11
‘My God!’ Nina gasped, Osterhagen echoing her words in
German. Everyone stared in amazement. The chamber was roofless
where the wood had long since decayed, but an overhanging tree
blotted out most of the light. At the east end was a single window
. . . facing the wonder opposite.
Mounted on the west
wall was a metal disc, a stylised face surrounded by elaborate
patterns of spirals and interlocking lines. It was some four feet
in diameter, at its deepest four inches thick . . . and even
covered with the dirt of ages, it was instantly obvious that it was
made from solid gold.
‘The Punchaco!’
exclaimed Becker.
Even through his awe,
Osterhagen shook his head. ‘No, it is too small, and there are no
jewels. It must be a copy.’
‘What’s a punchaco?’
Macy asked.
‘A sun disc,’ Nina
replied. ‘One of the greatest Inca treasures.’
‘The greatest,’ Osterhagen corrected her. ‘It
represented the sun god Inti, and was in the Temple of the Sun at
Cuzco. As well as being made of pure gold, it was decorated with
thousands of precious stones. But when the Spanish arrived, even
though they looted the temple of a huge amount of gold, the
Punchaco was gone.’
Eddie moved further
into the room. Before the golden face was a large stone slab, which
he guessed was an altar – and behind it was proof that someone else
knew of the sun disc’s existence. ‘The Spanish weren’t the only
ones who wanted to get their hands on this thing,’ he said, holding
up a length of heavy-duty chain.
Nina rounded the
altar to see a trolley made of thick steel with six fat little
tyres, as well as a pile of equally beefy metal struts, several of
which had been fastened together to form the basis of a truss. She
also recognised the pulleys of a block and tackle. ‘Looks like they
were going to lift the disc off the wall and stand it on this
cart.’ She went to the window. At one time it would have allowed
the light of dawn to shine on the Punchaco. Though the view was now
blocked by trees, she could still make out the main gate to the
east – and closer, the oddly proportioned crate.
Its purpose was no
longer a mystery. It was the right size to accommodate the sun
disc.
‘It’s a good thing we
did come in here,’ she said, with a
faintly accusing look at her husband. ‘They were about to steal the
sun disc. And they were probably saving it until last – it’s not
something they could carry off in their pocket like the artefacts
Interpol recovered. That much gold must weigh tons.’
Kit examined the sun
disc. ‘It’s about one metre twenty across, and . . . ten
centimetres deep. So it would weigh . . . ’
‘The volume of a
cylinder is pi r squared h,’ Cuff
mumbled through the handkerchief he was holding to his mouth. ‘So
that’s . . . ’
‘One hundred and
thirteen thousand, one hundred and forty-two cubic centimetres,’
Nina announced, performing the calculations in her head, to the
surprise of Valero and Osterhagen’s team. ‘Or zero point one one
three cubic metres, more or less. And I think gold is something
like nineteen times denser than water, which weighs a metric ton
per cubic metre, so . . . ’ Another moment of thought. ‘We’re
talking over two tons of gold. The weight of an SUV.’
‘No wonder they left
it till last,’ said Eddie. ‘Be a bugger to get out of
here.’
‘But if this is only
a copy,’ said Macy, ‘where’s the real thing?’
‘Still hidden,
somewhere,’ suggested Loretta.
Nina looked towards
the entrance. ‘Somewhere here, maybe?’
Osterhagen had the
same idea. ‘The palace! We have to search it.’
‘Two minutes,’ warned
Eddie. ‘The longer we’re here, the more chance we have of getting
caught.’
‘I know, I know,’
Nina snapped, bustling the others to the door.
They hurried out and
ascended another set of steps to the building on the highest tier
of the jungle city. It too was open to the elements, and in a state
of partial collapse where windborne seeds had taken root and grown
into infinitely patient, subtly destructive trees, but more than
enough of the structure remained to reveal its stark majesty. Every
block had been carved with painstaking precision to fit exactly
amongst its neighbours without needing mortar to secure it, and in
contrast to the plain architecture elsewhere in Paititi the palace
was decorated, geometric patterns carved into the stonework and
sculpted heads jutting from sections of wall.
‘Split up,’ Nina
ordered. Much as it pained her, she ignored the ancient adornments
to search the various rooms for any unlooted treasures. Though
there were a few remaining artefacts that would be valuable from a
cultural perspective, nothing stood out as being so financially.
The raiders had been thorough. ‘Find anything?’ she
called.
‘It’d help if I knew
what I was looking for,’ Eddie complained from a neighbouring
room.
‘Anything obviously
valuable – gold, silver, jewels. If it shows up on the black
market, we can tie it back to here and give Interpol some legal
ammunition.’
‘If we just take it
with us, we can stop them getting hold of it,’ Macy piped
up.
Nina was about to
give her a refresher course on professional ethics when Eddie
called out again. ‘Nina! In here.’
She knew from his
tone that it was important. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s not gold or
silver or jewels,’ he said as she entered the small chamber, ‘but
I’m pretty sure you’ll think it’s valuable.’
Unlike the palace’s
other rooms, one end of this had a roof of sorts where an alcove
was set into the wall. The space was around six feet deep, slightly
wider. Set into its rear was a foot-high arched recess. Something
stood inside it.
She took out a
flashlight. Its beam revealed that the alcove’s walls were painted;
though in places split by cracks and scabbed by mould, most of the
images were still discernible.
But it wasn’t the
paintings that had seized her attention. Even before she brought
the light on to it, she recognised the shape in the recess. And
when she did, she also recognised the colour.
A strange purple
stone.
‘It’s the third
statue . . . ’ she whispered. Like the other two figurines cocooned
in their case in her backpack, it was a crude but recognisably
anthropomorphic sculpture, arms held out in such a way as to
interlock with its near-twins when they were placed
together.
Except . . . there
was only one arm.
‘What—’ she gasped.
There was less to the statue than met
the eye. It stood sideways in the niche, its right side to her –
but there was no left side. It had been sliced in half down its
centre line. ‘No!’
‘Yeah, I thought you
might not be happy about that,’ said Eddie as she plucked it from
the recess and turned it over in her hands. ‘Why do you think they
chopped it in two?’
‘No idea,’ she said,
disappointment welling. For all the archaeological wonders of the
lost settlement, the statuette had been her primary reason for
coming here – but she now had no more clues to lead her to the rest
of it.
Unless . .
.
She switched off the
flashlight. ‘Hold this for a minute,’ she told Eddie, passing the
figurine to him. As the other expedition members filtered into the
room, she took the other two statues from their case. No eerie
light, but there was a mildly unsettling sensation through her
palms, like the tingling of a very low current.
‘What are you doing?’
Osterhagen asked.
‘Seeing if maybe this
isn’t the end of the line for the Incas.’ Nina slid the statues
together shoulder to shoulder . . .
The others made
sounds of surprise as the linked figures glowed, very faintly but
just enough to stand out in the shadows. ‘Give me the other one,’
she said to Eddie. He slipped it between the pair. She used her
thumbs to nudge it into position, the lone arm in place round its
neighbour – and the glow subtly changed, strongest on one
particular side of the triptych. ‘Eddie, you’ve got a compass,
haven’t you?’
‘Yeah, of
course.’
She turned the
statues, the brighter glow remaining fixed as they moved. ‘What
direction is it pointing?’
‘Why are they doing
that?’ asked Valero, entranced.
‘They react to the
earth’s magnetic field,’ said Nina, simplifying for convenience.
‘And they also point towards each other. That’s part of what led us
here.’
Eddie, meanwhile, had
checked his compass. ‘Southwest,’ he reported.
‘Huh. That’s why we
didn’t realise it had been split into two parts – they’re both on
the same bearing from Glastonbury, so we only saw one
glow.’
‘Why isn’t it as
bright as at Glastonbury?’ Macy asked.
‘The earth energy
mustn’t be as strong here. Or maybe it was once, but the confluence
point moved.’
‘Earth energy?’
demanded Osterhagen. ‘What confluence point? What is going
on?’
‘It’s why the IHA’s
involved, I’m afraid. But it means the other piece of the statue is
somewhere southwest of here.’
‘Have to look for it
later,’ said Eddie. ‘Time’s up, and we need to get the fuck out of
here.’
‘Another minute,
please,’ said Osterhagen, turning his attention to the alcove’s
walls. He switched on a torch of his own, sweeping it across the
murals. Becker and Macy followed suit, while Loretta brought out a
camera and began taking photos. ‘These paintings . . . I think they
are the story of how the Incas came to this place. Look.’ He
indicated one section on the left-hand wall: a large building.
‘That is the Intiwasa at Cuzco, the Sun Temple – the Spanish
destroyed the upper levels to build the church of Santa Domingo on
it, but the base is exactly the same.’
Nina carefully put
down the statues, then retrieved her light and examined the mural.
Though simplistic, almost cartoony in the way everything was broken
down into blocks of solid colour, there was clearly a story being
told. ‘These figures outside the temple, the ones in different
clothes – are they the Spaniards?’
Osterhagen nodded.
‘Pizarro’s messengers. Giving Atahualpa’s orders for his people to
gather their gold and silver.’
‘And hide it from the
Spanish . . .’ Nina moved her light across the walls. Opposite the
representation of Cuzco was one of what she assumed was Paititi, a
walled town surrounded by trees, above which was an image of the
sun disc in the nearby temple – as well as a small shape that was
almost certainly meant to be the half of the third
statue.
Murals of other
locations were spread out between the start and the end of the Inca
exodus. A painted path connected them, marked along its meandering
length with symbols: vertical lines broken up by dots. ‘These
symbols,’ she said. ‘An account of the route they followed,
maybe?’
‘I thought the Incas
never developed writing?’ said Macy.
‘They didn’t,’ said
Osterhagen. ‘Most of their history was oral. They had ways of
storing numerical records such as censuses and taxes,
though.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Tax records
were of not the slightest interest to the young woman. She examined
another part of the wall.
Nina was still
concentrating on the markings. ‘I’ve seen this kind of thing
before. My guess is that these give you distances and directions to
follow. It’s a record of their journey to Paititi.’
‘And other places,’
said Macy with growing excitement, illuminating another painted
scene above the recess. ‘Look at this!’
Even Eddie was
impressed enough to delay yelling another, more forceful reminder
of the time. ‘Thought you said El Dorado was just a
myth?’
Mountain peaks rose
above a city, buildings stacked seemingly on top of each other as
they rose to a palace at their summit – above which was another sun
disc, but more elaborate than the one above the painting of
Paititi, and even its real-life counterpart in the Temple of the
Sun. Both city and god-image were coloured in yellow . . . or gold.
‘Is that the Punchaco?’ Nina asked. ‘The real one?’
Osterhagen’s nose
almost rubbed the faded paint. ‘Yes! Yes, it must be! Look at all
the jewels – look how big it is!’ Even taking the Incas’ primitive
understanding of perspective into account, it was clear the ornate
disc was meant to be larger than the figures kneeling below it. ‘It
must have been huge!’
Nina gently blew away
dirt and cobwebs to reveal more detail. Running down one side of
the city were streaks of pale blue that ended in a stippled cloud,
which in turn led into a winding blue line that could only be a
representation of a river. ‘A waterfall?’
‘It could be, yes . .
. ’ The German gazed open-mouthed at the scene. ‘Oh! And look at
these jaguars. They must be symbols of the gods, protecting the
city from invaders.’ He pointed out a little vignette between the
lowest tier of buildings and the river. At one side, a pair of
elegantly stylised cats, yellow bodies mottled with black spots,
sat and watched with aloof disdain as two figures were swept away
by another waterfall; to their right, a crouching jaguar observed a
man climbing a steep set of steps.
Nina was no longer
looking at the painting, however. With more light on it, the niche
was revealed to be not as empty as she had thought. There was
something beneath the accumulated dirt behind where the figurine
had stood. She brushed it experimentally with a fingertip, finding
a braided cord beneath and slowly lifting it. More muck fell away
as other lengths of coloured string were revealed, small knots
woven into them.
Loretta took a
picture. ‘It’s a khipu!’ she gasped.
‘Be careful,’
Osterhagen urged Nina. ‘They are very rare, only a few hundred in
the world. The Spanish destroyed any they found.’ She carefully
lowered the cords back into their resting place.
‘What’s a khipu?’
Macy asked.
Even through broken
teeth, Cuff’s condescension was clear. ‘Khipus are how the Incas
kept their records – the word actually means “talking knots”. They
had a very advanced mathematical system using different kinds of
knots in strings to store numbers. I thought everybody knew that,
but apparently not.’ He laughed a
little at his own pun.
Macy gave him a
scathing look. ‘Bite me. Oh wait, you can’t.’
But Nina was now
fixated on something else. In the heart of the palace atop the
painted city was a small oval space . . . and in it was a mirror
image of something she had already seen. ‘The third statue – that’s
its other half,’ she said. ‘It’s in this city – wherever that
is.’
‘Southwest of here?’
Osterhagen mused. ‘In mountains – that would be the Andes in
northern Peru. The eastern mountains and the edges of the Amazon
basin in that region were among the last conquests of the Incas
before the Spanish invasion, the farthest reaches of the empire. A
good hiding place.’
‘Not good enough,’
said Nina. ‘They must have thought the Conquistadors were going to
find it, so they moved again, all the way through the jungle to
here. Somewhere they could finally be sure it was
safe.’
‘Until now,’ Eddie
cut in impatiently. ‘If we don’t get moving right now, half the
Venezuelan army is going to roll up and catch us.’
Osterhagen began to
protest. ‘But we have to—’
‘No, we’re going. No
more arguments.’ He unshouldered his AK-103 for emphasis. ‘Nina,
I’ll give you a hand packing up those statues. Kit, Oscar, get
everyone else back to the Jeeps – we’ll catch up.’
Kit had also readied
his rifle. ‘Don’t take too long,’ he said, ushering the others
out.
‘We won’t, don’t
worry.’ Eddie crouched beside Nina to help return the statues to
their case.
‘Another five minutes
wouldn’t have killed us,’ she objected.
‘Those two arseholes
tied up outside would have if they’d had the chance,’ he countered.
‘I don’t think their mates’ll be any different. Especially not with
millions of dollars at stake.’
‘Oscar said we’ll be
miles away before they get here.’
‘Yeah, and Oscar said
he was going to order those soldiers to surrender, and look how
that turned out.’ The two IHA statues were back in their foam beds.
‘What about the one you just found?’
Nina hesitated, aware
of the hypocrisy of what she was about to say; she had been on the
verge of castigating Macy for the same thing not ten minutes
earlier. But she justified it – at least, to herself – as a case
when the IHA’s global security mandate trumped normal
considerations. ‘We take it,’ she said, taking out a penknife and
cutting away part of the foam to make a space for the third piece.
‘I don’t know what it’s going to lead to, but I think it’s
important.’ A glance back at the recess. ‘And that khipu might be
too – it was with the statue, so there could be a connection. I
don’t want to risk these soldiers getting it.’
‘If they wanted it,
they’d have swiped it already,’ Eddie pointed out.
‘But they don’t know
what we know about the statues.’ She swept the dirt from the niche,
exposing the rest of the khipu. It was longer than she had first
thought, folded over itself several times. ‘There should be some
Ziploc bags in my backpack. Can you get one for me?’
He did so, and she
gently slipped the khipu into the plastic bag, squeezing out the
air before sealing it shut. ‘Okay,’ she said, placing the bag in
the case and closing it, then putting the case in her pack, ‘I’m
ready.’
‘About time. Come
on.’
They hurried back
into the open, passing the temple and descending the steps into the
plaza. The soldiers were still tied to the tree, the other
expedition members heading for the main gate.
Not as quickly as
Eddie wanted. ‘What is this, a fucking afternoon stroll?’ he
growled. ‘Oi! You lot! Shift your arses!’
His shout spurred
them on, but not by much; Nina and Eddie caught up while they were
still short of the gate. ‘Some of us are injured, you know,’ Cuff
whined.
‘You don’t run on
your lips, do you?’ said Eddie, devoid of sympathy. ‘Oscar, how’re
you managing?’
The Venezuelan’s face
was tight with ill-concealed pain; unlike the American, he had
suffered blows that were affecting his movement, his torso badly
bruised by the soldiers’ kicks. ‘I’m okay,’ he grunted. ‘When we—’
He broke off, looking round at a noise.
Eddie heard it too –
or more accurately felt it, a subsonic
thumping inside his chest cavity.
He instantly knew
what it was. ‘Shit! It’s a chopper!’
The pounding grew
louder, rising to a clattering whump of rotors as a helicopter
swept overhead. Eddie glimpsed it through the jungle canopy: a
Russian-built Mil Mi-17.
With the yellow, blue
and red stripes of the Venezuelan flag standing out from the muted
green camouflage paint on its tail boom. A military
aircraft.
The soldiers’ backup
had arrived.