Temple

by Matthew Reilly

  “What does that mean for us?” Mitchell asked.

  “It means that we now have a very big problem.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Aum Shinrikyo cult is a doomsday cult. Its only goal—indeed, its only reason for being—is to bring about the end of the world. We only know about the Tokyo subway incident because the networks got film footage of it. Did you know that in early 1994 Aum Shinrikyo managed to seize control of a remote Chinese missile silo? They almost launched thirty tactical nuclear missiles at the United States in an attempt to initiate a full-scale thermonuclear war.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Mitchell said.

  “Commander, we’ve never really had a genuine doomsday cult in America. We have violent anti-government groups, anti-UN groups, anti-abortion, anti-Semitic and anti-Negro groups. But we have never had a group whose sole ambition is to bring about the mass destruction of life on this planet.

  “Now, if Earl Bittiker and the Texans have decided to adopt a doomsday philosophy, then that leaves us with a big problem. Because then we’ll have one of the most dangerous paramilitary groups in America running around with a death wish.”

  “Okay, then,” Mitchell said, “so how does all this relate to this robbery?”

  “Easy,” Demonaco said. “The group which carried out this robbery was a highly trained, highly skilled assault squad. The tactics that they employed were pure Special Forces—large-scale SEAL stuff—which would point to an organization more like the Texan Republican Army and not the Freedom Fighters.”

  “Right.”

  “But whoever did this left us a single tungsten-cored bullet—to point us toward the Freedom Fighters. If the Texans really did do this, don’t you think it would make sense for them to throw us off the scent by framing their enemies—the Oklahoma Freedom Fighters?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “What really scares me, though,” Demonaco said, “is what they were after. Because if the Texans really have acquired doomsday tendencies, then this Supernova of yours is exactly the kind of thing they’d go for.”

  “The other thing we have to think about,” Demonaco went on, “is how they got in. They had someone on the inside, someone who knew the codes to, and who could get cardkeys for, all the security locks. Do you have a record of the names of everyone working on the project?”

  Mitchell pulled a sheet of computer paper from his breast pocket and handed it to Demonaco.

  “That’s a list of all the people working on the Supernova project, Navy and DARPA.”

  Demonaco looked at the list.

  PROJECT NAME: N23-657-K2 (SUPERNOVA)

  CLASSIFICATION: ORANGE (TOP SECRET)

  RELEVANT AGENCIES: NAVY / DARPA

  PERSONNEL INV0LVEC:

  NAME

  POSITION HELD

  AGENCY

  SECURITY NO.

  ROMANO Julius M.

  Nuclear physicist,

  PROJECT LEADER

  NAVY

  N/1005-A2

  FISK, Howard K.

  Theoretical physicist

  DARPA PROJECT

  LEADER

  DARPA

  D/1546-77A

  BOYLE, Jessica D.

  Nuclear physicist

  DARPA

  D/1788-82B

  LABOWSKI, John A.

  Delivery system

  engineer

  NAVY

  N/7659-C7

  MAHER, Karen B.

  Secondary systems

  DARPA

  D/6201-22C

  NORTON, Henry J.

  Technical support

  NAVY

  N/7632-C1

  RACE, Martin E.

  Ignition system

  design engineer

  DARPA

  D/3279-97A

  SMITH, Martin W.

  Weapons electronics

  DARPA

  D/5900-35B

  ADDITIONAL PERSONNEL:

  KAYSON, Simon F.

  Project security

  NAVY

  N/1009-A2

  DEVEREUX, Edward G.

  Language specialist

  HARVARD

  N/A

  Mitchell said, “We’ve checked them all out. They’re all clean, even Henry Norton, the guy whose security card and PIN codes were used to get in.”

  “Where was he on the night of the break-in?” Demonaco asked.

  “In the Arlington morgue,” Mitchell said simply. “Paramedic records confirm that at 5:36 .A.M. on the night of the break-in—exactly fifteen minutes before the thieves stormed this building—Henry Norton and his wife, Sarah, were found shot to death at their home in Arlington.”

  “5:36,” Demonaco said. “They got here quickly after they killed him. They knew his name would be flagged at the hospital.”

  As both Demonaco and Mitchell knew, it was common for high-level government employees to have electronic flags attached to their names in the event that they unexpectedly arrived at a hospital. As soon as the important person’s name was entered into the hospital’s records, a flag screen would come up telling the doctor involved to call the relevant government agency.

  “Did Norton have any links to militia groups?” Demonaco asked.

  “Not a one. Been in the Navy all his life. Technical support systems expert—computers, communications systems, navigation computers. He has an exemplary record. Hell, the man’s a goddamn boy scout. The man least likely to betray his country.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Nothing. None of them has any links to any paramilitary organizations. Every member of the team had to go through a comprehensive security check before they were cleared to work on the project. They’re clean. Not a single one of them is believed to even know a member of a militia group.”

  “Well, someone does,” Demonaco said. “Find out who worked with Norton the most, anyone who could have watched him enter his PIN codes every day. I’ll make some calls to my people and see what Earl Bittiker and the Texans have been up to lately.”

  The Goose kicked up a shower of spray as it touched down on the surface of the Alto Purus River, not far from the base of the waterfall that cascaded out over the tableland.

  Night had fallen and, mindful of the presence of the rapas in the village, Race and the others had decided that they would moor the seaplane down by the waterfall and re-enter Vilcafor via the quenko.

  After Doogie had parked the Goose on the riverbank underneath a dense canopy of trees, the four of them disembarked. They left Uli in the plane, unconscious and dosed up on some methadone they’d found in a first-aid kit in the back of the plane.

  Before they made for the path behind the waterfall, however, Race made them do something quite unusual.

  Using a couple of wooden boxes they had found inside the Goose and a few energy bars that Van Lewen and Doogie had had on their persons, they set some primitive traps—traps that were designed to catch the monkeys rustling about in the trees above them.

  Ten minutes later, they had a pair of furious primates trapped inside the two wooden boxes. The two monkeys screamed and shrieked as Van Lewen and Doogie carried them along the path behind the rushing waterfall and into the yawning stone doorway of the quenko.

  Ten minutes later, Race climbed up into the citadel of Vilcafor.

  Nash, Lauren, Copeland, Gaby Lopez and Johann Krauss were all gathered in a corner of the citadel watching Lauren as she tried to make radio contact with either Van Lewen or Doogie.

  They all turned as one when they saw Race emerge from the quenko with the fake idol in his hands.

  Renée, Van Lewen and Doogie came up into the citadel after him. They were all completely covered in mud and grime. Race still had dried droplets of Heinrich Anistaze’s blood on his face.

  Nash saw the idol in his hands immediately.

  “You got it!” he exclaimed, rushing over to Race, snatching the idol from him.

  He gazed at it adoringly.

  Ra
ce just watched Nash coldly, and in that instant he decided that he wouldn’t tell Nash what he knew about him. Rather he would just wait and see what Nash did from here. They might still get the idol—indeed, maybe even with Race’s help—but Race was determined to ensure that Nash wouldn’t end up with it.

  “It’s beautiful,” Nash said wondrously.

  “It’s a fake,” Race said flatly.

  “What?”

  “It’s a fake. It’s not made of thyrium. If you turn on your nucleotide resonance imager again, you’ll find that there is still a source of thyrium is this area. But this idol isn’t it.”

  “But . . . how?”

  “During his escape from Cuzco, Renco Capac got the criminal Bassario to craft an exact replica of the Spirit of the People. Renco planned to surrender to Hernando and hand over the fake idol to him. He knew Hernando would kill him, but he also knew that so long as Hernando got an idol, he would never suspect that it might be the wrong idol.

  “As it happened, however, Renco and Alberto Santiago killed Hernando and his men, and Renco—so the manuscript says—proceeded to hide both idols inside the temple.”

  Nash turned the idol over in his hands and saw for the first time the hollowed-out cylindrical section in its base. He looked up at Race.

  “So the real idol is still somewhere inside the temple?”

  “That’s what Santiago says in the manuscript,” Race said.

  “But . . . ?”

  “But I don’t believe him.”

  “You don’t believe him? Why not?”

  “Does your NRI machine still work?” Race asked Lauren.

  “Yes.”

  “Set it up and I’ll show you what I mean.”

  They all moved to the open-topped roof of the citadel, where Lauren began setting up the nucleotide resonance imager.

  While she went about setting up the machine, Race looked out over the village. It was dark, still raining lightly. He caught a glimpse of a large feline shadow peering up at him from behind one of the smaller buildings of the town.

  After a few moments, Lauren had the NRI machine ready. She flicked a switch and the silver rod mounted on top of the console began to rotate slowly.

  Thirty seconds later, there came a shrill beep! and the rod stopped abruptly. It was not, however, pointing at the idol in Nash’s hands. Rather, it was pointing away from Nash, up at the mountains.

  “I’m getting a reading,” Lauren said. “Strong signal, very high frequency resonance.”

  “What’re the coordinates?” Race said.

  “Bearing 270 degrees. Vertical angle 29 degrees, 58 minutes. Range 793 meters. Same as it was last time, if I remember it right,” she said, giving Race a look.

  “You are remembering it right,” he said. “You’ll also remember that we thought it was inside the temple.”

  “Yes . . .” Lauren said.

  Race looked at her hard—harder than usual. He wondered if she had been party to Nash’s deception, decided that she probably was. “Do you remember why we thought it was in the temple?”

  Lauren frowned. “Well, I remember we climbed up the crater and saw the temple. Then we figured that the temple’s location matched the trajectory of the NRI. Ergo, the idol was in the temple.”

  “That’s right” Race said. “That’s exactly what we did. And that’s exactly where we went wrong.”

  They all came back inside the citadel.

  Race grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from inside the ATV that was still parked flush against the doorway to the citadel.

  “Copeland,” he said to the tall humorless scientist. “Do you think that with all this technological gadgetry you’ve got here, you could find me a regular calculator?”

  Copeland found one inside one of the American containers, handed it to him.

  “All right” Race said, allowing the others to crowd around him and watch.

  He drew a picture on the sheet of paper.

  “Okay,” he said. “This is a picture of Vilcafor and the plateau to the west of it as seen from the side. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Lauren said.

  Race drew some lines across the drawing:

  “And this is what we deduced yesterday from the reading that we got from the nucleotide resonance imager: 793 meters to the idol. Angle of inclination 29 degrees, 58 minutes—but I’ll just use 30 degrees to keep it simple. The point is, when we climbed up the crater and saw the temple, we immediately thought that the temple must have matched the reading. Right?”

  “Right . . .” Nash said.

  “Well we were wrong to do that” Race said. “Do you remember when we were climbing up that spiraling path around the rock tower and Lauren took a reading from her digital compass?”

  “Vaguely,” Nash said.

  “Well, I remember it. When we were level with the rock tower, standing on the outer ledge of the rope bridge, Lauren said that we had come exactly 632 meters horizontally from the village.”

  He added another line to the drawing and changed the words “793 m” along the hypotenuse—the longest side of the triangle—to “x m.”

  “Anybody remember doing trigonometry at school?” he asked. All the theoretical physicists in the citadel around him shrugged bashfully. “Granted, it isn’t nuclear physics,” Race said, “but it does still have some uses.”

  “Oh, I see it . . .” Doogie said suddenly from the back of the small crowd gathered around Race. Clearly the others didn’t.

  Race said, “Using simple trigonometry, if you know one angle of a right-angled triangle and the length of one of its sides, you will be able to determine the lengths of the other two sides by using the concepts of sines, cosines and tangents.

  “Don’t you guys remember ‘SOHCAHTOA’? The sine of an angle equals the length of the side opposite the angle divided by the length of the hypotenuse. The cosine equals the length of the side adjacent to the angle divided by the hypotenuse.

  “In our example here, to find x—the distance between us and the temple—we would use the cosine of 30°.” Race then wrote:

  “Therefore,” he said,

  He punched some numbers into the calculator Copeland had given him.

  “Now, according to this calculator, the cosine of 30° is 0.866. Therefore, x equals 632 divided by 0.866. And that is . . . 729.”

  Race amended his drawing accordingly, writing feverishly. Lauren watched him in astonishment. Renée just watched him, beaming.

  “Anybody see a problem here?” Race said.

  Everyone was silent.

  Race amended his drawing one last time, finishing with a flourishing “X.”

  “We made a mistake,” he said. “We assumed that because of its height the temple was 793 meters from the village and hence, that the idol was inside it. It was a good guess but it was a wrong guess. The real idol isn’t inside the temple at all. It’s beyond it, up on the plateau somewhere.”

  “But where?” Nash said.

  “I would imagine,” Race replied, “that the idol is to be found in the village of the tribe of natives who built the rope bridge up on the rock tower, the same tribe of natives that attacked our German friends here when they were about to open the temple.”

  “But what about the manuscript?” Nash said. “I thought that it said both idols were inside the temple.”

  “The manuscript doesn’t tell the full story,” Race said. “I can only guess that Alberto Santiago doctored the ending so that no one reading it later would know the true resting place of the idol.”

  Race held up the sheet of paper with his drawing on it. “That’s where the idol is. Your NRI says so, so does the math.”

  Nash pursed his lips, thinking. Then at last he said, “All right. Let’s go get it.”

  The two monkeys that Race and the others had caught down by the river had gladly—or perhaps angrily—obliged them with an ample supply of urine, urine which the two screaming primates had sprayed throughout the plastic bags that Race had line
d their boxes with.

  Put simply, the monkey urine reeked. Its sharp foul odor—the smell of ammonia—pervaded the interior of the citadel. It was no wonder the rapas despised it, Race thought as he and the others applied the warm stinking urine to their bodies.

  When they were all done, Van Lewen handed out weapons. Since he and Doogie were the only Green Berets left—so far as anyone knew, Buzz Cochrane was still up on the tower top—they took the two G-11s. Nash, Race and Renée were given M-16s, complete with grappling hooks.

  Race, still dressed in his black Nazi breastplate and his blue baseball cap, hung his grappling hook from his belt.

  Copeland and Lauren were each given SIG-Sauer P228 semiautomatic pistols. Krauss and Lauren, the ordinary scientists, went gunless.

  Once everyone was ready, Van Lewen stepped through the doorway of the citadel and into the ATV. Then he made his way to the rear of the all-terrain vehicle and opened the pop-up hatch.

  His G-11 emerged first.

  Then slowly, Van Lewen peered out from the open hatch and scanned the area. Immediately, his eyes went wide.

  The big eight-wheeled vehicle was surrounded by rapas. Their tails coiled and uncoiled behind their massive bodies. Their yellow eyes bored into him, hard and cold.

  Van Lewen counted twelve of them, just standing there in the street, watching him.

  Then all of a sudden, the nearest cat snorted—smelled the urine—and immediately reeled away from the ATV.

  One after the other, the other cats did the same, turning away from the armored vehicle and forming a wide circle around it

  Van Lewen stepped out onto the street his gun up. One by one, the others came out behind him, Race among them.