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.’