possible.’
‘But you know it to be true.’
Sabir allowed his eyes to play over Ixtab’s face. There was no room for doubt. What this woman said, she believed. And he believed it too. ‘I had no idea. She was too damaged by the time I was old enough to understand.’
‘She did not know it herself. You are not to blame. Your father loved her too much. She was swayed by that. She should never have married. Shamans should remain single. They are wedded to the truth.’
‘But you? You are married. You have a son.’
‘Two sons. And three daughters. But I am not a shaman. I am an iyoma. My duty is simply to recognize those whom the gods have marked out, and to guide those who are lost.’
‘Would you have guided my mother?’
‘If she had come to me. Only then. But I cannot search people out. This is beyond my power. Beyond anybody’s power but Hunab Ku’s.’ Ixtab glanced up at the Halach Uinic. She nodded. He nodded back.
Sabir turned to face the Halach Uinic. The Halach Uinic held out a hand and beckoned Sabir and Ixtab to follow him. Sabir turned to Lamia. She was staring at him with a quizzical expression on her face. He gestured to her, but she shook her head, and fell back in line behind Calque and the mestizo from Veracruz.
Sabir felt a sudden coldness overwhelm him. The feeling was so powerful that it was as if he had been touched by the shadow of his own death.
He turned to Ixtab. She was mentally urging him to climb the rest of the steps. This fact was so clear in Sabir’s head that it didn’t even occur to him to question it. He began dutifully to ascend. He had no idea what was happening to him, nor why he was behaving in the odd way that he was. Who was this woman? And why did he feel so connected to her? Why, moreover, had Lamia refused to accompany them? And what was the significance of the invisible triangle that now seemed to exist between him, Ixtab, and the Halach Uinic?
Instantly, in his head, three images appeared, just as they would have done in a dream. Together, they made perfect sense of everything he had been asking.
In them the Halach Uinic was the sky, Ixtab was the earth, and he, Sabir, represented the underworld.
74
‘We’re to do nothing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly what I said. Madame, our mother, says we are to do nothing. We are to watch and wait.’
Vau, Asson, Alastor, and Rudra were sitting in the car with Abi. They had each stripped, oiled, and tested their chosen weapons. Rudra had found some old wine corks at the warehouse, and had seared the ends to produce a quantity of charcoal substitute. Each of the brothers had camouflaged his face, hands, and forearms, so that no pale skin showed outside the borders of their clothes.
Alastor was still fired up from his activities at the Balancanche caves. He sensed that his brothers were experiencing the same physical lift. This is what they were trained for. This is what they lived for. There was little sense in doing anything else. ‘But we’ve been watching and waiting for more than a week.’
‘Exactly. Now we must do more of the same.’
The brothers looked at each other.
Abi was driving, so he couldn’t immediately identify the focus of their attention. But he knew just what they were all thinking. And he knew that this was the moment, if any, to engineer an invisible coup against Madame, his mother’s, leadership. ‘You all happy with that? At least you’ll get to go to the party. Asson, have you got the girls’ guns?’
‘A Walther P4 for Athame, Berettas for Dakini and Nawal, and the Heckler and Koch for Aldinach. I’ve got that right, haven’t I? I’m not missing anything? Like why do we need weapons at all if all the fuck we are doing is fucking watching a fucking ceremony?’
‘You’re right, Asson. And you argue your point so eloquently. We’d better leave them in the car then.’ Abi was enjoying winding them up.
‘The hell with that.’ It was Alastor. The starved planes of his face were drastically exaggerated by the black stripes of his camouflage. ‘I’m not letting this work of art out of my hands. I felt naked all through the US and most of Mexico without a pistol. Now I’ve got this Glock I’m going to keep it. Seventeen rounds of 9mm Parabellum – muzzle velocity 375mps – effective range 100 feet. And it’s all mine to do with as I please. God Himself couldn’t separate me from this piece.’
‘And this from the man who got a straight left and right of Mexicans with two hidden fighting sticks?’ Asson was grinning. ‘Alastor might not look like much, but he packs a mean backhand.’ Asson’s grin faded away. ‘Abi, are you serious? She really wants us to hold off? But what have we been doing all this past week? Pissing in the wind?’
‘Is your face wet?’
‘Fucking streaming.’
‘Then you just answered your own question.’
They fell silent for a while on the approach to Ek Balam. They could see the pyramid glowing in the distance. It looked like a Christmas cake with a thousand candles planted on it.
‘I’m going to leave the car down this track. We’ll walk in from here.’
‘What’s the point?’
‘The point is that we’re going to wait until the crowd disperses and everyone goes off to beddy-byes. Then we’ll strike. Athame says that the Maya aren’t carrying their rifles any more. My guess is that Sabir and company have inveigled their way into the High Priest’s good graces, and that they’re no longer considered prisoners. So we snatch the three of them, together with the book and the skull for good measure, and get out of here. No killing. No noise. We don’t want the Mexican police on our tail. Those boys don’t joke around when it comes to firearms. They’ll kill you as soon as look at you.’
Vau turned to his brother. ‘But Madame, our mother, told you to hold off.’
‘What Madame, our mother, doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Are we all agreed on that?’
There was silence in the car.
‘Listen. We get this done and then we present her with a fait accompli. She’s not here on the ground. She hasn’t got the necessary facts to make an informed decision. Plus she doesn’t know about the warehouse.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m not going to talk about it on an open phone line, am I? Do I look like a moron? The fewer people who know about it the better. By the time we’re finished up here there’ll be seven bodies down in that cenote. And I want them to stay there. Forever. When the guys who think they own the place come back from picking up their consignment in six days’ time, I don’t want them sniffing around the cenote. It’s got to look normal. Untouched. Because we’re going to be dumping most of the remaining ordnance down there too.’
‘Why, Abi?’
‘Because we want the big boss to think that dear old Pepito and his three cronies took off with all his junk. Instead, he’ll be brushing his teeth and showering in a mixture of corpse water and rust for the next ten years.’
‘Won’t he phone up from wherever he’s going? When he doesn’t get an answer, he’ll send someone down to check the place out.’
‘He’s up at the US border, for Christ’s sake. And he’s not going to phone in the middle of the night to check if his watchmen are still on duty – that’s what they’re paid for. Do you think he expects his warehouse to be invaded by a bunch of Frenchmen? By the time he gets someone on a plane, maybe tomorrow afternoon, maybe later, we’ll be long gone. Anyway, I’ve told Oni and Berith to set up the Stoner and that piece of shit AAT we found in crossfire positions to cover the approach road. Anything comes up from there unannounced, we can blow it into a hundred thousand pieces. Does that answer your question?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Is “sort of” enough to grow your balls back?’
