Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

  “I’m too busy,” she said aloud.

  “What?” said Porfiro, looking up from his microscope. “Too busy for what?”

  “Oh,” said Deborah, flustered. “Just—you know—too much to do. This site...” She gestured vaguely with her hands, and Aguilar nodded solemnly, as if she was making sense.

  “I just wish we had more material to work with,” he said. “If only we knew where the rest of the grave goods were. Do you think Bowerdale knows?” he asked.

  “If I knew that...” Deborah trailed off.

  “Let’s face it,” Aguilar said bitterly. “The only reason Bowerdale would be heading away from us was if he was going toward the missing artifacts. We both know him well enough to know that.”

  “Maybe,” said Deborah, not wanting to think about it. She changed the topic. “Aguilar, why did Krista come back to Mexico?”

  “What?” said Porfiro, looking defensive. “Oh, you know. Workaholic, I guess. Aren’t we all?”

  Deborah held his eyes for a moment, and finally he shrugged and smiled apologetically. It was a confession of sorts. Deborah nodded, and he breathed out, smiling again, broader this time, before returning to his microscope.

  Deborah checked her watch. She was hoping to get up to the village to see Adelita before the day was out. She had brought her a stuffed bear dressed up, ridiculously, like a yeoman warder of the Tower, and a book on English royal history. If she could make sure everything here was all right, she could take the remaining van.

  She opened her laptop. She wanted to see if Hargreaves was up and about. She had called the hospital twice but he had been resting and they wouldn’t patch her through. If he was getting his e-mail they might schedule a time to talk.

  But when she opened her e-mail there were two messages, one from an unfamiliar address—probably spam—the other from her mother.

  Perfect, she thought. Dropping me a line to tell me what she thinks my childhood home will fetch, no doubt.

  That wasn’t fair.

  They were just so different, Deborah and her mother, always had been. Deborah had been her father’s daughter, and once he had gone, her mother had seemed like the enemy, the wicked stepmother, the...

  Witch.

  Deborah frowned, not liking the way the word had come to mind. She opened the e-mail reluctantly, expecting to find it spiteful and petty in ways that might justify Deborah’s sense of herself as the aggrieved party. It was, however, more careful than usual, and though it wasn’t what you would call tender, there was a note of feeling in it that she couldn’t imagine her mother actually saying.

  Hence the e-mail. She knew she’d never get it out if she called.

  She had received an offer on the house. She would delay the sale if Deborah would come. She wanted to see her, wanted to talk face-to-face, didn’t want any more angry phone calls, didn’t want to sell without Deborah coming home first. That, the letter said, would be terrible. It would put us back. Deborah wasn’t sure what that meant. Put who back? Her mother and Steve, delaying their plans? Or did it mean Deborah and her mother? She ended, “I love you, Debs. I know you don’t always think so, but I do.”

  The words she never said.

  She was considering how to respond to this when she opened the other note, but it all went out of her head when she read the new message. It said simply: I’m sorry. Really sorry. His name is Dimitri, I think. I think he’s Russian. Not sure. I’m sorry. —Alice.

  Attached to the message was a document. It began:

  My honoured mother,

  Much has happened since I last wrote and the consequences of my small doings have caught up with me at last...

  Deborah sat bolt upright, her eyes wide. She checked the name at the end of the letter and then reached, fumbling for her phone.

  This is it, she thought. It’s what we needed. Evidence of Edward Clifford’s final resting place. He went to Uxmal!

  And then the phone in her hand rang before she had had chance to dial, and she answered it, flushed with excitement, her eyes scanning the letter on the screen.

  “Nick!” she exclaimed. “I was just about to call you...”

  “Deborah...”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “Edward Clifford wrote another letter...”

  “Deborah, listen,” he said, and his voice was leaden. “Something has happened.”

  “What?” she said, still staring at the computer, but now only absorbing Alice’s string of apologies.

  “It’s about James,” said Nick. “Bowerdale’s graduate student. His body was found in a hotel in Uxmal this morning. He had been shot at close range...Deborah? Are you still there?”

  But Deborah could only stare blankly across the lab, through the side shafts of sunlight from the windows, saying nothing as her eyes filled with tears.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Deborah and Nick drove west toward Merida and south to Uxmal, barely speaking. Deborah drove because it gave her something to concentrate on, though the toll road had almost no traffic and it was all too easy for her mind to wander as they sped through miles of scrub jungle broken by occasional fields of corn and agave.

  She had replied to Alice’s e-mail, but she doubted she would hear back. She had forwarded the message to an account Nick had given her but so far nothing useful had returned from whatever searches and tests he had initiated. Not that she expected any. She didn’t know who this Dimitri was, didn’t really believe in him. She had called Powel to give him the news and he had sounded shaken, though the line was unusually bad. She had told him they were going to Uxmal, that she was still looking, but she couldn’t bring herself to talk for more than a minute about something that seemed so irrelevant next to James’s death.

  It was your dig, she told herself. If nothing else, it was your dig. And these were your people.

  James was just a kid. He thought of himself as an archaeologist, but he was little more than a child, wide-eyed and full of excitement and potential.

  Deborah lowered her foot involuntarily and the car sped forward.

  “You want to talk about it?” said Nick, sitting up.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said, eyes on the road.

  “Seems like there is.”

  “No,” she clarified. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  So they didn’t talk about it—or anything else—and the miles slid by. In the back of the car, still stuffed into a red plastic bag, were the souvenirs she had brought back for Adelita. She had never made it up to the village, and that too felt like a failure.

  Two hours later Nick started making phone calls, and by the time they reached Uxmal, Kenneth Jones, the CIA operative, was there to meet them.

  “Now maybe we’ll get that Anglo American accord,” Nick remarked.

  It took a while for the American agents to show any sign of that accord. There were two of them, Jones and another man called Freykes, a quiet, middle-aged white man in a gray suit whose professionalism couldn’t mask what she took to be resentment. He didn’t want to work with the English agent. Neither did Jones. They were acting on orders from higher up. There were some muttered apologies for previous encounters, but there was a posturing stiffness to the way the men interacted that she found tiresome.

  Deborah was relieved to find the crime scene already tidied up, the body long gone. Jones was working closely with the local police, he said, and other agents were en route from the States. His manner was businesslike, formal, pointedly not blaming anyone. Deborah had been bracing herself for his rebuke, his allegations of amateurism and reckless incompetence, and maybe if she had come in cocky and unaffected by the news he would have unleashed them all, but he took one look at her and just gave her a nod of greeting. He even offered his condolences, but Deborah couldn’t even find the words to thank him, and there was a long, awkward pause till Nick, still professional, took him aside to talk, secret agent to secret agent, thought Deborah bleakly. As if I needed furthe
r evidence of why I shouldn’t be here.

  But if she expected to be ignored, left to go her own way from then on, she was wrong. She heard them muttering in the hallway outside, but no more than five minutes later, they were back and, without explanation, continued to include her in the conversation. Nick had shown Jones the e-mail from Alice—or, as he said, “allegedly” from Alice—and asked him if the name Dimitri meant anything to him. Jones shook his head without meeting their eyes and Nick pressed him.

  “You want our help on this, you need to be honest with us,” said Nick.

  “Our help?” said Deborah. “I’m not on your side.”

  “Fine,” said Nick. “We need your archaeological expertise, right, Agent Jones?”

  This was obviously what they had been discussing outside. Jones seemed to hesitate, not liking it, then nodded.

  “I’m not crazy about having civilians in a hot zone,” he said, “but under the circumstances I don’t think we have a choice. Besides, I know a bit about you. You’ve worked with the FBI on two occasions, productively. We could use your expertise.”

  “I’m not an expert,” said Deborah, seemingly for the hundredth time. She shot Nick a glance, but he showed no response to this news of her past, which, she suspected, meant he already knew about it. Unaccountably, the fact that he had never said so annoyed her. “I’m especially not an expert on Uxmal,” she added. “I’ve never even been here before.”

  “That’s how you pronounce it?” said Jones. “Well you’re more of an expert on Oosh-mahl,” Jones said, mimicking her pronunciation of the word, “than we are. You’re the best we have till the others get here. That could take a couple of days, maybe longer. So let’s walk.”

  They moved briskly from the hotel to the archaeological remains, passing through the ticket and orientation area with a flash of Jones’s badge, through the quadrangle of souvenir stores and facilities, and then up a long path that stepped gradually up to the site itself. It was hot outside after the shade of the hotel, and the air was alive with the steady rasping buzz of insects.

  At the perimeter fence were low-slung derelict buildings. They moved along a narrow paved way flanked by trees, probably the original sacbe route. To one side was a shallow circular reservoir, and up ahead was a massive, looming pyramid with curved sides and a broad ceremonial staircase up the side facing them.

  Deborah couldn’t help but smile. She had hoped she would get to see this during her visit, and it was, if anything, more impressive than the pictures she had studied. She had known it was here, but it was still a surprise and a privilege to see it, like glimpsing a jaguar. From down here the pyramid looked almost impossibly sheer, the stairway close to vertical and the rounded sides pointing up like the entire mountainous structure had pushed up from the world below. The stonework was immaculate, and the combination of the proportional elegance of the thing—its balance and regularity—coupled with the extraordinary engineering required to raise it in a world without modern machinery, electricity, or even metal tools took Deborah’s breath away.

  “That’s the Pyramid of the Magician,” said Deborah, unable to keep a note of awe out of her voice.

  The CIA man paused and gazed at it for a moment and something of his professional demeanor slipped away as he shaded his eyes.

  “Cool,” he said, meaning it. “And that’s like a thousand years old?”

  “Give or take,” said Deborah.

  “Huh,” he said, admiring.

  “Any word on Bowerdale?” said Nick. Deborah thought he sounded impatient.

  “No,” said Jones, turning to him.

  Nick seemed to give him a searching glance and Jones opened his hands.

  “Look,” he said. “You say you want me to trust you and I’ve said I will, but that means you have to trust me too. So when I say I don’t know where Bowerdale is, that’s because I don’t know where Bowerdale is. OK? He can’t have gotten from Valladolid to Uxmal in time to kill James, so he’s not a suspect anyway. We’ll catch up with him later.”

  “And this Dimitri character,” said Nick, pressing. “Is he real or did Alice make him up?”

  Jones gave Deborah a swift look.

  “You realize you are helping your government in a very delicate situation,” he said, “and that while your assistance is appreciated, were you to reveal hereafter anything of a delicate or sensitive nature, it might be considered grounds for charges of treason?”

  “I’m aware,” she said. “So?”

  “He’s real,” said Jones.

  Deborah stared.

  “You know him?” said Nick.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Jones. “Dimitri is not his real name. He’s a Serbian freelancer.”

  “Freelancer?” said Deborah. “Which means what?”

  “Hit man and gun runner,” said Jones. “Linked to Bosnian atrocities in the midnineties.”

  “Gun runner?” said Nick, emphatically persistent. “As in, an arms dealer?”

  “That’s classified,” said Jones.

  “Didn’t we just have this conversation?” said Nick.

  “There are some things I am not at liberty to reveal,” said Jones.

  “Bollocks,” said Nick, pausing under a shady tree where a pale iguana with dark vertical stripes lounged. “You might be able to demand her help,” he said, nodding at Deborah, “but if you want the assistance of Her Majesty’s government, you’re going to have to be a bit more forthcoming, mate.”

  “Why are you pursuing the stones?” demanded Jones.

  “They are of ancient cultural significance to the Crown,” said Nick.

  “OK,” said Jones.

  “So this Dimitri,” Nick pressed. “He’s dealing in what, antiquities?”

  “That’s right,” said Jones.

  “You’re lying,” said Nick.

  Deborah thought Nick was right. Jones had looked hurriedly back to the pyramid. But then Nick wasn’t telling the truth either, or not all of it. So she did.

  “The Brits think that the stones and other objects buried here might be the lost English crown jewels that were supposedly melted down and sold off by Oliver Cromwell between 1649 and 1658 when the monarchy was restored.”

  Both men stared at her, both aghast, if for different reasons.

  “You want him to come clean,” she said to Nick, “then so should you.”

  “That wasn’t your call,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing is, but here I am. Now it’s your turn,” she said, turning to Jones.

  “Wait,” he said, wrapping his brain round the idea. “You think we’re looking for a lost crown?”

  “Several,” she said. “There wasn’t one English crown. There were lots. Some had special authority in terms of coronation, but each king or queen added wealth to the royal regalia—usually riches and gifts they received from other monarchs or items they commissioned themselves. So yes, that’s what he’s looking for. Now, what about you?”

  “Well,” he said. “Gold and precious stones are worth a lot of money. Money drives war and terrorism. If this Dimitri gets a major cash haul, it’s guaranteed most of the money will go into guns that ultimately will be bought by terrorists.”

  “This can’t just be about money and guns or you wouldn’t be here,” she said. “There’s more to it than that. What is it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “You’re lying,” said Nick again. He turned on Deborah. “Thanks,” he snapped. “So you blew my interest without getting anything in return. Brilliant.”

  Jones said nothing, but he couldn’t contain the shadow of a smile.

  Terrorism?

  She let her thoughts swirl, looking from the pyramid, and suddenly it struck her.

  “It’s not just the monetary value of the stones,” she said.

  “You said it was a matter of national security,” Deborah said. “You keep talking about terrorism, and you have only ever referred to the grave goo
ds as gems. You haven’t mentioned the metal, the bones, or any of the other things we’re looking for: only the stones. Now our analysis said the gems weren’t that valuable, so it can’t be about their intrinsic value as precious stones. But we’re talking about naturally occurring crystals, right? And there are lots of uses for crystals. In industry, for instance.”

  “And in weapons technology,” added Nick.

  “Bowerdale worked for the military,” said Deborah. “He did topographical survey work on the White Sands missile range in New Mexico.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” said Nick, looking at Jones.

  “Missiles?” said the CIA man. “I don’t see the connection.”

  “It’s not just missiles they test at White Sands,” said Nick. “They work with military lasers there, some of which are built around crystals. The US Army has been working on the development of solid state military lasers for years.”

  Kenneth Jones said nothing and was very still.

  “Lasers, yes,” said Deborah. “I read something about how the rare combination of chrome and iron in a ruby might enhance a laser’s optical properties...”

  “But the crystals used in lasers are manufactured, surely?” said Nick. “They aren’t naturally occurring, and there’s no way a primitive culture—Mayan or English—could artificially manufacture crystals of any kind.”

  Jones looked away again.

  “I have the original specs for the crystal scanned by Aguilar,” said Deborah, “and those for the Malkin Tower stone. I’m sure British intelligence could figure out why Dimitri wants them based on that information.”

  “Transfer that information to a foreign power and you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison,” said Jones, stern but clearly on the defensive.

  “Aguilar sent it out the day we found it,” said Deborah. “He contacted people all over the world trying to match the signature because the stone was so unusual. Anyone who wants to know already does. They just don’t have the stones themselves, and you’re going to need me to find them.”