âThen why not take Jonah too?' said Coldhardt. âMore profitable.'
âKabacra, maybe,' said Con. âHe might have kidnapped Tye to get a hold over you.'
Motti shook his head. âIf he knows we ripped him off, why not grab one of us from this hotel? Hell of a lot easier.'
âIt doesn't sound like it was much trouble getting inside the ranch.' Coldhardt fixed him with a glare. âI shall expect a comprehensive report on the state of those security systems upon your return to the estate.'
âIf you'd only let me oversee the guys who installed them like I asked â'
Something pale and dangerous flashed in Coldhardt's eyes. âNever question my decisions, Motti.'
Motti nodded mutely.
âIn any case, Jonah's found us something to go on,' Coldhardt continued. âOne of the intruders left this behind.' He tapped a key to wake up his laptop, and the image of a circular amulet made of jade came up big on the screen. Engraved on the front was some sort of cartoonish birdman, with a big beak, muscular wing-arms and titchy legs like the artist had run out of room.
âThe design is antique Mesoamerican,' Coldhardt informed them. âIt is centuries old, and almost certainly worn by a particular sect of Aztec priests.'
âAztecs,' Patch realised. âThem people Cortes conquered, right?'
âLived in Mexico, five or six hundred years ago,' Con agreed. âBig empire, big on sacrifice â'
âBig whoop,' Motti put in sourly. âBack to the amulet. Do we think Tye was taken by an art collector?'
Coldhardt shook his head. âI believe this particular symbol has been adopted by a secret society calling themselves Sixth Sun. Their beliefs are apparently influenced by those of the Mesoamericans.'
âWhat, they believe in feathered serpents and jaguar men and all that crap?' Motti frowned. âGotta be crackpots.'
Con looked less amused. âIf they are responsible for breaching our defences and kidnapping Tye, they could be very dangerous crackpots, no?'
Patch liked the sound of this less and less. âHow'd you know about them, Coldhardt?'
âIt was when I heard of Sixth Sun's interest in Cortes's sword some time ago that I became certain the weapon's existence was more than just rumour. Naturally I checked them out, just as I would any business rival.' Coldhardt's face clouded slightly, enough to put the wind up Patch. âIn this case, it seems secret society really does mean secret. I could find out next to nothing about them.'
Con shrugged. âBut if they have links with Kabacra, they must be in the arms trade, no?'
âWhoever they are,' said Patch fiercely, âwe've got to get to these Sixth Sun-of-a-bitches and get Tye back, fast!'
Coldhardt ignored him. âMotti, a taxi is waiting outside reception to take you to the airstrip at El
Péten. You'll take the six a.m. flight back to New Mexico and go straight to the base to check security. I want to know how these people breached our defences.'
Motti raised his eyebrows. âThought I was s'posed to work on getting you into Kabacra's place, once you found it?'
âPlans change. Go.'
Motti nodded. âAm I gonna have to nursemaid Jonah, too?'
âHe is already using his computer skills to scour the Internet for further information on Sixth Sun. Now, get on with it.'
Dismissed, Motti slouched from the room.
âWhat about the rest of us?' wondered Patch.
âWe still have our other business to attend to,' Coldhardt replied, closing up the laptop. âNamely, this meeting with Kabacra. Thanks to Patch's work at the nuclear complex, we now know the whereabouts of his base of operations.'
Patch frowned. âWhat did I do?'
âIt seems the number code you cracked with the bit-buster â 15-30-90-15 â was not picked at random. Turns out a similar series of numbers was imprinted on my reconnaissance photos of the nuclear power station â precise latitude and longitude co-ordinates for the location.'
Con raised an eyebrow. âSo Kabacra's code was a set of co-ordinates, yes?'
He nodded. âLocated at 15â² 30â³ north, 90â² 15â³ west in the middle of Guatemala is a large colonial-style mansion. The locals say the owner is a foreigner
with a scarred face.' He looked at them both. âI have invited all three of us round to deliver certain of his missing swords in person.'
âNo wonder you don't need Motti.' Con smiled. âWe can walk in through the front door.'
âSo you
were
serious about giving them swords back.' Patch sighed. âAre you gonna 'fess up that we nicked 'em?'
âNo. Merely that we have located them, and wish to return them to their rightful owner. I want to put Kabacra in a generous frame of mind. But if he is not prepared to give, then we will take.' He looked at them both, his eyes like cold stones. âAcquiring Cortes's sword has to be our top priority.'
Along with getting Tye back again
, Patch willed him to add.
But Coldhardt's mind was clearly elsewhere. âCon, book the best car you can find for seven o'clock this morning. Oh, and just so you know â Kabacra has warned me that at the first sign of a double-cross we shall be taken and executed by a firing squad in the grounds.' Coldhardt leaned forwards. âIt goes without saying, we must play this one
very
carefully.'
âPlay?' echoed Patch. âSounds like this Kabacra don't know the meaning of the word.'
Con looked knowingly at Coldhardt. âThen we must teach him â yes?'
Jonah stared blankly at his PC, eyes stinging, head still hurting like hell. He'd been online for hours, breaking through firewalls and security protocols, trawling through encrypted postings from all kinds of weird
and worrying newsgroups, trying to find some trace of Sixth Sun's existence. But about all he'd dug up after near-enough twelve hours was some background on the amulet design and a possible reason as to how Sixth Sun came by their name. He felt so guilty, just sitting round while Tye was God-knew-where, so useless and frustrated that he couldn't find them another lead â
âYo, geek!' came a holler from downstairs. âYour nursemaid's here. Where are you?'
âMot?' Jonah jumped up from his chair and gasped as the world rocked about him. The back of his head hurt so much he felt sick. He sat down on the bed before he
fell
down.
âHey.' Motti was standing in the doorway dressed in washed-out black, a distressed
Punisher
logo screaming from his T-shirt, a smudge of stubble infringing on his goatee. He seemed concerned, and Jonah felt pathetically grateful that he should care. âYou look dog rough, man.'
âI know.' It all spilled out of him, everything that had happened last night. The only stuff he skipped was the close-call-clinch with Tye and the mysterious vault in the wine cellar. Motti listened in silence, nodding from time to time, his face grave.
âI let Sixth Sun take her, Mot,' Jonah finished hoarsely. âI screwed up. Maybe if you or Con had been here â'
âC'mon. You think I didn't spend the whole of the flight over here blaming myself for them getting past security?' Motti sat down in the chair. âI got scanners, I got motion sensors, I got microwaves ⦠I got goddamned
Canada geese with spy cams wrapped round their beaks â'
âYou do?'
âWell, no, but I thought about it. Look, geek, it ain't no good blaming ourselves.' He snorted. âSo let's blame Coldhardt instead. There's more than five hundred acres to police here, man, including a goddamned river. And does he let me supervise the security installations? No, he's gotta get contractors in â¦'
Jonah thought of the vault hidden down in the wine cellar.
Tye was right
, he thought,
he didn't want you to see
. And for now, Jonah decided to keep quiet about it â he had to be in enough trouble with Coldhardt already.
âCould the contractors have sold the details of security here to Sixth Sun?' he wondered.
âCon wiped their memories with her hypnotism act. They won't remember jack about this place.' Motti shook his head bitterly. âNah, Sixth Sun musta had the place under surveillance for some time. We were here, what, four days before Coldhardt sent us off to Guatemala. That ain't long enough to test all the sensors, the alarms, the infra-red â¦'
âSo they'd have known the place wasn't totally secure yet,' Jonah realised. âBut how'd they find out Coldhardt was setting up here at all? And why take Tye?' He picked up the amulet from his bedside table and tossed it over. âThey took a piece of me. But at least I got something in return.'
âSaw this on Coldhardt's computer,' said Motti, studying the amulet. âLooks old. Real antique. Guess Coldhardt attracts a better class of housebreaker.'
âCrazy thing was, one of them seemed more like a professor or something than a burglar. Short little guy.'
Motti looked at the design on the front. âBirdwatcher maybe?'
âApparently that's a hummingbird.' Jonah rubbed the back of his neck, felt the muscles all bunched up there. âIt features on a lot of Aztec pottery and jewellery and stuff. Aztec warriors believed that when they died in battle or got sacrificed, they would transform into hummingbirds and flutter off to join the Sun God.'
âSounds fun,' said Motti. âWhat kind of outfit's gonna want that as their emblem?'
âI've been reading up on it â Aztecs were big on blood sacrifice. They killed thousands of people each year, even their best warriors. The priests chopped out their hearts while the victims were still alive.'
âNice.'
âCreepiest thing is, the victims were cool with it. They believed that by giving their life force to the gods, they would go to heaven and live with them.
Motti snorted. âEternity as a hummingbird? You can keep it.' He looked down at the amulet. âColdhardt said priests would have worn these. So is that what these guys think they are â priests or something?'
âPriests or warriors,' Jonah agreed. âOr maybe both â¦'
âAnyways.' Motti chucked the amulet on to the bed. âYou find out anything a little more current that could help us?'
âNot really,' Jonah admitted. âBut get this.' He crossed woozily to the computer and called up a page in Explorer. âApparently, the Aztecs had this weird calendar going on. Believed that the history of the world could be divided into cycles of hundreds of years, that they called Suns. And at the end of each Sun, the Earth was pretty much wiped out by a different disaster â flamed up one time, flooded by water another ⦠and humanity only just survived.'
Motti fidgeted impatiently. âJust how bad
was
your knock on the head, geek?'
âRight now, we're meant to be living in the fifth cycle of creation â and the last. The age of the Fifth Sun. The Aztecs reckoned this age would come to an end in the twenty-first century with a load of mega-earthquakes. No get-out for the human race this time. The end.'
âSo, what,' said Motti, âthese guys call themselves Sixth Sun 'cause they think they're going to cheat the predictions and see in a new age?'
âCould be. But what kind of new age would it be?' Jonah frowned, staggered back over to his bed. âSuppose it depends if they're priests or warriors â¦'
âWhatever the hell they think they are,' said Motti, getting up. âHow come they need Tye? As a hostage to use against Coldhardt?'
âThen why not take me along too?' said Jonah. âTwo hostages are better than one. They just beat me up and dumped me.'
âThey got taste,' Motti joked. âOr else not enough room in their transport. Their best chance of getting past the defences was if they took a chopper, and that
would mean limited space â¦'
âOh God,' said Jonah. âI did see a helicopter a bit before â but it was miles away.'
âNah. You'd have heard it touch down.'
âBut we ⦠we were down in the cellar.'
Now Motti's eyes widened. âYou and
Tye
were down in the cellar?'
Jonah blushed. âWe just ⦠fancied some wine to drink.'
âUh-huh.' Motti's voice had hardened, he clearly didn't believe a word of it.
âIt wasn't like that, Mot,' said Jonah, getting to his feet â and wincing as the world pitched and tilted.
âJust stay in bed, lover-boy,' said Motti gruffly, getting up too. âI'll go out and see if I can find any evidence of that Sixth Sun 'copter. And you'd better hope I turn up a better lead than anything
you've
found so far.'
He stalked from the room and shut the door behind him. Jonah curled up on the bed and closed his aching eyes. âI'm hoping,' he breathed. âGod, am I hoping.'
Con sat in the front of the Range Rover, shooting a pained glance at the chauffeur every time he took a bend too fast or drove over one of the many deep ruts in the road. He was a local, stuffed into an ill-fitting uniform and clearly wishing he was a thousand miles away. His presence was a constant unpleasant reminder that Tye had been taken from them.
Poor, serious Tye, always agonising over everything instead of milking the moment for all it was worth. It didn't seem possible to Con that she might never see her again.
She glanced over her shoulder at Patch and Coldhardt but they hadn't shifted; one wearing out his good eye and blasting both ears with his Game Boy, the other apparently asleep. Con sighed. Coldhardt looked so much older when he slept. Frail and vulnerable.
The road was near deserted as they climbed and swooped through the dramatic landscape of Baja Verapaz. They had driven for hours along the Carretera al Atlántico, scrubby bush and cacti slowly giving way to lush pine forest and alpine meadows. Now, as they descended into the heart of the Salamá
valley, there was an almost sinister stillness about them. Con's unease grew as the car drew inexorably closer to Kabacra's hidden lair. Hemmed in by parched hillsides, the hard, featureless sky like pale ceramic high overhead, she felt more and more isolated from the real world.