Алистер Маклин - River of Death

‘He’s got something to hide,’ Hamilton said. ‘I know he has.’

Navarro said: ‘What?’

‘That’s what we’re going to find out, isn’t it?’ Hamilton said.

‘I wish you wouldn’t play your cards so close to your chest,’ Navarro said.

‘What cards?’

‘We look forward to watching you at work, Mr Hamilton,’ Ramon said. His tone was neutral to the point of being ambiguous. ‘It should be worth watching. By every account, the man is totally above suspicion. He goes everywhere, sees everyone, knows everyone. And everyone knows that he and the President are blood brothers.’

The President’s blood brother was leaning forward in a chair in his splendid drawing-room, oblivious of the company around him, staring in fascination at the silver screen. The room had been so efficiently darkened by the heavy drapes that he would have had difficulty in seeing those around him: had it been broad daylight, he still wouldn’t have seen them. His absorption was total.

The transparencies were of superb quality, taken with a superb camera by an expert photographer who knew precisely what he was about. The colour was true, the clarity and the resolution impeccable. And the projector the best that Smith’s money could buy.

The first group showed a ruined and ancient city, impossibly clinging to the top of a narrow plateau with, at the far end, a breathtakingly well-preserved ziggurat, as imposing as the best surviving works of the Aztecs or the Maya.

A second group showed one side of the city perched on the edge of a cliff that dropped vertically to a river and the rainforest beyond. The third group showed the other side of the city overlooking a similar gorge with a river sliding swiftly past in the distant depths. A fourth group, clearly taken from the top of the hills, showed a reverse view of the ancient city, with a brief glimpse of scrub-land beyond – once obviously terraced for cultivation – and with the two cliff-sides meeting in the middle distance. A fifth group, obviously taken 180° from the same position, showed a flat, grassy plateau, the sides curving to meet like the bows of a boat. Nearly incredible as those pictures were, the next few groups were staggering.

They were taken from the air and as transparency succeeded transparency, it became evident that they, like a number of the previous ones, could only have been taken from a helicopter.

The first of those helicopter shots showed the entire ruined city from above. The second, from perhaps five hundred feet higher up, showed that the city was perched on top of a vertically-sided, boat-shaped pinnacle of rock splitting a river which swept by on either side of it. Both arms of the river were rock-strewn, foaming white and clearly unnavigable. The third and fourth groups, from an even higher altitude, were a shock: taken horizontally they showed pictures of a densely crowded rainforest, reaching out, it seemed, almost to touch the camera and extending, unbroken, to the distant horizon. The fifth set, vertically downwards, made it clear that the great outer cliff-walls of the twin gorges were at least several hundred feet higher than the top of the cliff-walls that formed the island on which the Lost City was built. The sixth group, taken at a still higher elevation, showed just a narrow gap between two great stretches of forest reaching towards each other, with the Lost City just vaguely visible in the gloomy depths below. The seventh and last group, taken anywhere between five hundred and a thousand feet higher up again, revealed nothing but the continuous majestic sweep of the Amazonian rainforest, unbroken from pictorial horizon to pictorial horizon.

It was small wonder, then, that the planes of the Brazilian ordnance survey services, whose pilots claimed, probably rightly, to have crisscrossed every square mile of the Mato Grosso, had never discovered the site of the Lost City. It just could not be seen from the air. But the ancients had stumbled across it, discovered the most invisible, the most inaccessible, the most impregnable fortress ever created by nature or devised by man.

The viewers in the Villa Haydn drawing-room had sat throughout in silence. They knew they had seen something that no white man, with the exception of Hamilton and his helicopter pilot, had ever seen before, something, perhaps, that no-one had ever seen for generations, maybe even for centuries. They were hard people, tough people, cynical people, people who counted value only in the terms of cost, people conditioned to disbelieve, almost automatically, the evidence of their own eyes: but there is yet to be born a man or woman the atavistic depths of whose soul cannot be touched by that one questing finger that will not be denied, that primitive ancestral awe inseparable from watching the veil of unsuspected history being swept aside.

The slowly comprehending silence stretched out for at least a minute. Then, almost inaudibly, Smith exhaled his breath in a long sigh.

‘Son-of-a-gun,’ he whispered. ‘Son-of-a-gun. He found it.’

‘If your intention was to impress us,’ Maria said, ‘you’ve succeeded. What on earth was that? And where is it?’

‘The Lost City.’ Smith spoke absently. ‘Brazil. In the Mato Grosso.’

‘The Brazilians built pyramids?’

‘Not that I know of. May have been some other race. Anyway, they’re not pyramids, they’re – Tracy, this is more in your field.’

‘Well. Not really my field either. One of our magazines had an article on those so-called pyramids and I spent a couple of days with the writer and photographer on the job. Curiosity only, and wasted curiosity – I didn’t learn much. Pyramid-shaped, sure, but those stepped-sided and flat-topped structures are called ziggurats. No-one knows where they originated although it is known that the Assyrians and Babylonians had them. Oddly enough, this style bypassed the virtually neighbouring country of Egypt, which went in for the smooth-sided and conically-topped version, but turned up again in ancient Mexico where some are still to be seen. Archaeologists and such-like use this as a powerful argument of prehistoric contact between east and west but the only sure fact is that their origins are lost in the mists of those same prehistoric times. My word, Mr Smith, this is going to drive those poor archaeologists up the wall. A ziggurat in the Mato Grosso.’

‘Ricardo?’ Hamilton said. ‘I shall be leaving our friend’s place in about two hours’ time. I’ll be driving – moment.’ He broke off and turned to Ramon lounging on the couch in the Imperial Suite. ‘Ramon, what shall I be driving?’

‘Black Cadillac.’

‘A black Cadillac,’ Hamilton said into the phone. ‘I do not wish to be followed. Thank you.’

There were six people in Smith’s drawing-room that sunny afternoon – Smith himself, Tracy, Maria, Hiller, Serrano and Hamilton. All had glasses in their hands.

‘Another?’ said Smith. His hand reached out to touch the button that would summon the butler.

Hamilton said: ‘I’d rather talk.’

Smith raised an eyebrow in slight if genuine astonishment. Not only had he heard from Hiller of Hamilton’s reputation as a hard drinker, but his slightest suggestion was usually treated as a royal command. He withdrew his hand from the buzzer.

‘As you wish. So we are agreed on the purpose of our visit. I tell you, Hamilton, I have done many things in the past that have given me a great deal of pleasure, but I’ve never been so excited–’

Hamilton interrupted him, something no-one ever did to Smith. ‘Let’s get down to details.’

‘By God, you are in a hurry. I’d have thought that after four years–’

‘It’s a lot longer than that. But even after only four years a man starts to become a little impatient.’ He pointed towards Maria and Tracy. People never pointed in Smith’s drawing-room. ‘Who are they?’