drink their brother’s blood, to permit their own destruction.
Jessica’s fingers were trembling. Entheogenic and psychedelic drugs united all the cultures of pre-Columbian America. The Aztec and the Inca, the Maya and Mazatec, the Zapatec and the Mixtec, the Chan Chan and Zuni, and Hopi and Chimu, and Nazca and Navajo and beyond. The practice stretched far north: the Kiowa of Oklahoma took peyote cactus buttons; it reached west into the deserts, where the Tarahumara ate mescal; it reached deep into the jungle, where Amazonian tribes took ayahuasca; it reached unto the Olmec, who delighted in datura; it reached long into the Great Plains, where Apache imbibed nicotine, and down the Andes, where virtually all cultures sniffed and chewed cocaine. It reached into the Sonora wilderness, where ancient men licked the cane toad, and into the pampas, where Argentine tribes endured psychedelic enemas of liquidized snuff made from the ground seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina.
The Aztecs even gave hallucinogens to their jaguars.
The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good
Jess sat back. She had her proof; or, at least, an excellent theory. Drug use was the unifying factor that underlay all pre-Colombian cultures from Patagonia to Canada, and therefore perhaps all their rituals and religions. And maybe their iconography, too: perhaps they all hallucinated in the same way, because of this unknown plant, explaining the similarity of pre-Columbian art from the Maya to the Aztec to the Inca and Muchika.
A universal proto-drug that eroticized sadism or masochism would also explain the terrible cruelty of all these religions and cultures: the obsession with sacrifice and blood letting, with blood drinking and decapitation.
The words of the carol were still spinning in her mind, though the PA had been switched off, long ago.
The holly bears a prickle
As sharp as any thorn
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas Day in the morn.
So what happened to this precious and terrible drug? It must have gone north, from Peru to Mexico, and then gone to ground. But now, it seemed, ulluchu had re-emerged. Someone had found it, taken it, used it. Others were looking for it.
Jess felt a tiny frisson of exultation, but then her epiphany passed, and the fear returned. Who would be the most likely people to want such a powerful and dangerous drug? Who would be prepared to kill to get it? To murder indiscriminately?
They were all in much more danger than they had ever realized. She reached for her phone. This time she wasn’t going to be fobbed off with cached Facebook pages and unanswered emails.
Getting put through to the right person took an hour, and it probably cost her two hundred dollars. But she didn’t care.
Finally a warm but wary British voice answered her query. ‘Yes, I am Detective Chief Inspector Mark Ibsen. I’m in charge of the McLintock case. But who are you?’
43
The Embassy of the United States, Lima, Peru
‘Carlos “El Santo” Chicomeca Monroy.’
Jessica looked at the besuited man in front of her. He was young: about thirty; his head was close-shaved, his eyes were piercingly blue, the shirt was the whitest shirt she had ever seen. Clearly he was CIA or FBI, or Drug Enforcement Agency. DEA. She asked, ‘El Santo?’
‘The Saint.’ The man smiled. Very briefly. ‘It’s a joke, Mexican black humour. Carlos Monroy is about as far from a saint as you can imagine. Even by the sick standards of the Mexican drug wars, he is a sicko. Pathologically violent. We think he drinks blood.’
Jessica had phoned the embassy with her theory just after she had spoken with the British police, and made several other connections to cover her bases. The embassy had immediately asked her in for an interview the following day. But now it was their turn to talk.
The official pulled out a sheet of paper from a file on the desk and swivelled it so that Jessica could see. ‘This is the best image we have of Monroy.’
She leaned to look. ‘He’s handsome. Very young?’
‘It was taken a few years ago, when he was at Harvard.’
‘I don’t understand.’
The DEA guy leaned back, steepling his fingers, as if in prayer. ‘How much do you know about the Mexican drug wars? The drug cartels? You told us that you suspect the drug gangs are somehow involved in the events in Zana, and Europe. But what else do you know?’
‘Well.’ She shifted in her seat. The room was airless. Windowless. Featureless. Buried deep inside the embassy, like a safe room. ‘Not that much. I’ve been abroad the last three years. India, then Peru.’ She shrugged, awkwardly. ‘I mean — I hear about the awful murders of police. I know it is seriously violent across the border. I know that if the Mexican drug gangs are involved in all this, then it’s important. And dangerous.’
‘Indeed. Seriously violent is something of an understatement. Since 2003 at least fifty thousand people have died in the conflict between the various drug cartels of Mexico, who are competing to supply cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin, primarily to the USA. Moreover, in recent years the death rate in this drug war has actively worsened. The death toll is far higher than, say, the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The rate of killing is actually higher than the Afghan war. One city alone, Ciudad Juarez, on the Texan border, sees thousands of murders a year: it is the most dangerous city on earth.’ A terse pause. ‘And the violence is unbelievably brutal. People are tortured to death on YouTube. Victims are beheaded and mutilated and stripped naked and strung up from bridges in Juarez, with obscene notices slung around their necks. Women are mercilessly raped and tortured, then killed. In 2009 a series of victims were dissolved in acid by the “stewmaker” — so called because that’s what he did, he made human stew. A stew of dissolved humans.’
The young man frowned, stood up, and walked to the side of the room. ‘One reason for the violence is the vast amounts of money provided by the narcotics industry. We estimate the drug trade in Mexico generates at least forty billion dollars in profits a year. One cartel leader, Chapo “Shorty” Guzman, was listed amongst the world’s richest men by Forbes magazine. The income these guys make is phenomenal, and they will fight to the death to own the “plaza” — the place of trade. They will kill indiscriminately. They will walk into a wedding and spray the place with machine guns just to show they can. Just to terrorize.’ He gazed at a wall, as if it were a window. ‘The drug lords, of course, become famous. Even glamorous. Songs are sung about them — about the narcos, the enviable billionaire drug bosses, these songs are so popular have their own genre, narcocorridas. There is a whole culture of narco this and narco that. When the drug lords die they are buried in elaborate narcotumbas. Their beautiful teenage mistresses are called narcoesposas — narco-wives. There is a narco-architecture: the vast lurid villas they build. You get the idea. It is an entire civilization of cruelty and killing, based on the misery of addiction.’
He turned. Talking directly at her.
‘A couple of years ago, straight into this maelstrom of horror, walked Carlos Monroy. His family is aristocratic: they can trace their descent from the Aztec royal family, and from the conquistadors. This is not uncommon, of course. There are many descendants of the Aztec Emperor Montezuma living today; some went to Spain, to Europe. President Chavez of Venezuela was descended from Montezuma. Similarly, the conquistadors had many children, when they interbred with the Aztec and Inca royal families. But it is unusual for the leader of a drug cartel.’
Jessica felt a need to speak now, to interrupt this ceaseless flow of knowledge. To show she existed. ‘I don’t understand. Why is his lineage so important?’
‘Because it meant he got a very good education. Most cartel bosses are from the slums, the barrios. They fight and kill their way to the top. But Monroy went to Harvard, where he studied history and science. He is extremely intelligent, cultivated and educated, and his family is already wealthy. Why then did he become a cartel
