The work area in which they stood was compact, and segregated by mosquito nets from the steel-tube framed bunks in which the rangers slept. The nets hung like curtains around the individual carrels. There were six bunks, but only three desks, which made sense as most of the day the rangers would be out patrolling the territories, not cooped up behind a desk marking inventory or recording their observations on the migratory habits of the animals under their supervision.
The lazy ceiling fans revolved like something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, while a beetle scuttled across the hardwood floor. There was a mobile air-conditioning unit cranked up to full power, pumping out its BTUs, and a small portable radio beside a pile of mouldering paperbacks. Beneath the window there was a long distance radio-set and a solitary computer. The machine must have been ten years old and working on an obsolete operating system, yet it was a window into the world via a satellite uplink and a web-browser, which was more than most jungle outposts could boast, he suspected.
There was a large topographical map pinned up on the shortest wall, marked out with various coloured tacks and lengths of string. Cutter assumed they demarcated the individual territories and duty regions of the rangers. A territorial division made sense. A fly crawled across the heart of the rainforest, then took flight, drawn to the light bulb that was dangling on a raw cord in the middle of the ceiling.
“Jenny,” Cutter said, “I think perhaps Mr Chaplin should be ‘debriefed’ while we get on with the boring science stuff. Outside.”
She nodded. “Of course — come on Alex, come with me.” Jenny held out an arm for him to link his with hers, and steered him outside, away from the conversation they had no wish for him to hear. She closed the door behind them. Cutter had no idea what kind of debriefing she would provide, but it would notinvolve anomalies and creatures that crawled out of the Plio-Pleistocene. That was good enough for him.
Connor lay on the nearest bed, still wearing his shoes, thumbing through one of the ratty paperbacks. Abby sat cross-legged on another of the beds, her back pressed against the logs of the wall. She looked dead on her feet as she listened to Nando describe the peculiarities of the place he called Kon Ridge. She crossed her hands and arms behind her head and leaned back, cracking the vertebrae in her spine one bone at a time.
“Sorry,” she said, sheepishly, when all heads turned her way.
Blaine and Lucas lay top and tail on a thin mattress with their eyes closed, and Stephen leaned against a wall nearby.
“So, Nando,” Cutter said, “why do you think this is what I needed to see?”
“Because in all my years monitoring the various endangered species in the region, this is the first time I have seen this particular set of tracks. I’ve encountered hundreds, probably thousands of different tracks out there, and yes, I have seen similar, but nothing the same as the ones we’ve cast.”
“How can you be sure?” Cutter asked, laying the plaster cast aside.
“I do this day-in and day-out, Professor. I head a team of thirty rangers that are solely responsible for the monitoring of all of the species that live within our territories. We track their movements, even keep count of their number as a lot of these truly are on the verge of extinction. I know all of our animals, and these tracks do not belong to any of them. Trust me.”
“I do,” Cutter said, smiling. “Stephen,” Cutter picked up the cast and tossed it under-arm to his assistant, “what do you make of it?”
“I’m not sure,” Stephen said, but there was excitement in his voice. He turned the cast over and over again in his hands. “In terms of track pattern, it’s not dissimilar from the jaguar, though these are more lozenge-like, as opposed to the pads of the ball-like phalanxes of the jaguar’s paws. It’s amazing stuff.”
“Exactly,” Cutter agreed. “So what does that mean in terms of our predator?”
“Same approximate size and build as a jaguar, but not a jaguar.”
“Not a jaguar,” Cutter concluded. “Would you concur, Abby?” Stephen handed her the cast. She took it, turning it over and over in her small hands.
“It’s not a bobcat or a coyote, definitely not a panther, though actually it does bear a striking resemblance to the track of the so-called black panther. Taken in isolation, it’s difficult to be sure. The track patterns give an idea of the animal’s gait, size and weight.”
“But your first impressions?”
“Not a jaguar,” Abby said.
“Which is all well and good,” Nando said, sounding somewhat confused, “but I don’t see how knowing what something isn’tactually helps us?”
“That’s science for you,” Cutter said, without the slightest hint of irony in his voice. “You can’t prove anything, you can only disprove things. I’d be curious to match these tracks to the ones of the animal that attacked Cameron Bairstow.”
“You think it is the same predator?”
“On the surface, there’s a good chance,” Cutter said, peering at the floor. “Cam reported the same sort of erratic behavioural patterns you noticed from the wildlife. I certainly wouldn’t rule out a link just yet.” He turned back to Nando. “We need to take a look at the scene of the attack, and at some of these places where you’ve noticed this eerie silence.”
“Of course, we shall head out at first light.”
“Great. One question before we all turn in: you know this area well, tell me, is there much in the way of Inca ruins around here?”
“Oh, yes. The Incas were a great building nation, and unlike the conquistadors that followed, what they built has lasted. Within thirty miles of here there are a number of burial sites. There is much yet to be discovered, too. That is the nature of Peru. So many of her treasures still lie hidden beneath the jungle. Only ten minutes walk to the south there are a series of anthropomorphic mummy cases lined up along a cleft in the hillside. They were only found last year, during the foundation of the reserve.”
“Really?” Abby said. “I’d love to see them.”
“They are quite impressive, especially when you consider they are made from vegetable fibre and mud. Amazing how they’ve lasted 600 years.”
“They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” Connor chipped in.
“It is amazing that so much is yet to be discovered,” Stephen said. “Whenever I think about our world, I tend to imagine we’ve seen it all and done it all.”
“That is the temptation,” Nando agreed, “but the jungle is loathe to surrender her secrets. For a while at least there is still stuff out there waiting to be found for the first time. Can you believe we found an entire limestone city with, honestly, thousands of structures, just last month? Some of them are over forty-feet tall, and are built into a hillside to the east of here. We call it La Ciudad de los Muertos,the City of the Dead, because of the cliffs beneath it, where we discovered more than four hundred burial chambers. It is our hope that we might invite archaeologists to help us preserve the ruin. I do not know how much you know of the ways of my people, but our settlements often had very different purposes, and having explored these ruins myself, I believe we have discovered a holy city.”
“How can you differentiate between a city of war and one of worship?” Stephen asked.
“It is in the cut of the stones and the geometry of the settlement,” Nando explained. “Many of the stones used in Muertos possess what we call huaca, or a holy aspect. It is that aspect that leads us to believe it was a place of worship all those centuries ago. A city of warriors would be constructed in a very different manner. The geometry of war is different to the geometry of worship. War requires organisation and straight lines and conformity, worship is a celebration of the sun and the earth.”
Stephen nodded.
Abby handed the cast of the Thylacosmilus print back to Cutter.
“How about a temple?” Cutter asked. “At least some part of it would be subterranean.”
“There are many such temples in the jungle, Professor. My brother Esteban was
close to one when he... disappeared,” Nando said. At that, he glanced down, and his voice cracked. Cutter was surprised at the sudden change.
“I didn’t know... When did it happen?”
“Soon after I contacted you for help,” Nando explained, scratching at his eyebrow. His ever-present grin had disappeared. “He radioed in to base to say he was going to investigate a settlement. He had seen panicked villagers fleeing through the jungle. We lost radio contact. When I went to investigate, the settlement was abandoned. Esteban has not returned. Neither have the rangers who were with him.”
“It doesn’t have to mean...”
“I was in the settlement, Professor. I saw the animal tracks there again. Esteban had reported the peculiar cone of silence around him. I warned him to be careful. Now...” he shrugged and fell silent.
Being the one left behind was always the hardest. Cutter was struck by the similarity between young Bairstow and Nando, the resonances between their two very different lives.
He moved across to the window, indicating to Jenny that it was safe for her to return. A moment later she and Chaplin came back into the office.
“Tell me about the ruins,” Cutter said, for want of something to say.
“Our ancestors were devout, if nothing else. Where they did not build up to celebrate the gods of the sky, they built down to celebrate the gods of the Earth. Thus there are tunnels beneath many of the structures.”
“Ah, this might help,” Chaplin offered. He took a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Cutter.
“What is it?” He smoothed out the wrinkles and read what appeared to be a series of co-ordinates.
“Cam and his brother were not completely hopeless,” Chaplin told the others. “Before they set off into the rainforest, they recorded their intended location with the embassy, in case they got into trouble. It’s fairly standard practice. Of course this isn’t definitive, but it would give us a place to start looking. And Jaime is out there somewhere. I promised Sir Charles we would bring both of his sons home.”
“I could kiss you,” Cutter said, grinning. But in the back of his mind he was thinking, It might have been nice if you had shared this information sooner.
“I think that would involve a rather substantial lifestyle choice I’m not ready to embrace just yet,” Chaplin told him, smiling wryly.
Cutter pushed himself to his feet and went across to the map to check out the grid-reference. Reading off the co-ordinates, he jabbed a red pin into the board.
They had a point-zero.
It might not have been precisely where the anomaly opened, but it was close.
“Any ruined temples in the vicinity?” He asked Nando, who came to stand beside him.
The diminutive Peruvian nodded. “It has many names. It used to be known as The Temple of the Broken Land, then it was renamed The Temple of the Four Winds. Today we call it the Temple of the Dead Earth, because it was buried in a landslide nearly a century ago. It was dedicated to the death god, Supay.”
“Then we know where we are going tomorrow,” Cutter said.
FOURTEEN
Cutter woke before dawn, to the chorus of the jungle.
The small cabin they shared was like a sauna. He lay in bed listening to the insects and the birds and the haunting elegiac whisper of the morning wind through the high trees. Despite the fact that he didn’t move for twenty minutes, his skin was still bathed in a sheen of sweat. Finally he turned his head.
Stephen was asleep on his back, the sheets tangled around his legs. Connor lay like a dead man minus the chalk outline, arms and legs in a whorish sprawl. Abby was curled in a foetal ball, her knees up by her chin. Blaine and Lucas were already up. He listened to them goading each other on through a series of reps, crunches, curls and press-ups, after which they moved to the veranda, where they sat talking about nothing, their voices muted by the thin walls.
He had no idea where Chaplin was, nor Jenny for that matter.
They had a busy day ahead of them. He wanted to check out the tracks and the temple if at all possible. The answers were there, rather like so many of the Inca ruins Nando had described, hidden in plain sight, just waiting to be found.
He got out of bed and stretched, working the kinks out of his muscles. The mattress was old and thin and his lower back ached viciously. Still, a bed was a bed, and given the circumstances, any mattress was better than sleeping on a strip of carry-mat.
He dressed quickly, doing his best not to wake the others. He had no idea what the time was; the sun rose around four-thirty in the morning, and it had been up since before he had opened his eyes, so he guessed that it could have been anywhere between five and seven-thirty a.m.
In other words, time to make tracks.
He took a water flask from his backpack and swallowed a few mouthfuls of almost-hot liquid. Opening the cabin door, he took another mouthful, gargled and spat.
“Morning, Prof.,” Sean Lucas said, without turning. Cutter had been about to ask him how the hell he knew who it was, when he saw his own reflection in the silver of the soldier’s broad-bladed knife.
“Morning, Lucas. Have you seen our Mr Chaplin?”
“About twenty minutes ago. Said he was going to get some grub.”
“Sleep well?” Andy Blaine asked. Blaine, he saw, was stripped to the waist and sheathed in sweat. The man was all tightly coiled muscle. His back was heavily tattooed with Celtic imagery, crosses within one huge endless knot that spanned his shoulder blades and went all the way down to the hollow of his coccyx.
“About as well as can be expected,” Cutter replied.
Behind him, Connor yawned theatrically, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as he stood and wandered out into the daylight. He took one look around him, muttered, “I feel like I’ve woken up in an episode of Lost.” Then he wandered back into the more subdued semi-dark of the cabin.
Cutter stuck his head back inside and half-shouted: “Rise and sunshine, my lovelies.”
The noise earned him a lot of groans, a few moans, and a disgruntled roll-over and sigh.
“We’re leaving in twenty minutes,” he continued mercilessly. “It’s up to you whether you choose to sleep them away, or get something to eat, but if you pass out from dehydration, I’ll not be carrying you.”
More groans, a bit more theatrical this time.
Stephen sat up, his hair plastered flat to his scalp. His stubble had grown through thickly and was almost wild enough to be called a beard. Cutter rubbed his own chin. There was no ‘almost’ in it in his case.
“Nineteen minutes,” he said ominously. Then he left them to it, and went in search of food.
Nando had set the table. It was nothing fancy — some cut meat, hard bread and butter, with fruit juice — but they had eaten a lot worse. Jenny, looking fresh and alert despite a hot uncomfortable night’s sleep, was already there, along with a dishevelled-looking Chaplin, who was wearing the same sweat-stained shirt as the day before. Black rings circled his eyes. The embassy man — he didn’t really know what Chaplin was. Not a bureaucrat per se, ex-military almost certainly. Perhaps special forces or MI6. Regardless, he hadn’t slept, and he had taken on the aspect of a haunted man.
Cutter had wanted to send him back to whatever hole he had crawled out of, but Chaplin had remained insistent that he wasn’t going home until they had recovered Jaime’s bones. He had his orders, he maintained. Cutter didn’t like the man, but he also didn’t have a great deal of choice in the matter. Sir Charles had tied his hands, so he reluctantly agreed that Chaplin would remain with the expedition.
They would just have to be very careful what they said around him.
“Do you think we can find the remains?” Chaplin asked anxiously as Cutter sat.
What did he want him to reply? To lie blithely and say, “Yes, of course,” or to tell the truth and say, “Not a prayer.” Cutter took a slice of the hard bread and smeared butter across it. One advantage of the ridiculous heat and humidi
ty was that it spread like melted margarine.
“We’ll try,” he said. It was the best he could offer without making a liar of himself.
Lucas and Blaine joined them. The stragglers came through while they ate, and for a while at least there was an air of normality about the table, as though they had managed to forget where they were, and why.
“This place really is in the middle of nowhere,” Connor said, scratching at his scalp.
“My people have a saying,” Nando told him, planting his elbows on the table, “with one little step after another we find we have travelled far.” He looked every inch the superstitious tribesman with his shirtsleeves rolled up his forearms to reveal intricate tattoos. The black ink formed the face of a movie star on his left arm, caught in her familiar ooh-boo-be-do pose, and on the right arm there appeared to be some sort of sun or super nova, surrounded by mystical symbols that looked as if they had been culled from the Cabala and other ancient texts.
“We’re talking about a lot of little steps here, Nando,” Connor said.
“One or two,” the Peruvian agreed.
“So, Nando,” Cutter said, “how are we going to do this today?”
“Genaro Valdez, one of my rangers here, will travel with us out to the site so that you and your team can examine the tracks for yourselves. I have made arrangements for a local guide to join us later at the site of the temple, so that he can fill you all in on the legends and history of the place. He is a well-known and respected historian from the university at Trujillo, an expert in the Inca culture and the significance of their holy sites.”
“Thank you,” Cutter said. “That should be most enlightening.” Inwardly he worried what might happen, should so many civilians witness an anomaly, but he decided to cross that bridge when they came to it.
“It will involve a lot of walking today, I am afraid,” Nando apologised, “since the temple is very much off the beaten track. We cannot get a car any closer than about ten miles. Little steps.”
“Ten miles?” Connor echoed plaintively, the exhaustion of every one of those little steps wrought in his voice. “Are you trying to kill me? A gun would be easier, you know? Less painful.”
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