Stikes and Callas, the general in full uniform, waited for her outside, but there was also a third man; tall, tanned, with long jet-black hair swept greasily back from his forehead. His pastel jacket and trousers were clearly of some extremely expensive designer label, though the stylish effect was offset by a vulgar gold medallion. Even this early in the day, he had a glass of Scotch and clunking ice cubes in his hand.
‘Ah, here she is!’ said Callas as the soldiers brought Nina into the open. ‘My expert.’
The third man’s eyebrows flickered in recognition. ‘Wait, she is . . . ’
‘Dr Nina Wilde,’ Callas announced. ‘Discoverer of Atlantis, and the secret of the Sphinx, and now . . . my guest. Dr Wilde, meet my good friend Francisco de Quesada.’
She remembered the Venezuelan mentioning the name at the military base, though in a far from friendly way. Like Pachac, then; another of his allies of necessity.
De Quesada took in Nina’s dirty, dishevelled clothing. ‘You do not let your guests shower, Salbatore?’
‘She’s not entirely a willing guest,’ said Stikes.
‘But she will still tell you how much this is worth,’ Callas said, indicating something on a glass coffee table: the khipu, opened out to its full length, knotted strands displayed along the braided central cord. Nina noticed the case holding the statues on the floor nearby.
De Quesada shook his head. ‘I am already paying you fifty million dollars for the sun disc—’
‘It is worth far more,’ Callas smoothly interjected.
‘Perhaps. But you are also getting a share of my . . . proceeds.’ He looked askance at Nina. ‘Is it safe to talk in front of her?’
Callas snorted. ‘You can say anything you like – she won’t be telling anyone.’
‘My drug revenue, then. Now that the American DEA and the government have cracked down in Colombia, I need Venezuela to ship my product. Which means I need you, general. Or should I call you el Jefe?’
Callas smiled proudly, only to be deflated by Stikes’s ‘Let’s not count our chickens before they’re hatched.’
‘Which brings me to another English phrase,’ said de Quesada. He gestured dismissively at the khipu. ‘“Money for old rope”. You are getting a lot of money from me, Salbatore – cash now, and a share of what will come later. Why should I pay another million for this trash?’
‘That is why I brought Dr Wilde,’ said Callas. ‘Who better to tell you why these strings are worth so much? If you can’t trust the world’s most famous archaeologist, then who can you trust?’
‘Yes, who?’ de Quesada replied, his tone suggesting to Nina that the Venezuelan’s veiled dislike was mutual. But he sat back, gesturing at her with his drink. ‘Very well. Impress me, Dr Wilde.’
‘And be honest,’ Stikes added in a quiet but threatening voice.
Nina walked to the table, examining the khipu. Fully opened, it was more than three feet long, the number of multicoloured strings attached to the woven spine greater than she had thought; well over a hundred. The number of knots on each string ranged from a couple to over a dozen.
The topmost knot on each string, she noticed, was always one of four kinds. She knew that the Incas had divided their empire into quadrants based on astronomical features: could they be directions? Below the first, the other knots were more varied, strung like beads. If it were indeed a guide to the Incas’ journey, it would require considerable work to decode.
But she had seen such guides before – leading to Atlantis, to Eden. It could be done. El Dorado could be found.
If she made the khipu seem dull enough to dissuade de Quesada from buying it.
‘Well, it’s called a khipu,’ she began, slipping into a professorial tone. ‘They were used as a system of record-keeping by the Incas. The knots on each string are a way of storing numbers, similar to an abacus.’ She tried to remember what Osterhagen had said about them. ‘They were used to keep censuses, calculate taxes, track how much food was grown.’ Keep it boring, she told herself. ‘They were the backbone of the Inca accounting system.’
To her relief, de Quesada didn’t appear impressed. ‘But they are valuable, no?’ prompted Callas.
‘I suppose, but more because of their scarcity than any intrinsic worth. There are only a few hundred still in existence. The Conquistadors destroyed all the ones they found.’
‘The Conquistadors?’ De Quesada’s eyes flashed with sudden interest. ‘Why did they destroy them?’