The Last Monument

by Michael C. Grumley

  “What is that?”

  Morton winked. “Anku and I are compatriots. Fellow Catholics, if you can believe it. He introduced me to sweet tubes, and I introduced him to iced tea.”

  Angela chuckled. “Seems like a fair trade.” She took the tube out of her mouth and briefly studied it before continuing to chew. “It’s actually really good.”

  Mike Morton eased back in his chair. “It’s also medicinal. Twenty-five percent of western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yep.”

  Rickards withdrew the stick. “This is a drug?”

  “No, not this. It’s more similar to an herb. It stimulates your circulation and helps increase blood flow.”

  Angela looked around and blinked several times. “I feel a little weird.”

  “It also gives you a small dopamine kick,” Morton said. “About the same as half a glass of wine.”

  “Wow,” she said, grinning. “They should market these in the states.”

  “Nah, too mild for most people.”

  Angela settled back into her chair. “So, Mike, how close are you to finding what you’re looking for?”

  “Pretty close,” he said. “Based on the measurements I’ve been picking up, possibly within a hundred to two hundred square kilometers.”

  Next to her, Rickards looked around their small camp, into the nearby darkness. “Where exactly are we?”

  “About ten miles from the mountains, where the Amazon ends, and the Andes begin.”

  “What do you suppose you’re going to find?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “But you two have got me thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About that letter of yours.”

  He stared thoughtfully into the glowing light of the lantern. “I’ll be honest. I never really believed in Paititi. But this story with your uncle has me thinking about some of the local legends around here. Over the years, Inca beliefs have gradually been mixed with Catholicism. But they still believe in things like the mallkus, guardian spirits who reside in nature. Especially up in the mountains. And shamans, of which Anku’s father is one, called yatiri, still make ritual payments to these spirits in exchange for prosperity and protection. But even more, one site very sacred for the Quechuan people is Machu Picchu, a place in the Andes where the very forces of nature are believed to dwell.”

  Angela was staring at Morton in the darkness, blinking repeatedly. “And?”

  “The forces of nature would include all the forces of energy,” he concluded. “And I’ll tell you this, when it comes to energy, especially things like electromagnetism, few things on this planet are better conductors of electrical energy…than gold.”

  59

  “You are certain?”

  “Yes,” confirmed the voice on the phone. “They were not on the flight, neither getting on nor disembarking in Lima.”

  Ottman leaned back in his chair, looking up at Fischer and Becker. Just as they thought.

  He had to wait for the plane to land in Lima to be sure. But now there was no doubt. Neither the Reed woman nor Rickards had taken the opportunity to flee.

  But why?

  With as frightened as the woman was, why would she not leave?

  In Ottman’s mind, there was only one answer. The woman knew something. Just as he originally suspected. And she clearly believed she could deceive him long enough to locate Paititi.

  But she was wrong. She had no idea how long he had been planning for this very moment. Ottman knew far more than she did and had vast resources at his disposal, more than she could possibly imagine, not only from the Nazi Train, but all he had leveraged from it. Vast resources that were limited only by his need to keep things quiet. But if it came to it, if Ottman felt the secret was somehow slipping away, eluding him when he was so close, he would unleash it all. Release every resource, every option he had at his disposal, to find it.

  No matter what the consequences.

  He snapped from his thoughts when the voice continued.

  “They are likely still in the same vehicle that picked them up outside the station,” the voice said. “A yellow, older-model truck.”

  “Can you see who was driving?”

  “Not from satellite. But I can see that it traveled to the hotel, then out of Puerto Maldonado.”

  “They got back into the same vehicle after the hotel.”

  “Correct.”

  “Where is it now?” asked Ottman.

  “I cannot be sure. Still in the jungle somewhere, beneath the trees. Based on distance, terrain and available roads, it should lie within an eighty-kilometer diameter of the last sighting. Further analysis should give us a smaller target range.”

  “How long?”

  “Hours.”

  Ottman turned his attention to Fischer. “Call the trucks.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A helicopter was faster, but impractical for the Amazon’s terrain. But unlike the chopper, military trucks—sourced straight from the Peruvian army—could follow them anywhere, though commandeering them required time, no matter how much money Ottman had.

  The old man pressed his lips together in an effort to remain calm. He lowered his hands onto the padded arms of the chair and inhaled quietly. Patience, he said to himself. Nothing done quickly is done well.

  On the other end of the phone, the eyes belonging to Ottman’s cyber expert flitted back and forth between several brightly illuminated computer screens.

  It would take time, but with thermal imaging, he should be able to reveal all available roads in the area beneath the dense canopy, and perhaps whether some still bore any lingering signs of recent activity. But it would have to be done before the next sunrise, when all differences in heat signatures were erased.

  To his right, on another monitor, was a screen of constantly scrolling text. Numbers and letters all rotating in and out of dozens of open character slots, trying to find the right combination, copied too quickly to follow, while in the top frame was listed the complete wording from Roger Reed’s original letter. The note to his brother, as well as the paragraph copied from Fawcett’s book.

  It was clear the letters ALMV10 at the bottom of the note was a code, meaning somewhere within the rest of the letters, either in the note or Fawcett’s transcription, had to be the primer. The key to cracking what ALMV10 meant.

  His eyes briefly glanced at the progress on the scrolling screen, rotating an innumerable number of combinations at blinding speed. Too fast, in fact, to discern anything within the constant blur of letter changes.

  Much faster than any human brain could do it.

  60

  It was seventeen minutes after five a.m. when the door to the trailer opened and swung outward with a squeak, allowing in the earliest rays of morning. Glowing through open patches of overhead canopy, it was enough to dimly light the surrounding area and the three metal chairs still positioned in the tall grass, now covered in thin clear beads of morning dew.

  Adding another shirt and setting her hair in a quick bun, Angela was only mildly surprised to see Mike Morton already waiting outside when she opened the door, sipping a steaming cup of tea.

  She looked around for Joe, whose frame could still be glimpsed in the back of the truck bed beneath a dark blanket.

  “How long have you been up?”

  “Couple hours,” he replied.

  Angela briefly glanced around and came back to Morton, who was still staring at her. “Is something wrong?”

  “Nope.”

  “Thank you for making room in here for me with Killa.”

  He laughed. “You’re welcome.”

  When he didn’t look away, Angela began to wonder if she had something on her face. Fighting the urge to check, she asked, “Everything okay?”

  “Better than okay.”

  “Better?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  Curious, she descended the trailer’
s three metal steps and jumped down onto the thick grass next to him. “Why is that?”

  Morton calmly sipped his tea. “I may have something on that letter of yours.”

  Angela’s eyes widened. “Like what?”

  Morton looked at the truck to see Rickards slowly rising.

  “I think your uncle used a code.”

  “You mean the letters at the end?”

  “Yes. ALMV10.” Morton withdrew the copy she made for him the night before and showed it to her. All over the page were mathematical scribblings.

  “What is this?”

  “Doodling,” he said. “Searching for different possibilities.”

  “And?”

  He raised his mug to welcome Rickards, who was now approaching while yawning beneath a head of messy hair.

  “It’s not what I thought,” Morton said, finishing his tea. “It’s simpler.”

  Angela glanced at Rickards, who cleared his throat. “Simpler than what?”

  “Simpler than what I was expecting. Given the age of the letter, I assumed this was a cipher and not a code. So I started looking at some of the most common ciphers out there. Ciphers that were well-known fifty or sixty years ago. There are dozens of classics--substitutional, transpositional, algorithmic. All used pretty effectively and over long periods of time. Caesar’s cipher, for example, lasted over eight hundred years before someone cracked it.”

  “What’s the difference between a cipher and a code?”

  “There’s some overlap, but often a code uses a primer, where ciphers generally don’t. It really depends on how complicated you’re expecting the encryption to be. I ran through several possible scenarios and assumed the primer was somewhere either in the letter or disguised within the paragraph from Fawcett’s book.

  “A lot of those would take a while to crack, even with computers, so eventually I had to step back and rethink things.”

  Angela grinned at Rickards. “Outside the box.”

  “Encryption is often thought of too linearly,” Morton said. “Too often it’s from the encoder’s perspective, which is the process of hiding something. But an encrypter, believe it or not, has to not only focus on how well he can encode something, but he also has to consider things from the opposite direction, or the decrypter’s perspective. Meaning a secret code is not just about how well you can scramble something, but how problematic it will then be to unscramble. After all, who wants to encrypt a message no one can ever decrypt, even its intended recipient? It makes the whole thing a wasted effort. Kind of like the Voynich manuscript, which is a long text from the fifteenth century written with illustrations and symbols no one understands, not even today. So, whatever message someone was trying to convey through their cipher, it doesn’t really matter anymore.”

  Morton looked at Angela. “Clearly, your uncle would not have done that. So I stepped back and reasoned that whatever he inscribed would have been something he could be sure his brother could figure out. The long and short is that it’s a normal human reaction to assume a code is more complicated than it really is, and assuming so makes the job of unscrambling infinitely harder.

  “One mistake I made was assuming all six characters were part of the cipher, which I eventually had to concede might not be the case. A-L-M-V, sure. But not necessarily one-zero. I’ve worked with a lot of mathematical patterns and formulas over the years, and something about the one and zero didn’t feel right.” He looked at Angela. “In the original letter, do you remember whether there was a space between the V and the one?”

  Angela closed her eyes, thinking. “Sorry, I don’t remember.”

  After a momentary thought, Morton shrugged. “That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, at that point, I was thinking, what were the chances of your uncle, a history professor, also being a math expert? Possible? Yes. Probable? No. So regardless of whether it was a cipher or a code, it was likely more basic. Something applied only to the first four characters and not the one and zero. And, if those assumptions were correct, then it made the next one that much easier. Because the first four characters are alpha only. Not numbers. And one of the easiest and fastest alpha-only ciphers…is Atbash.”

  “Atbash?”

  Morton nodded. “It wasn’t until I thought the two numbers might not be part of it that I was able to figure it out. Otherwise, I’m not sure I would have. Alphanumeric ciphers are much more complicated.”

  “So, you assumed it was a simple cipher in the first place,” Angela said.

  “Eventually. I tried to put myself in your uncle’s place and think of something simple, fast and still relatively effective.”

  “Which was Atbash,” Rickards said.

  “Yep. And you want to know the funniest part? Atbash is also a commonly used cipher for kids’ puzzles. When I was growing up in the fifties, they were even used with prizes in cereal boxes. So I’ll bet a lot of American kids are familiar with Atbash and don’t even realize it.”

  “So, what does it say?!” Angela pressed.

  Morton reached out and folded the paper over while she was still holding it. On the back were two lines of letters. The first read “A-L-M-V 1-0.” And directly below it the second line: “Z-O-N-E 1-0.”

  “Zone Ten?”

  Mike Morton nodded. “Yep.”

  “What is Zone Ten?”

  The large man standing in front of her grinned from ear to ear and twirled his empty mug around his index finger.

  “That’s the easy part. Zone Ten…is La Paz.”

  “La Paz?”

  “As in La Paz, Bolivia. Just over the border.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’ve been there. It’s in the center of town. Kind of an urban plaza and one of the largest open spaces in the city. Also called Plaza San Francisco.”

  Angela turned and immediately looked at Rickards. “La Paz!”

  “Okay?”

  “La Paz,” she said again, excitedly, “was the very first place in South America Percy Fawcett traveled to.” Angela whirled toward Morton. “You said you thought a primer was hidden in the paragraph transcribed from Fawcett’s book.”

  “Originally,” he nodded, “but—”

  “Don’t you see?!” she said back to Rickards. “The primer to A-L-M-V was not in the quote from Fawcett’s book. It was Fawcett himself! Personally! The place he first visited!”

  61

  Ottman glanced out of his side window. Wide and steel-framed, it gave him a clear view down the side of a shallow valley colored in rich, dark green, then up the opposite side, to a ridgeline just as green below a fiery sunrise overhead. Its golden rays lit up the entire canopy as far as the eye could see.

  It was stunning, if only for a minute, before a long line of dense trees passed between them, once again obscuring the view—an amazing view that Ottman barely acknowledged.

  Instead, he silently sat preoccupied in the back seat of the olive-colored Humvee, running through a multitude of scenarios in his mind.

  Next to him, Fischer lowered a bulky satellite phone and signaled the driver on the shoulder. “There’s a reservoir about twenty kilometers ahead. You know it?”

  The uniformed driver nodded without speaking.

  “Turn off there.”

  The soldier behind the wheel barely acknowledged him, instead keeping his eyes glued to the road in front of him. The vehicle bounced constantly from the holes in the asphalt, gradually growing worse the deeper they pushed into the jungle.

  Fischer checked his watch and looked at Ottman. “About thirty minutes.”

  ***

  Both Humvees sped over the narrow dirt road with giant rumbling tires, glancing over rocks and dips with minimal effect. Charging like racing beasts over a path now barely wide enough to hold them. Trees brushing heavily against both sides. Ottman couldn’t see anything except walls of grass and towering trees, blanketing each side and casting most of the road in morning shadows.

  When they arrived, the giant tr
ucks slowed at the end of the path. A small opening could be seen at the end of a grass wall, accentuated by two narrow rows of bent grass. They traveled perhaps thirty meters before the men found a large open area, with grass cut to knee-height.

  In the middle was an old, dingy travel trailer, parked by itself with two-by-fours stacked beneath the front hitch and back tires for support. Behind each muddy tire sat an oversized rock, wedged into position to prevent it from moving.

  Ottman, the only one not carrying a rifle, walked carefully behind Becker, half waiting for something unexpected in the morning stillness. But the only sounds he heard were from cicadas in the surrounding trees.

  Leading, Fischer reached the trailer first and carefully peered through the lower corner of one of the windows before lowering himself beneath it. Behind him, a Peruvian soldier did the same, while two more circled to the opposite side.

  Fischer waited several seconds, listening for sounds inside. Hearing nothing, he looked to Ottman standing farther away, behind Becker.

  The old man nodded and Fischer moved. He rose quickly to the trailer’s door, spinning past it to the other side while simultaneously checking the latch.

  Locked.

  With a shake of his head, he waited for Ottman’s nod, then immediately stepped back and fired three rounds into the door latch, sending chunks of metal and fiberglass exploding and falling to the ground with several pieces bouncing off or sticking to Fischer. Who immediately grabbed the hole near the door handle with his gloved hand and yanked it open.

  The operation was smooth and fast, allowing Fischer and one of the soldiers to gain entrance to the trailer in mere seconds. Showcasing an exercise in efficiency and bone-chilling accuracy.

  The scene was witnessed quietly by Killa from a nearby tree. Sitting comfortably atop a wide branch, wrapped in a dark blanket, blending in against the tree trunk. Where she nibbled on small berries and watched the soldiers below with intense curiosity.

  62