The bubble vanished as it had appeared, abruptly and without a sound. Dazed, Stuart watched the snow-like settling of the last few floating flakes of detritus. He breathed in smells of ash and ozone.
He looked behind him. He looked up.
Both Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were gone.
He was alone.
Silent, the wounded rainforest swayed and grieved.
PART THREE
TWENTY-TWO
3 Rain 1 Movement 1 House
(Thursday 20th December 2012)
Mal Vaughn got the call at 4am. The phone next to her hotel bed rang shrilly and insistently. In the adjacent bed, fast asleep, Aaronson moaned and swore. Mal herself had been only drowsing. She groped for the phone in the dark and pressed the receiver to her ear.
“Vaughn.”
As the voice on the other end of the line spoke, Mal slowly sat up. Then she lunged for the bedside lamp switch.
“Really? You’re absolutely certain?”
“Whassat?” said Aaronson.
She shushed him. “Hold on,” she said into the phone. “Wait just a second.” She rummaged in the bedside table drawer for a pad of hotel stationery and a pen. “Give me the name of the town again.” She jotted it down. “And your name?” She jotted that down too. “You’re the arresting officer? The duty officer. Okay. Well, if he is who you say he is, Mr Necalli, then I reckon you and your whole station are in line for some kind of citation. I’ll be there as soon as I can. How far are you from Teotihuacan? What’s that in miles, about seventy? Give me an hour and a half, then. And don’t, whatever you do, let the slippery bastard out of your sight.”
She planted the receiver back down in its cradle. There was a look of something like elation on her face.
Aaronson propped himself up on his elbows. Beneath the bedcovers he was sporting a prominent morning glory that he did little to hide. Aaronson being who and what he was, an erection on him meant nothing to Mal, just a biological function. Besides, she’d already seen every bit of him, in every conceivable state, during the fortnight he and she had been travelling together to and fro across Anahuac. He was a remarkably immodest hotel room sharer.
“Look at you, boss. The cat that got the cream.”
“Ten fucking bowls of cream, with a mouse on top.”
“Another person’s seen him?”
“Better yet, he’s only gone and got himself arrested.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“In a town called Mixquiahuala. It’s north of here. Local Jaguars have him in the nick. Picked him up yesterday. Charge of vagrancy.”
“How are they sure it’s him?”
“Armour. Smug idiot had his armour on. Came wandering out of the rainforest, dressed as the Conquistador. Even carrying his sword.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Well, I do, so let’s get dressed and on the road.”
“What, no breakfast?”
“It’s four in the ruddy morning. Nowhere’ll be open.”
Grumbling, and now beginning to wilt, Aaronson climbed out of bed and grabbed his clothes.
As she drove the hire car out of Teotihuacan, through prosperous adobe-built suburbs slumbering beneath a pearly grey pre-dawn sky, Mal reflected on the two and a half weeks gone by and the fragile trail of clues that had brought her and her sergeant all the way from London to the Land Between The Seas.
After the unmitigated farce that was her second attempt to bring Stuart Reston to book, Mal had been certain that summary execution lay just around the corner. No way was she going to be allowed to live, not after she’d had Reston in her grasp — chained up in the back of a paddy wagon, no less — and still managed to lose him. Never mind that it hadn’t been her fault. Never mind that she had been blindsided by Reston’s Mayan cronies. She’d had the man, had him, and he’d got away. No self-respecting Jaguar could screw up on so grand a scale and not expect to pay the penalty for it.
The two days she spent in hospital recuperating from a mild concussion were, she was sure, destined to be the last two days of her life. As soon as she was discharged and she reported back in for work, she would get the word from on high. Be in the quadrangle at midday sharp. Full dress uniform not compulsory but preferable. Serve her right, too. She had masterminded what she’d thought would be a textbook takedown, and it had degenerated into a total shambles, first with Reston leaping into the Thames, then with the Mayans ramming the paddy wagon side-on with their van. Net result for all her efforts? Eight Jaguars injured, including herself, most with cuts and contusions but a couple with broken bones. One paddy wagon written off. No villain in custody.
Oh, and she’d picked up a gruesome eye infection from the river water as well, which was going to take a while to fix with antibiotics.
All in all, execution was going to come as a relief. She wouldn’t have to live with her shame for long, or for that matter her sore, pus-gummed eyes.
When she tipped up at Scotland Yard on the morning of 13 House 1 Monkey, everyone shunned her. It was predictable, only to be expected. She was a pariah. Dead woman walking. Aaronson alone met her gaze and spoke to her more or less as normal. Even with him, though, there was awkwardness. He was too cheery, making too many forced jokes and studiously sidestepping any mention of the events of the previous Sunday.
But then, as the hours passed, a curious thing happened.
And the curious thing was that nothing happened.
No execution order. No summons from her superiors. Not even a message requesting Mal to deliver a full account of the arrest and the reasons why it went awry.
She wrote a report anyway, because protocol demanded it, and she filed it with the secretary of the commissioner, and she waited for the fury and derision to rain down from above.
It didn’t that day, and it didn’t the next.
And gradually it dawned on Mal that nobody knew what to do, nobody was sure how matters stood, because there was no new chief superintendent in place yet. The chain of command had a gap in it, and communication channels between upstairs and downstairs were open but for the time being in hiatus. As in any state of interregnum, caution was the watchword. Until the position left vacant by Kellaway was filled and the status quo was restored, it was better not to make any firm decisions or put forward any radical plans of action. Better simply to coast along, keep your head down, and wait for the situation to settle.
For Mal, this was something akin to a reprieve. It was at least a stay of execution, and she resolved to make the most of it.
First thing she did was go with Aaronson to the imposing Thames-side apartment complex Reston called home, with a view to searching his penthouse flat for a suit of Conquistador armour. A rabble of reporters was camped outside the building. At the sight of two Jaguar Warriors, a flurry of questions and camera flashes began. Mal’s response was to swan past, offering no comment beyond a through-the-teeth “Fuck off.”
Ordinarily a Jaguar was obliged to bring along a locksmith to effect non-destructive ingress to a property, and of course obtaining a warrant to search private premises beforehand was considered good manners. Mal wasn’t in the mood for such procedural niceties. In her view, Reston had forfeited his citizen’s rights, such as they were, long, long ago. So she kicked down the rather smart mahogany door — strong wood, weak hinges — and got busy ransacking.
In the event, it was Aaronson who discovered the secret panel at the back of the walk-in wardrobe. He had excellent spatial awareness, and something about the layout of the master bedroom bothered him: unless the flat was a very odd shape, it should have been four or five yards longer. A full-length wardrobe ran alongside the en suite bathroom, and the wall at the rear seemed unusually thin: more a partition than a wall.