Tears of the Jaguar (46 page)

Then Dimitri was looming over him and Martin Bowerdale found himself looking into the black eye of the pistol.

For a moment nothing happened, but the screaming confusion of the site seemed to fall away, and Bowerdale, catching the
scent of the jungle in his flaring nostrils, suddenly saw in his mind the Mayan city of Palenque as he had seen it as a boy visiting with his parents. He must have been no more than eight. He had not thought of that moment for years and had never thought of it as important, but he remembered now standing at the foot of the Temple of the Inscriptions, gazing up the monumental staircase to where his mother, wearing a blousy white shirt, was gazing out, eyes shaded with one hand. He saw his little boy’s hands as they thumbed the film advance on his tiny Kodak Instamatic, and he remembered the awe and the sudden, surprising thought that people made a living by exploring such places.

And just then, between the tightening of the trigger and the flash of the muzzle, Martin Bowerdale smiled.

Deborah had seen them march into the site—Alice and Bowerdale and the big, pale man who must be Dimitri—and she had thrown herself down in the grass and vines, dragging Nick down with her. He had struggled against her, still delirious with panic, and for a second that had attracted the beam of Dimitri’s flashlight. She held her breath, but then the light went back to scanning the site till he found the grave. He had only stayed there a few moments, and then he was shouting.

What happened next took only seconds, but it seemed agonizingly slow, and she almost thought she could get up and run over to them before the inevitable shot came. That was, of course, nonsense. She would have covered maybe half the ground before Bowerdale died, and then the Serb would have shot her too.

So she lay, facedown in the dirt, Nick babbling beside her, and she waited for them to go, wishing there was something she could do, hating the feeling of weakness and ineptitude that
threatened to drown her like the cool waters of the river beneath Ek Balam.

When Dimitri left, still shouting at a sobbing, broken Alice, she had got up slowly, first checking to see that Aguilar had not been shot. He hadn’t, but he was completely incoherent. Nick reacted badly to the Mexican’s terror, drawing his weapon and waving it unsteadily.

“Give it to me, Nick,” she said, firmly, getting right in his face. “It’s me. Deborah. Give me the gun.”

He seemed bemused but had not resisted as she gently reached up for the pistol and pried his fingers from the grip.

Bowerdale was dead. She had known that before she checked the body, but the fact of it calmed her somehow, steeled her resolve. There was no sign of Rylands. She tried to get some sense out of the CIA men, but, like Aguilar, they were too far gone. Krista Rayburn was still standing on top of the mound, shrieking like a banshee.

Which leaves you.

“Give me your phone,” she ordered Nick. “I have to go.”

He stared at her, blank.

“Nick,” she said. “Listen to me. I have to go.”

“Where?” he managed.

She thought. This was no longer about the gems. It was about the life of a little girl that was to be taken, sacrificed, to save another.

“She’ll go to a ritual space,” said Deborah, thinking aloud. “Not in Kabah. There are too many agents around here and likely to be more as soon as you get word to the police or whatever government agencies can get here first. But she’s in a hurry, so she won’t go far.”

She paused, then, knowing she was gambling, said, “Uxmal. It has to be. And she’ll make either for the Pyramid of the Magician—the dwarf—or for the Great Pyramid. I’m going. Now.”

“Wait,” he said drowsily. “I’ll come with you.”

“No, Nick. Try to look after the others till the police arrive.”

“Right,” he said, still vague.

“Where am I going, Nick?”

“What?”

“Where am I going? Come on! Keep it together.”

He seemed to search her face for the answer.

“Kabah!” he said. “You’re going to Kabah.”

“No!” she shouted back, stung with frustration. “I’m going to Uxmal.”

“Right,” he said. “Uxmal. OK.”

“Right. I’m going now.”

“Deborah,” he said, catching her by the shirt and pulling her face toward his.

“What?”

“Be careful.”

And he leaned in to kiss her.

“Look after the others, Nick,” she said again, pulling back. “And remember: It’s not real. Anything you think you see, it’s just the drug.”

As she walked away she dialed the phone and summarized what had happened, first in clunky Spanish, then in fast, insistent English to the police dispatcher. Then she hung up, knowing it would take too long for them to reach her, knowing that it was all on her now.

And then she ran down the forest path, thrusting the pistol into her waistband, running hard past the ruins to the side,
through the trees to the great arch that marked the
sacbe
to Uxmal and the van that sat alone in the parking lot. She had a set of keys in her pocket and snatched them out as soon as she saw it squatting there, toad-like, in the dark. Her thinking was almost completely clear, but she still felt unsteady and anxious. What had Nick said about the bufotenin: it instilled “a paranoiac sense of impending death.” Considering she was chasing a gunman and a woman bent on human sacrifice through darkness and jungle, that seemed only appropriate.

Deborah turned the engine over and snapped on the headlights.

She drove fast, barely touching the brake except at junctions, putting her foot down hard the rest of the time so that the engine raced and complained. Beside her on the passenger seat was the heavy black pistol, and her right hand kept straying to it, fearful of the thing, far from sure how to use it, and desperate that it would not come to that. Nick would send word. She was only five minutes from Uxmal now, but the place would be crawling with cops and US agents when she got there.

At first, she thought her wish had come true. Cars and buses crowded the parking lot, though the site had closed hours ago. But none of them were official vehicles, and the truth hit her as she ran into the site, shouting at an attendant to call the police and ignoring his attempts to stamp her ticket.

The famous Uxmal sound and light show was tonight. That was why people were still filing in to the seats overlooking the Quadrangle of the Nuns beside the Pyramid of the Dwarf Magician. And it meant that either Stroud would have gone somewhere else—in which case all was lost—or that she would make for the Great Pyramid.

So Deborah ran away from the carefully lit path, as she had when she had needed to phone Hargreaves, pounding her way toward the ball court, the house of the turtles, and the governor’s palace, behind which sat the Great Pyramid itself. She was halfway there before she heard the booming sounds of the PA behind her, the Spanish voices relaying high points of Uxmal’s ancient history while the buildings around her lit up red and yellow and green, the banks of lamps below them belting out enough power to saturate the massive structures with color.

The great pyramid itself was in darkness. Deborah pushed the gun she had been carrying back into her waistband and then cautiously began to climb the steep, ladderlike steps up to the temple at the top on all fours. She seemed to have been doing the same thing ever since she came to the Yucatan.

Back in the Quadrangle of the Nuns there was a crash of symphonic music, the lights shifted, and the pyramid she was climbing was suddenly bathed in cool, blue light. Deborah looked up and saw at the top, against the backdrop of the frieze wall with its recessed alcoves and masques of Chaak, a human figure half in silhouette, half splashed with the turquoise glow.

The shape was wrong, the head somehow distorted.

A mask
?
With some kind of headdress.

Deborah thought the figure was speaking, but then the PA from the sound and light show cut out all other sound as a chorus of voices spoke in unison, a long slow and echoing chant of the rain god’s name:

Chaak!

Deborah hesitated, unnerved by the sound and the silence that followed it. She felt for the gun at her back, and then started
up the stairs again, too late realizing that her touch had dislodged the pistol. She felt it sliding out as she took the next step, reached hurriedly round to catch it, but the motion threw her off balance. She flung herself against the steps to keep from falling, and knew the gun was gone before she heard it clattering off the steps below her.

Chaak!
called the voices echoing from the speakers behind her.

She paused in the silence and looked down but couldn’t see where the gun had gone. She climbed again, faster now, recklessly, clambering apelike up the monumental staircase.

She was too close now to see what was happening above her, and there was no cover from which she could watch or time her appearance. Her best weapon was surprise. She took only a half pause at the very top, stiffened her muscles, and sprang over the final step not knowing what she would find there. In the same instant, with a final cry of
Chaak!
, the pyramid and its macaw-stamped temple at the top turned a deep crimson.

Adelita lay bound and gagged on the stone platform, her skin daubed with a blue paste, the Mayan color of sacrifice. The child’s eyes were wide and glassy: her abductor must have made her walk up the pyramid, only binding her legs when they reached the top. Beside her lay a clay figurine with what looked like a lock of silver-blonde hair fastened to it, and around her in a rough circle were items from the Witch’s House tomb: pouches of jewels, scepters, and ceremonial rods, an assortment of silver and gold objects studded with gems.

Standing over the girl was Marissa Stroud, wearing a dark cape of jaguar skin and holding a long knife of flaked obsidian
that sparkled like shards of glass in the red glow. On her head she wore a mask that left only her mouth uncovered, the mask itself bearing the features of the jaguar, the fangs of the upper jaw bared as if the woman’s face was emerging from the animal’s throat. Around her neck was a roughly fashioned cord onto which jewels from the hoard had been randomly threaded, and above the mask sat a twisted crown inlaid with stones that flashed darkly.

Rubies
.

Stroud stood facing forward to the rest of the site, with the great alcoved frieze wall behind her, but she did not react to Deborah’s appearance. She was chanting to herself, whispering, “
Teche a caah a uilah u yich a yumil can
,” then moving from Spanish to English and back to ancient Mayan so that Deborah caught only “symmetry” and “daughter,” standing with her head tipped back and arms spread like some strange crucifix. As if to complete that image, Deborah saw that Stroud was bleeding heavily from her hands and mouth.

A blood sacrifice
.

She thought the big woman’s eyes might be closed.

So Deborah ran at her, leaping over the prone child and snatching at the woman’s arms just as the knife blade began its downward sweep. Stroud fell backward, momentarily stunned by the attack, but she held onto the knife, and as she swung it wildly Deborah shrank from it. The conquistadors had learned long ago what obsidian could do to human flesh.

Chaak
! roared the unseen crowd again, and the light went out.

The darkness lasted only a few seconds, but it was, briefly, total. Deborah sensed Stroud moving but could see nothing. She was also terrified of stepping backward off the platform. Even if she only fell down the stairs she doubted she’d survive, and in parts the drop was vertical. So she held her ground, dropping to a half crouch and spreading her arms, fingers splayed, to catch the other woman. She didn’t realize how close Stroud was till she heard the faintest rush of air and felt the scalpel-clean slice of the obsidian against her left palm and forearm.

For a moment there was no pain at all, only shock, and she took a step backward with no clue if there would be stone or a hundred-foot fall through empty air behind her. Then her skin and the muscle beneath it began to sing with the terrible ecstasy of the gash and she clamped her other hand to the wound to gauge how deep it was. Her arm from elbow to fingers was slick
with blood. She bit back the panic and moved her other hand along its length.