The Aztec Heresy Read Online Free PDF

silly,’’ said Kessler. ‘‘All of it when I put the file in your hands. Hard copy, microfiche, or microfilm. Scanned onto a memory stick, if you prefer, it’s all the same to me.’’ The scanner was Kessler’s only nod to twenty-first -century technology, but it had become necessary simply for the sake of transportability.
    ‘‘You’ve got to be joking!’’ the man exclaimed. ‘‘You expect me to pay you that kind of money, sight unseen?’’
    ‘‘I expect nothing,’’ said Kessler, standing. ‘‘And I never joke. Ask your father. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’’
    ‘‘You said three hundred!’’
    ‘‘I don’t like your tone,’’ said Kessler. ‘‘Let me know what you decide.’’ He glanced at his watch. The car would be waiting outside the museum in a minute or two. He turned away from the bench and headed back down the path. A Rottweiler on a leash was squatting on the grass, having a gargantuan bowel movement; the creature’s owner, a pretty young woman in a flowered skirt and sweater, was looking on like a proud parent, a clear plastic bag wrapped inside-out around her hand. Kessler wondered if she’d noticed there wasn’t a trash bin for miles around.
    He reached the loading zone in front of the museum just as the Lincoln reappeared. He climbed into the rear of the car and gave the driver his instruction.
    ‘‘Home, please.’’
    The driver nodded and pulled smoothly away from the curb. Kessler sank back against the leather once again. He closed his eyes. A good lunch and an interesting meeting. It demonstrated one of his father’s favorite credos when it came to intelligence gathering: sometimes the questions asked were more useful than the answers. Why did Harrison Noble, the dilettante owner of Noble Ventures, a treasure-hunting company, and the son of the pharmaceutical billionaire James Jonas Noble, want detailed information on a Mexican thug and drug lord based in the wilds of the Yucatán jungle? And why now?

5
    C apitán de Navio Arkady Tomas Cruz stood at the wheel of the stinking old fish boat and smoked a cigarette. Behind him the few lights of the village he used as a navigation marker were beginning to fade on the far side of the bay. He adjusted his course a little, feeling the helm sluggishly answer to the motion of the wheel.
    The boat was the Cuban version of a classic North Carolina Core Sounder with a low, graceful sheer sweeping up to a flared bow, while the after end was almost daintily curved, offering no sharp edges to snag the nets. There was a simple cabin forward that sheltered a minimal galley, a pair of berths, and a bad-weather steering station with a hatchlike windowed box for the helmsman to look around. The boat was thirty-five feet long and carried a rusted old Guantánamo province registration plate on the bow. The name Panda was roughly painted in black on the stern. It was most definitely not Arkady Tomas Cruz’s usual command.
    Arkady Tomas was a hybrid with the dark, tanned, almost Indio looks of his Cuban father and the high cheekbones and bright blue eyes of his Russian mother. His parents had met in Russia, his father a student at the First Leningrad Medical Institute, his mother a physicist at the Admiralty Shipyards, which dated back to the times of the czars. Arkady spent his early years in Leningrad, journeying back to Cuba once a year with his father but never quite feeling as though he belonged.
    He spoke Spanish well, but not quite like a native, and somehow the coldness of the country of his birth seemed to infuse itself into his personality, making him shy and distant. He graduated from the Nachimovsky Naval School in 1984 and in 1986 from the Higher Naval School for Submariners. He spent the early part of his career on both Juliet and Foxtrot submarines, and on the death of his mother in 1992 he returned to Cuba with his father. From 1993 until their decommissioning he was in overall command of the four Foxtrot