Blood Sun

by David Gilman

  Dr. Miller stopped. Breathless, he tapped his chest. “Indigestion. Too many cakes,” he said, then fumbled a small bunch of keys. The doors to the next room were bolted by a heavy-duty chain and padlock. Max heard a movement behind him as the clanking chains rattled through the door handle. A shaft of light caught them both like animals blinded on a country road.

  “Hey!” a voice commanded. “What the hell are you doing?” The torchlight barely wavered as the figure moved quickly toward them. Dr. Miller turned. Waved and rattled his keys.

  “It’s Dr. Miller. I need to get into room twenty-seven for a few moments. Sorry to disturb you.”

  The night security guard was right next to them but refused to take his torch from Miller’s face until he was certain of the curator’s identity. Finally he lowered the beam.

  “You should tell us when you’re working late, Dr. Miller,” the man said officiously. “I’ll have to make a note of this in the log.”

  “Of course you will. Quite right too. Don’t worry, we won’t be long. Good night to you.”

  There was no mistaking Dr. Miller’s dismissal. The man turned away, switched off his torch and faded back into the shadows.

  “They get a little jumpy at night. Imagination is what does it mostly. Things tend to take on a life of their own. I don’t blame them, of course. I’ve worked late here myself and definitely seen statues shift position.”

  “You’re not serious?” Max asked.

  “That depends on one’s imagination.”

  There was sufficient light to see the old man’s face crinkle into a smile. He pushed open the doors and led the way into a room full of Central American artifacts.

  Max gazed into the emerald-green eyes of a black beast. Misshapen, but unmistakably a big cat, it glared back as if Max had just come face to face with the black jaguar in the dense undergrowth of the rain forest.

  It was an ancient carving hewn from black volcanic rock. The ragged edges gave the beast a sense of movement, as if its fur was being brushed by the breeze or a low-lying branch. The open jaws displayed white bone teeth, carved to match the shape of incisors and canines. It was powerful and ferocious. It loomed, ready to strike, ears flattened, fixing its glare on him.

  The dim light in the room seemed to fade even more. Max smelled the musky cat fur and the carnivore’s stale breath, and heard the resonant growl from somewhere deep within the predator’s chest. It was frightening. Frightening and glorious. Max felt the sigh escape from his lips as he reached forward and touched the beast’s flanks.

  A part of Max ran free. Claws dug into the bole of a tree, and a canopy of stars beckoned above the treetops.

  “Max?”

  Dr. Miller’s voice returned the statue to its role as lifeless guardian of the room’s treasures.

  The showcases around three of the four walls were lit, while on the fourth, stone fresco slabs, intricately carved with figures, were frozen in a silent, macabre dance of bloodletting.

  “Those are Mayan kings and queens, making sacrifices to their gods.”

  He stepped farther into the room. Max faltered, his hand drawn to touch the rough stonework, as if willing the storyboard to unfold through his fingertips. A loud buzzing alarm startled him. Yanking his hand away, the sound stopped immediately.

  “Electronic beams scan those lintels,” Dr. Miller said. “They’re ancient, so we can’t have every child on a school tour rubbing their hands over them, can we? But never mind those for a moment. Now, where are we … yes, here.”

  In the exhibit’s half-light, he pointed out the history of the Mexican and Central American people. Different colors stained the map as Miller walked around the room, following history. He stopped. “The Maya—250 BC to AD 1000.”

  Max gazed past his reflection in the glass and pressed his hand against it. It felt like a contact between him and his mother. She was there, still there, among all those marks and symbols on the ancient map.

  Dr. Miller spread out the khipu on an exhibit’s plinth.

  Max heard movement somewhere deep in the silence. “I heard something, back there,” he whispered.

  Dr. Miller took his attention away from the knotted cords. A questioning look.

  “A flat, dull sound. I don’t know what it was,” Max said, unable to identify the muffled movement he had heard.

  They listened for a moment longer, but it was silent. Dr. Miller turned back to the map. “It will be one of the night security people. Now, see here,” he said, ignoring the fact that Max stayed focused on the channels of darkness reaching into the endless halls. His instincts prickled. The sounds were a whispering movement. Not the almost-silent tread of a bored man on night duty whose long hours stretched out before him. These were like rushes of air across the cold, hard surface of the museum’s floor, like rats’ whispers.

  Instinct warned him to stay alert, but he knew it could also be his imagination—he hoped. He forced himself to concentrate on what Dr. Miller was looking at on the map. The narrow strip of land between South America and Mexico was pockmarked with symbols.

  Dr. Miller carried on without further hesitation. “Here. This is where Danny Maguire passed through on his way to Mexico. He contacted me several months ago, said he had reached the ancient ruins of Lord Shield Jaguar, who is the king shown on that stone lintel you touched.”

  “Then Danny went into Central America? He wasn’t just in Peru?”

  “Absolutely. I was quite concerned at the time. That isthmus is a well-worn path for drug smugglers from Colombia into Mexico and the United States. Danny was traveling off the beaten track, deep into the mountains and rain forest.”

  Max felt something squeeze the air out of his chest. It was a swell of hope. “My mother died somewhere in the rain forest. Does that khipu tell us anything else? Like where exactly Danny might have traveled in the jungle?”

  Miller winced. Perhaps his own enthusiasm to help Max would exceed the boy’s expectations. He hesitated, then shrugged. “I did say this was a crude example. A khipu is an information-storage device.”

  “Like a computer,” Max said, remembering Sayid’s words.

  “Yes. But if someone keys the wrong letters into a computer, then it will not make any sense. So these knots might be the same. Who knows what might have urged Danny to make up this message.”

  “Dr. Miller. Please. Don’t you see? He was responding to my call for help for any information about my mum. He wouldn’t go to all this trouble if it wasn’t really important. I think Danny was killed because of something he witnessed or because of information he was given. But that bit of knotted string must have more information on it. He was there. Right there. Where Mum died.”

  Max had raised his voice. He quieted, seeing the look of concern on the old man’s face. He lowered his voice. “I’m convinced Danny died trying to get this to me. I’ve already been attacked. Is there anything, anything else at all?”

  Dr. Miller fingered the knots like Sayid fingered his misbaha, the prayer or worry beads inherited from his father.

  “I can only speculate,” Miller finally said. “In truth, Max, I do not think this khipu has anything to do with your mother. There is nothing to suggest it. It has more to do with a state of affairs that is dangerous and involves children.”

  He took Max’s hands and laid them on the khipu. “Close your eyes and feel the knots,” he said gently.

  Max did as he was told. The man’s smooth palms brushed across the back of his hands and then lifted away. In his mind’s eye, Max saw the knots through his fingertips. In that moment of stillness, his mind caressed every fiber. Since he had received the khipu, he had been so focused on finding answers that he had not stopped and held the dead boy’s legacy.

  There was a rhythm to the strands of cord. The looped and curled knots felt different from each other. The spaces between the knots and the lengths of each pendulum string felt like a pause in speech. It was deliberate. It carried meaning and inflection. But the mystery
remained exactly that. He could have no hope of understanding.

  Miller’s voice guided him like helping someone stumbling through a pitch-dark room. “That gap you feel there is, I think, a vast open tract of land. The curls and loops in the knots indicate disruption. Damage of some kind. Devastation. Perhaps now, perhaps then. I think it is near a volcano. Possibly the temple is near a volcano where the armed men are. I think there is also great fear.”

  Max opened his eyes. The old man was gazing at the map, his finger hovering near the center of the land mass. “And your mother’s photographs could well have been taken in this area. There are pyramid temples hidden in the jungle there, and borders between the countries in the Yucatán Peninsula are imprecise. Those valleys and mountains in Belize and Guatemala, many of them are impenetrable. They’re dangerous areas where superstition and ancient beliefs can still hold sway.”

  Miller turned to gaze at the stone lintel that depicted Lord Shield Jaguar pushing what looked like a needle through his tongue.

  Body piercing was one thing; this was something else.

  Miller sensed for the first time the seriousness of Max’s quest. “Blood sacrifice,” he whispered.

  “Move!” Max yelled.

  He pulled the startled Miller out of the grasp of the shadow that lunged from the darkness. A man dressed in black, eyes glaring, face covered by a balaclava, jumped at them.

  Max realized too late that here was the source of the noises he’d heard earlier: the whispered rush of a search.

  Dr. Miller fell. Max rolled across him to stop the harsh boot kick aimed at his head. The blow caught Max’s backpack. Hands snatched at him. He twisted and slid across the floor like a break-dancer.

  “Help us!” he yelled. “In here! Help us!” He was already on his feet, desperate to find any weapon, but there was nothing. The shadow was coming for him. Max sidestepped, dug his shoulder into the man’s midriff and heard him grunt, but he knew from the hard muscle he’d made contact with that he’d barely caused the man any pain. It merely bought him a few seconds.

  His attacker stumbled into the corner of a plinth. The man lost his balance, went down on the floor, rolled and came up ready to fight. But Max saw that the impact had injured his leg, and the man’s ragged breath told him he was hurting.

  Max dived for one of the stone lintels, striking it with his fist. The alarm buzzed. Someone out there must hear that! He struck it again.

  “In here!”

  The man swung out at him. His fist connected with the backpack’s shoulder pad, but the shock wave tore into Max’s ligaments. Pain seared through his arm. He was lame. And defenseless. He went down, pushing himself backward across the floor as quickly as he could, trying to escape the onslaught.

  His shoulders and neck hit the wall. Max felt the wave of agony suck him down into a whirlpool of blackness.

  The last thing he saw was a jade-encrusted skull, cut-stone eyes gleaming madly, broken teeth leering at him.

  Welcome to hell.

  Marty Kiernan had no choice but to tell the police Max had been at the nursing home. It would be suspicious if the security tapes showed Max running across the open lawns and Marty hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.

  It was easy enough, though, to explain the man carried away in an ambulance under police escort as no more than an opportunistic thief. When Marty’s big fist had applied pressure to the conscious man’s nerve points, he’d squealed but told Marty nothing. He gabbled in a foreign language that Marty knew to be Serbian. The police had responded quickly, so the ex-Marine had gained no information of any use. Now at least he would be held long enough for his immigration status to be checked. It was a fair bet he was illegal, given that he was being used to attack fifteen-year-old boys.

  Marty picked up the phone to call Fergus Jackson. He decided he would tell him that Max had visited his father but would say nothing more. Max was Tom Gordon’s son and had the same spirit as his father. Marty knew that no one could persuade him not to do whatever it was he’d set his mind on.

  Jackson watched Sayid’s face. Khalif had that ability to appear totally innocent of any wrongdoing.

  “I’ve had a couple of phone calls, Sayid,” Mr. Jackson said, handing the boy a mug of hot chocolate and nudging his old Labrador-lurcher away from the hearth of the study’s fire. “Max went to see his father. He was very upset—both of them were, actually—and he did a runner. People who are trying to help Max—”

  “What? Like that horrible woman? Misery Morgana the Witch?”

  “Now, Sayid,” Jackson chided gently, “she is an MI-Five officer who is trying to help find Max as a favor to me.”

  “That’s not a powerful motorbike she’s riding. It’s a specially designed broom handle.”

  Jackson smiled. “Yes, you’re probably right. She was certainly heavy-handed, but she is on our side. Anyway, we all thought Max was going to see the chap who came here to give that lecture. But he didn’t.” Jackson smiled again, and this time it seemed to say, Though you knew that, didn’t you?

  Sayid did his blank expression, something he found particularly useful when his mum had one of her agonizing “I’m a single mother doing the best I can for her son” moments, when it was no good saying anything. When her pain passed, he would let her hug him. That calmed her down and gave her some kind of assurance about something. So was there any way he was going to tell Mr. Jackson where Max had gone, that he was trying to find info on his dead mum?

  Sayid shook his head. “Then where did he go?” he asked, forcing a note of surprise into his voice.

  Jackson couldn’t tell if it was genuine. Max had cracked his safe, stolen the keys to his vault and lifted his own passport. Just how much was Sayid implicated in all of that?

  “The Oxford professor told Ms. Morgan that one of the curators at the British Museum was an expert on khipus. She has alerted the police and is on her way there herself.”

  “Then maybe everything is going to be OK,” Sayid said.

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this, but they are also alerting all the airports, because his laptop suggested he was going to travel to South America. Did you know that? Please, Sayid. We need to confirm this.”

  Sayid agonized for as long as he could. He squirmed a bit, hid his face in the mug and swallowed. He looked a bit guiltily at Jackson, who watched him intently, searching for the very signs that Sayid gave him.

  “Peru, actually,” Sayid lied, looking as stricken as he could.

  “So he is trying to get there. Lima? We found a forged letter.”

  “Did you, sir? Oh. Well, yes. Max was pretty determined. I shouldn’t have said anything, I suppose, but … it sounds as though he’s in more trouble than I thought.”

  “That’s all right, Sayid. Now that we know for certain that’s where he’s going, we can do all we can to stop him. You’re a good friend to help him, and you are helping him by telling us. Thank you.”

  Sayid gave a rueful smile, as though he was uncertain. What he knew for sure was that his best friend needed time to make his escape, and his lie had just bought Max more of that precious commodity.

  But, knowing Max, he probably didn’t need any help.

  Riga walked calmly through the museum’s side entrance. The intruder alarms had now been turned off, the few night security staff dealt with. No serious harm came to any of them, except for the one who had to be subdued quickly. His body had crumpled from the swift blow to his neck, but he would recover.

  By the time the day shift arrived in the morning to find their colleagues trussed up in one of the staff rooms, there would be a few small stickers left prominently on doors and exhibition cases.

  ACT WAS HERE.

  ACTION AGAINST CULTURAL THEFT.

  It would be assumed the raid was by a new group of previously unknown activists who objected to the British Museum holding so many artifacts from around the world. There would be more than enough time wasted to allow Riga and his men to be long gone. And
hopefully have nothing more to do with Max Gordon.

  Riga’s employers were paying a substantial sum of money for this job to be completed, but it was becoming tiresome. Being paid to find another boy was almost below his dignity. Danny Maguire had been tracked and chased, his body now destroyed, but pursuing this Max Gordon kid was like trying to corner a feral dog. The boy seemed to have a guardian angel. Well, not tonight. Riga could blast guardian angels out of the sky like a hunter on a pheasant shoot.

  “Max! Max! My boy!” An urgent whisper. Max felt someone tapping his face gently. He came to. His blurred vision cleared. He was propped against the wall with Dr. Miller at his side. The jade skull still grinned in the exhibit case, and on the floor, the attacker’s body lay prone. Miller still held the hefty chain and padlock in one hand.

  “Ah. My boy. Good. Good. Come along, we have to get out of here.”

  Max clambered to his feet, looked at the fallen man and then at the academic.

  “I may be getting old, but I’m not afraid to stand up to thugs like that. Though I hope I didn’t hit him too hard.”

  Max nudged the man with his toe, and he groaned. “He’ll be all right. Where do we go?”

  Dr. Miller was limping. It was obvious he had been hurt in the scuffle. “I fell badly on my knee,” he explained, catching Max’s glance. “I’ll manage. We must get to a phone.”

  “I’ve got a mobile.”

  “It’s no good down here.”

  Max took Miller’s arm across his shoulders and helped him to walk. The pain in his own shoulder from the attacker’s punch still hurt, but he kept silent; this was no time to moan. Shadows flitted and fast-moving footfalls padded quietly but urgently in the background. Dr. Miller’s breathing was labored.

  He stopped and leaned against an exhibition case. They had barely managed a dozen meters. Miller was trembling, his face drawn, his breathing becoming more strained. His face grimaced in pain.

  “Oh dear … Oh God …”

  Max tried to ease him gently to the floor, but his weight was too much to control. Dr. Miller slumped hard and tore unsuccessfully at the constriction of his shirt collar. His eyes seemed glassy and unfocused. Max touched the man’s face. It was clammy. Something more frightening than the assault gripped Max’s stomach. The edge of panic threatened to take control. Dr. Miller was having a heart attack.