At more or less the same time - in a concrete bunker by the main gate - Dwayne and Frank were faced with a similar loss of power.  The security cameras flickered and died.  The two guards sat in silence for a minute or two until Dwayne said:

"Power out."

"Uhu.  We should've switched to the back-up generator but seems that's out too." 

"Funny."

As Dwayne and Frank scratched their heads over the power outage, a small golf buggy was trundling unsteadily from the side exit of the house nearest to the Monocratical suite down to the lakeside where a grove of aspen trees screened it from the main house.

As the buggy bumped along the track, a distant buzzing sound became suddenly louder, and a squall of wind hit the aspens and bent them sideways as a black helicopter with the lights dimmed, manoeuvred itself into position and landed on the far side of the wood at the same time as the buggy trundled into view. 

Any witnesses (though there were none) would have seen two slight figures manhandling a larger shapeless, though conceivably human, mass out of the buggy and into the helicopter.

By the time Dwayne and Frank had reestablished power in the guard bunker (apparently a member of staff had accidentally thrown the mains switch) and checked that power was on in the main house, the Monocrat was no longer in residence at the Rolling Hills Golf Resort and Spa.  He was hovering some 600 feet above the lower slopes of Mount Rushmore.

*        *        *

"I don't want to die," said the man with orange hair to the masked man who brought his supper on a tin plate.

"¿Que?"

"No quiero morir," he repeated, dredging up a remnant of the Spanish he'd picked up in school.

"But yes, you must die.  All must die," drawled the man, sleek in his black mask as a small dark stoat with glittering eyes.

"Not now, not yet."

"You will no die yet."

"You're not going to kill me?"

"Oh, yes, but no yet.  We wait a little," said the stoat weaving from side to side, "Then we cut out your heart with the flint knife."

The fat man's mind was searching for an exit from what he perceived as a dangerously encroaching reality.  "The security forces are on my trail.  They know where I am.  They'll send the whole goddam army."

"Nobody knows where you are."

And the captive couldn't argue with that.  He'd no idea where he was himself, except that it was very smelly and dark and when it rained the tin roof roared deafeningly.  He spent most of the time listening out for the sound of rotor blades.  He was convinced they would come.

*        *        *

"Now let's see.  What've we got?  He's been missing a week," said the Head of Security to his team,  "What do we know?  Do we have any leads?"

"Well, we've been questioning the director of the company who carried out the recent upgrade of the alarm system at the golf resort."

"Who was that?"

"A certain Diego Ramirez of A. Z. Tec Alarm Inc."

"And what did you get?"

"A lot of technical data.  They carried out a very thorough overhaul of the system.  We're keeping them under observation."

What was even more anomalous to the security services was how an aircraft had managed to penetrate the airspace above the golf resort and for this they had no information, nothing, nada…

*        *        *

Disheveled and sweaty after a fortnight or so without much in the way of washing facilities, and still regretting the lack of toilet paper, the man with the fake tan was woken from a deep sleep and bundled into a black and yellow transit van.  It was the middle of the night.  There were no windows in the back of the van, otherwise the occupant may have seen a sign: 'San Juan Teotihuacan, 5km'.  Instead he felt a violent lurch to the left as the van careered at speed towards the largest complex of pyramids in the world.  The gates, normally padlocked at night, were open for the passage of the transit van.  All was proceeding according to plan.

The van came to a shuddering halt and the grumbling occupant in the rear was helped out.  There was a short tussle as the ropes binding his legs were loosened but he was quickly overpowered and after a very short walk the little group had reached the base of a large pyramid.  It was the Pyramid of the Sun.

The captive twisted his body this way and that.  He  would not climb the rough-hewn steps that rose up the side of the pyramid.  Two men stepped forward, they were short and wiry but very strong.  They lifted him between them.  The captive flailed about but they pinned his arms to his sides.  Another man took control of the petulantly kicking feet.

"No," said the Monocrat.  He set up a low moan.

The ancient Aztecs honoured their sacrificial victims.  They decorated them with flowers.  They fed them with a special diet in the days before their death.  But these people did not accord this lump of flesh that honour.  They had enough trouble getting 243 pounds up the steeply-graded steps of the main pyramid.

"This is an act that violates international treaties, loads of them.  If you don't release me right now, you'll be punished.  The United Nations Court of Human Rights…"

"The US has withdrawn from the stipulations of the UN Court of Human Rights."

The two men dragged him up, a step at a time.

As they paused for breath, he saw a dragon's head carved in stone that reminded him of a creature he'd once seen in a zoo, in an aquarium, peering from behind a film of green algae.  He'd been face to face with that enigmatic creature with gold-flecked eyes that transfixed his gaze until it seemed to him that they'd swapped places and he was in the aquarium, pawing at the glass and the animal was outside, peering in at him.  That eerie tight-lipped smile and the feathery gills had mesmerized him until his father's hand had pulled him away, "Come on, Don, don't loiter there for hours."  And now he was dragged off again - no time now to swap personalities with a stone dragon.  There were other ways to face eternity.  At the top of the steps was a low stone platform.  If he'd had paid more attention to history, if he'd taken the module in Mesoamerican Archaeology instead of Economic Theory, he would have recognised it as a chacmool - a sacrificial altar.

His shirt, or what remained of it, was torn away and the top of his head was anointed with a strange concoction.  A woman made a long speech in which he detected not one word of English or Spanish.

And still he waited for the thrumming of helicopter blades, coming to rescue him from this nightmare.

Finally a figure dressed in the white uniform of a hospital surgeon appeared from behind the ring of dark-faced people who surrounded the man on the pedestal. 

"Hello, how are you?" said the surgeon in perfect English, smiling.

"Thank goodness, someone who speaks proper English," said the Monocrat feeling they were going to get on like a house on fire, "Where, may I ask, were you educated?"

"Harvard Medical School."

"Well, that's just fine.  And would you mind explaining why I'm here?"

"Yes, let me explain.  It's very simple.  We are going to remove your heart.  But you won't die.  Your body will be frozen.  The science of cryogenics has advanced far enough to allow us to preserve your body here in Mexico, until such time as medicine has progressed to allow us to revive your body, intact.  When that happens we will repeat this ceremony.  There is a lot of technical detail I have omitted but this is the main picture.  Do you have any questions?"

"This is barbarous," said the man whose body mass index made him officially obese.

"I disagree," said the surgeon, "In Aztec times your body would have been hurled from this platform down to the apetlatl at the base of the pyramid, your viscera fed to the zoo animals, your skull impaled on the zompantli.  What we are performing is precision surgery."

The man in the orange wig disagreed.  He resisted the honour of sacrifice. 

The white-coated surgeon had laid out her tools on a sterile tray.  Someone wafted a burning brand that smelled of incense but the surgeon waved them away.  She stood priest-like between the primitive urges of those who would have torn the fat body limb from limb in atavistic frenzy and the more refined beliefs of her sect who knew that to appease the gods of both scientific rationality and common justice, sacrifice was essential.

Dazed by exhaustion, confused by the flickering lights, high on the inhalation of some narcotic incense, the subject's last image before a searing pain blotted out his vision was of the dark sky in which a dragon-headed serpent trailing feathers of vapour turned upon him its obsidian gaze, terrible and indifferent.