‘Interpol’s got his records. And why do you think I kept your card in a plastic bag? So they can get fingerprints off it. Yours and de Quesada’s.’
‘So . . . they haven’t actually fingerprinted it yet?’
‘Not yet. But I’ll give it back to them if you don’t make a very large donation to charity in the next few days.’ He returned the card to his pocket. ‘I’m giving you a chance here, Dad. You do the right thing. Or I will.’
Larry gulped down the last of his drink, fingers clenched tightly round the glass. ‘I’ll . . . think about it.’
‘Don’t think for too long.’ Eddie went to the door, looking back at his father with disdain. ‘Have a nice trip.’ With that, he left.
Larry banged the empty glass down on the table and jumped up. He paced back and forth across the room, shaking with barely contained fury, before taking a long breath, and picking up his phone. He thumbed through the contact list and dialled a number.
‘This is Larry Chase,’ he said when he got a reply. ‘I need . . . I need to speak to Mr Stikes.’
Nina had already returned to Caracas; Eddie flew back to meet her. She was understandably curious about his side trip to the Colombian capital, but he refused to tell her anything beyond its being connected to Stikes. However, they were both too tired to argue about it, flopping into the luxurious bed in their hotel suite and almost instantly falling asleep.
As soon as Eddie was woken by voices from the next room the following morning, he realised that Nina had something more important occupying her mind than his excursion to Bogota. Her excitement was clear even through the door. He got dressed and went through to the lounge, finding Nina sitting at a table with Macy, Osterhagen, Kit and even Mac. ‘What’s this, a remake of
Nina hurriedly gulped a mouthful of toast, washing it down with a swig of coffee. ‘Mm, morning! Guess you slept well – you don’t normally get up this late.’
‘Well, yesterday was kind of knackering. Mornin’, all.’ He waved to the others, getting greetings in response. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘I thought you needed a lie-in. And you looked so sweet while you were asleep.’
‘Funny, I’ve seen Eddie when he’s asleep,’ said Mac, ‘and that’s not a word I would ever have used to describe him.’
‘Yeah, well, kipping with a bunch of sweaty, farting SAS blokes tends to make you scrunch your face up,’ Eddie retorted. He looked at the table, seeing the recovered khipu laid out on a long white board, and a jumble of notes in front of the three archaeologists. ‘So, have we got this thing figured out? Hope you’re going to wash your hands before you pick it up,’ he added to Nina, who was wolfing down another slice of buttered toast.
She waved to Macy for a napkin. ‘Yeah, Leonard thinks he’s got something.’
Eddie pulled up a chair and sat as Osterhagen, with deep bags under his eyes that suggested he had been working all night, held up a large photo of the map in Paititi. ‘We know the start point of the journey,’ the German explained. ‘Cuzco, of course, the centre of the Inca empire. And we know the end point – Paititi. What we needed were reference points along the way. If we could identify other known locations, it would allow us to work out the code shared between the map and the khipu - directions and distances.’
Eddie nodded. ‘So what’s you found?’
Osterhagen was about to speak when Macy enthusiastically cut in. ‘Only the biggest Inca landmark in the world,’ she said, waving at a blow-up of part of the painted wall. ‘Machu Picchu!’ She pointed out a small illustration amongst the markings, little more than a sketch: two rounded-off conical peaks, one large, one small, with lines presumably representing buildings at their bases. ‘It’s about seventy miles northwest of Cuzco, along a thing called the Inca Trail.’
‘I’ve travelled along it many times,’ said Osterhagen, trying to wrest back the discussion from the perky student. ‘I know the landmarks well. Now, the number of these markings here,’ he indicated part of the map, ‘correspond to the
‘
Those who knew him well either smiled or let his attempt at a joke pass without comment; Osterhagen, however, seemed mildly affronted. ‘No, they are sacred sites,’ he said. ‘The Incas believed that certain places were of spiritual importance. Some were natural features like springs or mountain peaks, some were places of historical importance, and others were burial sites for mummies. Not all of them survived the Spanish conquest, because the Conquistadors tried to eradicate everything associated with the existing religions.’
‘But it’s kinda hard to destroy an entire mountain,’ Macy added. ‘A lot of them survived.’
‘Got you,’ Eddie said, examining the photographs. ‘You know where these things are today, so we can work backwards and say this marking means a burial site, or whatever.’
‘And the other part,’ said Nina, having wiped her fingers, ‘is the khipu.’ She indicated the leftmost section of the collection of knotted strings. ‘This part is a record of the first stage of their journey, as far as Machu Picchu. The number of strings matches the number of
‘A lot of landmarks,’ noted Eddie.
‘It was a long journey. It’s over a thousand miles from Cuzco to Paititi, and that’s as the crow flies – the Incas took an even longer route. You see this?’
She pointed further along the Inca artefact’s woven spine. Although the strings were dirty and darkened by time, Eddie saw that the various strands were discernibly different. Those up to roughly two-thirds of the way along the khipu’s length were a variety of shades, mostly greys and browns and reds with greens and blues interspersed; beyond that point, they were almost entirely of the last two. ‘The colours change,’ he said. ‘What does that mean?’
‘We think,’ said Osterhagen, ‘the colours represent different types of terrain. This section here,’ he gestured at a cluster of grey strings in the first section of the khipu, ‘corresponds to the highlands along the Inca Trail leading to Machu Picchu. By going back towards Cuzco, we found that other colours match particular features of the landscape.’ He gently nudged one of the strands with a toothpick. ‘This shade of turquoise seems to represent river valleys, for example.’
