Matthew Reilly: Temple

‘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 managed 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.’

‘What’s more interesting,’ Nash continued, ‘is what they were after. Apparently, the commandos gathered all the monks together in the abbey’s dining room and made them get down on their knees. Then they grabbed one of the monks and demanded to know the location of the Santiago Manuscript. When the monk said he didn’t know where it was, they shot two monks—one on either side of him. Then they asked him again. When he again said he didn’t know, they killed the next two monks. This would have gone on until they were all killed but then someone stepped forward and said he knew where the manuscript was.’

‘Jesus…’ Race said.

Nash pulled a photograph from his briefcase. ‘We have reason to believe that the man responsible for this atrocity was this man, Heinrich Anistaze, formerly a major in the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Race looked at the photo. It was an eight-by-ten glossy of man getting out of a car. The man was tall and broad shouldered, with short black hair that was brushed forward and two narrow slits for eyes. They were hard eyes, cold eyes, eyes that seemed to be set in a perpetual squint. He appeared to be in his mid-forties.

‘Notice the left hand,’ Nash said.

Race looked at the photograph more closely. The man’s left hand rested atop the car door. Race saw it.

Heinrich Anistaze had no left ring finger.

‘At one time during the Cold War, Anistaze was captured by members of an East German crime syndicate that the Stasi was trying to shut down. They made him cut off his own finger before they sent it off in the mail to his superiors. But then Anistaze escaped, and returned—with the full force of the Stasi behind him. Needless to say, organised crime was never a problem in communist East Germany after that.

‘Of more importance to us, however, are his methods in other circumstances. You see, it seems Anistaze had a peculiar way of making people talk: he was known for executing the people on either side of the person who failed to give him the information he wanted.’

There was a short silence.

‘According to our most recent intelligence,’ Nash said, ‘since the end of the Cold War, Anistaze has been working in a non-official capacity as an assassin for the unified Ger man government.’

‘So the Germans have the original manuscript,’ Race said. ‘How did you get your copy then?’

Nash nodded sagely:

‘The monks gave the Germans the original manuscript. The actual, undecorated, handwritten manuscript written by Alberto Santiago himself.’

‘What the monks didn’t tell the Germans, though, was that in 1599—thirty years after Santiago’s death—-another Franciscan monk began transcribing Santiago’s handwritten manuscript into a more elaborate, decorated text that would be fit for the eyes of kings.

Unfortunately, this second monk died before he could complete his transcription, but what remains is a second copy of the Santiago Manuscript, a partially-completed copy that was also kept at the San Sebastian Abbey. It is this copy of the manuscript that we have a Xerox of.“

Race held up his hand.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘Wait a minute. Why all this murder and intrigue for a lost Incan idol? What could the U.S. and German governments possibly want with a four-hundred year-old piece of stone?’

Nash gave Race a grim smile.

‘You see, Professor, it’s not the idol that we’re after,’ he said. ‘It’s the substance that it’s made of.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Professor, what I mean is this: we believe that the Spirit of the People was carved out of a meteorite.’

‘The journal article,’ Race said.

‘That’s right,” Nash said. ‘By Albert Mueller of Bonn University. Before his rather untimely death, Mueller was studying a one-mile-wide meteor crater in the jungles of south-eastern Peru, at a site about fifty miles south of Cuzco.

By measuring the size of the crater and the speed of jungle growth over it, Mueller estimated that a high-density meteorite about two feet in diameter impacted with the earth at that site sometime between the years 1460 and 1470.’

‘Which,’ Walter Chambers added, ‘coincides perfectly with the rise of the Incas in South America.’

‘What is more important for us,’ Nash said, ‘is what Mueller found in the walls of this crater. Deposited in the walls of the crater were trance samples of a substance known as thyrium261.’

‘Thyrium261?’ Race said.

‘It’s a rare isotope of the common element thyrium,’

Nash said, ‘and it is not found on Earth. In fact, thyrium has only been found here in petrified form, presumably as a result of previous asteroid impacts in the distant past. It is indigenous to the Pleiades system, a binary star system not far from our own. But since it comes from a binary star system, thyrium is of a far greater density than even the heaviest of terrestrial elements.’

Things were beginning to make a little more sense to Race now.

Especially the part about the Army sending a team of physicists down to the jungle.

‘And what exactly can you do with thyrium?’ Race asked.

“Colonel!’ a voice called suddenly.

Nash and Race turned in their seats to see Troy Copeland, one of the other scientists, come striding quickly down the centre aisle from the cockpit. Copeland was a tall man, lean, with a thin, hawk-like face and intense, narrow eyes. He was one of the DARPA people—a nuclear physicist, Race recalled—and he appeared to Race to be a completely humourless individual.

‘Colonel, we have a problem,’ he said.