Empire of Gold

Nina was dragged down a white-painted passage to another small room. It had apparently once been used for storage, but the shelves were now empty – except for two small boxes and a single glove of thick black leather. One box was tightly secured by an elastic band, several little holes poked in its side. A rust-scabbed metal chair sat beneath the glaring overhead light.

Lengths of rope were coiled on its seat.

Nina fought to break loose, but the soldiers forced her on to the chair and held her as Stikes tied her wrists securely to its armrests, then her ankles to the front legs. He finished by looping the last length of rope tightly round her chest. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ he asked.

‘Go fuck yourself!’

Stikes was unfazed. ‘Then we’ll begin.’ He told the soldiers to leave, then closed the door and opened the case again, revealing its ancient contents. ‘El Dorado,’ he said. ‘I always thought it was just a myth.’

‘It is a myth.’

‘The paintings in that temple suggest otherwise. This Paititi may have been the last outpost of the Incas, but there was a much greater settlement along the way. El Dorado.’ He went to the shelves and picked up the ominous glove. The leather creaked softly.

‘Whatever it’s called, it’s not El Dorado,’ Nina insisted, trying to draw out the purely verbal part of his interrogation for as long as possible. The punctures in the box could only be air holes; there was something alive inside it . . . and the protective glove suggested it was deeply unpleasant. ‘That’s a completely different legend. The Conquistadors got it mixed up with the story of the Incas hiding their . . . gold . . . ’ She tailed off as Stikes pulled on the glove, clenching his fingers into a fist.

‘Semantics,’ he said. ‘The name may be wrong, but the story, it seems, is true. Somewhere in Peru is an unimaginable fortune. I did a little Googling upstairs just now. The ransom room, which the Inca emperor said he would fill with gold if the Spanish set him free, was seven metres by five and a half. Thirty-eight and a half square metres. Assuming it was two metres high, that would be—’

‘Seventy-seven cubic metres.’

Stikes seemed almost impressed. ‘Correct. Seventy-seven cubic metres . . . of gold. Do you know how much that would be worth?’

‘Y’know, I forgot to check today’s price with my broker.’

He was less appreciative of her sarcasm. ‘One cubic metre of gold weighs nineteen point three metric tons. And I’m sure you can use your apparent skills at mental arithmetic to work out how many tons would fill the ransom room.’

Despite herself, Nina couldn’t resist the urge to work it out. ‘One thousand four hundred and eighty-six tons. Point one.’

‘Point one,’ Stikes repeated with a sardonic smile. ‘Almost one and a half billion grams of gold – using the American billion, that is. The proper imperial billion seems to have fallen by the wayside. But at today’s price per gram, that’s worth over fifty billion dollars. As you can imagine, General Callas and I are rather keen to find it.’

‘Flooding that amount of gold on to the market would drop the price to almost nothing,’ Nina pointed out, still trying to prolong the discussion. She could hear movement inside the box, sinister little ticks and rustles. ‘And Atahualpa told Pizarro he’d fill the room with treasure, not actual solid gold. However tightly everything was stacked up, there would still be a lot of empty space.’

‘Frankly, even if it were four-fifths air, it would still be plenty. But the point is, he didn’t fill the room, did he? Instead, he told his people to hide it all somewhere the Spanish would never find it. And they never did. And nor did anyone else.’ His gaze moved to the statues. ‘Until now.’

‘I’m telling you, I don’t know how to find it.’

‘Maybe you don’t know . . . yet.’ Stikes slipped the elastic band off the box. ‘But as I said, you’re an intelligent woman. And your past record speaks for itself. I’m sure that if you turn your mind to finding El Dorado, you will.’

‘Not gonna happen.’

‘Oh, I disagree.’ He lifted the lid. ‘Even if it takes a little, shall we say, encouragement?’ He lowered his gloved thumb and forefinger into the box to grab its contents.

That it took a couple of attempts suggested the contents did not want to be grabbed.

‘Ah, shall we not say? We could . . . ’ Nina dried up in instinctive toe-curling fear as Stikes lifted the box’s occupant into view.

A scorpion.

Dark green with mottled golden spots and bands across its carapace, it writhed angrily in Stikes’s grip, jabbing its poisonous sting ineffectually at his thick glove. ‘This is a Gormar scorpion, a native of Venezuela,’ Stikes announced, as if presenting it for Show and Tell. ‘There’s some dispute over whether it’s the deadliest scorpion in the world, or only the second. Either way, its sting will kill a healthy adult in ten minutes.’ He moved closer, holding the thrashing arachnid up to Nina’s face. She cringed back in rising terror. ‘Once stung, the only hope of survival is to get an injection of antivenom. Fortunately,’ he glanced at the second box, ‘I have a syringe there.’

‘Th-that’s good,’ Nina gasped, heart racing. The scorpion was mere inches from her eyes, bulbous claws snapping at her. ‘’Cause accidents can happen.’

‘Oh, this won’t be an accident.’ Stikes moved the scorpion away from her face . . .

To her bound arm.

The hideous little beast lashed out with its tail, the poisonous barb stabbing into the back of her wrist. Nina instinctively yelped, as if stung by a bee – before screaming for real as the full horror of the situation struck her. The jab’s initial pain was fading, but already another was replacing it, a burning spreading up her arm. ‘Oh God! Jesus Christ!’

Stikes returned the scorpion to the box, then opened the second container and took out a syringe containing