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.