The Aztec Prophecy

CHAPTER SEVEN

Thousands of miles away in the tropical heat of the Yucatán Peninsula, Jorge Mendoza pulled a crumpled pack of Delicados from his shirt pocket. He fumbled for a moment with his lighter before firing up the unfiltered cigarette and taking a long drag. Lighting a cigarette was not normally a problem for Jorge, but today his hands were shaking, and with good reason. At least his brother Silvio wasn’t here to see his fear.

Jorge was sitting in a cartel Silverado parked up south of the dunes on the Calle de Arena, watching the supertankers transport oil across the Gulf of Mexico. All very boring, but one ship had his interest. It was a Greek container ship registered in Antigua and Bermuda and it was slowly making its way toward him as he waited at Progreso Port.

He glanced in the rear view mirror at his men. They were parked up behind in a Mercedes Atego, a light-weight truck from the Wade carpool. All ready.

He turned to the woman at his side. Juana Diaz was younger than Jorge, and wore a fresh black eye on her face as a reminder not to argue with him. He looked at her and sneered. She should know better than to make trouble. It was Jorge who rescued her from the favelas and pimps of Iztapalapa and this was the thanks he got — backchat and disrespect. He hoped the purple shiner on her cheek would teach her who was boss.

“I want a drink,” was all he said, his eyes fixed on the horizon outside the windshield.

She reached inside the glove box and pulled out a half bottle of Espolon. Jorge glanced at it.

“Open it.”

She unscrewed the bottle wordlessly and held it out to him. It shook in her fingers.

Jorge snatched it with a greasy hand and greedily swigged at the earthy, peppery liquid. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and handed the bottle back to Juana.

“Put it back.”

She did as she was told and Jorge returned to his business, studying the sunlight as it danced on the intermodal containers. They were stacked like multicoloured bricks on the ship’s vast deck. These ships carried endless amounts of junk from one side of the world to the other, and this one was no exception. On board were cars, trucks, processed food and electronic equipment among countless other commodities. But there was one important difference — one special factor that made this ship different from the others.

Only this ship carried the Hummingbird.

Jorge tried not to think about the Hummingbird. He might be the man who helped one of the country’s most feared drug cartels in the notorious Guerrero massacre, but some things unsettled even him, and the Hummingbird was one of them.

A second deep drag on the Delicado. He held the smoke down for slightly longer than usual before releasing it into the clammy air of the Yucatán coast.

Guerrero.

His mind drifted back to the massacre. Visions of hangings and decapitations and terrible punishment beatings blew through his mind as if they were carried on the humid breeze. He hadn’t paid for those deeds in this world, he mulled, but maybe he would in the next.

But not even that concerned Jorge Mendoza. Like his brother, he was a serpiente — a snake… as if he could ever forget. Until they were smashed by a joint exercise between the Mexican Federal Police Drug Division and the American DEA, the serpientes were one of the most ruthless drug cartels in Mexico.

As he recalled the memory of his initiation ceremony into their unyielding, cutthroat ranks he shuddered with disgust. Had he really done such a foul and unforgivable thing? As the tequila burned down his throat, he shook his head in denial. It’s not my fault… Silvio told me to do it.

Maybe the gods would strike him dead, or had they enjoyed watching him? In any case, a lot more people would be journeying to the next world very soon, he mused — more than anyone could count — and he wondered if they were as ready for it as he was. Jorge had never worked out why, but he’d never been afraid of death.

If anything, he mocked it. Not like those people he’d tortured back in Guerrero. He winced at the thought of all the begging and pleading. He would never beg for his life like that, not Jorge Mendoza. And yet… Señor Dios, sé muy bien que soy pecador, y sé muy bien que he pecado… Dear Lord, I know well that I am a sinner, and I know I have sinned…

Slowly the container ship pushed through the tropical waves and moved closer to the shore. Jorge hung the cigarette off his lower lip and turned the engine over. He shifted the stick into drive and spun around in the dunes on his way toward the port.

He made good time, driving in silence with the Atego just behind him. Now, in the heavy, humid air of Progreso Port, Jorge watched anxiously as the towering container crane lifted the deadly cargo from the deck of the Paralus and lowered it with a gentle crunch on the dockside a few yards from his men.

His men prepared to load the Hummingbird into the back of the Atego. It had its own entourage of around half a dozen Kazakhstanis. These were the men who had brought the package from Semipalatinsk all the way through Turkmenistan and Iran before loading it onto the Paralus in the free port at Chabahar. Quite a journey for such a precious cargo.

Jorge’s men now loaded the container onto a Hyundai forklift truck. He winced at the noise of the hydraulic system as it whined and raised the load to the height of the Atego’s interior. The Hyundai tipped forward and the container slid along the forks until it banged into the large truck’s tailgate.

Through his sunglasses he was suddenly aware of the fear on the Kazakhstani men’s faces but he smiled and shook his head in disbelief. It would take more than a nudge to upset the Hummingbird.

But fear was good, he thought as the Kazakhs turned and went back into the ship.

He slid back into the Silverado. “Señor Wade will be pleased.”

Juana moved a few inches away from him on the vinyl seat. “I heard a rumor he walks among the ancient gods,” she said meekly.

“Shut your mouth,” Jorge said dismissively. “You know nothing.”

He didn’t want to talk about it because it was more than a rumor for Jorge Mendoza. He had seen Wade in that damned creepy chamber in the coffee fields… he’d caught a glimpse of one of the ancient gods talking to Wade… after that his life changed, but no one had believed him when he told them what he’d witnessed. Even his own flesh and blood, Silvio. Especially Silvio, his own brother. He mocked him. After weeks of ridicule he stopped talking about it.

He turned the engine over.

All that mattered was that Mr Wade got the Hummingbird on time.

Scarlet Sloane felt the vodka fight its way down inside her. Forty thousand feet below her window was the Jamaican capital, Kingston, but it passed without so much as a glimpse. Scarlet had been this way before, and few things in life excited her these days.

She sank another vodka, but this one went down more politely. Maybe, she considered with a shudder, she was getting old.

Unlike her parents — they never aged. A sad side-effect of being gunned down in their thirties. She squeezed shut her eyes to push the memory from her mind, but it struck back with a vengeance.

Now she could see it all.

Sir Roger Sloane’s quiet voice as he reassured her everything was going to be fine. Lady Philippa Sloane less convincing as her husband put Scarlet and her brother in the wardrobe and told them to stay silent. That was the last time her mother spoke to her.

And then the sound of the guns.

And the screams.

She was just a child.

She often wondered what her parents would be doing had they not been murdered — her affable but ruthless property developer father and her keen-eyed archaeologist mother. They would be sitting back at the family home in soft retirement, surrounded by their gardens and family.

But instead they were in the graveyard not five hundred yards from their home and Spencer was in the house. She and her brother rarely saw eye to eye. He had inherited the baronetcy upon his father’s murder and the rest of the property was held in trust until he was twenty-one. Scarlet got nothing except her mother’s Maserati Spyder, and Sir Spencer Sloane as he was now formally known, was several degrees less generous than their father had been during his life.

Maybe one of these days her luck would run out and Spence would get the Spyder too… or maybe she would quit ECHO once and for all… She gazed dreamily out of the window as her thoughts turned to destroying Wade’s depraved empire. Family was tough, but that kind of stuff she could handle.

She checked her watch. They were still another two hours out of Acapulco.

Reaper belched loudly and dropped a used bottle of lager into the bin in the galley. Not formally one of the team, he didn’t even know if he wanted to be one. He liked being the outsider, the former French legionnaire with a mysterious past and an even more enigmatic future.

Truth was, even mercs had to sleep and he liked to do that with Monique, his on-again-off-again ex, while knowing that his two boys were safe in their beds down the hall. Leaving all that behind to work full-time for Eden wasn’t his style, even if these days he seemed to be spending more and more time doing just that. He grabbed a second beer and headed for his seat.

Across the aisle, Lexi Zhang’s mind had also turned to family, not that she had much. Raised in a good home in Chaoyang Park by elderly parents who sacrificed everything to send her to Oxford, she was an only child. When her parents died she would be alone in the world and it was not a thought she liked to dwell on.

She knew she owed them everything, but she didn’t even know when she would be able to see either of them again. Since she crossed over to ECHO she had made a grave and permanent enemy of the Chinese security services and she knew better than anyone what that could mean if she ever let her guard down. They would be crawling in the shadows — in her shadow — until they had their revenge.

And they would send their best after her, because until her defection she had been their best. That meant someone from the Zodiac Syndicate, the most elite department in the Ministry. Without emotion, she calmly sifted through her possible hunters’ codenames — Tiger, Rat, Monkey or Pig — all named after animals from the Chinese Zodiac calendar. They were the best but there were others. Were they already after her — out asking questions in the seediest bars of the world? Would Hawke and the rest of the team help her if she lost her touch?

She hoped so.

“Any of that left?” she asked Scarlet.

“You betcha, darling,” Scarlet said, and tossed the half bottle across the aisle.

Lexi caught it and took a swig. She and Scarlet had gotten closer recently, but there was always a mutual mistrust hanging in the air like smoke. Lexi had betrayed the Chinese State to join the ECHO unit and hoped that gesture might extend her credit with the others. Hawke was good, as long as Zambia stayed in the shadows, and Lea was the sort to give everyone the same length of rope, but Scarlet and the Russian were different — harder to read.

She sighed and then spoke up. “Do you hate me, Cairo?”

Scarlet turned away and closed her eyes.

“We’re landing soon so get some rest. And no one calls me Cairo anymore.”