Age of Aztec

THREE

6 Vulture 1 Monkey 1 House

(Tuesday 27th November 2012)

The British Airways aerodisc touched down at Palermo at 11am local time. It was a commercial long-haul flight out of Heathrow, and the yellow quadrant on the disc’s compass totem was highlighted to indicate its southerly bearing. For the onward journey east to Beijing, with recharge stopovers at Istanbul and Karachi on the way, the red totem quadrant would be highlighted, in accordance with divine precept.

Stuart Reston disembarked with all the other business class passengers. A flight attendant enquired if he’d had a pleasant trip, and he nodded, although in truth the flying time was so brief — a little over an hour — that he felt like he’d scarcely fastened his seatbelt before it was time to unfasten it again.

He was met in the terminal building by a uniformed chauffeur holding up a sign with his name on it.

“ Niltze,” the chauffeur said.

Reston responded to the Nahuatl greeting with the equivalent in Italian: “ Buon giorno.”

The chauffeur took one item of his luggage, a sturdy leather briefcase, and shortly Reston was in the back of a limousine, cruising along the A20 on the northern coast of Sicily. Beside him sat Ettore Addario, CEO of the Compagnia Coltivazione delle Miniere di Mongibello, a man with something to sell and every hope that Reston would buy.

“A pleasant flight?” Addario enquired. Like everyone else in the world of non-Anahuac origin, he spoke Nahuatl fluently as a second language, but he happened to have near-perfect English as well and hoped to impress Reston with it.

“The usual. Quick. Boring.”

“Ah. Like making love to my wife.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Reston said.

“I should hope not, signor. Not for my sake but for yours. A miserable experience. My mistress, on the other hand… Then I would have grounds for jealousy!” He chuckled at the joke. Reston looked unamused. Oh, the English. So uptight. Addario realised he wasn’t going to break any ice with salaciousness, so changed tack. “Your first visit to our beautiful island?”

Reston nodded.

“If there is time, perhaps I can introduce you to our native cuisine. Rabbit in chocolate sauce, for example, and pasta alla Norma. I know this wonderful trattoria in Taormina, right by the beach, where they serve the most delicious pani ca meusa. Some say a burger made from fried spleen sounds disgusting, but believe me, when you taste it…”

“My return flight departs at four. Just show me your operation, so I can see for myself what I might or might not be purchasing.”

“Of course, signor.” Not just uptight — businesslike to the point of being rude. Well, that was an admirable trait, Addario supposed, if you ran as large a corporation as Reston did. No one got to earn a seven-figure annual salary by being nice. Still, would a little civility go amiss?

The Mediterranean glittered to their left. To the right, pale against the brilliant blue sky, stood Mount Etna, growing ever closer. A plume of smoke drifted from the summit of its snow-streaked cone, a smudge of grey pastel in the air. It seemed a benign thing, that plume, given the seething subterranean turmoil that generated it. The sigh of a man whose passion for life is spent.

Etna could rage, though, if the Great Speaker willed it. Nearly every volcano on the planet could.

The limo wound through low fertile foothills, eventually pulling into the public car park on Etna’s eastern flank. A four-wheel drive waited to ferry Reston and Addario onward to the CCMM site. They bumped along a track grooved by truck tyres and caterpillar treads, upwards through a landscape of ash and rough clinkery rock. Here on these barren black slopes it seemed like the world was constantly being rubbed out and restarted, never finished, an eternal first draft.

Addario pointed out the fusion plant that hunkered half a mile away in the huge depression known as the Valley of the Ox. Its domes and cooling towers wobbled like mercury in the heat haze. On the Great Speaker’s say-so, the plant could send intense bursts of energy deep into Etna’s magma chambers in order to trigger volcanic activity. This might happen at any time, contingent on His Imperial Holiness’s whim. It was rare if a volcano was not erupting somewhere on earth, spewing ash and gas into the atmosphere and keeping the thermostat on the planetary greenhouse turned up high.

“As long as we receive the standard twenty-four hours’ notice,” said Addario, “we can pack up our equipment and be off-site with plenty of time to spare. In fact, our safety record is amazing, if I do say so myself. In the past decade we have lost only thirteen workers, and all those fatalities have been due to sudden catastrophic machinery failure or individual negligence. Not a bad statistic, and well below average for a company this size.”

“Nothing worth obtaining comes without loss of life.”

“Well put, signor. Indeed.”

The four-wheel drive deposited them in the thick of CCMM’s current mining site. The obsidian lode was located not far from the Piano Caldera near the base of Etna’s summit cone — a deep seam of felsic lava that had been churned up during recent eruptions and cooled under just the right conditions. A high silica content gave it the necessary viscosity to remain solid rather than become crystalline.

Mechanical diggers were busy excavating the area, exposing the layers of volcanic glass for workmen to hew out with pneumatic drills. Addario handed Reston a pair of overboots, a hard hat and an emergency particulate respirator. Then he led the Englishman on a tour of the site.

Conversation was kept to a minimum, as they had to compete with the roar of diesel engines and the staccato hammering of the drills. Addario assumed anyway that Reston already knew what he was looking at. The man’s family had been in the obsidian trade for four generations, and Reston Rhyolitic Ltd. was Britain’s largest importer and distributor of the mineraloid. It would be odd, to say the least, if the Englishman had had no first-hand experience of the noise, dust, heat and sulphur stench of a volcano-side mine, nor any understanding of the crude, brute-force methods needed to extract obsidian from where it was birthed at these rupture points in the earth’s crust.

Work halted as Etna stirred underfoot. The ground heaved, growling louder than the drills whose chatter it had silenced. Everyone waited for the tremor to pass, poised, ready to down tools and run if need be. There hadn’t been an unscheduled eruption here in years, but you could never be complacent. The Great Speaker could manipulate volcanoes but they also had minds of their own.

“Tlaltecuhtli is groaning,” Addario commented. Reston just gave him a curt smile. Perhaps he didn’t believe in dismembered monster goddesses writhing in agony below ground, causing earthquakes and other upheavals. Addario, who had a degree in geology and had written a thesis on plate tectonics, wasn’t sure he himself did.

The tremor faded. Work resumed. Addario noted that Reston hadn’t blanched or betrayed a flicker of anxiety. The Englishman was a cold fish, but nerveless too. He’d been an Eagle Warrior at one time, hadn’t he? Addario had done a fair amount of research into the background of CCMM’s potential new majority shareholder. He knew that Reston had taken the unusual step of submitting himself for national service rather than go to university. Unusual in that he’d been offered unconditional places by both Oxford and Cambridge and because his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had all been graduates. By and large it was the less academically-gifted, or those whose families couldn’t afford the steep exemption fees, who did the mandatory three-year stint with the Eagles.

Reston, therefore, had clearly felt he had something to prove, or else had a bloody-minded streak a mile wide, because not only had he stuck out the three years, he had gone on to serve for another five in the infantry, rising to major. He might well have continued had his father not died, obliging him to quit the army and assume directorship of the family firm.

No mere pampered rich kid, then. And observing him, Addario could see Eagle Warrior discipline in his bearing still. Reston strode with his fists beside his hips as though on a parade ground, and he remained in good fighting trim, judging by his lean cheeks, broad shoulders and narrow waist. By contrast, Addario’s own pot belly and double chin attested to his love of cannolo siciliano and Marsala wine and his aversion to physical exertion of any kind that did not take place in the boudoir.

It would be interesting, he thought, to be answerable professionally to this man. Not always easy, or enjoyable, but there would be no bullshit, that was for sure. With CCMM’s current Italian owners, it was all bullshit all the time. Addario yearned for a straight-talking employer, as a person lost in the desert yearns for water.

“Seen enough?”

Reston indicated that he had, and they returned to the four-wheel drive. On the way downhill Addario didn’t expressly ask for a verdict, but dropped so many hints that only a fool could have missed them. Finally Reston said, “I can’t give you a definitive answer right now. I need to go over the figures one more time. Tell me, are kickbacks involved?”

“In the purchase?” Addario shrugged. “This is Sicily. There are always kickbacks. You can’t even repaint your front door without bribing some official or other. And there are certain other bodies one must always take into account…” He wasn’t going to say the word mafia out loud.

“I thought the Empire had put paid to all that.”

“The Empire likes to think it has. We Sicilians know better. Some of our traditions go back further than the end of Fortress Europe and the installation of the High Priests. Does that change anything?” Addario asked, a little plaintively.

“It bumps up my initial outlay,” Reston replied. “But all said and done, things are looking positive.”

After Addario had seen Reston off at the airport, he headed straight to his apartment in Palermo’s Four Corners district to share the good news with the woman who mattered most to him. Then he went home to his wife.

Signora Addario wasn’t surprised to learn that Reston, in person, was a reticent, tightly buttoned individual. “Didn’t you tell me he lost his wife and child recently?” she said. “You can’t expect a man touched by so profound a tragedy to be overflowing with joy.”

“But they sacrificed themselves to the gods,” said her husband. “Many would consider that a badge of honour.”

Once again Signora Addario was forced to confront the fact that the man she had married was an idiot of the highest order.

“Would you,” she said, “not be distraught if I put myself forward to have my heart carved out by the priest?”

Provided he could find it, Addario thought, but said, “My dear, it would leave me helpless with grief, but I would somehow find the strength to carry on.”

To carry on visiting that trollop you keep in the Four Corners, his wife thought, but said, “There, then. Somehow Signor Reston is finding that strength. Clearly it comes harder to some than others.”

Stuart Reston’s flight home was delayed because the disc had to wait for a VIP passenger whose connecting flight from Tangier was running behind schedule. When the VIP finally stepped aboard, he made his way to the first class cabin without tendering regret or apology to anyone. He swanned through business class with his pair of burly minders as if no one had been inconvenienced here but himself. He was a priest — plainclothes, no robes, but the sacred facial tattoos gave the game away — and other people’s considerations came second to a priest’s. That was just how it was. If you didn’t like it, tough. Take the matter up with the gods.

For the entire hour of the journey, as the disc skimmed over sea and France, Stuart wrestled with his better judgement. It lost, he won.

If an opportunity comes, he told himself, if you think you can get away with it, go for it.

At Heathrow, the priest was first out of the disc and onto the gangway. For him, there would be no standing in line at customs and passport control. International travel was a breeze for the theocracy. Wherever they went, they were just waved on through.

Stuart still got the chance he was looking for, however. No sooner had the priest entered the terminal than he had to answer a sudden, rather urgent call of nature. He scuttled off to the nearest public convenience, minders in tow.

After a pause, Stuart followed.

The minders had taken up position just inside the door to the gents, forming a two-man wall. Both were giants — professional security consultants with necks as broad as their heads and wrists as thick as their fists.

“Sorry, sir,” said one to Stuart. “You can’t use this facility right now.”

“Try somewhere else,” the other chimed in.

Stuart hopped from foot to foot as though his bladder was past capacity. “But I’m bursting.”

“You’ll have to hold it, sir.”

“I’m sure it won’t be long.”

“Who are you guarding, anyway?” Stuart demanded, gesturing past the minders. “Why’s his need more important than mine?”

“I’d advise you to keep your tone civil, sir. You’re in the presence of His Holiness Jasper Marquand, priest of Birmingham.”

“Oh.” Stuart cringed with feigned contrition. “I had no idea. How stupid of me. Of course I’ll wait outside ’til his holiness is finished.”

He turned, and turned again, pivoting on the ball of his foot and swinging his briefcase into the face of the nearer of the two minders. As the man sank to his knees, clutching a shattered nose, Stuart delivered a knife-hand jab to the throat of the other minder, crushing his larynx. He whacked the briefcase against the first minder’s head, knocking him cold. The second was already close to unconsciousness, struggling to draw breath. Stuart locked an arm around his neck and put pressure on his carotid until he fainted.

In all, it took less than fifteen seconds, and was as quiet as it was swift.

Stuart approached the only cubicle with a closed door. From within came the sounds of someone grappling with an explosive digestive disorder.

“Carling, is that you?” the priest called out. “I heard a bit of a scuffle. What’s happened? Has that insolent moron gone?”

“All sorted, Your Holiness,” Stuart said in an approximation of the minders’ gravelly growl. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Bloody Moroccan food,” Jasper Marquand muttered. “You go there for a short break, some jollies with the local catamites, and what do you end up with? The worst case of the runs imaginable. Sun, sea, sodomy, salmonella. Never again, I tell you. Never again.”

“If you insist, your holiness.”

The toilet flushed. The bolt unlatched.

Stuart kicked the door violently inward. It struck the priest on the forehead and he staggered back. Stuart grabbed him, spun him round, and slammed him down face first onto the toilet bowl. He repeated the action twice more, until blood flowed freely and Marquand was gibbering in pain and distress.

“Please,” the priest begged, “I can give you money. However much you want. Please stop hurting me.”

“I already have money,” said Stuart, “and as for hurting you, that’s not what I’m here for.”

“What, then? Anything. Name it.”

“You dead. That’s all.”

Marquand bucked in sheer terror. Stuart took a firmer grip on him and plunged his head deep into the toilet. He held the priest’s face under the water until his struggles ebbed and became death twitches. He kept him there for another minute, just to be sure, before letting go. Remarkably, he had managed to get very little water on himself, just the odd splash here and there on his suit and shirt cuffs.

He exited the cubicle and went to deal with the minders. Unfortunately for them, he couldn’t leave them alive. They had seen his face and might be able to identify him to the Jaguars; at the very least, furnish a decent description. He gave each man’s head a short, sharp twist, separating skull from Atlas bone. Then he lugged the bodies into two empty cubicles and shut them in.

He washed his hands at the basin and sprinkled cold water on his face. His heart rate was returning to normal. The adrenaline surge that came with murder had begun to abate.

He stared hard at his reflection. A handsome but hollow man stared back. He composed himself. Hand-combed a stray lock of hair into place. Adjusted his tie.

Businessman Stuart Reston emerged from the gents and sauntered over to rejoin the passport queue. Within twenty minutes, he was out of the building and hailing a taxi.

Not long after that, a janitor wheeled his cleaning cart into the gents to give the place its hourly spruce-up.

His screams of horror could be heard halfway across the terminal.

Stuart’s penthouse flat boasted enviable views of the Thames, all the way from Blackfriars Bridge to Limehouse Reach. He stood on the balcony with a glass of whisky and a bowl of pistachios and watched the sun sink into the red fires of the western horizon. One of London’s few remaining pigeons alighted on the balustrade with a dainty coo. It was soon seen off its perch by a brash macaw and went flapping mournfully away, merging with the grey dusk. The more colourful bird sidestepped along the handrail, bowing and scraping, begging for a nut. Stuart showed it what he thought of that by swiping a fist at it. The macaw got the message.

Stuart was aware he had taken a ridiculous risk, slaying the priest like that at the airport. He had gone off-mission. The chances of being caught in flagrante had been huge.

He’d not been able to help himself, though. Once Marquand went into the gents, his fate had been sealed. Had Stuart believed in the gods, he would have said it was a gift from them. He had felt the familiar tingle of cold certainty in his gut: what you are about to do is right, and righteous. After that, there’d been no turning back.

Indoors, he flicked on the TV, and there on the news they were talking about Priest Marquand. “A vicious assassination,” said the reporter on the spot. “Murdered in cold blood at Heathrow Airport by an unknown assailant as he returned from a trecena — long cultural exchange trip to north Africa.”

“Cultural exchange trip,” Stuart echoed dryly.

Then the inevitable. “Is this the work of the Conquistador? The Jaguar Warriors have refused to speculate. Certainly nobody at the scene reports seeing an armoured figure matching the Conquistador’s description, but it has all the hallmarks, from the choice of victim to the sheer wanton brutality of the execution. The alternative theory is a copycat killing. Someone inspired by the Conquistador’s example is targeting the hieratic caste, mimicking his methods. If so, could this be the first of many such attacks? Are we seeing the beginning of a widespread civil uprising?”

Stuart raised an eyebrow. “Now that would be interesting.”

Leaving the television to jabber to itself, he went to the walk-in wardrobe that adjoined his bedroom. Suits and shirts hung in neat rows. Dozens of pairs of shoes sat, polished to a gleam, on racks. Stuart passed them by and halted at the far end. He felt for the hidden spring catch that released a secret sliding panel. The rear of the wardrobe opened up, and there in an alcove stood several suits of steel armour, perched on mannequins. Rapiers and flechette guns were mounted on the walls. Black masks dangled slackly from pegs.

Stuart could not suppress a smile. It was like some glorious treasure trove — a museum exhibit crossed with a functioning arsenal.

He reached out and stroked the nearest suit of armour.

“Soon,” he said, as though soothing a baby to sleep. “Soon.”