Blood Sport Page 25

  I grinned along with Rafael as I imagined the effect of its words: I am a bomb. Do not attempt to touch me or disarm me. I am filled with enough plastic explosive to kill everyone within fifty meters. I am a bomb. I am going to explode in twenty seconds. Nineteen . . . eighteen . . . seventeen . . . Just fifteen seconds now until I explode. Thirteen . . . twelve . . . eleven . . .

  “Where did you put it?” I asked Fede.

  “Behind the counter of the most popular taco stall on the concourse,” he answered. “The vendor who runs it is a very nervous man who already imagines rebels everywhere. Right now he should be scrambling over the counter, screaming about a bomb. It’s certain to cause all of his customers to flee in panic.”

  “Good job,” I said. Then I took a deep breath. It was now or never. Either our distraction was working—or it wasn’t. It was time to find out.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Fede opened the door and we entered the corridor at a brisk walk, passing the surveillance camera and moving toward the first-aid rooms. As we entered them, I saw two attendants in MedíCarro uniforms, sealing the hatch of a medical stabilization capsule. The injured ollamaliztli player lay braced inside it, oxygen mask over his face and his arms studded with intravenous tubes. Quick-setting sterile plasti-foam fixative had been sprayed over his left leg and hip—I guessed he’d broken his femur and thigh. His knee and hip pads had been removed, but his leather elbow pads were still in place. I was glad to see that his chest still rose and fell—I hadn’t relished the thought of having to carry an actual human heart into the temple.

  The MedíCarro attendants barely glanced at us, instead concentrating on raising the stabilization capsule on its articulating, wheeled legs.

  “Too late!” one called to us over his shoulder. “This one’s ours. You’ll have to move more quickly next time if you want to earn your response-time bonuses!”

  Then they hurried away, pushing the stabilization container before them and leaving us alone in a room filled with stretchers, cabinets of medical supplies, and rehab machines. Fede immediately began opening the storage lockers at one end of the room, searching for the organ-transplant cases that were used by the corazón runners to carry hearts. Just then, a woman pushed open a side door and entered the room. I assumed she was a “jock doc”—a team physician. She wore a track suit in the official Tenochtitlán colors of black and gold and carried a medkit in one hand. In the other she held a string of jade beads with a tuft of turquoise feathers at one end that I guessed was some sort of spell fetish. She’d probably used magic to help stabilize the injured player. I hoped she’d used enough to drain her, or else we might be in trouble.

  Time for another distraction. Rafael knew just what to do. Smiling, shrugging at having come “too late” to pick up the injured player, he moved toward the doctor, turning on all his charm and chatting non-stop about how we’d have been the first MedíCarro team on the scene, except for the inefficiency of the security guards outside, who were supposed to keep the roads to the stadium clear . ..

  I pulled the perfume bottle out of my pocket with my gloved hand and edged forward at the same time. Making sure the nozzle was pointed in the right direction, I raised the bottle suddenly and squirted the mage in the face. She immediately began staggering as the drug hit her. Within three seconds, she was down on her knees—within ten she lay slumped on the floor, fully conscious but unable to move.

  Rafael raised his hand, palm outward, in the team player’s triumphant salute. I was feeling just cocky enough to peel off the surgical glove and give his hand a high-five slap in return. Then I pulled a fresh glove out of my pocket, made sure the perfume bottle wasn’t leaking, and stowed it in a pocket where I could reach it easily. There was no telling who would come through that door next.

  “Whatever that stuff is, it sure works,” Rafael said in an awed voice, looking down at the mage. He reached down to grab her by the arms.

  “Careful!” I warned him. “Don’t touch her throat or face, or any gamma scopolamine remaining on her skin and clothes will get you too. It’s mixed with DMSO—one touch and your skin will instantly absorb it.”

  “Right.” He picked the magician up carefully and eased her rigid form inside a storage cupboard. I was pleased to see that he set her down gently in what would be a comfortable position once the muscle-paralyzing properties of the gamma scopolamine wore off. I breathed a sigh of relief at the fact that she wasn’t one of those unfortunates who went into respiratory shock at the synthetic toxin. When I purchased it in the Thieves’ Market I’d intended to use it only on Vargas—if he died from it, that was only justice being served. But I didn’t want to see an innocent person harmed by the chemical compound.

  “Found them!” Fede called out. He held up a white case, about thirty centimeters wide, stenciled with red crosses. It was old tech, designed to keep human tissue viable as it was rushed from donor to recipient, back in the days when heart patients received actual organ transplants instead of modern cybernetic hearts made of polyurethane, dacron, and vat-grown myocardium. The Azzies had found a new use for the organ-transfer case—keeping hearts as fresh as possible until they could be offered up to their bloodthirsty gods.

  Rafael was busy listening to the game over the microreceiver in his ear. “Two more injuries,” he told us. “And they sound serious. One of the Texcoco players took a ball to the chest and got his jaw broken after being kicked when he was down, and in retaliation his teammates gutter-stomped the captain of the Jaguars. They say he has a broken neck, massive chest and head injuries, and a collapsed lung.”

  “Good!” I said grimly. “Three injuries—three heart-runners. This just might work.”

  Had there been no other serious injuries, only one of us could have gotten into the teocalli as a corazón runner. And that someone would have been me. As a former police officer, I stood the best chance of impersonating an ambulance attendant. I’d dealt with enough emergency cases in my time with the Star. But it looked as though the gods and the spirits were smiling upon us. Three injuries, back-to-back, were exactly what we needed. At the same time I felt a pang of guilt. Our plan depended on the pain and suffering of others. But then I told myself that the injuries would have occurred anyhow, whether or not we’d been present at the ollamaliztli finals.

  My cyberear picked up the roar of the crowd in the stadium above as a door opened somewhere in a room beyond ours. I heard the sound of people moving toward us.

  “Grab the transfer cases,” I told Rafael and Fede. “This place is going to be full of people in the next few minutes. It sounds like it’s time to make our run.”

  Just as Fede and Rafael picked up the cases, a wave of people crashed into the room. Two players were carried in on gyro-stabilized stretchers, their bodies cradled by the stretchers’ lining of form-fit polyfoam. Jock docs hovered over them, working with trauma patches and applying “spray skin”—a mixture of silicone and natural polymers—to seal off the bleeding around fractured bones that had broken the skin. A doctor similar to the one we’d immobilized a few minutes ago moved along with one of the stretchers, his hands placed one on top of the other, palms down, on the Texcoco player’s forehead. His lips moved as he whispered the words of a healing spell.

  The Jaguar player looked especially bad. A large, bloody dent creased the side of his head, and red foam frothed at his lips as he struggled to breathe. One of the physicians barked: “Maria! We need your magic. Now!” He looked wildly around. “Chingada!” he snapped. “Where is that mage?”

  Fede gave the injured captain a pitying look as he passed the stretcher. Then he jerked his head and pushed his way out of the room. Rafael was close on his heels. They would go on ahead of me, trying to get to Vargas. They would have to rely on surprise, raw muscle—and the few drops of gamma scopolamine I’d sprayed onto the surgical glove each had in his pocket. The gloves were turned inside out. The trickiest part would be reversing them so that the gamma scopolamine was on the outs
ide without getting any of it on their hands.

  I bent to pick up an organ-transfer case and follow Fede and Rafael, but just at that moment the Jaguar captain went into convulsions. The team doctor who had been shouting for the mage grabbed me by the wrist, dragging me over to the stretcher.

  “We’re losing him!” he shouted. “Both lungs have collapsed. We need a respiratory assist. Where’s your medkit?” He shook his head in exasperation and pressed my hands against the injured player’s head. “Hold him steady—I want that neck immobilized. If there’s any further spinal cord damage . . .”

  From the stadium above came a roar that sounded like distant thunder. A moment later, a man in a black and gold track suit burst through the door into the first-aid room, waving his arms excitedly.

  “We’ve won!” he screamed. “Pancho scored a ring goal! The Jaguars have won the national finals! The crowd is going mad!” He skidded to a halt and looked at the injured team captain. “Ah. Poor Rico. Too bad he can’t savor his team’s victory.”

  I looked down at the man whose head I held in my hands. He lay still, his fight for life over. His eyes were closed and his jaw was slack. Bloody foam still coated his lips and chin. I jerked my hands back and wiped them on my pants.

  At that moment, another team of MedíCarro attendants burst into the room. The Texcoco team doctors shouted at them to take away the other player, that the injured Jaguar was already beyond help. In the resulting commotion, I bent down to pick up the organ-transfer case, thinking to slip out of the room. But then I realized what had just happened. The Jaguars had won the national finals. The man who lay on the stretcher in front of me was the team captain whose head the cultists—and Vargas—wanted to place in the itzompan at dawn. Did it matter that he had died at the stadium, instead of being sacrificed at the site itself?

  The answer came quickly enough.

  As the legitimate MedíCarro paramedics bustled the injured Texcoco player out of the room, one of the Jaguar doctors gestured at the organ-transplant case I was holding. “Bring that with you,” he ordered curtly. “And follow me.” The other physicians and attendants fell into a hush, as if they knew what was about to happen. All their joy at the victory seemed to have fled.

  Waving the others away, the jock doc—an elf with narrow, delicate fingers and a widow’s-peak hairline—pushed the stretcher into an adjoining room. Forced to play my part, I picked up the case and followed. He shut the door behind us and motioned for me to stand to one side of the stretcher. As I did, he velcroed an apron over his track suit and carefully lifted a monofilament blade out of the medical bag he carried. He pulled the micro-thin line taut between its two plastic handles, then raised it above the dead man’s neck. Knowing what was coming, I fought down the bile in my throat.

  I averted my eyes while he sliced swiftly into the neck of the dead captain with the monofilament blade, trying to ignore the smell of blood and the hiss of the line cutting flesh. I glanced up as I heard a squeaking noise, and saw that the blade was cutting through the blue polyfoam of the stretcher with equal ease.

  “Open the case,” the elf said curtly.

  I did as I was told, feeling lightheaded as the jock doc curled his long fingers in the dead player’s hair and lifted the head away from its body. A rush of blood spilled from the cleanly sliced neck, and a large lump of flesh—probably part of the tongue—fell back onto the stretcher. I tasted vomit at the back of my throat, swallowed hard, and closed my eyes. The case in my hands grew heavier as he placed the head inside it. He sealed the protective gel pack that lined the interior of the case over the head, then closed the lid.

  I thought I felt the ground under my feet tremble slightly just then. It might have been the excited crowd in the stadium above, stomping their feet, or it might have been another minor earthquake. Or it may just have been my nerves.

  “You’re awfully squeamish for a MedíCarro,” the elf said coldly. “You haven’t been a corazón runner before, have you?”

  I opened my eyes and met his gaze. His eyes bored into mine. Was there a hint of suspicion there? Had he looked closely at my uniform and seen that it was a fake? If I dropped the case quickly enough, I could reach the bottle of “perfume” in my pocket and blast him with a squirt. ..

  “Have you been briefed on this transfer?” he asked. “Do you know where to go and who to run this to?”

  I nodded. Then I realized he was waiting for me to answer. I spoke the only possible name that fit. “To the priest in the teocalli. Domingo Vargas.”

  The suspicion fled from his eyes. “Correct. Now go!”

  I didn’t need any more urging. When he opened the door, I rushed through it, past the cluster of people who still filled the first-aid room and down the corridor that Fede had briefed me about. I’d converted the map he’d drawn of this area to a datafile and stored it on my headware memory, and that was how I was able to follow it without giving conscious thought to where I was going. I passed a pair of Aztechnology Corporate Security guards, held up the organ-transfer case in my arms as if it were a passcard, and sighed with relief as they cracked a door to let me through. As the door closed behind me, I heard one of them speaking into the microphone at his throat.

  “She’s on her way up.”

  Now the run began in earnest. I raced along a short corridor and found myself at the foot of a steep flight of stairs that Fede had told me led into the teocalli itself. The walls here were not ferrocrete but stone, narrow and pitted with age like those of the pyramids in the Yucatán. I smelled incense drifting down from the temple above.

  I shifted the case into my left arm and pulled the perfume bottle out of my pocket. I paused to make one last preparation, then held the bottle so that it was hidden between my palm and the case itself. When I handed Vargas the case, I’d blast him with a squirt of gamma scopolamine. Then it would be just be a matter of playing the part of a concerned MedíCarro attendant as we hustled him up to the landing pad and into the private VTOL he’d chartered. If that way was blocked, we’d take Vargas back the way we’d come, into the stadium, and load him aboard one of the MedíCarro vans. If there was still one on site.

  I shook my head. Too many ifs. I started to climb.

  I used my cyberear to pick up sounds from the temple above. I heard the faint sound of voices chanting—priests in a distant room, I guessed—and the surflike roar that was the crowd celebrating in the adjoining stadium. I didn’t hear any gunfire or shouts of alarm. So far, so good. It didn’t seem that we had been found out.

  I wondered how Rafael and Fede were doing. They couldn’t have been more than a few minutes ahead of me. They must have made it past the Azzies on guard at the door below—I hadn’t seen any signs of a struggle as I passed. We’d decided that, in the case of them getting into the temple before me, they were to try and track down Vargas on their own. If they were able to touch him, the amount of gamma scopolamine on their plastic gloves might not be enough to immobilize the priest completely. Instead, they would have to get an improvised mage mask on him before he could cast any spells.

  I’d gotten the idea from the mage masks we used at the Star to neutralize magically capable detainees. The police-issue masks were a combination plastic hood and breathing tube that prevented the magician from seeing or speaking—easily duplicated by an old-fashioned cloth blindfold and gag. A white-noise generator, built into the hood and designed to prevent the magician from concentrating, was trickier to duplicate. But then I’d hit upon the idea of using the microreceiver that Rafael wore in his ear to monitor the ollamaliztli game broadcasts. If set between channels and cranked up loud, the resulting static would do the trick.

  I reached the top of the stairs, puffing a little from the rapid climb. I emerged into a long, narrow room whose stone walls and ceiling were intricately carved with boxy Aztec glyphs and painted with scenes of frowning gods and sacrificial victims dripping blood from severed fingers, hands, and throats. Modern track lighting provided illumination,
but the air was filled with the sweet smoke of incense that burned in ancient-looking stone bowls, held in the hands of statues of skeletal, grinning gods that squatted in each of the four corners. Against the far wall hung a neon-tube sculpture of the stylized jaguar head that was the logo of Aztechnology Corporation. Its baleful red glow lent an eerie light to the room. Beside it, on a granite pedestal, was a bronze statue of an eagle sitting on a cactus and eating a snake—the national symbol of Aztlan and of the sun god Huitzilopochtli, patron of the ollamaliztli games.

  From Fede’s briefing, I knew that the rectangular archway in the wall to my left led up to the area where the victory celebrations would be held—and to the balcony from which the priests watched the ollamaliztli games. Since I’d seen Vargas on the balcony earlier, it seemed logical to assume that I’d find him in that direction. And that was the way that Rafael and Fede would have gone. It was the part of the teocalli that Fede knew best—the part where he’d attended semi-final victory celebrations as captain of the Tampico Voladores in 2055.

  I jogged through the archway, with its ornately carved wooden lintel and frame, and into the room beyond. And nearly dropped the case in my surprise as I skidded to a halt.

  Vargas stood at the far end of room, arms folded across the golden pectoral that hung over his chest. The balloonlike hands of the flayed skin he wore dangled like obscene mittens, and gigantic gold ear plugs stretched his earlobes nearly down to his shoulders. He stood about four meters away, but even at that distance and even over the incense, my nostrils were overwhelmed by the reek of decay that clung to his costume. It smelled like a corpse that had lain in the sun for a week or more. But it wasn’t the smell that had brought me up short.

  It was the sight of Fede and Rafael lying prone at Vargas’ feet. The organ-transfer cases they’d been carrying lay on the floor beside them, lids open. One of Rafael’s arms was stretched toward Vargas, the surgical glove pulled halfway down over his hand. He’d probably been trying to touch the priest when he collapsed. I couldn’t tell if my friend was breathing or not—his body lay in a contorted heap and his head was turned away from me. Fede was equally still.