Effigy (44 page)

This was getting ridiculous. As he raced down the road he knew he couldn’t outrun a helicopter. There was nowhere to hide, no arroyos to help him this time. He was debating on his next move when a spray of bullets pelted the road just ahead, deciding for him. He slammed on the brakes and the van skidded to a final halt. The smell of dust settling over a hot engine permeated the air.

The helicopter lowered across the road in front of him and when it reached the ground, three AFI officers spilled from the dirt lifted by the rotor wash. In an instant they were there, jerking him out of the van, throwing him to the ground and cuffing his arms behind his back. When they pulled him back to his feet, Peet found himself forced toward the helicopter.

“No! Wait!” he said, planting his Gore-Tex boots into the sand. His resistance was ineffective against the armed officers.

“Stop!” he cried. “Take me back in the van if you want. Just don’t put me in that chopper.”

The butt of a rifle slammed into his stomach. Peet had seen it coming. He’d tightened his abs against the blow, and although it didn’t entirely knock the wind out of him, it certainly caught his attention.

“Can’t we drive?” Peet gasped. “
Camino?
”

There was no response as the officers shoved him into the helicopter. Inside he was trapped, and he gritted his teeth as the officers clambered in around him. A resurgence of helplessness engulfed him in a way he hadn’t felt since that tragic day in
Chaco
. The rotors pounded the air even faster and the floor suddenly lifted beneath him. The sandy red earth fell away—like Cathy’s blood on the
Chaco
desert.

Peet panicked.

“I can’t fly,” he said, twisting in his restraints. “I’ll go anywhere in a car.”

It felt as though all of his weight had been sucked down into the seat of his pants as the helicopter surged upward like the light end of an overbalanced scale. Peet was near dizzy thinking about the altitude they were reaching. He desperately wrestled for freedom.

“Put me down. Put me down!”

Two officers pounced and to Peet’s surprise, his hand slipped out of the cuffs from his frantic efforts. His elbow slammed into the face of the first officer, instantly paralyzing his arm with a numbing tingle. The second officer had him in a head lock as Peet slammed his boot into the third officer’s chest, sending him careening backwards against the door that easily sprang open. The man fell right out of the helicopter. There was nothing Peet could do for he was still wrestling with the second officer while the first pounced again.

He kicked again but missed. Instead, his sole made contact with a loose rifle behind him. The gun discharged two deafening rounds, the first bullet harmlessly disappearing somewhere, the second ricocheting into the control panel in front of the pilot.

The helicopter suddenly dropped. Peet found himself sucked to the roof by the force of the dive. He gulped, trying to keep his stomach down and about the time he began to feel the helplessness of real fear, the chopper leveled off and he and the two officers fell to the floor in a heap. He dragged himself up and heard the pilot barking something in Spanish, saw his hands fisted around the controls. The veins were bulging from the strain and that’s when Peet realized he still hadn’t regained control. They were still falling, pitching recklessly back and forth.

Peet reached for anything he could hold on to, which turned out to be the leg of the nearest officer who was desperately searching for a handhold himself. He kicked off Peet’s grip, landing a swift blow to his cheek in the process. The tail of the helicopter swung wildly, sending Peet skidding for the open door. One final lurch and he was falling, his hand still clutched around a balaclava mask and an empty rifle cartridge.

The ground came quick and hard.

As Peet lay stunned upon the crushed stalks of an immature corn field, he became aware of the helicopter sputtering above him. Its shadow passed over him like an eagle over a rabbit. But this bird was floundering, listing precariously on its side so that Peet could see the whites of the officer’s eyes as he slid out of its belly.

Peet scrambled to his feet and raced as fast as his legs could carry him through the softened soil. Just when he reached the edge of the corn row he heard the crunch of animated metal and the deafening explosion that followed. The force hurled him back to the ground with a scalding wave of heat.

The sound of his own breathing eased through the static of his ringing ears. Then he heard the flames. The air was heavy with toxic smoke. His stomach could take no more. Before he even found his knees he was heaving and then he vomited his fear right into the irrigation water trickling at the end of the corn row. The black mask was still there in his crushing grip, though where he’d dropped the rifle cartridge, he couldn’t say. The cuffs still dangled from one wrist.

With his stomach and the ringing in his ears slowly settling, Peet clambered back to his feet and forced his rubbery legs to carry him onward. He didn’t know where he would go, he just had to get going.

When he topped a small rise just beyond the burning corn field, he found himself looking down into the lowlands of two intersecting rivers. A town slightly more urban than rural sprawled along the banks to the billowing stacks of a refinery in the distance. In the foreground rose a rather blunt precipice crowned by the jagged ruins of an ancient city. He recognized the cluster of rigid telamons standing atop the broad platform of an unfinished pyramid. They were the Atlanteans—the watermarks of
Tula
.

PART VI

A New Age

Of the fire priest…who was experienced, it was his office to draw, to drill, the new fire.

Fray Bernardino De Sahagún,
Florentine Codex

Tula

Dr. John Friedman leaned in close to the van’s tinted window until he could feel the cool glass on his cheek. They were speeding ever northward, but his attention was drawn to the blanched glare of the sun nearing its ecliptic apex in the white sky above them. Hidden somewhere in the bright wash of light was the moon and the Pleiades, three heavenly bodies marching toward the same point high in the sky.

This was the day, the very solar conjunction, foreseen well over a thousand years ago by the Toltecs, and later the Aztecs and the Mayans. John realized he was witnessing the very hour for which all of
Mesoamerica
had been holding its breath. His mind wandered to
Chichen Itza
, to the Pyramid of Kukulkan where the New Age Followers of Quetzalcoatl were no doubt gathering for their blessed event.

“It’s almost noon,” he observed aloud.

Eva didn’t bother to respond. She had her face turned to her own window but John could still see her dismal expression through the reflection in the tinted glass.

“Quetzalcoatl is nearing his throne in the sky,” he continued thoughtfully. “Perhaps this really is the fabled return.”

“Don’t you ever stop?”

John snapped out of his reverie. “I beg your pardon?”

Eva turned from the window. Her face was hollow and weary, her long black hair collapsing in tendrils from the clip at the back of her head. “Stop talking!” she blurted. “I don’t care about Quetzalcoatl or those stories of his return. I don’t even give a damn about the New Age. I wish to God I’d never heard of the Toltecs or their calendars or this stupid power of Quetzalcoatl. I don’t
care
!”

The officer driving the van glared back at them through the rear view mirror. “
Quiete.
”

Eva slumped back, her arms pinned, like John’s, between the seat and her back. She too was glaring at John.

“How can you even talk about Quetzalcoatl at a time like this?” she hissed, and with that, she turned back to her window.

John watched her for a moment, hoping she’d turn back to him, but she didn’t. Finally, with a cautious glance at the two officers in the front seat, he leaned over and whispered, “I believe you care more about this than you’ll admit.”

She turned back so fast that he thought her neck would crack like a whip. Her eyes snapped with contempt. “I care only that I lost my son because of those stories, and now my father has died chasing them.”

“But there’s more to it than that,” John said matter-of-factly.

Eva’s eyes narrowed into a how-dare-you-question-me look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I believe you do. Why else are you here?”

“If you’ll recall I’m in
Mexico
only because of my careless father.”

Her voice was growing louder so John tried to counteract it with a low, steady tone. “I’m not talking about
Mexico
. I mean why are you here, right now, in this van flying ninety miles an hour towards
Tula
?”

“It was your damned cell phone that tipped the police about
Tula
.”

“Yes, but it was
you
who promised them a bomb.”

The van slowed as they approached the town of Tula de Allende. Atop the precipice just ahead, John knew, awaited the ancient ruins of
Tula
. The van eased past a road blockade turning away the day’s visitors and tourists, and continued up the hill to the parking lot now besieged by AFI vehicles and squad cars from the local municipal police. There, they finally stopped.

Eva began to chew her lip, but the fire still smoldered in her eyes. “I had to lie about the bomb,” she said as the two officers in the front seat got out of the van. “I couldn’t let them beat you to death.”

“That’s very admirable,” John said, “but who am I to you? You’re putting your life on the line for an old man you met barely twenty-four hours ago. Why?”

Eva worried her lip more fiercely and quickly turned back to her window.

“Would you have done the same for your father?” John pressed.

Silence.

John hesitantly leaned in close again until he was nearly whispering in her ear. “Have you considered the consequences should you fail to produce a bomb?”

“I’m not here to hand over a bomb,” Eva snarled.

He sat back again. “I know you’re not. You’re here because of that note your father left in the matchbook. ‘Don’t let One Reed reach Tollan.’”

“It said ‘Reed One,’” she corrected.

“Nonetheless. Despite your apparent contempt toward your father’s teachings, I believe there’s a little girl inside you who wants to believe in the power of Quetzalcoatl.”

“Stop it.”

“We’re not here to look for a bomb. You used that as a means to get us to
Tula
so we can search for the effigy.”