Chapter Seventeen

The Ancient Witness

"They're ready," the man reported, after a brief phone conversation inside.

Delgado had Lorenzo released and returned to his room. El tried to catch his eye as they took him away, but Lorenzo was lost in a haze of pain and only looked up to give a glare of purest hate to Sands.

Sands, of course, was oblivious to the look. He began cracking the whip around him as if he saw attackers invisible to everyone else. He seemed not to hear Tomás and the others shouting at him, as they dodged and tried to get close to him.

Delgado he heard. "Put the whip down, Señor Sands. This is your only warning."

Sands dropped the whip immediately. Again, El felt a tiny bit sorry for him.

El was ushered through a part of the estate he had not seen, along many lovely paths, until they reached a high outer wall, rimming the grounds. El made note of everything, but in a distracted sort of way, his conscious mind working on the problem of the phone number.

Was zero the highest or the lowest note on a push-button phone?

The thugs with him nodded to the two guards at the gate, and, once it was open, the group of them passed through to find two jeeps waiting just beyond. El studied the gate, the guards, and likely places for motion sensors.

Thirteen numbers. That meant it was an international call, and the first numbers would be the code for calling out of the country. That made zero the highest note and one the lowest.

A short jeep ride up the side of a plateau, and they arrived at a helopad. By the time El and six other goons were seated, facing each other in rows inside the military-style helicopter, he had worked out the phone number.

The flight to the area around Villahermosa was not long. El watched the landscape beneath him in order to get a sense of the estate's location. As planned, the helicopter set down miles from the building, on the far side of a jungle covered ridge between them and the mountainous rise where the concrete building sat. The helicopter approached low, using the ridge as cover. After the seven men got out, the pilot left in the same direction, staying at the treetop level.

"So," El said to the chief goon, a man named Vasquez, "do I get any guns, or do I conquer the Orozcos with my hands?" He held up his bandaged fingers.

Another man produced two familiar gunbelts, and Vasquez drew out a small cell phone, showing it to El.

"We have your own guns for you, Mariachi. I will stay behind to report back on your success. If you make a misstep, and your bullets go astray, your friend will suffer for it. If you betray us, or if I do not call by sundown, your friends die. Understand?"

"I understand," El snapped. He reached for his guns and enjoyed the hesitation he saw in the other men before they handed them to him. He checked them thoroughly, then strapped them on, took a machete and a canteen from the other equipment the men had brought, and, without a word, turned in the direction of the building and set off into the jungle.

He moved easily through the terrain, slicing expertly with the machete. He had grown up in a village surrounded by similar dense jungle, and he knew its ways. He wondered how serious the consequences would be of losing the five thugs who tried to follow him, so long as he still got the mission done. He decided not to worry about whether they kept up or not.

It was a long, hot hike. As he crested the ridge, he paused, looking for a window through the foliage to the rise beyond. His practiced eye found the piece of jungle that had been kept clear by man. The Orozcos had beat back the jungle around their cache - too risky to allow that much cover near their door. El shook his head. They had given up the main advantage they had in this terrain - invisibility. Left to its own, this jungle could completely bury a small structure within ten years.

The fatter of his followers came panting at his back. "Wait," the man gasped.

"You keep up," said El, and he started down the ridge.

He saw nothing further of the Delgado thugs as he began the climb up the rise.

Halfway to where he estimated the building should be, he encountered a strange find. In a land where vegetation ruled all, the top half of a bare basalt boulder poked up from the jungle floor. The dome of the four-meter wide rock had been carved in patterns too regular to attribute to nature. El even recognized the helmet-shaped pattern and he was startled into stillness, his mission momentarily forgotten.

He was looking at the top of an Olmec head. A few machete swipes at plants at the downhill base of the dome revealed that once this half-buried boulder had borne the carved features of one of those mysterious, enigmatic faces from an ancient time. Something or someone had long ago damaged this one, de-facing the rock into anonymity. Only the shape of the headgear remained, but once this enormous face had looked out over the ravine he had just crossed, watching.

Despite his closeness to his goal, El felt quite confident that he still could not be seen by any guards the Orozcos had. He patted the ancient guardian in greeting, sat on top of it, and took some deep swigs from his canteen, thinking.

He now remembered an intriguing item in the slide show Delgado had shown him. The landmark Sands had given them to find this concrete bunker in the jungle was a nearby pile of ruins, visible from the air. Too remote, small, and dilapidated to be of interest to any but the most pedantic of archaeologists, the rubble of bygone ages had been left unclaimed by modern curiosity-seekers. Why then was it visible? The Orozcos must have been clearing the jungle around it, as well.

Suggestive it might be, but El didn't know of what. Additional guards, perhaps. He wished for a moment that he had the devious kind of mind that could plot and manipulate, and therefore unravel other people's deceptions. A mind like . . . well, like Sands's.

Oh well. He did well enough once the bullets started flying. He always had.

He finished his water at leisure, waiting for his watchdogs. Eventually they arrived, following his trail of sliced foliage.

"I told you to wait," said one red-faced man.

"I'm waiting," El replied.

"That will cost your friend another stripe," he said.

El said nothing.

The others grouped nervously around the rock, none of them noticing what it was. They drank, swatted mosquitos, and checked and re-checked their weapons. El enjoyed sitting calmly above them, he and the Olmec head, coolly superior.

"Well, get on with it, great mariachi," the man finally said.

El was ready, the old familiar exhilaration stirring within him. He slid off the domed statue.

"What will you do?" the Fat Man asked.

El shrugged. "Sneak in close and shoot anyone I can see."

"They'll hide inside."

"We'll go in after them. You brought explosives."

"That could destroy the cocaine."

"Then you'll have to be careful, won't you."

With that, El turned and left them. This really should be simple.