Viktor took a deep breath and tried to look relaxed.
“Hey, Norm.”
Bennett smiled. “What are you doing here today, Professor Sobotka?” He said jovially. “I thought it was your wife’s birthday and you had the day off?”
“It is, yes.”
The guard smiled and nodded his head. “I thought you were planning on going out someplace?”
“Sure we are, yes.”
“Boy, I wish I could knock off early today.” He dabbed his brow with the back of his sleeve. “Jeez — this heat sure is something today, ain’t it?”
“Yes… it sure is.” Viktor glanced in the mirror at the Vandura and then at the little dashboard clock. The Soto woman had been very clear about not wasting time.
“You know, I remember back in the mid-nineties when we hit the record for the State. One hundred and twenty-two ball-crushing degrees that day my friend, Jeez… was that 1993 or 1994?”
“I don’t know, I’m sorry,” Victor said, his throat growing drier by the second. “I wasn’t here then.”
“Well this ain’t nothing like that, I’ll grant you, but all the same…”
“I’m in a little bit of a rush, Norm, actually…”
Norm Bennett pulled himself up and dropped the smile. He nodded his head as if Viktor had asked a question, and then peered through the back windows of the car. “Pop the trunk, please.”
Viktor did as he was told and watched nervously as the guard strolled around to the rear of the Prius. Hurry up you fool! he whispered to himself.
After a heart-stopping few moments Norm finally waved him through and he drove down the driveway toward the immense car park. He looked at his watch. Not long until Aurora Soto and those thugs killed his wife. He knew what he had to do.
A few hundred miles south of the border, Morton Wade trembled as he moved slowly into the dark obsidian chamber. So many times had he come in here but now it somehow felt different — like other more powerful gods were observing them.
All around him he heard the screaming cacophony of the cicadas as they sang in the jungle, but in here, deep in the dark, volcanic inner sanctum, the Texan focussed as the ancient god rose in front of him and cast him into his shadow. The awesome, terrifying figure of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec sun god, and great deity of war and sacrifice was finally standing before him.
“As ever, I bow to you, Great One,” he said, his voice trembling.
A long exhalation, somewhere between a hiss and a sigh. “You are late, mortal.”
Wade raised his fearful eyes to the deity’s powerful face. It was almost human, but the color was all wrong. The forehead, cheeks, chin and throat were Maya blue but the strip over the eyes was the darkest pitch-black he had ever seen. And the eyes inside that ribbon of black were faint slits of blood-shot madness. It was like he was staring into an abyss. The divine apparition was crowned with a magnificent headdress made of plumes of emerald-green quetzal tail-feathers. Wade dropped his eyes back to the floor after snatching the undeserved glance.
“I’m sorry, Great One.”
Huitzilopochtli growled, and Wade felt the floor move. It was all he could do not to run from the room screaming like a baby. This was the power he worshipped.
“You were right to kill the intruders, Tlatoani.”
“Thank you, Great One.” Wade shivered with pleasure as he heard the word Tlatoani reverberate in his head. Tlatoani… the one who speaks for the gods, a priest charged with making divine battle plans and expanding the gods’ empires. But was he really a tlatoani, or something more? Hush, you fool! Do not harbor such thoughts in the presence of… Him.
He growled again. “There are many more on their way. Kill them all. Offer them to me.”
“Yes, Great One.”
“Do you fear him?”
Wade knew who he meant but he was too frightened to mention his name.
“I fear all the ancient gods, Great One.”
A long silence was broken by the sound of a ringing telephone.
Wade spun around in rage and snatched up the receiver. “Who is it?”
“It’s Aurora.”
“What do you want?” he barked, looking nervously at the terrifying presence just a few feet in front of him. “I told you no one was to disturb me.”
“We have Sobotka. He’s in the lab right now.”
“Ah…” Wade glanced at the black and blue face. The red eyes… he looked away. “Good. You know what to do next. Make sure he knows what’s at stake.”
“You got it, boss.”
Wade didn’t like the way the woman had cut the call, and he didn’t much like the way she’d called him boss like that, in that not-give-a-shit manner of hers. She and Mendoza were lethal, he knew, but what were they when compared with the gods?
“It has begun, Great One.”
A low, long growl was the only response.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jack Camacho watched carefully as Special Agent Kim Taylor slipped elegantly off the sidewalk and walked confidently across the Avenida Costera Miguel Alemán. She had just exited the Acapulco Bay Hotel. She crossed over the central reservation which divided the avenue’s six lanes and lingered for a moment beneath a palm tree. Only an hour over the horizon, the tropical sun was already burning hot and bright above her head as they waited for Soto.
Aurora Soto.
She was the weak link, and they’d had her apartment under surveillance since they’d arrived. Now it looked like it might be paying off. After days off the grid she’d suddenly resurfaced at a private airfield to the north of the city with two goons and an elderly couple. No one knew who they were but they split at the airport, with the goons and the elderly couple piling into a Chevrolet Beauville and Aurora Soto driving a black Porsche Boxster. They’d trailed them to the hotel where Aurora had met a man known to the authorities as Emilio Perez, a small-time embezzler, and now she was going to lead them to Wade and his cult one way or another.
“Another hot day in Mexico,” Camacho drawled in his New Jersey accent.
Scarlet Sloane raised an eyebrow. “You could always take your shirt off, darling.”
Lexi rolled her eyes.
Reaper rolled a cigarette and fired it up. “I like the heat. Reminds me of sitting on the terrace with a coffee. Maybe a little chocolatine, just watching the world go by.” He puffed out some smoke and pushed back in his seat.
“Sounds sorta French,” Agent Doyle said dismissively.
When the westbound traffic had thinned, Kim made her way to their SUV, a six-seater Ford Explorer loaned courtesy of the Mexican Government after a call from Jack Brooke’s office. Camacho was less than amused by the manual transmission, but other than that all was good with the world. The Mexicans were reluctant at first but it wasn’t exactly the first time US law enforcement had worked cases south of the border.
The heat was rising in the car, but there was no chance of switching on the engine to run the aircon in case they drew attention to themselves. Camacho felt the sweat running down his neck and building in the small of his back. He tried to cool himself by using a street map as a makeshift fan.
“I’ll keep my shirt where it is, babe,” he said, cocking his head an inch to Scarlet. He yawned and cracked his knuckles. He liked it down here — even the heat. Most of his CIA work these days was office-bound in DC back on The Farm, and missions like this gave him a chance to relive the old days and push himself to the limit again — to prove to himself he wasn’t over the hill just yet.
Kim climbed into the Explorer. “She’s in there all right,” she said. “She’s still with Perez and drinking Tiger’s Claws like there’s no tomorrow.”