Stuart did not do as asked. Looking at the man, he doubted he could make good on the threat. Soft and chubby. Slow reflexes. Then again, he’d somehow been aware Stuart was sneaking up on him. There could be more to him than met the eye.
“Who are you?” Stuart demanded in English. The intruder had addressed him in Nahuatl, which Stuart refused to use if he didn’t have to.
“I’m sorry, my knowledge of your native tongue extends to basic reading, that’s all. What did you say?”
Stuart switched to the other language, reluctantly. “I asked who you are.”
“You don’t remember me from last night? No surprise, I suppose. Like you, I am in my civvies.” A grin doubled the number of plump folds in the man’s face. “My name is Ah Balam Chel, and I helped save your life at the theatre. Ringing any bells yet?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Stuart replied. He brandished the knife. “You have five seconds to get out of here, or else.”
Ah Balam Chel gently pushed the blade aside. “No need to keep waving that thing around. I mean you no harm. I am not your enemy. Believe me, if I wanted you dead, you would be. I had ample opportunity to kill you last night. That I did not must tell you something. The fact is, I want you alive. Very much so.”
“And why would that be?”
“Because you are the Conquistador.”
“Oh, come on!” Stuart scoffed.
Chel just smiled knowingly. “When I removed your mask and armour in the back of the getaway van last night, it surprised me to see such a well-known face beneath. I’d had the Conquistador pegged as a nobody, some disgruntled member of the lower orders — not an obsidian magnate whose fortune is based on a product so beloved of the Empire. Far from being an outsider or a social outcast, you’re part of the establishment. You’re the last person I’d ever think would go running around London playing the radical revolutionary.”
“Seriously, you’re mistaken,” Stuart insisted. “You’ve got the wrong man.”
“Who helped you back into this building, when you were so dazed you could barely walk? Who cleaned you up and put you to bed? Me. And all the while, I couldn’t quite get my head round the fact that this pillar of the community is also the man who would tear down the Empire. The final confirmation came when I inspected the premises while you slept, and found the stash of equipment and spare suits of armour at the back of your wardrobe.”
“All right,” Stuart said, relenting. There was no point trying to brazen it out any more. Chel knew what he knew. “I am the Conquistador. What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing. Why would I? You think I’m going to turn you over to the Jaguar Warriors?”
“There’s a substantial reward on offer.”
“But I’m an outlaw too,” said Chel. “Remember at the theatre? When you were surrounded by those priests who weren’t priests?”
Stuart recalled the men with the death’s head faces. From the moment a Jaguar Warrior clobbered him on the head, events had taken on a hazy, surreal glow. The death’s heads had dragged him out of the theatre. There’d been a mad dash through the jungle of Regent’s Park, and then…? Chel had mentioned a getaway van, and Stuart had a dim recollection of a tumbling, swerving journey and the tang of diesel fumes. By that point he’d become half convinced the death’s heads were supernatural beings, the souls of the dead come to escort him to Mictlan. It seemed absurd now, especially as he didn’t believe in Mictlan, or Tamoanchan, or any form of afterlife. At the time, though, he’d felt it was a distinct possibility — at the very least, part of a dying man’s fever dream.
And yes, yes. Ah Balam Chel had been one of the death’s heads. Not just one of them, their leader. He’d been barking out orders from the passenger seat, even as he busily scrubbed his makeup off.
“Now, I imagine you’re hungry after your ordeal,” Chel said. “Why not put on some clothes, eat some breakfast? And then we shall talk, you and I. I have things I’d like to tell you, and a proposal to put.”
Stuart studied Chel’s face. He saw neither deceit nor fear there. Stuart trusted no one, but he didn’t sense any danger coming from this man.
Almost without meaning to, he lowered the knife. “All right.”
“How long’s this going to take?” Stuart had just wolfed down a bowl of porridge and two rounds of hot buttered toast. He’d also drunk a pot of proper tea, not coca infusion, which like most of the Empire’s cultural impositions he spurned. He was starting to feel himself again.
“Why, do you have somewhere you’d rather be?” replied Chel amiably. “A holding cell at Scotland Yard, perhaps?”
“Is that a threat?”
“Merely a joke. Perhaps not a funny one.”
“As it happens, I have a business meeting at nine o’clock sharp.”
“Ah yes, your other life. The man you are when you’re not in your Conquistador costume.”
“It’s not a costume,” Stuart said. “It’s a pretence, a necessary disguise. I wouldn’t have been getting away with doing what I’ve been doing for half as long as I have, if I did it as plain old me. Plus, it gives me protection.”
“The image the armour projects, though, that’s important.”
“I don’t deny there’s some theatrics involved. I want the Conquistador’s deeds to stick in people’s minds. I want to be memorable — unignorable. I want TV coverage and newspaper headlines. I’d get none of that if I was just some bloke running about in street clothes and a balaclava.” Stuart pointed an accusing finger at Chel. “All this is pretty rich coming from you. You and your friends with the death’s head faces, the ethnic weaponry. And that jewellery you were wearing. The jade frogs and carved circle pendants. Mayan, right?”
Chel nodded.
“Which explains why you speak Nahuatl without an accent, and you look Anahuac. So why are you over here?”
“To meet you, of course.”
“No, really.”
“Really. Well, it is a little more complicated than that. Have you got time?”
Stuart glanced at his wristwatch. “The meeting’s in half an hour, and it’s twenty minutes from here to Reston Rhyolitic if the traffic’s good.”
“Then we should perhaps do this on some other occasion, when you’re not so busy.” Chel stood up as if to leave. “Mustn’t interfere with the wheels of industry, must we?”
“Or,” said Stuart, “I could phone my PA and have her postpone the meeting. It’s not urgent urgent. Just going over the half-yearly figures with the accounts team.”
“That would be your decision. If you’re interested in listening to what I have to say…”
“I don’t know.” Stuart genuinely didn’t know. He was intrigued by Chel, that was for sure, and there was no getting around the fact that this man and his band of bolas-wielding paramilitaries had pulled the Conquistador’s fat out of the fire last night. Stuart owed him for his continued liberty — his life, indeed. Hearing him out seemed the least he could do.
“It shouldn’t take too long,” Chel said.
“I’ll make the call.”
“There is, of course, no such thing as the Mayan nation,” Ah Balam Chel said. “Everyone knows that. The Maya are no more. We were the last of the Aztecs’ conquests in Anahuac, before the Empire’s expansion out into the rest of the world began. The Olmec, the Zapotec, the Inca and the Mixtec had been enslaved and become tributary states. The Aztecs then swarmed across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and up into the Yucatan Peninsula. Urged on by the Great Speaker, they slaughtered and pillaged, committing atrocities on a scale you wouldn’t believe. Mayan men were killed in their thousands, children too, and women raped in their tens of thousands. That, the mass rape, was a vital plank in the Aztecs’ plan. Their footsoldiers took a particular, vindictive pleasure in carrying out that particular duty. Within months, countless mixed-race infants were born. The bloodline of the Maya was thinned and sullied and would never be pure again.”
“Yes, yes, a history lesson,” said Stuart. “I already know all this. Everybody does.”
“You should not be so dismissive. It may have happened a long time ago, but it is as fresh in my people’s
