Temple

'During his escape from Cuzco, Renco Capac got the criminal Bassario to craft an exact replica of the Spirit of the People. Renco planned to surrender to Hernando and hand over the fake idol to him. He knew Hernando would kill him, but he also knew that so long as Hernando got an idol, he would never suspect that it might be the wrong idol.

'As it happened, however, Renco and Alberto Santiago killed Hernando and his men, and Renco—-so the manu script says—proceeded to hide both idols inside the temple.'

Nash turned the idol over in his hands and saw for the first time the hollowed-out cylindrical section in its base. He looked up at Race.

'So the real idol is still somewhere inside the temple?“

'That's what Santiago says in the manuscript,' Race said.

'But… ?”

'But I don't believe him.'

'You don't believe him? Why not?'

'Does your NRI machine still work?' Race asked Lauren.

'Yes.'

'Set it up and I'll show you what I mean.'

They all moved to the open-topped roof of the citadel, where Lauren began setting up the nucleotide resonance imager.

While she went about setting up the machine, Race looked out over the village. It was dark, still raining lightly.

He caught a glimpse of a large feline shadow peering up at him from behind one of the smaller buildings of the town.

After a few moments, Lauren had the NRI machine ready. She flicked a switch and the silver rod mounted on top of the console began to rotate slowly.

Thirty seconds later, there came a shrill beep! and the rod stopped abruptly. It was not, however, pointing at the idol in Nash's hands. Rather, it was pointing away from Nash, up at the mountains.

'I'm getting a reading,' Lauren said. 'Strong signal, very high frequency resonance.'

'What're the co-ordinates?' Race said.

'Bearing 270 degrees. Vertical angle 29 degrees, 58 minutes.

Range 793 metres. Same as it was last time, if I remember it right,' she said, giving Race a look.

'You are remembering it right,' he said. 'You'll also remember that we thought it was inside the temple.'

'Yes…' Lauren said.

Race looked at her hard—harder than usual. He wondered if she had been party to Nash's deception, decided that she probably was. 'Do you remember why we thought it was in the temple?'

Lauren frowned. “Well, I remember we climbed up the crater and saw the temple. Then we figured that the tem ple's location matched the trajectory of the NRI. Ergo, the idol was in the temple.'

'That's right,' Race said. 'That's exactly what we did. And that's exactly where we went wrong.'

They all came back inside the citadel.

Race grabbed a pen and a piece of paper from inside the ATV that was still parked flush against the doorway to the citadel.

'Copeland,' he said to the tall humourless scientist. 'Do you think that with all this technological gadgetry you've got here, you could find me a regular calculator?'

Copeland found one inside one of the American containers, handed it to him.

'All right,' Race said, allowing the others to crowd around him and watch.

He drew a picture on the sheet of paper.

'Okay,' he said. 'This is a picture of Vilcafor and the plateau to the west of it as seen from the side. Okay?'

'Okay,' Lauren said.

Race drew some lines across the drawing:

'And this is what we deduced yesterday from the reading that we got from the nucleotide resonance imager: 793 metres to the idol. Angle of inclination 29 degrees, 58 min- utes-but I'll just use 30 degrees to keep it simple. The point is, when we climbed up the crater and saw the temple, we immediately thought that the temple must have matched the reading. Right?'

'Right…' Nash said.

'Well we were wrong to do that,' Race said. 'Do you remember when we were climbing up that spiralling path around the rock tower and Lauren took a reading from her digital compass?'

“Vaguely,' Nash said.

'Well, I remember it. When we were level with the rock tower, standing on the outer ledge of the rope bridge, Lauren said that we had come exactly 632 metres horizontally from the village.'

He added another line to the drawing and changed the words '793 m” along the hypotenuse—the longest side of the triangle—to 'x m'.

632m

'Anybody remember doing trigonometry at school?' he asked. All the theoretical physicists in the citadel around

him shrugged bashfully. 'Granted, it isn't nuclear physics,'

Race said, 'but it does still have some uses.'

'Oh, I see it…' Doogie said suddenly from the back of the small crowd gathered around Race. Clearly the others didn't.

Race said, 'Using simple trigonometry, if you know one angle of a right-angled triangle and the length of one of its sides, you will be able to determine the lengths of the other two sides by using the concepts of sines, cosines and tangents.

'Don't you guys remember 'SOHCAHTOA'? The sine of an angle equals the length of the side opposite the angle divided by the length of the hypotenuse. The cosine equals the length of the side adjacent to the angle divided by the hypotenuse.