Treasure of Lima

by Alex Archer

  Without prompting, Marcos left the path they’d been following and headed for the pyramid, using his machete to cut a path through the undergrowth. At the rate he was going, it would only take him a few minutes to reach the base of the structure.

  Eagerly, Annja followed.

  As they drew closer, they could see that the pyramid rested on a small shelflike plateau that jutted out from the side of the mountain. Vegetation grew over much of the structure, though to Annja’s trained eye it didn’t have the haphazardness of wild growth but seemed to follow specific lines and contours. She tried to imagine what it would look like when viewed from above and realized that the structure would probably be nearly invisible from the air, so cloaked was it in a sea of green.

  A sudden thought occurred to her.

  Was the structure still being used?

  She hurried forward, eager to find out.

  They made it to the base of the pyramid without incident and started up the stairs toward the temple on top. They hadn’t gone far before Annja slowed, then stopped. She turned and looked out over the jungle around them, searching for...she wasn’t sure what, actually.

  She didn’t see anyone lurking in the trees or hiding along the rocks of the ridge. On the contrary, it looked as if they were the only human beings to have come this way in centuries. And yet the feeling remained.

  That feeling of being watched.

  “Everything okay?” Hugo asked, and Annja noticed him standing close, his gun in hand, his gaze fixed on the jungle, as well.

  She hesitated, her eyes still scanning the trees around them, but eventually she said, “Yeah. It was nothing, I guess. Just nerves.”

  “Happens to the best of us,” Hugo said, but he didn’t look any more confident than Annja felt.

  The two of them had just turned to continue up the stairwell when a scream split the afternoon air, startling them both.

  It was shockingly loud and it hit them at a visceral level, making their guts tighten and their skin crawl. Hugo spun around so quickly that his foot slipped off the step. If Annja hadn’t reached out with lightning-quick reflexes and caught him, he would have fallen.

  “Easy there,” she told him, helping him back to his feet and then continuing with him up the next several steps until they reached the others.

  “What the heck was that?” Marcos wanted to know, his gaze still on the jungle below and beside them.

  Before Annja could answer, it came again—a howling scream that sounded as if something had just been shoved into a buzz saw. Almost as one, the four of them dropped down, instinctively trying to make themselves as small a target as possible.

  That time, however, after a moment’s reflection, Annja recognized the sound and laughed in relief when she did.

  She stood up. “It’s okay,” she said to them. “It’s okay. It’s a jaguar.”

  Hugo disagreed. “That was no cat, Annja.”

  The absolute conviction in his voice made Annja want to argue, but she knew it would be the wrong thing to do then. Instead, she put her hand on his arm, trying to get him to lower his gun and calm down.

  “Have you ever heard a jaguar scream, Hugo?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know that wasn’t a jaguar?”

  He glanced at her, doubt settling into his features. Annja was about to say something soothing when movement below them caught her eye and instead she pointed over his shoulder.

  “See? What did I tell you?”

  A large cat, most likely the one who had just been making the cries they’d heard, wandered out of the undergrowth and stared up at them from the edge of the brush. Unlike the cat she’d faced off against the other day, this one was a rare specimen, its fur a smoky black instead of orange, giving its spots an oddly hypnotic effect if you stared at them too long. Its yellow eyes followed the group, but it made no move to advance, just settled down beneath an overhanging palm frond and watched them with lazy interest.

  “Good kitty,” Hugo mumbled beneath his breath.

  Annja would have laughed if she hadn’t noticed Marcos lining up his rifle to take a shot at the big cat.

  She leaped up the two steps that separated them and knocked the barrel of the rifle up and away in the split second before Marcos pulled the trigger.

  The shot went wide and the sound echoed off the mountainside for several long seconds.

  Before Marcos could react to her interference, Annja snatched the rifle out of his hands.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she said, avoiding shouting in his face only by the thinnest of margins. “Announce our presence to everyone within half a mile, why don’t you?”

  Marcos barely heard her. His attention was still on the jaguar, which, oddly enough, hadn’t moved an inch. “Give me that gun!” he told her, trying to grab it from her as he did so. “I’m going to take care of that cat....”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Annja said, and the steel in her voice got his attention. She watched him take in the fact that she’d changed her hold on the weapon and was standing there before him with one hand near the trigger and the other around the forestock. It was a position that would let her bring the weapon to bear quite easily if she chose to do so.

  “That cat isn’t bothering you, and you’re going to leave it alone even if I have to break your fingers for you to get the message.”

  Marcos sneered. “You go right ahead and give it a try.”

  That made Annja smile. “Hold this for me please, Claire,” she said, extending the rifle toward the other woman, her gaze never leaving Marcos’s own.

  The fact that she was so clearly unintimidated by him gave Marcos pause and he glanced at Claire in confusion before taking a step backward.

  Annja was about to move in, fully prepared to prove her point and not liking the big guy all that much, anyway, when Claire slipped between them.

  “All right, that’s enough. Stop acting like children and let’s focus on what we are here for. My husband is still missing, remember?”

  With a last glance at the jaguar, which still hadn’t moved from its spot in the shade, Annja continued up the stone steps toward the temple at the top of the pyramid.

  * * *

  THE TEMPLE WAS GORGEOUS.

  It was simple—there was no other adjective that so encompassed the condition of the place to Annja. She’d seen her fair share of ancient ruins and architecture, but she’d never seen a building from an ancient culture the way it was meant to be viewed, with all the vibrancy and color of the time in which it had been settled. This particular structure looked as if it had been built yesterday.

  Lining the entire interior of the temple, starting at about ankle height and rising to eye level, was a glorious full-color mural. It showed scenes from Incan mythology, from the creator god Virachoca bringing the world into being and pulling the sun and moon from the waters of Lake Titicaca, to the transformation of a flirtatious woman who was cut in half by jealous lovers into the goddess of health and beauty, Cocomama. Image after image splayed out along the walls, all of them done in exquisite detail, the likes of which Annja had never seen.

  The centerpiece of the temple was a twice-life-size statue of the sun god, Inti, the second most powerful god in the entire Incan pantheon, subordinate only to Virachoca himself. Inti was usually represented by a humanoid figure sitting crossed-legged with his hands in his lap. The top half of his head was a vast array of sunbeams, extending outward like an unfurled ladies’ hand fan.

  That alone should have been enough to keep an archaeologist like Annja in heaven for weeks, but the fact that the entire statue was made from gold sent the treasure-hunter side of her reeling, as well.

  The value of such a piece was incalculable.

  Marcos gave a low whistle when he saw it, and it did the one
thing none of the others thought was possible: it struck him dumb at the site. All he could do for several minutes was stand and stare.

  Annja didn’t blame him.

  As she turned away, intending to look at other parts of the temple, she spotted something on the floor behind the statue. Stepping over to investigate, she found a tan fedora, very similar to the ones that she’d seen Dr. Knowles wearing in pictures taken at his various dig sites. When she bent to pick it up, she discovered a satellite phone underneath it.

  “That’s Richard’s hat!”

  Annja stood as Claire rushed over and grabbed both the hat and the phone. Claire immediately tried to turn the satellite phone on, only to discover that the battery was dead. Still, both items were proof that they were still going in the right direction.

  They didn’t seem like the kind of objects one would simply forget, so Annja guessed that Knowles had left them behind intentionally, just like the marks he’d made along the trail. Dr. Knowles was trying to tell anyone coming after him that he was still alive and kicking.

  Or, at least, he had been recently.

  “Hey, come take a look at this,” Hugo called from the other side of the statue, and the group joined him near the back wall. The mural Annja had been examining continued here, but now it was different. Where the earlier scenes had been images captured from Incan mythology, these pictures chronicled events a bit more recent than that. In the image Marcos was pointing at, there was the unmistakable picture of a sailing ship with three masts that sailed into port and deposited three groups of people on the beach before continuing on their journey. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that they were looking at a picture of the Reliant.

  Later scenes showed the Incas attacking the ship, leaving the captain for dead and herding the captives into the jungle. What seemed to be a long march followed, with the captives ultimately ending up in what Annja thought appeared remarkably like an Incan city.

  They moved “down” the mural a few feet, their eyes widening at the number of ships and expeditions to the island that were cataloged in the images on the walls. The pictures of the ships progressed from sailing vessels to more modern-looking motor yachts, including two that Annja would have sworn were the Sea Dancer and the Neptune’s Pride.

  There were several images of Dr. Knowles’s expedition, identified by the cave full of treasure drawn nearby. Like the crew from Jeffries’s Reliant, it seemed that Knowles and his people had been captured and taken to the temple as well, if the images were to be believed.

  Now all they needed to do was find this Incan city and they should find Knowles and his team. And if there was one thing that Annja was good at, it was finding things that other people didn’t want found. Ancient or modern, it didn’t matter—she had the skills and capability to track them down if given enough time.

  The very last image in the mural was chilling, though, for it showed an individual who could only be Marcos being taken from his tent in the midst of their camp and strung up in the tree while a jaguar sat patiently at his feet.

  Well, we foiled that plan, Annja thought. Guess they will need to have the artist do some touch-ups by the time we’re done.

  She was poring over the images, trying to find some clue as to the whereabouts of the Incan city, when the jaguar outside let out another scream.

  This time, however, the cat was answered by another.

  Annja knew it was two different beasts; the second call had a deeper timbre than the first.

  She would have passed it off as two unfriendly cats hunting the same source of food if it had stopped there.

  But it didn’t.

  The first and second calls were answered by a third.

  And then a fourth.

  Four jaguars in the same place?

  That didn’t make any kind of sense at all. Curious, she stepped over to the door they’d entered through and looked down to where the jaguar had been sitting in the shade when they’d entered the pyramid half an hour ago.

  The cat was still there.

  But a new cat sat at each of the other cardinal points of the compass, guarding the steps down from the pyramid.

  The activity was too human to be anything but trained.

  Even as she looked on, she saw figures moving through the trees, converging on the pyramid. Most likely brought there by Marcos’s rifle shot earlier.

  “We’ve got company!” Annja called.

  The others rushed over to join her.

  By then the figures had revealed themselves to be a hunting party of about fifteen men. All of them were dressed in lightweight tunics and pants made from local materials and decorated with colorful thread arranged in geometric patterns.

  Annja had seen clothes just like these before on the Incan warriors in her dream the other night.

  It seems their adversaries had finally chosen to reveal themselves.

  Armed warriors and trained hunting cats.

  Perfect.

  29

  Slopes of Mount Yglesias

  Cocos Island

  Incan warriors. Here, on Cocos Island.

  Annja was having trouble wrapping her head around the idea. One side of her was saying, Yes, of course it’s the Inca. Who else did you expect it to be? while the other half was telling her how ridiculous it was to even think that the men at the foot of the pyramid were members of a civilization that had disappeared in the sixteenth century.

  She might still be standing there staring if Hugo hadn’t brought his rifle up to his shoulder and aimed it down the slope of the pyramid at the newcomers below. Claire followed suit seconds later. The sudden motion broke her mental paralysis and focused her on the problem at hand.

  She reached out and put a hand on Hugo’s arm while, below them, the Incan warriors reacted in predictable fashion, bringing their weapons—blowguns, bows and arrows, and long, metal-tipped spears—to bear on the four of them atop the pyramid.

  “That might not be a good idea,” Annja said to Hugo gently, not wanting to spook him into accidentally pulling the trigger. She hoped that Claire was listening.

  “Why not?” Hugo snarled at her, without taking his gaze away from the warriors below.

  Annja kept her voice calm. “Because they’ll turn you into a human pincushion full of darts and arrows before you could even get off a second shot. And that’s if the cats don’t get you first.”

  As if on cue, the cats had risen to their feet and were leaning forward, lips drawn back from their teeth and their tails twitching behind them as they stared unblinkingly at the threat above. One of them let out a snarling cry that gave no doubt as to its intentions.

  “What do you want us to do? Surrender?” Hugo hissed at her, suddenly afraid to raise his voice.

  “If you want to live to see tomorrow, then yes. We can’t escape if we’re dead.”

  One of the warriors stepped forward and shouted up at them, gesturing at the same time. Annja didn’t understand a word, but the gist of it seemed plain enough.

  Drop your weapons and come down here.

  Sounded like a quick way to get themselves killed, but really, what choice did they have? They were cornered like rats, with nowhere to go. All the warriors had to do was sit there until Annja and her companions were too weak from the lack of food and water to resist, then climb the steps and take them captive, anyway. Annja didn’t see the point in going through all of that just to end up at the same place. Better to be seen as cooperating, which might gain them some mercy at a crucial time, than fighting and generating more ill will than they’d apparently already gained.

  The warrior repeated himself, this time a bit more sharply.

  “He wants us to drop our weapons,” Marcos said from where he stood on the other side of Claire.

  Annja glanced his way, ready with a qu
ick retort about stating the obvious, when she saw the expression on his face—surprise, wonder, amazement, confusion, all rolled up in one.

  “What?” she asked sharply, concerned.

  But she needn’t have worried.

  “The language. I recognize it,” Marcos said. “Or at least some of it.”

  Claire stared at him.

  “You do?”

  Marcos nodded. “It’s Quechua. Or close enough to it that I can get the gist of it.”

  Quechua was one of the indigenous languages of South America, spoken by nearly eight million people throughout the nations of Bolivia, Ecuador, Columbia, Peru, Chile and Argentina.

  It was also the main language of the Incan Empire throughout most of its history.

  It all seemed so obvious in hindsight, but then again, that was why they said hindsight was twenty-twenty. Hard not to see the connections when you already knew the answers.

  Beside her, Claire said, “Annja’s right. Do what she says, Hugo.”

  Hugo grumbled beneath his breath, but complied.

  Annja and Marcos raised their hands over their heads. Claire and Hugo lowered their weapons, slowly put them down on the ground by their feet and then did the same.

  The leader of the warriors, the one who Annja decided to privately call Cuzco after the capital city of the Incas, shouted something else up to them and then gestured for them to come down.

  Annja didn’t need Marcos to translate that one.

  “What do we do?” Claire asked.

  “Unless you’ve got a full case of jaguar repellent hiding in your shorts somewhere, I’d do what the man says,” Annja said laconically. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”