“It was a bloodbath.”
“Still, I heard you cheering.”
“Granted, but did you? Cheer, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Mal. “I think so. Didn’t I?”
“Not so’s anyone would notice. You sat there stony-faced throughout.”
“Inside, I was cheering.”
“Doesn’t count.”
They’d reached the hotel. After checking at the reception desk for messages, they crossed the lobby and rode the rickety lift to the sixth floor.
“Fun’s overrated, anyway,” Mal said as she unlocked the door to their room. “Fun’s for idiots.”
“Which is unquestionably the most idiotic thing you’ve ever said,” Aaronson replied.
They got ready for bed in frigid silence, like an old married couple after a tiff.
It was in the small hours of that night that the call came about Reston’s arrest.
T
HE TOWN OF
Mixquiahuala sat perched on a ridge of high ground above a plain. At its feet,
chinampas
fields stretched as far as the eye could see. Behind it, dark green rainforested slopes glowered.
The main approach road ran along a causeway, raised between deep irrigation canals in the
chinampas
. Farmhands were already out amid the maize crop, wrenching out weeds and relieving the vermin traps of their overnight haul of cavy and capybara corpses.
Past the fields the road snaked upslope to the town and, once inside its environs, branched off a dozen different ways. Mal pulled up alongside a pastry seller who was setting out his wares in front of his shop. He gave her directions to the town’s Jaguar HQ, and she purchased a couple of meringue-topped sponge cakes from him to placate Aaronson, who’d not stopped whingeing about how hungry he was the entire journey.
Necalli, the duty officer at the Jaguar HQ, had an amazing shovel-shaped nose, so large that it left little room on his face for his other features. After a few preliminaries he escorted the two British Jaguars downstairs to the holding cells. He told them that the prisoner had been in a disorientated state when he was brought in yesterday evening. He appeared underfed and showed all the signs of someone who’d been in the rainforest for several days: covered in bites, stings and scratches, not properly bathed, hair and clothing unkempt.
“Also, he’s been babbling, on and off. In English. No one round here speaks it, so we haven’t been able to make head or tail of what he’s saying. We haven’t even been able to process him properly. We’re hoping you’ll be able to help with that, now you’re here.”
“You took his armour off him, I suppose.”
Necalli gave her a look:
This is Anahuac. You breeze in from a piddling little island colony like Britain and speak to us like we don’t know how to do our jobs?
“Just asking,” she said.
“As it happened, he surrendered the armour quietly. The arresting officers thought he was going to put up a fight, but he just handed everything over when invited to – sword, gun, the works – and went with them meek as a lamb. The funny thing was, he was wearing only a few items of armour, not a whole set. Like he’d dressed in a hurry and not been able to finish. All in all, he’s a queer fish. If it hadn’t been for you distributing round that intel about him, we’d have had a hell of a time figuring out who and what he was. We’d probably have assumed he was some kind of mental case and handed him over to a psychiatric care unit. I doubt any of us would have identified him as a terrorist. More likely a victim of bewilderness.”
“Bewilderness?” said Aaronson.
“You know. Civilian heads off for a jaunt into the forest, underprepared, thinks it’ll be just like a meander through the woods, a nice daytrip. He gets hopelessly lost, walks in circles for days or even weeks, and finally finds his way out, but by that time he’s been driven half mad by thirst, hunger and fever. Bewilderness. It happens more often than you’d think. And it’s almost always white foreigners. Some urge they have to conquer nature, challenge themselves, find themselves, maybe have a kind of ascetic spiritual experience, like religious hermits in the olden days. Anahuac natives are far too sensible for that. We know how fucking dangerous the rainforest is. We prefer our towns, most of us, with our air-conditioned buildings and our clean running water.”
“But the armour,” said Mal. “Wouldn’t that have been a big clue that he was something out of the ordinary?”
Necalli shrugged. “I’ve seen stranger. This one guy, a few years back, he turned up on the outskirts of Mixquiahuala naked apart from an anaconda skin. He’d killed the snake and cut the skin off and draped it around himself like a sort of cloak. There was plenty of it, too, so the snake itself must have been a monster. He was under the delusion that by wearing it he had become an anaconda himself. He died in custody.”
“Oh, one of those. Resisting arrest.”
“No, a genuine accident. There was a rat in his cell – crawled in via the toilet. He caught it and tried to swallow it whole. Choked to death.” Necalli chuckled ghoulishly at the memory. It seemed there wasn’t a Jaguar in the world who didn’t have a streak of gallows humour. It went with the territory. “The forest can do things to a man’s mind. Make him lose it completely, sometimes. I think that’s what may have happened to your Mr Reston.”
“He’s not ‘my’ Mr Reston,” Mal said, but in a way he was. She felt about him much as a lioness must feel about the carcass of her prey – proprietorial, covetous.
“Visitors, Reston,” Necalli called out, peering through the spy hole in one of the cell doors. “Up and at ’em.” To Mal and Aaronson he said, “He’s not very lively. All he’s done since he got here is wallow on the bunk. I doubt he’ll give us any trouble, but let’s keep our
macuahitl
s at the ready just in case.”
He patted his sword and nodded at Mal’s. She was reminded that she hadn’t yet got round to upgrading to a DCI’s
macuahitl
yet, the version with the crystal snowflake patterns embedded in its obsidian. She’d been, to say the least, preoccupied.
The cell reeked of unwashed body. Reston lay on his back on the narrow, mattress-less bunk. He stirred as they entered, blinking groggily and rolling onto his side. His hair was lank and matted and several days’ growth of stubble coarsened his chin. Scabs and swellings stippled his forearms and neck, constellations of infection, and he’d shed several pounds. His clothes were torn and caked in dirt. All in all, he was a far cry from the sleek, groomed businessman Mal had met at Reston Rhyolitic or for that matter the fit, muscular jogger she had run alongside the Thames with. His eyes were red-rimmed and he looked fragile. No,
cracked
, that was the word. Like a dropped cup.
“Stuart Reston,” Mal said. “Fancy meeting you here. You should have realised you could never get away. Long arm of the law and all that.”
At the sound of his native tongue, Reston become more animated. He propped himself up into a sitting position. He peered up at the faces of his three visitors, his gaze alighting last on Mal’s.
“Fuck me, it’s you,” he croaked. “My supercop nemesis.” He forced a smile. “Well, welcome to my new abode, Inspector Vaughn. Slightly more humble than I’m accustomed to, but make yourself at home anyway. I’d offer you and your friends seats, except...”
There was barely floorspace in the cell for the three Jaguars to stand.
“You’ve been having a hell of a time of it, by the looks of you,” Mal said. “Hard, isn’t it, living rough and on the run? And ending up in this grotty little cell – it must make you regret all the choices you’ve made.”
“I never had you pegged as the gloating type, but you’re just loving this, aren’t you?”
“I am feeling a warm rosy glow inside, I can’t deny. You’ve put me through several tons of shit, Reston. It would take a better person than I am to not get some satisfaction out of seeing you in the state you’re in now. The phrase ‘how are the mighty fallen’ springs to mind. That and ‘serves you bloody well right.’”
“So what now? I’m getting dragged back to England, presumably.”
“That’s the general idea. A few arrangements have to be made first, but basically you’re coming back with us to face the music.”
“Any chance we can use Nahuatl?” Necalli interjected. “I don’t like being excluded from a conversation in my own station.”
“Fine by me,” said Mal, in Nahuatl.
“If we must,” said Reston, likewise.
“Ah, bilingual after all,” said Necalli. “I was starting to wonder.”
“I wasn’t in the frame of mind to co-operate before. Wasn’t in the frame of mind to do much at all, as a matter of fact. But now that the delightful Inspector Vaughn has appeared...”
Reston accompanied the remark with a gesture in Mal’s direction. Instantly, all three Jaguars’ hands flashed to their sword hilts.
“Hey,” Reston said. “Easy does it. I’d be crazy to try and take on three of law enforcement’s finest. Especially at such close quarters. I wouldn’t stand a chance.”
“But you
are
crazy,” Mal said, “that’s just it. Haven’t you realised? Nutty as squirrel shit.”
“In your opinion. Although I must say, there are things I’ve seen recently that have made even me begin to doubt my own sanity.” Reston’s voice trailed off. He became lost in some deep inner musing, grappling with bafflement and despair. “Men as gods,” he said, mostly to himself. “Gods as men. Demigods? Who knows? Where do you draw the line? How do you distinguish?”
“Nahuatl,” Necalli growled. Reston had reverted to English. “If you please.”
Mal shook her head in an exaggerated show of pity. “Maybe you
aren’t
mad, Reston. Maybe for the first time in a long while you’re lucid and the consequences of your actions are hitting home. The guilt’s catching up. In which case, now is the time to ask if you’ve given any thought to what’s going to become of your company now that its CEO has been unmasked as an anti-Imperial seditionary? Did you even think that far ahead? All those people on your payroll – however many hundreds it is – suddenly their jobs are up in the air, their livelihoods on the line, thanks to you and your psychopathic dog-and-pony show. Do you have any idea how far Reston Rhyolitic stock has fallen since word got out who the Conquistador really is?”
“I imagine the shares hit rock bottom but bounced back. Some other company has launched a takeover bid and now owns a controlling stake. Am I right?”
“Well, yes actually, but –”
“Who is it? CCMM in Italy? One of the Indian consortiums?”
“I have no idea, and I care even less. I only know that someone has.”
“No surprise. Reston Rhyolitic’s too good and too successful that anyone would ever let it fall by the wayside. I made provision, you see. If something untoward were to happen to me – and being arrested and having to flee the country definitely qualifies as that – I arranged things so that the company would immediately be put out to tender, lock, stock and barrel. That way it wouldn’t be broken down and sold off piecemeal but kept as a whole entity, a going concern. My people’s jobs are safe. There may be some restructuring, a handful of compulsory redundancies perhaps, the odd boardroom resignation, but the vast majority of the workforce will still be clocking on as usual, for the same salaries and pensions as before. I’m not a complete idiot, inspector. I’d always assumed the Conquistador would get his comeuppance sooner or later. His lifespan was finite. It was a good run while it lasted. Only now...” His eyes took on that faraway, despairing look again. “Now I really don’t know that it matters. That anything matters.”
“What happened to you out there?” Mal waved to indicate the world beyond the cell’s humidity-blotched walls – the land, the rainforest.
“I’m touched by the concern,” Reston said, coming back to himself. “I didn’t think I mattered to you so much.”
“I’m curious, that’s all. Necalli here says there’s this phenomenon called bewilderness, a delirium people can lapse into in the forest, a kind of fugue state. Is that it? Is that why you’ve come over all weird and spacey?”
“No. I couldn’t really explain it if I wanted to.”
“Why not try?”
Reston deliberated. “I think,” he said eventually, “that the world is a lot stranger and more complex than any of us suspects. I think there are truths we’ve forgotten or been forbidden from remembering. I think you and I, inspector, locked in our own little struggle, our own little battle of wits and wills, just have no conception of the bigger picture around us. We’re fleas. No, ants. We’re ants. Tiny, insignificant, anonymous, scurrying about on our missions and errands, oblivious to the fact that there are giants among us. They can control us, stamp on us, manipulate us, squash us without even trying. We’re nothing to them except objects of curiosity and sometimes distant affection. Am I making any sense?”
“None whatsoever,” said Mal.
“But keep going with the deep philosophical stuff,” said Aaronson archly. “It’s really enlightening. I can feel my brain expanding. Wow.”
“I’m wasting my breath,” Reston said. “You can’t know unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. Seen
them
in action.”
“Them?” said Mal. “Who’s them? Your Xibalba chums?”
“Oh no, not them.” Reston looked pained. “No, they learned the same lesson I’ve learned but, sadly, the hard way.”
There was only one inference Mal could draw. “They’re dead?”
“All of them. Wiped out, like crumbs off a tablecloth. It’s not even like they had a chance. They might as well have not been there.”
Necalli leapt in. “You’re saying a whole band of separatists has been eliminated? Well, that’s marvellous. I need details. Is there some kind of proof? Where are the bodies?”
“No bodies.” Reston gave a hollow laugh. “Only dust. Proof? I suppose you could go looking for a dirty great hole that’s been blasted somewhere in the forest. I couldn’t begin to tell you where, but get an aircraft up there, go scouting around, you’re sure to find it.”
“And what was responsible for this ‘dirty great hole’?”
“A disc. Blown to smithereens. I watched it go up. I was there, right in the middle of it. Right in the middle of the explosion, and I just stood, wasn’t touched, safe as houses.”