The Mayan Codex (27 page)

Not that Calque wished to seduce Lamia – far from it. She was thirty years his junior, and very nearly the same age as his daughter – the whole idea was grotesque. But it was clear that she needed protecting from Sabir’s continual litany of gaffes. The man was as unaware of the effect of some of his statements as a six-year-old child. Take that nonsense at the White Horse Inn. No Frenchman would have blundered in like that and drawn attention to the catastrophic blemish on a woman’s face in the first few moments of their acquaintance. No. It would take an American to promote such a faux pas.

Calque knew that Sabir had had a French mother, but he privately decided that she must have become Americanized very quickly indeed for a
rustre
such as Sabir to be the end product of her childhood educative influence. When it came down to it the man was as
American as apple pie. His maternal French blood was clearly little more than an accident of history.

When Calque finally emerged from his daydream, it was to the realization that the twins were not following him. They had remained on station at the motel, just as he had anticipated.

Calque consulted his watch. Yes, the time was right. He made a left, and then another, until he was on the road parallel to that on which the motel was situated. Then he counted four blocks off in his head, following which he hung another left. Yes. This was it. This was the road they had agreed on after consulting the town map kindly provided by the motel management. Lamia and Sabir would be leaving their motel rooms by the back window about now. He was to give them twenty minutes to make their way the four blocks that separated them from the car.

He let the engine run. Best be prepared. There was always the chance that the twins would intervene early. In that case he must be prepared to hurry back to the motel and do what he could to save the situation. Call the police if necessary. Interpose himself between the twins and their victims. He laid the cell phone he had borrowed from Lamia carefully on the seat beside him.

Then he shook his head. What was he thinking of? He had never been a scrapper or a scrimmager – he simply wasn’t cut out for the rough stuff. In fact he found all physical exertion antipathetical in the extreme. Throughout the entire extent of his police career, Calque had never needed to unsheathe his pistol, far less use physical force on anybody. He had always had a plethora of willing – and more or less able – assistants for that.

Lancelot du Lac he was not.

‘Whatever’s going down is going down.’ Vau touched Abi on the shoulder.

Abi, as usual, was taking his sleep where he could. Ever since they were children he had mastered the art of dozing off in the most extreme of circumstances. Once, even, he had fallen asleep in the midst of a burglary. It had been a test run, engineered by their mentor, Joly Arthault, at the instigation of Madame, their mother. Vau had looked around for his brother, only to find him curled up on a sofa in the corner of the living room of the house they were robbing. He had protected his brother’s back on that occasion, too, just as he had done on a thousand other occasions during the course of their childhood and early adolescence.

The twins watched Calque get into the Grand Cherokee, adjust his seat, then back out towards them.

‘Look at him, Vau. The bastard’s pretending we don’t even exist. His head’s frozen in place. He didn’t even check if there was any traffic coming. If we didn’t know he was planning something, we’d sure as hell know now. Doesn’t he realize that people who are plotting stuff should behave and act normally? Not like robots. You’d think a policeman would have a little more sense.’

‘What would we have done? If we hadn’t had back-up?’

‘I’d have got out of the car and stayed here, and you’d have followed him.’

Vau nodded. ‘Oh, I see. That way we could keep them all under surveillance.’

‘That’s it. But now we merely stay here and let him think his little plan is working. I’ve just heard from Rudra
and Aldinach. So that means we now have five people in place to shepherd them through when they try to make their break for it.’

‘What will they do? Climb out of the window?’

‘Yes. You saw them checking the place out when they first arrived. They were making sure there was a potential rear exit. As we speak, they are probably bundling their belongings out the back, and dodging and ducking their way out of the rear car park. If I had a warped sense of humour, I’d be tempted to take a turn around the periphery of the motel, just out of spite. See two trails snaking out from underneath a car, and you’d know for certain they’d pissed themselves.’

Sabir dropped his carryall out of the window, and eased himself through after it. Then he waited for Lamia to do the same thing. He was tempted to reach forward and help her as she struggled out of the window, but something prevented him. He still felt raw about his initial blunder about her face, and he sensed that she was, unsurprisingly, not entirely comfortable with him yet.

‘Please. Can you help me?’

Sabir hurried forward. He put one hand on the small of Lamia’s back to steady her, and then half lifted, half carried her, away from the window. She touched the ground very lightly, almost as if she had flown out of his arms.

He glanced down at the ground, disturbed at the effect the close physical proximity to a woman was
having on him. For the split second that he been carrying her, he had become more than a little aware of the swell of Lamia’s hips, and the ultra-feminine contour of her buttocks beneath her thin cotton slacks. Now his eyes made their automatic tomcat journey back to her breasts. He could feel himself beginning to salivate. Jesus Christ. Who’d be a man? It was like being harnessed to an out-of-control lawnmower.

Lamia straightened up and smiled at him.

He felt the smile somewhere in the region of his back pocket. Women, he thought to himself. They always know just how to turn it on. It’s a sort of inbuilt instinct. A ‘look at me, I’m here’ sort of instinct. He smiled back despite himself, more susceptible to the feminine than he cared to admit. ‘Come on, we’d better get out of here before they cotton on to what we are doing.’

Sabir grabbed Lamia’s bag alongside his own, and started to edge around the parked cars. Now I’m even carrying her bag, he said to himself. Fantastic. Like an on-the-make schoolboy carrying his girlfriend’s schoolbooks.

They made their way to the outskirts of a nearby motor court, and ducked in between the parked cars.

‘We’ll cut through here, and then down a block, so that there’s no chance at all of them seeing us. Then we cross three blocks over and up a block – Calque ought to be waiting for us.’

‘My brothers aren’t as stupid as you seem to think they are, Monsieur Sabir.’

‘Adam. Please.’

‘Adam.’

‘I’m sure they’re not, Lamia. But what are they going to do? If they haven’t followed Calque, it means they’re stuck waiting in front of the motel. If they’ve followed Calque, we aren’t any the worse off than we were before.
It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I know so.’

The hermaphrodite, Aldinach de Bale, was the first one to see the Grand Cherokee.

‘I’ve got them. They’re heading north out of town.’

‘Then follow them.’

‘It’s already in process.’

Aldinach pulled into the stream of late-night traffic heading out of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. At the very last moment, the Grand Cherokee swung across the oncoming traffic flow, and switched its heading to south.

‘They’re heading south now. They’ve switched lanes on the highway.’

‘For Christ’s sake don’t follow them. Oni’s facing in the right direction. They can’t help but come past him. He can pick them up from there. We must let them believe they’ve given us the slip. We want them relaxed and at ease.’

Aldinach continued on the way he was going. Only when he was a mile or so down the road, and well out of sight of the Grand Cherokee, did he switch lanes and head south too. He had a sudden, amusing picture in his head of one of those cable-channel helicopter camera shots of an endless trail of cars following the as yet unaware silver Grand Cherokee.

He wondered idly what sort of journey Sabir had in store for them. It looked like south. And Aldinach liked
south. He liked the heat, and the opportunity to dress as a woman. In the north, he stuck to his masculine identity, because it seemed more appropriate. But in the south, he was very definitely a girl.

‘That’s it. We’ve lost them.’ Calque was rather keen to pass the driving over to Sabir, but didn’t quite know how to engineer it. He desperately needed a cigarette, and didn’t fancy driving a monster like the Cherokee with only one hand on the steering wheel.

‘Do you want me to take over the driving?’

Calque grinned. ‘That would be excellent. Excellent. And do you think, now that we’re finally clear of the twins, that we could stop somewhere for some real dinner? I don’t know about you, but my stomach is reminding me every instant that it has not eaten since approximately two o’clock this afternoon.’

‘Great. We’ll stop at a Wendy’s.’

‘No!’ It was almost a scream. A cold sweat had broken out on Calque’s face. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout. But surely, if we park around the back, we could find a nice little family restaurant, serving local, homemade food.’