The Aztec Code (4 page)

‘Great plan, Mot,' said Jonah coldly. ‘Wake up the whole neighbourhood, why don't you –'

‘I think we've got company,' Con shouted, checking the wing mirror. Then she swore as the back of the car took a fierce smack of bullets. The rear windows shattered under the onslaught.

‘Jesus, Tye, get us out of here!' Motti yelled, as Jonah roughly bundled him and Patch forwards to the floor before they got their heads blown off.

‘Guess they worked out we weren't hiding in the turbine block, then,' called Patch weakly.

Tye stamped down on the accelerator as she eased up on the clutch, and with a screech of tyres the car sped away. She steered in a crazy zigzag, felt the bullets pumping into the bodywork, the steering wheel twitching with each hit. If just one of the tyres burst …

But the car held it together as she steered out on to the bumpy dirt road that would take them back to the
highway. She was about to let out a cry of relief when two more guards came sprinting out of the thick foliage ahead of them, raising their automatic weapons. ‘Hang on,' Tye shouted, yanked up the handbrake and tugged the wheel round hard left. The car tore into a screeching 360-degree spin, and its rear end broadsided the guards before they could open fire. Sticking the gearstick into first, Tye pumped the accelerator and they lurched off again, careering down the track, bumping round the bends, until finally the broad grey strip of the highway came into sight and they roared away into the night's thin traffic.

They'd gone a full half-mile before Tye realised she was gripping the wheel so tight she had lost all sensation in her fingers.

‘Am I still alive?' Patch wondered weakly.

‘You feel this?' Motti pinched his arm.

‘Ow! Yeah!'

‘Then you're still alive.'

‘No thanks to you,' snapped Jonah. ‘That drop-the-swords trick was stupid.'

Motti climbed shakily back into his seat. His long dark hair had scraped loose from its habitual ponytail and gusted in the wind through the broken windows. ‘Got the armed hood out of our transport, didn't it?'

‘And brought another three running!' Jonah stared at him angrily. ‘You could have got us all killed!'

‘Oh, get the new boy, ticking me off like he knows it all!'

‘I'm just saying maybe you should have told us what you were –'

Motti leaned forwards and shouted in Jonah's face.
‘There wasn't time for a debate!'

‘The important thing is, we got out unharmed,' said Con diplomatically. ‘We may not have got the main prize, but I think Coldhardt will be very happy with the rest of our little haul, yes?'

‘Quantity, not quality,' said Patch with a sigh.

‘Just pray those jokers didn't hole the fuel tank,' said Tye. ‘Or we'll be carrying that “little haul” on foot, fifty miles cross-country.'

‘Maybe we'd better stop at a drive-through on the way, then,' Patch suggested. ‘They gotta have 'em even in Guatemala, right? A Big Mac might help keep our strength up.'

‘Filet-o-Fish,' Con corrected him. ‘And I'm having two.'

‘Beanburger, Jonah?' Tye asked lightly.

He forced a small smile. ‘Sure. Nothing like dodging bullets to give you an appetite.'

Tye kept glancing expectantly at Motti, hoping he would join in the banter and the bickering and make things more normal. But he just sat there brooding, the moody look only let down a little by the way his glasses were perched wonkily on his nose.

It was ten in the morning when Jonah dumped his heavy holdall on the spotless marble floor of Livingston's finest hotel. He rubbed his gritty eyes and wished he could just keep them closed. Tye was on the phone, bypassing the posh receptionists, trying to get through to Coldhardt to see if a) the big man was up and b) he was ready for an audience with his employees.

The luxury resort certainly seemed a million miles from the filthy, impoverished town where they'd dumped the 4x4. Seeing just how many bullets had churned up the bodywork made him feel sick, and the others had looked pretty shaky too. Even Motti had kept his usual smart comments to himself.

While Patch had gone scouring the town for rucksacks so they could shift the swords a little more discreetly, Tye had bought them a battered Subaru from a dealership – refusing to let Con ‘persuade' the owner to give them one for nothing. ‘She has no idea what it's like, living some place like this,' she'd said. ‘To be so trapped.'

Jonah hadn't answered. Sure, Con had been educated in the best schools all over Europe, but only
because she'd been shunted round from relative to uncaring relative after her mum and dad died in a car crash. Maybe she'd felt just as trapped in her own way. Why else would she have split at fifteen and turned to conning dirty old men out of their cash to survive?

He watched Con now, taking a long swig from a can of Seven Up. She glanced at Motti, who was slumped against an ornate pillar beside her, and offered him the can. He just shook his head. He'd barely said a word since they'd got away, and Jonah found himself feeling bad for bawling him out. God knew Motti had been ready enough to forgive in the past when Jonah messed up. And despite the brown-trousers getaway, things had worked out. Hadn't they?

It was funny. Jonah knew that Patch had lived rough round London from the age of nine when his mum had finally flipped out for good, knew that Tye had been forced into smuggling as a kid to support her drunken father. Their stories made Jonah's spur-of-the-moment decision to divert funds to his foster mum's bank account so they could escape her cheating, manipulative husband seem a bit lame. But Motti's hard-luck story was a little different. He used to design elite security systems for different companies in his native Minnesota – until he was caught exploiting hidden weaknesses he'd built in so he could rip them off himself. Was it greed or boredom that had driven him to steal and first brought him to Coldhardt's attention? Or something more?

‘Coldhardt will see us now,' Tye announced, jolting
him from his thoughts. She slipped her mobile back into her jeans pocket and led the way over to the lifts.

Hastily Jonah picked up the holdall and fell into step with Motti, who was last in line. ‘Hey. I'm sorry about having a go, before,' he said.

‘S'OK,' said Motti, looking straight ahead. ‘I'm sorry you're a pussy.'

Jonah decided to leave it there.

The lift whooshed them up to, where else, the penthouse. The doors opened on to a large air-conditioned room, done out in black suede and calico. The sudden dip in temperature brought Jonah's skin out in gooseflesh.

Who was he kidding? He got shivers every time he was summoned to the presence of Nathaniel Coldhardt.

The boss man was maybe in his early sixties. He sat in the dead centre of the room in a high-backed chair, watching as they filed in to face him, deathly pale in a dark, tailored suit. A mane of white hair framed the craggy features, lined more with experience than the years. And age had done nothing to diminish the rogue's sparkle in his piercing blue eyes.

Coldhardt sat and watched them, as if daring them to fill the chilly silence. He could easily be taken for a big businessman, Jonah decided, a mover and shaker. You might put his arrogant half-smile down to decades of deal clinching, or assume his easy confidence and charm was simply the badge of someone at the top of his game.

And in a way, you'd be right.

Coldhardt was a crook. A master-planner. Getting
too old to pull off heists himself, he'd recruited kids to act for him, all from the wrong side of the tracks and all experts in the fields he needed. One by one Coldhardt's ageing hands had scooped them out from their dead-end situations and into a life their peers could only dream about: luxurious homes, the coolest creature comforts, fast cars, bikes, yachts, even a plane, for God's sake … Pools, gyms, amusement arcades, they had them all in half a dozen homes all around the world.

The only thing they didn't have was the option to turn him down. Whatever they were told to do, they did, trading their lives and skills for 10 per cent of Coldhardt's net profits. And with the kind of capers the boss man set up, those profits could easily roll into millions.

‘I understand from Tye you encountered trouble.' The Irish lilt in Coldhardt's deep voice held a gently mocking edge.

‘We encountered guards armed with automatic weapons,' said Con coolly.

‘AK74s by the looks of it,' Motti added. ‘That's Russian issue, right?'

‘Kabacra's an arms dealer who operates all over the world,' said Coldhardt, rising to his full imposing height of well over six feet. ‘He'll locate, acquire and sell on anything to anyone, from a crate of assault rifles to weapons-grade plutonium.'

Patch piped up, ‘But not made at
that
nuclear power plant, right?'

Coldhardt shook his head. ‘He bought the Guatemalan complex when it was decommissioned
fifteen years ago, stripped it bare and made it into a strongroom to hold his personal collection of weapons. Weapons that are allegedly
not
for sale at any price.'

‘Well, Cortes's sword ain't there, man,' said Motti sourly. ‘May have been once, but not now.'

Coldhardt stared hard at him. ‘You're certain?'

‘You told me what to look for. There was a whole lot of metal in that containment chamber, but not the blade you want.'

‘The information came from a most reliable source.' Coldhardt took a thoughtful sip of his drink. ‘An unknown collector has recently made it known that he – or she – is willing to pay an incredible sum for Cortes's sword, and I had reason to believe it might be found in Kabacra's collection.'

‘Which is why you decided to rip him off before he could flog it to them,' Jonah realised.

‘There was this space on the wall,' said Patch cautiously. ‘The mounting screws were there, but … Well, maybe that was where this Cortes geezer's sword used to hang, and Kabacra's already got rid.'

Jonah tapped his holdall with his foot. ‘We brought most of his collection back with us if you want to check it for anything else you might like.'

An unfathomable look came into the old man's eyes and he slowly shook his head. ‘It must be Cortes's,' he said quietly, and a faint chill ran down Jonah's spine. Coldhardt specialised in the theft of artefacts, both ancient and arcane – fabled relics that were near priceless on their own, but which more often than not held the key to secret, spooky mysteries smothered by the
centuries. And Jonah got the feeling that
this
was the real treasure in Coldhardt's eyes. Not just acquiring dark knowledge for its own sake, but because he knew of some way to use it. Though to what end Jonah didn't like to think about.

Abruptly Coldhardt chuckled out loud. ‘I shall enjoy going through your little haul,' he told them, like an indulgent uncle, ‘and I believe it will prove most valuable to us.'

Con's eyes brightened. ‘You are going to sell the swords, yes?'

‘No.' That cryptic half-smile was back on his lips. ‘I am going to give them right back.'

Jonah lay down on a sunlounger, cradling a beer. The job was done; typically that was the cue to relax and party. But there was an air of unease about the guys as they gathered by the hotel's private pool.
Glad it's not just me
, he thought.

‘Thank God we're out of there,' said Tye quietly, angling a parasol to keep the sun out of her eyes.

Patch nodded, rocking back in his chair. ‘We nearly got ourselves killed to get those swords, and now Coldhardt's just gonna …' He trailed off as Con undid her towelling robe to reveal a tiny blue bikini. ‘Hey. That's new.'

She glared at him. ‘Someone stole my red one.'

Patch grinned. ‘Who would do a thing like that?'

‘Someone who's gonna go blind in his other eye if he don't watch out,' said Motti. As usual he was making no concession to the sunshine, lying on a lounger in black grungy gear and flicking through Manga.
‘Told you before, Con, you wanna pay me to secure your pantie drawer, I'm open to offers.'

‘I'll pay you to take pictures while you're in there, Mot,' Patch suggested.

Con walked slowly up to him, slipped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him to his feet. But his dreamy smile vanished as she pinched him hard. ‘Patch, why are you so disgusting?'

‘Would you notice me if I wasn't?'

She twisted round and threw Patch into the pool. He made a splash like a depth charge. ‘Filthy little boy.'

‘He's got a point, though,' said Jonah, earning him raised eyebrows from Con and Tye. ‘About the swords, I mean,' he added hastily. ‘To find out that after all that, Coldhardt's going to give the swords straight back to Kabacra …'

‘What
is
that about?' Con muttered.

‘Guess we'll know what's going down when Coldhardt says, not before,' said Motti.

‘Interesting point of view, Mot,' said Patch from the pool. ‘But me, I got a better one.
Butt
me – get it?'

Con glanced behind her to find Patch staring up at her ass. She sighed wearily, trod on his head and used it as a springboard for a perfect dive that barely rippled the water.

Motti laughed as Patch bobbed back up, spluttering. ‘Hey, can anyone have a go, cyclops?'

Jonah smiled, while Tye shook her head in mock-weariness and lay back down on her sunbed. But as the hot sun climbed higher into the sky, the mood seemed a little lighter.

* * *

In the end, the summons to Coldhardt came at six that evening – for Tye and Jonah at least. It turned out they weren't needed for the next stage of Coldhardt's plan – a face-to-face meet with Kabacra. Tye shuddered, happy to leave that little pleasure to Motti, Patch and Con.