‘No, in a drugs raid on a mansion in Mexico a few weeks ago. The man had a taste for ancient art. But his records contained a paper trail that led back to their illegal source.’
‘Peru?’
Kit shook his head. ‘Venezuela.’
‘What?’ Nina shook her head. ‘That doesn’t make sense – the Inca empire never extended that far from the Andes. Are you sure they weren’t just smuggled through Venezuela?’
‘After these were recovered, we checked with our informants to find out if any other Inca artefacts had come on to the black market. They had, and apparently some were being sold for very large sums, tens of millions of dollars. We didn’t find out who was selling them or exactly where they were coming from, but there are two things we are certain about.’
‘Which are?’ Eddie asked.
‘They are definitely coming from somewhere in Venezuela, most likely the south of the country. And they are all completely unknown artefacts. Nobody has ever seen them before.’
The implication of that struck Nina almost physically. ‘Unknown?’ she echoed. ‘But if all these pieces are genuine Inca artefacts, that would mean . . . there’s an undiscovered Inca settlement somewhere in Venezuela!’
‘Somebody must’ve discovered it,’ Eddie pointed out, nodding at the photos.
She wasn’t listening. ‘That would be an enormous change to what we thought we knew about the Inca empire. They made incursions into the Amazon jungle, but never settled there – they were a mountain people.’ She went to the wall map, holding her thumb and forefinger apart above the scale before moving her hand in steps across the map. ‘Venezuela is a good nine hundred miles from the empire’s outer reaches. Any Inca outpost that far away would be . . . ’ Her eyes widened. ‘Legendary. No, it couldn’t be!’
‘What couldn’t be?’ Eddie demanded.
‘The Spanish conquered Peru in the 1530s,’ she explained excitedly. ‘Francisco Pizarro, the leader of the Conquistadors, captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa, who tried to make a deal – in return for his freedom, he’d give Pizarro enough gold to fill his cell from floor to ceiling. Pizarro agreed, after demanding that he also get enough silver to fill the neighbouring cell. Atahualpa told him it would take two months to collect the gold and silver from throughout the empire, so Pizarro sent messengers to issue his demands, while keeping Atahualpa as a hostage.’
‘How big was the room?’ asked Kit.
‘I can’t remember exactly, but quite large. So enough gold to fill it would be worth millions of dollars in today’s money – maybe even billions.’
Eddie whistled appreciatively. ‘Did this Pizarro get the gold?’
‘I don’t know if anyone ever literally tried to fill the room with treasure, but Pizarro certainly became extremely rich. Although that didn’t stop him from putting Atahualpa up before a kangaroo court, forcing him to convert to Christianity, and then executing him.’
‘Ungrateful git!’
‘Yeah, the Conquistadors weren’t exactly shining beacons of integrity. But the thing was, when Pizarro took control of Cuzco, the capital, the Spanish realised there was much less gold there than they’d expected from previous expeditions. They melted down everything they could get their hands on, tens of tons of it – but they thought they were going to find hundreds of tons. And it didn’t take long before they started thinking that Atahualpa’s message hadn’t only been to send gold for his ransom, but also to warn his people to hide as much treasure as they could from the Spanish.’
‘This treasure,’ said Kit, ‘it might have been hidden in Venezuela?’
Nina looked at the map again. ‘Nobody knows. But there’s a legend of a hidden city where the Incas kept their greatest treasures. It’s called—’
‘El Dorado!’ Eddie cut in.
‘No – you’ve fallen into the same trap as the Spanish,’ she said. ‘That really is a myth, or rather a misinterpretation. The Chibcha Indians in Colombia had a ritual where they covered their king in gold dust and he went out into their sacred lake to wash himself clean. The Spanish, who only heard about it second-hand, thought El Dorado meant a golden city, not a golden man.’
‘Huh. And I thought I’d actually learned something from cartoons as a kid!’
‘Hey, I loved that show too – it was one of the few cartoons my parents didn’t mind me watching. Even if it was just so they could point out all the historical inaccuracies . . . Anyway, the real legendary city, if that’s not an oxymoron, was called Paititi. The story was