James Lovegrove - Age of Aztec

“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.”

7 Movement 1 Monkey 1 House

(Wednesday 28th November 2012)

The spotlights around the Regent’s Park amphitheatre dimmed, and the audience hushed. The stage lights came up. The performance began.

A woman entered from the wings, dressed as the hermaphroditic god/goddess Ometeotl, half male, half female. She performed an elaborate, graceful dance set to a score that fused traditional instruments — clay flutes and ocarinas, mainly — with a contemporary pop rhythm. As she darted from one side of the stage to the other, her stance and style changed. On the left, she was all stomping, square-shouldered machismo. On the right, she was lighter-footed, more feminine.

She was Oneness In Duality, the coming together of opposites. She was the primordial flux that existed before the first great age. She was neither one thing nor the other, and both at once.

Her dance culminated in a symbolic birth. As the music crescendoed, from between Ometeotl’s legs (and up through a trapdoor) the Four Who Rule Supreme emerged.

First came Quetzalcoatl, resplendent in feathers and scales.

Next, Tezcatlipoca in a dark mirror-bedecked costume, amid swirls of smoke.

Then Huitzilopochtli, the wings on his back blurring like a hummingbird’s.