Tears of the Jaguar (48 page)

The police helicopter took the site team to Merida for hospital observation, but as soon as it was clear that the CIA agents would be flying on to Chicago, Deborah insisted that they first return Adelita home.

No one felt like arguing.

It was a little after dawn when they reached the village of Ek Balam. Word had reached the Maya that they were coming, that they were bringing the girl with them, and the whole pueblo turned out for their arrival. Adelita had been quiet but was regaining something of her old poise, and the reception by her friends and family completed the transformation. She sprinted gleefully into her mother’s arms, and the family turned in on themselves, weeping and laughing, forgetting everyone and everything else. Deborah watched, but when she felt her eyes prickling, she turned to Nick Reese and said, “Time to go.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Adelita spotted her and ran after her, hugging her, but it was like she was tied to her parents again, enclosed in a kind of bubble, and Deborah was outside it.

That’s OK
, she told herself.
Better this way.

“You saved my life,” said Adelita.

Deborah remembered saying the same thing to the girl after that fateful storm so long ago, and recalled the girl’s response. She waved the remark away and shrugged.

“Thank you,” said the girl’s mother, in English.

Deborah just nodded, then raised a hand in farewell.

The chopper had them at the airport in under an hour. Deborah had said little on the flight to Merida but looked down at the jungle trying to spot pyramids and other remains as they flew. She sensed the men watching her, and when, just before they boarded the plane, they approached her, she brushed them off.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“That’s a nasty cut,” said Kenneth Jones, eying the palm-to-elbow bandage.

“They’ve cleaned and dressed it,” she said. “There’s nothing else they can do and I need to get back to the States. There’s work I have to take care of.”

“Given what you’ve gone through, I’m not sure travel is wise.”

“You know, Kenneth,” said Deborah, taking a step closer to him, “last night you didn’t know what day it was, so I don’t think you’re in any position to say what is and isn’t going to be too taxing for me.”

The black man looked away, his brows knit, and for a second she thought he was angry, that he thought she was rubbing his
nose in what she had done while he had been out of it, but then he grinned.

“And would I be right in thinking that this work of yours would take you to Chicago rather than Atlanta?” he said.

“You need me,” she said. “One last time.”

“She’s right,” said Nick Reese. “She’s the only one who holds all the pieces of the puzzle.”

Jones looked at the floor for a moment, then began to walk. “Why don’t you tell me about them once we’re airborne,” he said.

As well as Eustachio and James, Dimitri, Bowerdale, and Stroud were all dead. The doctors thought Chad Rylands would make a full recovery. The bullet had gone through his stomach, and he was in surgery now but was, they said, out of the woods. Porfiro Aguilar and Krista Rayburn, like the CIA men, seemed no worse for the drugs they had ingested, though the hospital staff weren’t ruling out occasional relapses as was possible with hallucinogens like LSD. They just didn’t know enough about the mixture Stroud had used, though their labs had plenty of sample to analyze from the cooler at the site. Nick had not drunk as much, and Deborah still less. Alice was under suicide watch at the hospital. She would never be the same, Deborah figured, but maybe that was true for all of them.

There were a lot of questions to be answered, and it wasn’t yet clear who would ask them and whose government they would work for. Nor was it clear if there would be charges against the survivors. There had been protocol violations, minor law infractions, and lots of bad judgment, but the only one who might face arrest was Alice, and Deborah doubted it would come to that. For Steve Powel, director of Cornerstone, the man who had sent her to Mexico in the first place, and then sat in his Chicago
office, surrounded by pictures of his skater daughter, things would not go so easily. He had, it seemed, been in contact with Stroud throughout, had been the one to get her name in front of Deborah as soon as it was clear they needed new people on their team. Powel and Stroud might have been separated, but Deborah suspected they had always been bound by their daughter, and the accident had brought them back together, however quietly.

Deborah talked it all through on the plane, and even the professional agents, who she figured had heard it all, gaped and squinted in disbelief.

“And you think,” said Jones, “that Powel promoted the entire excavation to recover these jewels with a view to using them in some kind of black magic ritual designed to revive his daughter?”

“I don’t think he knew Edward Clifford had gone to Ek Balam, no,” said Deborah, “and I don’t think they saw it as
black magic
, but I do think Powel suspected what the Malkin Tower stone was after he bought it. He had to have known there was a link between the Pendle farm and the crown jewels through the Cliffords, so I’m pretty sure he knew Edward had gone to the Yucatan. Cornerstone had been involved in digs all over the Mayan world, and though I doubt he was actively searching for the missing crown jewels, they were clearly on his radar. Though they had been separated for sixteen years, he had been married to Marissa Stroud, who was one of the world’s authorities on royal regalia. She had been poking around in those records for years. I don’t know where it came from, but they both became fascinated by the occult, and when their daughter was hurt and left in a coma, they turned to legend and superstition. Desperation, I suppose. Nothing else had worked.”

“Crazy,” said Jones.

Deborah nodded, but sadly. “I guess when people lose a child, or think they will...”

The sentence was left hanging in the air, fading into the steady background noise of the aircraft.

Is that how Ma feels,
she wondered suddenly
, that she has lost me, that I’ve slipped away from her over the years and she doesn’t know how to get me back?
That without Dad, our bond is dissolving completely?
The idea surprised and unsettled her even as she tried to dismiss it.
Ma? Is it possible?
Or was she just projecting, wanting to believe that her mother still needed to know they were connected, bound by invisible filaments of personal history, or fused at the level of the blood and bone of their so dissimilar bodies.

She thought of Lady Anne Clifford and the faceless, demonized pariah, Jennet Device.

Janet Davis
, she corrected herself, the alternate name bringing the woman almost into the present so that Deborah felt that she could almost see her.

“So we know the gems aren’t magic,” said Nick Reese, breaking the silence. “No great surprise there. But what are they?”

“If you’re asking whether they are the solution to decades of research into solid state military lasers,” said Jones, “I’m betting they’re not, but we won’t know till they have been carefully analyzed. Bowerdale knew a little about the crystals used in laser technology, and he recognized some signatures in the initial chemical and physical analysis of the stones that piqued some people’s interest, but I don’t think they’ll turn out to have the value he or Dimitri thought they did.”

The irony sickened Deborah.
All those lives lost.

“Like I said, we’ll see when the analysis is complete,” said Jones, seeming to read her look.

“So long as they aren’t damaged in the process,” said Reese, “and so long as Her Majesty’s government gets full access to all results.”

“I don’t think you get to set the terms of what happens next,” said Jones.

“I think I do,” Reese countered.

“And why would that be?”

“Because the gems concerned are property of the English Crown,” said Reese. “Literally, in this case.”

Jones gave Deborah a look. “You buy that?”

“The evidence is circumstantial right now,” she said, thoughtfully, “but it’s pretty compelling.”

“So you think we’ve found the lost crown jewels of England?” he said, daring her to say
yes
.

“Yes,” she said. “I think so. They may be incomplete, they may be damaged, and they may not be as impressive as the ones on display in the Tower, not as intrinsically valuable, but yes: the crown jewels of medieval and renaissance England going back to Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, which makes them about as old as the pyramids of Uxmal and Ek Balam.”

“Which also makes them a British Natural Treasure,” said Nick Reese, “so no, you can’t chop ‘em up to see if they make your lasers better.”

“I said it before and I’ll say it again,” said Jones. “If there’s a choice between foreign cultural history and domestic national security, which way do you think the US government will go?”

It was a rhetorical question, and Deborah, depressed by it, looked out of the aircraft window to where the runways of O’Hare International Airport were just coming into view.

Steve Powel had been taken into custody before dawn and long before Deborah’s plane touched down in Chicago. He had gone quietly, she was told, and though he had not yet been charged he was making no demands for lawyers or release. His secretary, Mrs. Gloria Pickins, had also been taken in for questioning, but it might be weeks before a clear sense of what had happened emerged and the case could proceed to trial. Various occult objects had been found in Powel’s home and office, including some human bones, but it was believed they had been acquired from grave robbers and their agents, and there would be no serious charges against him that did not involve what had happened in Mexico and the UK. There was no sign of the Malkin Tower stone in any of his collections.

As they drove into the city, Deborah began to adjust her left arm and shift in her seat.

“You OK?” asked Nick.

“I think it may have reopened,” she said. “Maybe I should get it looked at again.”

“We have people on staff in the office,” said Jones.

“That’s OK,” she said. “Just drop me off and I’ll swing by the hospital. Excuse me,” she called to the driver. How close are we to East Fifty-Fifth Street?”

“Right now?” he said. “Not very. But I can get you there.”

“That would be great,” she said. “Corner of Ellis, please.”

“I didn’t know you knew the city so well,” said Nick, watching her carefully.

“I had to spend time here with Cornerstone,” she said, looking out the window. “What happens to Cornerstone now?” said Nick.

“I have no idea,” she answered.

They dropped her at the junction she requested, and she said she’d call within the hour.

“Don’t leave town,” said Jones, half-seriously. “There’s still a lot we don’t know.”

She agreed and walked briskly away down to the hospital entrance, but once the car had pulled away, she paused, then moved away from the emergency room. She found an information desk, asked her questions, and five minutes later was standing outside a private room telling a nurse she was a family friend.

Angela Powel lay still, wired to monitors, IV drips running bags of fluid into her system. Her head was unbandaged and her pale gold hair spilled out onto the pillow. For a long moment, Deborah just looked at her, trying to imagine how it would be different if this had been her own daughter, but she couldn’t do it. She thought of Adelita and her parents and, feeling something
real for the girl who had been her friend in Ek Balam, wondered what her loss would have been like.

Terrible,
she thought
. An absurd injustice that proved the arbitrariness of the universe.

Which was, she suspected, how Steve Powel and his estranged wife had felt about the ridiculous accident that had left their beautiful and accomplished daughter lying here. No wonder Marissa Stroud had wanted to believe in symmetry, in an order to the cosmos that she could somehow manipulate with the old surrogacy of Mayan ritual and sympathetic magic: the torturing of one human as a sacrifice to the gods, the offering of one child to save another. It was, she thought, a kind of love: selfish, desperate, and irrational, no doubt, but love just the same. w