Age of Aztec (16 page)

Up on the bridge a voice echoed Mal’s cry. It was Aaronson. Again the demand went unheard, but Aaronson backed it up with a well-aimed shot from his l-gun, which was set at antipersonnel level and so would not to do too much damage to property. The bolt of plasma hit the dinghy’s prow, charring and splintering. The three boaters got the message. Reston was dropped back in the river, and the dinghy reversed away with some haste.

Reston resumed his bid for dry land. Mal was now much closer to him, just a few strokes behind, cutting through the swirls of surf left by his kicks. Reston reached the shallows and rose to his feet. The riverbed was thick, sticky mud. He waded laboriously towards a rusting, weed-draped ladder that would take him to street level. Mal, with a final frantic burst of effort, lunged out of the water after him.

For once, being less heavily built than her quarry served her well. She didn’t sink as deeply into the mud as Reston did, and was able to traverse it more quickly. At the same time that Reston latched a hand onto a rung of the ladder, she latched a hand onto the back of his running singlet. She yanked hard, catching him off-balance, pulling him down into the mud.

“You had to make a run for it, didn’t you?” she panted. “Had to make life as difficult as possible.”

Reston reared up from the mud, but Mal whacked him back down with an elbow jab to the crown.

“I was trying to appeal to the gentleman in you,” she said. “I thought you’d appreciate decency.”

Reston struggled to rise again, while also aiming a punch at Mal’s knee. She foiled him with another vicious, stunning strike to the head.

“Just stay put, will you? You’re under fucking arrest.”

Reston grabbed for her ankle but she kicked his hand away with one muck-caked trainer.

“I said stop resisting. You’re only going to get hurt.”

He was weakening, exhausted. Mal was exhausted too, but charged up with adrenaline and righteousness. She stamped on Reston’s chest, forcing him so far down into the slimy shoreline ooze that his face almost went under. The mud sucked at him and held him fast, resisting his best efforts to writhe out of it. He scrabbled and clawed, but couldn’t free himself.

Helmeted heads appeared above, peering over the embankment’s barrier railings. Mal looked up, still with one foot on Reston’s sternum like a safari hunter posing with a fresh kill.

“Got him,” she said. “I want three of you down here now, with handcuffs and leg manacles. We’re bringing him in.”

Cold, wet, trembling, steeped in mud up to her thighs, Mal had never felt better.

TEN

Same Day

W
ITHIN MINUTES, A
bedraggled, mud-encrusted Stuart found himself being prodded at gunpoint into the back of a paddy wagon.

He liked to think he had given the Jaguar Warriors a run for their money. He’d known, though, from the moment they sprung their little surprise for him on Tower Bridge, that there was a strong possibility the outcome would be this. When that boat had come by he thought his luck had turned, but it was not to be. He was in the authorities’ clutches now. At the mercy of Jaguar Warriors. Things could have looked less bleak, but Stuart refused to be discouraged. As long as he was alive there was always a chance of turning the situation around. Something could be done.

He was made to sit on one of the narrow benches lining the interior walls of the paddy wagon. A chain was clamped onto his handcuffs, the other end secured to an eye-bolt in the floor. Jaguars crowded in on either side of him. Chief Inspector Vaughn planted herself directly opposite, so near that her knees were almost touching his. She looked extraordinarily pleased with herself, and frankly Stuart didn’t blame her.

The rear doors slammed and the paddy wagon revved and pulled away.

Stuart noticed noses wrinkling around him.

“Yes, I know, I stink,” he said. “Phew! Sorry about that, everyone. The Thames isn’t the most pleasant of rivers to take a dip in. And all this mud too. Ninety per cent human waste, probably, and the rest fish shit.”

The Jaguar to his right chuckled. Vaughn shot the man a look and he instantly fell silent.

“Confined space,” Stuart continued. “Can’t be much fun for you people. At least the chief inspector here’s as guilty of reeking as I am. Although of course in every other respect she’s come up smelling of roses.”

“Do you ever shut up, Reston?” Vaughn snapped.

“I just felt I should apologise.”

“Well, don’t. Don’t feel you should do anything.”

The paddy wagon rumbled on for a little while. The rear section was windowless, partitioned off from the driving cab. A dim overhead bulb was the only illumination, and for Stuart there was nothing to see but policemen and l-guns.

“Nice takedown, by the way,” he said to Vaughn. “You are one persistent little bloodhound, and no mistake.”

“Why, thank you,” she replied in a sarcastic drawl. “Coming from you, that’s such a compliment.”

“I like to pay beautiful women compliments.”

“Ye gods, what a charmer. I’m getting moist between the legs.”

Several of the Jaguars chuckled at this, and Vaughn was happy to let them.

“I mean it, though,” Stuart said. “You are beautiful – as beautiful as you are formidable. I’m sure I’m not the only man here who fancies you. And I know for a fact that you have something of a reputation. Homework, remember? Word is, your morals are loose and your knicker elastic even looser.”

Vaughn’s expression soured and hardened. “I’d advise you to stop talking right now.”

“Queen of the quickie. Just ask anyone at the Yard.”

Stuart hadn’t in fact spoken to anyone at the Yard. He’d found out about Vaughn’s background by ringing a journalist famed for his Jaguar contacts and offering him a hefty sum of money in return for a spot of private freelance research. The journalist, after a little delving, had come back with the story about Vaughn and her brother and also with rumours, unconfirmed, that the woman liked to put it about a bit and went on the occasional bender. “In every other respect,” the hack had told him, “she’s a model cop. They’ve all got bad habits, and hers, such as they are, are far from being the worst.”

Vaughn was looking daggers at him across the van. “Are you trying to piss me off, Reston? Does it amuse you? Because believe me, down in the holding cells you’re not going to find life nearly so amusing.”

“I’m just making light conversation. Trying to get us better acquainted. You can’t feel this thing between us?” Stuart gestured as expansively as his restraints would permit. “The sexual tension?”

A Jaguar sniggered, then stopped sniggering when he realised no one else was.

Vaughn’s grey eyes had turned to iron.

“I do,” Stuart went on. “I’m looking forward to spending some time being interrogated by you. We can put that reputation of yours to the test. You don’t even have to untie me. I don’t mind a bit of the kinky stuff, and neither, I suspect, do you. We’ll just –”

Vaughn jack-knifed out of her seat and struck him across the face, backhand. It was as good a shot as the one she’d got off in his office, and it hit almost exactly the same spot. Stuart tasted blood. Probing with his tongue, he found that a molar had been loosened.

“Ugh,” he said. “Not nice. Police brutality.”

“That’s just a taster of things to come. Given how many of us you’ve killed, there’ll be no shortage of candidates wanting to come see you downstairs and get a little payback.”

“Allegedly killed, chief inspector.”

“How long are you going to keep up this ‘innocent man’ routine?”

“I don’t know. How long are you going to keep up the pretence that you’re happy being a Jaguar?”

She flinched. “Bollocks. I love my job.”

“So the drinking, the over-reliance on coca, the cheap sordid assignations with strangers – these are all signs of someone content in herself, with a healthy relationship to her work? And not, say, someone whose conscience plagues her constantly and who knows she’s a good person doing bad things and who tries to numb herself so she doesn’t have to think about any of it too hard.”

“Like I told you, solving crimes, keeping the peace, collaring undesirables, where’s the harm in that?”

“You Jaguars are no better than the crooks you round up. The only difference is you have badges and they don’t.”

“The law –”

“The law is meaningless,” Stuart scoffed. “The law is whatever the Great Speaker wishes it to be. It’s there to keep him in power and quash anyone who disagrees with him or would like to see him dethroned.”

“The Conquistador himself couldn’t have put it better.”

“He’s obviously as much of an advocate of free speech as I am.”

“Freedom of speech doesn’t extend to insulting the Great Speaker.”

“I wasn’t insulting His Imperious Stupendousness, merely criticising. And if that’s not allowed, then my case is proven. QE-fucking-D.”

“I’m not having this argument with you,” Vaughn said brusquely. “It’s pointless. If you’d like to live in a world of anarchy...”

“Not anarchy, Miss Vaughn. Just democracy. A world where we choose who rules us and how we’re ruled. We had a world like that, Britain did, up until a hundred years ago, before the Empire finally ground us down. I can see a time when we might have it again.”

“Well, I can’t, and neither can anyone else in this van. You’re in a minority of one, Reston.”

“Maybe if you stopped boozing and spreading your legs like a bitch in heat, you’d have a clearer head and clearer vision too.”

Vaughn leapt to her feet and drew back her fist to sock him as hard as she could.

WHAAAMMMM!!!

The entire paddy wagon took to the air. It rolled and rolled, and everyone inside rolled with it. Bodies tumbled. Limbs tangled. Heads collided. Only Stuart, thanks to his bonds, stayed more or less in one place. The Jaguar Warriors were thrown about helplessly while he swung, hung, crash back against his seat; swung, hung, crashed. There were resounding, thunderous thumps as the paddy wagon somersaulted, striking the ground repeatedly. There were also screams, shouts and grunts from its occupants, and once or twice the deep
snap
of a bone breaking.

The paddy wagon came to a rest on its side. In the back, Jaguar was piled on Jaguar in a jumbled heap. Low groans filled the air. Someone whimpered in pain.

Then, with a wrenching squeal, the rear doors were crowbarred open. Men rushed into the stricken vehicle. They had skull-face makeup and paramilitary jumpsuits. One wielded a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters.

The Xibalba guerrillas dug through the tangled mass of semiconscious Jaguar Warriors to find Stuart buried beneath. The one with the bolt cutters made short work of the chains securing Stuart, and in no time Stuart was being helped out into the daylight.

Blinking around him, he realised he was at the large intersection north of Whitehall, Tenochtitlan Square. Traffic had come to a complete standstill in all directions. Horns honked. Drivers yelled from their windows, and some leaned out to gesticulate.

The guerrillas hustled Stuart across to their van, which stood nearby with a severely dented front bumper and radiator grille. The engine was turning over, rattling somewhat. Stuart was shoved into the back and the van howled off, tyres screeching.

In the passenger seat, Ah Balam Chel swivelled round.

“Hello again, Mr Reston,” he said, grinning. “So Xibalba plucks you from the clutches of the Jaguar Warriors a second time. This is becoming a habit.”

PART TWO

ANAHUAC