everyone how consumed with hate he is. Everything he does, it’s showboating, designed for maximum effect. State occasions. Public ceremonies. Priest investitures. If it’s holy, he has to desecrate it. Hence the armour and weaponry resembling something an old-world Spanish explorer would have been kitted out with. This is all about making a statement, the same one over and over.”

“Not a fashion statement, I hope.”

“I’m serious,” Mal snapped. Sometimes Aaronson was too flippant for his own good. He needed to rein it in if he ever hoped to get ahead. “He’s set himself up as the opponent of the Empire, its nemesis. When the Spanish invaded Anahuac, they were expecting to find a primitive culture ripe for the picking, based on their and other Europeans’ experiences in North America. They got a hell of a shock when it turned out that the Land Between The Seas had technology and capabilities far beyond their own, and was in fact readying itself to expand its territory. They fought the Aztecs hard and committed countless atrocities, but it was inevitable that they would be defeated. Conquistadores — an ironic name, in the event. It’s as if this guy, our Conquistador, wants to reclaim the title, turn it back from something vainglorious to something meaningful again.”

“All on his own? One man against the entire world — against billions?”

“In his head, those are acceptable odds,” Mal said. “He believes all he has to do is keep hitting the Empire where it hurts, time after time, and eventually it’ll fold up and crawl away.”

Aaronson grimaced. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you admired him.”

“Someone that blindly, nakedly stubborn — what’s not to admire? Doesn’t mean I’m not going to do everything in my power to nail the bugger. And not just because he’s an enemy of the state and a mass murderer. Because it’s my neck or his.”

“So,” said Aaronson as they set off down the steps, “any ideas? Are we going to wait until the Conquistador makes his next move and try to nab him then?”

“That was Nyman’s tactic, and look how far it got him. No, I think it would be more sensible to force his hand. Lure him out. Let’s us make the running for once.”

“You have a plan.”

She did. A sketch of one. It would require Kellaway’s full backing, some string-pulling, and the mobilisation of considerable manpower and resources, but she doubted she would have trouble securing any of those things. The chief super was no less keen than she was to see the Conquistador dead or in custody. A commanding officer could shift the blame onto subordinates only for so long. Mal sensed she was his last throw of the dice. If she didn’t come up with the goods, Kellaway would most likely be kneeling beside her in the quadrangle at HQ, waiting for the shimmering whir of obsidian and the farewell to earthly existence.

The galling thing was — and Mal could never share this with anyone, not even Aaronson — she had been on the point of turning in her resignation this very morning. For the past few weeks she had been trying to pluck up the courage to write her letter of notice and hand it in. Today, she’d been convinced, was going to be the day. In fact, back in the quadrangle earlier, with Kellaway, she had been close to blurting out the words “I quit”several times.

Events had taken on their own momentum, however, and almost before she realised it she’d been assigned the Conquistador investigation. It was too late to change that now. In spite of her disenchantment with her job, the Jaguar motto still had some resonance for her: Never back down, never pull out.

Besides, just as this case that could break a career, it could also make one.

All the more crucial, then, that her plan got given the green light, and worked.