Tears of the Jaguar (45 page)

The woman turned toward Deborah, but she had no eyes, and the mouth hung open as if the jaw were disconnected. It was black inside and wide enough to fall into.

Ma?

The word ran up her throat from her belly, tearing as it came, so that she felt her insides wrenching and buckling.

No
, she countered.
Not real.

Deborah tried to take a step toward her, but it was like pushing against something with substance, yielding, black and viscous as if the night itself had coalesced and begun to harden. It came from the woman’s mouth. The darkness seemed to spew from her gaping jaws. It surrounded her, a deep, oily blackness that grew more solid by the moment. Deborah pushed against it but could not take the step, and then something hit her and she fell.

It was Nick Reese. He had run into her full pelt, not seeing her at all, so there was no bracing for impact, no slowing before the collision, and she went down hard, holding her head. He fell half beside her, half on top of her, and his breathing was fast and uneven, his eyes mad.

“Get me out of here!” he gasped, still not really seeing her. “I shouldn’t be here.”

Deborah clutched the spot above her eye where he had hit her with his head, and rolled, the darkness seeming to brighten with the pain of the impact, but her head cleared a little, and she seized him by the wrist as he rose and tried to run.

“It’s not real,” she managed. “It’s the water. That woman...” She turned but was disoriented. “How much did you drink?”

“What?” He looked at her as if he had never seen her before, his eyes moving uneasily from her face to the darkness behind her. “I don’t belong here.”

“How much did you drink?” she said again. She felt clearer already, as if telling him what had happened had somehow convinced her own senses. But somewhere back there the eyeless woman still clawed in the dirt. Deborah could sense her. She was coming now, with those hollows where her eyes should be and that terrible, gaping cave of a mouth.

Not real!

“How much did you drink?” she repeated, focusing on Nick.

“I don’t know,” he said. “A cup?”

She sat up and swept her flashlight over the clearing. It was chaos. The others were doubled up, shouting, pointing at nothing, running. Two of them—including one of the CIA men—were lying down, motionless. Jones was on his hands and knees, his arms over his head. Either the others had drunk more than she had, or Stroud had used a considerably greater dose of her toxic cocktail this time.

Stroud! That was her name
.

It had just come to her. Deborah seized this and stood up. The ground seemed to roll around her and she had to steady herself, but she was vertical and alert.

Stroud
.

And there was something else elbowing into her memory.

Adelita
.

Deborah checked the grave, but even from here she could see the child was not there. Another hallucination. But Stroud
had
taken Adelita. That was true. Why?

Deborah ran, stumbling, to the dark rectangle in the earth of the Witch’s House, forcing herself to slow before she fell, but the woman was gone. She had been there though. That had not been a hallucination. Deborah knew because the bones had been disturbed and most of what had been in there with them was gone.

Marissa Stroud carried the duffel bag over her shoulder and walked quickly along the track through the forest without a lamp. There was just enough light to see by, and she felt lit from within by a sense of purpose. There was a rightness to it all, a symmetry. The ease with which she had doctored the water coolers while they stared at the grave proved it.

The universe aligns for those who know its rules.

Then there was a light coming along the path toward her. It was erratic, flashing about, like whoever was carrying it was running and didn’t know where he was going.

Without pausing for thought she moved right, stepped off the path and into the trees: four long strides and then she dropped into a crouch, the bag and its sacred contents shrouded by her skirt, her head down so that her hair fell over her face. Then she became still and silent.

She could hear them coming toward her but she did not look up. She already knew who it was. The student—Alice—and the thug with the guns. And Bowerdale. As they got closer she closed her eyes to focus her hearing, and she could tell which was which, the girl sobbing and whining, the thug’s rough curses, and Bowerdale’s labored breathing as he struggled to keep up. She listened, half seeing the flash of the light, red through her eyelids, but they did not pause, and in another second, they had gone on ahead to the site. She counted to ten slowly, then returned to the path, thanking her gods once more without surprise. It would happen as it was meant to. She could almost sense their hunger for the sacrifice to come.

It had all gone wrong. Bowerdale wasn’t sure when it had started: probably when Dimitri first arrived. He had, he supposed, been warned during that first phone call when his usual artifact buyer had backed off like there was a gun to his head. But hindsight was no consolation whatsoever, especially now that he could no longer see how he might get free of the situation. He was—or had been—a respected archaeologist, a top man in his field. Now he was being pushed around by this European Neanderthal, forced to keep hold of the girl who had flouted his advances and had become a whining wreck. He didn’t know why Dimitri wanted to keep her around, but he was pretty sure that if he let go of her arm, she wouldn’t run.

He
would.

He had known long before he heard what the Serb had done to James. He had been stupid to think he could just walk away from a man like Dimitri, that he wouldn’t still be waiting when
he got out of jail. Involving James had been a mistake too. He saw that now and regretted it bitterly. If he could wipe out everything that had happened in the last weeks, Bowerdale thought fervently, he would, but that wasn’t possible. All he could do now was try to make sure he got out of it alive.

Right now Dimitri thought he was useful, and that would stay true as long as they were picking around Mayan ruins. The moment they stopped, or the moment Dimitri realized that Bowerdale’s specialist knowledge meant precisely damn all, then he would become both unnecessary and inconvenient. Bowerdale was under no delusions about how someone like Dimitri dealt with people he thought were in his way.

So as the big Serb strode down the forest track with that overlong pistol in his hand, Bowerdale held Alice close as he had been told but took the opportunity to mutter into her ear.

“We have to get out of here,” he said. “We have to stop him.”

She had been sobbing, but she stopped suddenly and gave him a wild look, her face inches from his so that he could tell she wasn’t breathing. Then her eyes flashed guiltily to Dimitri, and when she turned back to Bowerdale, she shook her head, fast and small like a terrified child.

“Keep up,” roared Dimitri.

And suddenly it struck him that it hadn’t been Dimitri’s arrival that had made everything go wrong, hadn’t even been his own boneheaded pursuit of the stones and his clumsy inquiries about their possible applications. It had not even begun when they had found the tomb. It had begun years ago, perhaps decades, at some point when he had forgotten why he had gone into archaeology in the first place, some moment when career and
salary and status had drowned out the raw wonder he had once felt when confronted with the remnants of the past. Somewhere out there in the night were places where people had once lived and worshipped, places that would once have filled him with awe and reverence, sensations he had not felt for decades. Now he was a ghost, a shadow of the man he had been, drifting purposeless in the footsteps of his former self, a mere echo...

“I said, keep up,” Dimitri spat.

As they scuffled along after him, Bowerdale felt the woods open up, and around them to their right were stone structures. Up ahead, he could hear strange noises: shrieking and laughing, he thought, but also howling and crying.

What the hell was going on there?

Dimitri reached into his shirt and drew another pistol, this one smaller and with a barrel so short you could hardly see it, and walked toward the Witch’s House with his arms cocked, a gun on each side at shoulder height.

Then someone was coming toward them, sprinting hard down the dark path, panting and sobbing as they ran from the ruins. Dimitri hesitated fractionally then he raised the larger pistol in front of him and fired. In the darkness you could see the flash of the gun, but there was almost no sound beyond the sort of noise you might make by hitting a potato with a pin hammer. There was smoke after that, more than he would have expected, so that for a moment the woods smelled like the Fourth of July, and only after he had processed that did he realize that the man who had been running toward them was gone.

Dimitri kept walking, barely glancing down to where Chad Rylands lay crumpled half in the woods, his legs sticking out
onto the trail. Bowerdale stooped to him, releasing Alice, who went immobile again, but Dimitri barked at him without turning, “Keep up,” as if nothing had happened.

It was too dark to see much of the Witch’s House itself, but a light had been left by the grave site. There were people scattered around, some of them lying on the ground, some of them running about. It was chaos. They were whimpering and shouting. Krista Rayburn was screaming from the top of the mound as if she was being assaulted from all sides. Alice’s knees gave way and Bowerdale let her fall.

Dimitri stood staring at the grave. He stirred the bones with his foot, then turned, his face dark with fury.

“They’re gone,” he bellowed. “They’re fucking gone. Who has them? Where are they?”

He turned, pistols raised, shouting at the first person he saw. It was Aguilar, who was standing with his feet close together on a stone, his body twisting as he stared at the ground around him.

“Where are they?” Dimitri demanded, and he put the muzzle of the silenced pistol to Aguilar’s temple.

“He doesn’t know,” shouted Bowerdale. “Look at him! He doesn’t even know you’re there.”

“Where are they?” Dimitri repeated.

Aguilar continued to scan the ground as if it was alive with something terrible, and Bowerdale, seeing the flash of fury in Dimitri’s face, knew he had less than a second to decide.

It was easy to blame Dimitri for all that had gone wrong, but Martin Bowerdale knew that that was a dodge. Dimitri would be nowhere without Bowerdale’s hunch that Eustachio had ridden the motorbike to Coba to bury the gems. Bowerdale wished he’d never returned the call after Dimitri had first contacted
him. That seemed like a long time ago now. That was when Bowerdale thought he was calling the shots, that Dimitri was reasonable, that they could split the find and the money that came from it. Back then, Dimitri had made it sound like that was the way it would work. But it was more than obvious now that Dimitri was not capable of sharing.

It was only after the gems had disappeared that Eustachio had been murdered in that gruesome fashion. And who had done it? Not him or Dimitri—even though the thug
was
responsible for chasing Miller into the
cenote
and nearly killing her. No, Bowerdale still didn’t know who’d murdered Eustachio or why. But one thing was certain: he’d opened the door for Dimitri. If he hadn’t, James and Chad Rylands might still be alive.

He might still be able to atone for it.

He ran at the Serb, head lowered, arms spread, and launched himself. He made contact just as the pistol coughed and spat its smoke and flame and the shot went high into the jungle night.

Bowerdale was a big man, but his fighting days were long over. The weight and surprise of his attack sent Dimitri sprawling, but the Serb was up on his feet before Bowerdale could get to his knees. He didn’t see the kick coming till it connected with his cheek, and the shock of the pain blindsided him utterly. He thought something snapped, but his hands went not to his face but to the ground for something—a rock, a pick, something he could wield as a weapon—though his fingers found only grass and dirt and air.