Kellaway retaliated gamely, lashing out with his feather-fringed club, and managed to get in a few solid connections. He was not going down without a fight. He was not supposed to. However, the odd bruise here and there could hardly compare with the damage that was so insistently being inflicted on him. Moreover, he was an old man, long past his prime, and his opponents were all of them younger, quicker and nimbler.
As the minutes passed, he began to sag. There were wounds all over him now, on torso, neck, buttocks, chest, head. His uniform hung off him in tatters. He was breathing stertorously, his eyes bulging. The three Jaguars did not let up. Kellaway staggered this way and that, flailing with his club, and they continued to dart around him, slashing him as finely and neatly as they could. His body was soon cross-hatched all over with shallow gashes and incisions. He was quite literally striped with his own blood.
Mal knew she couldn’t loiter on the sidelines any longer. Her three colleagues were casting puzzled looks at her. Why wasn’t she joining in? Why the sudden squeamishness? She was letting them down. She was letting the chief super down. She needed to go in and do what she was here to do.
“My turn,” she said, and motioned to the others to stand back. She outranked them all, so they did as instructed. Clearly she’d been leaving the preliminary work to them. Now she was going to show what finesse and élan a DCI could bring to the process. Senior officer’s prerogative.
She approached Kellaway. He stood hunched over, teetering, bent double. His club dangled from his fingertips, almost too heavy for him to lift any more. He peered up at her. One eye was closed, the upper lid hanging in slivers like a broken Venetian blind. The tip of his nose was absent, revealing a strawberry of cartilage. An ear had been split in two. There was no faulting her colleagues’ craftsmanship.
“Sir,” she said softly so that only he could hear, “I can finish this for you right now. One blow and it’s all over. Just give the word.”
Blood bubbled at his lips. “No,” he managed to say. “It wouldn’t be right. I must go on.”
“You’ve suffered enough. No one would blame you if you wanted it ended. Please let me.”
Kellaway tried to hoist his club to strike at her. He brushed her shin feebly with its tip.
Sorrowfully, Mal raked her club across his collarbone, opening up a long thin streak of red. The chief super moaned.
“Then listen,” she said. “I have him. I have the Conquistador. I know who he is.”
“How?” Kellaway gasped.
“Vision quest.”
“Not... Not admissible as grounds for an arrest.”
“I know, but still. It means the search is over and it’s just a question of time now. Either the Conquistador slips up or I get what I need to haul him in, it doesn’t matter which. He’s done. I have him by the balls. He’s going down.”
Kellaway attempted a smile – a skewed, hangdog thing. His one visible eye regained some of its old lustre.
“Not lying about this? To make a doomed man feel better?”
“Not at all, sir. Gospel truth. And when I do get him, it’ll be for you, in your name.”
The chief super feinted with his club, or at least offered the vague appearance of doing so. Mal duly nicked him on the shoulder.
“Good Jaguar, you are, Vaughn,” he said. “Good copper. Glad I never had to execute you. You’ll go far.”
She gave him a few further little cuts, to show willing. Then she retreated and let the other three have their way with him once more. She could barely bring herself to watch as they reduced the rest of Kellaway’s skin to shreds. How he was able to stay on his feet, she had no idea, but some inhuman determination kept him upright long past the stage where most men would have collapsed. It was love, she though. Kellaway loved being a Jaguar. Loved it even unto death.
The sky darkened, thunder rumbled, rain fell. It was a warm rain, but hard, drops so powerful and heavy they could have been hail. Many of the civilians scurried off to find shelter, but all of the Jaguar Warriors in attendance stayed put, while up on the ziggurat the striping continued unabated. Kellaway had sunk to his knees, but refused to lie down. There seemed to be not one square inch of his body that wasn’t marked, lacerated, ragged. He was a living effigy of Xipe Totec. It was as though the Flayed One had been brought to earth, reincarnated. A god in all his exposed raw flesh.
The rain puddled around Kellaway’s knees, mingling with his blood. Lightning and thunder splintered overhead. Mal raised her face to the pummelling force of the storm, letting it pound her head, her brain, her mind, until she felt empty within, battered into submission, numb.
When, finally, she looked down again, Kellaway was dead and the acolyte was stepping forward to hack out his heart.
THAT NIGHT, NO surprise, Mal went out and got steaming drunk. She wound up in some man’s bedroom – she had no clear recollection how she got there – on all fours, letting herself be fucked soundly up the arse and relishing every brutal, piercing thrust of it. At the crucial moment the man withdrew and showered her back with semen. Mal then shat herself and passed out.
She came to in an alleyway some time later, filthy, rain-sodden, no knickers. She hobbled home and sat in a tepid bath while the water slowly turned pink around her. Then she crawled into bed. Hugging her knees to her chest, she waited for sleep to come. Her last thought before she drifted away from herself was: Fuck procedure. Fuck protocol. Nab him anyway.
And in the dark, in pain, she smiled.
NINE
11 Crocodile 1 Monkey 1 House
(Sunday 2nd December 2012)
STUART WAS TEN miles into a twelve-mile run when he became aware of someone keeping pace with him a few yards behind.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw that it was a woman. A second glance confirmed her identity: the Jaguar Warrior detective, Vaughn.
He wasn’t surprised. For the past twenty-four hours he’d had a feeling he was being watched. Someone was always lurking just at the limits of his vision, a presence more sensed than seen. He would have put it down to imagination, if not for his bruising encounter with Vaughn at the office. It was possible she had been tailing him ever since, and now she was making her move, coming out of the shadows into the light.
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, surrou
nded 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.
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