Blood Sport

by Lisa Smedman

  For me, the game was only a partial distraction. I was more concerned with finding out whether Domingo Vargas really was in attendance this evening. I’d tried to contact Caco to see if the information he’d supplied us earlier was still valid, but had met with no success. The esquincles with whom I’d left messages assured me that they would pass along my queries to Caco, but I’d heard nothing back in return.

  At the rate this game was going, I didn’t think we’d have to wait long for a serious injury to occur. At the lower levels of play, both cybernetic and hand-held, zero-range weapons are permitted on the ollamaliztli court. According to Fede, it’s common for players to divide their time equally between chasing the ball and taking each other out with monoknives, stun batons, cyberspurs, electroprods, and hand blades. Some games turn into a battle of attrition, with victory going to the team that can eliminate all of the opposing team’s three regular players and three spares from play. There aren’t any penalties and ferocity is encouraged—even if an attack results in permanent injury or death. The only check is that, if a team ignores the ball completely, concentrating instead on attacking opposing players, it’s easy for the opposing team to quickly rack up points and win the game. Assuming they survive long enough to do so, of course.

  The national finals, however, stick to the “original” rules of the game. Besides restricting the game to non-enhanced, human male players, the ollamaliztli officials ban all weapons from the field. Players can still elbow, kick, punch, or gouge out each other’s eyes, but are limited to doing this with their bare hands—or bare feet.

  I kept my eyes on the security guards who patrolled the stands and tried not to glance up too many times at the teocalli that towered above the stadium. The temple, dedicated to the sun god Huitzilopochtli, rose in a series of stepped levels just beyond the eastern end zone of the playing field—the end zone that was defended by the Tenochtitlán Jaguars. The late-evening sun shone through the sprawl’s smog cover, painting the temple’s stonework a lurid red. I could occasionally see movement on one of the temple’s upper balconies—the flash of a turquoise-feathered cape or the glint of gold as sunlight reflected off the huge golden ear plugs of one of the priests who stood in attendance there. I raised my binoculars and pointed them at the temple as yet another priest emerged from the darkened interior of the teocalli. . .

  And there he was. I had spotted our objective for the first time since our arrival in Aztlan.

  Domingo Vargas wore a similar costume to the one I’d seen him wearing in the documentary tridcast that Angie had uploaded to me. It looked like a jumpsuit of soft leather that had been dusted with a layer of powdered gold. Form-fitting and presumably laced up the back where Vargas’ jaguar-pelt cape covered it, the suit included hands that dangled from his wrists. Each time he moved his arms, the hands bobbed about like balloons. I fought back my gagging reflex as I wondered whether the hands might be real—whether the suit had been made of flayed human skin.

  I shifted my binoculars to look at Vargas’ face. His head was bare and his face was painted with broad bands of red. More gold dust highlighted his forehead, heavy cheeks, and pouting lips. His hair was longer than it had been in the tridcast, slicked back and hanging in loose gray curls behind his ears. But his eyes were the same flat black, glittering like chips of hard obsidian.

  Just below his double chin and above the gold pectoral that hung down his chest, I noticed a bulge. Stepping up the power of the binoculars, I zoomed in for a closer look. There, over his jugular—an intravenous catheter similar to the one I’d seen on the chest of the priest who had tried to sacrifice Teresa, out in the ruins. What had the blood spirit told him? To ask his “blood brother” for the location of the itzompan. Had the two priests each undergone some sort of blood transfusion as part of a past ritual or medical procedure?

  I flinched back as Vargas looked directly at me. I hurriedly lowered my binoculars and pretended to be watching the game, instead. There was no way he could have picked me out across all that distance, lost as I was in the sea of people that filled the stands of the tlachtli. But then I thought about his magical abilities and shuddered. For all I knew, some sort of enemy detection spell might be alerting him to my presence. Even now, ACS guards or a malevolent blood spirit might be headed my way . . .

  I shook off my fears, telling myself that they were no more than simple paranoia. To pull this off, we needed to maintain our self-confidence. Otherwise we’d be defeated before we began.

  I must have been developing some sort of sixth sense myself, because just at that moment my eyes were drawn to one of the vendors who was climbing the steps between the rows of seats, hawking pepitas—roasted squash and melon seeds, flavored with salt and chili powder—and cold cervezas. As the wiry teenager reached our row of seats, he met my eye and called out his wares: “Pepitas! Cerveza frla! Chiclets!”

  Chiclets?

  The vendor winked when he saw that he had my attention. Excusing myself, I squeezed my way past the jacked-in fan next to me and the two cheering men closest to the aisle, then reached the vendor. “Chiclets, please,” I said.

  “A wise choice, señorita." he said in a low voice. “And only one million pesos.”

  I reached into the pocket of my suit jacket, pulling out the last of my plastiweave bills. “I’ve only got eight hundred thousand pesos,” I said. “Will that be enough?”

  “Hmm—nine hundred thousand then.”

  “I’m not trying to barter,” I said angrily. “Unless you want to slot my credstick and leave an electronic trail, eight hundred thousand is all I’ve got.”

  The teenager shook his head, clucking his tongue. “Good thing my boss has a soft heart,” he said teasingly. “All right. Eight hundred thousand pesos.”

  He pressed a foil-wrapped package of pepitas into my hand, winking and telling me to make sure I didn’t break my teeth on any “uncooked seeds” that might be inside. I gently squeezed the foil between my fingers and could feel the now-familiar rectangular shape of a Chiclets box inside. I slipped the vendor the pesos. Pocketing them swiftly, he turned and continued climbing the stairs, calling out his wares as before.

  As I returned to my seat, Rafael gave me a quizzical look. I tore open the foil bag and showed him the bright yellow box it contained. “Looks like our friend Caco has some more information for us,” I said. I passed the seeds to Rafael and opened the Chiclets box. “I just hope it’s worth . . .”

  An optical memory chip slid out of the box and into my hand. It looked like a datasoft—small and square, with a tab at one end. I stared at it, wondering whether I should slot it. If Caco could be trusted, the chip probably contained additional information on Vargas. If Caco had sold us out to Aztechnology, the datasoft might be contaminated with a virus or brainkiller program that would flatline me. There was no way to know. But then I thought back to the kid who had confronted us with a snapblade outside our hotel, after the earthquake. As he’d said, if the “Chiclets lady” wanted us dead, there were other, less complicated ways to kill us. And frag it, I’d just paid the last of our hard currency for the chip. Whispering a silent prayer, I slotted it into the chipjack behind my left ear. Then I accessed its memory—and sat down as the transducer converted the information the chip held into thoughts that reverberated in my mind like spoken words. The ollamaliztli game and cheering crowd faded around me as I concentrated on the data being fed into my mind.

  Your target has altered his travel arrangements for this evening, the chip informed me in a voice I couldn’t slot as either male or female—Caco’s voice. Instead of returning via government VTOL to the Aztechnology castillo, he will be traveling by private charter plane to Izamal, a small town in the Yucatán. Despite the prohibition against civilian aircraft using local airports in this region after curfew, your target has obtained permission for his charter plane to land. He insisted that his flight could not depart Tenochtitlán until after 2000 hours—the time the ollamaliztli game is anticipated to end.<
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  I have not been able to establish the reason for this journey, nor do I know if Izamal is your target's final destination. But I wonder if his journey has anything to do with the recent death of the priest of Tezcatlipoca. The body of this bacab, who served with your target at the Temple of the Sun, was found yesterday in some ruins about forty-five kilometers southwest of Izamal. Your target may be flying there to investigate this death.

  My mouth dropped open as I realized who Caco was referring to: the priest who had summoned the blood spirit that called itself King Nezahualpilli. The priest whom Teresa had torn to pieces on top of the teocalli in the desert.

  Caco’s genderless voice continued: Your target will be one of two passengers on board the flight. Name of the second passenger was not specified. I am able to supply you with the registration number of the VTOL plane that your target chartered, the name of its pilot, and its ETD and ETA as filed in the flight plan that was registered earlier today. This information follows.

  I paused the upload, shaking my head. Part of the story was easy to guess. The second passenger on the plane would be the captain of whatever team won the nationals here today. The one whose severed head needed to be placed in the itzompan to trigger the coming of the new age. But Izamal? That was the town where we’d met Father Gustavo Silvio—where Mama G had hidden out once, before losing her memories, and where Gus had sheltered her after her time in the fovea. If Caco was right about Vargas going there to investigate the death of his fellow bacab, he should have gone to Izamal yesterday, when the body was found. Or later in the week, after the ball game—and the sacrifice of the winning captain—were over. No, it didn’t make sense. If he was going to participate in the cultists’ sacrifice of the winning ollamaliztli team captain, he had to be at the site of the itzompan by first light. . .

  I stared at the ball court below me, watching the players charging back and forth along the playing field. The ball slammed off a wall, bounced high into the air, and was knocked against the opposite wall and almost into the ring by a blow from a Jaguar player’s elbow. Then it rolled down the slope of one wall, across the floor of the playing field, and up the slope opposite .. .

  Suddenly I made the connection. The sloping walls of the ball court that lay below me were identical, in their angle and method of construction, to the walls in the sub-basement of the Sanctuary of the Virgin in Izamal. According to Gus, the church had been built on top of an ancient Mayan building of some kind. I now knew what that building had been: a ball court, older and much more unique than the one below. I remembered the flat, round stone on which Gus had sat while we were resting in our flight from the Azzie soldiers—the one with the skulls and glyphs carved around its edge and the hole at its center. Someone who didn’t know its history might take it to be goal ring, broken free of its mount on the wall and left where it lay when the base of the tlachtli was turned into the sub-basement of the church. But this stone was unbroken and had been set into the floor of the ball court itself. Positioned dead center, at the spot where the four quarters of the playing field met.

  It had to be the itzompan.

  What was it that Mama G had said, the day before she was killed? “Where the priest walks, the ground shakes.” I’d dismissed it as meaningless babble at the time—she’d also talked about trees, and bloody crosses, and serpents . . .

  And severed heads. Which, if dropped into the itzompan at the appointed hour, would bring about the end of the world.

  Or perhaps just one fragger of an earthquake.

  I shivered, despite the heat of the evening sunshine and the press of excited sports fans around me. I knew where Domingo Vargas was headed. To the church in Izamal. To the very spot where the Cristeros were holding their meeting ...

  I scanned the rest of the information on the chip. Caco had been thorough—had assumed that we might try to grab Vargas during his visit to Izamal instead. And so he had provided us with a warning. One that sent chills through me.

  If you're thinking of confronting your target in Izamal, I have just one word for you: don't. Word has it that the Aztlan military has been tipped to the hiding place of a bunch of rebels based there—some religious group that is gathering there this evening—and is going to be mopping them up in a raid tonight. Curfew in that town will be even more strictly enforced than usual—the soldiers there are under orders to shoot on sight.

  Things were even worse than I thought. The rebels that Caco was referring to could only be the Cristeros. And that meant that both Teresa and Gus were in grave danger. Someone in their group had betrayed them.

  I thought back to the other cryptic phrase that Mama G had uttered that day: “Beware the priest whose magic ...” Certainly we had to be wary of Domingo Vargas. But had Mama G been referring to him in her warning—or to someone else? To Gus, for example. Also a sacerdote, but of another religion. Also quite capable of working magic. And also, by his own admission, quite capable of betrayal.

  I didn’t get a chance to think about it further. The fans around me leaped to their feet and cheered—and then the stadium was filled with angry shouts and groans.

  Rafael crouched beside my seat and shook my shoulder.

  “Leni!” he said. “It’s happened. One of the Jaguar players has been critically injured. They’ll have called MedíCarro for this one. It’s time to move!”

  I scrambled to my feet and followed Rafael as he elbowed his way down the steps, checking my watch as we joined Fede on the concourse. It was 7:23 p.m.—exactly twenty-one minutes into the game. MedíCarro prided itself on its response time—here in the heart of the city it was said to be four to five minutes. Right now, every second counted.

  I didn’t have time to worry about getting word to the Cristeros. We had a temple to infiltrate and a priest to confront.

  The clock had begun ticking for Mama G’s killer. It was time for Vargas to be brought to justice.

  22

  Fede’s word had been good. He did know the stadium as well as he’d claimed. He led us briskly along the concourse to a locked door beside one of the washrooms, then punched a combination on its keypad. We passed through a janitorial storage area and into a corridor whose ceiling echoed with the thumping feet of spectators in the seats overhead. We descended a flight of ferrocrete steps at a run, passed through another locked door to which Fede also had the combination, and entered a carpeted corridor whose walls were lined with faded holos of ollamaliztli players.

  As we jogged along, Rafael suddenly exclaimed and punched a fist in the air. “Yes!” he hissed. “The Jaguars just scored. It’s two to one.”

  I wondered if he’d suddenly become omniscient—and then I remembered the micro-receiver in his ear. “Let me know if another player is injured,” I told him.

  The corridor led to a former meeting room that now served as a storage space. Chairs were upended on a massive table, and a layer of dust covered everything. Old posters, broken sports equipment, and other junk was piled everywhere. A gigantic jaguar head—a vinyl balloon that had long since deflated—lay draped over a stack of plastic boxes in one corner. Its eyes glared out at us, as if challenging intruders onto its turf. Under its watchful glare we stripped off our street clothes and hid them inside one of the boxes. We also took off our breathers—there was no need for them inside the climate-controlled interior of the stadium.

  Now came the critical part. According to Fede, the hallway beyond this room connected the hangarlike area where MedíCarro emergency response vans pulled into the stadium with the actual first-aid rooms where injured players were treated. Despite the fact that it was used only by MedíCarro staff—who were cleared by Aztechnology Corporate Security personnel before they entered the stadium—the corridor was monitored by closed-circuit surveillance cameras.

  I checked the timepiece set into my wrist. A total of five minutes had passed since the Texcoco player had been injured on the field. By now at least one team of MedíCarro attendants should already be on the scene, work
ing to stabilize the injured player. But I had to make sure. It would look odd, indeed, if the ambulance attendants entered the stadium ahead of the emergency response vehicle . ..

  I lay down on the floor and pressed my cyberear to the crack between the door and the carpet. I filtered out the hiss of the stadium’s air conditioning and the hum of its electrical systems, and heard voices that must have been the ambulance attendants working on the injured player. A reference to a stabilization unit and synthetic Fluosol universal blood confirmed it. So far, so good.

  I knew from my days with the Star that, in a medical emergency, it wasn’t uncommon for more than one vehicle to respond. The first team of MedíCarros wouldn’t be surprised by our arrival on the scene—they would be too busy working on their patient to stop and ask us any questions. All we had to do was get into the first-aid rooms . ..

  But first we had to make sure that any security guards who might be watching the closed-circuit imaging system would be focusing on another monitor screen, instead.

  “Time for our distraction,” I said, first pulling on one of the thin plastic protective gloves I’d hidden inside my pants pocket and then readying my perfume bottle. “Make the call, Rafael.”

  Rafael grinned and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. Flipping it open, he dialed the number that would normally activate the ringer of the Masked Matador—the cartoon-character phone that Fede had carried into the stadium and then left where it could do us some good. Except that we’d cross-wired the phone so that the call would activate its voice-demonstration chip, rather than its buzzer and vibration-alert system. Even now, the Masked Matador would be blaring out his warning in a low, menacing voice.