Hunt at the Well of Eternity (7 page)

The next morning, the pickup rattled and bounced along the expressway leading southeast from Mexico City to Puebla. The road was fairly good, but the pickup’s suspension was in bad shape. Pancho had told them that he’d intended to get it repaired; he just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

“But the engine, she runs perfect,” the old man had claimed, and so far, it seemed to be true. Gabriel felt plenty of power under the dented hood when he pressed down on the gas. The pickup might not be much to look at, but it would get them where they were going.

Gabriel wished he knew exactly where that was.

Trading vehicles with Pancho Guzman had been his idea. Cierra hadn’t liked it, but she had to admit it might be safer to take Pancho’s pickup and leave her jeep stashed safely out of sight in the shed behind the old foreman’s house. Esparza might have men watching all the roads leading out of Mexico City, especially the ones on the southeastern side of the city.

Gabriel was at the wheel, a battered straw Stetson belonging to one of Pancho’s sons on his head. He hadn’t shaved, and he wore one of Pancho’s faded work shirts. Cierra sat beside him, her hair pulled back in a tight bun behind her head. Gabriel thought she looked good in a white, off-the-shoulder blouse and a long skirt. Their appearance was different enough from the night before that he hoped they would escape notice if Esparza did have men watching the highway.

The pickup’s bed was filled with supplies that Pancho’s wife had brought back from the market this morning. A tied-down tarp covered the boxes and bags. Pancho had also insisted that they take a lever-action Winchester and a double-barreled shotgun that belonged to him, and his wife had packed ammunition for the weapons, too.

“I don’t know what sort of trouble is chasing you, and I don’t want to know,” the old man had said. “But if it catches up to you, you might need those guns.”

Gabriel couldn’t argue with that.

They had left before sunrise. To all appearances, they were a young couple, a farmer and his wife, who had come to Mexico City and were now on their way home. If that masquerade was successful, they would be well out of the city before Esparza ever found out that they were gone. With any luck, he might not find out at all.

Gabriel didn’t think they would be that lucky. Even if they slipped through the cordon that Esparza was bound to have thrown around the city, the man knew more about what was going on than they did. He had to figure that they would head for Chiapas to pick up the trail of General Fargo. He had gone to a lot of trouble to try to stop Gabriel from interfering with his plans, what ever they were, and he wouldn’t stop now.

But maybe they could gain a few days’ advantage. Gabriel hoped to, anyway.

Cierra told him where to turn and which roads to take. He knew Mexico fairly well, but she was the native here, not him, so he trusted her directions.

“It’s eight hundred kilometers to the old plantation,” she told him as they left Mexico City behind. “Not so far that it can’t be driven in a day, but not all the roads will be as good as this one.”

“I don’t want to push this old pickup too hard, either,” Gabriel said. “I know what Pancho told us about how well it runs, but we can’t afford to break down.”

“It was good to see him and his family again.” Cierra leaned back against the seat’s tattered upholstery and sighed. “I swear, if Vladimir bothers them, I’ll come back and…and claw his eyes out myself.”

Gabriel laughed. “I believe it. But you shouldn’t have to do that. It was just one night. It’s pretty unlikely that Esparza will ever connect us with them.”

They had hidden the jeep in the shed the night before and pulled the pickup around back to pack the supplies in it this morning. No one in the neighborhood should have been able to get a good look at Gabriel or Cierra, and the chances of Esparza’s men even looking for them there were slim.

Pancho and his wife had insisted on giving up their bed for Cierra. Gabriel had slept on a sofa. The house was full of children, but they had all been asleep when the two visitors arrived the night before. That hadn’t been the case this morning, when Gabriel had awakened to find four solemn-faced youngsters under the age of five standing beside the sofa and staring at him. He had grinned at them, and that sent them scampering off in search of their
madres.

The chance to get some rest had helped, and so had the hearty breakfast washed down by several cups of strong black coffee. When they were ready to go, Cierra had hugged Pancho and Pancho’s wife and each of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“Why don’t you let me come with you?” Pancho had asked. “I know I’m an old man, but I know those jungles down there as well as anyone.”

“I’m sorry, Pancho,” Cierra had told him. “I couldn’t take you away from your family. They need you more than we do.”

“I would tell you to be careful…but even as a little girl, you were reckless. Always daring to do more and more, even when it put you in danger.”

That brought a smile to Gabriel’s face when he heard it. His first impression of Cierra had been that she was a beautiful but fairly strait-laced academic and museum administrator. But she had demonstrated since a wilder side. The way she had handled the jeep during the pursuit down the hillside told Gabriel that she had been in some tight situations before.

That was good. He was liable to need a tough, competent ally again before this was over.

But not today. This day turned out to be a welcome respite for Gabriel Hunt. The expressway climbed and wound through the mountains that surrounded Mexico City, then dipped toward the Gulf of Mexico, turning to parallel that body of water several miles inland. The terrain flattened into plains covered by cultivated fields, interspersed with coffee and banana plantations and areas of oil drilling. The driving was easy, as there wasn’t too much traffic on the expressway.

Gabriel kept a close eye on the rearview mirror, watching for any signs of pursuit, and he noticed that Cierra often turned around to look behind them, too. Gabriel said, “I’m sorry you had to find out about Esparza like this. I know you considered him a friend.”

“Not really,” Cierra said. “Not a friend. I appreciated the things he did for the museum, of course, but that was all. We had little in common.”

“He claimed to have a passion for history and archaeology.”

Cierra shook her head. “I think the only thing Vladimir really has a passion for is power.”

“What about money?”

“That goes hand in hand with the desire for power. You can’t have one without the other.”

Gabriel nodded. Clearly, Vladimir Antonio de la Esparza was going to be a formidable enemy. But Gabriel had gone up against better men than Esparza, he told himself, and he was still here.

They reached Villahermosa late that afternoon and found a rundown motel in which to stay. There were plenty of nicer hotels in the city, but that wouldn’t have fit the image of a poor farming couple.

After taking one look at the neighborhood, they decided to carry all of their supplies into the room rather than leaving them in the pickup. As Gabriel slipped the chain into place on the door, Cierra asked, “Were you bored today?”

Gabriel frowned. “What do you mean?”

“No one shot at you all day. That must be a dull day by your standards.”

That brought a laugh from Gabriel. “Sometimes my life is as mundane as anybody else’s.”

“Really?”

“Well…sometimes. Not too often.”

Cierra smiled. “I think I’ll see if the shower works.”

She went off into the bathroom, and a few minutes later Gabriel heard the water running in the shower. Through the thin walls, he could hear Cierra turning under its spray, soaping up. He tried to put the image out of his mind; there was still work to take care of. He took off his shirt and removed both flags, which he’d folded and taped to his torso, front and back, in flat, compact bundles. He spread out General Fargo’s personal standard on the bed and sat beside it, leaning over to take a closer look at it.

The artwork on the flag was fairly crude and of course somewhat faded, but everything was still clear and distinct. Some of the lines, in fact, were darker than the others, Gabriel realized. The distinction was small enough so that it wasn’t likely to be noticed except on close scrutiny. Two such lines made their way in a snaking, parallel path across the hills to the right of the cavalryman figure. Gabriel had assumed at first that those lines just depicted slopes in the hills, but he realized now that wasn’t right. In some places the lines cut
across
the slopes that the artist had drawn. They ended at the far right of the circular picture in what Gabriel suddenly realized was a tiny letter
Z
.

No, he thought as his heart began to slug harder in his chest. It wasn’t a Z. He turned his head so that he was looking at the flag lengthwise, ninety degrees from how it would normally be flown.

It was an
N
…for
North
.

The damned thing was a map.

Those two winding lines represented a river making its way generally from north to south. A curving line of right-angled marks crossed the wavy lines, and when looked at from this direction they resembled caret marks…which were sometimes used on maps to signify mountains, Gabriel thought. Little squiggles that were meaningless marks one way became smoke from those mountains when looked at the other way.

Volcanoes?

His pulse was racing now. The reason those marks were slightly darker than the other designs on the flag was because they had been drawn on there
after
the flag was made, after it had been flown in battle, possibly for a number of years. But not any time recently—they were faded by time, too, just not as much. So: Sometime after the start of the war someone had drawn a map on the flag. The most logical person to have done that was the flag’s owner—General Granville Fordham Fargo.

But what was it a map to?

He was so engrossed that he almost didn’t hear the bathroom door open. He did hear it, though, and glanced up to tell Cierra about his discovery.

The words got stuck in his mouth when he saw that she was standing there in the doorway with nothing on but a towel, wrapped loosely around her torso. Its lower edge fell barely below the curve of her hips, leaving her sleek, honey-golden legs bare. Her arms and shoulders were bare as well, and her raven hair was damp and tumbled loosely around her neck.

Even though the sight of her affected him strongly, it wasn’t enough to make him forget what he had found. His voice sounded a little strained, though, as he said, “There’s a map.”

She stiffened. “A map? What are you talking about?”

“On the flag.” He gestured toward it. “Someone drew a map on it. It’s hidden in the picture, but if you look closely you can see it.”

Cierra hurried forward. If she had intended to seduce him—and the pose she had struck in the bathroom doorway certainly hinted that she had—she had forgotten about doing so as soon as she heard the word “map.”

She lowered herself onto the bed next to Gabriel and leaned forward to study the flag. Her eyes followed his finger as he traced the river and pointed out the mountains.

“You can see the letter N when you look at it from this direction,” he said, rotating the flag. “That’s north.”

“Of course,” she said with a trace of impatience in her voice. “How could we have missed this?”

“Nobody ever said we were looking for a map. And whoever drew it did a good job of concealing it. Unless you were looking for them, you’d think these were just random marks in the picture.”

“But whoever drew it would know where they were.”

Gabriel nodded. “That’s right.”

“General Fargo?”

He shrugged. “Or one of his followers. You can tell from the way the ink is faded that the map wasn’t added any time recently. My gut tells me that Fargo either drew it or had someone draw it.”

“That’s smoke coming from the mountains. They’re volcanoes.”

“Exactly.”

“There are volcanic mountains here in Mexico.” A frown appeared on her face. “But the river’s not right. You can see the way the mountain range curves around and runs in an east-west direction, while the river bisects it from north to south. The closest area that matches that terrain is—”

“Guatemala,” Gabriel said.

Cierra nodded. “Yes. It has to be. The southern tip of Mexico swings to the east to form the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and that orientation continues on over into Guatemala. The rivers run down from the rain forests to the north into the mountains.” She looked up from the map and met Gabriel’s eyes. “But what’s there?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, but this has to be why Mariella Montez brought the flag to New York. She was going to give it to the Hunt Foundation and ask us to send an expedition down there. I’m sure of it.”

“Well…in a roundabout way she got what she was after, then, didn’t she?”

“I guess you could say that.” Gabriel chuckled. “An expedition of one.”

“Two,” Cierra corrected.

He had glanced down at the flag again, but something about the soft tone of her voice made him look up at her. She had been holding the towel around her, but it had slipped a little, leaving the upper slopes of her breasts uncovered. Gabriel had a good view of the enticing valley between them. It was nicer geography than any you’d find on a map, he thought.

“Two,” he agreed as he lifted a hand, slid his palm along her arm and shoulder, enjoying the sleek warmth of her flesh. His hand went behind her head, into that damp tangle of midnight-dark hair, and urged her closer to him. She rested her hands against his chest as their lips met.

That left the towel loose to slide down so that nothing was between them. Gabriel felt his desire growing as the kiss became more urgent. The surroundings were hardly romantic, but that didn’t matter all that much when the attraction between two people was strong enough, as it was here.

And at least nobody was shooting at them right now, he thought as he pushed the flag aside so that Cierra could lie back on the bed and pull him on top of her.