Wade laughed and turned to Maria and Ryan. “Like you two, these kind folk have agreed to be my sacrifices to the god of the dead.”
“Bloody hell…” Ryan said, his voice trailing into the dank darkness. “I think you’re the craziest person I’ve ever met.”
Mendoza looked at the men and women and scratched his jaw. “Maybe we should just take the treasure and leave?” he said, the ridges and valleys of his terrible scars lit in the translucent chemical flicker of the glow stick.
“Don’t push me, Silvio,” Wade said. “We’re not here for any god-damned trinkets, you got that, boy?”
Mendoza got it, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to take it for much longer and was starting to think Barton might have been right after all. He’d mocked the old fool when he started to get nervous and break away from the Order of the Sixth Sun.
Barton said they were a sun-worshipping cult, not some crazy outfit of cannibals worshipping the god of the dead. Mendoza never thought a man like Wade would have the cojones to see something like this through, and yet here they were, outside the gates of the Aztec Underworld itself… knocking on Mictlantecuhtli’s grimy cobweb-covered door. How far would Wade go?
The Texan sniffed hard and ran his hands through his hair. “Now — you men! Get the keystone,” he said, sliding into the shadows. “I must prepare for the god of the dead.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Alex Reeve held onto the safety handle as Camacho swung open the door and the warm Californian air blasted into the chopper whipping her hair around and pushing her back inside. As she watched Potrero Hill slip beneath them, she knew time was running out. Just a couple of miles north was the Embarcadero Center where her father was about to give his speech.
The Eurocopter touched down minutes later on the Helipad of the new San Francisco Police Headquarters in Mission Bay. Alex and the others climbed out and ran out of the chopper’s powerful rotorwash toward a utility door leading inside the enormous complex. It was a vast monolithic structure of concrete and glass that housed the city’s 911 Emergency Communications Center and the regional Homeland Security.
They were met by a nervous police chief and after some hurried handshakes introduced to the SWAT Incident Commander, a man named Jackson. Thanks to a briefing from her father’s office, they knew that news of the bomb hadn’t reached the media and the city’s population was blissfully unaware of the terrible threat facing them. There was little point, the city’s authorities had argued forcefully — there was no way they could safely evacuate millions of people from the peninsula. In other words, it was all on Alex and the others to save Everybody’s Favorite City.
Jackson was on the ball, as Alex had expected. Moments after landing, his SWAT team was assembled and ready to go. They were armed with an eye-watering array of weapons including Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, AR-15 assault rifles and Beretta and Sig-Sauer side-arms. Other weapons in their arsenal included impact munitions and flash-bang diversions. There was even a sniper with a Remington 700LTR.
“Impressive little army you have here, Sergeant Jackson,” Scarlet said.
“The SFPD SWAT team is a highly-respected elite force, ma’am. If some crazy cult bastards want to take over our city then they’re shit out of luck with us around.”
It took a few short minutes for the team to strap on the body armor jackets and tool up with submachine guns and back-up side-arms and then they were walking back to the choppers, rotors already whirring and powering up ready for the short flight to Alcatraz.
As she walked through the warm San Francisco evening on her way to the helicopter, Alex reflected on how peaceful it could be even in the heart of a massive, sprawling city like this. All round her millions of people were living their lives — driving cars, pushing prams, walking dogs, sitting in bars enjoying a drink… children playing. She knew the cobalt bomb would sweep all of this away in a fraction of a second. It would be gone forever, and millions of lives all over the Bay Area extinguished because of one man’s insane obsession with revenge and resurrecting an ancient cult.
And Alcatraz was the perfect place to keep the bomb. Before her parents had split, they had made a visit to the island one hot afternoon in June. It was one of her favorite childhood memories — the last summer before her father left home, and their last family vacation together. If she closed her eyes she could almost walk back into that day, and hear the laughter as her father made jokes all the way around the tourist trail. Now her father was a mile to the south in the Embarcadero preparing to fight his way to the White House and there was an old Soviet cobalt bomb about to annihilate everything, and it was guarded by an insane death-worshipping suicide cult.
…Another day in ECHO, she thought as she climbed inside the chopper with her friends. But would it be her last day?
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Maria Kurikova watched the crazed figure of Morton Wade with horror as he emerged from the shadows of the antechamber in full make-up. His human face was gone, replaced with black and blue stripes punctuated by the two white slits that were his eyes. On his head was a turquoise feather headdress, and in his hand he held a savagely crude obsidian knife. He had put the paint on hastily, and it was smeared all over his hands.
“What the hell is this?” Mendoza said, taking a step back.
Wade stared at him for a moment, eyes bulging with madness. “I am changed, Silvio. I am a tlatoani — a priest, reflecting the image of the creator Huitzilopochtli. He commands me now. Bring the keystone! It is time to cross to the other side.”
“You are crazy,” Mendoza said, no longer able to conceal the contempt he had always felt for the Texan. This… insanity must be what his brother Jorge had seen when he said he’d witnessed Wade talking with the gods. He had ridiculed him for it — mocking his own flesh and blood, but now he saw it all. Jorge had seen no god in Wade’s secret chamber, but Wade himself, dressed up like Huitzilopochtli and parading around in front of the obsidian mirrors.
“This is over, Morton,” Mendoza said. “We take the gold and we leave.” As he spoke, the other men and women began pulling strange robes out of a bag and sliding into them. They looked like ghosts.
Wade laughed and the thugs he called his Jaguar Knights leaped up and pinned Mendoza against the tunnel wall. “You cross me, Silvio — after all I have done for you?”
Mendoza struggled against the grip of the men. “Let me go… you’re insane!”
Wade walked to him and placed the tip of the obsidian blade on his lips to silence him. “Hush, Silvio… don’t exercise yourself. You have made your choice, blasphemer. You will make the ultimate sacrifice to the gods.” He turned to one of the cultists behind him. “Bring the ECHO prisoners. They will join Silvio in making the ultimate sacrifice.”
“What are you going to do, you bastard?” Maria screamed.
“Why, cut your heart out and eat you, of course. It is the only way to appease the god of the dead, the mighty Mictlantecuhtli.”
Maria could hardly believe what she was hearing and struggled against the ropes to free herself but it was useless, and Wade ordered the surviving Sixth Sun members forward with the keystone.
She watched, terrified as the robed cultists lifted the heavy stone artefact they had looted from the British Museum and carefully inserted it into the aperture in the wall. She saw now the way the key worked, with the intricate carving slotting perfectly into corresponding recesses in the aperture.