“As for the Great Speaker,” he said, “he’s no more Moctezuma than I am. He isn’t immortal. Beneath that ridiculous mask there has been a succession of men — ordinary mortal men — who have played the role just as these actors here play theirs. One after another they assume the mantle of Great Speaker and give out orders and edicts from the Lake Palace at Tenochtitlan, and when each dies the next in line replaces him, and it is all done behind closed doors, amid a conspiracy of silence, and we are none the wiser. You know in your heart of hearts that I’m right. Nothing you’ve seen here tonight is real. What you’ve been watching is a lie. Artful propaganda. Stage managed in every sense. A myth masquerading as legend. And it’s all to help keep that lot” — he jabbed a finger at the priests — “in power. Reinforce their tyranny. Tighten their stranglehold still further.”
He unsheathed his rapier, to gasps and squeals.
“Well, you’re looking at a man who will not be strangled. A man who’s sick and tired of living under this regime and wants rid of it. They call me a terrorist. Maybe I am. But the only people who should be terrified of me are the hieratic caste and anyone who supports them.”
With that, he bounded over the footlights and off the front of the stage, making for the priests’ platform. Panicking audience members leapt from their seats and ran shrieking. Their Holinesses themselves seemed rooted to the spot, paralysed by fear. They exchanged looks, as if to ask how this could have happened, how it could be that so many of them at once were about to become the Conquistador’s next victims.
The Conquistador sprang up onto the platform.
“Should’ve thought this through a bit better, shouldn’t you?” he crowed. “You arrogant bastards. Not one Jaguar Warrior bodyguard? Talk about sitting ducks.”
“Actually,” said one of the priests, the tallest of them, “I think you’ll find you’re the sitting duck.”
The Conquistador cocked his head. “Oh, yes? And how do you work that out?”
“Well…” The priest reached beneath his chair and snatched out the macuahitl concealed there.
All the others did exactly the same thing.
Behind his mask, the Conquistador’s face fell. His eyes gave it away. A moment of pure, uncomprehending shock.
The priests, as one, rose.
“No Jaguar Warriors, mate?” sneered the tall one. “Try twenty of them!”
In her seat, five rows back from the platform, Chief Inspector Mal Vaughn watched with satisfaction as her trap was sprung.
Really, it was a surprise the Conquistador had fallen for it. Mal had had her doubts he would. Surely he’d be too smart. Surely he’d think that it was just too blatant. Twenty priests unexpectedly attending a show at an open-air theatre in the middle of a park? A venue where watertight security was virtually impossible? It must have been screaming STAY AWAY! to him.
But no, he hadn’t stayed away. He’d come charging in, unable to resist the bait.
That fitted with the psychological impression Mal had built up of him. He was a narcissist. He enjoyed the big gesture, the grandstanding performance. He liked to make an impact.
All the same, she was vaguely disappointed. Somehow she’d felt he was cannier than this.
The bogus priests moved in on the Conquistador, swords aloft. He backed away a couple of steps.
Mal’s masterstroke was that there was no way the Conquistador could have suspected the priests were not what they appeared to be. To impersonate a priest — hieratic fraud — was one of the most heinous offences on the statute books. The punishment was a litany of hideous tortures. You would have skewers driven through your most sensitive parts. You would be flayed alive. Your skinned body would be roasted over hot coals. You would then, if not already dead, be disembowelled and, for good measure, beheaded. And the same treatment would be visited on every single member of your immediate family. Even your cousins, even your pets, would not be immune. It was something only a lunatic would consider doing.
Chief Superintendent Kellaway had laughed at Mal when she’d suggested disguising a squad of Jaguars as priests. Then he’d realised she was deadly serious, and he’d laughed again, this time scornfully. It would never happen, he’d said. The High Priest would never allow it.
But he might, Mal had insisted. He might make a special dispensation, in this one instance, if he could be convinced that it was the best, the only way of drawing out the Conquistador and catching him unawares. Could the chief super just try? Ask him? Plead?
In the event, the High Priest had gone for the idea and granted permission. Twenty Jaguar Warriors had had their heads shaved and their skin adorned with non-permanent tattoo designs, the customary assortment of iguanas and quetzals and hieroglyphs. They had spent hours practising how to sit, stand and behave in a priestly manner. Few of them had been able to resist the temptation to walk with a mincing gait and make lisping demands for peeled grapes and depilated virgins, and Mal had let them have their fun, even though by rights she should have reported them for gross impertinence. Mocking a priest was nearly as bad as impersonating one, and the penalty might not be as severe but you and your kin would still regret it — at least a dozen of your relatives would have a hand lopped off, and you yourself would lose both hands and a foot as well. Like the old joke went: I called a priest an idiot then hopped it.
And it had paid off. The Conquistador was now surrounded and heavily outnumbered by some of the best swordsmen on the force.
He managed to recover from his dumbstruck stupor in time. As the first of the Jaguars attacked, up came his rapier. Blades clashed. The fight was on.
Mal turned to Aaronson, seated beside her.
“Come on. Let’s get in there.”
“What?” said her DS. “Have you gone mad? Twenty of them, one of him. They don’t need our help.”
“Maybe not, but he’s my fucking collar. I’m not letting someone else hog the glory. Whoever kills him, the body is still mine and I’ll gut the man who tries to take it off me.”
“You know, boss,” Aaronson said, getting to his feet, “you scare me sometimes.”
“Good.”
The one advantage the Conquistador had over his opponents was that he was fully armoured and they were not. Their garb was the standard plainclothes wear for a priest, a light alpaca wool suit over a multicoloured brocade waistcoat which echoed the much fancier garment used for ceremonies. Underneath their shirts, many of the Jaguar Warriors had taken the precaution of donning stab-proof vests, but that still left their heads and limbs unprotected. It was a vulnerability the Conquistador was quick to exploit.
The tall Jaguar, Constable Carey, died first. The Conquistador ducked inside his guard and ran him through the groin. He yanked the rapier out just in time to counter a macuahitl slash from the left. Grabbing the Jaguar’s sword arm, he opened his neck from ear to ear. As the man went down, he twisted the macuahitl out of his grasp.
Now, armed on both sides, he met the onslaught of the next two Jaguars, matching them blow for blow. The two of them flanked him at the platform’s edge. The Conquistador feinted forwards, then leapt backwards, off the platform. Both Jaguars lunged at him at the same time and were wrongfooted. They stared down in astonishment to find each other’s swords embedded in their thighs, and collapsed against each other like a pair of broken bookends.
Down in the area between the seating and the stage front, the Conquistador discarded the borrowed macuahitl and drew his pistol. With three shots he eviscerated the nearest three Jaguar Warriors. Even a stab-proof vest was no protection against a high-velocity cluster of flechettes.
Another Jaguar, however, got close enough to knock the pistol out of his hand before he could inflict any more damage with it. In retaliation, the Conquistador sliced through the man’s arm with his rapier, severing the limb at the elbow.
At that point it became clear that the Conquistador was cornered. His back was against the stage. Several very angry and determined Jaguars were closing in on h
im.
All at once they rushed him. Obsidian blades hammered at his armour from all directions, seeking chinks. Someone with a sense of irony might have seen the very image of what he had described onstage a moment ago, Britain embattled on all sides, a lonely island beleaguered by the might of the Empire.
He fought back gamely, but the Jaguar Warriors were giving him no quarter. Mal, at the rear of the pack, was convinced it would be only moments before a crippling sword stroke got through, maybe a fatal one. She allowed herself a quick gloat. She had done it. She had succeeded where all the previous investigating officers had not. She had pulled off a feat most would have thought impossible. The Conquistador was about to become an ugly footnote in modern British history, not to mention a significant feather in her cap. Nobody would forget tonight. This was the kind of achievement that future chief superintendents were made of.
And to think that a week ago she had been contemplating quitting the force.
A week was a long time in policing. Maybe all she’d needed was this — the opportunity to do something worthwhile with the job, the chance to feel like she was helping society rather than simply serving the state.
The pommel of a macuahitl pounded down on the Conquistador’s helmet. He fell.
Yes!
It was then, as Mal was enjoying a surge of triumph, that everything turned to shit.
One of the Jaguar Warriors masquerading as priests suddenly grabbed his neck. His eyes rolled up, his knees buckled, and he crumpled to the ground.
A hoarse shout came from the trees surrounding the amphitheatre, giving an order in a language Mal didn’t recognise. Then men came leaping down from the branches onto the topmost seats.
They hurtled down the raked rows, uttering battle cries as they ran. They were small and dark-haired, and their faces were daubed with white warpaint so as to resemble, more than anything, skulls. Their clothing mixed combat fatigues with chunky jewellery, and some of them whirled bolases above their heads while others brandished blowpipes. Everyone was startled by their unexpected appearance, and none more so than Mal.
The Jaguar Warriors turned as a volley of blowpipe darts came whipping towards them. Wherever a dart scored a hit, the man fell immediately and lay prostrate on the ground, motionless as a waxwork. The remaining, unscathed Jaguars threw themselves at the new arrivals. Linked trios of bolas balls helicoptered through the air, catching them around their necks and legs. They toppled, and as they sprawled flat out, yet more blowpipe darts rendered them inert and insensible.
They’re hunting us, Mal thought. Bringing us down like animals on the pampas plains.
One of the skull-faced attackers ran at her, bolas spinning. Before he could launch it, she narrowed the distance between them and spiked her macuahitl at him. His momentum drove him straight onto the blade, impaling him up to the hilt.
As Mal heaved the sword out, another of the skull-faces sprang. This one wasn’t taking any chances. His blowpipe was already at his lips. The range was point blank. Mal swung her sword anyway, hoping against hope that she could get him before he sent the dart on its way.
His cheeks inflated, and at the very same instant Aaronson jumped at him with a frantic cry of “No!” There was a phoooft! and Aaronson yelped. He and the skull-face tumbled to the ground together in a heap.
Mal pounced on the two tangled bodies, thrusting the point of her macuahitl down into the skull-face’s eye and piercing him to the brain.
“Aaronson! Talk to me. Are you okay?”
She turned him over. He moaned. His eyes rolled in their sockets. His limbs were floppy, rubbery. Was he dying or simply lapsing into unconsciousness? Was the poison on the dart’s tip fatal or just a powerful paralytic?
Either way, there was nothing she could do for him right now. She rose, scanning around. The attackers had cleared a path through to the Conquistador. They were after her villain. Well, they weren’t bloody well having him.
She sprinted towards him, leaping over the bodies of downed comrades. The Conquistador looked stunned and exhausted. The skull-faces were helping him to his feet. He didn’t seem to know who they were, but was plainly relieved that they had intervened.
Mal was just yards from him when a rotund individual stepped into her way. His warpaint was the most detailed of all of them, savage and snarly. Yet his eyes were weirdly compassionate. He looked almost sorry as he loosed off his bolas at her.
She tried to duck, but wasn’t fast enough. The bolas cords twined around her head, tightening in an instant. There was a triple impact, a triple burst of lightning and thunder.
Then darkness.
FIVE
8 Flint Knife 1 Monkey 1 House
(Thursday 29th November 2012)
Stuart woke up in his own bed, in his own bedroom. Not where he expected to be at all, but he was very glad he was there.
As he heaved himself to a sitting position, a tsunami of aches and pains crashed over him. His arms and legs felt stiff as cardboard. Examining himself, he found bruises almost everywhere, as though someone had planted a garden of purple and yellow orchids under his skin. His head rang like a gong.
He tottered to the bathroom in his underpants. There, amid the marble fixtures, he almost passed out. The world greyed, wavered, dimmed. A glass of cold water helped bring him back to his senses, and a second glass washed down a fistful of aspirin.
As he shuffled along the corridor to the kitchen, Stuart felt a sudden, instinctive certainty.
He wasn’t alone in the flat.
It was too early for the maid, Grace. Besides, in spite of her name, Grace moved with all the elegance of a rhino. You always knew which room she was cleaning, by the thudding footfalls and the clunk of ornaments not quite being broken.
Someone was here and doing their best to keep quiet.
Razor-alert, Stuart slid a carving knife out of the block on the kitchen counter. The intruder was in the living room. Stuart padded to the connecting door, which stood slightly ajar. He peeked through the crack. He had a view of half the room and there was nobody in sight, but the certainty remained. It was something in the air, in the sounds of the flat; something almost unconscious.
He eased the door open just enough to slip through sideways. He held the carving knife at his hip in a backhand grip, the blunt edge of the blade resting against his forearm. It wasn’t the most precise of weapons but, in experienced hands, it would serve.
There was a short, portly man standing in the far corner with his back to the doorway. He wore a neat tropical suit and appeared to be admiring Stuart’s bookshelves, which were laden with first editions of pre-Empire British fiction. His hands were laced together behind him as he keenly ran his gaze over the books’ spines, the cloth and leather bindings, the gold stencilled lettering.
Stuart crept towards him using all the stealthcraft at his disposal. His bare feet made not a sound on the floor tiles. His breathing was slow and measured, drifting silently in through the nostrils, out through the mouth. He skirted the sofa. He was almost within striking distance.
“H.G. Wells,” said the man abruptly, without turning round.
Stuart halted mid-step.
The man gestured at a blue-bound volume. “He foresaw the eventual fall of Britain to the Empire. What are the Martians in The War Of The Worlds if not a thinly disguised allegorical warning of an Aztec invasion? Whereas Kipling” — he pointed to a green book on the shelf above, a Collected Poetical Works adorned with beautiful blind-tooled patterns — “insisted your country would remain independent, an empire unto itself, for all time. Two authors, contemporaries, both equally brilliant, yet one got it so right and the other so wrong. Funny, that.”
Now, finally, he turned. He was round-faced, twinkly-eyed, with an impish cast to his features.
“Kindly put the knife down, Mr Reston. Were you to attack me, I would be forced to disarm you, possibly hurt you. Neither of us would want that.”
Stuart did not do as asked. Looking at t
he man, he doubted he could make good on the threat. Soft and chubby. Slow reflexes. Then again, he’d somehow been aware Stuart was sneaking up on him. There could be more to him than met the eye.
“Who are you?” Stuart demanded in English. The intruder had addressed him in Nahuatl, which Stuart refused to use if he didn’t have to.
“I’m sorry, my knowledge of your native tongue extends to basic reading, that’s all. What did you say?”
Stuart switched to the other language, reluctantly. “I asked who you are.”
“You don’t remember me from last night? No surprise, I suppose. Like you, I am in my civvies.” A grin doubled the number of plump folds in the man’s face. “My name is Ah Balam Chel, and I helped save your life at the theatre. Ringing any bells yet?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Stuart replied. He brandished the knife. “You have five seconds to get out of here, or else.”
Ah Balam Chel gently pushed the blade aside. “No need to keep waving that thing around. I mean you no harm. I am not your enemy. Believe me, if I wanted you dead, you would be. I had ample opportunity to kill you last night. That I did not must tell you something. The fact is, I want you alive. Very much so.”
“And why would that be?”
“Because you are the Conquistador.”
“Oh, come on!” Stuart scoffed.
Chel just smiled knowingly. “When I removed your mask and armour in the back of the getaway van last night, it surprised me to see such a well-known face beneath. I’d had the Conquistador pegged as a nobody, some disgruntled member of the lower orders — not an obsidian magnate whose fortune is based on a product so beloved of the Empire. Far from being an outsider or a social outcast, you’re part of the establishment. You’re the last person I’d ever think would go running around London playing the radical revolutionary.”
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