Downstairs, Aaronson enquired how the meeting had gone.
“Better than anticipated,” Mal replied, and what was odd was that she meant it. She felt an incredible sense of release. Brockenhurst had cut her loose. She was at liberty to do as she wished.
And what she wished, more than anything, was to hunt Reston down.
Aaronson consented to act as her man on the inside at the Yard, and it was he who informed her, two days later, that the Mayans’ van had been located in Woolwich, near the docks. The vehicle had been rolled into a side alley and abandoned. Scavengers had relieved it of everything of resale value, tyres and engine parts mostly, but it was still unmistakably the van used in the Reston rescue. The radiator grille was stove in and the front bumper bore scrapings of paint that matched paint from a paddy wagon.
So Reston had been smuggled out of the country by boat. That was the only conclusion Mal could draw. And where would he go? France was the logical answer. Not only was it closest to hand but it had a longstanding tradition of resistance and subversion. The Louisiens would have clasped someone like the Conquistador to their bosom. He was one of them, as overt in his actions as they were covert in theirs, but no less opposed to Imperial rule.
Mal had neither the jurisdiction nor the resources to go haring round all of France looking for Reston. But she didn’t believe she needed to. He wouldn’t be there for long. It was the Mayans. The Mayans were key to all this. She had Aaronson do some digging, and made a few transatlantic calls herself, and soon she knew everything there was to know about a group of Mayan nationalists who painted skulls on their faces and whose preferred weapons were blowpipes and bolases.
Reston was in Anahuac. Had to be. In the company of the separatist guerrilla faction known as Xibalba.
Aaronson claimed he had a backlog of paid leave due which he would lose if he didn’t use, and he’d always had a hankering to visit the birthplace of the Empire. Call it a pilgrimage, if you will. Mal pointed out that she was currently persona non grata at work. It might hurt Aaronson’s career prospects if he continued to be associated with her, not least when she was busy doing that which Commissioner Brockenhurst had expressly forbidden.
In answer, all Aaronson said was, “What can I tell you, boss? I’m your bitch, and I always have been.”
Mal owned a few gilt-edged Empire bonds, a nest egg for her retirement, which she cashed in. That, along with money in a savings account amounted to just enough to secure two return flights to the Land Between The Seas and cover two or three weeks’ worth of travel and accommodation expenses.
They flew to Teotihuacan and made that city their base of operations. Then next few days all followed the same pattern. They drove out in their hire car to some other city or major town and introduced themselves at the Jaguar Warrior HQ there. They showed pictures of Reston, both in and out of armour, and explained who he was and what he’d done. A few of the Anahuac Jaguars had heard of the Conquistador’s exploits. The majority hadn’t. As far as they were concerned it had been a domestic matter in a small, far-flung outpost of the Empire, no business of theirs. However, they promised to keep an eye out for Reston, in the event that he really was over here and consorting with local rebels.
Mal could tell she wasn’t being taken seriously; she was being patronised. It peeved her but she didn’t let it get to her. She stayed polite. They’d take her even less seriously if she lost her cool. She had to be the consummate professional. Were she to give them the slightest reason to doubt or distrust her they might be seized by the desire to check up on her back home.
Evening after evening, she and Aaronson returned to their hotel in the centre of Teotihuacan. Mal would be despondent, Aaronson would do his best to keep her spirits up. Then she would find some bar and would drown her sorrows in pulque while her sergeant cruised the neighbourhood, looking for some action. There wasn’t a thriving gay scene in Teotihuacan, but through instinct and a little bit of luck Aaronson could usually find someone to hook up with. Mal herself got propositioned a few times and was often drunk enough to be tempted but not so drunk as to succumb. It didn’t help that almost every adult male in Anahuac was shorter than her, sometimes by as much as a head. She had a problem with smaller men. Try as she might, she could never bring herself to fancy one. They made her feel gangly and uncomfortable. She preferred a lover she could literally look up to. Someone around Stuart Reston’s height, a shade over six feet, was just right. Although not Reston himself, obviously. Sleep with him? Hideous thought. She’d rather stick a macuahitl up her snatch.
Two weeks in, just as Mal’s funds were beginning to run out, came some good news. Good-ish. There’d been a sighting of a man matching Reston’s description in the general vicinity of Lake Texcoco. A few days earlier a Jaguar patrol, visiting rainforest villages on a routine stop-and-search expedition, had come across a Caucasian male in a canoe. He was a botanist apparently, hailing from France. Name of Rene Jolicoeur. He’d shown a valid passport, and there had been someone with him, an Anahuac national acting as his guide, who had vouched for him.
The patrol leader had thought nothing of it at the time. Later, however, having learned that a British Jaguar was over here trying to track down an absconded criminal, he decided to consult the Jaguars in France about Monsieur le Professeur. It didn’t take him long to establish that the person he’d met was an impostor. The impostor and Rene Jolicoeur were roughly the same age, but there the similarities ended. The real Rene Jolicoeur had a receding hairline, wore thick bifocals to counteract profound myopia, and was about thirty pounds overweight. In addition, he suffered from chronic-progressive multiple sclerosis, which was not disabling but which discouraged him from overseas travel and fieldwork, and meant he was largely restricted to the laboratory and the library. In short, the fine physical specimen of a man who’d pitched up in that canoe that day was not — emphatically not — Rene Jolicoeur.
The sighting of Reston was too old to be of any immediate practical use to Mal. He wouldn’t be anywhere near that river now, not if he had any sense. The trail there would be stone cold.
It was, all the same, encouraging. It confirmed that Reston was in Anahuac and also that he had, as she suspected, come there via France — hence the passport, furnished by Louisiens no doubt. It suggested, too, that he was up to something. Why else would he be hiding under an alias and venturing along the rivers?
That the river in question fed into Lake Texcoco was also suggestive. After all, what lay at the middle of said lake but Tenochtitlan itself?
Could that be Reston’s objective? Could he really have something so audacious in mind? An attempt on the life of the Great Speaker himself?
It beggared belief. Mal knew the man was arrogant but this took arrogance to a whole new level. This was hubris in the extreme. Almost a kind of insanity.
She didn’t share her suspicions with the local Jaguars, but then she didn’t need to. They were quite capable of drawing the same inferences themselves. Rogue British terrorist spotted at large in Anahuac, not a million miles from the capital? It was cause for concern, at least. So the search for Reston was escalated to a higher priority status. His picture was more widely circulated among the various regional HQs. His name was added to the national Most Wanted list. The word went out. A small reward was being offered for information leading to the capture of this known fugitive from justice. By the same token, anyone found to have been harbouring Stuart Reston or giving him succour or assistance of any kind would be subject to the harshest of penalties. Apprehending him became a matter of relative urgency.