Age of Aztec by James Lovegrove

whittle it down further. He’s local, that’s almost certain. Almost all of his attacks have occurred in and around the capital. It’d be reasonable to assume he’s a Londoner. Also, he has a fair bit of dosh. Not rich, necessarily, but he abandoned a suit of armour the other day and turned up in another one yesterday evening. Those things must cost a bob or two, so we can assume he’s not penniless. Finally, he’s nursing some sort of deep-felt grudge against the Empire. Don’t know what, don’t know why, but it’ll flag itself up when combined with all the other criteria. Questions?”
    There was a way of asking “Questions?” that indicated you weren’t actually interested in hearing any. Mal used it.
    “Then what are you waiting for, ladies and gentlemen? Quetzalcoatl to return? Move your arses.”
     
     
    I T WAS A long day, and it stretched well into the evening. Mal coaxed, chivvied and cajoled throughout, fuelled by the cups of coca Aaronson fetched for her, every hour, on the hour. Her team went through criminal records, military records, financial records, sifting, sorting, cross-referencing. When she saw their energy levels begin to wane, she pushed them to redouble their efforts. She led by example, refusing to show an ounce of the bone-deep tiredness she was feeling. The bruises left by the bolas balls ached. Just to hold her head up required superhuman stamina. But she could not flag, could not fail. There was so much at stake here, not least her own life. She was thirty-two. Not ready for Tamoanchan yet, or even the other place. And the chief super was depending on her, the commissioner too, the High Priest himself. She wasn’t going to let anyone down.
    Finally, verging on midnight, she sent everyone home, Aaronson included. They’d all put in a good day’s work, and plenty of overtime, and between them they’d managed to rustle up a list of thirty-odd candidates each of whom fit the profile for the Conquistador.
    Mal herself would gladly have gone home too. She was so exhausted she could barely see straight. Her coca buzz was fading and she knew that if she drank any more of the stuff she could pass out and maybe even end up in hospital with cardiac arrhythmia. It was down to just her now, her and her own inner resources.
    She arranged the candidate dossiers on a table. Some had mugshots clipped to them, others not. She read through each one carefully. In many instances, the sum total of knowledge about the man amounted to no more than a few lines of text. With others, particularly those who had spent time being detained at His Very Holiness’s pleasure, there was a great deal of information, none of it painting them in a flattering light. Her gut instinct told her that the Conquistador wasn’t likely to be part of this parade of model citizens – stalkers, pub brawlers, wife beaters, flashers, kiddie fiddlers. They all of them used to be lower-ranked Eagle Warriors, non-coms, cannon fodder. Given his cunning and his articulacy, the Conquistador would have been higher up the pecking order, officer class.
    By this process of elimination she was able to cut the number of suspects by half. That still left nigh-on twenty possibles, however, and no amount of filtering or compare-and-contrasting could seem to get that total any lower. Each man was as much Conquistador material as the next. The business executive? The blueblood? The publishing tycoon? The tlachtli team manager? Which?
    There was nothing else for it. Mal jotted down the remaining candidates’ names on a sheet of paper, then left the building. She went out into Campbell-Bannerman Street, the broad thoroughfare formerly known as Victoria Street, renamed after the prime minister who signed the peace accord with the Empire, embraced the faith and became Britain’s first ever High Priest – all on the same day. A few blocks down from the Yard, there was a twenty-four-hour pharmacy. Mal approached the counter and asked for a vision