Empire of Gold

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 f*ck 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 f*cking 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.