Shadow of the Jaguar Read online

  He had to impress Sir Charles’ urgency onto Jenny. He had given his word. That meant that they would bring him home.

  And not in a box, if it could be helped.

  ***

  The storerooms were an Aladdin’s Cave of gadgets. Connor Temple scratched the scruff on the side of his face and tapped through the various menus looking for anything and everything that might be of use.

  Every item he could possibly need or want was represented by a small icon, which led to a description detailing precise dimensions, weight, and function. Despite what Cutter had said, he fully intended to fill up one of the Personal Digital Assistants with every scrap of data he could find on Peru, including flora, fauna, maps, political climate, hot zones, traditions and culture. They could jury-rig extra juice from a spare battery cradle that would give them twenty-four hours continuous use, and considerably more if used sparingly. Sometimes the holes in Cutter’s understanding were frightening. When it came to technology, it was as though he were trapped somewhere back in the eighties with his transistors, eight-track players and LEDs.

  “Practical, think practical,” he muttered to himself, resisting the urge to get carried away and requisition stuff for every eventuality.

  As an afterthought, he patched through to Jenny on the intercom.

  “Stupid question, but what sort of baggage allowance have we got?”

  She laughed at him. It wasn’t cruel laughter, though — far from it. There was genuine affection in the sound. He could imagine her smiling into the intercom.

  “We aren’t flying British Airways, Connor. And we can’t exactly drop in on a Hercules, so just this once we’re travelling in style. I’ve chartered a private jet from a government contractor.”

  “Nice.” He was impressed.

  Moments later, Connor was compiling the playlist for his MP3 player in his head, and he had it complete by the time the first of the steel coffins rolled in on the conveyor belt. It was all about the mood, matching the spirit of adventure with the mellowness demanded by fifteen hours cramped up in a tin can hurtling through the sky. Augustana, Aimee Mann, Breaking Benjamin, some Foo Fighters and Everclear to kick-start the journey. He could imagine Dave Grohl singing ‘Next Year’ as the wheels left the ground, followed by something more grungy as they climbed to altitude, The Levellers’ ‘England My Home’ with its discordant fiddles, and Pearl Jam’s ‘Black’ with its melancholic melody. Throw in some Snow Patrol, Billy Corgan, Neil Hannon, and Mike Doughty and some old classics like Black Dog and 2112, and that was the first hour pretty much sorted.

  The second hour, well, that had to be mod classics like Madness’ ‘Must Be Love’, Adam Ant’s ‘Prince Charming’ and The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’, then shake it up a bit with ‘It’s A Kind of Magic’, ‘Mirror in the Bathroom’ or Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ to follow. With any kind of mix, the success was down to how well the individual tracks flowed — it wasn’t about how great they were individually. There needed to be just the right amount of juxtaposition and continuity between bass lines and vocals to make it interesting, but not jarring.

  He broke the seals on the coffins to make sure everything he had chosen was safely stowed inside. Once he was satisfied all was as it should be, he locked them up again and struggled to drag them through to the loading bay. He muttered the refrain from a Stone Temple Pilots song as he wrestled with the steel boxes, not that anyone would have been able to recognise the words between huffs and puffs.

  It was a huge amount of equipment, but then, he had tried to think of every eventuality.

  Connor went through to the rec room. A re-run of Robot Wars was playing to itself on the flat-screen. He sank down into one of the bean-bags across from the sofa and fired up the laptop someone had left on the table. The ARC was on an integrated network. Within a few minutes he was browsing the music files on his own machine and recreating the playlist from scratch. It took him the best part of an hour.

  It was an hour in which his curiosity got the better of him. He went back to the virtual server that linked the various machines up, and tapped in a string of commands. He hit a wall immediately, But, he thought to himself, what are walls for if not climbing?

  He tried another string, hit another wall.

  Then he went back to his own file directory and pulled out a spider program, and set it running as he returned to the wall. In five minutes he was through and looking at the main server, completely free of any filters or barriers.

  “Well, well, well,” he said to himself, cracking his knuckles. Six more keystrokes had him in the personal files. Four more and he was reading the name Abigail Sarah Maitland on his screen. It was all there, everything that was known about her, and he couldn’t stop himself from reading until he heard footsteps in the corridor outside.

  Connor slammed the laptop case down and tried to pretend that he was minding his own business. He was whistling a mangled Nirvana tune when Abby’s pixie-like face peered around the doorframe. Seeing Connor, she stuck her tongue out, grinned, and then hurried away, her heavy boots clattering along the corridor.

  He blushed and, sighing with relief at his narrow escape, fired up the laptop again. He killed the connection to the personnel database.

  He spent the rest of the day filling three PDAs with everything remotely Peruvian that he could find, and it really was a case of anything and everything: restaurant addresses in downtown Cuzco, emergency service numbers, embassy contact details, festivals, ceremonies, custom and costumes, religious practices, poisonous plant life, six-months-worth of newspaper articles. By the end of the day he had compiled an electronic oracle.

  “Ask it a question, anything you like,” he challenged Abby the next time he saw her.

  “Oh, I don’t know, how about the meaning of life, the universe and everything?” Abby said, smiling.

  “That’s too easy.” Connor tapped out a couple of commands, and the number forty-two appeared on the screen. He held it up to show her.

  “You are such a geek.”

  “But a loveable one, right?”

  “Not the first word I would have chosen.”

  “Tread softly,” Lester said, handing Jenny Lewis the contact details for Sir Charles’ man on the ground in Peru. “There was an attempt on young Bairstow’s life last night. He’s still with us, and we need to keep it that way.

  “Needless to say,” he continued, “Sir Charles is most upset by the whole affair. I promised him you would take care of it. There are armed guards assigned to the hospital now. You are to get Bairstow out of there. Understood?” She nodded.

  “Minimum of fuss. Sir Charles is leaning on me to get his boy home, which is all well and good, but on top of the whole attempted murder thing, we’ve got an actual murder to worry about, of a Peer of the Realm’s son on foreign soil. Like it or not, we’re talking a political minefield.

  “Sooner or later, the press are going to get wind of Jaime Bairstow’s death. They always do. Someone in Births, Deaths and Marriages will sell them a copy of the death certificate, or one of the baggage handlers at the airport will let slip about the coffin he carried off the plane that morning. We don’t need a diplomatic incident here, Jenny. It’s all about damage limitation. We need to keep our stories straight.”

  Jenny read through the contact information.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked quizzically.

  “Make the call, ask the right questions. That’s what you’re good at, after all. Make the necessary arrangements to bring the boy home.”

  “There’s something you aren’t telling me, Lester,” Jenny said, laying the paper aside. “What is it?”

  Lester shrugged.

  “I don’t know. Just a feeling. I’m really hoping we’re talking about poachers here. Perhaps the boys stumbled across some of them in flagrante delicto, so to speak. God forbid Cutter’s paranoia rubs off on me, or Connor’s conspiracy theories, but I can’t help thinking there’s something Sir Charles doesn�
��t want us to know — and my money’s on the fact that that something is tied in with Cameron’s recollection of the attack. First Cutter comes into the office talking about anomalies in Madre de Dios, now this. I’m not a huge believer in coincidence, if you catch my meaning.”

  “It’s rather hard to miss.”

  “Good. Let’s be blunt here, if it turns out young Bairstow has seen an anomaly, we’re going to need to make sure that part of the story never makes it out for public consumption.”

  When the next contact time arrived, Jenny took the details down to the Communications Centre on the main concourse. She had a technician relay one of the handsets through the com-sat on the right frequency, and retreated into the privacy of an empty lab.

  “Little Gods,” she said into the handset. “Little Gods, are you receiving me?”

  A burst of static answered her.

  She repeated the call sign every twenty seconds for five full minutes before a disembodied voice crackled back.

  “This is Little Gods, over.”

  “Little Gods, this is the ARC calling. Over.”

  “What can I do for you, ARC? Over.”

  “Our mutual friend suggested we contact you before we fly in. We have some questions about the lie of the land. Over.”

  “Ask away. Over.”

  “We’ve been led to believe you have spoken with Cameron? Over.”

  “Yes, I have. Over.”

  “What can you tell us about the attack on his brother? Over.”

  That was met by a grunt of what sounded like laughter. She hoped it was a quirk of the broadcast.

  “Nothing that makes any sense, I’m afraid. Over.”

  “Try me, Little Gods. Over.”

  “His recollections are patchy at best, though he does recall being stalked by a big cat. Over.”

  “So it wasn’t poachers? Over.”

  “No. He’s adamant that it was an animal. A jaguar perhaps, but huge. He kept saying that. The cat was huge. That’s about the only coherent part of his story. Over.”

  “Don’t make me drag it out of you, Little Gods. Over.”

  More laughter greeted that.

  “He talked about diamonds in the air, as well. Diamonds that swallowed his attacker. Over.”

  Jenny paused a beat, and wished she hadn’t heard correctly.

  It was a concise and credible description of an anomaly, but she wasn’t about to let Sir Charles’ man know that his words meant anything to her.

  “I see what you mean,” she said. “It makes no sense. Over.”

  “Trauma plays tricks on the mind. It’s a miracle the lad is alive, after everything he’s been through. His wounds are terrible to see. Over.”

  “Indeed. I am assuming one of them was a head wound? Over.”

  “Multiple blows to the head, resulting in severe concussion, all of which would account for the disturbed vision and so-called floating diamonds. Not very exciting, I’m afraid. Over.”

  This time it was Jenny who laughed. Breaking protocol, Bairstow’s man continued.

  “Our friend tells me I am to meet you at the landing strip. I hope you are as beautiful as your laugh, ARC. Over and out.”

  Jenny sat there for a few moments, letting the implications of what she had heard settle in. Diamonds in the air. Cameron Bairstow had described the shimmer of an anomaly. There was nothing else she could think of that could possibly account for what he had seen. Not even a concussion would lead him to that precise a description.

  The revelation posed an entirely new set of problems, but it did not begin to answer why someone would try to kill him.

  She needed to talk to Lester.

  “Well, that is most disturbing,” Lester said. He had his back to her, and stared at the wall as though gazing out through a window that wasn’t there. “Are you sure that’s what he said?”

  “Positive,” Jenny confirmed. “At least that’s what Little Gods reported.”

  “So what do you suggest we do now?”

  “Cutter should be made aware of the situation, for a start.”

  “I’m not entirely sure he should. The last thing we need is Indiana Cutter thrashing through the jungle with a machete, in search of diamonds in the sky.”

  “But what’s the alternative?”

  “In-and-out, that’s the remit. Keep Cutter away from the Bairstow boy. Keep the Bairstow boy away from the press. Basically keep everyone away from the anomaly, and bury this non-story dead.”

  “You make it sound simple.”

  “It’s why we pay you the big bucks,” Lester said without the slightest trace of irony in his voice. As he turned, she saw that he was smiling. Far from being pleasant, it was an almost predatory expression. “Do your job, manage the situation, Jenny. Go there. Get the boy. Bring him home. I don’t want to be reading about any of this in the newspapers. No anomaly lasts forever, we know that much. So we keep it quiet, bide our time, wait it out. It will decay and disappear. It might already have done so, for all we know. The fewer people who know about what’s going on, the better.”

  “Standard governmental operating procedure,” she said, before she could stop herself. Lester didn’t appear to catch the cynicism in her voice; he was far too preoccupied with fighting imaginary PR fires in his head.

  “Quite. Least said, soonest mended. It is not as though people are going to stumble upon a temporal rift in the middle of the rainforest.”

  She resisted the temptation to point out that it had already happened once.

  FOUR

  Connor hurled aside the garishly covered book he was reading in disgust, nearly hitting Stephen.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly.

  “What’s wrong? They kill your favourite character?”

  “No. It’s this bloody stupid rule that says all superior officers have to be fat, corrupt, and incompetent. Just once I’d like to read a military novel where the arch prelate wasn’t a back-stabbing son-of-a-bitch with his own agenda instead of God’s, and the Captain of the Guard wasn’t some bloated power-hungry moron who’d gut his own mother for a chance to advance.”

  Connor looked across at the three soldiers spread out in the row behind him. Gesturing, he got their attention.

  “Tell me your Commanding Officer is a fat, bloated, slug of a man, and I’ll scream,” he said, eliciting strange looks from each of the trio.

  “It’s an occupational hazard.” Jack Stark, one of the three men who made up their covert military support, explained, “Bosses get fat and they get stupid, forgetting everything that made them ruthless enough to rise through the ranks in the first place. That’s just the way it goes.”

  Connor shot him a look of disgust. Andy Blaine, the second of the three, grinned at Stark.

  “Remind me to let the Sarge know your thoughts on his waistline when we get home,” he said. Then he nodded at the discarded novel. “You not reading that then, sunshine?”

  “No, not any more.”

  “Mind if I do?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Connor plugged his headphones in, leaned back, and screwed his eyes closed.

  Across the row, Abby turned away from the exchange that had just occurred. She was quietly impressed with the way the soldiers were taking to the mission. It wasn’t every day you were told about rifts in time, and learned that prehistoric beasts walked the earth. In many ways, the hardest part had been explaining that the anomalies reached both backward and forward.

  Yet they didn’t seem phased.

  Her attention was drawn back to the window. There was nothing quite like the bird’s eye view of flight to make one appreciate the sheer immensity and raw beauty of nature. The difference between London — with its precision geometry of streets and roundabouts that intersected like cogs on some vast clockwork mechanism — and the barrenness of Cuzco, which for as far as the eye could see was nothing more than sand-blasted stone and dehydrated trees, was as extreme as the world had to offer.

  Coming
out of London City Airport, the view out of the window had quickly degenerated into thick clouds that had thoroughly obscured England’s green and quite unpleasant land as far as the coastline, giving way to the deep blue of the ocean.

  Then for more than a thousand miles she had been able to see the curves and lines of water trailing in the wake of oil tankers and cruise liners and fishing vessels, the ships themselves skating on the meniscus curve of the Atlantic.

  Coming down over the east coast the vista had been replaced by snowcapped mountain peaks, and then bare expanses of farming land with cities dotted in between. The world hadn’t truly become green until their flight path took them over the Amazon basin.

  Here the heat shimmered on the horizon. It was a peculiar phenomenon, considering the chill of the pressurised cabin’s air-conditioner, but it offered a good indication of the weather conditions they were flying into.

  Glancing over, she decided that Connor was probably fantasising about being Flash Gordon, skimming over the surface of Arboria. She chuckled at the thought, though a moment later she realised the implications of it: her lodger’s geekdom was rubbing off on her. Six months ago the word ‘Arboria’ wouldn’t have meant anything to her, outside of some vague conjugation of plant life. Shuddering at the thought, she turned her attention again to the window.

  The verdant greens of the rainforest had given way to sand and soulless stone. The plane juddered again, the rocking no more severe than a carriage’s jounce on the underground, but vastly exaggerated by the sensation of falling.

  Abby loved flying. But she saw Connor’s knuckles whiten as his fingers dug into the faux-leather armrest of his chair, not sharing her passion.

  Stephen had his head buried in an extreme sports magazine, the glossy pages filled with photos and accounts of wingsuit flying, ice climbing, storm chasing, bungee jumping, and other death-defying activities. He had stared at the same pictures at least a dozen times during the long flight.

  Cutter sat in quiet conversation with Jenny, though Abby noticed that he never seemed to look the woman in the eye.

  There were three other men on the plane with them, and not one of them had the look of a scientist about them. They were uniformly over six feet, with broad shoulders and a lithe musculature which spoke of hours of punishing exercise. But more telling was the coldness about their eyes, and an alertness that shouldn’t have been there. They all shared it. Even now, fifteen hours into a cramped flight, these three men had not relaxed. It wasn’t that they were tense, but more that they were incredibly aware of the world around them.