The Death Relic (28 page)

Ulster groaned. ‘She must feel horrible.’

‘She does. And she’s taking it out on me.’

‘A big tough guy like you – I think you can handle it.’

‘I could, but DJ won’t let me shoot her.’

Ulster smiled. ‘A hundred years ago, that would have been perfectly legal in Mexico. Nowadays, I’m fairly certain it’s frowned upon.’

‘Yeah. That’s what DJ said, too.’

Ulster laughed loudly. Even though he loved his work at the Archives, he missed spending time in the field. Over the past few years, the most thrilling moments in his life had occurred with Payne and Jones by his side. Or, more accurately, with him at their side. Actually, that wasn’t correct, either. Most of the time, he was cowering behind a tree or running in the opposite direction while they fought their way to safety. The truth was, when the three of them got together, Payne and Jones called the shots – and fired them, too.

Ulster cleared his throat. ‘I know you haven’t asked, so if I’m overstepping the mark, please let me know, but I’m more than willing to fly to Mexico to assist your efforts.’

‘Jeez, I don’t know,’ teased Payne, who’d been hoping for the offer all along.

Unaware of this, Ulster pleaded his case. ‘Between the Maya and Maria, it sounds like you have your hands full. Not to mention my dear friend, Terrence. I would like to be there for him. You know, as a friendly face in a trying time.’

He sighed for effect. ‘Fine, I’ll let you come, but on one condition …’

‘Anything. Just name it!’

‘If I happen to shoot Maria, you have to help me bury the body.’

Ulster laughed at the joke. ‘No worries, my boy. I’ve done a lot of digging over the years. I have the perfect shovel.’

As long as the weather in Switzerland cooperated, Ulster’s private jet would arrive in Cancún in less than twenty-four hours. In the meantime, Payne had a few ideas about what they should do. That is, if he could convince Jones and Maria to go along with his plan.

Payne spotted them near the main entrance to Tulum. They had wandered off during the phone call and were sitting on a massive slab of grey stone that had once been a part of the western wall. From their vantage point, they could see most of the site and the turquoise waters of the Caribbean. It was truly a beautiful spot.

Jones sensed his approach from behind. ‘How’d it go?’

‘Just as I expected,’ Payne said.

‘In other words, Petr’s packing for the airport – with an erection.’

Maria smacked his arm. ‘David!’

‘What? It’s just a figure of speech. I simply meant he’s excited about the trip.’

‘Then you should have said
that
. Why be so crass?’

Payne sensed a lecture coming, so he saved his buddy by changing the topic. ‘Maria, I’ve got some good news for you. Petr is friends with the Italian Ambassador to Switzerland. He felt confident that we could get you a new passport by Monday.’

‘Really? That’s wonderful.’

‘Unfortunately, it means we have to drive back to Cancún today.’

‘Why today? The Italian Consulate is closed at the weekend.’

Payne smiled. ‘Not for Petr, it isn’t. He said he’ll call us with a name and a time. All you have to do is show up and fill out some paperwork.’

‘That’s great, I guess. But I feel kind of guilty about heading back to Cancún. Didn’t we leave there to get away from danger?’

‘I’m glad you brought that up. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, and I think danger might be a good thing.’

Maria stared at him. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Yeah,’ Jones said, ‘you might need to explain that one.’

Payne obliged. ‘After talking to Petr, I strongly believe we’re dealing with some desperate people. Unfortunately, we don’t know who they are or what they want. In my opinion, the worst way to handle a faceless enemy is to run away from them. On the road, everyone is a potential threat, and every place is a potential trap. It would be different if we were chasing a solid lead or trying to get across the border, but what we’re doing is foolish. I’d rather hunker down and take a stand than stumble around Mexico.’

Jones nodded in agreement. ‘Actually, that makes a lot of sense. Worst-case scenario, they make a move and we get to see who we’re dealing with. That sounds good to me.’

‘Really?’ she argued. ‘Isn’t the worst-case scenario actually death?’

Payne grimaced. ‘Death? Who said anything about death?’

‘I’m just making an argument.’

‘No, you’re making this difficult. I thought you said you were going to start trusting me? Hell, it’s not even about me. It’s about
us
. When are you going to start trusting
us
? DJ’s in full agreement on this one, yet you’re arguing with him, too.’

She glared at Payne. ‘What? I can’t have an opinion?’

‘Of course you can have an opinion. Have as many goddamned opinions as you want. But things would go a lot smoother if you kept some of them to yourself, especially when they’re outside your area of expertise. Seriously! Did I challenge a single thing about your Spanish translation? No, I didn’t. And do you know why? Because I can’t “sprechen de Spanish”.’

‘That’s completely different, and you know it.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s the same damn thing,’ he argued. ‘Do you know anything about defending a perimeter? Or choke points? Or kill zones? What about surveillance techniques? Well, DJ and I could teach a class on that shit because we’ve lived and breathed it for two decades. That’s our foreign language. We speak it better than anyone else in the world, yet you constantly challenge our conclusions. That has got to stop now.’

She turned toward Jones for support. ‘David?’

He shrugged. ‘Sorry, Maria. I’m with Jon on this one. You called us to help you out, and you’re making it awfully tough. How can we protect you if you fight us on everything?’

Maria seethed, but realized she wasn’t going to win. ‘Fine. We’ll do it your way. Whatever you guys say, I’ll just keep my mouth shut.’

Without saying another word, she hopped off her perch and stormed towards the
SUV
. The entire time, she was kicking rocks and cursing them in Italian.

Jones watched this unfold without saying a word. Eventually, he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He knew he was in for a gruelling trip back to Cancún. ‘There’s no way she’ll keep quiet for the whole trip. I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you drive her to the consulate.’

‘Not a chance in hell.’

‘Come on, man. Be a friend. How about five thousand?’

‘Only if I can use a gag.’

Jones glanced at him. ‘Wait. Do we have a gag?’

Payne laughed at the sheer desperation in his buddy’s eyes. He almost felt bad for him. ‘Hang on a minute. I thought you liked her feistiness.’

‘Feisty is one thing. Crazy is another. I’m beginning to wonder which one she is.’

Payne pointed at the
SUV
. ‘Only one way to find out.’

Jones sighed. ‘Would it be rude to frisk her before I unlocked the door?’

‘Probably.’

He reluctantly nodded. ‘Can I borrow a rifle?’

‘Sorry, soldier. Can’t let you do that.’

‘Then how am I supposed to defend myself?’

Payne studied her from afar and shivered. ‘I honestly have no idea. We weren’t trained for someone like her.’

Conversation was non-existent for the first seventeen minutes of the trip, which shocked and pleased Jones. He had expected a one-sided verbal barrage that would leave him hard of hearing in his right ear. Instead, he got the silent treatment. No words. No profanity. Not even a growl to express her anger.

In Jones’s mind, it couldn’t have gone better.

Unfortunately, he made a rookie mistake while weaving through traffic on Federal Highway 307. He leaned forward to check the side mirror and accidentally made eye contact with Maria. It lasted less than a second – nothing more than a fleeting glance in which no words were spoken – but somehow it opened the floodgates. Before he knew it, emotions poured out like water through a broken dam.

She said, ‘I’m sorry about my behaviour back there. I didn’t mean to yell at you guys over something so stupid. But sometimes – I don’t know – sometimes I feel so unappreciated, like my opinions don’t make a damn bit of difference.’ Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She wiped them away with the back of her hand. ‘Do you ever feel like that?’

Jones, who rarely shared his feelings with anyone, squirmed in his seat. Normally, he would crack a joke to avoid a serious conversation, but he sensed that simply wouldn’t cut it. He knew he was dealing with someone in a fragile state and the wrong response would only make things worse. So he opted to talk about his past. ‘Not any more. But I used to feel that way all the time.’

‘Really? What changed?’

‘Just about everything.’

She looked at him, waiting for details. ‘Like what?’

He took a deep breath. This was going to get messy. ‘You and me, we come from completely different backgrounds – different countries, different families, different lifestyles – but we ended up in the same place because we let something beat us down. Unlike you, I had all the love and support I could get at home. My parents were great. They worked hard to make sure I had everything I needed, but they always had time for me, whether it was to help me with my homework or to smack my ass with a wooden spoon when I was bad. And let me tell you, I was a handful at times. Even worse than I am now.’

She smiled when she pictured him as a child.

‘For me, problems were non-existent at home. They started the moment I walked out the door and tried to fit in with my classmates. In my hometown, white faces were the norm. In a town of three thousand people, there were less than fifty minorities. Not black people, mind you,
minorities
. It was so bad that I used to keep track of them in a notebook.’ He laughed at the memory. ‘I’ve always been a numbers guy, so I used to find solace in charts and graphs. At any one time, I could tell you exactly how many blacks, Asians, or Hispanics there were in my town and where they lived. I actually learned about Venn diagrams when the Chang family moved down the street. They were Chinese Jews, which forced me to change my entire system.’

She laughed despite her confusion. ‘Why did you track minorities?’

‘Why? Because I was looking for allies. If the shit ever hit the fan, I wanted to know where I should run to first. I figured the Jacksons were more likely to help me than Billy Bob’s parents. By the way, that’s the name of a real kid. The bastard kicked my ass. Twice.’

‘Did that happen a lot?’

‘What?’

‘Fights.’

He shrugged. ‘I was smart, skinny and black. I was a walking kick-me sign.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ she said sympathetically.

‘Really? I thought I told you I was black.’

She smiled. ‘Nope. Never came up.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it came up quite a bit for me. Believe it or not, the physical beatings were easier to handle than the mental ones. Most of the time it wasn’t blatant. I didn’t grow up in the deep south or the 1800s. It’s not like people called me nigger to my face – at least not very often. I’m talking about small things, the things that make a person feel bad about themselves. Snide remarks, backhanded compliments, jokes that went a little too far. My teenage years were pretty rough. I felt like I was alone in the world, and no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I would always be looked down upon by society. I was a person without self-esteem.’

She nodded in understanding. She felt the same way after years of abuse from her father. Not physical abuse, but mental. Whether it was his comments about her intelligence, his insults about her looks or weight, or his general disregard for women, she learned to hate herself at an early age. Her mother tried to comfort her and tell her everything would be all right, but when she died there was no one left to protect Maria. By then, she’d already been shipped off to boarding school, where she fought long and hard to turn her life around.

Eventually, she learned to use the hatred she had felt for her father as fuel for revenge. She scratched and clawed and beat all the odds to become a rising star in the field of archaeology. Unfortunately, what should have been her crowning achievement – the discovery of the Catacombs of Orvieto and all of the secrets hidden within – was marred by the death of her father. Instead of having the chance to rub it in his face, she found herself linked to the crimes he had committed before his murder. Crimes against the Vatican itself.

Even in death, her father made her suffer.

‘What did you do to change?’ she asked.

He glanced at her. ‘Well, I was tired of being an outcast in my hometown, so I joined the one team in the world where they treat everybody the same.’

‘Which team is that?’

‘The military,’ he said with a smile. ‘Of course,
everybody
is treated like shit in the military, but that’s a lot better than being the only one who’s treated like shit.’

‘Misery loves company.’

He nodded. ‘Before long, I was getting more respect at the academy than I had in high school – probably because I’d toughened up over the years. Other cadets in my class struggled with the abuse. They weren’t used to the insults or the cruelty. For me, it felt like home. I figured there was only so much they could do to me. They could scream and rant and get in my face, but they weren’t allowed to kick my ass like Billy Bob. If they did, their ass was grass, not mine. That fact alone gave me inner peace. So did my performance at
SERE
. That’s when I knew I had found my calling.’

‘What’s SERE?’ she asked.

‘It used to be a training programme at the academy. It stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. I’m not allowed to talk about the specifics, but let’s just say it was so difficult that the academy was forced to shut it down because it was too damn hard. During my first year, I heard all kinds of horror stories about it from the upperclassmen. They made it sound like a concentration camp, as if only the lucky ones survived. I figured a skinny sucker like myself would be broken within hours, but somehow I thrived. By the end of the programme, I was so damn confident I felt like I could take on the world. Ironically, the thing that was supposed to break me made me stronger. Ever since then, I haven’t looked back.’