The Nemesis Origin

XXV

‘This is it.’

The museum was a blocky, modern construction that loomed out of the darkness as Ethan, Lucy and Lopez strolled along the damp pavement towards it. The road beside them was filled with commuter traffic, rivers of headlights illuminating the drizzle falling from the dark and sullen sky above. The warm glow of the museum’s interior ahead seemed unusually inviting as they hurried toward it.

‘It’s one of several of Berlin’s national museums, and reputed to hold the largest collection of quipu anywhere on earth,’ Lucy said as they began climbing the steps towards the entrance.

The museum was located in the Dahlem neighbourhood of the borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, and shared a building with the Museum fur Asiatiche Kunst and the Museum Europaischer Kulturen. Ethan had never visited Berlin before, and was feeling somewhat disorientated by their rapid transit from country to country.

Lucy Morgan had, with Dr El-Wari’s help, been able to secure their passage out of Egypt to Berlin via a chartered flight, their passage smoothed by Dr El-Wari’s credentials. Once again Ethan had been reluctant to use normal passenger aircraft, but with Arnie and the Catalina having flown out of Cairo barely an hour after landing and refuelling, there was no other way to get to Berlin in a reasonable amount of time.

‘How will we know which one we’re looking for?’ Ethan asked as they stepped inside the museum. ‘We don’t want to be hanging about here too long.’

‘We’ll have to sort through them,’ Lucy admitted as she led the way. Numerous tourists were milling through the collections, so Lucy kept her voice low she replied. ‘One way or the other, we have to find the quipu before the Russians close in on us again. They’re not stupid, and if they’re following what we’re doing now they might attempt to decipher the clues themselves and get ahead of us. I don’t really want an armed party waiting for us on the other side of the Atlantic.’

‘You may not have to worry about that if we’re arrested here in Berlin,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘I’m guessing that most of these exhibits are alarmed, and I can see already that most of them are also behind locked glass cabinets.’

The museum was filled with an exotic array of artefacts gathered by German explorers over centuries from around the world. Full-size replicas of Amerindian shelters stood alongside rows of glass cabinets containing figurines and carvings from a dizzying array of cultures and civilizations stretching back through to prehistory. Ethan glanced this way and that at the elaborate displays as he followed Lucy towards a separate room that contained South American artefacts.

‘We not going to be able to just pop one of these cabinets,’ he observed as he saw the heavy duty locks guarding each of them, much like a jewellery shop. ‘What’s your plan?’

‘I’ve been working on that,’ Lucy replied mysteriously as she led the way into the South American exhibit.

The exhibit was slightly darker than many of the others, the lighting softer as though to enhance the sense of mystery around the iconic civilizations that had long been lost to the Spanish invasions and time itself. Images of great Maya, Inca and Aztec strongholds dominated the walls, while cabinets stood in rows between the great images and were filled with countless artefacts, everything from shawls and sandals to solid gold carvings and masks with grotesque expressions that reflected the light in moving shadows as though alive.

Along each wall were a series of lower glass-fronted cabinets that contained exhibits at waist height, and among them were multiple rows of quipu. Lucy Morgan fished out the pictures of the engravings from both Cambodia and Japan and held them in one hand as she began methodically moving from left to right down the cabinets.

‘This could take a real long time,’ Lopez whispered to Ethan. ‘We’ve got to assume that whoever is following us knows that we landed in Berlin.’

‘We had no choice but to take a scheduled flight,’ Ethan replied. ‘The Catalina would never have got us here quickly enough and besides, I think Arnie would suffered a coronary if we’d asked him to fly us to Berlin.’

‘Do you think the Russians know what we’re looking for here?’

Ethan shook his head as he watched Lucy making her way down the row of display cabinets, one finger gently drifting across the surface of the glass.

‘Hell, even I don’t know what we’re really looking for here. I would have thought that a photograph would have sufficed, but Lucy couldn’t find one on-line and she says that these quipu are too detailed to decipher by imagery alone.’

Lucy let out a small grasp of excitement and one hand flew to her lips as she looked over her shoulder at Ethan and beckoned him to join her. Lopez followed with a disinterested look on her face as Ethan wandered across to Lucy’s side and looked down. She pointed excitedly at one of the quipu before her and Ethan raised an eyebrow in surprise as she laid the photograph down on the glass either side of the artefact.

‘It’s a perfect match,’ Lucy whispered, her eyes shining with delight. ‘This is the one.’

‘Smashing,’ Lopez murmured wearily, ‘why don’t we we just take a photograph of it and make our way out of here?’

‘That won’t be good enough,’ Lucy insisted. ‘That’s not the way quipu work. The Inca did not have a means of writing down language in the sense that we do, so instead they used quipu to record numerical information by using differing lengths of cord and differing numbers of knots in each of those chords.’

‘And you need the original piece to count the chords in each of the lines,’ Ethan said as he looked down at the quipu.

‘Exactly,’ Lucy agreed. ‘A quipu is made of cotton or camelid wool string in a two-dimensional array. The primary cord supports up to a hundred pendents. The pendents can bear subsidiary cords, which themselves can have subsidiaries, and so on, up to six levels in some instances. There may also be a set of top cords, attached so as to lie most naturally on the opposite side from the pendants. The pendents, subsidiaries and top cords each carry a sequence of knots, which record information.’

‘And you can read them?’ Lopez asked.

‘Kind of,’ Lucy replied less certainly. ‘In a canonical numerical quipu, each pendent or subsidiary displays a number: a positive integer, expressed in decimal notation. A “One” is represented by a figure-eight knot, figures two-to-nine by the corresponding long knot, and tens appear one level higher. Ten is represented by a single overhand knot on that level, twenty by a cluster of two overhand knots and…’

‘Yeah, we get the picture,’ Lopez cut her off. ‘Let’s just get the damned thing and you can count in your head okay?’

‘If we leave it here then the Russians will simply record the same information,’ Lucy said to Ethan. ‘There are plenty of experts in South America they can hire who are capable of reading quipu and deciphering what the message within it means. We’ll be no better off than if we just sat here waiting to be caught.’

‘How do we get that out of there without smashing the cabinet to pieces?’ Ethan asked as he began looking for a fire extinguisher or something to hit it with.

‘We ask, nicely,’ Lucy replied.

She turned and strode across to one of the curators, and Ethan watched as they conversed for several moments before the curator finally nodded and hurried off. Lucy strolled casually back to Ethan’s side, a knowing smile on her face.

‘This is how work is done in the academic world,’ she said. ‘We cooperate.’

‘He’s going to let you handle that thing?’ Lopez asked.

‘We won’t be able to touch it, but he’s going to take it out of the cabinet to an examination room where we can study it more closely.’

‘Can you figure out what it says?’ Ethan asked.

‘If you’re asking me whether I can read a quipu, then yes I can read it. It is whether it will tell me what we need to know that is important, and how long it will take me to do so. Reading these things is a bit of a fine art.’

The curator returned and opened the glass cabinet, retrieving the quipu and then leading them to a small observation room set off to one side of the main museum. He laid the quipu carefully down on the table before Lucy.

‘I can only give you about five minutes,’ the curator told her in heavily accented English. ‘The museum will be closing after that.’

‘Five minutes should be fine,’ Lucy replied. ‘I’ll take good care of it.’

The curator nodded and left the room as Ethan and Lopez moved to stand either side of her. ‘You can read it that fast?’ Lopez asked.

‘Not a chance,’ Lucy admitted. ‘But now I can photograph each individual pendent and measure them. That will be enough detail to decipher it while we travel to South America.’

‘We’d better keep watch,’ Ethan said as he turned to Lopez.

‘I’ll be right behind you,’ Lucy promised.

Ethan walked out of the room and turned back towards the Amerindian antiquities exhibit with Lopez by his side.

‘I really don’t know why we’re doing this,’ Lopez said. ‘What on earth is worth chasing in all of this? Some bunch of bones in Peru?’

‘You weren’t there in Israel,’ Ethan replied as they walked toward the glass cabinets. ‘You didn’t see what those remains looked like. If there are more of them, if they can be used to prove not just the existence of extra-terrestrials but their intervention in ancient civilizations and human evolution, imagine what will happen in the wake of such news becoming public. The Defense Intelligence Agency was quite happy to take those remains from Lucy and bury them away from view and then force us to sign nondisclosure agreements in order that the news never got out — why would they do that? Why would they keep something so important so secret?’

‘Panic,’ Lopez replied without hesitation. ‘They’re afraid that every single religious nutter on the planet will go bonkers and start blowing up churches, mosques and synagogues wherever they find them, depending on whose side they’re on. They’ll scream that their god is the right one, when every other one is false, no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary.’

‘I don’t know,’ Ethan murmured in reply.

‘Are you kidding?’ Lopez asked. ‘Islam goes into meltdown if anybody even thinks about just drawing a picture of Mohammad let alone blaspheming about him. They still hang people in Iran for not believing in Allah or being gay. Christians swear they’re under attack in the USA despite being in a huge majority. Israel bombs the hell out of Palestine virtually every day, and Palestinians respond in kind just because they differ on who owns what land. You really think they’ll take it sitting down that all of their faiths are based on nothing, that humanity might have been tampered with by an alien species, that their supposed gods might in fact have been little green men?’

‘I don’t think you give people enough credit,’ Ethan replied, ‘or rather perhaps governments don’t. I think people would take it pretty well, they’ve virtually been expecting it for decades now. Every day NASA and other agencies are finding earth-like planets orbiting stars light years from us. Everybody is pretty much waiting for science to find evidence of life on other planets or even signals from them. I think there is something else behind the secrecy, something else they want to protect.’

‘I can’t imagine what,’ Lopez replied, ‘just like you can’t imagine why the Russians or the Americans are after it to. If they want to keep everything secret, surely they would be working together rather than against each other?’

Ethan stopped walking as he considered what Lopez and said.

‘That’s a very good point. Why are they working against each other?’

‘Maybe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the annexing of Crimea soured the water a bit between us?’

‘Maybe,’ Ethan murmured. ‘But when it comes to something of this importance politics doesn’t always get in the way. Both countries would have equal motivation to maintain secrecy if it’s global panic they worried about. Unless…’

‘Unless neither of the people that are chasing us are American and Russian military personnel,’ Lopez completed the sentence. ‘Which would mean their motivations would be purely financial.’

‘Those troops in Cambodia were a paramilitary unit, and that means they’re likely not working for the military or the government directly but for departments of the government which work autonomously,’ Ethan recalled. ‘They’re operating outside of congressional oversight.’

‘Defense Intelligence Agency,’ Lopez almost spat her reply with distaste. ‘It could be Jarvis. He could be on to us already.’

Doug Jarvis, Ethan’s former platoon commander in the Marines and long-time servant of the intelligence community, had retired over a year previously in the wake of Ethan and Lopez’s long flight from the CIA and their final investigation together in New York City. The chances were that Jarvis would know enough to have picked up Ethan’s trail, but it seemed unlikely that the DIA would have gone to him. Jarvis was an old man now and surely not willing to return to the field.

Ethan was about to reply when he looked up and saw the curator talking to two men, both of them in sharp suits and with muscular physiques barely contained by their jackets. The curator nodded and turned to point at the cabinets containing the quipu.

‘I think it’s time to leave,’ Ethan said.

The two suited men looked in the direction of the glass cabinets and then both of them looked directly at Ethan and Lopez. Even from the distance between them, Ethan could detect the look of surprise and recognition on both the men’s faces.