The Aztec Code (10 page)

‘He is going through the stuff we stole from Kabacra,' said Con proudly. ‘Looking through the client list.'

Patch sighed. ‘Wish he'd start looking for Tye.'

Coldhardt emerged from a back room, dressed all in black save for a tiny white rosebud pinned to his lapel, and sat in a high-backed chair at the head of the table. ‘As yet I have had no demands, no threats, nothing from Tye's kidnappers,' he announced. ‘But I
have
received a message from Tye, forwarded from the Stanley Hotel in Livingston.'

Jonah's heart lurched. ‘When did they get it?'

‘Shortly after Con, Patch and I set off for Kabacra's.' Coldhardt produced a small, flat remote, and pressed a button. Suddenly Tye's voice, hollow and speckled with digital noise, boomed out from hidden monitors.

‘Coldhardt, it's Tye. I'm safe, I'm being well-treated. The attack wasn't aimed at you; it's me they were after. It's kind of complicated to explain, but you don't need to race to my rescue. I'll get in touch again soon. Be careful, guys. Bye.'

‘She's all right,' murmured Patch. He looked totally bewildered.

‘That's it?' Motti slammed down his coffee. ‘“It's kind of complicated to explain”?'

‘She must have been forced to give that message,' said Jonah loyally, his insides all bunched up. ‘Why else would she phone the hotel instead of our mobiles?'

Con shrugged. ‘Perhaps because she didn't really want to talk to us?'

Jonah gave her a look. ‘Coldhardt, can we trace where she was calling from?'

‘No. The message was already a day old by the time it was forwarded. We have no idea of her location.'
Coldhardt looked at Jonah. ‘Did you find anything on Sixth Sun online?'

‘Nothing,' Jonah admitted.

‘Then I'm glad that Con and Patch at least have not let me down.' He tapped a pile of papers on the desk in front of him and smiled thinly. ‘There are some illuminating entries in Kabacra's client list.'

Motti set down his espresso cup with bad grace. ‘Like what?'

‘For one, a penthouse residence in Santa Fe marked as belonging to Sixth Sun.' Coldhardt looked at each of them in turn, as if to underline the importance of the words that followed: ‘According to Kabacra's transaction records, the sword of Cortes was delivered to that address.'

‘A drop-off point,' Con speculated.

‘Or their base,' Patch offered.

‘A top-floor apartment doesn't sound like much of a base,' said Jonah.

‘I don't believe it!' Motti was shaking his head. ‘We bust our asses getting to Guatemala and ripping off a nuclear power plant, and the whole time it's sitting just about eighty miles down the highway from here?'

‘So why kidnap Tye?' asked Jonah. ‘They must already have had the sword by then, so it can't be to warn us off. If anything it's going to make us
more
likely to come after them.'

Con shrugged. ‘Maybe they're using her as bait, and this is some kind of trap.'

‘Then why no messages, no demands, no contact at all?' said Jonah. ‘And why do they even want this sword of Cortes so much in the first place?'

‘It's the sword of their nemesis,' Coldhardt reminded him, ‘the most notorious conquistador of all.'

Jonah looked at Coldhardt straight. ‘So why do
you
want it?'

He smiled without warmth. ‘Let's confine ourselves to the first question, shall we? Why
would
a secret society dedicated to old Aztec tradition wish to acquire the symbol of that people's absolute defeat?'

‘They wish to avenge their defeat by possessing the symbol of his victory,' Con speculated, undeterred. ‘Or to destroy it – kind of a symbolic gesture, yes?'

‘Pretty pricey gesture,' noted Motti.

‘Actually, they paid a good deal less for the sword than I would have expected,' said Coldhardt. ‘The payment was recorded in Kabacra's accounts along with a second Sixth Sun address across the border in Colorado, headed “Black House”.'

Jonah frowned. The name seemed familiar from somewhere but he couldn't place it.

‘Then this Black House must be their base,' Con asserted.

‘I'm looking into it,' said Coldhardt curtly. ‘In the meantime we must investigate that penthouse. There's a chance the sword has been kept there – perhaps even Tye.'

Motti raised his eyebrows. ‘So we're breaking in?'

‘You will drive to Santa Fe this afternoon, get the lie of the land,' said Coldhardt. ‘You, Patch and Con.'

Patch sighed. ‘If it's a radiation-free zone, I'm happy.'

‘What about me?' asked Jonah. ‘My head's feeling much better this morning. I can go too.'

‘I need you here to finish work on the computer setup.' Coldhardt looked graver than Jonah had ever seen him. ‘There are things I need you to do. We can't afford to be exposed now.'

To Patch's eye, being in Santa Fe was like falling through a time warp. Everything was built like it was really old, kind of Spanish-looking and muddy. The car parks were done out in red-brown clay, and even the petrol stations were disguised as ancient Native American monuments.

But the only building that mattered right now was the penthouse.

They drove into the city in Con's powder blue Porsche 911. She couldn't drive, just loved to be seen in it – as did Patch and Motti. But today they sat as quiet as the ride, not getting off for once on all the stares and jealous looks thrown their way as they cruised along the streets.

Normally, it was Tye who did the driving.

Patch looked up from his Game Boy and saw some kids their age hanging outside a bar. One boy eyeballed Motti. ‘Hey!' he called. ‘D'you steal that car?'

‘It's
my
car,' Con informed him. ‘And as a matter of fact it's about the only thing I
didn't
steal.'

Motti razzed away the moment the lights changed and left the kids eating Porsche dust. ‘Gotta spend your money on something,' he reflected. ‘Gotta enjoy it while it lasts. 'Cause you never know when the high life's gonna end.'

‘Never know when life's gonna end full stop,' said Patch gloomily, holding his stomach.

‘Throw up over my car and it ends right now,' Con promised him.

They stopped near a quiet pizza parlour where Con's charms and talent got them some useful props – including a delivery van. Then the recce began.

Motti dressed up as a pizza delivery guy – possibly the grouchiest pizza delivery guy in the whole world – and took a big box up to the penthouse on the top floor. No one had answered his banging on the door, so he'd pretended to call his boss, all the time taking pictures of the locks and alarms and stuff with his phone-camera.

Patch studied the evidence, worked out which tools he would use, while Motti worked out the best way to bypass the alarms. Con, meanwhile, sat in the back of the van, stuffing her pretty face with decoy pizza all afternoon while she kept watch on the penthouse. The few people who came and went didn't show at any of its windows. She was fairly sure it had stayed empty. No sign of Tye.

Finally, once Motti had returned the van around nine that evening, they were ready to move. Patch felt the familiar drill of nerves building in his stomach as they walked along the street.

‘Reckon it's the place next door we gotta worry about,' Motti told Patch as they pulled up in the Porsche a few blocks away, outside one of the ten billion art galleries crammed into the city. The sun was setting, and the mountains on the horizon glowed with fierce red light. ‘These two huge guys came out from inside just as I'd finished casing. They did not look happy to see me.'

‘They were probably in the mood for a Chinese,' Patch suggested.

‘Or perhaps they thought you were lowering the tone of the place, yes?' Con had changed from jeans and T-shirt into a smart, chic business suit with killer heels. She looked like she owned the whole building.

‘I'll go in through the front way,' said Con, ‘persuade the man on the door that we have every right to be here, yes?'

‘Signal when it's safe,' Motti agreed quietly.

There were security cameras in the communal hallways on each floor, monitored from the main reception. So long as Con's mesmerism bit worked, the doorman could spy the Moscow State Circus breaking into the penthouse and not bat an eye. That just left the building's roaming security guard, but Con could take care of him one way or another while Patch and Motti got on with the job in hand.

‘You all right, Mot?' Patch asked quietly. ‘You been kind of quiet lately.'

He didn't look round. ‘I'm fine.'

‘Worried about Tye?'

‘And about Coldhardt,' Motti admitted. ‘He ain't exactly breaking his balls to get her back, is he? This sword's all he cares about. I'm thinking, what if it was one of us? How much do
any
of us count with him?'

Patch frowned. ‘He cares about us! 'Course he does!'

‘Sure. It's all a nice, cosy game of happy families.'

At that moment, Con re-emerged and stuck her slender thumb up. Nervously, Patch followed Motti into the building to join her. All together they took the
lift up to the top floor, where Patch took his lock-pick tools from out of his false eye.

‘Do your thing,' said Con as the lift doors opened on to the penthouse approach. ‘The guard is on the third floor, he's working his way up. I'll meet him on the fourth and talk him out of going any further.'

‘Got it,' said Motti, and breezed off to study the door to the penthouse.

‘Take care,' Con told them as the lift doors closed again.

‘So what've we got?' Patch asked.

‘I'm guessing a sensor in the side of the door. If the door opens, the switch tells the alarm to prime itself. And when that happens we've got, what, fifteen seconds tops to stop the alarms going.' Motti glanced behind him at the door to the penthouse opposite. ‘Maybe less if Bozo and Bozo through there stick their broken noses in.'

Patch was already working the lock, teasing the tumblers into turning his way. ‘So it's E-bomb time?'

‘Risky, but we ain't got no choice.' Motti had taken a small metal drum about the size of his palm from his pocket. It emitted a powerful electro-magnetic pulse; enough high-powered microwaves to completely screw the electrics of anything in the area while leaving everything else intact. Trouble was, you couldn't really aim an E-bomb – they just went off and took out anything electronic within range. The one in Motti's hand was a titch, but it could still easily take out the whole top floor – not to mention their mobiles, the bit-buster, all their gadgets …

Patch got to work on the door's lock and was
rewarded just a few seconds later with a quiet click. His hand closed on the door handle. ‘Ready?'

‘Look out, alarm,' muttered Motti, priming the E-bomb. ‘Got ten gigawatts coming up your ass.'

Patch threw open the door, and Motti pushed through into the penthouse, activating the device. The alarm didn't make a sound – but the lights in the hallway clicked off in an instant. Patch checked his digital watch as he followed Motti inside. It was dead.

‘Right,' said Motti softly, ‘let's hope everyone else in the place thinks it's just a power cut and waits nice and quietly inside for the juice to turn back on.' He pulled out a solar-powered torch and was soon pulling paintings off the living-room wall, looking for a hidden safe.

Patch produced his own torch and started searching the white and minimalist master bedroom. He had a quick poke around in the slatted wardrobes. ‘Found the safe!' he hissed. It was large. Easily large enough to hold a sword.

Motti was beside him in a second. ‘Can you crack it?'

‘Dial combination lock with key-change capability,' Patch muttered. ‘In other words, if you wanna change the combination, you need a special key from the manufacturer. You stick it into that hole in the lock case there, see?'

‘And you have the special key, right?'

‘Nope.' Catching the murderous look in Motti's eyes, Patch moved on swiftly. ‘But I do have a fibreoptic scope. I can stick
that
into the lock case and read the correct positioning of the wheels on the
combination dial that'll free the bolt.'

‘Sounds clever.'

‘It's bloody genius, mate.'

‘Get on with it.'

Patch got out his scope and set to work.

Jonah rebooted the server in Coldhardt's data centre. ‘OK. Firewall should be up and running now.' He glanced over at Coldhardt. ‘If you restart, you should be able to access all your shared files.'

The old man did not acknowledge him, staring into space with a gaze as blank as the screen in front of him. Jonah's eyes lingered on the small, unsettling statue upon his desk; it depicted a man in combat with some squat, demonic figure. It was a theme common to many of the artworks Coldhardt put on display, and every variation gave Jonah the same shivers.

‘Thank you, Jonah.' Coldhardt snapped suddenly back into life. ‘A timely announcement. I need to check some aerial maps of the area.'

‘What area?'

‘Colorado Springs.' He paused. ‘That Black House address I found mentioned in Kabacra's records – it cannot be found on any official maps.'

Jonah frowned as he finished checking the proxy server was up and running – a further protective barrier between Coldhardt's network and any possible attack from over the Internet. ‘Could it have been a bogus address? Or maybe encoded in some way?'

‘Possibly,' Coldhardt conceded. ‘Once you have hacked into a certain satellite scanner in low orbit over the area and secured us a live feed, we can be
certain.' He fixed Jonah with those unnerving blue eyes. ‘Something's existence may be denied. But that's not to say it doesn't exist.'