The Aztec
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
1936. As General Franco's Nationalists march on Madrid in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, the Republican government authorises the evacuation of the country's gold reserves. 7900 crates of gold leave Cartagena for Russia - but only 7800 arrive. The hundred missing boxes, if found today, would be worth over $200 million...
2004. Jack Hadley, a British visiting professor at the University of Salamanca, his girlfriend Mercedes and the enigmatic civil servant Rosa Uribe have been arrested on drug charges in the wake of an evening's excessive partying. Hadley is facing prison, disgrace and possibly the end of his career, until the Spanish Secret Service offer him a surprising reprieve: Hadley is about to visit Cuba to interview the reclusive revolutionary Jesús Florin - better known as the 'The Aztec'. The Spanish intelligence chief believes Florin knows the location of the missing gold and coerces Hadley into his service.
Switching between Florin's past and 2004, The Aztec is a gripping international thriller full of double agents and deception, where no-one seems to be sure who's pulling the strings or why.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Vidal (The Clayton Account) plays "what if" with an actual event the transfer of Spain's gold reserves to the Soviet Union at the start of the Spanish Civil War in this thought-provoking novel of foreign intrigue. When part of that shipment, worth about $200 million in today's dollars, disappears in November 1936, only the reclusive Mexican revolutionary, Jes s Florin (aka "the Aztec"), may know the gold's whereabouts. After years of stonewalling various publishers, Jes s has finally agreed to have his biography written by Jack Hadley, a British visiting professor at the University of Salamanca. Jack is excited about the job, until the Spanish Secret Service trumps up a phony drug charge against the historian in an effort to get him to focus his research less on Jes s's political life and more on the missing gold's location. The occasionally jerky plot loses focus toward the end on a tangent involving a planned coup in Africa, but the author effectively blends history and fiction.
