neither, I suspect, do you. We’ll just — ”
Vaughn jack-knifed out of her seat and struck him across the face, backhand. It was as good a shot as the one she’d got off in his office, and it hit almost exactly the same spot. Stuart tasted blood. Probing with his tongue, he found that a molar had been loosened.
“Ugh,” he said. “Not nice. Police brutality.”
“That’s just a taster of things to come. Given how many of us you’ve killed, there’ll be no shortage of candidates wanting to come see you downstairs and get a little payback.”
“Allegedly killed, chief inspector.”
“How long are you going to keep up this ‘innocent man’ routine?”
“I don’t know. How long are you going to keep up the pretence that you’re happy being a Jaguar?”
She flinched. “Bollocks. I love my job.”
“So the drinking, the over-reliance on coca, the cheap sordid assignations with strangers — these are all signs of someone content in herself, with a healthy relationship to her work? And not, say, someone whose conscience plagues her constantly and who knows she’s a good person doing bad things and who tries to numb herself so she doesn’t have to think about any of it too hard.”
“Like I told you, solving crimes, keeping the peace, collaring undesirables, where’s the harm in that?”
“You Jaguars are no better than the crooks you round up. The only difference is you have badges and they don’t.”
“The law — ”
“The law is meaningless,” Stuart scoffed. “The law is whatever the Great Speaker wishes it to be. It’s there to keep him in power and quash anyone who disagrees with him or would like to see him dethroned.”
“The Conquistador himself couldn’t have put it better.”
“He’s obviously as much of an advocate of free speech as I am.”
“Freedom of speech doesn’t extend to insulting the Great Speaker.”
“I wasn’t insulting His Imperious Stupendousness, merely criticising. And if that’s not allowed, then my case is proven. QE-fucking-D.”
“I’m not having this argument with you,” Vaughn said brusquely. “It’s pointless. If you’d like to live in a world of anarchy…”
“Not anarchy, Miss Vaughn. Just democracy. A world where we choose who rules us and how we’re ruled. We had a world like that, Britain did, up until a hundred years ago, before the Empire finally ground us down. I can see a time when we might have it again.”
“Well, I can’t, and neither can anyone else in this van. You’re in a minority of one, Reston.”
“Maybe if you stopped boozing and spreading your legs like a bitch in heat, you’d have a clearer head and clearer vision too.”
Vaughn leapt to her feet and drew back her fist to sock him as hard as she could.
Whaaammmm!!!
The entire paddy wagon took to the air. It rolled and rolled, and everyone inside rolled with it. Bodies tumbled. Limbs tangled. Heads collided. Only Stuart, thanks to his bonds, stayed more or less in one place. The Jaguar Warriors were thrown about helplessly while he swung, hung, crash back against his seat; swung, hung, crashed. There were resounding, thunderous thumps as the paddy wagon somersaulted, striking the ground repeatedly. There were also screams, shouts and grunts from its occupants, and once or twice the deep snap of a bone breaking.
The paddy wagon came to a rest on its side. In the back, Jaguar was piled on Jaguar in a jumbled heap. Low groans filled the air. Someone whimpered in pain.
Then, with a wrenching squeal, the rear doors were crowbarred open. Men rushed into the stricken vehicle. They had skull-face makeup and paramilitary jumpsuits. One wielded a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters.
The Xibalba guerrillas dug through the tangled mass of semiconscious Jaguar Warriors to find Stuart buried beneath. The one with the bolt cutters made short work of the chains securing Stuart, and in no time Stuart was being helped out into the daylight.
Blinking around him, he realised he was at the large intersection north of Whitehall, Tenochtitlan Square. Traffic had come to a complete standstill in all directions. Horns honked. Drivers yelled from their windows, and some leaned out to gesticulate.
The guerrillas hustled Stuart across to their van, which stood nearby with a severely dented front bumper and radiator grille. The engine was turning over, rattling somewhat. Stuart was shoved into the back and the van howled off, tyres screeching.
In the passenger seat, Ah Balam Chel swivelled round.
“Hello again, Mr Reston,” he said, grinning. “So Xibalba plucks you from the clutches of the Jaguar Warriors a second time. This is becoming a habit.”
PART TWO
ELEVEN
2 Snake 1 Lizard 1 House
(Thursday 6th December 2012)
Stuart set down the binoculars in order to slap at something biting his wrist. Inspecting the palm of his hand, he found the mushed remnants of a mosquito the size of a bumblebee, along with what seemed like several fluid ounces of his blood, the insect’s last meal.
The rainforest. There was nothing here that wasn’t trying to sting you, eat you, poison you, suck your blood, or keep you awake half the night with hundred-decibel screeching. Anahuac, the holy land, cradle and hearth of the Empire. Well, you could fucking keep it.
He raised the binoculars and zeroed in again on the object of his scrutiny. It lay at a distance of two miles from his vantage point, across the placid blue waters of Lake Texcoco, on an island approximately a mile long. It covered the whole of the island, its walls rising sheer above the lake to a height of around a hundred metres, Stuart estimated.
Tenochtitlan, home of the Great Speaker. More citadel than city and more fortress than either.
Ziggurat rubbed shoulders with ziggurat. Some of them were topped with roof gardens, others with glassed- in solariums, a couple with aerodisc landing pads. There was one waterfront entry point only, a harbour with a road that led up to a large gate at the city’s southern tip. The gate was built as an inverted trapezoid, in true Aztec fashion, and was well defended. There was no other mooring place around the island perimeter as far as Stuart could see, but there were watchtowers at regular intervals along the walls and any number of armed patrol launches circling in the vicinity. Tenochtitlan had been designed to be unbreachable. The Great Speaker’s personal army, the Serpent Warriors, added a further layer of security.
Beside Stuart, Zotz shifted impatiently. “Seen enough?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
Ah Balam Chel’s second-in-command grunted and popped a flake of jatoba bark into his mouth to chew on; it settled his stomach.
As Stuart scanned Tenochtitlan’s roofline he caught sight of a private aerodisc making its descent towards the city. The moment the disc touched down, it was surrounded by a dozen Serpent Warriors. Some dignitary or other — an ambassador, a delegate here to crave a boon, a priest, perhaps even a High Priest — came down the gangplank. He waved warily at all the lightning guns that were pointed at him. Only after he had presented identifying documents and a seal of office were he and his entourage permitted off the rooftop, into the city. Several Serpents were posted to stand guard around the disc and would remain there until it was the dignitary’s time to
