have three basic problems,” Richard said. “You need someone from your university who knows integral calculus to compute your trajectories. He’ll understand these equations here.” Richard wrote out a glossary, defining the symbols. “He then has to find a good book on the chemistry of explosives. He will then be able to tell you how to mix the cordite you need to power your shells.”
“Cordite?” Mateo asked.
“None of the European Great Powers are using black powder for their artillery and their other high-powered weapons,” Richard said. “Not anymore. America is phasing it out too. You’ll need nitroglycerin, if you want to manufacture nitrocellulose and nitro-guanidine, both of which you really need if you want to produce the cordite necessary for really high-quality howitzer powder. It’s not easy to make though.”
“I can’t even make a shell go a hundred yards,” Mateo grunted, eyes downcast.
“Aim the guns at a forty-five-degree angle for maximum range,” Richard said, “and then—”
Stopping in midsentence, he looked up from his paper full of equations and saw the troopers were all circling around him, staring at him, fixedly, fascinated—a little too fascinated. Mateo was suddenly putting his arm around his shoulders.
You had to show off, didn’t you ? Richard cursed silently. How in living hell do you get out of this one?
Rachel came back. Hearing Richard’s last remarks and seeing the paper full of equations, she instantly realized how badly Richard had screwed up. She removed Mateo’s arm from Richard’s shoulders.
“Richard, we are out of here.”
Chapter 2
A woman in a black robe stood with a youthful captain of the guard on the third step of the Great Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl. The widowed stepmother to the governor of the Sinaloa, she was that state’s true ruler and now ran Chihuahua as well. She was also the wealthiest woman in all of Central America. She had made countless enemies over the years, and if she truly wanted to go out in public, she was wise to do it incognito. The black robe effectively disguised her appearance. With the hood up, most people mistook her for a priest.
She wanted to stand next to the young capitán during the next few minutes and watch his reaction when the enormity of his fate finally and irrevocably sank in.
* * *
She had commissioned this particular pyramid almost fifteen years before. She had overseen its construction and had visited it countless times. Still it never failed to impress her. Close up, it was so vast that no one could fathom its dimensions. It was as if it encompassed the entire universe.
Its square base was three hundred yards along the edges. Its sloping sides were lined with hundreds of steps—so numerous they seemed to reach the sun. At its top, off to one side, was the sanctuary of Quetzalcoatl—the god-king. Many mejicanos viewed him as the Aztec Jesus Christ. Quetzalcoatl was the only god in their firmament who had once lived and walked among them and who actually liked the mejicano people. Hanging on the sanctuary wall atop the temple was a stunning representation of Quetzalcoatl, an immense mosaic rendered in gold, silver, and turquoise.
* * *
But on the flat summit also stood several gesticulating priests, brandishing machetes and obsidian carving knives. Before them was a limestone altar, four feet high and six feet long—the infamous stone on which countless victims had been, as the Lady Dolorosa liked to mockingly put it with a sly sneer curling her upper lip, “heartlessly sacrificed.”
Shrouded in human skins, crowned with gleaming headdresses of elaborately woven eagle plumes, gemstones, and glittering strands of finely spun silver and gold, the bloodstained holy men harangued the roaring throng, shaking their big gore-dripping obsidian knives at the howling masses below.
The pyramid was cordoned off and federales kept the surrounding mob approximately a hundred feet from the temple’s base. The Señorita needed federales to control them. The crowd numbered in the thousands, and they howled continually: “Blood for Quetzalcoatl!” She still could not believe how popular her human sacrifices were with Sinaloa’s populace.
Four hulking novitiates appeared at the pyramid’s base with the terrified wretch in hand. Partially flayed by the Grand Inquisitor, he was almost too weakened to resist. But one glimpse of the priests—their knives, the stone—and he was a raving madman with the strength of the demented.
The Señorita had chosen her spot on the pyramid well. Her ex-lover was about to be dragged, kicking and screaming, past her on his way up the terraced steps to the sacrificial stone. In fact, he was so close she could discern his whip welts, burns, knife slashes, his missing teeth and fingernails, to say nothing of large swaths of stripped-away skin. From the way his right arm was bent and pressed against his chest, she inferred that her Inquisitor had dislocated that shoulder, probably on the strappado or the rack.
There. They were dragging him up the first step less than ten feet from her.
“Ey, hombre!” she yelled at him.
Recognizing her voice, he abruptly turned his head and stared straight into her eyes. The shock of recognition shook him to his core.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he shouted at her. “What did I do to you?”
She quickly crossed the short distance between them. The priests, sensing who she was, quickly stopped on the fourth step. Mounting that step, she leaned toward the captain, her mouth and eyes bursting into a blazing sunburst of a smile. When the two of them were nose to nose, eyes locked, she said:
“You were a truly terrible fuck.” The Lady Dolorosa spoke softly, her smile still grand and glorious. Looking back at her new major—a man whose name she also could not, did not, remember and would never remember—and staring him straight in the eye, she grinned condescendingly and said: “Got the picture, puto? You comprende? That’s what happens to hombres who can’t cut it between the sheets.”
Chapter 3
The big man in the black Plainsman hat with the flat crown and broad uncreased brim stared into the campfire. Dropping to one knee, he fed several dried-out cottonwood branches into the blaze, warmed his hands, and then drank some more mezcal out of the neck of the bottle.
“We gonna take that bank, Torn?” the man on his right said.
Slater passed the bottle to his friend and nodded slowly. He’d done time with Moreno in the Sonoran Pit—arguably the worst of Méjico’s many despicable slave-labor prison mines—for three long years, and he trusted him. They’d been through hell together, and Luis did every minute of it standing straight up. If he couldn’t rely on the man here on the outside, he couldn’t rely on anyone, and Slater couldn’t take down major banks and payroll trains all by himself. Even worse, since Slater was wanted in thirteen states and territories, as well as the states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua, and had the same $20,000 price on his head in both the U.S. and Méjico, trust was a luxury he couldn’t usually afford.
But for three years, he and Moreno had survived that prison hellhole together, and afterward they’d robbed banks and trains together. Yes, Moreno was a man you could ride the river with.
Their third man, Alberto Segundo, sitting on his saddle blanket by the
