Chapter 2: Warping history again
Davies stepped out of the small jet which had brought him from London on the Hudson to Missouri, the capital of Quivera province, in a little less than two hours. Davies was a thin man in his youth, broadening in the beam in middle age. He wore a well-tailored gray suit and a nose broach with a small red garnet.
In the style of the Imperial Mexicans, his host embraced him and kissed his cheek. The man wore the skin cape of a Jaguar Knight and limited his makeup to thin red stripes over his broad cheekbones. Not unexpectedly, Chief Commissioner Tepultezan spoke excellent English.
Once inside the long sleek limo, Davies and Tepultezan could barely feel the acceleration as the driver sped from the airport to the city center. Like all highways in Tenochtitlan's Empire, which spanned most of the North Mexico continent and reached down to the Gulf Shore of South Mexico, the concrete road was three lanes in each direction -- two lanes for private citizens and the inside lane reserved strictly for government business. In no time at all, they would be at the Government Pyramid, local headquarters of the Department of Mice, an Imperial Mexican euphemism for spies.
"The woman is still missing," Tepul told Davies.
"Border guards and custom agents are alerted to watch for her." Davies looked at the photo he had been handed -- a brown-haired woman of European ancestry dressed in the gown and wrap-around scarf common to women the world around.
"We checked the prints and photos you supplied us," said Davies. "We don't have any records of her either."
As they entered the central plaza of Missouri, which featured huge glass and steel pyramids at each of the cardinal directions, Tepul told how the strangers first drew suspicions.
"They asked for tea when they wanted chay," said the chief of the local secret police. "Would not eat sausage or anything that was cooked with it, and they called maize corn and asked for wheat bread when they meant corn bread. The cooks were driven to distraction by them: they liked their bread and rolls freshly-made instead of decently stale."
"Your hotels generally inform on crank guests, do they?"
"Don't West England hotels tell Wes?" asked Tepel, referring to Davies' organization, West England Security. Although the two nations shared no immediate borders, being separated from each other by, north to south, the Miami Confederacy, the Cherokee Commonwealth and the Creek Federation, West England and Imperial Mexico were the closest of allies ever since the Andean Coast War of 1953-1957. West England, the consolidation of English colonies on the east coast of North Mexico, and Imperial Mexico, heir to six centuries of greatness, needed each other to make an effective Balance of Power against the Bucharest-Honolulu Defense Coalition.
The limo slid into a steep ramp and Davies and his host left it at a door leading to a sub-basement. "Would you like to see the man's body first?" asked Tepel. Nodding his head yes, Davies was lead to a morgue. There, insulated from the freezers cold by a pane of glass, lay the body of the Euro he had seen in pictures.
The coroner was there to give details. "The deceased is a European male, approximately thirty or thirty-five years of age. Circumscised, he has extensive dental work to his rear teeth, done in a non-standard manner, with alloys atypical of North Mexican standards. Oddly, his septum has never been pierced and the mark of his smallpox vaccination scar is on his shoulder and not his stomach."
On the way to the evidence locker, Tepel gave more information: "We put an electric ear in the suite they rented so we have hours of tapes. They never searched for a listening device and they spoke a weird jargon of English between themselves. Not Scottish, something utterly strange. "
"What did they talk about?"
"That is odd too. They had copying machines and minipix machines, as you would expect spies to have, but they spent their time copying books and lifediscs. Not weird or obscure works, but best sellers and top rentals. Stuff popular now and things popular for the last fifty years."
An attendent opened up the shelves in the brightly lit evidence storage room. Davies picked up a card bearing the photo of the dead man. Dated that year, the license bore the initials ITA and stated in English that the bearer was authorized to operate a Gridney. "What is a Gridney?" asked Davies. "What is the ITA?"
Tepel raised his knee and slapped it. "We don't know."
The Imperial Mexican gestured to computer monitors and cases on another shelf. " All of those machines bear maker's marks which have never been registered anywhere on Earth. A couple parts say they were made in Mexico and the language on them is Spanish. What did Spain ever have to do with Mexico?"
After listening to a clerk say how the computer languages used in the confiscated machines were unique, Davies had seen and heard enough. "Let me listen to the tapes."
Later, relaxing on a tattooed skin chair in Tepel's wood-panelled office, Davies listened to the suspects. The accent they affected was not really an accent used at all, yet they never fell out of the affectation.
MAN: "Back where I come from, Shakespeare was the major poet and playwright of the Seventeenth Century. I wonder what became of him here?"
WOMAN: "I don't know. But Christopher Marlowe was very prolific here. He lives to 1630 and has seventy plays to his credit, none of them what he wrote elsewhen."
MAN: "Aztec influence on European music didn't do much good in my opinion. Too many drums and rattles."
WOMAN: "This is a good historical drama -- Marlowe's _Richard the Great_, part two. It starts out after Richard killed Henry Tudor by breaking through the Welshman's armored bodyguards at Bosworth Field.
"It has the story of how Richard hired Columbus to seek out the route to Asia and how Richard promptly realized that the Italian navigator had unknowlingly found a New World. It ends with Revered Speaker Water Monster signing the first trade treaty between the Aztecs and England.
"You know, Chuck, this is a weird place."
MAN: "You can say that again. Bases on the moon and multiple Martian landings and human sacrifices every morning and evening at every pyramid. Better HDTV than we have, full 3D effect, and they never put toilet paper on a roll but pull the sheets out of a box like kleenex."
WOMAN: "And that stale bread. If it hasn't dried out for two weeks, they won't touch it."
MAN: "Yeah, and they put roasted grasshoppers in their popcorn."
Both the man and the woman chorused "yick."
Davies shrugged and confessed to his host. "I can't phantom it. They don't sound like agents of the Romanians or the Chinese Oceaners."
"They did not act like it either," said the Imperial Mexican. "They were putting hundreds of books and discs into a compact, compressed format. Nothing classified, nothing with blackmail potential against anyone."
In clear three-D images (just what did the man mean by saying his home lacked modern 3D imaging?) taken by a hidden camera, the woman and man were talking to a squat, mustached man. That fellow -- if dressed in a sarong and lei -- could resemble a Chinese Oceaner.
"Listen to this," stated Tepel. "This stranger went through customs claiming to be a stock broker at the mercantile exchange of Lakefront City on the south shore of Lake Michigan."
MUSTACHE: " ....has it been for you?"
WOMAN: "Okay. Here are the dispatches for transmission to the Primary Route. I think the novels of Dawn Water are great -- despite the exotic background, she writes well about basic human truths."
MAN: "I wish we could get to Europe."
MUSTACHE: "If you were there, you wouldn't like it. The Danish Skruta are as vicious a secret police as you'll find anywhere. Between censorship and corruption, you wouldn't last a week in Scotland or England without being shaken down for everything you're carrying.
"Likewise, continental Europe is also under the thumb of tyrannical regimes that report to the Voivode of Romania.
"Believe it or not, the Aztec Empire has more civil liberties than anywhere else in this world. Even the USA analog, West England, is more repressive."
WOMAN: "More repressive? Worse than twice daily human sacrifice?"
MUSTACHE: "Just like the nose plugs every where in this world, human sacrifice has caught on. Every Easter and Christmas, at least a thousand criminals and paupers are crucified in London on the Hudson."
"What is this Aztec Empire?" asked Davies. "And what is the USA they talk about? That man's badge was licensed by the ITA, whatever that is."
"My remote ancestors came from a place called Aztlan six or seven centuries ago," said Tepel. "Maybe that is why he calls us Aztecs. But I have no idea for the USA or ITA."
"None of it makes sense," said Davies bitterly. "Romanian or Chinese Oceaner spies would blend in better. Besides, they speak of the Skruta and the Voivode as though they were their enemies. And they seem surprised by commonplace events like Christmas decorations."
Davies got back to business. "So this mustached man committed suicide when you ambushed him on the monorail back to the Miami Confederacy?"
"Yes. He fired back with a standard handgun and ignited some sort of flare in his luggage. It was all melted to slag when we got to it. Mr. Mustache bit down on a pill of highly effective cyanide concentrate so we got nothing. A raid by the Miamis turned up nothing at the man's apartment in Lakefront City."
"And the man?"
"At the same time we stopped Mr. Mustache, we raided his agents in Missouri. The man was shot, but held off our men long enough to let the woman escape. Three of my men died."
Davies felt a headache throb behind his temples. Why couldn't the Imperial Mexicans knock out their suspects with a mild nerve gas before they commenced raids? The loopholes in Imperial Mexican law would drive any cop mad! But what was done was finished.
"Possession of unlicensed micropix machines and use of false credentials are still crimes here, right?" said Davies. When Tepel nodded, Davies continued: "Good. We can hunt this woman down and find out all we want to know about this ITA and her mission here.
"I can't help but think this has something to do with the Romanian-Oceaner decision to resume testing sunbursts on their lunar reservations. It seems too co-incidential that that pair shows up in Quivera province the same day that breach of the test ban treaty is announced by Honolulu and Bucharest."