Lea threw her hands up in frustration as Maria spat out a string of Russian curses. Behind them, a wheezing Ryan Bale was trying to get his breath back, doubled over with his hands on his knees for support.
Hawke heaved a low sigh of disappointment as he realized he’d failed again, and his feeling of failure was compounded when Silvio Mendoza appeared through the rear sunroof of the limo. He gave him a mock salute and waved the codex at him before disappearing back inside the car.
Filmed by literally hundreds of tourists, the limousine accelerated away and skidded across St. Peter’s Square before hanging a left and slipping out of sight into the maze of Roman backstreets.
And with that, the codex was gone.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Acapulco International Airport was situated ten miles south of the city. The drive was short and uneventful and soon they were cruising through the southern suburbs of the world-famous location. According to the driver of their taxi, this was once the playground of the rich and famous, a utopia… but not any more. He explained in grim detail about the rise in murders and violence… gangland decapitations, assassins on jet skis. It was becoming, he said sadly, a very dangerous place.
Hawke said nothing, but instead pushed back into his seat, taking the moment to close his eyes and finish the sleep he’d started on the plane. This proved harder than he had anticipated as their driver’s monologue meandered from corruption in the government to the value of plebiscites via chemtrails, the Apollo moon landing hoax and the phantom time hypothesis.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Ryan piped up. “Oh my God, there it is!” he said, pointing out the window to the left.
“There what is?” Maria asked.
“That property down there was where they filmed the Villa Arabesque in Licence to Kill!”
“What?” Lea asked.
“It was the Sanchez villa in the Bond film.”
“I thought Sanchez Villa was a footballer,” Lea said, casting a sideways glance at Ryan in the mirror.
“Heathens.”
After a short silence Lea sighed. “You’re not James Bond, Ry.”
“I know that.”
“You could be Oddjob though,” she said with a contemplative look at her ex-husband.
“Drole.”
Hawke wasn’t paying attention to the chitchat. His mind was stuck on the sight of Silvio Mendoza mocking him back at St Peter’s Square, and his own failure to secure the codex for the ECHO team.
When they got to the hotel room, he was surprised to see Sir Richard Eden and Alex Reeve alongside Scarlet, Lexi and Reaper, not to mention a team of Americans working for Jack Brooke, the US Secretary of Defense. The Americans were headed by a man who introduced himself as Jack Camacho. He shook hands like a professional wrestler.
“SAS, huh?” Camacho said with respect.
Hawke sighed and turned to Scarlet. “Who briefed this man?”
“Oh — I’m sorry,” Scarlet said. “I did — I thought I’d talk you up a bit.”
“Very drole, Cairo.”
Camacho was confused. “What’s going on?”
“Forget it,” Lea said.
They passed round some cold beers and settled down to the briefing but the mood was sour — both sides had lost good people to Wade’s murderous gang. Worse still, information was hard to come by. Wade was running a pretty tight ship and anyone connected to him seemed happier to die than give up anything that might lead to his capture and the end of his activities.
“That’s the problem when you’re dealing with a suicide cult,” Camacho said drily.
They knew that Wade had successfully looted both the British Museum of what they were now sure was not a sun-worshipping object or calendar stone but part of the Key of Mictlan, a mysterious artefact once believed to open the doors to the Aztec underworld. Worse, from the looks of the footage Ben filmed before his death, it was obvious the fragment Mendoza had taken from the British Museum would fit perfectly with the artefact Wade pulled out of the jungle the day before. If it was a key, then Morton Wade now had all of it.
They also knew Wade had relieved the Vatican of the Codex Borgia, but despite the best efforts of Alex and Ryan exactly why he needed it was still a mystery. Their speculation that Wade had somehow stumbled upon the Aztec Underworld seemed too grim to contemplate, but the map found under the codex’s painted illustrations pointed that way. As for the sacred chants, they shuddered to think what Wade was trying to summon.
Ryan pushed back in his chair and took a long gulp of the beer before turning to Hawke and the others. “Something’s been bothering me for a while.”
“They have a pharmacy at the end of the block,” Scarlet said, leaning back in her chair with a wide smirk.
Ryan didn’t even look at her. “On the plane from Rome I kept thinking about the image Pavoni showed us before she was murdered and it was driving my crazy.”
“What image?” Scarlet asked.
“An image of a man in a canoe.”
“The one she said was similar to a drawing in a different codex?” Lea asked.
“Yep — an image of Aztlán in the Codex Boturini, only this one — the one the reflectographic imaging revealed under the paint showed more detail.”
“Aztlán?” Kim said.
“Spill the beans, mate,” Hawke said, and all eyes turned to the young man in the Iron Man t-shirt.
“Sure — I’m talking about the Aztec legend of Aztlán.”
“I failed Aztec 101,” Scarlet said with a sneer. “So dumb it down a notch.”
“I can’t dumb it down any more without crayons,” he said.
Scarlet scowled at him. “And you know what you can do with a crayon?”
Ryan ignored her. “The Nahuatl legend tells us that in the beginning there were seven tribes who lived in seven caves. They came together and dwelled in the land of Aztlán, but after their society turned into a tyranny they decided to flee south. The god Huitzilopochtli told them they would no longer be the Azteca people, but the Mexica people, and that’s where Mexico gets its name from. Huitzilopochtli told them to settle wherever they saw an eagle sitting on a cactus, and that turned out to be Tenochtitlán — the present day Mexico City.”
“And where was this Aztlán?” Lexi asked.
“As you might have guessed with a legend this old, no two descriptions of the place are alike, but its location is of more importance. Some claim it was situated just north of Mexico City, while others have made the case that it was further away on the Pacific coast. The really interesting part is that there is a debate about whether or not it’s an island thanks to a drawing of it in the Codex Boturini.”
Scarlet cracked open a lager and reclined on the leather couch before turning to Maria. “Is this how he talks when he’s warming things up in the sack?”
The Russian ignored her with a haughty, if vaguely suppressed smile and asked Ryan to continue.
“The picture in that codex shows the Aztecs fleeing from Aztlán, and it clearly shows them sailing away from an island in an Aztec canoe, fleeing some kind of tyranny, as I said. The drawing depicts a large island with a massive temple in the center of it, not to mention a number of other buildings, but the picture revealed in the Codex Borgia we saw in Rome was much more explicit about Aztlán being an island.”
“I see where this is going.”
“Right — some have argued that Aztlán was in fact an island, but until now we had no real evidence for it except for a couple of vague references by Plato. If you can’t see the connection between the words Aztlán and Atlantis then I can’t help you.”