Age of Aztec a-4

by James Lovegrove

  Stuart upped his speed, tapping his reserves of energy. He’d done a twelve-miler yesterday as well, along this very same route, and his lungs were aching and his legs were leaden with tiredness, but he could grit his teeth and bludgeon through the discomfort. Only another ten or so minutes to home.

  Vaughn matched his acceleration and added a further turn of speed, gradually narrowing the gap between them. Stuart lengthened his stride, but Vaughn was fresher than him. She’d been going for minutes, not an hour plus. Soon she pulled alongside him.

  Stuart offered her an ironic salute and focused on his running. There were hundreds of promenaders meandering about on the south bank today, few of them looking where they were going. To steer a safe course through them demanded concentration.

  To these passers-by, Stuart and Vaughn looked like a fitness-fanatic couple jogging side by side, enjoying a spot of aerobic exercise together. No one could have guessed, by their appearance, that they were enemies on opposite sides of a moral divide — upholder of the law and flouter of it. Just a man and woman in sportswear, husband and wife maybe, keeping in trim.

  They thudded eastbound along the embankment, passing under Waterloo Bridge, then Blackfriars. The stonework on both structures was wreathed with lianas and vines. Cracks and crevices played host to colonies of bats which, come twilight, would emerge from their roosts in black swarms.

  Stuart waited for the chief inspector to breach the silence. As they neared Southwark Bridge, she did.

  “There’s two ways we can do this, Mr Reston.”

  “Don’t tell me. Easy or hard.”

  “I was going to go with clean or messy, but whatever. You can come in quietly and anonymously with me, or publicly, noisily, melodramatically, surrounded by a bunch of Jaguars in full uniform. It’s up to you.”

  “Why would I do either?” Stuart asked.

  “Why isn’t open to debate, only how.”

  “But where’s the proof? What grounds do you have for arrest?”

  “I’ve decided I don’t need any. I know you’re the Conquistador. That’s all I need. The rest is academic.”

  “Even in a police state — and let’s face it, this is one — due process of law has to be observed. Seen to be observed, at any rate. I’d like to see an arrest warrant, please.”

  “That can be arranged,” said Vaughn. “I can’t promise when one will appear, but it will. Probably after I’ve had a good nose round your flat and unearthed a suit of reproduction Spanish armour hidden somewhere there.”

  “I’ll claim it was planted. Or rather, my hideously expensive lawyer will.”

  “Lawyers aren’t much help to people who are being held downstairs at the Yard. Often they can’t get in to see you because they haven’t filed the proper paperwork, or else you happen to be asleep each time they visit.”

  “Sleep and unconsciousness can look alike, can’t they?”

  “You have a very clear grasp of our methods, Mr Reston.”

  Stuart thumbed sweat out of his eyes. The Thames, to his left, rolled along thick and brown, dotted with barges and bright little pleasure boats. He was running faster than the river was.

  “You won’t be able to make any charges stick, you know,” he said.

  “We’ll see.”

  “The person you answer to, your chief superintendent or whoever, he’s going to have a very rough time of it.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, at this point I would say, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ but you already do.”

  “Wealth and status won’t impress him, Mr Reston.”

  “They should.”

  “But won’t, because he’s dead.”

  “Ah,” said Stuart. “Him. The poor sod who was striped the day before yesterday. I thought they’d have replaced him by now.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m surprised.”

  “I’m not. His are hard shoes to fill.”

  “I bet, thanks to the Conquistador, candidates aren’t exactly queuing up.”

  “No, they’re not. But what that means for me is, I have a window of opportunity, and I’m going to make the most of it.”

  “Directly answerable to no one,” said Stuart. “Rogue Jaguar.”

  “Let’s just say I’m motivated and I’m unsupervised.”

  “How did you know where I’d be this morning?”

  “I watched you head out for a run yesterday. Apparently you do this on both days of the weekend, the exact same route every time. You’re a creature of habit, Mr Reston.”

  “And you, Chief Inspector Vaughn, have been doing your homework.”

  “I chatted to a few of your neighbours, and with your PA, Tara. I’ve been busy charting your comings and goings. She was unusually cooperative, was Tara. I popped round her house yesterday and she supplied me with a list of all your recent business trips.”

  “There’s employee loyalty for you.” Stuart tried to sound phlegmatic, not bitter. He couldn’t hold it against Tara. She would have felt she was doing her civic duty, and to refuse to assist the Jaguars in their enquiries was not the wisest course of action a person could take. Nonetheless…

  “Unlike you, Tara respects the badge.” Vaughn was starting to get out of breath, but she ploughed doggedly on. “Now, it seems the Conquistador has never struck while you’ve been out of town. I find that interesting.”

  “ I find it circumstantial.”

  “But it’s something to go on. And if — no, when — I find Conquistador armour at your flat… Put all that together and we’re looking at a watertight conviction. No lawyer, however much he charges per hour, is going to be able to winkle you free. It’ll be a quick trial. Can’t say the same about the execution.”

  Tower Bridge loomed, Stuart’s crossing point, the start of the last leg of the journey.

  “Miss Vaughn?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that you’re on the wrong side in all this?”

  Her hesitation was brief, but the fact that she hesitated at all was telling. “I’m a Jaguar Warrior. I represent law and order. This is all I’ve ever wanted to do, all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

  “You prop up a ruthless dictatorship. You wield authority without accountability. You’re the puppet of a theocracy that dominates its subjects through fear and oppression.”

  “Someone has to administer justice. Someone has to keep crime in check.”

  “While working for the biggest criminals of all, the unelected rulers?”

  “Perhaps I’m just a realist.”

  “Or perhaps you’re so institutionalised, so conditioned by the regime, you no longer have any conception what reality is.”

  “You’re saying I’m brainwashed?”

  “That might be putting it strongly, but then how else would one describe a woman who shopped her own brother, her own flesh and blood, knowing the end result would be him being put to death?”

  Vaughn’s face, already coloured from the exertion of running, reddened further.

  “Oh yes,” Stuart said. “I’ve been doing my homework too.”

  “Well, aren’t you just the clever bastard?”

  “It can’t have been an easy thing, grassing him up. Ixtli, was that his name? I don’t suppose you were close, you and Ixtli. What with him being a gang member and you being police, it’d put a strain on any sibling relationship. Nevertheless, what you did was pretty cold, chief inspector.”

  He sprinted up the flight of stone steps that brought him to the roadway, level with the bridge. Inspector Vaughn remained beside him, and she was fuming now, her face contorted in a scowl of resentment.

  “I did what any good citizen would and should,” she said. “And I don’t have to justify it to you, or myself, or anyone.”

  “Still, I imagine it gave you the odd sleepless night. Maybe still does.”

  “Right,” she said with finality, as they set foot on the bridge. “I gave you a choice, Reston, remember that
. It was entirely your call how we play this. This is all on you now.”

  “What do you mean?” Stuart replied. “I’m nearly home. Look, I can see my building from here. What are you going to do?”

  The chief inspector signalled behind her, and ahead.

  All at once the rear doors of the unmarked paddy wagons parked at either end of the bridge opened, and uniformed Jaguars emerged. There were a couple of dozen of them, all told, and they swiftly fanned out across both lanes of the road, halting the traffic. They had lightning guns, and they levelled them at Stuart.

  Stuart slowed to a jog, then a walk. He and Vaughn were almost halfway across, near the seam where the bridge divided when raised.

  “Ah,” he said. “Ambush. Should’ve seen that coming.”

  “Isn’t that the whole point of an ambush? That you don’t?” said Vaughn. “We’ve got you pincered. No way off. You might as well surrender. It’s that or get zapped with enough voltage to remove your eyebrows.”

  “But not to kill?”

  “The High Priest would like to make a lesson of you. You have to have the longest, slowest, vilest death imaginable, and everyone has to see it and know why.”

  “So you need to take me alive,” said Stuart.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  No sooner had these words left his lips than Stuart sprang up onto the parapet of the bridge and hurled himself over the side.

  For one astonished second Mal stared at the space where Reston had been standing. She could not believe her eyes. Motherfucker. Motherfucker.

  Then, “No,” she said, and “No!” again, this time yelling, and she scrambled onto the parapet herself and dived after him.

  She had just enough time, between leaping off the bridge and landing in the water, to wonder what the hell she thought she was doing. When she hit the river surface the impact smacked the breath out of her lungs. She went under amid a welter of bubbles and flailed her way desperately back up to air.

  Dazed, treading water, she searched around for sight of Reston. The tide was running out, the current torpid. She couldn’t see him anywhere. There were cries from up on the bridge, Jaguars calling to her, asking if she was all right. She ignored them. Reston. Where was he? Had he drowned?

  Damn him if he had. Damn him to Mictlan. She wanted to march him into Scotland Yard for all to see. She didn’t want him to have taken the coward’s way out.

  Downstream, beyond the bridge, a head broke the surface. Reston came up with a mighty heaving gasp and almost immediately began toiling through the water, heading diagonally for shore. Mal set off after him. As she swam between two of the bridge pilings, the channelled current gave her extra impetus. She thrashed along, spitting warm, foul water out of her mouth. Reston was nearly fifty yards ahead, and whether he did or didn’t know she was hot on his heels, he powered hard. Mal dug deep and powered hard too.

  A small wooden dinghy with an outboard motor hove to beside Reston. The three young men on board extended hands to him over the gunwales. Concerned citizens trying to help, but Mal knew if Reston got onto the boat he would commandeer it and be off at a rate of knots.

  “No!” she spluttered. “Jaguar Warrior in pursuit. Do not touch that man.”

  Above the idling motor and their own shouts, the young men didn’t hear. They grabbed Reston’s wrists and started to haul him out.

  Up on the bridge a voice echoed Mal’s cry. It was Aaronson. Again the demand went unheard, but Aaronson backed it up with a well-aimed shot from his l-gun, which was set at antipersonnel level and so would not to do too much damage to property. The bolt of plasma hit the dinghy’s prow, charring and splintering. The three boaters got the message. Reston was dropped back in the river, and the dinghy reversed away with some haste.

  Reston resumed his bid for dry land. Mal was now much closer to him, just a few strokes behind, cutting through the swirls of surf left by his kicks. Reston reached the shallows and rose to his feet. The riverbed was thick, sticky mud. He waded laboriously towards a rusting, weed-draped ladder that would take him to street level. Mal, with a final frantic burst of effort, lunged out of the water after him.

  For once, being less heavily built than her quarry served her well. She didn’t sink as deeply into the mud as Reston did, and was able to traverse it more quickly. At the same time that Reston latched a hand onto a rung of the ladder, she latched a hand onto the back of his running singlet. She yanked hard, catching him off-balance, pulling him down into the mud.

  “You had to make a run for it, didn’t you?” she panted. “Had to make life as difficult as possible.”

  Reston reared up from the mud, but Mal whacked him back down with an elbow jab to the crown.

  “I was trying to appeal to the gentleman in you,” she said. “I thought you’d appreciate decency.”

  Reston struggled to rise again, while also aiming a punch at Mal’s knee. She foiled him with another vicious, stunning strike to the head.

  “Just stay put, will you? You’re under fucking arrest.”

  Reston grabbed for her ankle but she kicked his hand away with one muck-caked trainer.

  “I said stop resisting. You’re only going to get hurt.”

  He was weakening, exhausted. Mal was exhausted too, but charged up with adrenaline and righteousness. She stamped on Reston’s chest, forcing him so far down into the slimy shoreline ooze that his face almost went under. The mud sucked at him and held him fast, resisting his best efforts to writhe out of it. He scrabbled and clawed, but couldn’t free himself.

  Helmeted heads appeared above, peering over the embankment’s barrier railings. Mal looked up, still with one foot on Reston’s sternum like a safari hunter posing with a fresh kill.

  “Got him,” she said. “I want three of you down here now, with handcuffs and leg manacles. We’re bringing him in.”

  Cold, wet, trembling, steeped in mud up to her thighs, Mal had never felt better.

  TEN

  Same Day

  Within minutes, a bedraggled, mud-encrusted Stuart found himself being prodded at gunpoint into the back of a paddy wagon.

  He liked to think he had given the Jaguar Warriors a run for their money. He’d known, though, from the moment they sprung their little surprise for him on Tower Bridge, that there was a strong possibility the outcome would be this. When that boat had come by he thought his luck had turned, but it was not to be. He was in the authorities’ clutches now. At the mercy of Jaguar Warriors. Things could have looked less bleak, but Stuart refused to be discouraged. As long as he was alive there was always a chance of turning the situation around. Something could be done.

  He was made to sit on one of the narrow benches lining the interior walls of the paddy wagon. A chain was clamped onto his handcuffs, the other end secured to an eye-bolt in the floor. Jaguars crowded in on either side of him. Chief Inspector Vaughn planted herself directly opposite, so near that her knees were almost touching his. She looked extraordinarily pleased with herself, and frankly Stuart didn’t blame her.

  The rear doors slammed and the paddy wagon revved and pulled away.

  Stuart noticed noses wrinkling around him.

  “Yes, I know, I stink,” he said. “Phew! Sorry about that, everyone. The Thames isn’t the most pleasant of rivers to take a dip in. And all this mud too. Ninety per cent human waste, probably, and the rest fish shit.”

  The Jaguar to his right chuckled. Vaughn shot the man a look and he instantly fell silent.

  “Confined space,” Stuart continued. “Can’t be much fun for you people. At least the chief inspector here’s as guilty of reeking as I am. Although of course in every other respect she’s come up smelling of roses.”

  “Do you ever shut up, Reston?” Vaughn snapped.

  “I just felt I should apologise.”

  “Well, don’t. Don’t feel you should do anything.”

  The paddy wagon rumbled on for a little while. The rear section was windowless, partiti
oned off from the driving cab. A dim overhead bulb was the only illumination, and for Stuart there was nothing to see but policemen and l-guns.

  “Nice takedown, by the way,” he said to Vaughn. “You are one persistent little bloodhound, and no mistake.”

  “Why, thank you,” she replied in a sarcastic drawl. “Coming from you, that’s such a compliment.”

  “I like to pay beautiful women compliments.”

  “Ye gods, what a charmer. I’m getting moist between the legs.”

  Several of the Jaguars chuckled at this, and Vaughn was happy to let them.

  “I mean it, though,” Stuart said. “You are beautiful — as beautiful as you are formidable. I’m sure I’m not the only man here who fancies you. And I know for a fact that you have something of a reputation. Homework, remember? Word is, your morals are loose and your knicker elastic even looser.”

  Vaughn’s expression soured and hardened. “I’d advise you to stop talking right now.”

  “Queen of the quickie. Just ask anyone at the Yard.”

  Stuart hadn’t in fact spoken to anyone at the Yard. He’d found out about Vaughn’s background by ringing a journalist famed for his Jaguar contacts and offering him a hefty sum of money in return for a spot of private freelance research. The journalist, after a little delving, had come back with the story about Vaughn and her brother and also with rumours, unconfirmed, that the woman liked to put it about a bit and went on the occasional bender. “In every other respect,” the hack had told him, “she’s a model cop. They’ve all got bad habits, and hers, such as they are, are far from being the worst.”

  Vaughn was looking daggers at him across the van. “Are you trying to piss me off, Reston? Does it amuse you? Because believe me, down in the holding cells you’re not going to find life nearly so amusing.”

  “I’m just making light conversation. Trying to get us better acquainted. You can’t feel this thing between us?” Stuart gestured as expansively as his restraints would permit. “The sexual tension?”