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 a colourless liquid. ‘Now, we’re going to discuss El Dorado. If you give me good answers, I’ll give you the antivenom.’
Nina struggled uselessly against the ropes. The spot where she had been stung had already swollen. The burning sensation pervaded her body, her racing heart spreading the venom faster through her bloodstream. Another kind of pain, an intense cramp, grew in her shoulder muscles. ‘I don’t know where El Dorado is!’ she cried. ‘Osterhagen’s the Inca expert, not me!’
‘You can do better than that. Now, you saw the paintings on the wall. You must have deduced what they meant. I mean, even I did, and I’m not an archaeologist.’ He held up the syringe tantalisingly. ‘Tell me what you saw.’
The cramp reached her throat, feeling as though an invisible hand was slowly tightening around her neck. ‘An – an account of their journey,’