Effigy (43 page)

Mexico City

Lori stepped off the bus, thankful to be alive and back among the civilized again. Unfortunately, her relief was marred by a deplorable guilt for having abandoned Dr. Peet. What right did she have to judge a man for falling in love? How could she criticize a relationship she knew very little about? Moreover, in all her collegiate years she had never known Dr. Peet to be a threat to anyone, much less herself. Could it be that Derek was exaggerating out of jealousy?

She had silently wrestled with the situation all the way back to
Mexico City
. There was no sense talking to Derek about it given his obvious bias on the subject. The whole thing left her feeling unsettled and the way she’d handled it was the most upsetting of all. There was only one way to rectify the situation.

“How do we get to the embassy from here?” she asked as Derek stepped off the bus behind her.

“What’s the rush?” he asked.

Lori started down the street. “We have to find Eva and Dr. Friedman.”
And Dr. Peet
. “Maybe the embassy can track them down. Maybe they can find out why they were arrested.”

Derek reached into his pocket and withdrew his BlackBerry. “I’ll give them a call. Let them know we’re coming,” he said, pushing the power button.

A green Volkswagen beetle started toward them with a taxi sign glowing like a crown. Lori hailed it down.

“Not the bugs!” Derek warned, reaching for her elevated arm but it was too late. The taxi eagerly pulled up to the curb beside them.

“It can take us to the embassy,” Lori said.

“Yeah, but Friedman said—”

“Do you see any other taxies around here?”

Derek rolled his eyes with a relenting sigh. They climbed in behind the driver and Derek, in his best Spanish, ordered to be taken to the embassy. The cell phone chimed to life in his hand.

“Did you find the number?” Lori asked as the taxi pulled onto the street.

Derek shook his head. “I got a text message. From John.”

Lori leaned in close, curious but confused. “What’s it say?”

Derek frowned. “Nothing. It just says ‘Tula.’”

“
Tula
?”

“The cops must have taken them there.”

Lori shook her head. She noticed the cab driver watching them through the rear view mirror. “Maybe,” she said, lowering her voice. “But Shaman Gaspar mentioned
Tula
in the note he left in the matchbook.”

There was a sudden and unexpected spark in Derek’s eyes. “You think he left the effigy there?”

Lori shrugged. “I don’t know what to think.”

“
Maybe Dr.
Friedman already found the effigy in
Tula
.”

The cab driver’s eyes continued to shift from the road to the mirror, raising the hair on the back of Lori’s neck. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said uneasily, shifting her own gaze from the rear view mirror to Derek and then back again. “The cops arrested him in
Teotihuacan
.”

“Maybe Friedman got away.”

“I doubt it.”

“Either way, we have to go to
Tula
. It’s up to us now to find the effigy.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Lori asked in an airy bark. “Finding Eva and Dr. Friedman is a little more important than the effigy. Not to mention Dr. Peet, who must be in custody by now.”

Derek wasn’t listening as he turned to the driver.

“He’s not going to take us all the way out to
Tula
,” Lori protested, but Derek was already through his bilingual request, which visibly annoyed the driver.

“Tell him to take us to the embassy,” she said, but her words were drowned by the quarrel already progressing between the two men. The argument quickly heated until the cab driver suddenly pulled a pistol and trained it on Derek.

“
Deme su dinero
!” the driver demanded.

Derek sat back in his seat.

“What did you say to him?” Lori asked, irritably.

“I told him to take us to
Tula
,” he growled, digging into his pockets. “Now he wants our money.”

The driver trained the gun on Lori and yelled something she couldn’t possibly translate. Nonetheless, she hastily began searching her own pockets.

Derek withdrew a handful of pesos but instead of handing them to the driver, he threw them in his face. The driver flinched at the onslaught. The car swerved. Derek grabbed the pistol. Before Lori could blink, he was flying over the seat, his fist pounding into the driver’s face.

“You lowlife son-of-a-bitch!” he yelled as he pounded the driver over and over. The driver’s arms flailed helplessly. The car swerved uncontrollably. Lori’s own objection was lost among a chorus of honking horns.

The Volkswagen skidded to a screeching halt, throwing Lori into the back of the seat in front of her and the driver into his steering wheel. Derek hadn’t lost a beat. His fists were flying until the defenseless driver hurled himself out onto the street. The pistol, which had fallen between them, was caught amid the scuttle and clattered to the pavement behind the driver as Derek slid in behind the wheel.

With tires squealing again, Derek pulled away just as the grappling driver found his knees. From the rear window Lori watched him gather the pistol.

“Get down!” she cried, just as the back window shattered from the gunshot. The bullet harmlessly buried itself in the upholstery of the seat in front of her.

“Hang on!” Derek ordered. He twisted the wheel and they skidded around the corner, just dodging an oncoming garbage truck and drawing further and further from the pistol’s range.

Lori took a deep breath. With the danger behind them, she tried to calm her frantic heart. “We have to go to the embassy,” she said between gasps.

“We’re going to
Tula
,” Derek said with a husky finality to his voice. He kissed his inflamed knuckles, sucking the blood from one of them.

“From this day forward,” he said, “we stay away from the bugs.”

Diversion

Peet pulled the sweaty mask off his face as he brought the van up to speed on MEX 132. In less than an hour he’d be back in
Mexico City
, certain he could find the embassy and straighten up this whole mess. He was confident they’d locate John, Eva and perhaps even Derek and Lori who, given the rental car still parked in
Teotihuacan
, he assumed had been captured by the police. The only thing he wasn’t certain of was the effigy.

Maybe he just didn’t want to be certain about the effigy. In all likelihood, the artifact was gone. Stolen. Maybe even sold to some unscrupulous collector with his thumb on the pulse of the antiquities black market. Chances were he’d never see the effigy again, but Peet refused to think that way.

It was hard for him to believe the effigy had been a lucky snag from some random robbery. Was Gaspar’s killer really the same thief Lori chased out of the university’s building of anthropology? The circumstances seemed far too coincidental not to be related. In fact, it seemed very likely that Gaspar was murdered for the effigy, but why? The measures taken for the thief to acquire the artifact seemed too extreme for someone planning to sell it on the black market. Then again, if enough money was on the line…well, what did he know anyway?

There was something else going on—something he wished he’d never become entangled with. Like a detective, his mind started rolling through the facts. Maybe it was the AFI uniform he was wearing, or the archaeologist inside him still striving for answers. Whatever it was, he couldn’t resist toying with the puzzle pieces laid out before him.

Shaman Gaspar had been clearly obsessed with Quetzalcoatl and all the astronomical significance that followed the deity. Even as Peet followed the traffic on MEX 132 he was aware of the sun climbing across the sky, on its way to rendezvous with the moon and the Pleiades above
Chichen Itza
, thus ascending Quetzalcoatl to his throne.

The effigy surely symbolized this event to Shaman Gaspar and his New Age followers. As highly revered as this Age of Quetzalcoatl had been to Gaspar’s followers, could there be others who highly despised it? Was there another cult out there, secretly devising a plan to thwart the New Age belief?

If that was the case, there wasn’t much time left. If someone was trying to destroy the New Age of Quetzalcoatl, they’d have to get it done by noon, a little over an hour away.

He became aware of the van’s radio squawking from the dash panel. He could usually decipher Spanish all right, but he couldn’t keep pace with the words smearing over the radio waves. Nevertheless, he could tell the voice was growing more urgent, and twice now, he caught the words
veinte seis
.

He glanced at the simple plastic key fob dangling from the ignition. The keys had been labeled for unit twenty-six. It dawned on him that the dispatcher was calling for his vehicle.

They were calling for him!

No sooner had the realization struck than a police cruiser blazed past, headed the other way. Peet checked the rearview mirror and sure enough, the cruiser was peeling through the meridian, turning around. It headed straight for him.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!”

Peet turned the wheel and the van careened off the shoulder, bounced through the desert in a spray of sand and found traction again on a gravel road. He slammed the accelerator to the floor and the engine responded with a repressed growl. The pursuing unit wasn’t far behind.

“Shit!”

He raced down the road with the cruiser inching up on him. Peet urged the van for everything it had, but it wasn’t enough. He slammed on the brakes and skidded onto an intersecting road but the chase only continued across the desert from there. A boiling cloud of dust reeled off the van’s wheels, veiling the cruiser behind him, but Peet sensed it was drawing closer.

He raced past a small group of goats herded by a boy who ducked beneath the onslaught of rocks flying from his tires. Peet only saw him for a brief moment, and then the boy and his goats were swallowed by the choking dust in his wake. He still couldn’t see the car behind him, but he became aware of a rapid thrumming overhead, urging him ever forward.

Small plots of corn and agave flew by in an interchangeable patchwork of cropland and desert. Farmhouses were nestled here and there. Just ahead, the road appeared to dead end.

Peet slammed on the brakes again. The van skimmed out of control across the gravel as the road took an abrupt ninety degree turn at the lip of a dry arroyo. He gripped the wheel tighter and as the van spun out of the way, the cruiser exploded out of the cloud of dust, crashed through a wooden guard rail and flew off the edge, diving nose first into the sand at the bottom of the shallow arroyo.

There wasn’t time to examine the scene, for Peet caught a glimpse of the helicopter thum-thum-thumping overhead. He hit the accelerator one moment, then thought about it the next as the van surged forward again. For being innocent of whatever charges they were pursuing him for, he was sure giving them enough reason to convict him.