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.’