Authors: Michelle Gagnon
“Fine.” Reluctantly Kelly handed over the book. Rodriguez plopped down in a chair, and she went into the bathroom. Over the noise of the shower, she heard occasional exclamations. It was shocking how much filth came off her. The water only ran clear after ten dedicated minutes of scrubbing. It was tough to balance without a handicap bar; she dropped the soap a few times and almost fell out of the tiny stall trying to retrieve it. It was funny that today she’d actually been less aware of her injury than usual. Despite the pain, having something else to focus on made it fade into the background. Yet a simple shower drove the point home. She wasn’t whole anymore, and never would be again.
Kelly laid a towel on the toilet seat and sat on it while she dried off and strapped her prosthesis back on. Rodriguez had scrounged up some clean clothes for her. The T-shirt was a size too small, the pants too large, but she rolled up the cuffs and examined herself in the mirror. Purple bruises were emerging on her face, and her throat still showed the ghosts of Stefan’s hands in bright red marks. She swallowed hard, once again feeling the life being choked out of her. Kelly shook it off. She ran a brush through her hair and went back into the bedroom.
“The guy who wrote this is nuts,” Rodriguez declared without looking up. “I mean, man, you should read the stuff in here. And he’s treating it like the Gospel.”
“I know,” Kelly said. The book was a pseudohistorical text. Based on a single claim that one of the Aztec kings had red hair, the author posited that the Vikings had made their way to the Mexican peninsula during the tenth century.
“It says that they found longboat hulls in Baja. Is that true?” He looked up at her.
Kelly shrugged. “I have no idea. But obviously Stefan thinks it’s true. There’s a lot of stuff like that. But so far I haven’t found anything that might tell us where he’s headed.”
“Huh.” Rodriguez flipped forward another few pages, then his eyes widened. “Did you see this?”
Kelly leaned in to peer over his shoulder. On the right hand side of the page was a drawing of a temple. At the top, one figure stood over another. The caption read, “Ritual Sacrifice during Tlacaxipehualiztli (6 March–25 March).”
“The Aztecs practiced a lot of ritual sacrifice,” Kelly said. “They used to throw kids into volcanos.”
“Right, but look at what he’s holding up.”
Kelly leaned in. The image was fuzzy around the edges and she had to squint to make out the details. “It looks like a jacket.”
“Unless I’m wrong,” Rodriguez said, “that’s human skin.”
Twenty-Seven
Kelly felt a rush of excitement as she examined the image. “It says this is a sacrifice to Xipe Totec. Do you have your computer?”
“Back in my room. I kind of doubt we’ll get a wireless connection here, though,” Rodriguez said. “The phone in my room doesn’t even work.”
“We have to try.” Kelly skimmed the margin notes. Unfortunately most were in Danish, the cribbed handwriting so small she could barely make out the text. “We’ll have to translate this, too. And find out where that pyramid is.”
“So you think Stefan is copying ancient Aztec sacrifices now?” Rodriguez raised an eyebrow. “That kid he killed didn’t have any of the same wounds as the college girls. That would mean he’s totally broken from his M.O.”
“I know, it’s not textbook,” Kelly said. “But it’s still a form of ritual sacrifice. Maybe that’s all that matters to him, having a larger justification for killing his victims.”
“It’s still a stretch, Jones. If he’s that crazy, maybe he even thought that dump was an Aztec pyramid.”
“Or maybe the pyramid used to be there.” Kelly hoped not, though. She knew that Stefan was insane, but at least in the past that insanity had been grounded in reality. He’d probably been using the dump as a base to practice—it perfectly suited his needs, with an endless supply of potential victims and little risk of interference by the authorities. If this was anything like his previous scheme at the university, he was building up to something larger. Their best shot at catching him lay in figuring out what that would entail.
“All right,” Rodriguez sighed. “I’ll get my computer. But the deadline still stands—if we don’t have a better lead by tomorrow, we’re out of here.”
“Of course,” Kelly said. “Keeping my bag packed just in case.”
“Funny,” Rodriguez said. “Be ready to go in five. We’ll probably have better luck getting WiFi at the restaurant anyway.”
Kelly grabbed her backpack and scanned the room to make sure she wasn’t leaving anything behind. She had a funny feeling they wouldn’t end up coming back tonight. For the first time in a long while, she felt a familiar spark, that sense of a case about to break open. It was a sensation she’d almost given up on ever experiencing again. She had no intention of leaving without seeing this through. If lying about her willingness to go home tomorrow kept Rodriguez here a bit longer, so be it. In the end, she’d find a way to get Stefan with or without his help.
Running uphill was a hell of a lot harder than coming down. On the plus side, Jake wasn’t slipping as much. But the whole time he kept expecting to feel the hot burn of a bullet penetrating his back. He’d seen the damage that an automatic weapon inflicted on human flesh. In a place this isolated, there was no surviving that kind of wound. If one of them got hit, they’d have to be left behind.
Syd was still ahead of him, and he could hear the rest of the group following. He’d lost all sense of bearings, and prayed that Syd knew where the hell she was going. The gunfire must have put the Zeta camp on high alert, who knew how many units would be combing the jungle for them now. They’d have to move the whole team back and regroup, if not retreat entirely. Without the element of surprise on their side, Jake couldn’t conceive of any way they’d be able to pull off the invasion.
Syd vanished behind a tree. He followed, almost slamming into her when she stopped dead.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she commented, pushing him back with one hand.
“Why are we stopping?”
“Because I don’t think they’re following us anymore.”
Jake listened. Gunfire still crackled below them. “I still hear it.”
“Yeah, but that’s not close.” She cocked her head to the side. “Sounds like it’s coming from the far side of camp.”
Mark suddenly passed the tree. Syd let out a low whistle. He spun in his tracks and spotted them. “Decker and Brown are headed back to base to regroup,” he said. “We should join them.”
“I don’t know if we have time. Listen.”
Mark’s eyebrows knit together. “Crap,” he said. “The other cartel.”
“They probably heard the gunfire, figured that was their cue to start the raid,” Syd said.
“I’ll call Brown on the radio,” Mark said, pulling it off his belt. “We better get in there now if we want to save anything but corpses.”
Twenty-Eight
Flores was in the back of the pen, working away at the chicken wire with the knife when the firing start initially tried to dig down to where the wire was inserted in the soil, but whoever constructed their cage did an annoyingly good job of it. Two feet down and he’d still encountered nothing but wire mesh. The only way out was to slice through, separating the wires one by one, which was extremely time-consuming. Three hours in, and he’d only managed to separate four wires in a straight line. His hands were a bloody mess from rubbing against the sharp edges.
At the first burst of gunfire, he froze. Was Tyr coming for them? Or had the unit been discovered?
“What’s going on?” he asked. Calderon had the side of his face pressed against the bars, trying to see down the line of cages.
“No sé,” he replied. In the neighboring cage Tejada suddenly started hacking. “Silencio, Ramon!” Calderon snapped.
Tejada’s shoulders shook, but he kept his mouth closed as he coughed.
“Why aren’t they coming?” Calderon sounded puzzled. “In the drills, they always come within a minute or two.”
“Maybe the general isn’t sticking by his word,” Flores said. “Could be he decided to use this as a cover to kill us.”
Calderon snorted. “Don’t kid yourself, amigo. He can shoot us whenever he wants. No, this is something different.”
“Whatever it is, we gotta get a move on.” Determined, Flores went back to the task at hand. A pair of white eyes shone from his left, regarding his handiwork.
“Take me with you,” Tejada begged. “Please, or they will kill me.”
“Absolutamente,” Flores lied. The truth was, he’d be lucky to get himself and Calderon out of here in one piece. He sawed away, and another set of wires split. Flores pried them apart with his fingers, then started on the next one down.
“All right, here it is.” Rodriguez tapped at the keyboard one-handed while holding a taco in the other. A trail of salsa dribbled down his chin.
They were ensconced in a restaurant a few blocks from their hotel in the Chapultepec-Lomas district. The area was decidedly more upscale than the other sections of Mexico City Kelly had seen so far. The few cars passing by at this late hour were mostly foreign-made, Toyotas with a few Lexuses and Mercedes scattered in between. The streets were cleaner, and even the smog seemed less pervasive. In spite of that, Danny had declared three other restaurants too sketchy before settling on this one. Part of a hotel bar, their meal even came complete with a free wireless connection.
“Man, this is good,” Rodriguez said appreciatively, holding back the taco to eye it. “Just like Momma used to make.”
Kelly had only managed a few bites of her enchilada. She was itching to find a lead to pursue, keenly aware of Stefan’s trail fading by the minute. By now, he might even have snatched another victim. “You were saying?” she asked impatiently.
“The guy who wrote the book has a website with more information. Xipe Totec, aka ‘our lord the flayed one,’ was a life-death-rebirth deity. He’s usually represented wearing a flayed human skin. The flayed skins of sacrificed victims were believed to have curative properties when touched. Mothers even took their children to handle such skins in order to relieve their ailments.” Rodriguez made a face and set his half-eaten taco back down on his plate. “So much for dinner.”
“What else does it say?”
“Xipe Totec flayed himself to give food to humanity. It was supposed to be symbolic of the way maize seeds lose their outer layer before germination. After twenty days the priests took off the skins and placed them in caves. Must have been pretty ripe by then.”
“What about the sacrifice, and the pyramid?”
Rodriguez continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “There’s an Aztec calendar here with each deity and what kind of sacrifice they got. To kick off the New Year on February 2, they committed mass drownings. Next month, the flaying, then victims were shot with arrows and had their hearts yanked out while they were still alive…it says here that in 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed eighty thousand prisoners over the course of four days. That’s insane. How was anyone left?”
“The temple, Rodriguez.”
“Right. Okay, sacrifices to Xipe Totec were made during the month of Tlacaxipehualiztli, starting around March 6.” He looked up. “That’s over a month away, so Stefan’s timing was off.”
“Unless he was just practicing,” Kelly said grimly.
Rodriguez shuddered. “Makes me appreciate Catholicism.”
Kelly read over his shoulder. “It says Xipe Totec was associated with the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlán. Where’s that? Is it still around?”
“Holy crap,” Rodriguez said. “Jones, it’s right here. The Aztec city of Tenochtitlán was built on an island in Lake Texcoco, the site of present-day Mexico City.”
Jake smeared some more mud on his face. Under close inspection it would never hold up, but he was hoping that from a few feet away, in the dark, a Zeta guard would be fooled.
“Nice,” Syd said.
“You’re not going to do the same?” he asked, eyeing her.
Aside from tucking her blond hair under a cap and dressing in camo, Syd hadn’t done anything to alter her appearance. “No reason to bother,” she said. “I doubt there are any female guards down there. The Zetas aren’t known for their forward-thinking gender policies. If I get spotted, they’ll shoot me whether I’ve got crap on my face or not.”
She had a point, Jake thought, taking her in. Even in the somewhat loose-fitting camouflage, she was obviously female. “Don’t worry about me, champ. I’ll be fine.” She winked at his look of concern.
As always, Syd was never in a better mood than at the outset of an extraordinarily dangerous operation. Jake wished he could share her enthusiasm. They were about to go up against highly trained mercenaries, while trying to avoid the other aries shooting at everything in sight. They had to penetrate to where the hostages were being held, in the middle of what sounded like the final stand at the Alamo.
And that was the easy part. Somehow, they had to get back out.
Kane and Maltz still hadn’t made it back from town, so they were forced to rely almost exclusively on a bunch of guys from a competing company, who so far hadn’t impressed Jake with their level of skill. All things considered, he would have preferred stepping into an active volcano. The odds of survival were probably roughly the same.
Another rocket flared across the sky above camp. Jake watched its flickering descent. Sputters of automatic gunfire below them, a deafening cacophony that lit up the night like sparklers. The bulk of the fighting was centered on the south side of camp.
Mark came to stand beside them. “We’re infiltrating in teams of three. Brown and his guys are going after Calderon and Flores. Decker and I will cover them, then we’ll try to find Isabela’s father.”
“We never got a lock on his location,” Syd protested.
“I know. But I promised I’d try.”
“Where do you want us?” Jake asked.
Mark turned to look at him. “I’d feel better if you covered us from here.”
“Bullshit,” Syd said.
“Syd, you’re a walking target in there. And Jake, we both know this isn’t your sort of thing.”
“You can’t go in there without someone watching your back,” Jake argued.
“It’s not a put-down. I just don’t think—”