“To congratulate me? Give me a medal?”
“Don’t be obtuse. To recruit you. We have need of your skills and expertise. Xibalba could truly do with a man like you in its ranks.”
“I’m a solo operator,” Stuart said immediately.
“I know, but –”
“It’s worked okay for me so far. I don’t think I could be part of a unit. I wouldn’t mesh well.”
“I would debate that. With your Eagle Warrior background, you know about giving and taking orders, chain of command, watching a comrade’s back, teamwork, all of that.”
“That was a long time ago. I’ve been my own boss ever since.”
“You’d still be an invaluable asset to us,” said Chel. “And, really, don’t you yearn for a chance to hit the Empire right at its very heart? Destroy it once and for all?” The Mayan paused, then smiled. “I saw it – that telltale flash of curiosity on your face, just before you concealed it. You were thinking, Is it possible? Is this funny little round man really saying he can bring down the Empire?”
“I’d like to think it can be done,” said Stuart. “Of course I would.”
“But you’d settle for simply liberating your own country from oppression? Free Britain and leave the rest of the world to sort itself out?”
“Why not?”
“Do you honestly, in your heart of hearts, think that’s going to happen? How?”
“The Conquistador’s example will spark an uprising. People have seen me kill priests. I’ve shown our government to be vulnerable. In time, there’ll be a groundswell, a mounting tide of anti-imperial sentiment that’ll become a full-fledged revolt.”
“Shouldn’t it have begun by now? Where are the protestors on the streets, Mr Reston? Where are the hordes of Conquistador-alikes emulating you?”
“Turning a large ship around takes a long time. If I keep at it, the public mood will shift eventually.”
“Well, perhaps. Or perhaps, if you’re really fortunate, a microbial infection will come along and wipe out all Aztecs, as it did the Martians in Wells’s novel. A somewhat unconvincing conclusion, I’ve always thought. It suggests the author was dredging up hope where he himself felt none. Nevertheless, my proposal to you is this. Come with us to Anahuac. Work alongside us. We have a plan of action that will finish the Empire, and we’d like your assistance is implementing it.”
“Go on, then,” said Stuart. “What is it? What’s the big idea?”
“Simple. Kill the Great Speaker.”
STUART WAS SILENT for a full minute.
Then, shaking his head, he whistled softly and said, “You’re crazy.”
“Am I?”
“It’s not possible. Can’t be done. Tenochtitlan, the guards, the levels of security around him, not to mention his palace is stuck in the middle of a fucking great lake... Out of the question.”
“But if it could be done, would you join us?”
“No.”
“You’re not even tempted? You’ve been a gadfly to the Empire, and that’s all well and good, but what if you could help be its executioner? Kill the Great Speaker, cut off the Empire’s head, and the Empire itself will surely wither and collapse.”
“Still no. It sounds like a recipe for suicide. Pointless suicide. You’d never get anywhere near the Great Speaker. Certainly never get within striking range.”
Chel sighed with heavy emphasis. “Then, alas, it seems I’ve had a wasted journey. Well, not entirely wasted. I’ve met the Conquistador in person, and managed to ensure that he can continue his dissidence a little while longer. That’s something.”
He rose and held out his hand.
“It’s been a pleasure, Mr Reston,” he said as they shook. “I can’t say I’m not disappointed by the outcome of our chat, but” – he shrugged – “win some, lose some. Oh, we still have your armour, don’t we? I know you have those other suits, but would you like it back?”
“Yes. They don’t come cheap.”
“Let us arrange its return. We’ll be discreet, I assure you. In the meantime, please give further consideration to what I’m suggesting. Perhaps you’ll change your mind.”
“I won’t,” said Stuart.
“You might just,” said Chel. “I’ll see myself out.”
SIX
Same Day
MAL AWOKE WITH a clanging hangover, her head throbbing as though there was a chainmailed fist inside trying to punch its way out. She made it to the bathroom just in time. Bent double over the toilet, she vomited until there seemed to be nothing left to come up but stomach lining.
A whole bottle of pulque would do that to you.
Trembling, her entire skeleton feeling as brittle as chalk, she fixed herself a mug of coca tea. She sat at the kitchen table, staring out of the window at the glow of yet another furnace-hot day. When the phone rang, she refused to answer it. It would be work calling. Probably Kellaway himself, full of spite and spittle. Where the hell are you, chief inspector? Drag your sorry arse down to the Yard immediately!
Twice more in the next half hour the phone rang. The sound bored into her ears like an electric drill. She nearly picked up the receiver just to stop the pain.
She was tempted to go back to bed, haul the covers over her head, and sleep for as long as she could. But her troubles weren’t going to magically disappear, however hard she ignored them. The fiasco at Regent’s Park had happened, and wishing it hadn’t couldn’t unhappen it.
She showered, turning the water as cold as it would go. By means of this chilly dousing and more coca tea, she wrestled the hangover into submission. By the time she was dressed, Mal had regained some semblance of normality.
The phone rang yet again, and now she picked up. Bracing herself for the chief super at full blast, she was relieved to hear Aaronson’s voice instead.
“Boss? Finally. It’s gone ten. Why aren’t you at work yet?”
“Why are you? You’re supposed to be in hospital recovering.”
“Aah, I discharged myself. It was fucking boring. Not a decent-looking doctor in sight, not like on the TV shows.”
“But they said something about running more tests. On all of you who got poison-darted.”
“For what? It was heavily-diluted curare. Enough of a dose to turn your muscles to noodles, but that’s all, nothing worse. It wasn’t much fun lying there unable to move, and I feel like shit now, but hey, I’m not dead. How about you?”
“Aftereffects of mild concussion. I’ve got a couple of goose-egg bruises on my skull, but I spent most of the night self-medicating. I’ll be fine.”
“Paying your respects to Mayahuel?”
“The goddess of the fermented agave plant did get a good deal of worshipping, yes,” said Mal. “What’s the mood like over there? Dare I show my face?”
“Everyone’s still a bit staggered. Can’t quite figure out how it all went so wrong, just when it looked like we were about to pull it off. Nobody’s blaming you, but... Permission to speak freely?”
“Granted,” Mal sighed.
“You need to be here. You need to put on a brave face and bluff it out. Better that than skulking at home, hiding. It’ll look bad if you don’t show, however much you’d like not to.”
“Okay, Aaronson. Thanks for that. And thanks again for what you did at the theatre. Taking the dart for me. I... I really appreciate it.”
“Too bad the Conquistador still got away. Who were those people, boss? Why did they save him?”
“Not the foggiest. But I aim to find out, and when I do, the bastards are dead meat.”
“That’s the spirit, boss. That’s the Mal Vaughn I know and fear.”
MAL COULDN’T REMEMBER a time when she hadn’t dreamed of becoming a Jaguar Warrior. As a child, she had loved the formal uniform, especially the cat-head helmet that gleamed and snarled, with jade-like eyes that flashed in the sun.
Her brother Ix used to laugh at her whenever she admitted her ambition to join the force. At first, when they w
ere little, he laughed because she was a girl, and a puny one at that, and he couldn’t believe she would ever grow tall enough or brawny enough to look like the Jaguars they saw out patrolling the streets.
Later, when they were in their teens, Ix’s laughter became more cynical. “Yeah, sis, great idea,” he would say. “Be a paid thug. Carry a macuahitl and an l-gun. Beat up innocents and enforce the status quo. You go right ahead.” By then Ix was running with a gang, petty crooks committing petty crimes, and his anti-establishment posturing was a self-justifying rationale for his delinquent behaviour. The Empire, the hieratic caste, the Jaguars, they were all parts of a machine designed to suppress the freedom of the individual – by which Ix meant the freedom of the individual to shoplift, vandalise, drink underage, and mug pensioners. He believed, although perhaps not as wholeheartedly as he might have liked, that by hanging out with his cronies and causing trouble he was somehow striking a blow against the system.
Whereas to Mal, and other right-thinking types, he was simply being a mindless twat.
They stopped talking, the two of them, the day Mal sent in her Jaguar Warrior application form. She had just turned eighteen, the minimum required age. She had filled out, too, no longer the stick insect she had been when little, now a sturdy young woman who had captained the school’s senior girls tlachtli team and gained a reputation as the toughest player in the south London education authority leagues, with a string of broken opponents’ noses and ankles to her credit.
“You disgust me,” were Ix’s last words to her before he turned his back on her for good. “Go be the Empire’s whore. See if I care. You’re fucking scum, that’s what you are.”
Brother and sister weren’t to see each other again until a year after Mal finished her training and made constable. She knew from her parents that Ix had gone completely off the rails. He would turn up at their house now and then, usually after dark, looking wretched and demanding cash. He would become abusive if they didn’t cough up, and there was that time he threatened their father with a knife. The old man was whisked to hospital the next day with a suspected heart attack. He recovered, but from then on was never the same. Weakened and sad. A shell of himself.
Eventually Ix’s and Mal’s paths crossed again, as she had somehow known they would. Ix had started working for a mob boss, Davey Furman, whose gang, the Battersea Batterers, ran most of the rackets south of the Thames, from Putney to Camberwell. Ix made himself useful shaking down shopkeepers for protection money, intimidating would-be grasses, and defending Batterers turf against incursions from rival gangs. At least he was earning a decent wage now, so that he didn’t have to go terrorising their parents for handouts any more.
Furman had several people high up in the Jaguar Warrior ranks in his back pocket, and it was informal policy to turn a blind eye to his gangster activities unless they were unusually egregious. Then the incumbent High Priest died and a new man was elevated to that position, the current holder of the office, His Very Holiness Seldon Whitaker. Whitaker fancied himself a hardliner, with zero tolerance for criminality of any description. One of his first edicts, issued with new-broom zeal, was that organised racketeering in Britain’s cities must come to an end.
Even corrupt police officials could not soft-pedal a direct and unequivocal order like that, so a clampdown got under way. In London that meant Battersea Batterer haunts were raided and ransacked. Known associates of Furman were brought in for interrogation, which many of them did not survive. Underlings were snatched off the streets, never to be seen again, except for those who ended up doing hard time in one of the Empire’s notorious subterranean jails, and they were broken ghosts of themselves when they finally returned home. The gang was dismantled piecemeal, and its worst, most notorious felons were convicted of offences ranging from GBH to first degree murder, all of which carried the death penalty. The months after Whitaker took charge were not good ones for the urban mob fraternity, and the Batterers bore the brunt.
Which was why Mal was less than shocked when her brother appeared on her doorstep in the small hours one night. She had been expecting it. That or finding his name on the list of death row inmates, awaiting execution.
“Help me,” Ix begged. “Please. Only you can.”
He looked a mess, grubby and unshaven, his expensive suit wrinkled and creased. He had been on the run for several days, he told Mal, sleeping rough or on friends’ floors. The net was closing in around him. He’d gone to visit Furman but the Batterers’ leader was nowhere to be found; word on the street was that he’d fled the country. The whole enterprise was falling down around the gang’s ears. It had all turned to shit. There were Jaguars on every corner, hunting. Nowhere to hide.
“But you’ll do right for me, won’t you, Mal? I mean, I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but we’re still brother and sister, still blood, beneath it all. And blood helps blood, yeah? If I’m caught, I’m dead, simple as that. But you can see that that doesn’t happen, can’t you?”
“How, Ix? What am I supposed to do? Put in a good word for you somewhere? Ask my colleagues to just sort of step around you? How exactly can I help? You got yourself up shit creek. I don’t have the paddle.”
He looked so crestfallen then that it nearly broke her heart. He became the little boy she remembered, two years older than her and often cruelly dismissive of her, but sensitive, too, at times, easily hurt if she rejected him. She recalled how he could be her mortal enemy at home but was ever ready to leap to her defence at school if she got bullied or was in trouble. She hated to see him crushed in this way. He regarded her as his last and only hope.
“Look,” she said, “come in. I’ll put you up for the night. I’ll do right for you.”
“Oh, thank you, Mal! By all the Four, thank you! I don’t know what to say. You’re the best,” and he hugged her, hard, as he had never hugged her before. Mal made up a bed for him on the sofa, and Ix dropped straight off, snoring soundly in what was probably the deepest, sweetest sleep he had had in ages. She stayed up watching him for a long while, and then she did what was right for him. And for her.
Jaguar Warriors came at dawn. Mal let them in. Ix awoke to find himself surrounded by drawn macuahitls. The Jaguars handcuffed him. He went quietly, too overwhelmed by her betrayal to resist or even to speak. At the last moment, as he was being manhandled out through the door to the waiting squad car, he turned and shot his sister a fulminous look. His eyes seethed with rage and outrage and, beneath that, sheer despairing agony.
Mal was invited to attend his beheading. She chose not to. Likewise their parents. Ix Vaughn was consigned to Mictlan alone, unwitnessed, sobbing his eyes out.
In return for having done her duty, Mal was promoted to acting sergeant, transferred to the CID and put on the fast track to an inspectorship. Loyalty to the Jaguars had outweighed loyalty to family, and that was truly laudable and deserving of reward.
Mal of course had not shopped her brother for personal gain. Her motive had simply been a desire not to see bad deeds go unpunished. That, to her, mattered more, far more than kinship.
She would never again feel the same way about being a Jaguar Warrior, however. Like her father after the heart attack, she had lost something vital. There was a taint on her life. Where before she’d had the courage of her convictions and an ability to keep the shadows of doubt at bay, now all that was gone. A single decision – a taking of sides – had changed her utterly and irrevocably.
In the years that followed, Mal advanced professionally in leaps and bounds, fully repaying the force’s faith in her abilities. She was not quite the youngest person ever to be appointed detective, but close. She set about racking up an enviable tally of arrests and commendations. She earned a reputation as a harsh but fair taskmaster. She had the kind of career that parents would boast about, especially parents who were staunch Empire loyalists and showed it by giving their children Nahuatl forenames such as Ixtli and Malinalli, and even more especially parents whose other
child had proved such a disappointment.
Where Mal’s private life was concerned, things were less rosy. A lot of alcohol abuse went on, and the closest she got to a committed relationship was a short run of assignations with the same person, although that was rare. Usually she preferred the anonymous, no-strings drunken fuck, at the other participant’s place not hers, followed by a bad-breathed but guiltless departure before breakfast. One-night stands with men, ideally much younger men, whom she would never have to meet again. Those and the booze stopped her thinking too hard about anything much. Her conscience was quietened. The shadows shrank.
Shrank but returned. Constantly returned, denser and darker. For almost a full solar year, Mal had felt she was losing the battle with her misgivings. Ix’s words from all that time ago kept recurring to her. Be a paid thug. Enforce the status quo. Empire’s whore. Was that all she was? Was that all any Jaguar Warrior was?
She wanted to do good. She wanted to help those who needed helping. And if somebody broke the law, they needed to be caught and made to face the consequences, however drastic. Morally, it was that straightforward.
Wasn’t it?
Why, then, had it become so difficult to face going into work each morning? Why had she written that letter of resignation in her head, and refined and rewritten it, over and over until she had it by heart? Why did almost every punishment the Jaguars meted out, in the Empire’s name, sicken her these days?
While a bus ferried her to Scotland Yard, Mal ran over these questions in her mind, as she often did. By journey’s end she was no nearer answers than before.
The only positive she could glean from the previous night’s spectacular cock-up was that if she carried on handling the Conquistador case as badly as this, the future wouldn’t hold much more worrying for her. A macuahitl would soon be putting her out of her misery, and that would be that.
Age of Aztec Page 7