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.
XXVI
Ethan burst back into the examination room with Lopez close behind him. ‘We’re leaving, now!’
Lucy stood up from her chair as she snapped off more images of the quipu. ‘I need another couple of minutes.’
‘You need to leave now or we won’t be going anywhere!’ Lopez snapped as she strode across to the desk and yanked off her jacket.
Lopez wrapped the jacket around her right arm and without hesitation she drove the point of her elbow straight down into the glass case. The glass shattered and she reached in and grabbed the quipu from within the case and stuffed it into her pocket as Lucy stared aghast at her.
‘Let’s move!’
Ethan led the way out of the room to see the two suited men already marching toward them hurriedly. He turned the other way and spotted an access corridor at the rear of the gallery, then made a run for it with Lucy and Lopez following close behind. Ethan crashed through the access door and into a corridor that led between rows of laboratories where staff scientists were cleaning and preparing exhibits for display. They looked up from behind transparent eye shields at the intruders as they dashed past, Ethan leading the way out of the laboratories and into a service corridor.
He turned right to where signs in German directed him toward loading bays at the rear of the building.
‘We can’t escape the building,’ Lopez whispered harshly as she followed him. ‘There must be more of them outside.’
‘We’ll deal with them when we get there,’ Ethan replied. ‘Right now we just need to disappear.’
The corridor opened out onto a loading bay and warehouse, a set of sliding doors partially open to the cold night outside where two uniformed warehouseman were unloading a truck full of boxes. Ethan did not head for the open door but instead turned towards a series of racks where other similar boxes were stacked, Lucy and Lopez following him as he ducked down behind the boxes and waited.
The two suited men burst into the warehouse and immediately saw the open door. They hurried toward it and one of them called out angrily to the two warehousemen.
‘Did you see three people come through here?’
The two warehouseman stared blankly back at the suited intruders but said nothing. Just as Ethan had expected, the two warehouseman understood nothing of English. More importantly, he recognized the accent of the leader of the two suited men, the same voice he had heard in the jungle in Cambodia.
‘Stay here,’ Ethan whispered to Lucy.
Ethan stepped out of cover with Lopez alongside him and they began walking toward the two American men, using their bodies to shield them from the view of the two warehousemen beyond. They were within just a few yards when the two men sensed they were being approached and turned to face Ethan and Lopez.