by Stephen Cole
‘Maybe Jonah’s right,’ said Patch hopefully.
A long silence followed. Coldhardt broke it. ‘Now the computer network is back up and running, we must start a search. I want to know if this third codex pictogram is marked on any other artefacts of the era. If it is, the context may help Jonah deduce a key for the cipher. I will check through my own collection. Your task will be to gather images, schematics, sketches, anything from the late post-classical period. Some will be public domain online, others will exist only in museum records withheld from the public –’ he smiled ‘– but not from us.’ He stood up from the table. ‘You will start work at six a.m. For now, you are dismissed.’
Like any thought of helping Tye, Jonah thought, rising to go, his head spinning. Like any idea of finding the truth.
Tye wouldn’t have walked out on them, he knew that. And she could never betray them.
Right?
Chapter Ten
Why did Tye stay behind? The question went on haunting Jonah as he sat with the others in the hangout.
Not that anyone seemed much in the mood for playing tonight. The raw thud of Motti’s grungy homemade music thumped out from the speakers, well-fitted to the spiky, unsettled atmosphere.
‘Pretty cool tune, huh,’ said Motti, slumped on a couch beside a crate of ice-cold beers. ‘This has got hit written all over it.’
‘Close,’ said Con. ‘You missed out an “s”.’ Draped demurely over a designer chair, she had fixed herself a cocktail almost as dark and vivid as the bruise on her chin, and was staring into space.
‘You don’t need talent to make it in music. Just cash.’ Motti drained another beer. ‘And man, life with Coldhardt has got me a lot of cash. Who needs anything else?’ He sighed heavily. ‘I don’t need nothing else.’
Patch belched loudly. Jonah turned to where he lay sprawled in an enormous beanbag surrounded by empty bottles of alcopop. ‘Jonah!’ he hissed. ‘Got something to tell you. Private, like.’
Jonah crouched down beside him. ‘What’s up?’
‘I meant to tell you before. Tye had a message for you, mate …’
‘She did?’ Jonah stared at him, fearing a wind-up.
‘She said to tell you there was nothing like the sunset.’
Jonah’s mind processed the words with a sting of disappointment. ‘That’s all she said? What the hell’s it meant to mean?’
‘Maybe it’s enkip – encroute –’ He emptied his glass. ‘Maybe it’s in code.’
‘Maybe.’ Jonah crossed back to his sofa and slouched back down. He remembered standing with Tye on the veranda that day as the sun slipped down behind the mountains; she had said, You can’t help but lose yourself in a sunset like that.
Maybe now she was lost in a different way.
The last track on the CD jarred to a stop, and Patch spoke up in the sudden silence, his voice a miserable slur: ‘So d’you think Coldhardt will get someone else in to replace Tye, then?’ He belched again. ‘We’re gonna need a new pilot.’
Con looked at Jonah. ‘Tye was training you, no?’
‘She sure had his head in the clouds,’ said Motti.
Jonah ignored him. ‘I could probably fly that plane,’ he conceded. ‘But not cars, not boats, not hovercrafts or …’
‘And what about the whole human lie detector bit,’ Patch interrupted. ‘Ain’t gonna be easy, finding someone who can do all that.’
‘Whoever Coldhardt chooses, I think we should be allowed to audition him first,’ said Con.
‘Him?’ Motti looked at her sharply. ‘Who says it’s a him? Coldhardt told you something?’
‘Nah, she just hopes it’s a him,’ said Patch. ‘She wants some hunky new bloke to fall at her feet.’
Jonah glared over at them. ‘Guys, could we give the Tye replacement stuff a rest?’
‘Well, I hope he gets another chick in,’ said Motti. ‘Older woman maybe, late twenties. A real piece of ass …’
Con snorted. ‘Another boy would be far better.’
‘What’s up, can’t take the competition?’
‘Stop it!’ Jonah shouted, stunning the others into silence. ‘Is this all Tye’s walking out on us means to you – the chance to get someone hot in to take her place?’
Con looked away. Motti started peeling at the label on his beer bottle. ‘Ain’t none of us indispensable,’ he said quietly. ‘Just ask the boss man.’
‘OK, but remember when Coldhardt first dragged me into all this? I wanted nothing to do with it. You tried to sell me the set-up by saying you were like family. That after all those years on my own, maybe here was a place I could fit in. Really belong.’
‘We are like family.’ Patch looked at Con. ‘’Cept we can still fancy each other. It’s allowed. It ain’t incest or nothing –’
‘Yeah, thanks, Patch, shut up a sec.’ Jonah looked between Con and Motti. ‘I know I’m the newest one to show round here, and maybe I’ve got no right to say how things should go. But I always figured family pulled together when things got tough.’
Motti grimaced. ‘Aw, jeez, geek, save us the moral hero bit.’
‘Suppose Tye has been brainwashed by Sixth Sun,’ he argued. ‘Or suppose Ramez has some hold over her.’
‘Hold on her, more like.’ Motti mimed groping a pair of breasts. ‘Him topless, her in a dressing gown …’
Jonah gritted his teeth. ‘If we get her back, maybe she could tell us stuff. Important stuff.’
‘What, important stuff like –’ Motti put on an oochie-coochie voice – ‘“It’s you I love really, Jonah!”’
Jonah turned away angrily. ‘Jesus Christ, Motti!’
‘She’s ditched us, man,’ Motti shouted, jumping up from the couch. ‘All of us, you included. What you so surprised about? You know in this life you can’t trust no one.’
Jonah shut his eyes. He didn’t want to hear this. Didn’t want to think that Tye could be the same as all those faces in his past, shaking their heads, refusing him, sending him away.
‘Tye did say she could help us find out more by staying there,’ said Patch weakly.
‘Right.’ Con looked down at the floor. ‘Because she’s made so much effort to stay in touch since she left.’
Jonah sighed. ‘She was kidnapped, remember?’
‘Was she?’ said Motti. ‘Seems you put up way more of a fight than she did.’
‘What, now you think she went willingly?’
Motti drank some more, shrugged. ‘Who knows?’
‘It’s like you can’t wait to turn your back on her!’ Jonah threw his arms up in the air. ‘But then, maybe you’re too scared to do anything else. Too scared to go on believing in Tye because you can’t face the hurt if you’re wrong.’
‘Go to hell, geek.’
Jonah squared up to him. ‘Call me geek just one more time –’
‘And what, you’ll start crying?’
Con shook her head wearily. ‘Oh, stop this macho bullshit!’
‘Well, if lover-boy don’t like “geek”, I got a whole bunch of other four-letter words I could –’
‘She was the glue!’ Patch shouted, silencing them all. He was up on his feet now, swaying about, pissed off his face. ‘Tye, I mean. She was quiet and that … but she was the glue what held us all together. As a group. What made us a family. Just won’t be the same now …’ He fell back in his beanbag, tears in his eyes, a huge yawn twisting his face. ‘It’ll never … be the same …’
His head fell back and he started snoring loudly.
‘Dumb mutant.’ Motti sighed, the anger suddenly gone from him. ‘I’ll go take him to his room.’ He picked Patch up with surprising tenderness. ‘Let him sleep it off.’
‘I’ll get the doors for you,’ said Con quietly.
Jonah watched them go, trembling and unsure. He didn’t want to be alone right now but he was too proud to follow them.
And too scared that if he did, and if he listened too long, he might start believing the same as they
did.
In the end he slumped back down in his chair and cracked open another beer from the icebox. He contemplated his reflection in the neck of the bottle.
This isn’t going to help any, Jonah thought.
But then, what the hell would?
He took a long, deep swig of the beer. Then he hurled the bottle against the wall, where it shattered.
Tye was back with Ramez in the candlelit bedroom, only the atmosphere was a little less cosy.
The bodyguards, bruised and bleeding, had bundled up Ramez from the floor and dumped him on the bed. They’d shoved Tye in there too, ignoring her faked outrage at where the hell those intruders had sprung from and what had happened to the lights. And they’d locked the door as well as the windows.
Patch would have been able to get them out in ten seconds. But she’d told him to leave.
His look of dismay, frozen in the doorway, haunted her now. She’d seen the same look on her own face so many times before, staring into the mirror every time her drunken father had pushed her away.
Only this time she was the one who’d done the pushing, choosing to side with her old flame. Motti, Patch and Con must hate her guts now, and what about Jonah? She looked at Ramez, lying listless on the bed, fingers plucking idly at the silk sheets. She’d put her feelings for him ahead of everything she’d achieved since he’d gone.
‘Looks like the honeymoon’s over,’ she said. ‘It’s time you came clean with me, Ramez.’
‘I told you how it is.’
‘But I still don’t know why it is. What hold do Sixth Sun have over you?’
‘They don’t.’
‘You think I’m too dumb to know when you’re holding out on me? I know when people lie, Ramez. Especially you.’ Tye crouched over him on the bed, put her face closer to his. ‘Now. Tell me how much trouble we’re in.’
His eyes flicked up and held hers. ‘If you were stuck in hell … If there were five of you waiting to die in a stinking cell, if the guards beat you and pissed in your food each day … If your appeal was kept pending so long that you lost all hope and wanted to die. And then someone showed up out the blue with a deal that could get you out …’
‘Go on,’ she said, dreading what she might hear.
‘You know much about the Aztecs?’ His gaze was steady and intense. ‘You ever hear of the Perfect Sacrifice?’
‘Since when was anything perfect about a sacrifice?’
‘Each year some guy my age would volunteer to have his heart chopped out and burned in the name of some god or other. For the next twelve months he was treated like a god himself, given anything he wanted – girls, fancy houses, the best food, all of that. The priests gave him a perfect life for a whole year so he was fit to be sacrificed in the name of beauty.’
Tye swallowed, her mouth feeling dry as a desert. ‘This is your inheritance?’ she croaked. ‘Sixth Sun made you the same deal?’
‘I figured they were cranks, or crazy. So I had nothing to lose by saying yes. I never thought they could get me out.’ He shook his head, broke off the eye contact. ‘And I never imagined they could actually make good on the deal. A year. A year of everything and anything I could ever want. Can you imagine that, sugar-girl?’
‘But at the end of that year …’
‘It’s been a hell of a ride.’
Tye twisted his face back round. ‘How long before it’s over?
‘Soon.’ She saw the raw fear in his eyes. ‘Days.’
‘You stupid bastard,’ she whispered, as a growing coldness swept through her. ‘You stupid, stupid bastard.’
He took hold of her wrists. ‘Should I have stayed in that cell? A bit more of me rotting each day?’
‘I wanted to get you out,’ Tye told him miserably. ‘I asked Coldhardt about it when he first approached me but he said no, that I couldn’t take anything of my old life –’
‘I don’t blame you, sugar-girl,’ Ramez told her fiercely, his thumbs kneading the base of her palms. ‘I treated you like shit and I got it in return. That’s cool, that’s, like, karma. But right from the start, the first thing I asked for was you.’
She caught the flicker in his eyes, gently shook her head.
‘Well,’ he added, those heart-breaking eyes flashing. ‘Almost the first.’
She pressed her lips against his for a few fervent seconds. ‘We can escape. Coldhardt and the others will help us.’
‘I can’t go,’ Ramez insisted. ‘If I welch on the deal they’ll kill my little nephews. They’re the only things in my life not been spoiled or screwed up.’ He paused. ‘And they’ll kill you too.’
Suddenly a key turned in the lock and the bedroom door opened. Tye spun round to find a man framed in the doorway. Tall with fair wavy hair, a nice smile and tanned complexion, dressed in a suit and raincoat, he looked like a perfectly regular businessman; the kind of guy who had a pretty wife, a dog and two-point-four kids waiting to greet him home from work.
Which made it all the more freaky that he was pointing a gun at them.
‘Ramez is right, Tye,’ the man said. ‘I will kill you if you attempt to escape from here. Him we need. You’re just goods requested.’
Tye stared at him. ‘You work for Sixth Sun?’
His smile grew wider. ‘I founded Sixth Sun. As for my work, that’s a very different matter.’
Suddenly she recognised his Midwestern drawl. He was the guy she’d overheard talking with the Brit woman at the penthouse next door. ‘Just who the hell are you?’
‘His name’s Traynor,’ said Ramez. ‘It’s all right, Traynor, it’s cool. I ain’t going to escape nowhere, and neither’s she.’
‘How true.’ The smile slowly congealed on Traynor’s face. ‘You should have kept your big mouth shut, Ramez. ’Cause guess what? Now we can’t ever let her go.’
Chapter Eleven
With so much heavy stuff preying on his mind, Jonah imagined the time would crawl even if he’d been white water rafting. And since cracking Aztec codes was the cypherpunk equivalent of watching paint dry, time seemed pretty much at a standstill.
Could be worse, he told himself. You’re not trawling every Aztec relic in creation for a special symbol, like Patch and the others. Then again, perhaps he wouldn’t feel so miserable if he could hang with them a bit instead of being sat here at Coldhardt’s machine. After the flare-up last night he felt alone and isolated.
It didn’t seem real that he might never see Tye again.
He felt a chill at his back, and turned to find Coldhardt hovering behind him. The man had a nasty knack for showing out of nowhere and scaring the hell out of you.
‘Any progress, Jonah? Any leads forthcoming?’
‘Not yet,’ Jonah admitted. Give me a chance, I’ve only had eight hours. ‘I’m running the Nahuatl lines through some character substitution ciphers, but it takes time. And it’s hard to know what significance the symbols originally had.’
‘They stand for words, or places, surely?’
‘Maybe. But as you know, the Aztec language isn’t exactly straightforward.’ Jonah grabbed a biro and doodled an eye on a pad beside him. ‘I mean, what’s this? Could be a pictogram, meaning an eye. Or it could be representing the idea of sight – an ideogram. Or it could be standing for the sound “I” – the start of a sentence, like, “I am drawing a big blank here.”’
‘A phonogram,’ Coldhardt muttered. ‘Yes, I see.’
‘Their language seems a total jumble of different meanings. And it’s not even like you can just read the symbols left to right like words on a page.’ Jonah sighed, rubbed his stiff neck. ‘The symbols lock into each other to make new symbols. Like, you put together the Aztec sign for mountain and the Aztec sign for a tooth, and what d’you get – mountain-tooth? Nope, you get Tepetlitan, the name of one of their cities.’
‘So we will need to know the names of all Aztec dwelling places?’
‘I’m patched into a database of pretty much everything recorded in their l
anguage, that should pick up on all the official stuff. But if it was a nickname, or a place kept out of all proper records so the Spaniards didn’t find out about it …’
‘The objects in that temple were of such importance, there has to be a decipherable clue to its location,’ Coldhardt declared.
‘Maybe the lines of actual language will give us that,’ said Jonah, trying to stay positive. ‘But in some of these symbols, all sorts of words and ideas are being shoved together – a real picture puzzle. It would be hard enough to crack the meaning even if it wasn’t in code.’
‘And yet they must hold the key by which the puzzle can be unlocked.’ Coldhardt placed a hand on Jonah’s shoulder. ‘Would it help you if you saw the markings on the statuette for comparison?’
Jonah raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘I suppose it might.’
‘Come with me.’ Coldhardt led the way from the hub and called the lift. ‘It’s kept in my vault. The one in the wine cellar you’re not supposed to know about.’
Jonah felt a tingle of anticipation as he followed Coldhardt through the ranch house and down to the cellar, trying to push from his mind how it had been when Tye had led him by the hand to this same place.
Without ceremony, Coldhardt pulled the concealing curtain aside to reveal the vault door, then inserted an electronic key in a slot beside it. A red light played over his eye, scanning his retina maybe. Then he spoke aloud: ‘I have caught an everlasting cold. I have lost my voice most irrecoverably. Farewell glorious villains.’
A series of clicks and hisses sounded from the heavy vault door.
‘Voice recognition?’ Jonah wondered.
‘The lines are from The White Devil by John Webster,’ said Coldhardt. ‘A revenge tragedy.’
‘That’s nice. Who says it?’
‘Someone who is dying.’
The vault door opened like a cold, dry mouth. Coldhardt motioned for Jonah to step into the darkness beyond the silver gleam. A waft of stale, freezing air prickled his bare arms.
Jonah was uneasy. ‘No, after you.’
Coldhardt pulled a small remote from his pocket and strode inside. A moment later the place was blinding bright with the glare of spotlights. Jonah screwed up his eyes, waiting for them to adjust, shivering in the sub-zero temperature.