Lucy gasped and gripped the edge of the wall as she looked away from the endless depths and tried to control her thundering heartbeat.
‘Just a little further,’ she urged herself.
Lucy set one foot down on the steps as she kept her face to the wall and slowly descended the treacherous path toward the temples below. Perched on craggy outcrops that seemed specifically designed to scare the hell out of anybody attempting to reach them, she could see the largest of them, a building that had once possessed a roof that had long since been destroyed by the elements.
Lucy reached the bottom of the stone steps, the view ahead consisting of a rocky outcrop and then another plunging drop into oblivion. She turned, still clinging to the wall as she stepped gingerly toward the temple, once again exposed to the sheer drop to her right. Lucy tried not to think about the fact that the only way off the mountain was to actually ascend those same steps all over again. She reached the entrance to the temple and walked inside with a deep breath of relief.
The temple was open to the elements and somewhat resembled a small church, built from stone with three openings to looking out of one wall toward the mountains and gorges outside, and higher walls front and back that would have supported the roof structure. The floor was of cobbled stones that fit tightly together, and ahead was what looked like a small altar set against the far wall beneath a single opening. Above it, the sun would shine through one of the windows at sunrise and illuminate the temple’s interior.
Lucy looked down at the front of the ancient stone altar, and there she saw engraved into the rock a single icon: a sun, with beams of light emanating from beneath it, or a quipu with its informative pendents. But this time the lines were all of the same length, save one.
Lucy moved forward and knelt before the altar as she examined the icon. The central line extending down from the sun was longer than the rest, as so often was the case, but this time the line extended all the way down and vanished into the ground at her feet.
‘This is it,’ she gasped, her voice sounding odd within the hollow building’s walls and in the sepulchral silence that enshrouded the temple. ‘This is where they placed you, a royal tomb, the highest in the entire empire and facing the sun.’
Lucy looked down at the stones beneath her feet. The Inca were expert stonemasons who built vast cities without mortar, shaped each and every stone to fit perfectly alongside its neighbours. Using the method, identical to that of the ancient Egyptians, they had constructed massive citadels that had stood for centuries despite the earthquakes that rocked the Andes mountain chain. The stone floor of the temple was as neatly fitted together as any other part of the entire construction, except for one tiny detail. Whereas all the other stones were fitted together so tightly that one could not pass even a slip of paper between them, a small number of the stones beneath her feet had moss growing in the gaps between them. Lucy stood up and backed away slightly from the altar to see that the moss formed a perfect rectangle among the stones beneath her feet, directly in front of the altar.
Lucy reached into her backpack and produced a folding shovel as she moved alongside the rectangle and place the tip of the shovel over one of the gaps in the stones. She drove her foot down onto the shovel and the metal scraped as it dug down into the gap, ever so slightly wider than those of the stones around it so that moisture and eventually moss had been able to grow and fill the gap.
The tip of the shovel sank only two or three inches down, but it was enough for Lucy to get leverage on the handle. She leaned her boot down upon it, bouncing her weight up and down, and with a scraping sound the stone lifted out of the ground as the shovel got beneath it and prized it from the earth.
Lucy levered the stone aside and began working on the next, prizing one after another out of the ancient soil until she could see bare earth in a rectangle before the altar. She got down onto her knees and began scraping the earth away with the trowel, gouging chunks of it away until her hands brushed against fabric.
Lucy gasped as she worked, pulled out more soil and scattered it all around her as she frantically excavated the tight bundle buried at the altar and stared down at it in awe.
In the shallow grave lay a burial shroud every bit as old as the ones that had been discovered decades before in Paracus, the body within completely concealed. Around the neck of the shroud was a quipu.
‘I found you,’ she whispered. ‘I finally found you.’
Lucy reached down and carefully pocketed the quipu as she unwrapped the head of the shroud, placing layer after layer of fabric on the soil next to her until she finally revealed the skeletal remains within. The skull appeared first and Lucy gasped as she saw it.
For the most part the remains resembled those of an ordinary child but for the fused breastplate and elongated digits with what looked like extra bones that made them longer than those of a human. But the skull was bulbous, swelling from a narrow, delicate jaw to a broad teardrop-shape somewhat resembling a giant light bulb. Two enormous cavities denoted the position of what had once been very large eyes, and even at a glance Lucy could tell that the cranial capacity was far greater than that of even an adult human.
But in that same glance her heart plummeted in her chest in disappointment.
The soil of the high Andes Mountains was damp and cold, and the flesh of the being she saw laying before her had long ago rotted away. A dense pall of grief pulled down so hard on her she felt as though it would drag her heart from her chest as she recognised the level of degradation that the remains had suffered. The bones were brittle and stained with mud, which she had no doubt had infiltrated deep into the marrow. Any genetic remains, any DNA that might have been present within the bones, would by now have become so degraded as to be useless.
Lucy rested her forehead on her hands for a moment as she took a deep breath. She pulled the quipu from her pocket and sadly began sorting through the knots and strings, and then slowly she began to feel her heart beat quicken once more.
‘You weren’t alone,’ she whispered to herself.
The quipu spoke its ancient dialect to her and she realized that once again directions were encoded into the message, directions that must point to further tombs.
Lucy wrapped the skull once more, and then tied the shroud back in place before she lifted the remains out of the tomb and turned for the temple exit. A single click alerted her to the presence of an intruder just as Vladimir Polkov stepped into the temple entrance, a pistol in his grip and a grim smile on his face.
XXXIII
Ethan dragged himself up through a narrow fissure in the rocks, carved footholds in the stones beneath his feet that he somehow managed to get his boots into as he squeezed through the gap and out onto the flank of the mountain.
The sky above was brightening, and as he emerged onto a dizzyingly narrow stepped path that led further up the mountainside, he realized that he could no longer hear the sound of gunfire coming from behind him down on Macchu Picchu. He grabbed the rocky ledge and turned to look back down toward the city, and in the growing light he could see tourist vehicles far below winding their way up the Hiram Bingham trail.
Ethan’s stomach lurched as he saw the gorge wide open right alongside him, the Urabamba River’s winding green course just visible through the wreaths of morning cloud crowning the immense heights. He squeezed his eyes shut and forced himself to breath slowly before he opened his eyes once more and looked at the citadel’s visitor’s centre far below.
The Russian vehicles were gone, several of them making their way down the mountainside. Ethan knew that there was little that he could do to help: either Lopez and Jarvis had secreted themselves somewhere and would now mingle with the tourists when they arrived and make good their escape, or they had been captured by the STS team or the Russians.