Effigy

by Theresa Danley

  “He’s here for my father!” Eva blurted. There was a whimper in her voice.

  As John tried unsuccessfully to shoulder his glasses back into position, Diego turned on Eva. “Who is this John R. Friedman to you?” he asked. “This is not the young man you were with at the morgue.”

  Eva stiffened. “John is…” She took a deep breath, desperation filling her eyes. “John was a friend of my father’s.”

  “A friend,” Diego repeated doubtfully. “And was your padre planting bombs in pyramids too?”

  This time Eva remained silent. John still fidgeted his glasses with his shoulder. The room fell quiet except for the thumping of the agent’s boots pacing back across the floor. They shuffled to a halt in front of John again.

  “Well, since I cannot ask Señor Gaspar about it, I come back to you, John R. Friedman.” He reached up and righted John’s glasses, and they stared at each other once again. “I’ll ask only this once. Where did you hide the bomb?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” John insisted, bracing for another blow.

  “I think you do!” Diego threw the wallet. It hit John’s chest and dropped to his feet in a spray of passport and identification cards. The wallet appeared to have been stripped of everything else.

  Diego spun on his heel and took something from the officer behind him. He performed a snappy about-face holding John’s cell phone in his hand. He lifted the phone for John’s inspection. The screen was lit up with his last text message glowing on the display.

  “How do you explain this?” the agent asked. “What interest do you have in Tula? Could it be the bomb you hid in Pyramid B?”

  “I don’t—”

  John saw the blow coming this time. Diego’s balled fist, and the speed with which he flung it, landed squarely on the chin again, not as hard as the first, unless John had already grown numb to the abuse. At the very least, the blow hadn’t unseated his glasses this time.

  “Are you not working with the Equinox Killer?” Agent Diego asked. “Where did you plant that bomb?”

  John tasted blood in his mouth and a quick inspection with his tongue verified a loose molar. One more blow and he feared he’d be gumming bread and water for the rest of his life.

  “The sooner you cooperate, the easier I make this for you,” Diego said, calmly withdrawing his baton and tapping it in the palm of his hand.

  “Please,” John said. “I know nothing about a bomb.”

  He would have expected to hear the movement of air as the baton whipped through it, but instead he heard nothing until the cold weapon slammed into his abdomen, and it was the sound of his own air escaping his lungs that caught his attention. His knees went limp, and this time the officers let him fall to the dirt floor, his mouth gasping for a breath that his lungs refused to take.

  Eva was screaming for the beating to stop but the agent was already committed to the rhythms of his rage. The baton landed across John’s left shoulder, but the pain was trivial to the ache in his lungs—those vital organs that had somehow forgotten how to breathe.

  John’s face felt hot with the rush of blood as he stared at the flecks of dirt coating the floor. He would groan, but there was no air left in his lungs to usher such sounds. His chest seared with pain. Saliva and blood trickled from the corners of his mouth.

  Another blow glanced off his arm already twisted behind his back. John knew the collapse was coming, but not before Diego’s boot uppercut his belly. The blow lifted him off his knees and flung him onto his side. Had there been pain that followed John didn’t notice, for lying there on the cold, hard floor his lungs finally opened and the sweet rush of air flooded his chest once again.

  “Please stop!” Eva was screaming, on the verge of tears. “I can tell you where it is!”

  This time, Diego did stop. To John’s relief, the agent turned back to Eva, giving him the moment to inhale, then exhale.

  Inhale, exhale.

  Nothing before had ever felt so good as simply breathing.

  Diego was standing close to Eva now, his breath rustling the loose strands of raven hair falling around her face. “You can tell me what?” he asked, his baton still drumming in his hands.

  “The bomb,” she said.

  “Eva, no!” John gasped. Lord only knew what they’d do to her should they catch her in a lie.

  Eva maintained her resolve. Her eyes never faltered from the agent’s intimidating stare. Her voice had lost its tremble.

  “I know where the bomb is.”

  Mexico City

  Lori stepped off the bus, thankful to be alive and back among the civilized again. Unfortunately, her relief was marred by a deplorable guilt for having abandoned Dr. Peet. What right did she have to judge a man for falling in love? How could she criticize a relationship she knew very little about? Moreover, in all her collegiate years she had never known Dr. Peet to be a threat to anyone, much less herself. Could it be that Derek was exaggerating out of jealousy?

  She had silently wrestled with the situation all the way back to Mexico City. There was no sense talking to Derek about it given his obvious bias on the subject. The whole thing left her feeling unsettled and the way she’d handled it was the most upsetting of all. There was only one way to rectify the situation.

  “How do we get to the embassy from here?” she asked as Derek stepped off the bus behind her.

  “What’s the rush?” he asked.

  Lori started down the street. “We have to find Eva and Dr. Friedman.” And Dr. Peet. “Maybe the embassy can track them down. Maybe they can find out why they were arrested.”

  Derek reached into his pocket and withdrew his BlackBerry. “I’ll give them a call. Let them know we’re coming,” he said, pushing the power button.

  A green Volkswagen beetle started toward them with a taxi sign glowing like a crown. Lori hailed it down.

  “Not the bugs!” Derek warned, reaching for her elevated arm but it was too late. The taxi eagerly pulled up to the curb beside them.

  “It can take us to the embassy,” Lori said.

  “Yeah, but Friedman said—”

  “Do you see any other taxies around here?”

  Derek rolled his eyes with a relenting sigh. They climbed in behind the driver and Derek, in his best Spanish, ordered to be taken to the embassy. The cell phone chimed to life in his hand.

  “Did you find the number?” Lori asked as the taxi pulled onto the street.

  Derek shook his head. “I got a text message. From John.”

  Lori leaned in close, curious but confused. “What’s it say?”

  Derek frowned. “Nothing. It just says ‘Tula.’”

  “Tula?”

  “The cops must have taken them there.”

  Lori shook her head. She noticed the cab driver watching them through the rear view mirror. “Maybe,” she said, lowering her voice. “But Shaman Gaspar mentioned Tula in the note he left in the matchbook.”

  There was a sudden and unexpected spark in Derek’s eyes. “You think he left the effigy there?”

  Lori shrugged. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Maybe Dr. Friedman already found the effigy in Tula.”

  The cab driver’s eyes continued to shift from the road to the mirror, raising the hair on the back of Lori’s neck. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said uneasily, shifting her own gaze from the rear view mirror to Derek and then back again. “The cops arrested him in Teotihuacan.”

  “Maybe Friedman got away.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Either way, we have to go to Tula. It’s up to us now to find the effigy.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Lori asked in an airy bark. “Finding Eva and Dr. Friedman is a little more important than the effigy. Not to mention Dr. Peet, who must be in custody by now.”

  Derek wasn’t listening as he turned to the driver.

  “He’s not going to take us all the way out to Tula,” Lori protested, but Derek was already through his bilin
gual request, which visibly annoyed the driver.

  “Tell him to take us to the embassy,” she said, but her words were drowned by the quarrel already progressing between the two men. The argument quickly heated until the cab driver suddenly pulled a pistol and trained it on Derek.

  “Deme su dinero!” the driver demanded.

  Derek sat back in his seat.

  “What did you say to him?” Lori asked, irritably.

  “I told him to take us to Tula,” he growled, digging into his pockets. “Now he wants our money.”

  The driver trained the gun on Lori and yelled something she couldn’t possibly translate. Nonetheless, she hastily began searching her own pockets.

  Derek withdrew a handful of pesos but instead of handing them to the driver, he threw them in his face. The driver flinched at the onslaught. The car swerved. Derek grabbed the pistol. Before Lori could blink, he was flying over the seat, his fist pounding into the driver’s face.

  “You lowlife son-of-a-bitch!” he yelled as he pounded the driver over and over. The driver’s arms flailed helplessly. The car swerved uncontrollably. Lori’s own objection was lost among a chorus of honking horns.

  The Volkswagen skidded to a screeching halt, throwing Lori into the back of the seat in front of her and the driver into his steering wheel. Derek hadn’t lost a beat. His fists were flying until the defenseless driver hurled himself out onto the street. The pistol, which had fallen between them, was caught amid the scuttle and clattered to the pavement behind the driver as Derek slid in behind the wheel.

  With tires squealing again, Derek pulled away just as the grappling driver found his knees. From the rear window Lori watched him gather the pistol.

  “Get down!” she cried, just as the back window shattered from the gunshot. The bullet harmlessly buried itself in the upholstery of the seat in front of her.

  “Hang on!” Derek ordered. He twisted the wheel and they skidded around the corner, just dodging an oncoming garbage truck and drawing further and further from the pistol’s range.

  Lori took a deep breath. With the danger behind them, she tried to calm her frantic heart. “We have to go to the embassy,” she said between gasps.

  “We’re going to Tula,” Derek said with a husky finality to his voice. He kissed his inflamed knuckles, sucking the blood from one of them.

  “From this day forward,” he said, “we stay away from the bugs.”

  Diversion

  Peet pulled the sweaty mask off his face as he brought the van up to speed on MEX 132. In less than an hour he’d be back in Mexico City, certain he could find the embassy and straighten up this whole mess. He was confident they’d locate John, Eva and perhaps even Derek and Lori who, given the rental car still parked in Teotihuacan, he assumed had been captured by the police. The only thing he wasn’t certain of was the effigy.

  Maybe he just didn’t want to be certain about the effigy. In all likelihood, the artifact was gone. Stolen. Maybe even sold to some unscrupulous collector with his thumb on the pulse of the antiquities black market. Chances were he’d never see the effigy again, but Peet refused to think that way.

  It was hard for him to believe the effigy had been a lucky snag from some random robbery. Was Gaspar’s killer really the same thief Lori chased out of the university’s building of anthropology? The circumstances seemed far too coincidental not to be related. In fact, it seemed very likely that Gaspar was murdered for the effigy, but why? The measures taken for the thief to acquire the artifact seemed too extreme for someone planning to sell it on the black market. Then again, if enough money was on the line…well, what did he know anyway?

  There was something else going on—something he wished he’d never become entangled with. Like a detective, his mind started rolling through the facts. Maybe it was the AFI uniform he was wearing, or the archaeologist inside him still striving for answers. Whatever it was, he couldn’t resist toying with the puzzle pieces laid out before him.

  Shaman Gaspar had been clearly obsessed with Quetzalcoatl and all the astronomical significance that followed the deity. Even as Peet followed the traffic on MEX 132 he was aware of the sun climbing across the sky, on its way to rendezvous with the moon and the Pleiades above Chichen Itza, thus ascending Quetzalcoatl to his throne.

  The effigy surely symbolized this event to Shaman Gaspar and his New Age followers. As highly revered as this Age of Quetzalcoatl had been to Gaspar’s followers, could there be others who highly despised it? Was there another cult out there, secretly devising a plan to thwart the New Age belief?

  If that was the case, there wasn’t much time left. If someone was trying to destroy the New Age of Quetzalcoatl, they’d have to get it done by noon, a little over an hour away.

  He became aware of the van’s radio squawking from the dash panel. He could usually decipher Spanish all right, but he couldn’t keep pace with the words smearing over the radio waves. Nevertheless, he could tell the voice was growing more urgent, and twice now, he caught the words veinte seis.

  He glanced at the simple plastic key fob dangling from the ignition. The keys had been labeled for unit twenty-six. It dawned on him that the dispatcher was calling for his vehicle.

  They were calling for him!

  No sooner had the realization struck than a police cruiser blazed past, headed the other way. Peet checked the rearview mirror and sure enough, the cruiser was peeling through the meridian, turning around. It headed straight for him.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  Peet turned the wheel and the van careened off the shoulder, bounced through the desert in a spray of sand and found traction again on a gravel road. He slammed the accelerator to the floor and the engine responded with a repressed growl. The pursuing unit wasn’t far behind.

  “Shit!”

  He raced down the road with the cruiser inching up on him. Peet urged the van for everything it had, but it wasn’t enough. He slammed on the brakes and skidded onto an intersecting road but the chase only continued across the desert from there. A boiling cloud of dust reeled off the van’s wheels, veiling the cruiser behind him, but Peet sensed it was drawing closer.

  He raced past a small group of goats herded by a boy who ducked beneath the onslaught of rocks flying from his tires. Peet only saw him for a brief moment, and then the boy and his goats were swallowed by the choking dust in his wake. He still couldn’t see the car behind him, but he became aware of a rapid thrumming overhead, urging him ever forward.

  Small plots of corn and agave flew by in an interchangeable patchwork of cropland and desert. Farmhouses were nestled here and there. Just ahead, the road appeared to dead end.

  Peet slammed on the brakes again. The van skimmed out of control across the gravel as the road took an abrupt ninety degree turn at the lip of a dry arroyo. He gripped the wheel tighter and as the van spun out of the way, the cruiser exploded out of the cloud of dust, crashed through a wooden guard rail and flew off the edge, diving nose first into the sand at the bottom of the shallow arroyo.

  There wasn’t time to examine the scene, for Peet caught a glimpse of the helicopter thum-thum-thumping overhead. He hit the accelerator one moment, then thought about it the next as the van surged forward again. For being innocent of whatever charges they were pursuing him for, he was sure giving them enough reason to convict him.

  This was getting ridiculous. As he raced down the road he knew he couldn’t outrun a helicopter. There was nowhere to hide, no arroyos to help him this time. He was debating on his next move when a spray of bullets pelted the road just ahead, deciding for him. He slammed on the brakes and the van skidded to a final halt. The smell of dust settling over a hot engine permeated the air.

  The helicopter lowered across the road in front of him and when it reached the ground, three AFI officers spilled from the dirt lifted by the rotor wash. In an instant they were there, jerking him out of the van, throwing him to the ground and cuffing his arms behind his back. When they pulled him back t
o his feet, Peet found himself forced toward the helicopter.

  “No! Wait!” he said, planting his Gore-Tex boots into the sand. His resistance was ineffective against the armed officers.

  “Stop!” he cried. “Take me back in the van if you want. Just don’t put me in that chopper.”

  The butt of a rifle slammed into his stomach. Peet had seen it coming. He’d tightened his abs against the blow, and although it didn’t entirely knock the wind out of him, it certainly caught his attention.

  “Can’t we drive?” Peet gasped. “Camino?”

  There was no response as the officers shoved him into the helicopter. Inside he was trapped, and he gritted his teeth as the officers clambered in around him. A resurgence of helplessness engulfed him in a way he hadn’t felt since that tragic day in Chaco. The rotors pounded the air even faster and the floor suddenly lifted beneath him. The sandy red earth fell away—like Cathy’s blood on the Chaco desert.

  Peet panicked.

  “I can’t fly,” he said, twisting in his restraints. “I’ll go anywhere in a car.”

  It felt as though all of his weight had been sucked down into the seat of his pants as the helicopter surged upward like the light end of an overbalanced scale. Peet was near dizzy thinking about the altitude they were reaching. He desperately wrestled for freedom.

  “Put me down. Put me down!”

  Two officers pounced and to Peet’s surprise, his hand slipped out of the cuffs from his frantic efforts. His elbow slammed into the face of the first officer, instantly paralyzing his arm with a numbing tingle. The second officer had him in a head lock as Peet slammed his boot into the third officer’s chest, sending him careening backwards against the door that easily sprang open. The man fell right out of the helicopter. There was nothing Peet could do for he was still wrestling with the second officer while the first pounced again.