Effigy

by Theresa Danley

  He kicked again but missed. Instead, his sole made contact with a loose rifle behind him. The gun discharged two deafening rounds, the first bullet harmlessly disappearing somewhere, the second ricocheting into the control panel in front of the pilot.

  The helicopter suddenly dropped. Peet found himself sucked to the roof by the force of the dive. He gulped, trying to keep his stomach down and about the time he began to feel the helplessness of real fear, the chopper leveled off and he and the two officers fell to the floor in a heap. He dragged himself up and heard the pilot barking something in Spanish, saw his hands fisted around the controls. The veins were bulging from the strain and that’s when Peet realized he still hadn’t regained control. They were still falling, pitching recklessly back and forth.

  Peet reached for anything he could hold on to, which turned out to be the leg of the nearest officer who was desperately searching for a handhold himself. He kicked off Peet’s grip, landing a swift blow to his cheek in the process. The tail of the helicopter swung wildly, sending Peet skidding for the open door. One final lurch and he was falling, his hand still clutched around a balaclava mask and an empty rifle cartridge.

  The ground came quick and hard.

  As Peet lay stunned upon the crushed stalks of an immature corn field, he became aware of the helicopter sputtering above him. Its shadow passed over him like an eagle over a rabbit. But this bird was floundering, listing precariously on its side so that Peet could see the whites of the officer’s eyes as he slid out of its belly.

  Peet scrambled to his feet and raced as fast as his legs could carry him through the softened soil. Just when he reached the edge of the corn row he heard the crunch of animated metal and the deafening explosion that followed. The force hurled him back to the ground with a scalding wave of heat.

  The sound of his own breathing eased through the static of his ringing ears. Then he heard the flames. The air was heavy with toxic smoke. His stomach could take no more. Before he even found his knees he was heaving and then he vomited his fear right into the irrigation water trickling at the end of the corn row. The black mask was still there in his crushing grip, though where he’d dropped the rifle cartridge, he couldn’t say. The cuffs still dangled from one wrist.

  With his stomach and the ringing in his ears slowly settling, Peet clambered back to his feet and forced his rubbery legs to carry him onward. He didn’t know where he would go, he just had to get going.

  When he topped a small rise just beyond the burning corn field, he found himself looking down into the lowlands of two intersecting rivers. A town slightly more urban than rural sprawled along the banks to the billowing stacks of a refinery in the distance. In the foreground rose a rather blunt precipice crowned by the jagged ruins of an ancient city. He recognized the cluster of rigid telamons standing atop the broad platform of an unfinished pyramid. They were the Atlanteans—the watermarks of Tula.

  PART VI

  A New Age

  Of the fire priest…who was experienced, it was his office to draw, to drill, the new fire.

  Fray Bernardino De Sahagún, Florentine Codex

  Tula

  Dr. John Friedman leaned in close to the van’s tinted window until he could feel the cool glass on his cheek. They were speeding ever northward, but his attention was drawn to the blanched glare of the sun nearing its ecliptic apex in the white sky above them. Hidden somewhere in the bright wash of light was the moon and the Pleiades, three heavenly bodies marching toward the same point high in the sky.

  This was the day, the very solar conjunction, foreseen well over a thousand years ago by the Toltecs, and later the Aztecs and the Mayans. John realized he was witnessing the very hour for which all of Mesoamerica had been holding its breath. His mind wandered to Chichen Itza, to the Pyramid of Kukulkan where the New Age Followers of Quetzalcoatl were no doubt gathering for their blessed event.

  “It’s almost noon,” he observed aloud.

  Eva didn’t bother to respond. She had her face turned to her own window but John could still see her dismal expression through the reflection in the tinted glass.

  “Quetzalcoatl is nearing his throne in the sky,” he continued thoughtfully. “Perhaps this really is the fabled return.”

  “Don’t you ever stop?”

  John snapped out of his reverie. “I beg your pardon?”

  Eva turned from the window. Her face was hollow and weary, her long black hair collapsing in tendrils from the clip at the back of her head. “Stop talking!” she blurted. “I don’t care about Quetzalcoatl or those stories of his return. I don’t even give a damn about the New Age. I wish to God I’d never heard of the Toltecs or their calendars or this stupid power of Quetzalcoatl. I don’t care!”

  The officer driving the van glared back at them through the rear view mirror. “Quiete.”

  Eva slumped back, her arms pinned, like John’s, between the seat and her back. She too was glaring at John.

  “How can you even talk about Quetzalcoatl at a time like this?” she hissed, and with that, she turned back to her window.

  John watched her for a moment, hoping she’d turn back to him, but she didn’t. Finally, with a cautious glance at the two officers in the front seat, he leaned over and whispered, “I believe you care more about this than you’ll admit.”

  She turned back so fast that he thought her neck would crack like a whip. Her eyes snapped with contempt. “I care only that I lost my son because of those stories, and now my father has died chasing them.”

  “But there’s more to it than that,” John said matter-of-factly.

  Eva’s eyes narrowed into a how-dare-you-question-me look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I believe you do. Why else are you here?”

  “If you’ll recall I’m in Mexico only because of my careless father.”

  Her voice was growing louder so John tried to counteract it with a low, steady tone. “I’m not talking about Mexico. I mean why are you here, right now, in this van flying ninety miles an hour towards Tula?”

  “It was your damned cell phone that tipped the police about Tula.”

  “Yes, but it was you who promised them a bomb.”

  The van slowed as they approached the town of Tula de Allende. Atop the precipice just ahead, John knew, awaited the ancient ruins of Tula. The van eased past a road blockade turning away the day’s visitors and tourists, and continued up the hill to the parking lot now besieged by AFI vehicles and squad cars from the local municipal police. There, they finally stopped.

  Eva began to chew her lip, but the fire still smoldered in her eyes. “I had to lie about the bomb,” she said as the two officers in the front seat got out of the van. “I couldn’t let them beat you to death.”

  “That’s very admirable,” John said, “but who am I to you? You’re putting your life on the line for an old man you met barely twenty-four hours ago. Why?”

  Eva worried her lip more fiercely and quickly turned back to her window.

  “Would you have done the same for your father?” John pressed.

  Silence.

  John hesitantly leaned in close again until he was nearly whispering in her ear. “Have you considered the consequences should you fail to produce a bomb?”

  “I’m not here to hand over a bomb,” Eva snarled.

  He sat back again. “I know you’re not. You’re here because of that note your father left in the matchbook. ‘Don’t let One Reed reach Tollan.’”

  “It said ‘Reed One,’” she corrected.

  “Nonetheless. Despite your apparent contempt toward your father’s teachings, I believe there’s a little girl inside you who wants to believe in the power of Quetzalcoatl.”

  “Stop it.”

  “We’re not here to look for a bomb. You used that as a means to get us to Tula so we can search for the effigy.”

  Eva glared at him again. Her wavering countenance hardened into absolute assurance, suggesting she knew exactly what
she was doing.

  “I didn’t bring us here to find an artifact,” she snapped.

  “Then why did you agree to produce a bomb you know entirely nothing about?”

  The side door flew open and an officer grabbed Eva’s arm. As she was manhandled out of the van, she looked at John one last time. Her eyes still flared with anger, vainly masked by a tear threatening escape.

  “There’s something far more important in my father’s note than that damned old effigy,” she said.

  As she found her feet outside the van, the second officer rolled the door shut behind her. With a metallic clank of the lock, John was trapped alone in the silence that followed.

  Eva was gone.

  Blockade

  “Looks like the cops crashed a party,” Derek said, though he doubted the scene before them was the result of something so simple.

  They were at the end of a long line of cars abandoned in tandem along the road. Derek could just make out the cause less than a hundred yards ahead. He’d noticed the road blockade animated in red and blue squad car lights a full mile before they’d even reached the jam, and now he could see the mob that had gathered around.

  “Looks more like someone kicked a bee’s nest,” Lori mumbled.

  It was the first thing she’d said since they left Mexico City. Derek sensed her indignation. It left a moody overtone between them as she stewed over his decision to race back to Tula, especially after being so close to the embassy. He sensed her distrust. In fact, he supposed the only reason she was still tagging along was either because she was too afraid to jump out of a moving vehicle or simply because they were the last of their group still intact, two survivors now dependant upon each other.

  Whatever the circumstances, they didn’t matter to Derek now. The hope of finding the effigy was still alive. Despite Lori’s differing opinion, finding the effigy was most important. The arrests of Eva and Dr. Friedman could be sorted out later, after he found the effigy, after he rescued the only thing that could salvage his reputation and offset the consequences of stealing it in the first place. By then, Lori will have forgotten all about the displeasure she was feeling now.

  As Derek stopped the Volkswagen, his attention was drawn to a bold white t-shirt floating among the crowd that surged against the blockade. He spotted another. Then another, and on every white shirt was the black serpentine glyph from Shaman Gaspar’s newsletters.

  What are the New Agers doing here?

  He opened the car door.

  “Where are you going?” Lori asked.

  “I’ve got to find out what’s going on.”

  He quickly slipped out of the car and slammed the door on Lori’s protest. Without hesitation, he wove through the parked cars. As he drew closer to the police blockade, he heard the mob’s fury as they shouted profanities at the police.

  Derek was trying to make sense of the scene when he heard a thread of English break through the crowd.

  “Let us in, you grease-back sons-a-bitches!” a man was hollering, his face ripe with anger. He was clearly American, possibly an expatriate.

  “What’s going on?” Derek asked as he sidled up beside the angry man.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” he barked back. “They’re preventing us from paying our tribute.”

  “But the New Age celebration is in Chichen Itza,” Derek prodded.

  The man appraised him with a doubtful eye, as though questioning what Derek was doing here if he was so concerned about the New Age gathering.

  Derek backpedaled. “I mean, I don’t know about you, but I just couldn’t afford the trip,” he clarified.

  The man accepted that with a nod. “Neither could the rest of us,” he explained. “But when we heard about Shaman Gaspar, the Hidalgo Chapter decided to pay him tribute here.”

  At first, Derek was shocked to learn that the shaman’s death had already reached the New Agers. But looking around at the white t-shirts, primarily worn by Mexicans, it began to make sense. Of course the Hidalgo Chapter would have learned of the murder. They would have heard about it the same way he had—through the local news.

  “I thought Shaman Gaspar was found in Teotihuacan,” Derek proceeded cautiously. “Why aren’t we gathering there?”

  The man frowned as he focused his dark eyes on Derek. “The point is to celebrate Shaman Gaspar’s life, not his death. Tula was the capital of the Toltecs. This is where he spent much of his time.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend—”

  “If you’d known Shaman Gaspar at all, you would have realized how careless your question was.”

  Derek suppressed an impulse of outrage. He’d known the shaman just as well as, if not better than, the most loyal of New Age followers but this wasn’t the time or the place to squabble over words. If he wanted to get any more information from this guy, he had to play along.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, humbling his dishonesty. “I’ve only been a member for a month.”

  That seemed enough to convince the New Ager. The man nodded with consent, though the scowl had not yet left his brow. “If you ask me, there’s something fishy about all this,” he said in a lowered voice—so low that Derek barely heard him over the angry shouts of the New Agers.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  The man turned to him and leaned in close. The anger had dissipated from his face, but not his eyes.

  “Citlalpol is missing,” he said. “Now Shaman Gaspar’s dead. This is the time for someone to step up and take leadership of the New Agers. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  Derek studied his demanding face. There was something startling in the way the New Ager stared at him. “Who?” he asked.

  “That apprentice Gaspar’s kept tucked away all this time. You know—Acatzalan.”

  Derek’s heart skipped a beat. “Acatzalan?”

  “He’s the one that should be here paying tribute to Shaman Gaspar, but do you see him?”

  Derek gulped. “Maybe he’s in Chichen Itza.”

  “You don’t see him here because nobody knows who this guy is. Fishy, I tell you. Now’s the time for this so-called apprentice to reveal himself, but he won’t. Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  The man leaned in close enough to speak just beneath the noise of the crowd. “Between you and me, I think this Acatzalan has something to do with our disappearing leaders. He has to be the one that killed Shaman Gaspar and I’m willing to bet he’s killed Citlalpol too.”

  Derek’s chest felt constricted. After all this time searching for the effigy in order to cover his own ass, he never imagined his obscure alter ego might incidentally hang him out to dry. Even if he did return the effigy and clear his name of the theft, he might still face conviction for a more serious crime he didn’t even commit. That was, unless he could prevent anyone from connecting him to Acatzalan.

  He swallowed hard and wiped his sweaty palms across his shorts. “Why would Acatzalan kill our leaders?”

  “For the money. Rumor has it the New Age account was cleaned out three days ago. You do the math.”

  Derek was already figuring. Chances were Gaspar took the money himself in order to pay his way into Mexico, but these New Agers wouldn’t buy that. They weren’t about to believe their leader who’d preached only peace and harmony would clean them out of their money. Naturally, the mysterious Acatzalan would fall under suspicion, and that left Derek feeling himself swindled by the shaman.

  The expatriate straightened to scan the small progress the New Agers were making on the police. When he turned back to Derek, there was a startling surety to his voice. “I say first thing tomorrow, we hunt down this Acatzalan. Someone must know what he looks like or where he lives. Are you in?”

  So much for the new age of harmony.

  Derek wanted nothing more than to get away from there. “First, we should pay tribute to Shaman Gaspar,” he said nervously. “Has anyone tried skirting around the blockade?”

  The man smi
led. “Are you kidding me? The AFI are crawling all over the place.”

  “They are?”

  “Yeah. Someone heard they’re looking for a bomb. They’ve had Tula surrounded for almost an hour.”

  Derek turned away then, and ran smack into Lori. “Did you catch all that?” he asked.

  “I heard something about a bomb,” she said as Derek grabbed her arm and spun her back around.

  He quickened their pace, hoping nobody would recognize him escaping to the back of the crowd. He kept Lori close to his side, using her as a shield against any suspicious onlookers.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, throwing her elbow out as he tried to step in closer.

  “Just don’t want the cops to recognize me,” he lied.

  “And what if they recognize me?”

  “Just keep moving.”

  They cleared the crowd and as the New Agers’ angry voices fell behind them, Derek felt like he could breathe again. He spotted the green taxi cab ahead. More vehicles had parked in behind it, but he thought there might be enough room to back the beetle out between them.

  “We should go back to the embassy,” Lori said. “We’ve wasted enough time already.”

  “Not until we find the effigy.”

  “We can’t even get into the park,” she protested.

  “We’ll get in,” Derek said, reaching for the door handle of the cab.

  “Oh? And how do you plan on doing that?”

  Derek threw the door open and looked back at her with a nervous grin. “We have a Volkswagen, don’t we?”

  Ballcourt

  By the time Mateo reached the recessed ballcourt at the far end of the ruins, the AFI had blockaded the road into the archaeological park and had already besieged the flat-topped Pyramid B. Nobody could enter or escape Tula without AFI interference except, if one were so inclined, by climbing the backside of the slope leading up to the ballcourt, distant from the AFI’s attention. A perfect scenario.