Tears of the Jaguar (39 page)

It was Dimitri. She recognized him, though it was like seeing him through frosted glass and his words echoed oddly when he demanded what she was doing. She said something about the bag, and he grasped her by the shoulders and began to shake her. What was she talking about? The bag from Coba? Where was it? Who took it?

She told him she wasn’t sure of anything, that there had been something terrible inside the bag and that she had to get rid of it. Some lady had been there and she had taken it, she said, but her explanations just made him angrier, and he slapped her hard across the face with the back of his hand.

She fell badly, and the pain somehow cleared her head a little more so that she knew what had happened, and she started to say how sorry she was, but he just hit her again, harder this time. His face was red with fury and his eyes hard. When she fell this time, she stayed down for a moment, waiting for her vision to stabilize, trying to compose herself enough to get up. He came for her again and she put up her hands to block his punch, but then James came in. She saw his face shift suddenly as he took in the scene, and then he was running at Dimitri, throwing himself onto him.

Alice scuttled back out of the way, jamming herself into the corner as the two men fought. Except that it wasn’t really a fight. Dimitri shrugged James off and knocked him down so that he lost his glasses. It might have been OK, but James got up again, groggy but determined, and that was when it happened.

Dimitri was wearing a light jacket in spite of the heat, and Alice suddenly realized why. His hand flashed inside and came out with a gun, not the odd little round thing he wore lashed to his chest, but something bigger, with a heavy barrel almost a foot long that she knew was a silencer. She shouted something, but James came at him, his eyes flashing anger and defiance.

The gun coughed twice, and James seemed to pause, frozen, before crumpling to the floor. For a moment, Alice could only stare, and then, as the tears started to her staring eyes, she began to scream.

Deborah spent the whole of the next day in the lab with Aguilar. Krista had found reasons to go up to the site at Ek Balam, but Deborah thought she was being cagey, and Aguilar got tense every time Krista showed up. Something was going on, but whether it was important, or just some
relationship
thing, Deborah couldn’t say. Immediately, she heard her mother’s voice in her head: “How like you to assume that relationships aren’t important.”

Not now, Ma,
she thought
.

Aguilar was a good-looking man, and Krista was conventionally pretty, and both were smart and shared the same professional interests, so she shouldn’t be surprised. So why was she? Why was she always surprised when people connected, even briefly? And why, she wondered—Nick Reese’s image flashing through her head irritatingly—didn’t she?

“I’m too busy,” she said aloud.

“What?” said Porfiro, looking up from his microscope. “Too busy for what?”

“Oh,” said Deborah, flustered. “Just—you know—too much to do. This site...” She gestured vaguely with her hands, and Aguilar nodded solemnly, as if she was making sense.

“I just wish we had more material to work with,” he said. “If only we knew where the rest of the grave goods were. Do you think Bowerdale knows?” he asked.

“If I knew that...” Deborah trailed off.

“Let’s face it,” Aguilar said bitterly. “The only reason Bowerdale would be heading away from us was if he was going toward the missing artifacts. We both know him well enough to know that.”

“Maybe,” said Deborah, not wanting to think about it. She changed the topic. “Aguilar, why did Krista come back to Mexico?”

“What?” said Porfiro, looking defensive. “Oh, you know. Workaholic, I guess. Aren’t we all?”

Deborah held his eyes for a moment, and finally he shrugged and smiled apologetically. It was a confession of sorts. Deborah nodded, and he breathed out, smiling again, broader this time, before returning to his microscope.

Deborah checked her watch. She was hoping to get up to the village to see Adelita before the day was out. She had brought her a stuffed bear dressed up, ridiculously, like a yeoman warder of the Tower, and a book on English royal history. If she could make sure everything here was all right, she could take the remaining van.

She opened her laptop. She wanted to see if Hargreaves was up and about. She had called the hospital twice but he had been
resting and they wouldn’t patch her through. If he was getting his e-mail they might schedule a time to talk.

But when she opened her e-mail there were two messages, one from an unfamiliar address—probably spam—the other from her mother.

Perfect
, she thought.
Dropping me a line to tell me what she thinks my childhood home will fetch, no doubt.

That wasn’t fair.

They were just so different, Deborah and her mother, always had been. Deborah had been her father’s daughter, and once he had gone, her mother had seemed like the enemy, the wicked stepmother, the...

Witch
.

Deborah frowned, not liking the way the word had come to mind. She opened the e-mail reluctantly, expecting to find it spiteful and petty in ways that might justify Deborah’s sense of herself as the aggrieved party. It was, however, more careful than usual, and though it wasn’t what you would call tender, there was a note of feeling in it that she couldn’t imagine her mother actually saying.

Hence the e-mail. She knew she’d never get it out if she called
.

She had received an offer on the house. She would delay the sale if Deborah would come. She wanted to see her, wanted to talk face-to-face, didn’t want any more angry phone calls, didn’t want to sell without Deborah coming home first.
That
, the letter said,
would be terrible. It would put us back
. Deborah wasn’t sure what that meant. Put who back? Her mother and Steve, delaying their plans? Or did it mean Deborah and her mother? She ended, “I love you, Debs. I know you don’t always think so, but I do.”

The words she never said.

She was considering how to respond to this when she opened the other note, but it all went out of her head when she read the new message. It said simply:
I’m sorry. Really sorry. His name is Dimitri, I think. I think he’s Russian. Not sure. I’m sorry. —Alice.

Attached to the message was a document. It began:

My honoured mother,

Much has happened since I last wrote and the consequences of my small doings have caught up with me at last...

Deborah sat bolt upright, her eyes wide. She checked the name at the end of the letter and then reached, fumbling for her phone.

This is it,
she thought
. It’s what we needed. Evidence of Edward Clifford’s final resting place. He went to Uxmal!

And then the phone in her hand rang before she had had chance to dial, and she answered it, flushed with excitement, her eyes scanning the letter on the screen.

“Nick!” she exclaimed. “I was just about to call you...”

“Deborah...”

“You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “Edward Clifford wrote another letter...”

“Deborah, listen,” he said, and his voice was leaden. “Something has happened.”

“What?” she said, still staring at the computer, but now only absorbing Alice’s string of apologies.

“It’s about James,” said Nick. “Bowerdale’s graduate student. His body was found in a hotel in Uxmal this morning. He had been shot at close range...Deborah? Are you still there?”

But Deborah could only stare blankly across the lab, through the side shafts of sunlight from the windows, saying nothing as her eyes filled with tears.

Deborah and Nick drove west toward Merida and south to Uxmal, barely speaking. Deborah drove because it gave her something to concentrate on, though the toll road had almost no traffic and it was all too easy for her mind to wander as they sped through miles of scrub jungle broken by occasional fields of corn and agave.

She had replied to Alice’s e-mail, but she doubted she would hear back. She had forwarded the message to an account Nick had given her but so far nothing useful had returned from whatever searches and tests he had initiated. Not that she expected any. She didn’t know who this Dimitri was, didn’t really believe in him. She had called Powel to give him the news and he had sounded shaken, though the line was unusually bad. She had told him they were going to Uxmal, that she was still looking, but she couldn’t bring herself to talk for more than a minute about something that seemed so irrelevant next to James’s death.

It was your dig,
she told herself
. If nothing else, it was your dig. And these were your people
.

James was just a kid. He thought of himself as an archaeologist, but he was little more than a child, wide-eyed and full of excitement and potential.

Deborah lowered her foot involuntarily and the car sped forward.

“You want to talk about it?” said Nick, sitting up.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she said, eyes on the road.

“Seems like there is.”

“No,” she clarified. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

So they didn’t talk about it—or anything else—and the miles slid by. In the back of the car, still stuffed into a red plastic bag, were the souvenirs she had brought back for Adelita. She had never made it up to the village, and that too felt like a failure.

Two hours later Nick started making phone calls, and by the time they reached Uxmal, Kenneth Jones, the CIA operative, was there to meet them.

“Now maybe we’ll get that Anglo American accord,” Nick remarked.

It took a while for the American agents to show any sign of that accord. There were two of them, Jones and another man called Freykes, a quiet, middle-aged white man in a gray suit whose professionalism couldn’t mask what she took to be resentment. He didn’t want to work with the English agent. Neither did Jones. They were acting on orders from higher up. There were some muttered apologies for previous encounters, but there was a posturing stiffness to the way the men interacted that she found tiresome.

Deborah was relieved to find the crime scene already tidied up, the body long gone. Jones was working closely with the local police, he said, and other agents were en route from the States. His manner was businesslike, formal, pointedly not blaming anyone. Deborah had been bracing herself for his rebuke, his allegations of amateurism and reckless incompetence, and maybe if she had come in cocky and unaffected by the news he would have unleashed them all, but he took one look at her and just gave her a nod of greeting. He even offered his condolences, but Deborah couldn’t even find the words to thank him, and there was a long, awkward pause till Nick, still professional, took him aside to talk,
secret agent to secret agent
, thought Deborah bleakly.
As if I needed further evidence of why I shouldn’t be here
.

But if she expected to be ignored, left to go her own way from then on, she was wrong. She heard them muttering in the hallway outside, but no more than five minutes later, they were back and, without explanation, continued to include her in the conversation. Nick had shown Jones the e-mail from Alice—or, as he said, “allegedly” from Alice—and asked him if the name Dimitri meant anything to him. Jones shook his head without meeting their eyes and Nick pressed him.

“You want our help on this, you need to be honest with us,” said Nick.

“
Our
help?” said Deborah. “I’m not on your side.”

“Fine,” said Nick. “We need your archaeological expertise, right, Agent Jones?”

This was obviously what they had been discussing outside. Jones seemed to hesitate, not liking it, then nodded.

“I’m not crazy about having civilians in a hot zone,” he said, “but under the circumstances I don’t think we have a choice.
Besides, I know a bit about you. You’ve worked with the FBI on two occasions, productively. We could use your expertise.”