Camacho lunged forward a second time, lashing out at the much younger man in the way a grizzly bear swipes his paw, but the man skipped back and laughed. He was mocking his older opponent now, which Scarlet thought would turn out to be a bad idea, and this was proved right when Bandana got cocky and came too close with his blade.
Camacho sidestepped, dodging the blade and then grabbed the man’s wrist to secure the knife away from his body. Before the man could respond, the American piled a square fist directly into the center of the young Mexican’s face and knocked him back off his feet. He dropped the knife and it clattered to the cool tile floor. His blood sprayed up in an impressive arc from his nose as the cumbersome American padded over to his opponent and hooked his fingers beneath the bandana.
He lifted the young man’s head and neck off the floor and raised him up a little, grinning at him. “Just so I don’t have to bend down too far to do this,” he said in his heavy New Jersey accent.
The man’s blood-soaked face was now confused. “Do what?”
Camacho pulled back his right arm and Scarlet winced as the CIA man hit his opponent so hard she thought he might punch a hole through his head. As it was, he merely knocked the man out cold and then pulled himself up to his full height.
The fighting was at an end, and Reaper was impressed with Camacho’s fist-work. He looked at the young Mexican as he rolled unconscious on the tiled floor.
“Something tells me his duck is cooked, n’est-ce pas?”
“It’s a goose, darling,” Scarlet said.
“Sorry,” Reaper said turning to her. “Something tells me his duck is a goose.”
Scarlet rolled her eyes as Lexi approached, wiping blood from a swollen split lip and wincing as she tried to blink a badly bruised eye. “Looks like we did it,” she said.
Outside the guardhouse, they watched as Wade’s slave laborers slowly reappeared from their shanties.
Scarlet frowned. “We need to get over to the main house and find out what the hell’s going on with Hawke and Lea. Maybe they got Wade.”
“I doubt that,” Alex said, pointing up the valley to the hacienda. Just above the ornate roofline of the former monastery, a Bell helicopter was powering up and lifting into the sky.
From the front seat of the ex-army Huey, Morton Wade surveyed the chaos unfolding on his property with no emotion. He had what he needed and he was on his way. Now he peered across the jungle canopy as a god looks upon the creation of his own works. He owned everything to the horizon, after all — this was one of the biggest coffee plantations in southern Mexico.
The Texan had been obsessed with the landscape stretching out before him since he was a young boy. This was the kingdom of the ancient Aztec emperors… those magnificent kings who ruled this part of the world for countless centuries before Cortés and his barbarian thugs sailed from the east with their steel swords and smallpox and wiped out the entire civilization.
Now, the burning plantation slid behind the chopper as they went deeper into the jungle, tracking the contours of the hills as they rose and fell away again. The rise and fall of the hills was a metaphor for his life, he considered. Ups and downs, progress and setbacks… but now it was all coming together. He had lost the coffee plantation in the raid by the ECHO team, but that was of little concern now he was so close to his life’s destiny, plus he could console himself with the thought that the bastard Hawke and the smart-mouth Irishwoman were currently being hunted by the Jaguar Knights through the jungle and stood zero chance of survival.
For a moment he thought he felt something — was that guilt or nerves? Pull yourself together, Morton. The gods demanded sacrifices — Huitzilopochtli needed the blood for the sun, he knew that. But Huitzilopochtli didn’t terrify him in the way Mictlantecuhtli did. The strange skeleton god of the dead mortified him, but in some weird way exhilarated him as well… perhaps he needed that psychiatrist after all.
The serendipity of life amazed him. Searching for the Temple of Huitzilopochtli and not only finding it, but locating… that as well. The room without windows.
As they drew closer to his dreadful discovery, Morton Wade surveyed the jungle once again from the safety of his helicopter. Its violent, noisy rotorwash blew the treetops all over the place as it raced toward the final destination. He closed his eyes and saw the entrance to hell all over again — only this time he had both parts of the key.
This time he would open the gate. He would enter Mictlan, the Aztec Underworld. As he visualized himself entering into the darkness a cold rush went down his spine.
It was too late to stop now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
As Hawke and Lea trudged their way back to the hacienda, they saw Wade’s chopper rising into the tropical sky, and then a second helicopter rising up behind it. The Texan was evacuating the property and it looked like he was heading east to the Oaxaca Mountains, where Hawke had seen the mysterious temple on the map.
By the time they reached the property, Scarlet’s team had secured the area and were gathering outside the hacienda. They were standing on the north lawn adjacent to the outbuilding Wade used as a warehouse for his crops.
Across the yard, Reaper saw them and waved a hand. He walked over with Alex, Kim and Camacho. “You missed all the fun.”
They stepped inside and took a look at the radiation equipment now scattered all over the floor — used NBC suits and other paraphernalia. “This must be where they stored the bomb,” Hawke said. The powerful Mexican sun lit motes of dust as it streamed through the wooden slats in the north side of the warehouse. All over the floor were chests full of bright red, ripe coffee cherries and their aroma was heavy in the humid air.
“You know they say these things don’t taste like coffee at all?” Lea said.
“No?”
“Nope.”
“So what do they taste like?”
“Watermelon.”
“So they taste of nothing, in other words,” Hawke said with a momentary smile. “Reaper, where are Scarlet and Lexi?”
“Just tying up a few loose ends,” the Frenchman said, his face changing. “We found Sobotka, by the way.” He nudged his chin at the scientist’s corpse stretched out in the sun a hundred yards or so beyond the warehouse, partially obscured by a hedge. “He’s for the vultures, I’m sorry to say. If it’s any consolation, I think he was dead long before we arrived.”
Hawke cursed and walked over to the body. He knelt and checked he was dead before turning him over. “Damn it.”
“And we found something else as well,” Reaper said. “Some kind of weird little chamber behind the house near the coffee fields. Looks like some kind of crazy fun house hall of mirrors but Alex says it’s made of polished obsidian.”
“Wade really is off his rocker,” Hawke said.
“Wait — what’s that?” Lea said.
“Eh?”
“There’s something written in blood under where Sobotka was lying.”
They gathered around and looked down. She was right. There, on the hot asphalt were the words Wade has a Co. They’d been written fast, but there was no mistaking them.
“Mean anything to anyone?” Hawke asked.
Reaper shrugged. “Could be anything.”
“He obviously died before he could finish,” Kim said, sighing heavily. “What the hell’s a Co?”
“A company?” Lea said. “We already know that.”
Alex frowned. “I think I might know what he was trying to say.”
All eyes turned to the young American woman.
“It doesn’t mean anything. He was obviously losing it,” Camacho said.