Temple

ARMED FORCES MEMBERS

1 SCOTT, Dwayne T—United States Army (GB), Captain

2 VAN LEWEN, Leonardo M—United States Army (GB), Sergeant

3 COCHRANE, Jacob R—United States Army (GB), Corporal

4 REICHART, George P—United States Army (GB), Corporal

5 WILSON, Charles T—United States Army (GB), Corporal

6 KENNEDY, Douglas K—United States Army (GB), Corporal

He turned the page and saw a photocopy of a newspaper. The headline was in French: MASSACRES DES MOINES DU HAUL DELA MONTAGNE. Translated. ‘Monks massacred in mountaintop monastery. He read the article. It was dated 3 January 1999—yesterday-it was about a group of Jesuit monks who had been slaughtered inside their monastery high up in the Pyrenees.

French authorities believed it to be the work of Islamic militants protesting against French interference in Algeria.

Eighteen monks in all had been killed, all of them at close quarters in the same manner as in previous slayings.

Race turned to the next item in the folder. It was another newspaper clipping, this one from the Los Angeles Times. It was dated late last year and the headline

FEDERAL OFFICIALS FOUND MURDERED IN ROCKIES.

It said that two members of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had been found murdered in the mountains north of Montana. Both officials had been skinned. The FBI been called in. They suspected that it was the work of of the local militia groups who seemed to have a natural enmity toward any sort of Federal agency. It was thought that two Wildlife officials had stumbled upon some militiamen hunting illegal game for heir pelts. Instead of skinning the game the militiamen had skinned the rangers. Race winced, turned the page. The next sheet in the folder was a photocopy of an article from a university journal of some kind. The article was in German and it was written by a scientist named Albert L. Mueller. It was dated November 1998. Race scanned the article, rapidly translating the German in his head. It was something about a meteor crater that had been found in the jungles of Peru.

Underneath the article on the meteor crater was a police pathologist’s report, also written in German. In the box marked ‘NAME OF DECEASED’ were the words ‘ALBERT LUDWIG MUELLER’.

Beneath the pathologist’s report were some more sheets of paper, all covered with various red stamps Top SECRET; EYES ONLY; U.S. ARMY PERSONNEL EYES ONLY. Race flicked through them. Mostly, the sheets were filled with complex mathematical equations which meant nothing to him. Next, he saw a handful of memos, nearly all of them addressed to people he’d never heard of. On one of the memos, however, he saw his own name. It read:

3 JAN 1999 22:01 US ARMY INTERNAL NET 617 5544 8821105 NO.139 From: Nash, Frank To: All Cuzco Team Members Subject: SUPERNOVA MISSION Contact to be made with Race ASAP. Participation crucial to success of mission. Expect package to arrive tomorrow 4 January at Newark at 0945. All members to have equipment stowed on the transport by 0900.

The motorcade arrived at Newark airport. The long line of cars raced through a gate in the cyclone fence and quickly made its way to a private airstrip.

An enormous camouflaged cargo plane stood on the tarmac waiting for them. At the rear of the plane, a cargo ramp was lowered so that it touched the ground. As the motorcade pulled to a stop alongside the massive aircraft, Race saw a large Army truck being driven up the ramp into the rear of the plane.

Led by Sergeant Van Lewen, he stepped out of the Humvee, into the rain. No sooner had he emerged from the big black vehicle, however, that he heard a monstrous roar from somewhere high above him.

An old F-15C Eagle—painted in green and brown camouflage colours and with the word ‘ARMY’ emblazoned on its tail—came roaring in overhead and screeched to a landing on the wet tarmac in front of them.

As Race watched the fighter plane wheel around on the and taxi back in his direction, he felt Frank Nash grab him gently by the arm.

‘Come on,’ Nash said, leading him toward the big cargo ‘Everyone else is already on board.’

As they approached the cargo plane, Race saw a woman appear in a doorway on its side. He recognised her instantly.

‘Hey, Will,’ Lauren O’Connor said.

‘Hello, Lauren.’

Lauren O’Connor was in her early thirties, but she didn’t look a day older than twenty-five. She’d cut her hair, Race saw. Back at USE, it had been long, wavy and brown. Now it was short, straight and auburn.

Very late nineties.

Her big brown eyes were still the same, though, as was her fresh clear skin. And standing there in the doorway to the big cargo plane—leaning casually against the frame with her arms folded and her hips cocked, dressed in heavy-duty khaki hiking gear—she looked the way she had always looked. Tall and sexy, lithe and athletic.

‘It’s been a long time,’ she said, smiling.

‘Yes, it has,’ Race said.

‘So. William Race. Expert linguist. Consultant to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. You still play ball, Will?’

‘Just socially,’ Race said. Back in college, he’d lettered in football.

He’d been the smallest guy on the team, but also the fastest. He’d lettered in track too.

‘How about you?’ he said, noticing for the first time the ring on her left hand. He wondered who she’d married.

‘Well, for one thing,’ she said, her eyes lighting up, ‘I’m very excited about this mission. It’s not every day you get to go on a treasure hunt.’

“Is that what this is?’

Before Lauren could answer, a loud whining sound made both of them turn.

The F-15 had pulled to a halt about fifty yards from the cargo plane and no sooner was its canopy open than the pilot was leaping down onto the wet tarmac beneath it and running toward them, hunched over in the drenching rain. He carried a briefcase in his hand.

The pilot came up to Nash, handed him the briefcase.

‘Doctor Nash,’ he said. ‘The manuscript.’

Nash took the briefcase and strode over to where Lauren and Race were standing.

‘All right,’ he said, ushering them inside the cargo plane.

‘Time to get this show on the road.’

The giant cargo plane thundered down the runway and off into the rain soaked sky.

It was a Lockheed C-130E Hercules and the interior was divided into two sections—the downstairs cargo hold and the upstairs passenger compartment. Race sat in the upstairs section with the five other scientists going along on the expedition. The six Green Berets accompanying them were down in the cargo hold, stowing and checking their weapons.

Of the five civilians, Race knew two: Frank Nash and Lauren O’Connor.

‘We’ll have time for introductions later,’ Nash said, sit-ring down next to Race and hauling the briefcase onto his lap. ‘What’s important right now is that we set you to work.’

He began unclasping the buckles on the briefcase.

‘Can you tell me where we’re going now?’ Race asked.

‘Oh yes, of course,’ Nash said. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before, but your office just wasn’t secure. The windows could have been lased.’

‘Lased?’

‘With a laser-guided listening device. When we speak inside an office like yours, our voices actually make the windows vibrate. Most modern office towers are equipped to deal with directional listening devices—they have electronic jamming signals running through the glass in their windows. Older buildings like yours don’t. It would have been way too easy for someone to listen in.’

‘So where are we going?’

‘Cuzco, Peru-capital of the Incan empire before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532,’ Nash said. ‘Now it’s just a large country town, a few Incan ruins, big tourist attraction, so they tell me. We’ll be travelling non-stop, with a couple of mid-air refuellings on the way.’

He opened the briefcase and extracted something from it.

It was a stack of paper—a loose pile of A3 sheets, maybe forty pages in total. Race saw the top sheet. It was a Xerox of an illustrated cover sheet.

It was the manuscript Nash had spoken about earlier, or at least a photocopy of it.

Nash handed the stack of paper over to Race and smiled.

‘This is why you are here.’

Race took the pile from him, flipped over the cover sheet.

Now, Race had seen medieval manuscripts before—manuscripts painstakingly reproduced by hand by devoted monks in the Middle Ages, back in the days before the printing press. Such manuscripts were characterised by an almost impossible intricacy of design and penmanship: perfect calligraphy-including wonderfully elaborate leading marks (the single letter that starts a new chapter)—and detailed pictographs in the margins that were designed to convey the mood of the work. Sunny and gay for pleasing books; dark and frightening for more sombre tales. Such was the detail, it was said that a monk could spend his entire life reproducing a single manuscript.

But the manuscript that Race saw now even in blackand-white photocopied form—was like nothing he had ever seen.

It was magnificent.

He flicked through the pages.

The handwriting was superb, precise, intricate, and the side margins were filled with drawings of gnarled snaking vines. Strange stone structures, covered in moss and shadow, occupied the bottom corners of each page. The overall effect was one of darkness and foreboding, of brooding malevolence.

Race flicked back to the cover page. It read:

NAF,AT/O VERI/ PRIESTO IN RUR/$/NCAR//$: OPERIS ALBERTO

LIJ/S SANTIAGO ANNO DO.MIN/MDLXV

Race translated. The true relation of a monk in the land of the A manuscript by Alberto Luis Santiago. It was dated. Race turned to face Nash, ‘All right. I think it’s about time you told me what this mission of yours is all about.’

Nash explained.

Brother Alberto Santiago had been a young Franciscan missionary sent to Peru. in 1532 to work alongside the conquistadors. While the conquistadors raped and pillaged the countryside, monks like Santiago were expected to convert the Incan natives to the wisdom of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Although it was written in 1565, well after Santiago’s eventual return to Europe,’ Nash said, ‘it is said that the Santiago Manuscript recounts an incident that occurred around 1535, during the conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors. According to medieval monks who claimed to have read it, the manuscript recounts a rather amazing tale: that of Hernando Pizarro’s dogged pursuit of an Incan prince who, during the height of the siege of Cuzco, spirited the Incas’ most venerated idol out of the walled city and fled with it into the jungles of eastern Peru.’

Nash swivelled in his seat. ‘Walter,’ he said, nodding to the bespectacled, balding man sitting on the other side of the centre aisle, ‘help me out here. I’m telling Professor Race about the idol.” Walter Chambers got up from his seat and sat down opposite Race.

Chambers was a mousy little man, three-quarters bald and bookish, the kind of guy who’d wear a bow tie to work.

‘William Race. Walter Chambers,’ Nash said. ‘Walter’s an anthropologist from Stanford. Expert on Central and South American cultures—Mayans, Aztecs, Olmecs and, especially, the Incas.’

Chambers smiled. ‘So you want to know about the idol?’

‘It would seem so,’ Race said.

‘The Incas called it “the Spirit of the People”,’ Chambers said. ‘It was a stone idol, but one that was carved out of a strange kind of stone, a shiny black stone that had very fine veins of purple running through it.

‘It was the Incan people’s most prized possession. Indeed, they saw it as their very heart and soul. And when I say that, I mean it literally.

They saw the Spirit of the People as more than a mere symbol of their power. They saw it as the actual, literal, source of that power. And indeed, there were stories about its magical powers—how it could calm the most vicious of animals, or how, when dipped in water, the idol would sing.’

‘Sing?’ Race said.

‘That’s right,’ Chambers said, ‘sing.’

‘O-kay. So what does this idol look like.’

‘The idol’s actual appearance has been described in many places, including the two most comprehensive works on the conquest of Peru, J6rez’s Relaci6n and de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries. But descriptions vary. Some say it was a foot high, others only six inches; some say it was beautifully carved and smooth to the touch, others say it had rough, sharp edges. One feature, however, is common to all descriptions of the idol—the Spirit of the People was carved in the shape of a snarling jaguar’s head.’

Chambers leaned forward in his seat. ‘From the moment he heard about that idol, Hernando Pizarro wanted it. And all the more so after the attendants at the idol’s shrine at Pachacimac whisked it away from under his nose. See, Hernando Pizarro was probably the most ruthless of all the Pizarro brothers to come to Peru. I imagine today we would call him a psychopath. According to some reports, he would torture whole villages on a whim—just for the sport it. And his hunt for the idol became an obsession. Village, town after town wherever he went he demanded to know the location of the idol. But no matter many natives he tortured, no matter how many villages he burned, the Incas wouldn’t tell him where their idol was. ‘But then—somehow—in 1535 Hernando discovered the idol was being kept. It was being kept inside a stone vault inside the Coricancha, the famous Temple of the Sun, situated in the centre of the besieged city of Cuzco. ‘Unfortunately for Hernando, he got to Cuzco just in time to see a young Incan prince named Renco Capac make off with the idol in a daring ride through the Spanish and Incan lines. According to those medieval monks who read it, the Santiago Manuscript details Hernando’s pursuit of Renco following the young prince’s escape from Cuzco—a dazzling chase that wound its way through the Andes and out into the Amazon rainforest.’

‘What the manuscript also allegedly does,’ Nash said, ‘is reveal the final resting place of the Spirit of the People.’

So they were after the idol, Race thought.

He didn’t say anything, though. Mainly, because it just didn’t make sense.

Why was the U.S. Army sending a team of nuclear physicists down to South America to find a lost Incan idol? And on the basis of a four-hundred-year-old Latin manuscript.

They might as well have been following a pirate’s treasure map.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Nash said. ‘If someone had told me this same story a week ago, I’d have thought about it the same way you do. But then, up until a couple of weeks ago, nobody even knew where the Santiago Manu script was.’

‘But now you have it,’ Race said.

‘No,’ Nash said sharply. ‘We have a copy of it. Somebody 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 favoured 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 on to 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 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, organised 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 Ger man 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 south-eastern 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 sometime 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 trance samples of a substance known as thyrium261.’

‘Thyrium261?’ 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 centre aisle from the cockpit. Copeland was a tall man, lean, with a thin, hawk-like 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 humourless 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 short hand for 3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, Virginia. DARPA headquarters.

‘About?’ Nash said.

Copeland took a deep breath. ‘There was a breakin 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 breakin at DARPA 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 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: MELIS NOMINI EST ALBERTO LIIIS SANTIAGO ET ILLG EST MELIN! He translated. My name is Alberto Luis Santiago and this is my story…