The Aztec Code Read online

  THE AZTEC CODE

  STEPHEN COLE

  To Linda Chapman, for sharing all the madness

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Also by Stephen Cole

  Chapter One

  They came like shadows out of the warm, wet night. Three of them in black, moving swiftly and quietly through the long grass beside the winding dirt track. Their destination loomed up ahead of them: a sprawling complex of stained concrete, serene in the moon’s silver light.

  Jonah Wish stared at it with foreboding, rubbing the stitch in his side while his friends pushed on ahead. It was late Saturday night and what was he doing – partying hard? Clubbing all night? Getting trashed with his mates?

  No. He was breaking into a nuclear power station in the wilds of Guatemala.

  He pushed his damp blond hair up from his forehead. Same old, same old.

  However weird it might seem, this was his life now. A few months ago he’d been stuck in a Young Offenders Institution: a loser with no friends and family, better with codes and computers than with people. It was cyber-fraud that had got him locked up in the first place – but it had also brought him to the attention of a powerful and most unusual man …

  ‘Great place to stop, geek!’ Motti’s angry hiss cut through the muggy night from behind a dense tropical thicket. ‘You’re in plain view! Get your ass over here before I kick it clear over the perimeter fence.’

  ‘S’pose that’s one sure way of getting inside,’ Jonah muttered as he ran to catch up.

  Motti was a tall, rangy American guy, all glower and goatee, with black hair tied back in a ponytail. ‘About time.’ He squinted at some high-tech gadget through his round-rimmed glasses. ‘Thought you’d stopped to take a leak or something.’

  ‘Nope. I’m keeping a full bladder so I can wet myself properly when we tackle the main security systems.’

  Motti cracked the tiniest smile. ‘That I can believe.’

  ‘Oi, stop picking on Jonah,’ came a rough, south London accent from deeper in the thicket.

  ‘He’s eighteen, Patch. He don’t need no scrawny kid cyclops sticking up for him.’

  ‘He don’t need some gangly bearded tit on his backside either.’ Patch’s thin, freckled face pushed out from the fleshy leaves. In the moonlight, the square of leather over his missing left eye looked creepily like a gaping socket. ‘Actually, I s’pose no one needs a tit on their backside. How would you ever sit down?’

  ‘Carefully,’ Motti suggested, still scrutinising his gadget. They all sniggered, but then a red light started flashing. ‘OK, we got a signal. Power supply for the electric fence is thirty metres north.’

  Patch was suddenly dead serious too; like Motti, he knew when it was time to stop clowning. ‘Reckon you can bust it?’

  ‘’Course I can bust it,’ said Motti, calibrating something on his box of tricks. ‘And those dummies in security control will have no idea. Provided Tye and Con stay on the ball.’

  ‘I hope they’re OK,’ muttered Jonah.

  They waited edgily in silence – although ‘silence’ was hardly the word. The cicadas all around them sounded like some freaky giant generator. Night sounds carried eerily from the dark and distant rainforest, the howls and screeches of creatures unknown. But Jonah thought the loudest thing had to be the thrum of his racing heart.

  He bit his lip and tried to think of all the perks of his new lifestyle – the travel, the money, the freedom, the feeling of belonging somewhere after all these years. But right now he could only see the downside. OK, so they only ripped off people who deserved ripping off – shady, super-rich types who stood to lose a whole lot more by going to the cops. But in the long, nerve-twisting build-up to a job, with the iron taste of fear in the back of his throat, Jonah couldn’t help thinking: Someone get me out of here. I’m not cut out to be a thief.

  Especially not the creepy, freaky brand of thievery the boss man specialised in.

  ‘You know,’ Patch breathed, ‘I think I’d feel a whole lot happier if this place really was just a nuclear power station.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Jonah. ‘Which is saying something.’

  ‘OK, keep it down, we’re ready to go,’ said Motti. ‘And remember, we got a job to do. If we mess up …’

  He mimed a knife moving slowly across his throat. Then he moved off quietly into the undergrowth. Patch rubbed nervously at the leather over his eye, and scrambled after him.

  ‘Roll on Sunday morning,’ Jonah muttered, following close behind.

  Another day, another job, Tye told herself. Only this one was a little too close to home for her liking. She was born and raised in Haiti, and from the age of eleven had spent five years smuggling contraband all across the Caribbean and South America. She’d almost got herself killed in Guatemala a couple of times, crossing the border to Honduras. Making it three times unlucky was not high on her ‘to do’ list.

  Yet here she was, crouching close to the main gates of the apparently deserted complex. Beside her stood a rusted sign advertising clean, cheap nuclear energy for all.

  But Tye knew what the place was really for. And just how dangerous this heist would be. The sweat soaking her back wasn’t only down to the humid night.

  She looked at Con, her companion and colleague, wishing she could share her fears with a friend. But Con didn’t do friendship – alliances were more her thing. Platinum blonde and striking, the only thing she allowed close to her was money.

  Con raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow. ‘Everything is all right?’ Her voice held a trace of European accent, and was like a cool breath in the heat.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Tye straightened, smoothed out the clinging pink top Con assured her looked great against her dark skin. ‘You really think this will work?’

  ‘The men guarding this place are lonely and bored.’ Con undid the top few buttons of her lacy blouse. ‘They will not turn down the chance of some female company while the boss is away.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  Con smiled, hitching up her short black skirt a fraction. ‘We’ll have them eating out of our hands, yes?’

  Tye nodded unhappily. ‘They’ll be eating out of my fist if they try to lay a finger on me.’

  ‘It will be OK.’ Con strutted up to the main gates. ‘We must give our boys their distraction.’

  Distracting boys comes easy to you, Tye thought. When you’re around I just fade into the background.

  And that had never once bothered her, until Jonah Wish had showed up in her life.

  It wasn’t so much his looks, though they were just fine – scruffy blond hair, serious eyes, a smile that suggested he knew stuff he wasn’t meant to tell. It was more about the person he was. Tye had a gift for reading people – it had helped her stay alive in her smuggling days, and she’d known from the first time they’d met that if she was ever to really open up to someone, it would be Jonah.

  Yeah. If.

  ‘Come on,’ Con urged her. ‘It’s time.’ She jabbed a buzzer on the entryphone beside the gates
and looked up nonchalantly into the security camera.

  Tye took a deep breath and crossed to join her.

  A squawk of static and Spanish erupted from the entryphone. The man’s voice sounded gruff and threatening, but Con gabbled back at him, all smiles. She was fluent in eight languages and could get by in eleven more. It was just a shame you could barely believe a word she said in any of them.

  Tye spoke enough Spanish to understand the gist of the conversation. As rehearsed, Con was explaining they were backpackers fooled into coming out here by a couple of bastardos with more on their minds than a moonlit walk. They had run for it – but now didn’t have a clue where they were. Could anyone in there help?

  The voice told Con to wait.

  Tye looked up at the camera and tried to do ‘pleading’.

  The entryphone squawked back into life a minute later. A different man’s voice gave instructions to wait by the gate until someone came to fetch them.

  ‘They want us,’ Con murmured through her grateful camera-smile.

  Tye allowed her eyelids a token flutter. Already she could hear the distant roar of an engine approaching. Yellow headlights rushed to meet them from the shadowy buildings of the main complex. The gates rattled as some invisible bolt was released, and they started to swing inwards.

  ‘Get going, Motti,’ Tye breathed.

  Then floodlights snapped on. Tye shielded her eyes as three black men in a battered open-top jeep pulled up beside them. Automatic weapons were slung carelessly from their shoulders. They looked over at Tye and Con, sweaty and severe.

  Then the driver slowly smiled, showing teeth as rotten as he smelled. ‘Get in,’ he told Con, patting the seat beside him. Which left Tye the tiny space between his pet thugs in the back. She clambered in. They stank of BO and garlic, and made no effort to help her or to move out of the way. They must really believe they were dealing with a couple of helpless girls they could intimidate.

  Tye squeezed in between them and allowed herself the tiniest of smiles. You have no idea, she thought.

  Motti heard the low electric hum carry through the drowsy night.

  ‘Main gate’s opening,’ Jonah hissed beside him.

  ‘I ain’t deaf,’ Motti growled. Ain’t blind, neither, he thought as floodlights flicked on, sending long shadows streaking from the sprawl of buildings towards the electrified perimeter fence – a standard twenty-one-wire job on three-metre posts. Luckily, this far round from the entrance, the floodlights stopped short of him and the guys as they crouched down in their muddy trench. They had dug down to expose the power spur feeding the complex’s systems without tripping an alarm. Given the crappy state of repair of the place – weeds and shit all up the fence, kinks in the wire and worse – Motti wasn’t really surprised. But he was sure as hell relieved.

  So far so good.

  Patch trained a torch on the spaghetti-wiring inside the spur, while Jonah heaved a heavy-duty black box crammed with capacitors into position beside it. Expertly Motti hooked up jump-leads from his homemade device to the right terminals.

  ‘OK. As of now, all the charge in this part of the fence is being absorbed by the Motti-box. That’s 10,000 volts.’

  ‘Glad it’s running into there and not into us,’ said Patch.

  ‘It will do if you don’t get over that fence in sixty seconds,’ Motti told him, crossing to the fence and starting to climb. ‘That’s about how long we got before the box fills to capacity and the current flows back to the fence circuit.’

  Jonah and Patch hurled themselves at the chain-link and clambered up after him. ‘You sure the guards won’t notice the power’s been bled from this section?’ said Jonah as he climbed. ‘You said yourself there were anti-tamper devices –’

  ‘Computers and ciphers are your shit, security’s mine, OK?’ Motti swung himself over the top, counting in his head. Thirty-five seconds left. ‘Point one, all fence control comes from the monitoring station – the guard house, right? From there they can activate or isolate the entire fence or any individual sector.’

  ‘Like the way they just cut the charge around the entrance,’ panted Patch, close behind him.

  ‘Uh-huh, and when they do that, this little surge goes through the whole system. That’s why I waited till then before hooking up.’ Twenty-five seconds. ‘It causes a spike in the current – but since a single mom in a trailer park sees more maintenance than this fence system, if they notice they should put it down to wear and tear.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ said Jonah, last to haul himself over.

  ‘Ten seconds, geek!’ hissed Motti. ‘C’mon, move it!’

  Jonah hit the ground and flattened himself against it.

  ‘Main gates should be closing any moment,’ whispered Motti. Sure enough, a rattling clang sounded from the entrance. The floodlights died, plunging the periphery of the complex back into moonlit shadow. ‘And the power’s running back into the fence any time …’

  ‘… Now!’ Patch concluded, as the ominous hum of the electric fence resumed.

  ‘Nice work, Motti,’ breathed Jonah.

  ‘Whatever,’ he said gruffly. ‘The fence may have been left to rot, but getting inside the containment vessel’s gonna be way harder.’

  ‘You don’t say.’ Patch sighed and shook his head. ‘I can’t believe we’re raiding the core of a nuclear reactor.’

  ‘It ain’t been used for years,’ Motti pointed out.

  ‘But it could still be radioactive! Our bums could be glowing bright green by the time we get out of here!’

  ‘Cool. Yours’ll be easier to kick in the dark.’ Motti booted it now for good measure. ‘Now get us inside that containment vessel.’

  Jonah had raised his head and was looking all around. ‘Coast seems to be clear.’

  Motti nodded. ‘With any luck, the guards’ll go check out those two babes who just showed out of nowhere.’

  ‘Good for us,’ Jonah agreed grimly. ‘Bad for Tye and Con.’

  The bone-rattling ride to the guardhouse seemed to take for ever, but at least conversation was impossible over the jeep’s spluttering engine. In the headlights’ glare, Con could see the whole complex was decaying like some vast industrial corpse. Long grass was growing up through the cracked asphalt. Rusting forklifts and rotting pallets littered empty yards. Abandoned buildings were falling into disrepair.

  The jeep pulled up at the guardhouse that adjoined the main reception. Once it must have looked impressive, but the mirrored glass was now cracked and cobwebbed, divided by rusting steel strips. Con supposed only one area would be well maintained – the containment vessels that had once enclosed the reactor core.

  Now they held a secret treasure. The thought of the cash it could earn her was making her heart race. It was worth the danger. It was worth anything.

  She checked out the guards and was unimpressed. If you could scrub away the dirt, sweat and tattoos you’d find ‘mercenary’ written all over them. There was nothing wrong with that, of course – Con would hardly be here herself if not for the hard-cash incentive – but this lot must be pretty low-grade if they were stuck on guard duty in a place already so well defended. The owner must know that any self-respecting thieves would be mad to enter here.

  Unless they’re thieves like us, thought Con.

  ‘Get inside,’ the driver told her in Spanish.

  ‘May we use your phone?’ she asked. He just laughed in her face, his breath stale and spicy, and shoved her out of the jeep. Tye had already been bundled out by her two towering escorts.

  ‘Not very friendly, are they?’ whispered Tye. ‘Can’t you turn up the charm a bit?’

  ‘Please, we’ve been walking for hours,’ Con told the driver meekly. ‘All we want to do is rest and then –’

  ‘Inside,’ the driver insisted, opening the door to the guardhouse.

  What had once been the gleaming hub of security here was now a large, grotty living space, hazy with cigarette smoke. The stained floor was strewn wit
h litter. Few of the spotlights in the ceiling still worked; more light came from the CCTV screens showing views of the complex in flickering black and white. A poker table had been squeezed into one corner, cards and chips scattered round half-empty bottles of tequila and whisky.

  A wiry white man in a swivel chair spun round from the monitors to size up the newcomers. Con nodded to him politely. He looked greedily between her and Tye like a kid trying to decide which present to tear open first.

  The two big black men from the jeep stood blocking the way out behind them, and the driver barred the way ahead. Intimidating assholes. Con did her best to look scared, watched them get off on it with quiet loathing.

  ‘Take off your shoes,’ said the driver quietly.

  She looked at him blankly. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ve been walking for hours, you say? Let’s see your feet!’

  Not so stupid, then. Con shrugged over at Tye and did as she was asked. Luckily, they had been tramping for some time through the rough terrain beyond the complex, so as not to be observed. Her feet were chafed and red, almost as blistered as Tye’s. She promised herself a pedicure the second she got back to base.

  The driver peered down at their feet, then seemed to relax a little. ‘So, the two of you just happened to find your way here, huh?’

  ‘We saw your lights from the hillside,’ said Tye in halting Spanish. ‘These guys picked us up on the main road, said they would give us a ride to Livingston.’

  ‘Is that so?’ the driver sneered. He turned to his bozo buddies guarding the door. ‘Take Samuel and Kristian and search outside the grounds. Start with the main track. If you find anyone hanging around, bring them here. In one piece or several – Kabacra won’t care.’

  ‘Who are you people?’ Con affected horror, though there had always been a chance this would happen. At least Motti and the others would have fewer guards patrolling inside the complex to worry about. ‘What is this place?’