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  "You can stand by while your wife is beaten and raped and murdered, and not say one word to stop it?" Zolar asked, studying Moore's reaction.

  Moore's expression remained unchanged. "Barbaric stupidity will gain you nothing."

  "He's bluffing." Moore needed an acid bath after the look Sarason gave him. "He'll crumble as soon as he hears her scream."

  Zolar shook his head. "I don't think so."

  "I agree," said Oxley. "We've underestimated his monumental greed and his ruthless mania for becoming a big star in the academic world. Am I right, Doctor?"

  Moore was unmoved by their contempt. Then he said, "Fifty percent of something beats a hundred percent of nothing, gentlemen."

  Zolar glanced at his brothers. Oxley gave a barely perceptible nod. Sarason clenched his fists so tightly they went ivory-he turned away but the expression on his face gave every indication of wanting to tear Moore's lungs out.

  "I think we can avoid further threats and settle this is an orderly manner," said Zolar. "Before we can agree to your increased demands, I must have your complete assurance you can guide us to the treasure."

  "I have deciphered the description of the landmark that leads to the entrance of the cavern," said Moore, speaking slowly and distinctly. "There is no probability of error. I know the dimensions and its shape. I can recognize it from the air."

  His confident assertion was met with silence. Zolar walked over to the golden mummy and looked down at the glyphs etched in the gold covering. "Thirty percent. You'll have to make do with that."

  "Forty or nothing." Moore said resolutely.

  "Do you want it in writing?"

  "Would it stand up in a court of law?"

  "Probably not."

  "Then we'll just have to take each other at our word." Moore turned to his wife. "Sorry, my dear, I hope you didn't find this too upsetting. But you must understand. Some things are more important than marriage vows."

  What a strange woman, Zolar thought. She should have looked frightened and humiliated, but she showed no indication of it. "It's settled then," he said. "Since we're now working partners, I see no need to continue wearing our ski masks." He pulled it over his head and ran his hands through his hair. "Everyone try to get a good night's sleep. You will all fly to Guaymas, Mexico, on our company jet first thing in the morning."

  "Why Guaymas?" asked Micki Moore.

  "Two reasons. It's centrally located in the Gulf, and a good friend and client has an open invitation for my use of his hacienda just north of the port. The estate has a private airstrip, which makes it an ideal headquarters for conducting the search."

  "Aren't you coming?" asked Oxley.

  "I'll meet you in two days. I have a business meeting in Wichita, Kansas."

  Zolar turned to Sarason, leery that his brother might launch another rampage against Moore. But he need not have worried.

  Samson's face had a ghoulish grin. His brothers could not see inside his mind, see that he was happily imagining what Tupac Amaru would do to Henry Moore after the treasure was discovered.

  "Brunhilda has gone as far as she can go," said Yaeger, referring to his beloved computer terminal. "Together, we've painstakingly pieced together about ninety percent of the stringed codes. But there are a few permutations we haven't figured out--"

  "Permutations?" muttered Pitt, sitting across from Yaeger in the conference room.

  "The different arrangements in lineal order and color of the quipu's coiled wire cables."

  Pitt shrugged and looked around the room. Four other men were there-- Admiral Sandecker, Al Giordino, Rudi Gunn, and Hiram Yaeger. Everyone's attention was focused on Yaeger, who looked like a coyote who had bayed nonstop all night at a full moon.

  "I really must work on my vocabulary," Pitt murmured. He slouched into a comfortable position and stared at the computer genius who stood behind a podium under a large wall screen.

  "As I was about to explain," Yaeger continued, "a few of the knots and coils are indecipherable. After applying the most sophisticated and advanced information and data analysis techniques known to man, the best I can offer is a rough account of the story."

  "Even a mastermind like you?" asked Gunn, smiling.

  "Even Einstein. Unless he'd unearthed an Inca Rosetta Stone or a sixteenth-century how-to book on the art of creating your very own quipu, he'd have worked in a vacuum too."

  "If you're going to tell us the show ends with no grand climax," said Giordino, "I'm going to lunch."

  "Drake's quipu is a complex representation of numerical data," Yaeger pushed on, undaunted by Giordino's sarcasm, "but it's not strong on blow-by-blow descriptions of events. You can't narrate visual action and drama with strategically placed knots on a few coils of colored wire. The quipu can only offer sketchy accounts of the people who walked on and off this particular stage of history."

  "You've made your point," said Sandecker, waving one of his bulbous cigars. "Now why don't you tell us what you sifted from the maze?"

  Yaeger nodded and lowered the conference room lights. He switched on a slide projector that threw an early Spanish map of the coast of North and South America on the wall screen. He picked up a metal pointer that telescoped like an automobile radio aerial and casually aimed it in the general direction of the map.

  "Without a long-winded history lesson, I'll just say that after Huascar, the legitimate heir to the Inca throne, was defeated and overthrown by his bastard half-brother, Atahualpa, in 1533, he ordered his kingdom's treasury and other royal riches to be hidden high in the Andes. A wise move, as it turned out. During his imprisonment, Huascar suffered great humiliation and grief. All his friends and kinsmen were executed, and his wives and children were hanged. Then to add insult to injury, the Spanish picked that particular moment to invade the Inca empire. In a situation similar to Cortez in Mexico, Francisco Pizarro's timing couldn't have been more perfect. With the Inca armies divided by factions and decimated by civil war, the disorder played right into his hands. After Pizarro's small force of soldiers and adventurers slaughtered a few thousand of Atahualpa's imperial retainers and bureaucrats in the square at the ancient city of Caxanarca, he won the Inca empire on a technical foul."

  "Strange that the Inca simply didn't attack and overwhelm the Spanish," said Gunn. "They must have outnumbered Pizarro's troops by a hundred to one.

  "Closer to a thousand to one," said Yaeger. "But again, as with Cortez and the Aztecs, the sight of fierce bearded men wearing iron clothes no arrow or rock could penetrate, riding ironclad horses, previously unknown to the Incas, while slashing with swords and shooting matchlock guns and cannons, was too much for them. Thoroughly demoralized, Atahualpa's generals failed to take the initiative by ordering determined mass attacks."

  "What of Huascar's armies?" asked Pitt. "Surely they were still in the field."

  "Yes, but they were leaderless." Yaeger nodded. "History can only look back on a what-if situation. What if the two Inca kings had buried the hatchet and merged their two armies in a do-or-die campaign to rid the empire of the dreaded foreigners? An interesting hypothesis. With the defeat of the Spanish, God only knows where the political boundaries and governments of South America might be today."

  "They'd certainly be speaking a language other than Spanish," commented Giordino.

  "Where was Huascar during Atahualpa's confrontation with Pizarro?" asked Sandecker, finally lighting his cigar.

  Imprisoned in Cuzco, the capital city of the empire, twelve hundred kilometers south of Caxanarca."

  Without looking up from the notations he was making on a legal pad, Pitt asked, "What happened next?"

  "To buy his liberty, Atahualpa contracted with Pizarro to cram a room with gold as high as he could reach," answered Yaeger. "A room, I might add, slightly larger than this one."

  "Did he fulfill the contract?"

  "He did. But Atahualpa was afraid that Huascar might offer Pizarro more gold, silver, and gems than he could. So he ordered that his brothe
r be put to death, which was carried out by drowning, but not before Huascar ordered the royal treasures to be hidden."

  Sandecker stared at Yaeger through a cloud of blue smoke. "With the king dead, who carried out his wish?"

  "A general called Naymlap," replied Yaeger. He paused and used the pointer to trace a red line on the map that ran from the Andes down to the coast. "He was not of royal Inca blood, but rather a Chachapoyan warrior who rose through the ranks to become Huascar's most trusted advisor. It was Naymlap who organized the movement of the treasury down from the mountains to the seashore, where he had assembled a fleet of fifty-five ships. Then, according to the quipu, after a journey of twenty-four days, it took another eighteen days just to load the immense treasure on board."

  "I had no idea the Incas were seafaring people," said Gunn.

  "So were the Mayans, and like the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans before them, the Incas were coastal sailors. They were not afraid of open water, but they wisely beached their boats on moonless nights and during stormy weather. They navigated by the sun and stars and sailed with prevailing winds and currents up and down the shoreline, conducting trade with the Mesoamericans in Panama and perhaps beyond. An Inca legend tells of an early king who heard a tale about an island rich in gold and intelligent people, that lay far out beyond the horizon of the sea. With loot and slaves in mind, he built and rigged a fleet of ships, and then sailed off with a company of his soldiers acting as marines to what is thought to be the Galapagos Islands. Nine months later he returned with scores of black prisoners and much gold."

  "The Galapagos?" wondered Pitt.

  "As good a guess as any."

  "Do we have any records of their ship construction?" Sandecker queried.

  "Bartholomew Ruiz, Pizarro's pilot, saw large rafts equipped with masts and great square cotton sails. Other Spanish seamen reported sailing past rafts with hulls of balsa wood, bamboo and reed, carrying sixty people and forty or more large crates of trade goods. Besides sails, the rafts were also propelled by teams of paddlers. Designs found on pre-Columbian clay pottery show twodecker boats sporting raised stem and sternposts with carved serpent heads similar to the dragons gracing Viking longships."

  "So there is no doubt they could have transported tons of gold and silver long distances across the sea?"

  "No doubt at all, Admiral." Yaeger tapped the pointer on another line that traced the voyage of Naymlap's treasure fleet. "From point of departure, north to their destination, the voyage took eighty-six days. No short cruise for primitive ships."

  "Any chance they might have headed south?" asked Giordino.

  Yaeger shook his head. "My computer discovered that one coil of knots represented the four basic points of direction, with the knot for north at the top and the knot for south at the bottom. East and west were represented by subordinate strands."

  "And their final landfall?" Pitt prodded.

  "The tricky part. Never having the opportunity to clock a balsa raft under sail over a measured nautical mile, estimating the fleet's speed through water was strictly guesswork. I won't go into it now, you can read my full report later. But Brunhilda, in calculating the length of the voyage, did a masterful job of projecting the currents and wind during 1533."

  Pitt put his hands behind his head and leaned his chair back on two legs. "Let me guess. They came ashore somewhere in the upper reaches of the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California, a vast cleft of water separating the Mexican mainland from Baja California."

  "On an island as you and I already discussed," Yaeger added. "It took the crews of the ships twelve days to stash the treasure in a cave, a large one according to the dimensions recorded on the quipu. An opening, which I translated as being a tunnel, runs from the highest point of the island down to the treasure cave."

  "You can conclude all this from a series of knots?" asked Sandecker, incredulous.

  Yaeger nodded. "And much more. A crimson strand represented Huascar, a black knot the day of his execution at the order of Atahualpa, whose attached strand was purple. General Naymlap's is a dark turquoise. Brunhilda and I can also give you a complete tally of the hoard. Believe me when I say the bulk sum is far and away more than what has been salvaged from sunken treasure ships during the last hundred years."

  Sandecker looked skeptical. "I hope you're including the Atocha, the Edinburgh, and the Central America in that claim."

  "And many more." Yaeger smiled confidently.

  Gunn looked puzzled. "An island, you say, somewhere in the Sea of Cortez?"

  "So where exactly is the treasure?" said Giordino, cutting to the heart of the lecture.

  "Besides in a cavern on an island in the Sea of Cortez," summed up Sandecker.

  "Sung to the tune of `My Darlin' Clementine,' " Pitt jested.

  "Looks to me," Giordino sighed, "like we've got a hell of a lot of islands to consider. The Gulf is loaded with them."

  "We don't have to concern ourselves with any island below the twenty-eighth parallel." Yaeger circled a section of the map with his pointer. "As Dirk guessed, I figure Naymlap's fleet sailed into the Gulf's upper reaches."

  Giordino was ever the pragmatist. "You still haven't told us where to dig."

  "On an island that rises out of the water like a pinnacle, or as Brunhilda's translation of the quipu suggests, the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco." Yaeger threw on an enlarged slide of the sea between Baja California and the mainland of Mexico on the screen. "A factor that narrows the search zone considerably."

  Pitt leaned forward, studying the chart on the screen. "The central islands of Angel de la Guarda and Tiburon stretch between forty and sixty kilometers. They each have several prominent pinnaclelike peaks. You'll have to cut it even closer, Hiram."

  "Any chance Brunhilda missed something?" asked Gunn.

  "Or drew the wrong meaning from the knots?" said Giordino, casually pulling one of Sandecker's specially made cigars from his breast pocket and igniting the end.

  The admiral glared, but said nothing. He had long ago given up trying to figure out how Giordino got them, certainly not from his private stock. Sandecker kept a tight inventory of his humidor.

  "I admit to a knowledge gap," Yaeger conceded. "As I said earlier, the computer and I decoded ninety percent of the quipu's coils and knots. The other ten percent defies clear meaning. Two coils threw us off the mark. One made a vague reference to what Brunhilda interpreted as some kind of god or demon carved from stone. The second made no geological sense. Something about a river running through the treasure cave."

  Gunn tapped his ballpoint pen on the table. "I've never heard of a river running under an island."

  "I haven't either," agreed Yaeger. "That's why I hesitated to mention it."

  "Must be seepage from the water in the Gulf," said Pitt.

  Gunn nodded. "The only logical answer."

  Pitt looked up at Yaeger. "You couldn't find any reference to landmarks?"

  "Sorry, I struck out. For a while there I entertained hopes the demon god might hold a key to the location of the cave," answered Yaeger. "The knots on that particular coil seemed to signify a measurement of distance. I have the impression it indicates a number of paces inside a tunnel leading from the demon to the cave. But the copper strands had deteriorated, and Brunhilda couldn't reconstruct a coherent meaning."

  "What sort of demon?" asked Sandecker.

  "I don't have the slightest idea."

  "A signpost leading to the treasure maybe?" mused Gunn.

  "Or a sinister deity to scare off thieves," suggested Pitt.

  Sandecker rapped his cigar on the lip of a glass cup, knocking off along ash. "A sound theory if the elements and vandals haven't taken their toll over four hundred years, leaving a sculpture that can't be distinguished from an ordinary rock."

  "To sum up," said Pitt, "we're searching for a steep outcropping of rock or pinnacle on an island in the Sea of Cortez with a stone carving of a demon on top of it."

  "A ge
neralization," Yaeger said, sitting down at the table. "But that pretty well summarizes what I could glean out of the quipu."

  Gunn removed his glasses, held them up to the light and checked for smudges. "Any hope at all that Bill Straight can restore the deteriorated coils?"

  "I'll ask him to begin work on them," answered Yaeger.

  "He'll be diligently laboring over them within the hour," Sandecker assured him.

  "If Straight's conservation experts can reconstruct enough of the knots and strands for Brunhilda to analyze, I think I can promise to add enough data to put you within spitting distance of the tunnel leading to the treasure cave."

  "You'd better," Pitt advised, "because I have ambitions in life other thin going around Mexico digging empty holes."

  Gunn turned toward Sandecker. "Well, what do you say, Admiral? Is it a go?"

  The feisty little chief of NUMA stared at the map on the screen. Finally, he sighed and muttered, "I want a proposal detailing the search project and its cost when I walk in my office tomorrow morning. Consider yourselves on paid vacation for the next three weeks. And not a word outside this room. If the news media get wind that NUMA is conducting a treasure hunt, I'll catch all kinds of hell from Congress."

  "And if we find Huascar's treasure?" asked Pitt.

  "Then we'll all be impoverished heroes."

  Yaeger missed the point. "Impoverished?"

  "What the admiral is implying," said Pitt, "is that the finders will not be the keepers."

  Sandecker nodded. "Cry a river, gentlemen, but if you are successful in finding the hoard, every troy ounce of it will probably be turned over to the government of Peru."

  Pitt and Giordino exchanged knowing grins, each reading the other's mind, but it was Giordino who spoke first.

  "I'm beginning to think there is a lesson somewhere in all this."

  Sandecker looked at him uneasily. "What lesson is that?"

  Giordino studied his cigar as he answered. "The treasure would probably be better off if we left it where it is."