Temple (4 page)

But the manuscript that Race saw now even in black- and-white
photocopied form—was like nothing he had ever seen.
It was magnificent.
He flicked through the pages.
The handwriting was superb, precise, intricate, and the side
margins were filled with drawings of gnarled snaking vines. Strange
stone structures, covered in moss and shadow, occupied the bottom
corners of each page. The overall effect was one of darkness and
foreboding, of brooding malevolence.
Race flicked back to the cover page. It read:
NAF,AT/O VERI/ PRIESTO IN RUR/$/NCAR//$: OPERIS ALBERTO LIJ/S
SANTIAGO
ANNO DO.MIN/MDLXV
Race translated. The true relation of a monk in the land of the A
manuscript by Alberto Luis Santiago. It was dated
Race turned to face Nash, 'All right. I think it's about time you
told me what this mission of yours is all about.'
Nash explained.
Brother Alberto Santiago had been a young Franciscan missionary
sent to Peru. in 1532 to work alongside the con quistadors. While
the conquistadors raped and pillaged the countryside, monks like
Santiago were expected to convert the Incan natives to the wisdom
of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
*Although it was written in 1565, well after Santiago's eventual
return to Europe,' Nash said, 'it is said that the San tiago
Manuscript recounts an incident that occurred around 1535, during
the conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors.
According to medieval monks who claimed to have read it, the
manuscript recounts a rather amazing tale: that of Hernando
Pizarro's dogged pursuit of an Incan prince who, during the height
of the siege of Cuzco, spirited the Incas' most venerated idol out
of the walled city and fled with it into the jungles of eastern
Peru.'
Nash swivelled in his seat. 'Walter,' he said, nodding to the
bespectacled, balding mart sitting on the other side of the centre
aisle, 'help me out here. I'm telling Professor Race about the
idol.”
Walter Chambers got up from his seat and sat down opposite Race.
Chambers was a mousy little man, three- quarters bald and bookish,
the kind of guy who'd wear a bow tie to work.
35
'William Race. Walter Chambers,' Nash said. 'Waiter's an
anthropologist from Stanford. Expert on Central and South American
cultures—Mayans, Aztecs, Olmecs and, espe cially, the Lncas.'
Chambers smiled. 'So you want to know about the idol?'
'It would seem so,' Race said.
'The Incas called it “the Spirit of the People”,' Chambers said.
'It was a stone idol, but one that was carved out of a strange kind
of stone, a shiny black stone that had very fine veins of purple
running through it.
'It was the Incan people's most prized possession. Indeed, they saw
it as their very heart and soul. And when I say that, I mean it
literally. They saw the Spirit of the People as more than a mere
symbol of their power. They saw it as the actual, literal, source
of that power. And indeed, there were stories about its magical
powers—how it could calm the most vicious of animals, or how, when
dipped in water, the idol would sing.'
'Sing?' Race said.
'That's right,' Chambers said, 'sing.'
'O-kay. So what does this idol look like.'
'The idol's actual appearance has been described in many places,
including the two most comprehensive works on the conquest of Peru,
J6rez's Relaci6n and de la Vega's Royal Commentaries. But
descriptions vary. Some say it was a foot hgh, others only six
inches; some say it was beautifully carved and smooth to the touch,
others say it had rough, sharp edges. One feature, however, is
common to all descriptions of the idol—the Spirit of the People was
carved in the shape of a snarling jaguar's head.'
Chambers leaned forward in his seat. 'From the moment he heard
about that idol, Hernando Pizarro wanted it. And all the more so
after the attendants at the idol's shrine at Pachacimac whisked it
away from under his nose. See, Hernando Pizarro was probably the
most ruthless of all the Pizarro brothers to come to Peru. I
imagine today we would call him a psychopath. According to some
reports, he would torture whole villages on a whim—just for the
sport
it. And his hunt for the idol became an obsession. Village
village, town after town, wherever he went he
to know the location of the idol. But no matter many natives he
tortured, no matter how many vil-
he burned, the Incas wouldn't tell him where their
idol was.
'But then—somehow—in 1535 Hernando discovered
the idol was being kept. It was being kept inside a
stone vault inside the Coricancha, the famous Tern- lle of the Sun,
situated in the centre of the besieged city of
Cuzco.
'Unfortunately for Hernando, he got to Cuzco just in time to see a
young Incan prince named Renco Capac make off with the idol in a
daring ride through the Spanish and Incan lines. According to those
medieval monks who read it, the Santiago Manuscript details
Hernando's pursuit of Renco following the young prince's escape
from Cuzco—-a daz zling chase that wound its way through the Andes
and out into the Amazon rainforest.'
'What the manuscript also allegedly does,' Nash said, 'is
reveal the final resting place of the Spirit of the People.'
So they were after the idol, Race thought.
He didn't say anything, though. Mainly, because it just didn't make
sense.
Why was the U.S. Army sending a team of nuclear physi cists down to
South America to find a lost Incan idol? And on the basis of a
four-hundred-year-old Latin manuscript.
They might as well have been following a pirate's treasure
map.
'I know what you're thinking,' Nash said. 'If someone had told me
this same story a week ago, I'd have thought about it the same way
you do. But then, up until a couple of weeks ago, nobody even knew
where the Santiago Manu script was.'
'But now you have it,' Race said.
'No,' Nash said sharply. 'We have a copy of it. Somebody else has
the original.'
'Who?“
Nash nodded at the folder in Race's lap. 'Did you see the newspaper
article in the folder I gave you before? The one about the Jesuit
monks who were killed in their monastery
in the Pyrenees?”
'Yeah…'
'Eighteen monks killed. All of them shot at close range with
high-powered weapons. At first glance, it looks like the work of
your garden variety Algerian terrorists. They've been known to
attack isolated monasteries and their favoured m.o. is to shoot
their victims at very close range.
Sure enough, the French press reported it that way.
'But'—Nash held up a finger—'what the press don't know is that
during the carnage, one monk managed to escape. An American Jesuit
on sabbatical in France. He man aged to hide upstairs in an attic
during the whole thing.
After the French police debriefed him, he was passed on to our
embassy in Paris. At the embassy, he was debriefed
again, only this time by our CIA Chief of Station.'
'And?'
Nash looked Race squarely in the eye.
'The men who stormed that monastery weren't Algerian terrorists,
Professor Race. They were commandos. Soldiers.
White soldiers. They all wore black ski masks and they were all
armed to the teeth with some pretty awesome weaponry.
And they spoke to each other in German.
'What's more interesting,' Nash continued, 'is what they were
after. Apparently, the commandos gathered all the monks together in
the abbey's dining room and made them get down on their knees. Then
they grabbed one of the monks and demanded to know the location of
the Santiago Manuscript. When the monk said he didn't know where it
was, they shot two monks—one on either side of him. Then they asked
him again. When he again said he didn't know, they killed the next
two monks. This would have gone on until they were all killed but
then someone stepped forward
and said he knew where the manuscript was.'
'Jesus…' Race said.
Nash pulled a photograph from his briefcase. 'We have
Bason to believe that the man responsible for this atrocity /;was
this man, Heinrich Anistaze, formerly a major in the
/
East German secret police, the Stasi.
Race looked at the photo. It was an eight-by-ten glossy of man
getting out of a car. The man was tall and broad- shouldered, with
short black hair that was brushed forward
and two narrow slits for eyes. They were hard eyes, cold eyes, eyes
that seemed to be set in a perpetual squint. He appeared to be in
his mid-forties.
'Notice the left hand,' Nash said.
Race looked at the photograph more closely. The man's
left hand rested atop the car door. Race saw it.
Heinrich Anistaze had no left ring finger.
'At one time during the Cold War, Anistaze was captured by members
of an East German crime syndicate that the Stasi was trying to shut
down. They made him cut off his own finger before they sent it off
in the mail to his superi ors. But then Anistaze escaped, and
returned—with the full force of the Stasi behind him. Needless to
say, organ[sed crime was never a problem in communist East Germany
after that.
'Of more importance to us, however, are his methods in other
circumstances. You see, it seems Anistaze had a pecu liar way of
making people talk: he was known for executing the people on either
side of the person who failed to give
him the information he wanted.'
There was a short silence.
'According to our most recent intelligence,' Nash said, 'since the
end of the Cold War, Anistaze has been working in a non-official
capacity as an assassin for the unified Ger man government.'
'So the Germans have the original manuscript,' Race
said. 'How did you get your copy then?'
Nash nodded sagely:
'The monks gave the Germans the original manuscript.
The actual, undecorated, handwritten manuscript written by Alberto
Santiago himself.
'What the monks didn't tell the Germans, though, was
that in 1599—thirty years after Santiago's death—-another
Franciscan monk began transcribing Santiago's handwritten
manuscript into a more elaborate, decorated text that would be fit
for the eyes of kings. Unfortunately, this second monk died before
he could complete his transcription, but what remains is a second
copy of the Santiago Manuscript, a partially-completed copy that
was also kept at the San Sebastian Abbey. It is this copy of the
manuscript that we have a Xerox of.“
Race held up his hand.
'Okay, okay,' he said. 'Wait a minute. Why all this murder and
intrigue for a lost Incan idol? What could the U.S. and German
governments possibly want with a four-hundredyear-old piece of
stone?'
Nash gave Race a grim smile.
'You see, Professor, it's not the idol that we're after,' he
said. 'It's the substance that it's made of.'
'What do you mean?'
'Professor, what I mean is this: we believe that the Spirit of the
People was carved out of a meteorite.'
'The journal article,' Race said.
'That's right,” Nash said. 'By Albert Mueller of Bonn University.
Before his rather untimely death, Mueller was studying a
one-mile-wide meteor crater in the jungles of south-eastern Peru,
at a site about fifty miles south of Cuzco.
By measuring the size of the crater and the speed of jungle growth
over it, Mueller estimated that a high-density meteorite about two
feet in diameter impacted with the earth at that site some time
between the years 1460 and 1470.'
'Which,' Walter Chambers added, 'coincides perfectly with the rise
of the Incas in South America.'
'What is more important for us,' Nash said, 'is what Mueller found
in the walls of this crater. Deposited in the walls of the crater
were trance samples of a substance known as thyrium261.'
'Thyrium-261?' Race said.
'It's a rare isotope of the common element thyrium,'
Nash said, 'and it is not found on Earth. In fact, thyrium has only
been found here in petrified form, presumably as a result of
previous asteroid impacts in the distant past. It is indigenous to
the Pleiades system, a binary star system not far from our own. But
since it comes from a binary star system, thyrium is of a far
greater density than even the heaviest of terrestrial
elements.'
Things were beginning to make a little more sense to Race now.
Especially the part about the Army sending a team of physicists
down to the jungle.
'And what exactly can you do with thyrium?' Race asked.
“Colonel!' a voice called suddenly.
Nash and Race turned in their seats to see Troy Copeland, one of
the other scientists, come striding quickly down the centre aisle
from the cockpit. Copeland was a tall man, lean, with a thin,
hawk-like face and intense, narrow eyes. He was one of the DARPA
people—a nuclear physicist, Race recalled—and he appeared to Race
to be a completely humourless individual.
'Colonel, we have a problem,' he said.
'What is it?' Nash said.
'We just caught a priority alert from Fairfax Drive,'
Copeland said.
Race had heard of 'Fairfax Drive' before. It was short hand for
3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, Virginia.
DARPA headquarters.
'About?' Nash said.
Copeland took a deep breath. 'There was a break-in there early this
morning. Seventeen security staff dead. The entire night crew
killed.' .
Nash's face went ashen white. 'They didn't—'
Copeland nodded seriously. 'They stole the Supernova.'
Nash stared off into space for a second.
'It was the only thing they took,' Copeland said. 'They knew
exactly where it was. They knew the codes to the vault room and had
cardkeys for the clamp-down locks. We must assume that they also
know the codes to the titanium
airlock on the device itself, and maybe how to detonate it.'
“Any idea who it was?'
'NCIS are there now. Early indications are that it might be
the work of a paramilitary group like the Freedom Fighters.'
'Shit,' Nash said. “Shit! They must know about the idol.'
'It's likely.'
'Then we have to get there first.'
'Agreed,' Copeland said.
Race was just watching this conversation like a spectator at a
tennis match. So, there had been a break-in at DARPA
but what exactly had been stolen was a rays-
to him. Something called a Supernova. And who were these Freedom
Fighters?
Nash stood up. 'What's our lead?' he asked.
'Maybe three hours, if that,' Copeland said.
'Then we have to move fast.' Nash turned to Race. 'Pro fessor Race,
I'm sorry, but the stakes in this game have just been raised. We
don't have any more time to waste. It is now imperative that we
have that manuscript translated by the .time we fly into Cuzco,
because when we hit the ground, believe me, we are gonna hit it
running.'