Oni came back. ‘No. You can’t hear anything out there.’
‘Good.’ Abi shot the man in his other leg. ‘Now look here, my friend. It’s obvious you’re not going anywhere in a hurry with both your legs smashed. I’m going to shoot you in the arm next. Then in the stomach. Each time you don’t answer a question, I’m going to shoot you someplace else. You understand my Spanish?’
The watchman nodded. His face was pale and his eyes were fluttering. It was clear that he was going into shock.
‘The cenote. Where is it?’
The watchman indicated with his head. ‘North. Through the woods. About six hundred metres.’
‘Who else knows about it?’
‘Nobody comes here, if that’s what you mean.’ The man could hardly get the words out through his broken jaw. ‘Nobody dares. Bad people own this place.’
‘Yeah. And now they’re dead.’
The watchman shook his head. ‘No. There are more. They come to get you. You people will die.’
‘How many more?’
The man hesitated.
Abi raised the Glock.
‘Six. Maybe eight. I’m not sure.’
‘Where are they now?’
The man sighed. It was as if he knew that he was coming to the end of his life. ‘You going to kill me?’
‘Where are they now?’
‘Up at the US border. They got a big consignment of weapons coming in. They away for maybe six days. Pepito was just working something on the side when he made the deal with you guys. The boss left us here to watch this place. Pepito shouldn’t have left me alone here. But he said he’d pay me a hundred dollars if I watched the warehouse for an hour or two.’ The watchman was losing consciousness. His voice was fading away. ‘You going to kill me?’
‘Break his neck, Oni.’
‘Break his neck? Why should I break his neck? It’s hard to break somebody’s neck. Why don’t you just shoot him?’
‘Because I need you to keep in practice. That’s why. Okay?’
Oni smiled. ‘Okay.’
The watchman closed his eyes. He was pleased now that he’d lied to the gringo. Pleased that he hadn’t told him the truth about the boss, and the consignment, and how many people the boss had, and the number of days they would be away.
When Oni broke his neck it was almost a relief.
72
Abi stared down at the cenote. You got to it through a thick stand of pampas grass. The sinkhole was maybe sixty feet wide, and situated fifty feet straight down, with sheer walls on all sides. It was shaped like a cylinder. Trees grew up from the vase of the cenote, and trailed their fronds in it, but none of them reached anywhere near the lip. Around midday the pool would probably be bathed in sunlight, but now, nearer to eight o’clock in the evening, it looked like the entrance to hell.
A pipe had been let down one side, feeding a series of pumps that took water to the warehouse. Aside from the pipe, there was no way up or down to the cenote. What went in stayed in.
‘Strip the four stiffs and burn their clothes. Then put the stiffs in the Suzuki. Crack the windows about fifteen centimetres – enough to let the water in, but not enough to let anything leak out. Then drive it here and dump it in the cenote. Try not to disturb the grass too much.’
‘But the stiffs will spoil the water, Abi.’
‘We’ll drink bottled water while we’re here, Vau. We won’t be staying long enough to require baths.’
‘Okay. You’re the boss.’ Vau hesitated. ‘Are you going to bring Sabir, Lamia, and Calque out here to the warehouse?’
‘Yes. We’ll sweat everything out of them soon enough. Sabir will crack the moment we start in on Lamia. That’s what true love does to you, Vau. Makes you vulnerable. Some people admire that about it. I think it stinks.’
Abi watched Vau negotiating his way through the pampas grass and back to the warehouse via the track alongside the agave field. He shook his head. Things couldn’t have fallen any better really. They’d lucked into the perfect base. They had more weapons than the CRS and the Foreign Legion combined. And they had the aquatic equivalent of a batch incinerator to get rid of any inconvenient cadavers that turned up as a result of collateral damage.
‘Collateral damage’. How it rolled off the tongue. Abi loved American euphemisms. When he was really bored, he would make up new ones, like ‘inadvertent blood donors’ and ‘residual throw-downs’. But ‘collateral damage’ was still the best. He’d never come near matching that one.
Now all Abi needed to make his happiness complete was Madame, his mother’s, okay to go in and snatch Lamia, Calque, and Sabir and whatever else he could get his hands on, including the mestizo’s book and the crystal skull. Which, given the Countess’s recent form, would be easier said than done.
Abi called up Athame’s cell phone. He knew that her position might be compromised if she answered the phone at the wrong moment, so he let the phone ring twice only, and then hung up. She would feel the vibration through her clothes and know that he wanted to speak to her.
He sat on the lip of the cenote and stared down into the pool, waiting.
When his cell phone finally rang, it took him a moment to respond. Dusk had fallen. The forest all around him was alive with the furtive movement of animals.
‘Can you talk?’
‘It’s fine. There’s so much noise coming from over by the temple that I could bellow like a bull and they wouldn’t hear me.’
Abi smiled. The thought of the dwarf-like Athame bellowing like a bull tickled his sense of the absurd. ‘What’s happening?’
‘They’re holding some kind of ceremony.’
‘Can you make out what it’s about?’
‘I can’t get close enough. You could try Aldinach for that. She’s up in a tree, over on the other side of the site. She might have a better view. I don’t know where Dakini and Nawal are hiding. It was a brilliant idea of yours to use us girls. If we get caught, they’ll just think we’re a bunch of New Age gringas trying to cop a view of the ceremony.’
‘What do you figure is happening?’
‘You want my guess?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think they’re discussing what to do with the skull and the book. They’ve got my sister and her two boyfriends up there with them on top of the pyramid. Maybe when they’ve made up their minds they’ll cut their hearts out and offer them up to the jaguar god? Then someone could dress up in their skins and go cavorting about the sanctuary like in the good old days. That would save us all a lot of trouble.’
‘Who’s running the show?’
‘The High Priest. If we can keep tabs on him, we’ll know where to find the book and the skull.’
‘Stay where you are. I’m coming over to join you with Vau, Asson, Alastor, and Rudra. I’m leaving Oni and Berith here to watch the warehouse.’
‘What warehouse?’
‘I’ll tell you later. But we’ve got all the weapons we need. You can take your pick. Glock. Beretta. Heckler and Koch. Star. Walther. Smith amp; Wesson.’
‘I’ll take the Walther.’
‘Nice choice. It’s a P4. I’ll bring it to you personally.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’m about to find out. I’m about to call our mother.’
73
Sabir followed the Halach Uinic up the pyramid steps. He knew that every eye in the house was fixed upon him and his party. The crowd, for the most part, had fallen silent, but an underlying murmur remained, like that made by a distant swarm of bees.
Dusk was only gradually falling, but the brightness thrown out by the candles, the bonfires, and the burning bowls of incense exaggerated its effect. The higher Sabir rose on the pyramid, the easier it became to discern the endless blanket of forest stretching in every direction around him. It was like a great murky ocean, with the pyramid as a fragile island of light at its epicentre.
The wind picked at his clothes as he made his way up the endless stone steps. He turned his head briefly towards the west, relishing the cooler air. Was this why the ancient Maya had built themselves pyramids and not long houses? An understandable desire to compensate for the fearful heat of the Yucatan summers? The whole thing was probably as simple and as straightforward as that. All the rituals and the contrivances must have come later. Like the chaser to a glass of beer.