“But now you have it,” Race said.
“No,” Nash said sharply. “We have a copy of it. Some-body 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 favored 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 managed to hide upstairs in an attic during the whole thing. After the French police debriefed him, he was passed onto 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 reason 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 a 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 superiors. But then Anistaze escaped, and returned—with the full force of the Stasi behind him. Needless to say, organized 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 peculiar 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 German 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-hundred-year-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 southeastern 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 trace samples of a substance known as thyrium-261.”
“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 center aisle from the cockpit. Copeland was a tall man, lean, with a thin, hawklike 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 humorless 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 shorthand 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 headquarters, but what exactly had been stolen was a mystery 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. “Professor 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.”
With that, Nash, Copeland and Chambers moved off to other areas of the plane, leaving Race alone with the manuscript.
Race looked at the cover page again, scanned the rough texture of the photocopier’s ink. Then he took a deep breath and turned the page.
He saw the first line, written in fine medieval calligraphy:
MEUS NOMINUS EST ALBERTO LUIS SANTIAGO ETILLE EST MEUM REM . . .
He translated.
My name is Alberto Luis Santiago and this is my story . . .
FIRST READING
On the first day of the ninth month in the year of Our Lord 1535,1 became a traitor to my country.
The reason: I helped a man escape from a prison of my countrymen.
His name was Renco Capac and he claimed to be an Incan prince, the younger brother of their supreme ruler, Manco Capac, the man they called the Sapa Inca.
He was a handsome man, with smooth olive skin and long black hair. His most distinctive feature, however, was a prominent birthmark situated directly below his left eye. It looked like an inverted mountain peak, a ragged triangle of brown skin that sat atop his otherwise clear complexion.
I first met Renco on board the San Vicente, a prison hulk that lay out in the middle of the Urubamba River, ten miles north of the Incans’ capital, Cuzco.
The San Vicente was the foulest of all the prison hulks that lay at anchor in the rivers of New Spain—an old wooden galleon no longer fit for ocean travel that had been dismasted and hauled overland for the sole purpose of housing hostile or dangerous Indians.
Armed as usual with my prized leather-bound Bible—a three-hundred-page handwritten version of the Great Book that had been a gift to me from my parents upon my entering the Holy Orders—I had come to the prison hulk to teach these heathens the Word of Our Lord.
It was in this capacity as a minister of our Faith that I met the young prince Renco. Unlike most of the others in that miserable hulk—foul, ugly wretches who, owing to the shameful conditions my countrymen imposed on them, looked more as dogs than men—he was well spoken and educated. He was also possessed of a most unique sensitivity the likes of which I have not seen in any man since. It was a gentleness, an understanding, a look in his eyes that penetrated my very soul.
He was also of considerable intelligence. My countrymen had been in New Spain for but three years and he could already speak our language. He was also eager to learn of my Faith and understand my people and our ways, and I was happy to teach him. In any case, we soon struck up a friendship and I visited him often.
And then one day he told me of his mission.
Before he had been captured, so he said, this prince had been charged with traveling to Cuzco and retrieving an idol of some sort. Not an ordinary idol, mind, but a most venerated idol, perhaps the most venerated idol of these Indians. An idol which they say embodies their spirit.
But Renco had been waylaid on his journey to Cuzco, captured in an ambush set up by the Governor with the aid of the Chancas, an extremely hostile tribe from the northern jungles that had been subjugated by the Incan people against their will.
Like many other tribes from this region, the Chancas saw the arrival of my countrymen as a means of breaking the yoke of Incan tyranny. They were quick to offer their services to the Governor as informers and as guides, in return for which they received muskets and metal swords, for the tribes of New Spain have no concept of bronze or iron.
As Renco informed me of his mission and his capture at the hands of the Governor, I saw over his shoulder a Chanca tribesman who was also being held captive inside the San Vicente.
His name was Castino and he was an ugly brute of a man. Tall and hairy, bearded and unwashed, he could not have been more dissimilar to the young articulate Renco. He was an utterly repulsive creature, the most frightening human form I have ever had the misfortune to lay my eyes upon. A sharpened piece of white bone pierced the skin of his left cheek, the characteristic mark of the Chancas. Castino always stared malevolently at Renco’s back whenever I came to visit the young prince.
The day he told me of his mission to retrieve the idol, Renco was extremely distressed.
The object of his quest, he said, was locked in a vault inside the Coricancha, or sun temple, at Cuzco. But Renco had that day learned—by eavesdropping on a conversation between two guards on board the hulk—that the city of Cuzco had recently fallen and that the Spaniards were inside its walls, sacking and looting it unopposed.
I, too, had heard of the taking of Cuzco. It was said that the looting taking place there was some of the most rapacious of the entire conquest. Rumors abounded of Spaniards killing their fellow soldiers in their lust for the mountains of gold that lay inside the city’s walls.
Such tales filled me with dismay. I had arrived in New Spain but six months previously with all the foolish ideals of a novice—desires of converting all the pagan natives to our noble Catholic Faith, dreams of leading a column of soldiers while holding forth a crucifix, delusions of building high-spired churches that would be the envy of Europe. But these ideals were quickly dispelled by the wanton acts of cruelty and greed that I witnessed of my countrymen every day.
Murder, pillage, rape—these were not the acts of men fighting in the name of God. They were the acts of scoundrels, of villains. And indeed at the moments when my disillusionment was at its greatest—such as the time when I witnessed a Spanish soldier decapitate a woman in order to seize her gold necklace—I would wonder whether I was fighting for the right side. That Spanish soldiers had taken to killing each other during their plunder of Cuzco came as no surprise to me.
I should also add at this juncture, however, that I had heard rumors about Renco’s sacred idol before.
It was widely known that Hernando Pizarro, the Governor’s brother and chief lieutenant, had put up an incredible bounty for any information that led to the discovery of the idol’s whereabouts. It was to my mind a tribute to the reverence and devotion that the Incans paid their idol that not one of them—not a single one of them—had betrayed its location in return for Hernando’s fabulous reward. It shames me to say that I do not believe my countrymen, in similar circumstances, would have done the same.
But of all the tales I had heard of the looting, nowhere had I heard of the discovery of the treasured Incan idol.
Indeed, if it had been found, word would have spread faster than the wind. For the lucky foot soldier who discovered it would have been instantly knighted, would have been made a marquis by the Governor on the spot and would have lived the rest of his life back in Spain in unreserved luxury.
And yet there had been no such tale.
Which led me to conclude that the Spaniards in Cuzco had not yet found the idol.
“Brother Alberto,” Renco said, his eyes pleading, “help me. Help me escape this floating cage so that I can complete my mission. Only I can retrieve the idol of my people. And it is only a matter of time before they find it.”
Well.
I did not know what to say. I could never do such a thing. I could never help him escape. I would be making myself a hunted man, a traitor t
o my country. If I were caught, I would be the one imprisoned inside this hellish floating dungeon. And so I left the hulk without another word.
But I would return. And I would talk with Renco again—and again he would ask me to help him, his voice impassioned, his eyes begging.
And whenever I contemplated the issue more closely, my mind would always return to two things: my total and utter disillusionment at the despicable acts of those men I called my countrymen, and—conversely—my admiration of the Incan people’s stoic refusal to disclose the secret location of their idol in the face of such overwhelming adversity.
Indeed, never had I witnessed such unfailing devotion. I envied their faith. I had heard tell of Hernando torturing entire villages in his obsessive search for the idol, had heard of the atrocities he had committed. I wondered how I would act if I were to see my own kinfolk butchered, tortured, murdered. In those circumstances, would I disclose the location of Jerusalem? In the end, I decided that I would and I was doubly ashamed.
And so despite myself, my Faith and my allegiance to my country, I decided to help Renco.
I left the hulk and returned later that night, bringing with me a young page—an Incan named Tupac—just as Renco had instructed me. We both wore hooded cloaks against the cold and kept our hands folded inside our sleeves.
We came to the guard station on the riverbank. As it happened, since most of my country’s forces were at Cuzco partaking in the looting there, only a small group of soldiers were on hand in the tent village near the hulk. Indeed, only a lone night guard—a fat slovenly thug from Madrid with liquor on his breath and dirt under his fingernails—guarded the bridge that led to the hulk.
After taking a second glance at young Tupac—it was not uncommon at that time for young Indians to serve as pages for monks like myself—the night guard belched loudly and ordered us to inscribe our names on the register.
I scratched both of our names in the book. Then when I had finished, the two of us stepped onto the narrow wooden footbridge that stretched out from the riverbank over to a door set into the side of the prison hulk in the middle of the river.
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