It was all the same to him.
Spencer leapt to his feet from his position by his tent, AK-47 in hand, when the bushes near him rustled from something large moving through the undergrowth. Allie fumbled for her weapon as he flipped the firing selector to active mode, and gasped when Drake emerged, supporting himself on a staff, the cuts on his face healing and his black eye now faded to a dull purplish yellow. Spencer slowly lowered his gun, an expression of astonishment widening his eyes before his face resumed its usual unreadable set.
“What’s wrong? You’d think you’ve never seen someone come back from the dead before,” Drake said with a smile. Allie rose and rushed to him. She gave him a long hug before standing back and studying him.
“You look like you fell off a cliff or something,” she said.
“Yeah. Remind me not to do that again. It’s a lousy way to see the sights.”
“What happened?”
Drake dropped his backpack onto the ground and sat down stiffly, not completely recuperated from his injuries after a week, and filled them in on his near-death experience and his time among the natives. They both listened to him with rapt fascination as he described his salvation and fever, ending with his trip from the tribal longhouse and into the jungle, escorted by the chief’s daughter.
“That’s amazing, Drake. An incredible story,” Allie said.
“Yeah. I was lucky. If you call falling off a cliff lucky.”
Spencer moved to the circle of river rocks where he’d stacked some wood. He spread petroleum jelly on the pile and ignited it with his lighter, refraining from commenting on Drake’s ordeal.
“I caught some fish for dinner. Luckily, big ones, so more than enough to go around,” he said.
“That’s good. I have a feeling we’re going to work up an appetite over the next day or two,” Drake said, noting Allie’s body language, which was becoming more distant by the minute. He wondered vaguely whether, in her grief, she had turned to Spencer in his absence, and realized that he didn’t care with the same burning urgency he’d had before his fall. Something had changed inside him, as if the placid calm of the shaman and his daughter had somehow seeped into him.
“Oh yeah? I have to tell you, we’ve been looking since you went for your swim, and haven’t found anything,” Allie said, her voice resigned.
Drake nodded. “I’m not surprised.”
Something about Drake’s inflection or tone caused Spencer’s antennae to quiver, and he stopped what he was doing and stared at Drake.
“Yeah? Why’s that?” he asked.
Drake walked over to where the gathered branches were crackling, the fish waiting to be skewered and broiled whole over the fire, and kicked at the leaves on the ground before looking up at Spencer and meeting his eyes.
“Because you’re looking in the wrong place.”
Allie moved over to where the two men were facing each other. “What? What are you talking about, Drake?”
He sighed and touched the scab over his eye. “It’s not here. It’s about three miles from here. Nearer a smaller waterfall to the southwest.”
“How do you know?” Allie exclaimed.
Drake offered a small smile.
“Easy. Someone drew me a map.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
“They did what?” Spencer demanded.
“I just got back from the other waterfall. I was going to suggest we move the camp tomorrow morning, because it would be dark by the time we made it if we tried tonight,” Drake explained.
“You were just there?” Allie demanded, surprised, her tone skeptical.
“Yup. Or close enough.”
He told them about the shaman and the daughter leading him to the waterfall yesterday, but refusing to go near where they’d indicated Paititi lay. The daughter had stayed with him that night and guided him back to Allie and Spencer the following day after drawing Drake a map in the dirt. He’d tried to convince her to accompany him to the city, but she’d made it clear that she didn’t want to go any farther, and the fear in her eyes had been all too real. She’d drawn more pictures, but these were of hideous creatures, demonic. Even though they didn’t speak a word of the same language, he understood that she was terrified of whatever inhabited the ancient Incan ruins.
“Then you know how to find it?” Allie asked.
“I think so. It may take some doing, but with the GPS we should be able to get there a lot faster. Once we find the other waterfall, which is where I just came from, we follow the river that leads from that one, and when it forks off into a smaller one, we follow that.”
“You can’t see the city from that river?” Spencer asked.
“Apparently not.”
“But the local tribes know where it is?”
“I’m not sure they have any idea what it is. To them, I got the sense that it’s a haunted or forbidden place. The daughter looked like I was trying to get her to eat live scorpions when I wanted her to take me there. She was okay showing me with a drawing, but refused flat out to go anywhere near it. It was apparent they think it’s cursed, or evil. Or some kind of sacred ground they keep secret. I don’t know. Our communication was sign language, and even then, it left a lot to be desired.”
“You say the natives had no modern clothes? No rifles or shoes? Nothing?” Spencer asked.
“No. They looked like they could have been from a thousand years ago. The land that time forgot.”
“Then it’s quite likely they’re one of the Amazonian tribes that’s had no contact with modern civilization. If that’s the case, it would explain why the secret’s still a secret. There’s been no one to tell.”
Drake grew silent, his mind elsewhere as he stared off into the distance, and then he snapped back to the present. “Any signs of trouble here?”
Allie shook her head. “Nothing. So it looks like we’re in the clear.”
“That’s good. Tomorrow, at first light, let’s break camp and head for the waterfall. We’ll be able to make it in a few hours. Paititi will take longer, but by afternoon we should be camped there,” Drake said.
“It’ll take a while to explore if it’s big.”
Drake nodded. “Probably. Although my father had some theories about where the treasure could be located once he found the city. But who knows whether those were accurate or not…”
“So you really think you can find it?” Allie asked.
“We wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” Drake said, confidence in his voice. He still hadn’t put it all together, but he had a good idea that the fabled riches of the Inca Empire wouldn’t be located in an ordinary building. It would be in something that would survive the years. Something that would defy the casual adventurer who stumbled across the city, or any raiding conquistadores. He was sure that if there was a pattern to spot, he’d do so once he had seen the city’s layout.
Which all assumed that the mysterious Palenko hadn’t gotten to it. But Drake didn’t want to get ahead of himself. Based on the legends, there were anywhere from two hundred and fifty to five hundred tons of gold. Not the sort of weight you loaded on a few carts and hauled around the jungle. That meant that the treasure was still mostly, if not all, there.
Drake hoped so. The only wild card was the depictions of the demons his escort had drawn. While they could have been superstitious nonsense, Drake had felt a definite stab of unease when he’d looked into the daughter’s eyes, her expression clearly conveying fear for the first time since he’d seen her.
They sat around the fire munching on fish while discussing the following day. Spencer and Allie had innumerable questions about what he’d seen. Drake did his best to answer them without giving too much away.