The Nemesis Origin

XXVIII

‘Where’s Lopez?’

Ethan was sat next to Lucy in the back of one of the SUVs that was being driven by a government agent. Opposite them sat Doug Jarvis, his hands folded calmly in his lap and an appraising look on his face.

‘We’re following the Russian vehicle now but maintaining a safe distance,’ Jarvis assured him. ‘I suspect that they’ll want to avoid any further confrontations with us and will not harm Lopez once they have what they want. I take it that she has the quipu?’

‘She stole it,’ Lucy Morgan confirmed with a barely concealed disgust. ‘That artefact belongs in a museum.’

‘She had your best interests at heart, and what she did to defuse the situation was incredibly brave,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I’m sure the quipu will be recovered in due course.’

Ethan shook his head in disbelief, barely able to comprehend how in the space of a few days he had gone from being so far away from the Defence Intelligence Agency and the unfathomable workings of Doug Jarvis’s command, to being sat in a government vehicle with him as though the intervening years simply had not occurred.

‘Why are you in Berlin?’ Ethan demanded. ‘How the hell did you even know we were searching for that quipu?’

Jarvis kept the serene smile on his face and offered Ethan a shrug. ‘It’s my business to know what’s going on, Ethan. You of all people should know that.’

‘You’re retired,’ Ethan reminded him. ‘Dammit, you’re old enough to remember the Civil War, you shouldn’t be running around in the cold like this.’

Jarvis chuckled with what appeared to be genuine humor, although he could never be quite sure whether anything about Jarvis was as it appeared.

‘I didn’t choose to be here,’ Jarvis admitted. ‘And I’m not working for the DIA.’

‘Who are you working for?’

Again, the smile and the shrug. ‘Let’s just say that those who occupy the heady heights of the intelligence community have been trying to unravel the corruption that has plagued many of the departments and agencies over the last twenty years or more. When they got to your business in Israel of a few years ago, they realized that they simply didn’t have enough information to act upon so they called me to fill in the gaps. I have to say, it’s been quite invigorating after a couple of years’ in retirement.’

Ethan leaned back in the seat and rubbed his hands down his face. ‘What’s your skin in the game?’

‘Honestly Ethan, I don’t have any. My job is to figure out, on behalf of those heady powers, what the hell is going on now. Those responsible for overseeing the activities of the intelligence community have figured out that they are not being told everything they should be and they have a real compulsion to get to the bottom of what’s happening here. My job is to help them do that. My first port of call was Lucy Morgan, and I followed her to you. As ever, it was simply a matter of following the trail of destruction that you left behind.’

Ethan felt as though he had gone into a time warp and emerged two years previously. ‘I never cause a trail of destruction — it’s everybody else who keeps shooting at me.’

‘Keeps happening though, doesn’t it,’ Jarvis observed with a wry smile.

‘Do you know why I’m here?’ Lucy Morgan asked.

‘Yes I do,’ Jarvis acknowledged with a nod as the smile slid away from his face, ‘a truly noble cause with which I will assist with all the power that I can draw upon. I’m not here to hinder your mission, Lucy. My job is to try to ensure that you succeed, because with your success will come mine.’

‘So you do have skin in the game,’ Ethan observed.

‘I like to maintain a reputation of doing a thorough job,’ Jarvis explained.

The SUV slowed and pulled over to the side of the road, and through the tinted windows Ethan could just about make out Lopez standing waiting for them. Jarvis leaned over and opened the door, and Lopez climbed in and slammed the door shut. Her gaze swept the interior of the SUV and settled upon Jarvis.

‘You,’ she uttered.

‘Me,’ Jarvis smiled back.

Lopez turned to look Ethan. ‘May I borrow your gun?’

‘He’s here to help,’ Ethan replied.

‘He’s here to help himself. Please, let me put him out of his misery and me out of mine.’

‘A pleasure to see you again as always, Nicola,’ Jarvis said to her. ‘Believe me, I was quite happy spending my days gardening, not dodging bullets chasing you and Ethan halfway across the globe on yet another merry chase.’

‘Obviously not happy enough, or you wouldn’t be here. What is it this time? Fancied another promotion?’

‘I’m here to get you out of Berlin,’ Jarvis replied. ‘I have a jet waiting at Schipol airport and it can take you anywhere you need to go.’

‘Excellent,’ Lopez replied with a smile. ‘We’ll get aboard and you can stay here, agreed?’

‘Why did they let you go?’ Lucy asked.

‘They knew they’d never get out of the country if they didn’t,’ Lopez replied. ‘The authorities would be alerted by Jarvis and his people, and they’d be in a cell within an hour of showing up at the airport.’

‘Precisely,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘Volkov and his people want to maintain a low profile. Hard to do when they’re chasing Ethan here.’

Ethan turned to Lucy. ‘Did you manage to learn enough from the quipu to figure out where we need to go?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘It was too complex, too much information for me to absorb in one go. It would have needed an expert to decipher in that amount of time. We’re not going to get ahead of the Russians now, they’ll have the time to decipher the quipu and figure out where it is we need to go next.’

Lopez leaned back in a seat with a content smile on her face. ‘Oh ye of little faith, you don’t think that I would have done everything possible to ensure that they ended up without a good trail to follow?’

‘What do you mean?’

Lopez shrugged innocently. ‘I may have taken the time, while Ethan here was doing his Driving Miss Daisy bit around Berlin, to alter one or two of the knots on the quipu.’

Lucy Morgan grasped in horror. ‘You tampered with an ancient and priceless artefact?!’

‘No different from me messing with Jarvis’s tie,’ Lopez observed.

‘You think I’m priceless?’ Jarvis asked with a raised eyebrow.

‘I think you’re ancient.’

‘So that means that when they decipher the quipu it may lead them in the wrong direction,’ Ethan asked Lucy.

‘The location of knots in a quipu dictate values much like numbers,’ Lucy agreed. ‘If they’ve been altered then the information will be incorrect. But they still have the quipu and I didn’t have enough time to photograph all of the pendents.’

‘Then you’ll be glad that we have images of it,’ Jarvis said. ‘You’d be amazed at how far the DIA got in their investigation into the remains found in Israel. Although we were forced to confiscate those remains from your expedition, Lucy, there has been a ceaseless study of those remains ongoing over the years. Connections have been made, mysteries solved.’

‘Do you know where we need to go?’ Lucy asked keenly.

‘Right now, all that matters is getting out of Berlin,’ Jarvis replied. ‘The authorities will be onto our trail fairly quickly so the sooner we can take off the better, and with so many other people tracking you our diplomatic flight status will be essential in keeping them at bay.’

‘And who exactly is it that keeps following us?’ Ethan asked. ‘There were Americans at the museum, Russians waiting for us outside and you presumably coming toward us from the airport. It’s like half of the planet is after this quipu and what it could tell us.’

‘The Russian interest in the quipu comes from a man named Yuri Polkov, a Russian black-market dealer in fossils who made his fortune back in the 1970s and 1980s dealing in a combination of rare fossils smuggled out of countries like China and Mongolia and equally rare gemstones. Yuri pulled out of the black market game once he made his money, laundering most of it into properties around the globe. He has a portfolio worth a quarter of a billion and free capital worth about half of that.’

‘It was a Russian who came to see me at Chicago’s Field Museum,’ Lucy replied, ‘but he was not an old man. He was young, the same man who had a gun to my throat back there.’

‘Vladimir Polkov,’ Jarvis identified him, ‘the prodigal son. He seems to have inherited his sense of criminal enterprise from his father, but unlike daddy he has not curbed his excesses. The FBI has a file on him an inch thick but they haven’t managed to make anything stick and Vladimir avoids the USA as much as he can.’

‘And the Americans at the museum?’ Ethan persisted. ‘Who were they? Lopez and I figured they might be STS.’

‘That’s the big mystery,’ Jarvis admitted. ‘It’s certain that they are part of the US government but they’re working under the jurisdiction of an agency that we have not yet identified, part of the shield of secrecy that is preventing the Intelligence Director from getting to the bottom of this. Whoever they are working for, they’re not answering to Congress or even the White House, and we only have a name so far: Majestic Twelve.’

‘A rogue command,’ Ethan murmured. ‘We encountered one of those out in Idaho a few years ago and it nearly cost us our lives.’

‘And what about the SUVs that chased us down after we got out of the museum?’ Lopez demanded.

Jarvis grinned tightly. ‘They were my men, and would have got you out of here if you’d given them the chance to catch you up. As it is they are nursing various cuts and bruises and the damaged vehicles are being towed away by the German authorities.’

‘Oops,’ Ethan murmured without regret. ‘Perhaps you should send your men in to say hello first rather than following us in unmarked vehicles. This cloak and dagger crap got us down the last time around, Doug. How about you cut it out and tell us where we’re going so we can get this all over and done with?’

Jarvis inclined his head and the smile reappeared. ‘Fair enough. We’re flying to Peru.’

‘That’s what the quipu said?’ Lucy demanded.

Doug Jarvis produced a folder, which he opened to reveal an image of the quipu that they had attempted to decipher in the museum.

‘How on earth did you know about that?!’ Lucy gasped in amazement.

‘The DIA made connections with the engravings found at the site of the Israeli excavation and the iconography of certain ancient cultures over a year ago, Lucy,’ Jarvis explained. ‘But such unusual relationships flew in the face of accepted history and so few staff were assigned to continue the work. One of them put in some serious hours and finally realized what the icons represented — ancient Persian knowledge of another culture, much older than the Incas, thousands of miles away in South America who used quipu to store information. The link allowed us to investigate further, and although we did not have all of the information you did, regarding Cambodia and Yonaguni, we were able to study hundreds of quipu preserved around the world, and located this one in Berlin.’

Ethan sat back in his seat and rubbed his eyes.

‘You could have saved us a lot of time if you’d just approached us earlier,’ he said.

‘I would have done,’ Jarvis replied, ‘but since you both kept sneaking around it was hard to track you down. Anyway, despite its many flaws the CIA is remarkably adept at obtaining information when required. Unfortunately, if the mysterious faction within our government is using CIA assets to further its aims then this very operation, conducted six months ago, may have alerted them to the DIA’s work. Two agents were sent to photograph the quipu, and it was later deciphered by a South American specialist at Princeton University.’

‘What did it say?’ Lucy asked, her eyes bright with intrigue and excitement.

‘Enough to interest the DIA and spark this new investigation,’ Jarvis replied. ‘The quipu is directing us toward a place called Nazca. Whatever is waiting there had better be worth it, because I’m damned sure we won’t be the only people on site.’

‘It will be worth it,’ Lucy promised. ‘The icons at Yonaguni and Mahandrapavarta also pointed to Nazca in the physical sense, and the curator of the museum told me who discovered that quipu. His name was Hiram Bingham III.’

‘A former member of the US Senate,’ Jarvis recalled from memory. ‘He had a stake in all of this?’

‘Hiram discovered the lost citadel of Macchu Picchu in 1911,’ Lucy explained. ‘It’s estimated that Hiram excavated and transported out of Peru thousands of artefacts from the citadel, including mummies. Right after his discovery he had a life-long involvement with the US Government and became Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut and later a Republican Senator. It makes me wonder just what he might have excavated from the citadel to have brought him to the attention of the government in the first place, and perhaps what he might also have missed during his work in Peru.’

‘Peru is mountainous, the terrain difficult,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘We’ll need access, vehicles, a means to move freely. This jet won’t cut it out there.’

Jarvis waved Ethan’s concerns aside with a swipe of his hand.

‘I’ve contacted the perfect person for the job.’