The Nemesis Origin

XXIX

‘You’re absolutely sure?’

Aaron Devlin listened to the voice on the other end of the line before he acknowledged the details and set the phone down into its cradle in the corner his seat.

The Bombadier jet was parked on the servicing apron of Chile’s largest international airport, and the voice on the other end of the line had been an agent in Washington DC who had picked up a link between Lucy Morgan’s work in Cambodia and the DIA’s investigation into the remains excavated from Israel.

Warner and Morgan had been identified and pursued in Berlin, but once again had slipped away from Lieutenant Veer and another agent sent to apprehend them. A rapid egress from the scene and an assessment of their activities had enabled to agents to ascertain that Morgan had been studying an Incan artefact known as a quipu, and Aaron’s contacts had quickly identified the precise quipu in question and sent him everything that had been learned from it during previous studies.

The DIA had deciphered the quipu approximately six months prior to Aaron’s arrival in Peru, but had been unaware of its links to the archaeological sites in Cambodia and Yonaguni. Thus, the measurements and data contained within the quipu had presented no useful information and had been disregarded. Now, the information had suddenly been thrown into sharp relief by the revelatory imagery from the other sites, and its contents had stunned even Aaron.

The quipu detailed a particular location on a plateau deep in the deserts of Peru’s with astonishing precision, comparable to a modern Global Positioning System fix. Aaron’s assistants had been required to ascertain where the quipu had first been found, because the coordinates were based on the quipu’s original location. Many of the ancient Inca’s artefacts had been destroyed by the conquistadores including quipu, which had been considered by the Christian invaders as unGodly with typically bigoted arrogance. However, hundreds had survived and in 2014 a set of twenty five had been unearthed in an archaeological complex called Incahuasi, south of Lima. Six hundred years old, the quipu were perfectly preserved and one of them stood out as exceptional, for it matched perfectly the icons found at the seven-thousand year old burial site in Israel.

Orientating the data deciphered from the quipu with its location, Aaron’s team had been able to get a fix on the location the quipu described: the Nazca Plateau. Aaron picked up an image of an aircraft seen landing at the airport the day before, an antiquated old seaplane that had in the space of a few days completed half a circumnavigation of the globe from Egypt to Peru.

‘A Consolidated Catalina is not an aircraft designed to fly such distances,’ he murmured to himself as he used the Internet to study the aircraft type.

Built during World War II for the United States Navy and Army air force as a long-range, amphibious reconnaissance and antisubmarine aircraft, the Catalina was renowned for its long-range and endurance. However it was never really designed for all-weather operations, better suited to work in warm temperatures and low to medium altitudes. What interested Aaron was that the Catalina had last been seen on radar flying high into the Peruvian Andes on what had been filed on its flight plan as a sightseeing trip.

Aaron was no aviator, but he was fully aware of the dangers of flying in mountainous terrain. High elevations created various types of winds that could pull an aircraft from the sky and cause it to plummet into the ground. Most aviators avoided these conditions rather than choosing to fly directly into them.

To his annoyance Lieutenant Veer had lost track of Lucy Morgan somewhere between Cambodia and Cairo, where the Catalina had landed, but then picked them up again in Berlin after they had somewhat foolishly booked seats on a commercial flight. He considered it something of a triumph that he had decided to maintain a watch on the Catalina. Although he was certain now that they had not been aboard when the aircraft had departed Cairo, it was also obvious that Yuri Polkov was following the same aircraft, his private Lear Jet also identified at Schipol Airport and now being tracked across the Atlantic, heading for South America.

Aaron examined a photograph taken in Berlin after an incident at the museum and on the autobahn nearby. Clearly, Yuri Polkov’s men had pursued Lucy Morgan just as Aaron had been but they had been in possession of better information. Morgan’s disappearance from the city, with Warner in tow meant that fresh help had arrived to assist them, help with sufficient influence and power to spirit them out of Germany and away to South America. With so many parties now involved, it was difficult to track allegiances or fathom motivations.

Meanwhile the Catalina continued its journey across Europe and over the North Atlantic. Aaron had resisted the temptation to have the aircraft’s owners apprehended and questioned. Though he could not be sure, his instincts told him that the aircraft pilot was involved somehow and may well lead him to Lucy Morgan by a more roundabout means.

‘What are they looking for in Peru?’ he asked out loud.

The voice that replied came from speakers mounted in the aircraft, wirelessly linked to American spy satellites equipped to transfer secure communications outside of normal channels.

‘Given their previous research, it would seem likely that they are pursuing further evidence located in or around the sites of ancient civilizations. What we cannot confirm is where they will go next. We can reroute spy satellites to monitor the area but their orbits are not sufficient to maintain a constant watch and the aircraft you identified could easily depart the area and be missed.’

Aaron nodded. The Catalina’s amphibious nature allowed it to land in places that would not be accessible to other aircraft. Flying in mountainous terrain beyond the reach of local radar, the aircraft could be lost in a moment and impossible to locate in such a vast and uninhabited country.

‘We’ve got to get ahead of the game,’ Aaron insisted. ‘Apprehending Yuri Polkov and removing him from play could put us ahead of Morgan.’

‘Polkov is a dealer, a mercenary seeking profit. He likely knows nothing that would benefit us, and his possession of the quipu does not threaten our position, for we already know of its contents and the locations it describes. Our purpose and priority is to confiscate everything that Lucy Morgan or Yuri Polkov find and ensure that they are unable to share any of their discoveries with the wider world.’

Aaron nodded as he picked up a picture that had been taken four days before Vladimir Polkov had approached Lucy Morgan. The agency had been following Polkov and his entourage around Chicago, Illinois. As his enquiries had concerned Lucy Morgan, his presence then flagged up the CIA’s interest, the agency having placed a permanent watch on Lucy ever since the events in Israel. Aaron had been on Morgan’s tail almost immediately, but it was only recently that he had been able to assess much of the surveillance data that had been gathered on her movements during the period preceding the Polkovs’ appearance in Chicago.

The photograph was a split image of Chicago’s Lake Shore Hospital: one of Lucy Morgan walking inside, and one of the young girls who was being treated at the hospital for an unknown genetic disorder. Aaron stared at the image for a long moment before he spoke.

‘What is Lucy Morgan’s end game here?’ Aaron asked out loud. ‘Why do you think she intends to deliberately go against the conditions of her nondisclosure agreement with the DIA?’

The voice of Majestic Twelve’s Number Three replied.

‘The reasons why are irrelevant. All that matters is that she is attempting to expose national secrets and she must be stopped from doing so. This task above all others is the focus of your mission.’

Aaron nodded but his eyes were still affixed to the image of the young girl in the hospital.

‘We have people working to ensure that Morgan cannot share what she knows.’

Aaron looked at another image, this time of Rachel Morgan, Lucy’s mother.

‘Whatever it takes,’ Number Five insisted. ‘If Lucy Morgan cannot be cajoled or finds a way to conceal anything that she had discovered, then Rachel Morgan will become the focus of our campaign. Find a way to make it clear to Lucy Morgan that there is nothing we will not do to ensure her silence.’

Aaron let his gaze drift back to the image of hospitalised child.

‘Yes sir,’ he murmured in reply.

The Catalina’s piston engines growled outside the cockpit as Ethan sat in the mildly vibrating seat and watched the mountainous terrain drifting past far below.

‘I’ve been spending far too much time in aeroplanes’, he said.

‘You’ve been spending far too much time in my damned aeroplane,’ Arnie growled in response.

‘You took the government’s coin and flew the damned thing here to help us,’ Ethan replied, enjoying the pilot’s discontent. ‘I suspect that Jarvis paid you handsomely, so it’s our aeroplane for the time being.’

‘If I’d known Jarvis was working with you, I’d have told him to take his money and smoke it.’

‘But then you’d have missed all the fun.’

Arnie scowled but did not reply, watching the passing mountains instead.

Ethan felt somewhat relieved to now be at a higher altitude after spending such a long time aboard the Catalina as it weaved in between vast mountain ranges and plains, plunging through banks of dense cloud with nothing to guide them but Arnie’s skill as a pilot. He and his wife Yin had guided the aircraft across terrain far from any radio navigation beacons using nothing more than a map, compass and a stopwatch attached to the cockpit controls before them.

Jarvis had hired Arnie in Cairo, already aware of the need to make it to South America, and had arranged all the necessary paperwork for Arnie to be awaiting them at Peru’s Jorge Chavez International Airport, this time operating as a sightseeing venture and archaeological expedition overhead the Nazca plateau. Jarvis’s jet had remained behind at the airport, in Ethan’s opinion a conspicuous advert to the Russians of their presence in Peru.

Jarvis and a faithful escort of two armed agents sat nearby inside the Catalina, Lopez and Lucy next to each other on the seat opposite Ethan. Lucy was peering through the Catalina’s bulbous viewing port for her first glimpse of the famous Nazca plateau. In one hand she held a replica of the quipu they had lost to Vladimir Polkov, and it was as though she too were counting down the distance to their destination.

‘What’s so special about this place?’ Ethan asked as the Catalina began a gentle left turn, the barren mountains drifting by beneath its wing below fluffy cumulus clouds that trailed shadows across the desert.

‘This is the site of the largest petroglyphs ever created by human beings,’ Lucy explained delightedly with the enthusiasm only a scientist could hold for aged scrawlings in the desert. ‘There are countless gigantic figures, animals and lines drawn in the deserts here, including lines that extended dead straight for mile after mile and line up with astronomical bodies. The creation is generally attributed to the Inca, but they were actually created by an even earlier proto-civilization as much as three thousand years ago.’

‘What are the lines for?’ Lopez asked.

‘Again, nobody knows for sure. Some researchers believe they are astronomical markers, others that they are runways for extra terrestrial beings, others still religious pathways marched by their creators at certain times of the year to worship the seasons and the sunrises at various Equinox. If I am right and they bear any resemblance to this quipu then there may be more to them than that. They may indicate the presence of something far more important, something important enough to the Inca to completely transform hundreds of square miles of desert floor into a series of images that could only be seen from the air.’

‘If they can only be seen from the air, then why did they bother making them?’ Jarvis asked.

‘That’s the big mystery,’ Lucy said. ‘You don’t make things that you can’t see, unless you’re building them for somebody else to see. I think we can all agree that there were no flying machines five hundred years ago in South America that were built by human beings.’

Ethan was about to ask another question when Lucy gasped and pressed her hands to the glass of the observation bubble as the Catalina banked again and this time Ethan could see from where he was sitting the vast plateau opening up beneath them, and slicing across it endless perfectly straight lines vanishing towards the milky white horizon.

To his amazement, the lines seemed unperturbed by the fact that they often crossed rugged crests and valleys, their perspective still perfectly straight when viewed out of the Catalina’s windows. Some of the lines had been widened to resemble what Ethan could only describe to himself in his mind as runways, perfectly long and straight as though somebody had started to build an airstrip on the plateau and then abandoned the project before laying the asphalt.

Between the endless lines and often branching off of them directly where numerous pictographs; images of animals, birds, a giant spider and even a monkey with a tightly coiled tail. Ethan peered out of the window at the amassed images and then looked across at Lucy.

‘So, what are we looking for?’

‘Anything that resembles this quipu,’ Lucy replied as she laid the quipu out on the seat beside.

Ethan looked to the quipu, resembling as ever a circular sun with beams of light emanating down around it. There were too many knots to maintain a mental image of them so he merely stuck to looking at the length of the lines themselves and then turned and looked out of the window. Lopez and Jarvis likewise watched as the Catalina began gently circling the plateau in a wide arc. The occasional cumulus cloud drifted past and blocked the view, it’s shadow dragged below it along the scorching desert as though made reluctant by the incessant heat.

They circled for almost an hour attempting to pick out lines and images that matched the quipu without success. Ethan glimpsed a massive image of a human being on the desert floor far bellow as he pushed away from the window and heard Arnie calling from the cockpit. He walked up to the cockpit door as the grizzled old pilot looked over his shoulder.

‘We’re getting low on fuel,’ he pointed out as he tapped one of the gauges amid the myriad controls of the cockpit. ‘The air’s thin at this altitude so we’re not getting the best fuel economy out of the engines. Short story — we’re going to have to land soon.’

‘I’ll tell the troops,’ Ethan promised. ‘How far away from here will we have to land?’

‘Aerodromo Maria Reiche, just south of the lines here and somewhere I can get Avgas in decent quantities,’ Arnie replied as he scrutinised a map.

‘We’re getting close,’ Ethan said. ‘Sooner or later we’re going to be forced onto foot again and you’ll be in the clear, don’t worry.’

‘It’s not us we’re worried about,’ Arnie replied. ‘Your friend there, the scientist. Jarvis said that she’s on some sort of medical mission, right?’

‘She’s searching for a cure for somebody, on a hell of a long shot.’

‘Well it’s not going to get any easier with those Russians chasing you around the globe. Your friend Jarvis has pulled some strings all right, but we’re sitting ducks now. Best we can do is keep you in the air. The Russians aren’t going to have any influence on the authorities here unless they start throwing money around, but if the US government is in on this too it’s only a matter of time before they ground us. Whatever you need to figure out, you need to do it soon and get away from us so that you can’t be tracked.’

Ethan nodded and patted his friend on the back. He walked down into the fuselage once more and approached Lucy.

‘Time’s almost up. Arnie’s going to have to land within the hour.’

Lucy shook her head and ran a hand through her hair as she sought desperately for some sign on the desert far below.

‘There’s nothing there that fits,’ she said. ‘The quipu just doesn’t match anything that we can see and it could take us hours of searching photographs of this site before we finally find what we’re looking for.’

Ethan peered out of the window at the various images on the desert floor and then looked at the quipu once more. Despite the vividness of the images there were far more straight lines than there were curves on the desert floor. He looked down at the quipu and then on an impulse he reached down and undid the neck of the quipu, then laid it back on the seat. The circular shape extended into a straight horizontal line, the beams of light from the sun now looking more like vines draped over the edge of a cliff, pointing straight down.

‘Most of the lines in that desert are straight,’ Ethan said. ‘Do you see anything now?’

Lucy peered at the quipu for a long moment, the shifted her gaze out of the window as she sought something to compare it with. ‘Nothing leaps out, but some of these lines run for immense distances. Even if we could get up to thirty thousand feet we probably wouldn’t be able to see the entire plateau.’

Ethan looked at the plateau below and his eyes caught on a vivid image of a hummingbird, drawn entirely from straight lines that hooked back on themselves to form the outline and the shape of its wings and tail. The elegant, long tip of its beak extended out in front of it and pointed away to the north east.

Ethan glanced at the quipu once more and then pointed at the bird. ‘What about that one?’

Lucy looked down at the bird, its image prominently displayed upon a large plateau to the north of the desert where the other images were arrayed. She looked down at the seat where the quipu was laid and suddenly a correlation leapt into life before her. Ethan watched as she reached down and rearranged the various pendents of the quipu to match the orientation and shape of the hummingbird on the rocks far below and to his amazement the different lengths of the quipu lines matched the size of the wings and tail of the bird.

‘It’s perfect,’ Lopez muttered in disbelief.

‘All but for one feature,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘The quipu image doesn’t have a beak.’

‘Yes it does,’ Lucy replied in awe as she reached down and took the very longest pendent of the quipu and hooked it back from its current position at the rear of the bird so that it crossed the body of the hummingbird and ended as the beak, a perfect representation of the geoglyph in the desert far below them.

‘I need a compass,’ Lucy said hurriedly.

‘There’s one in the cockpit,’ Ethan informed her, and without hesitation Lucy dashed past and hurried up to the cockpit, Ethan in pursuit.

‘It’s the hummingbird,’ she said excitedly to Arnie. ‘I need to know which direction it points.’

Arnie glanced out of the window to his left and saw the hummingbird motif on the desert floor far below. He took the controls from Yin and guided the Catalina through a wide turn as he set up to fly directly overhead the image in the direction of the beak.

‘Stand by,’ he said as the Catalina slowly lined up with the tail and beak of the bird.

Ethan watched as the Catalina descended below scattered cumulus cloud and the image of the huge hummingbird loomed into view on the desert below, the aircraft pointing directly in the same direction as the hummingbird’s beak.

‘Zero-three-zero degrees,’ Arnie informed Lucy as he glanced at the Catalina’s magnetic compass among the instruments before him on the control panel.

Lucy sat down in the cockpit’s jump-seat and with a map, ruler and pencil she marked the position of the hummingbird on the map and then drew a line heading away on a magnetic heading of zero-three-zero. The line traced across the wilderness and plunged deep into the Andes mountains, but Lucy shook her head.

‘What’s wrong?’ Ethan asked.

‘It doesn’t point anywhere,’ Lucy explained in confusion. ‘There’s nothing up there in that part of the mountains.’

Ethan peered past her out of the cockpit windows as Arnie banked the Catalina over the hummingbird’s massive form below them. Beside it was a line that looked like a wide runway, narrow near the hummingbird and widening as it extended away at an angle very close to that of the hummingbird’s beak.

‘What about that line? Could that have anything to do with it?’ he asked Lucy.

Lucy looked out of the window but she seemed none the wiser as the Catalina turned. It was Arnie’s voice that reached them from the front of the cockpit.

‘I’m not one for your crackpot theories, but there is something known as magnetic declination. It’s the difference between true North, and the position of the magnetic North Pole. Your Inca friends of centuries ago probably would have had no knowledge of the magnetic North Pole, only the position of true North via the stars. Our compass points towards the magnetic North Pole and the magnetic declination in this part of the world is negative six degrees west, which would match that line alongside the hummingbird’s beak. Why not adjust your line on the map and see where it points then?’

Lucy stared wide-eyed at the pilot, her jaw dropping. ‘Arnie, you’re a genius.’

‘I keep saying it,’ Arnie agreed with a shrug.

Lucy redrew the line and Ethan could see her shiver with excitement as she jabbed the pencil at a point on the map.

‘The quipu’s knots state that it would take six days travel in the indicated direction to reach the destination it pointed to. Do you know what this line reaches at about six days travel in the indicated direction?’

Ethan leaned over to see the map and instantly recognise the name she had scribbled beside a cross deep in the Andes mountains.

‘Macchu Picchu,’ Ethan said, ‘the last citadel of the Inca Empire.’

‘And the site that Hiram Bingham III found and excavated over a hundred years ago. We have to go there, right now,’ Lucy said to Arnie.

Arnie through a mock salute over his shoulder as the Catalina levelled out on course toward the north-east.