17
The building nicknamed the Clubhouse was a mansion in
the Caracan hilltop district of Valle Arriba, overlooking the
perfectly kept greenery of a private golf course, and beyond it the
great sprawl of the city itself. Even with the Venezuelan
government’s increasingly militant push towards the redistribution
of wealth, the enclave was reserved for money and privilege. No
barrios here; even the smallest house
was worth several million US dollars.
Nina very much
doubted that she or Kit would enjoy the luxury,
though.
Callas’s helicopter
had flown north to the airbase at Puerto Ayacucho, where the group
transferred to a military transport plane to travel on to Caracas.
A convoy, two SUVs escorted by police outriders, completed the
journey to the Clubhouse. Callas and Stikes were in the lead
vehicle, Kit and Nina under heavy guard in the second. Nina looked
out through the darkened glass as the vehicles turned on to the
driveway. Two soldiers stood guard at the main gate, and she saw
several others inside the grounds. Off to one side of the mansion
she glimpsed a swimming pool and a private helipad. Not exactly a
typical military facility.
The SUVs stopped at
the front door. Nina and Kit were hustled out and taken down to the
building’s cellars. One underground room had been converted into a
makeshift prison, metal bars dividing it into three small cells.
Nina was pushed into one, Kit another, an empty chamber separating
them. A soldier locked the cell doors, then took up position on a
chair to watch his prisoners.
After half an hour,
footsteps echoed down the passage outside. The jailer looked round
as the door opened, standing and saluting when Callas entered,
accompanied by two more soldiers. Stikes followed them in, carrying
the case containing the statuettes. ‘Dr Wilde,’ said Callas. ‘Mr
Jindal. I hope you are both comfortable?’
‘I’m guessing this is
as comfortable as we’re going to get,’ Nina replied.
‘That is up to you.
And also to Mr Stikes. If you tell him what we want to know, your
discomfort may be kept to a low level.’
‘And if I
don’t?’
‘You can work it
out,’ said Stikes. ‘You’re an intelligent woman. Although your
marrying Chase does make me question that. And speaking of
questioning. . . ’ He opened the case to reveal the three figurines
within, two whole and one bisected, and the bag containing the
khipu. ‘El Dorado. You’re going to lead us there.’
‘I don’t know
how.’
‘Yes you do. You
found . . . what did Chase call it? Paititi.’
‘That was the result
of years of archaeological research by Dr Osterhagen and an aerial
survey,’ she lied.
‘Then why did you
bring these?’ He tapped the two complete statuettes. ‘How did you
know the third one would be there?’
‘Because . . . ’ Her
hesitation, her inability to fabricate a convincing excuse in the
split second available, told Stikes all too clearly that she was
concealing something.
The mercenary gave
her an unpleasant smile, then addressed Callas. ‘Is the room
ready?’
Callas nodded. ‘My
men will show you.’
‘And the item I asked
for?’
‘Waiting for you. It
was not easy to find at short notice, but my people have their
resources.’
‘Good.’ Stikes nodded
to the jailer. ‘Bring her out.’
‘What are you going
to do with her?’ Kit demanded, rattling his cell’s
bars.
‘The same thing I’m
going to do to you later,’ Stikes replied, chillingly
matter-of-fact.
‘Then take me first.
I’m an Interpol officer, and Dr Wilde is my
responsibility.’
A sound of sarcastic
amusement from the general. ‘He is quite a hero.’
‘Is he, though?’
Stikes eyed Kit curiously. ‘But that’s what I intend to find out.
In the meantime . . . ’ He stepped back as the jailer unlocked
Nina’s cell and the soldiers moved to bring her out. ‘A little chat
with Dr Wilde.’
‘Get your goddamn
hands off me,’ Nina snarled, jerking out of one soldier’s grip. The
other man backed her into a corner, and they both grabbed her. She
kicked at them. ‘Fuck you!’
‘Rather unladylike
language,’ said Stikes. ‘Chase really is a bad influence.’ He
closed the case. ‘General, if you’ll excuse me?’
Callas smirked.
‘Enjoy yourself.’
‘Oh, I will.’ He
signalled for the soldiers to take Nina, and followed them from the
cells.
‘Nina!’ shouted Kit,
but he was cut off as the heavy door slammed shut.
Nina was dragged down
a white-painted passage to another small room. It had apparently
once been used for storage, but the shelves were now empty – except
for two small boxes and a single glove of thick black leather. One
box was tightly secured by an elastic band, several little holes
poked in its side. A rust-scabbed metal chair sat beneath the
glaring overhead light.
Lengths of rope were
coiled on its seat.
Nina fought to break
loose, but the soldiers forced her on to the chair and held her as
Stikes tied her wrists securely to its armrests, then her ankles to
the front legs. He finished by looping the last length of rope
tightly round her chest. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ he
asked.
‘Go fuck
yourself!’
Stikes was unfazed.
‘Then we’ll begin.’ He told the soldiers to leave, then closed the
door and opened the case again, revealing its ancient contents. ‘El
Dorado,’ he said. ‘I always thought it was just a
myth.’
‘It is a myth.’
‘The paintings in
that temple suggest otherwise. This Paititi may have been the last
outpost of the Incas, but there was a much greater settlement along
the way. El Dorado.’ He went to the shelves and picked up the
ominous glove. The leather creaked softly.
‘Whatever it’s
called, it’s not El Dorado,’ Nina insisted, trying to draw out the
purely verbal part of his interrogation for as long as possible.
The punctures in the box could only be air holes; there was
something alive inside it . . . and the protective glove suggested
it was deeply unpleasant. ‘That’s a completely different legend.
The Conquistadors got it mixed up with the story of the Incas
hiding their . . . gold . . . ’ She tailed off as Stikes pulled on
the glove, clenching his fingers into a fist.
‘Semantics,’ he said.
‘The name may be wrong, but the story, it seems, is true. Somewhere
in Peru is an unimaginable fortune. I did a little Googling
upstairs just now. The ransom room, which the Inca emperor said he
would fill with gold if the Spanish set him free, was seven metres
by five and a half. Thirty-eight and a half square metres. Assuming
it was two metres high, that would be—’
‘Seventy-seven cubic
metres.’
Stikes seemed almost
impressed. ‘Correct. Seventy-seven cubic metres . . . of gold. Do
you know how much that would be worth?’
‘Y’know, I forgot to
check today’s price with my broker.’
He was less
appreciative of her sarcasm. ‘One cubic metre of gold weighs
nineteen point three metric tons. And I’m sure you can use your
apparent skills at mental arithmetic to work out how many tons
would fill the ransom room.’
Despite herself, Nina
couldn’t resist the urge to work it out. ‘One thousand four hundred
and eighty-six tons. Point one.’
‘Point one,’ Stikes
repeated with a sardonic smile. ‘Almost one and a half billion
grams of gold – using the American billion, that is. The proper
imperial billion seems to have fallen by the wayside. But at
today’s price per gram, that’s worth over fifty billion dollars. As you can imagine, General
Callas and I are rather keen to find it.’
‘Flooding that amount
of gold on to the market would drop the price to almost nothing,’
Nina pointed out, still trying to prolong the discussion. She could
hear movement inside the box, sinister little ticks and rustles.
‘And Atahualpa told Pizarro he’d fill the room with treasure, not actual solid gold. However tightly
everything was stacked up, there would still be a lot of empty
space.’
‘Frankly, even if it
were four-fifths air, it would still be plenty. But the point is,
he didn’t fill the room, did he? Instead, he told his people to
hide it all somewhere the Spanish would never find it. And they
never did. And nor did anyone else.’ His gaze moved to the statues.
‘Until now.’
‘I’m telling you, I
don’t know how to find it.’
‘Maybe you don’t know
. . . yet.’ Stikes slipped the elastic band off the box. ‘But as I
said, you’re an intelligent woman. And your past record speaks for
itself. I’m sure that if you turn your mind to finding El Dorado,
you will.’
‘Not gonna
happen.’
‘Oh, I disagree.’ He
lifted the lid. ‘Even if it takes a little, shall we say,
encouragement?’ He lowered his gloved thumb and forefinger into the
box to grab its contents.
That it took a couple
of attempts suggested the contents did not want to be
grabbed.
‘Ah, shall we
not say? We could . . . ’ Nina dried up
in instinctive toe-curling fear as Stikes lifted the box’s occupant
into view.
A
scorpion.
Dark green with
mottled golden spots and bands across its carapace, it writhed
angrily in Stikes’s grip, jabbing its poisonous sting ineffectually
at his thick glove. ‘This is a Gormar scorpion, a native of
Venezuela,’ Stikes announced, as if presenting it for Show and
Tell. ‘There’s some dispute over whether it’s the deadliest
scorpion in the world, or only the second. Either way, its sting
will kill a healthy adult in ten minutes.’ He moved closer, holding
the thrashing arachnid up to Nina’s face. She cringed back in
rising terror. ‘Once stung, the only hope of survival is to get an
injection of antivenom. Fortunately,’ he glanced at the second box,
‘I have a syringe there.’
‘Th-that’s good,’
Nina gasped, heart racing. The scorpion was mere inches from her
eyes, bulbous claws snapping at her. ‘’Cause accidents can
happen.’
‘Oh, this won’t be an
accident.’ Stikes moved the scorpion away from her face . .
.
To her bound
arm.
The hideous little
beast lashed out with its tail, the poisonous barb stabbing into
the back of her wrist. Nina instinctively yelped, as if stung by a
bee – before screaming for real as the full horror of the situation
struck her. The jab’s initial pain was fading, but already another
was replacing it, a burning spreading up her arm. ‘Oh God! Jesus
Christ!’
Stikes returned the
scorpion to the box, then opened the second container and took out
a syringe containing a colourless liquid. ‘Now, we’re going to
discuss El Dorado. If you give me good answers, I’ll give you the
antivenom.’
Nina struggled
uselessly against the ropes. The spot where she had been stung had
already swollen. The burning sensation pervaded her body, her
racing heart spreading the venom faster through her bloodstream.
Another kind of pain, an intense cramp, grew in her shoulder
muscles. ‘I don’t know where El Dorado is!’ she cried.
‘Osterhagen’s the Inca expert, not me!’
‘You can do better
than that. Now, you saw the paintings on the wall. You must have
deduced what they meant. I mean, even I did, and I’m not an
archaeologist.’ He held up the syringe tantalisingly. ‘Tell me what
you saw.’
The cramp reached her
throat, feeling as though an invisible hand was slowly tightening
around her neck. ‘An – an account of their journey,’ she said.
‘Showing how they fled Cuzco to escape the Spanish. Along the
Andes, then out into the Amazon basin. A map.’
‘A map, yes. With a
very important stop along the way. El Dorado.’
‘Yes,’ she croaked.
‘But they thought the – the Spanish would find it, so they moved
on.’
Stikes nodded. ‘So we
have a start point, Cuzco; an end point, Paititi; and a map, of
sorts. That should make it possible to find El Dorado. How do we
decode the map?’
‘I don’t
know.’
He held up the
syringe, pushing the plunger slightly with his thumb. Droplets
formed at the end of the needle. ‘Try again.’
‘I don’t know, I
don’t know! We never worked that out,
we didn’t have time!’
‘And you don’t have
much time now. So think fast. There were markings on the map,
between the pictures. What do they say? Are they
directions?’
She gasped as the
pain spread, struggling to remember what she had seen. ‘I don’t
know! The Incas never developed writing - if they’re directions, I
don’t know what they mean! Nobody’d ever seen anything like that
before, not even Osterhagen!’
Stikes regarded her
unblinkingly for a long moment . . . then, with a look of grudging
acceptance, turned away. ‘All right. You don’t know how to decode
the map. Let’s try something else. How did you really find Paititi?
And don’t tell me it was the result of years of patient research.’
He picked up one of the stone figurines. ‘It’s something to do with
these, isn’t it?’
Nina was losing
feeling in her hands and feet as the scorpion toxin paralysed her.
But despite the growing numbness in her extremities, the pain
within her was getting worse. The hand was tight at her throat,
squeezing harder. ‘They led me here,’ she choked out, struggling to
breathe. Any thoughts of resistance had vanished, survival instinct
forcing them aside.
‘Led you?
How?’
‘Earth energy, it’s
called earth energy. Don’t know how it works, but – statues glow
under certain conditions. Point towards each other. IHA had—’ She
broke off, convulsing as a searing cramp rolled through her body.
‘Oh God! Please, please!’ She looked desperately at the
syringe.
‘The IHA had what?’
Stikes demanded. ‘Tell me!’
‘Two statues, IHA had
two statues. I put them together, they pointed to Venezuela.
Interpol thought – link to Inca artefacts Callas was selling out of
Valverde.’ She started to hyperventilate, forcing air through her
constricted windpipe. ‘I don’t know anything else. Please . . .
’
Stikes regarded the
statuette thoughtfully. ‘This “earth energy” effect – can anyone
make it work?’
Nina’s eyes stung,
tears blurring her vision. ‘No, only me – something about my body’s
bioelectric field. Don’t know why, it just does . . . ’ She panted,
each breath a terrible effort. ‘Please, told you everything I know
. . . ’
Stikes remained
still, gazing at the stone figure . . . then put it down. He pulled
up Nina’s sleeve, searched for a vein, then jabbed the needle into
her. She barely registered the injection through the burning pain –
but after a few seconds, the pressure at her throat eased. With a
shuddering gasp, she drew in a long, unrestrained lungful of
air.
He withdrew the
needle. The syringe was still half full. ‘So, the first two statues
led you to Paititi, where you found half of the third . . . and the
other half, according to the painting, is somewhere in El Dorado.’
He returned the syringe to its box. ‘Which means you can use these
statues to point the way there. Very handy.’
‘Not gonna . . . help
you,’ Nina croaked, head lolling.
‘We both know that
you will. But,’ he said, going to the case, ‘I have work to do
first. No point making retirement plans until I have the money to
pay for them.’
Nina blinked away the
tears, focus returning as Stikes returned the statuette to its foam
bed. He put the bag containing the khipu on top of the three
figures and closed the case.
The khipu . . .
Osterhagen had said
the collections of knotted strings were valuable; not so much for
their intrinsic worth as their rarity. But what had Cuff called
them? Talking knots. A unique form of
record-keeping. The Incas had no written language, but they did
have numbers.
Numbers.
Distances.
Directions. Any journey could be reduced to a series of numbers, as
long as you knew the system—
A new tightness
pulled at her chest, but this time not because of the poison. It
was an adrenalin surge, sudden excitement as she realised what the
knots were silently telling her. Not a series of numbers. A string. In this case, a literal one. The khipu was
somehow the key to understanding the map, its markings connected to
the dozens of cords.
Stikes had her, and
the statuettes, but he didn’t have a source of earth energy. The
effect at Paititi had been so feeble it had only provided the
vaguest indication of the final statue piece’s
location.
But with the khipu
and the painted account of the Incas’ last journey, she wouldn’t
need the statues. She would have a map.
She stayed silent,
trying not to let the unexpected elation of discovery show on her
face. Stikes still had the scorpion, still had another dose of
antivenom he could use to take her to the agonising edge of death
if he thought she was concealing information. He looked down at
her, cold blue eyes piercing her soul. Had he realised that she had
worked out more?
No. He turned away
and opened the door, summoning the two soldiers back in. They
untied her and hauled her back through the cellars.
‘Nina,’ said Kit as
she was dumped, rubber-legged, in her cell. ‘Are you
okay?’
‘Super fine,’ she
moaned. The antivenom may have worked, but she still felt numb and
nauseous, the sting on her arm an angry red lump.
‘What did they do to
you?’
‘Your turn to find
out,’ said Stikes. The soldiers opened his cell. No attempts to
grapple the prisoner here; one of the men simply drove a punch into
Kit’s stomach, doubling him over.
‘You bastards,’ said
Nina, but she was too weak even to raise a hand in protest as Kit
was dragged from the cage. ‘He’s not an archaeologist, he can’t
tell you anything about El Dorado.’
Stikes held up a
hand. The soldiers stopped. ‘Maybe not,’ said the Englishman, ‘but
there’s something else he can tell me.’ He leaned closer to the
Interpol agent, examining him with unblinking intensity. ‘Why are
you here, Mr Jindal?’
‘Smuggling . . .
case,’ Kit groaned.
‘No, why are you
really here?’ A silent moment as the
two men locked eyes. Then Stikes clicked his fingers. ‘You’ll tell
me very soon,’ he said as the soldiers hustled Kit
away.
‘What do you mean,
why is he really here?’ Nina demanded. But Stikes simply gave her a
disdainful look before slamming the door behind him.