Eva glared at him again. Her wavering countenance hardened into absolute assurance, suggesting she knew exactly what she was doing.
“I didn’t bring us here to find an artifact,” she snapped.
“Then why did you agree to produce a bomb you know entirely nothing about?”
The side door flew open and an officer grabbed Eva’s arm. As she was manhandled out of the van, she looked at John one last time. Her eyes still flared with anger, vainly masked by a tear threatening escape.
“There’s something far more important in my father’s note than that damned old effigy,” she said.
As she found her feet outside the van, the second officer rolled the door shut behind her. With a metallic clank of the lock, John was trapped alone in the silence that followed.
Eva was gone.
Blockade
“Looks like the cops crashed a party,” Derek said, though he doubted the scene before them was the result of something so simple.
They were at the end of a long line of cars abandoned in tandem along the road. Derek could just make out the cause less than a hundred yards ahead. He’d noticed the road blockade animated in red and blue squad car lights a full mile before they’d even reached the jam, and now he could see the mob that had gathered around.
“Looks more like someone kicked a bee’s nest,” Lori mumbled.
It was the first thing she’d said since they left
Mexico City
. Derek sensed her indignation. It left a moody overtone between them as she stewed over his decision to race back to
Tula
, especially after being so close to the embassy. He sensed her distrust. In fact, he supposed the only reason she was still tagging along was either because she was too afraid to jump out of a moving vehicle or simply because they were the last of their group still intact, two survivors now dependant upon each other.
Whatever the circumstances, they didn’t matter to Derek now. The hope of finding the effigy was still alive. Despite Lori’s differing opinion, finding the effigy was most important. The arrests of Eva and Dr. Friedman could be sorted out later, after he found the effigy, after he rescued the only thing that could salvage his reputation and offset the consequences of stealing it in the first place. By then, Lori will have forgotten all about the displeasure she was feeling now.
As Derek stopped the Volkswagen, his attention was drawn to a bold white t-shirt floating among the crowd that surged against the blockade. He spotted another. Then another, and on every white shirt was the black serpentine glyph from Shaman Gaspar’s newsletters.
What are the New Agers doing here?
He opened the car door.
“Where are you going?” Lori asked.
“I’ve got to find out what’s going on.”
He quickly slipped out of the car and slammed the door on Lori’s protest. Without hesitation, he wove through the parked cars. As he drew closer to the police blockade, he heard the mob’s fury as they shouted profanities at the police.
Derek was trying to make sense of the scene when he heard a thread of English break through the crowd.
“Let us in, you grease-back sons-a-bitches!” a man was hollering, his face ripe with anger. He was clearly American, possibly an expatriate.
“What’s going on?” Derek asked as he sidled up beside the angry man.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he barked back. “They’re preventing us from paying our tribute.”
“But the New Age celebration is in
Chichen Itza
,” Derek prodded.
The man appraised him with a doubtful eye, as though questioning what Derek was doing here if he was so concerned about the New Age gathering.
Derek backpedaled. “I mean, I don’t know about you, but I just couldn’t afford the trip,” he clarified.
The man accepted that with a nod. “Neither could the rest of us,” he explained. “But when we heard about Shaman Gaspar, the Hidalgo Chapter decided to pay him tribute here.”
At first, Derek was shocked to learn that the shaman’s death had already reached the New Agers. But looking around at the white t-shirts, primarily worn by Mexicans, it began to make sense. Of course the Hidalgo Chapter would have learned of the murder. They would have heard about it the same way he had—through the local news.
“I thought Shaman Gaspar was found in
Teotihuacan
,” Derek proceeded cautiously. “Why aren’t we gathering there?”
The man frowned as he focused his dark eyes on Derek. “The point is to celebrate Shaman Gaspar’s life, not his death.
Tula
was the capital of the Toltecs. This is where he spent much of his time.”
“I didn’t mean to offend—”
“If you’d known Shaman Gaspar at all, you would have realized how careless your question was.”
Derek suppressed an impulse of outrage. He’d known the shaman just as well as, if not better than, the most loyal of New Age followers but this wasn’t the time or the place to squabble over words. If he wanted to get any more information from this guy, he had to play along.
“I’m sorry,” he said, humbling his dishonesty. “I’ve only been a member for a month.”
That seemed enough to convince the New Ager. The man nodded with consent, though the scowl had not yet left his brow. “If you ask me, there’s something fishy about all this,” he said in a lowered voice—so low that Derek barely heard him over the angry shouts of the New Agers.
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
The man turned to him and leaned in close. The anger had dissipated from his face, but not his eyes.
“Citlalpol is missing,” he said. “Now Shaman Gaspar’s dead. This is the time for
someone
to step up and take leadership of the New Agers. You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”
Derek studied his demanding face. There was something startling in the way the New Ager stared at him. “Who?” he asked.
“That apprentice Gaspar’s kept tucked away all this time. You know—Acatzalan.”
Derek’s heart skipped a beat.
“Acatzalan?”
“He’s the one that should be here paying tribute to Shaman Gaspar, but do you see him?”
Derek gulped. “Maybe he’s in
Chichen Itza
.”
“You don’t see him here because nobody knows who this guy is. Fishy, I tell you. Now’s the time for this so-called apprentice to reveal himself, but he won’t. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
The man leaned in close enough to speak just beneath the noise of the crowd. “Between you and me, I think this Acatzalan has something to do with our disappearing leaders. He has to be the one that killed Shaman Gaspar and I’m willing to bet he’s killed Citlalpol too.”
Derek’s chest felt constricted. After all this time searching for the effigy in order to cover his own ass, he never imagined his obscure alter ego might incidentally hang him out to dry. Even if he did return the effigy and clear his name of the theft, he might still face conviction for a more serious crime he didn’t even commit. That was, unless he could prevent anyone from connecting him to Acatzalan.
He swallowed hard and wiped his sweaty palms across his shorts. “Why would Acatzalan kill our leaders?”
“For the money. Rumor has it the New Age account was cleaned out three days ago. You do the math.”
Derek was already figuring. Chances were Gaspar took the money himself in order to pay his way into
Mexico
, but these New Agers wouldn’t buy that. They weren’t about to believe their leader who’d preached only peace and harmony would clean them out of their money. Naturally, the mysterious Acatzalan would fall under suspicion, and that left Derek feeling himself swindled by the shaman.
The expatriate straightened to scan the small progress the New Agers were making on the police. When he turned back to Derek, there was a startling surety to his voice. “I say first thing tomorrow, we hunt down this Acatzalan. Someone must know what he looks like or where he lives. Are you in?”
So much for the new age of harmony.
Derek wanted nothing more than to get away from there. “First, we should pay tribute to Shaman Gaspar,” he said nervously. “Has anyone tried skirting around the blockade?”
The man smiled. “Are you kidding me? The AFI are crawling all over the place.”
“They are?”
“Yeah. Someone heard they’re looking for a bomb. They’ve had
Tula
surrounded for almost an hour.”
Derek turned away then, and ran smack into Lori. “Did you catch all that?” he asked.
“I heard something about a bomb,” she said as Derek grabbed her arm and spun her back around.
He quickened their pace, hoping nobody would recognize him escaping to the back of the crowd. He kept Lori close to his side, using her as a shield against any suspicious onlookers.
“What are you doing?” she asked, throwing her elbow out as he tried to step in closer.
“Just don’t want the cops to recognize me,” he lied.
“And what if they recognize
me
?”
“Just keep moving.”
They cleared the crowd and as the New Agers’ angry voices fell behind them, Derek felt like he could breathe again. He spotted the green taxi cab ahead. More vehicles had parked in behind it, but he thought there might be enough room to back the beetle out between them.
“We should go back to the embassy,” Lori said. “We’ve wasted enough time already.”
“Not until we find the effigy.”
“We can’t even get into the park,” she protested.
“We’ll get in,” Derek said, reaching for the door handle of the cab.
“Oh? And how do you plan on doing that?”
Derek threw the door open and looked back at her with a nervous grin. “We have a Volkswagen, don’t we?”
Ballcourt
By the time Mateo reached the recessed ballcourt at the far end of the ruins, the AFI had blockaded the road into the archaeological park and had already besieged the flat-topped Pyramid B. Nobody could enter or escape Tula without AFI interference except, if one were so inclined, by climbing the backside of the slope leading up to the ballcourt, distant from the AFI’s attention. A perfect scenario.
His plan was working.
Mateo deposited the jaguar box on the floor of the recessed ballcourt. Its lid was now cluttered with the receiver and the servo, each connected to a battery switch through a tangle of wires. It was a shame to mar such a beautiful antique, but in a short time, it wouldn’t matter. He was prepared to do whatever it took to deliver the old man’s heart and the power of Quetzalcoatl to the Mirrored One.