The Aztec Heresy (18 page)

‘‘I’m here to talk of sodomy and related matters, ’’ said Sears.

‘‘Who the hell do you think you are!? Get out of this house before I phone the police!’’

‘‘You shall not be a corrupter of boys, nor like unto such,’’ said Sears pleasantly, keeping his eyes fixed on the old man at the head of the stairs. ‘‘The Letter of Barnabus. Not quite scripture, but close enough.’’

‘‘You bastard!’’ Boucher roared.

‘‘You pedophile,’’ answered Sears calmly, his eyes taunting.

Bishop Boucher let out a strangled screech. He took a step forward, his bare foot striking the almost invisible piece of fifty-pound test braided monofilament fishing line stretched from one side of the staircase to the other. He pitched forward in a desperate swan dive, arms windmilling in empty air, unable to stop himself. Sears stepped out of the way.

The heavyset man came down headfirst, flailing, striking halfway down. His C7 vertebra snapped with an audible crunch as his neck hit the edge of the hardwood stair at an impossible angle, twisted grotesquely, and then bounced off. He was dead an instant later and flopped limply down the last six stairs, landing at the bottom in an untidy heap.

Carrying his plastic bag, Sears stepped over and around the dead body and climbed to the top of the stairs, carefully stepping over the edge of the tread where the bishop’s head had struck, leaving whatever trace there was intact. At the top of the stairs he opened his plastic bag and took out a medium-sized Buck knife to remove the taut, unbroken piece of braided monofilament.

He balled up the fishing line and put it into the bag along with the knife. With that small damning detail taken care of, he went back down the stairs to the foyer. There was no need to check the bishop; his head was bent almost beneath his body. In his case, like that of his long-ago victim, it was unlikely that the body would be discovered for quite some time since visiting hours at the hospital didn’t start until noon.

Carrying his bag, Sears turned away, hung up the hall telephone, and went back to the dark kitchen. He stripped off the Tyvek jumpsuit, leaving the gloves and the booties on. He put the jumpsuit in the bag, stepped out onto the back porch and stripped off the booties, putting them in the bag along with the jumpsuit. He used the spare key to lock the door behind him and replaced it on the ledge. The job was done.

He went down the steps and back through the yard and the alley, returning back to the B&B. He slipped through the French doors on the patio and stepped into his room. Without turning on the lights he pulled the curtains across the opening and crossed to the bed. He sat down and checked the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Two twenty-five.

Sears finally stripped off the surgical gloves and dropped them into the plastic bag. He set the alarm on the traveling alarm clock on the bedside table for six. He’d get up then, the plastic bag with his tools stowed in his briefcase, and pause for one of Mrs. Rothwell’s excellent bran muffins before he checked out.

He’d be on the road in his rental by six thirty and be on the interstate twelve minutes after that. By eight he’d be at the Louisville, Kentucky, International Airport, where he’d hand in the rental. By nine he’d be aboard the United Express commuter flight to Washington. An hour and a half after that he’d be at Reagan Airport. He’d be home in time for lunch. So far everything was going exactly according to plan.

He kicked off his shoes and put his head back against the headboard. He lifted up his hand and looked at the slightly creped skin behind his knuckles and the thinning web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. He was even beginning to show little darkening spots here and there. Age. He sighed; there was no escaping it, he supposed. He’d have to start slowing down soon; two in one night was just about his limit, and he really did need his sleep.

His cell phone chirped inside the plastic bag. Sears frowned. There was only one person who knew the number for the disposable. He leaned forward and retrieved the flip phone from the plastic bag. He opened the phone and answered the call.

‘‘Yes?’’

A familiar voice spoke softly.

‘‘We have an emergency.’’

18

The Antonov An-26 turboprop, painted in the livery of Cubana Airlines, droned through the sky over the Gulf of Mexico on a straight course to Mexico City. It was three a.m. It was a regularly scheduled cargo flight and, oddly enough, it was almost exactly on time, proceeding on course and procedurally correct in every way, calling in every half hour to Mexico Federal Air Traffic Center and identifying itself.

Several years previously Mexico had become part of WAAS, orchestrated by the United States. WAAS stood for Wide Area Augmentation System, a combination of three satellites, GPS tracking, and five separate ground stations in Mexico City, San Jose del Cabo, Puerto Vallarta, Merida, and Tapachula.

On the surface WAAS was an attempt to coordinate air traffic control in North America, but the system was also covertly attached to the U.S. military AWACS system out of Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and the Drug Enforcement Administration. As one wit at Eglin put it, ‘‘With WAAS in place, if a seagull farts out of line anywhere in the Gulf of Mexico, we’ll know about it.’’

All aircraft flying in the dense WAAS network had to have identifying GPS beacons that squawked on the system. No beacon meant you were a bad guy, and any suspicious flight could be followed as low as twelve feet on existing radar. No more low-flying DC3s cruising at zero altitude delivering bales of marijuana over the Everglades. If the Antonov deviated more than half a mile off its flight plan, course bells would ring in a dozen different places. Flights out of Havana, especially ones in Russian-made planes, were a top priority.

The cargo hold of the aging transport was half filled with pallets of goods that had been rolled up the rear loading ramp and down the ball-bearing conveyor belt to the forward section, then netted down with web belt strapping. The rear section closest to the ramp held six men, all seated on fold-down jump seats on either side of the hull, their heavy packs in the central aisle between them.

The six men were all dressed in black combat fatigues, any exposed skin covered with stripes of dark green camo stick. Five of the men were members of a Chinese army Special Operations Group,
Long Fei Xing,
the Flying Dragon Squad. They were
Zhan Shou,
the Decapitators, specially trained to seek out and kill the command infrastructure of any enemy, beginning at the top.

This particular group, headed by the infamous Wong Fei Hung, had a great deal of experience in jungle fighting, having operated successfully in most of Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and half a dozen African countries as well. The sixth man seated in the hold of the Antonov with the Flying Dragon Squad was Arkady Cruz.

The plan that had put him seventeen thousand feet above the gulf instead of eight hundred feet below the surface had been developed by DGI’s Section II-1 division in Havana. Cruz thought the idea was insane, born out of desperation, but after meeting Wong Fei Hung and his men he was gradually convinced. One thing he knew with absolute certainty: there was no doubt that unlike Saddam Hussein’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction, the United States could easily establish a link between Cuba and Angel Guzman.

If the existence of thermonuclear weapons in the drug lord’s hands could be established, it could lead to a confrontation between Cuba that would make the missile crisis of October 1962 look like a school-yard scuffle, and might be just the excuse the Yankees wanted to invade his country.

So here he was, out of his element, literally about to take a leap into the darkness. There was a small buzzing from the headset in his ear. The pilot.

‘‘Lampara verde.’’
Green light.

Cruz nodded to Wong. The grizzled Chinese veteran nodded back and turned to his men, barking a taut command.

‘‘Jiu zhu.’’
Make ready.

Cruz and the others gripped the jump seats. There was a sudden yawning in the base of his stomach like an elevator dropping as the plane plunged several thousand feet. Suddenly his headset was filled with chatter from the pilot, who was talking to some invisible ground station, telling the controller that the flight had hit an air pocket. The chatter was drowned out by the droning of the hydraulic ramp mechanism as the rear door of the transport lowered, filling the aircraft with a howling backdraft.

‘‘Bao zhuang!’’
Wong ordered. Packs on.

The five members of the team rose and began helping each other into the large, bulky packs, each one weighing slightly more than thirty kilos, almost seventy pounds. Cruz followed suit, shrugging into the complicated harness. Wong stepped in behind him as Cruz turned himself toward the lowering ramp. Faintly, over the roar of the wind, he heard the Velcro shearing behind him as the Chinese Special Forces leader opened the rear flaps.

This was where things wandered into the realm of insanity for Cruz. One of the five soldiers went to the forward cargo section and rolled back a circular aluminum tubing frame with a four-bladed propeller attached on a short spindle. Wong fitted the spindle over the small shaft jutting out from his backpack, locking the frame and propeller in. He then looped a control cable around Cruz’s waist and strapped it to the Cuban’s wrist. It had a single, one-button switch that fit under his thumb. That done, the Chinaman looped the two nylon control lines and their hand grips over Cruz’s shoulders.

‘‘Press the electronic start once you are airborne, ’’ instructed Wong for the hundredth time since he’d given Cruz the rushed training course. He spoke in Russian, the only language they shared. The ageless, flat Chinese face speaking with the distinctive slurring accent of a Muscovite was somehow a little disturbing. He sounded like the ghost of Arkady’s father.

‘‘To turn to the left pull on the left line, dump air, to turn to the right, pull on the right line, dump air. All very simple. To slow down, press the electronic start a second time and the engine will stop and you will begin to descend. Very simple. Engine can be stopped and started as many times as you wish during the flight. Easy as pie—you understand?’’

‘‘Da,’’
Cruz answered, responding in his mother tongue.
‘‘Ya vas ponimayu.’’

‘‘Good,’’ answered Wong. ‘‘Now we go.’’

Now the truly insane part of it all began. Cruz had never been claustrophobic; clearly someone who spent most of his time commanding a submarine could have no fear of small enclosed spaces. Nor was he an agoraphobe; the sea, after all, was an endless vista that often stretched to the horizon.

Being an birritumophobe, a person who has a deadly fear of nothingness, was something else again. ‘‘Mad’’ was the only word to describe someone willing to walk to the end of the Antonov’s loading ramp and step off two miles above the surface of the earth into pitch blackness. Which, God help him, was exactly what he was about to do.

They didn’t call them Flying Dragons for nothing. The squads had invented the concept of powered paraglider insertion into enemy territory. The equipment, based on an Italian technology and copied by the Chinese military engineers at the National Defense University in Beijing, added a lightweight twenty-two-horsepower engine and propeller unit to a paraglider.

With a direct-drive transmission and a sixteen-liter fuel cell, the entire unit weighed in at just under thirty kilograms and had a range of two hundred and ten miles over a period of six hours’ flying time. This could be substantially increased by higher-altitude insertions and judicious hoarding of fuel by switching off the silenced engine for periods of the flight.

The insertions could be made with pinpoint accuracy and needed less than a hundred feet of open space to land. Of even more use, the paragliders, launched from the air, could just as easily be relaunched on foot from the ground. The paragliders could cruise at heights of sixteen thousand feet to no more than a yard above the treetops.

The Antonov could easily explain its sudden drop in altitude as long as it maintained its course. The jungle target coordinates was barely a hundred miles, or three hours cruising speed time, from the drop, timed for a landing just at daybreak. Wong, carrying a GPS unit, his paraglider equipped with a shielded blue beacon light invisible from the ground, would lead the group in.

Eyes firmly shut, wind howling in his ears, and the ignition button under his thumb, Arkady pushed his way through the buffeting air, reached the lip of the loading ramp and stepped off, his scream of abject terror and the sudden adrenaline rush lost in the dark rush of air.

‘‘Chyort voz’mi!’’
Arkady cursed and plunged into the bottomless belly of the night.

Finn Ryan stared into the dying coals of the small campfire and wondered if this time she’d bitten off more than she could chew. Garza and his bully boys were more than a simple escort for an archaeological survey team, that was certain. She wondered if, by some chance, the news had leaked about their discovery of the Codex Cortéz.

The four-hundred-year-old parchment had been a revelation and almost certainly the work of Hernán Cortéz himself, at least as transcribed into print by his Franciscan interpreter, Friar Gerónimo de Aguilar. The Franciscan’s tale was an astounding one, richly decorated with illustrations in the Mayan style.

According to the Codex, Cortéz worried that the great wealth in gold and gems that he had accumulated during the conquest of Mexico would be forfeited to the Queen of Spain on orders of Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, the governor of Cuba and Cortéz’s sworn enemy.

The excuse for the forfeiture would be that Cortéz had failed to deduct the
quinto
, or one-fifth of the wealth due to the crown, which in fact was quite true. If that didn’t work, Cortéz knew that he would almost certainly be declared a heretic by the Inquisition, with which Velázquez de Cuéllar’s family in Spain had close ties.

Not only would Cortéz be called back to Spain to stand before the Inquisitors, he would also likely be burned at the stake. The only way to avoid one or the other of these tragedies would be to make the entire, enormous hoard disappear.