The Aztec Prophecy

CHAPTER FORTY

Silvio Mendoza ran into the night, breathing hard and wincing at the pain of the bullet wound in his arm. He tripped over the roots of a chicozapote tree and stumbled forward, momentarily losing his grasp on the strange golden idol. He lay there for a moment, the sound of his heart pounding in his ears as the fighting back at the temple complex started to subside. Hawke must have won, he cursed.

But the bastard Wade was dead, and he had sent him on his way. God only knew what had happened to him in that hell pit. How deep did it go? Was it really the entrance to Mictlan? Mendoza preferred a simple life of extorting money and exerting power. Ideas like Mictlan and the god of the dead could fly away on the Tehuano wind as it ripped through the Chivela Pass. Such ideas were not for him.

And yet there was still this enigmatic little piece of the occult now in his possession. Maybe the fool Wade was onto something after all… he felt a shiver of fear run down his spine at the mere thought.

Gradually the noise of the battle behind him seemed to fade away as he studied the idol from his filthy, humid covert down in the roots and tangles of the rainforest. He felt like it was almost calling to him… whispering his name, but it was just in his mind. The moonlight shone dully on the idol as he stared at the mysterious face. He looked at it closer now.

It was a woman — for sure… a goddess of some kind, but nothing he recognized and certainly not Aztec, and yet there was something approximating Aztec pictograms on its back and side. Either side of her head was the strangest headdress he had ever seen — it looked almost like she had a wheel on either side of her head, and it was covered in intricate carvings. It was bewitching, beguiling… he couldn’t take his eyes off her and her imperious, almost inhuman face.

What value must an object as precious as this hold..? His avaricious mind raced with an almost uncontainable delight as he thought about what such wealth could bring him… his freedom from the Americans and a powerful new cartel. It was almost too good to be true, but Wade had been certain that any treasure they found in Mictlan was sure to be priceless.

He picked the idol back up and slipped it in his jacket pocket. Whoever she was, she was all he had now. Wade had died horribly back in the complex — he could still hear the screams as the blood pumped from his chest — and the ECHO team had gunned down Garza and the others. But what had happened in America?

He called Aurora from the dank silence of his jungle hole and it didn’t take her long to explain about the failure to deliver Armageddon to the gabachos in California. His brother was dead, at the hands of ECHO once again, and Aurora was a fugitive on the run.

Mendoza snapped the phone shut without a word to her. “I will live to fight another day,” he said, cursing his failure. “And for my brother, you will pay with your lives.”

Then he scrambled away into the thick, sultry jungle.