Aztec Century by Christopher Evans Read Free Book Online Page B

was concerned.
    ‘My husband was engaged in highly classified work.’
    ‘Well, he would have been, wouldn’t he? At the MoD.’
    He squashed his cigarette under the heel of his slipper.
    ‘Of course, our rooms might be bugged,’ I said.
    ‘There’s ways round that.’
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘We work at night for a start.’
    ‘What if they’ve got cameras monitoring us?’
    ‘Cameras are hard to hide. I took a look around – your placeas well as mine – while you were out yesterday. You’d left the door unlocked, see. There was nothing.’
    I was amazed at his presumption, yet also grateful he had taken the trouble. He really was a law unto himself.
    ‘What about microphones?’
    ‘Trickier. You can put them anywhere – under floorboards or in your plumbing. And there’s directional equipment that can eavesdrop a hundred yards or more. But even that’s not much use if you play music loud enough.’
    ‘You seem to know a great deal about it.’
    ‘Never know when it might come in handy, do you?’
    ‘So they could be listening to us now?’
    ‘It’s possible. But, then, you’re never going to do anything worthwhile if you don’t take a few risks, are you?’
    His tone was lazily challenging, as if he really couldn’t have cared less either way.
    ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘why don’t we start tonight?’
    My suite was equipped with an entire cabinet of laser-discs, and I put an Oppenheimer violin concerto on the player while Bevan sat down at the terminal and loaded the disk. His high forehead shone in the screen’s livid glow, and his stubby fingers moved with nimble assurance over the keyboard.
    For a long time nothing meaningful happened. Columns of electric-blue numbers and letters dropped like waterfalls on the screen, cursors blinked and darted, rows of nonsense swelled in ranks, halted, vanished. Bevan quickly grew rapt in his task, studying the screen with the earnest fascination of someone faced with a thorny but ultimately tractable problem. If it was a performance for my benefit, an attempt to display his competence, then it was a convincing one.
    After a while he became aware of my presence at his shoulder.
    ‘Chance of a cup of tea, is there?’
    I went to the kitchen and brewed a pot of Earl Grey. When Bevan took a sip of it, he grimaced and set the cup down in its saucer.
    I returned to the garden, walking to the balcony’s edge through grass that gleamed in the light of the generators. They topped the subsidiary pyramids like stylized suns, circular crystalssurrounded by florets of concentrators, all now awash with light. The Aztecs, loving display, were profligate with their energy sources, illuminating not only their buildings but also their craft with excess energy from the sun crystals, adding spectacle and drama to their technological accomplishments. An Aztec ship in flight never looked more fearsome than when it shone.
    Below me, the gardens were spread out, tier upon tier, planted with all kinds of shrubs and flowers, a plethora of shadowy foliage holding all the fruits of Aztec bioengineering. Across the river, the city slept, wrapped in its threads of sodium street-lamps, neon signs flickering messages for Cola Cacao and the latest Corona Sola saloon.
    Returning inside, I found Bevan swivelled away from the screen. He was sipping dark brown tea from a mug in which the teabag still floated. It was obvious he had been waiting for me.
    The screen highlighted his face. It was flashing a sequence of characters as foreign to me as Swahili. The Aztec rock group Itzpapalotl were thrashing out their savage version of ‘Darkness At Noon’ in the background. Bevan was tapping his foot to the music.
    ‘I think we’ve got something,’ Bevan said to me.
    I drew up a chair beside him as he tapped out a sequence on the keyboard.
    To my amazement, a picture of Alex appeared.
    He was framed like a newsreader on the screen, only his head visible, a matt grey background behind him. The