The Mayan Codex (49 page)

The Halach Uinic acknowledged Ixtab’s warning with a downward inclination of the head. Then he signalled to Acan, Naum, and Tepeu that they must bring forward the three gringos and the mestizo from Veracruz.

The Halach Uinic could sense the intense interest aroused by the appearance of the strangers. He allowed the collective emotion of the crowd to leach deep into his body until he could feel each individual’s response as if it were his own.

Only when he felt full to the brim – only when he felt as if he were carrying the entire wishes and the hopes of the crowd within himself – did he start up the stone steps.

Sabir felt at peace. He didn’t fully understand why this should be so, but neither did he feel any particular desire to investigate his newfound condition. He was content simply to bask in the unfamiliar harmony, and allow the long-awaited healing process to begin.

After half an hour or so of near total detachment, something snapped Sabir out of his reverie. He began to monitor the preparations being made by the Halach Uinic with more than the usual amount of interest. At
first he couldn’t understand what had triggered this intense curiosity, but then he realized that the High Priest was communicating in some quasi-telepathic way with a middle-aged woman standing halfway up the stone steps of the pyramid. It was this that had caught his attention.

Sabir was at a loss to understand how he had achieved this insight, but he could definitely sense the energy passing between them. It resembled the sudden flapping of a curtain in the wind, or the unexpected tightening of a sail out at sea in the run-up to a squall. The impression was so overwhelming that Sabir was instantly overcome by the conviction that he could intervene between the two of them if he so desired, transforming their duologue into something approaching a round table discussion – but that it would probably be considered the height of rudeness were he to do so.

He glanced at Calque to his left, and then at Lamia to his right. Both were deeply involved in watching the preparations for the ceremony.

Had he gone stark staring mad? It was obvious that his companions hadn’t the remotest idea of what was going on his head – and neither were they picking up anything of a similar sort themselves. Instead, they were watching the preparations going on around them with the natural interest of the outsider.

Had his never-ending litany of sleepless nights caught up with him at last? Was he hallucinating? Sabir shook himself like a dog and concentrated all his attention on the scene around him. Best drag yourself back to reality, man. No more airy-fairy nonsense. You’ll be dreaming of pixies next.

The first thing Sabir noticed following his reality check was that the Maya en masse were even smaller than he had imagined them to be – much smaller than a similar random grouping of Westerners, or even Latins, would
have been. Both men and women had round faces and wide cheekbones – they smiled a lot, and were quick to mirth. Most of the women standing in the group nearby were squat, square, and useful looking, with a low centre of gravity. Some had an almost Asiatic cast to their features. The older women were stocky, with solid bellies and protruding bottoms, although some of the younger women were very beautiful, with an almost sinister cast to their features – they had curved noses, almond eyes, dark, fine hair, and expressive, sensual mouths. Their colour varied from a light macadamia to a darker chocolate. Few of the women were heavy-breasted, with the young girls in particular seeming to retain their flat chests well into adolescence. Most of the women Sabir could see wore their hair long, while some of the men cut theirs
en brosse
.

Sabir also noticed that the Maya strolled rather than strode – in fact they almost bundled along, blowing their noses onto the ground whenever they felt like it. Ponytails were popular amongst the women, with the hair pulled tightly back from the forehead. The older women wore white shifts, with floral borders, visible petticoats, and occasional
rebozos
, worn across the shoulders like a shawl. The younger women wore wheel earrings – Sabir noticed that both the men and the women’s ears aimed backwards, just as in the sculptures.

‘Come on, Sabir. Snap out of it. We’re on the move.’

‘What?’

Calque was staring at Sabir as if the American had taken leave of his senses. ‘The ceremony. The one they’ve been preparing for two hours right in front of your face. All that clattering and banging. Don’t tell me you missed it?’ He turned to Lamia. ‘Do you think an alien life-form has taken over our friend here?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think so too.’ Calque turned back to Sabir. ‘Oh, Alien. Return our friend to us. You have taken all his secrets. You know that he is simply an empty vessel with nothing inside. Be satisfied with that. We earthlings are no threat to you.’

‘Yeah. Very funny. I love a good joke. Maybe you could become a stand-up comedian when you get back to France, Calque? You could call yourself “
Flic
-
Flaque
”. Otherwise known as the “Wet Policeman”.’

Calque stared incredulously at Lamia. ‘My God. He really
is
an alien. That was a halfway good French pun he managed there.’

Acan, Naum, and Tepeu were approaching from the direction of the pyramid. It was this that had triggered Calque’s wake-up call to Sabir. None of the three were carrying rifles, and they had changed from their usual work clothes into simple white shifts.

Acan split off and came towards Sabir. Naum had clearly been detailed to mind Calque, while Tepeu walked up to Lamia and invited her and the mestizo to accompany him.

Sabir was still feeling awkward following his unintentional detachment from his companions. Even Lamia was staring at him as if he had recently undergone some disastrously botched plastic surgery. He decided to try and patch up their fractured bond with a little forced bonhomie. Plastering an artificial grin on his face, he said, ‘Everything’s sweetness and light, now. Do you see? They’ve even ditched their rifles.’

Calque shook his head in mild despair. ‘Sabir, you probably haven’t noticed, but there are maybe a thousand Maya surrounding us at this very moment. Who the heck needs rifles?’

Alastor de Bale sat in his car in the parking lot of the Balancanché caves. It was six o’clock in the evening. He had been there since four o’clock. At five o’clock all the staff had packed up and left. Only the elderly carwash man had stayed behind, hoping for one final commission. Alastor had given him one hundred pesos and told him to get lost.

The man had hung around on the periphery of the lot for a further ten minutes until Alastor had made a throat-cutting motion at him. Then he had fled. The carwash man had never been given one hundred pesos for doing nothing before, and he had been hanging around to make sure that the skeletal gringo was actually real, and not simply the fiend Paqok, come out at night to feast on hapless men and women after tricking them into a false sense of security.

Alastor glanced back at the entrance to the parking lot. The gun-running Mexican wasn’t dumb. There was only one road into the space, and that was hemmed in on both sides by forest and impenetrable scrubland. Behind him were the caves – sealed tight now that the tourists had gone home. And there was no caretaker. What would be the point? There was nothing here to steal.

Rudra and Oni had taken up their positions half an hour before, following Alastor’s all clear, at which time Berith and Asson had also taken their places in the Hyundai’s trunk. It was stiflingly hot in there, but the two men were used to waiting – they simply switched their brains on to autopilot and their lungs to shallow yogic breathing. The time passed quickly. It always did when action was in the offing.

At exactly 6.15 a white Suzuki 4WD nosed its way down the Balancanché track. It paused at the entrance to the parking lot while the driver looked around. Then it engaged in a jerky three-point turn until it was entirely blocking off the parking lot’s only exit, with its nose facing back in the direction of the main road.

Alastor smiled.

Three men got out of the 4WD. The Mexican he had met in the cantina was flanked by two other Mexicans, both carrying Mini-Uzis. The first Mexican was holding what looked like a Glock 18 in the hands-down position.

Now Alastor was full-on grinning. Three guns down – eight to go.

He got out of the car with his hands held high. ‘You guys going to shoot me?’

‘Not if you give us the money.’

‘You got the guns we talked about?’

‘We got these. Will that do?’ The men were walking slowly towards Alastor. The two men flanking the first Mexican were looking around themselves just like they’d seen it done in the movies.

‘That’s three. I asked for eleven.’

‘Eh, man. That’s too bad. I must have forgot the rest.’

Alastor hunched his shoulders. ‘Well okay then. Three is better than nothing, I suppose. But we’ll have to renegotiate the price.’

‘What will we have to do?’ The first Mexican raised his Glock to the firing position. He was ten yards away now.

‘Ah, shit. I see your point. Maybe we’ll just stick by our original agreement.’

‘Yeah. We do that. Where you got the money?’

‘In the trunk. You want me to open it?’

‘No. We open it. You stand to one side.’

‘Okay. Here’s the key. You press the middle one. The
one with the open trunk drawn on it. The money’s in a cardboard box.’

‘What do think I am? Stupid?’

‘How do you mean?’ For one awkward moment Alastor thought the Mexican had changed his mind about opening the trunk.

‘You think I don’t know which button to press on an automatic key?’

‘Hell, man. No. I didn’t think that. I only wanted to make it easy for you.’ Now that the Mexicans were within three or four feet of him, Alastor could smell the liquor on their breaths. Maybe they’d needed to pump themselves up for the job of killing him? Give themselves Dutch courage? Either way, the alcohol would slow down their reaction times.

The men with the Mini-Uzis were flanking Alastor now, while the first Mexican was moving forward to deal with the car.

Alastor let the fighting batons slide gently down inside his sleeves, one into each hand. Then he crossed both hands in front of him, as if he had been handcuffed, or as if he were protecting his balls from a free kick at soccer. He could feel the adrenalin piping into his veins. Two at once. Christ. Could he do it? Could he pull it off?

The first Mexican tripped the trunk. As the hatch rose, Berith and Asson rose with it. Oni and Rudra reared up from their dugout positions on either side of the car, their groundsheets, and the sand which had been covering them, erupting into the air like the aftermath of a grenade attack.

Alastor threw his arms wide, the fighting batons at full extension. He felt the satisfying crunch of teeth and bone.

He looked back. Both men were flat out on the ground. In front of him, the first Mexican, not knowing which
way to look, had succumbed, first to a blow behind the knee from Rudra’s baton, followed by a second, straight-arm jab in the sternum from Asson. He was choking and gulping for breath.

Alastor motioned for Oni and Rudra to pick up the Mini-Uzis. ‘Check out the car. Also back on the main road. They may have back-up.’

The two men jogged off in the direction of the highway.