Temple

'The Incas called it “the Spirit of the People”,' Chambers said. 'It was a stone idol, but one that was carved out of a strange kind of stone, a shiny black stone that had very fine veins of purple running through it.

'It was the Incan people's most prized possession. Indeed, they saw it as their very heart and soul. And when I say that, I mean it literally. They saw the Spirit of the People as more than a mere symbol of their power. They saw it as the actual, literal, source of that power. And indeed, there were stories about its magical powers—how it could calm the most vicious of animals, or how, when dipped in water, the idol would sing.'

'Sing?' Race said.

'That's right,' Chambers said, 'sing.'

'O-kay. So what does this idol look like.'

'The idol's actual appearance has been described in many places, including the two most comprehensive works on the conquest of Peru, Perez's Relacion and de la Vega's Royal Commentaries. But descriptions vary. Some say it was a foot high, others only six inches; some say it was beautifully carved and smooth to the touch, others say it had rough, sharp edges. One feature, however, is common to all descriptions of the idol—the Spirit of the People was carved in the shape of a snarling jaguar's head.'

Chambers leaned forward in his seat. 'From the moment he heard about that idol, Hernando Pizarro wanted it. And all the more so after the attendants at the idol's shrine at Pachacimac whisked it away from under his nose. See, Hernando Pizarro was probably the most ruthless of all the Pizarro brothers to come to Peru. I imagine today we would call him a psychopath. According to some reports, he would torture whole villages on a whim—just for the sport of it. And his hunt for the idol became an obsession. Village after village, town after town, wherever he went he wanted to know the location of the idol. But no matter many natives he tortured, no matter how many villages he burned, the Incas wouldn't tell him where their idol was.

'But then—somehow—in 1535 Hernando discovered the idol was being kept. It was being kept inside a stone vault inside the Coricancha, the famous Tern- lle of the Sun, situated in the centre of the besieged city of Cuzco.

'Unfortunately for Hernando, he got to Cuzco just in time to see a young Incan prince named Renco Capac make off with the idol in a daring ride through the Spanish and Incan lines. According to those medieval monks who read it, the Santiago Manuscript details Hernando's pursuit of Renco following the young prince's escape from Cuzco—a dazzling chase that wound its way through the Andes and out into the Amazon rainforest.'

'What the manuscript also allegedly does,' Nash said, 'is reveal the final resting place of the Spirit of the People.'

So they were after the idol, Race thought.

He didn't say anything, though. Mainly, because it just didn't make sense.

Why was the U.S. Army sending a team of nuclear physicists down to South America to find a lost Incan idol? And on the basis of a four-hundred-year-old Latin manuscript.

They might as well have been following a pirate's treasure map.

'I know what you're thinking,' Nash said. 'If someone had told me this same story a week ago, I'd have thought about it the same way you do. But then, up until a couple of weeks ago, nobody even knew where the Santiago Manu script was.'

'But now you have it,' Race said.

'No,' Nash said sharply. 'We have a copy of it. Somebody else has the original.'

'Who?“

Nash nodded at the folder in Race's lap. 'Did you see the newspaper article in the folder I gave you before? The one about the Jesuit monks who were killed in their monastery

in the Pyrenees?”

'Yeah…'

'Eighteen monks killed. All of them shot at close range with high-powered weapons. At first glance, it looks like the work of your garden variety Algerian terrorists. They've been known to attack isolated monasteries and their favoured m.o. is to shoot their victims at very close range.

Sure enough, the French press reported it that way.

'But'—Nash held up a finger—'what the press don't know is that during the carnage, one monk managed to escape. An American Jesuit on sabbatical in France. He man aged to hide upstairs in an attic during the whole thing.

After the French police debriefed him, he was passed on to our embassy in Paris. At the embassy, he was debriefed again, only this time by our CIA Chief of Station.'

'And?'

Nash looked Race squarely in the eye.

'The men who stormed that monastery weren't Algerian terrorists, Professor Race. They were commandos. Soldiers. White soldiers. They all wore black ski masks and they were all armed to the teeth with some pretty awesome weaponry. And they spoke to each other in German.