“I’ve seen him in news footage, how he fights,” said Mal. “I’m not saying I couldn’t take him. It wouldn’t be easy, though.”
“DCI Nyman’s theory is that he’s had training. Eagle Warrior training. What do you reckon to that?”
“I’d say Nyman is — was — correct. The Conquistador, whoever he really is, is military. Or ex-military. You don’t pick up sword skills like those from private tuition.”
“Not Jaguar training, then?”
“What, he’s one of us? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Just airing the possibility.”
Mal mimed a shudder. “Fuck me, I hope not. What’s Nyman’s verdict on the armour retrieved from the scene?”
“New, bespoke, not a genuine antique, a copy. Somebody must have smithed it for the Conquistador, or the Conquistador smithed it himself. He was going to follow that up as a line of enquiry next. Should we?”
“I don’t know how far we’d get. The Conquistador’s wily. I doubt he’d leave the armour behind if he felt it could be traced. Anything else relevant?”
“Nyman reckoned the Conquistador knew the patrol disc would start shooting. He was counting on it. It was how he planned on making his getaway.”
“His mysterious getaway. Vanishing into thin air.”
“You sound like you know how he pulled it off.”
“I have an inkling.” Mal indicated to turn off the Strand onto Fleet Street. A cabbie braked and politely let her through. The traffic was always on its best behaviour around a marked Jaguar Warrior car.
“Can I make a personal comment, boss?” Aaronson asked.
“You will anyway, even if I tell you not to.”
“You’re taking this remarkably well. You’ve just been given the job no one on the force wants. You seem pretty cool about it.”
“I don’t have a choice. What can I do? I can’t tell the chief super to go and stick it up his arse. I just have to make the best of things.”
“But Nyman’s, what, the third inspector in a row who’s handled the Conquistador case.”
“And the third Kellaway’s executed. Way I see it, he can’t go on getting rid of us at this rate, otherwise there soon won’t be a CID left. That gives me some breathing space.”
“Do you honestly think that?”
“No. But also, the Conquistador’s had it easy so far.”
“How so?”
Mal flashed a grin. “Fucker hasn’t had me to deal with yet.”
They scoured every inch of the plaza, which was still closed to the public. Mal paid particular attention to the corpse enclosure. The flagstones there bore spectacular firework-like patterns of dried blood, baked black by the sun.
Then they climbed the ziggurat and picked their way across the shattered remains of the temple. Again, as below, it was the throwing off of the corpses that interested Mal. She squatted at the ziggurat’s rear edge and peered over. She probed the stonework below the lip of the apex, feeling with her fingers. Finally she found what she was after.
“Come and see this.”
“No thanks.” Aaronson felt dizzy just being this far above ground, never mind watching his superior officer leaning out over empty space.
“Don’t be such a wuss.”
“Still no.”
“I’ll hold you.”
“Oh, all right.”
Aaronson shuffled forward and, with Mal gripping his trouser leg, craned his neck. It was a sheer drop of some two hundred feet to the enclosure below.
“What am I looking for?”
“See that there? In the cement between those two blocks?”
“No. Oh. Yes. Is that…?”
“A climber’s piton.”
The ring-shaped head of the piton protruded out barely half an inch, and was as dark as the stonework around it. Unless you were searching for it, you could easily have never spotted it.
“Are you a climber, Aaronson?”
“Only career and social. Look at me. I’m shaking like a leaf. Do I look like I’ve got a head for heights?”
“My guess is our friend the Conquistador anchored the piton in with a hammer and abseiled down on a line looped through it. Then he reeled the line in and hid himself among the dead bodies.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I don’t think I am.”
“But surely eyewitnesses would have spotted him coming down.”
“Maybe. But nobody hangs around close to the corpse enclosure, do they? Plus, it’s behind the ziggurat, hardly prime viewing position. The temple obscures the altar from here. And if he abseiled quickly enough, and the line was thin, he might look from a distance like just another body falling. In all the confusion it’d be an easy mistake to make. Then the retrieval truck arrives, and to the workmen he’s just another partially clothed stiff.”
“The truck didn’t turn up until two o’clock. You’re saying he lay there for two hours in a pile of hacked-up corpses, playing dead?”
“I am.”
Aaronson whistled. “He is one determined fucker, that’s for sure.”
“I’d guess, too, that he smeared himself with blood, and maybe also stuck on some bone fragments and gristle from the bodies, so that at a glance he’d appear like all the rest of them.”
“Determined and sick.”
“No,” said Mal, “he simply doesn’t care. He does what he has to, whatever it takes, so that he can survive and attack again another time.”
“A madman.”
“It can look like madness, to be that focused on your goal.” Mal worked out the piton with a pocket knife, bagged it as evidence, then stepped back from the edge, contemplating. “This man — somebody did something to him once, something that changed him. He was hurt or damaged in some way, and he blames the Empire and wants to show everyone how consumed with hate he is. Everything he does, it’s showboating, designed for maximum effect. State occasions. Public ceremonies. Priest investitures. If it’s holy, he has to desecrate it. Hence the armour and weaponry resembling something an old-world Spanish explorer would have been kitted out with. This is all about making a statement, the same one over and over.”
“Not a fashion statement, I hope.”
“I’m serious,” Mal snapped. Sometimes Aaronson was too flippant for his own good. He needed to rein it in if he ever hoped to get ahead. “He’s set himself up as the opponent of the Empire, its nemesis. When the Spanish invaded Anahuac, they were expecting to find a primitive culture ripe for the picking, based on their and other Europeans’ experiences in North America. They got a hell of a shock when it turned out that the Land Between The Seas had technology and capabilities far beyond their own, and was in fact readying itself to expand its territory. They fought the Aztecs hard and committed countless atrocities, but it was inevitable that they would be defeated. Conquistadores — an ironic name, in the event. It’s as if this guy, our Conquistador, wants to reclaim the title, turn it back from something vainglorious to something meaningful again.”
“All on his own? One man against the entire world — against billions?”
“In his head, those are acceptable odds,” Mal said. “He believes all he has to do is keep hitting the Empire where it hurts, time after time, and eventually it’ll fold up and crawl away.”
Aaronson grimaced. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you admired him.”
“Someone that blindly, nakedly stubborn — what’s not to admire? Doesn’t mean I’m not going to do everything in my power to nail the bugger. And not just because he’s an enemy of the state and a mass murderer. Because it’s my neck or his.”
“So,” said Aaronson as they set off down the steps, “any ideas? Are we going to wait until the Conquistador makes his next move and try to nab him then?”
“That was Nyman’s tactic, and look how far it got him. No, I think it would be more sensible to force his hand. Lure him out. Let’s us make the running for once.”