Empire of Gold_A Novel

  Before anyone else did.

  Eddie put a pint of beer and a whiskey on the table. “There you go.”

  “Thanks,” said Mac, leaning forward to pick up his glass. His left leg creaked faintly, metal and plastic rather than flesh and bone; he had lost the limb from the knee down in Afghanistan. He took a sip of whiskey, then looked around the sunlit beer garden. “Nice afternoon for a trip to the seaside. I’m glad you called—it was looking to be a rather boring day otherwise.”

  “Any excuse to get out of work, right?” said Eddie, grinning.

  “Hmph. I wish. The jobs from Vauxhall Cross seem to be drying up of late.”

  Vauxhall Cross in London was the location of the headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6. Since his retirement from the military, Mac had on occasion worked for the agency as what was euphemistically described as a “consultant,” even though some of his operations had been very hands-on. “Really?” said Eddie. “Alderley not appreciating you, is he? Miserable sod. After everything you’ve done for him …”

  Mac shook his head. “Peter’s not the problem. It’s more that everything I’ve got to offer—contacts, local knowledge, intel … it’s all getting a bit out of date. The whole world’s moving on, Eddie, and when you’re not at the center of things you start to get left behind, unfortunately.” A small sigh, then his expression changed to one of curiosity. “And speaking of being left behind, you seem to have been abandoned by your other half. Where’s Nina today?”

  “Glastonbury. Work stuff.”

  “And you’re not with her?” Eddie’s lack of an immediate response told his friend volumes. “Things all right with the two of you?”

  “Just having a rough patch,” the Yorkshireman admitted. “You know what it’s like. Everything seems to end up in an argument. And we had a pretty big one last night.”

  “About what?”

  “My dad. We had dinner with him and his wife, and … it could’ve gone better.”

  “You actually met him?” Mac was surprised. “A long time since that last happened.”

  “Twenty-odd years, yeah. Lizzie basically tricked me into it. I would’ve told him to fuck off when he invited us to dinner, but Nina insisted that we go. And that turned out fucking brilliantly. He hasn’t changed—he’s still an arsehole.”

  “Hrmm.”

  Eddie eyed the older man. “Hrmm what?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Bollocks, nothing. That wasn’t a that’s interesting hrmm or an I need to think about this hrmm—that was a you’re being an idiot but it’s not my place to comment hrmm. What?”

  “Well, since you ask,” said Mac, sitting up with a faint smile, “I don’t think you’re an idiot—”

  “Cheers, always good to know.”

  “—but I know you well enough to imagine that … well, perhaps he wasn’t the only one who hadn’t changed.”

  “You saying I’m an arsehole?”

  The smile reappeared. “Never crossed my mind,” said Mac, before his face became more serious. “But he made the first move—he was the one who put out his hand.”

  “So?”

  “So he was trying to have some sort of reconciliation, at least. Apparently it didn’t go well, but still, he made the effort.”

  “Doesn’t mean that I should’ve been all fawning and grateful.”

  “I’m not saying that. I know there are some rather large issues between the two of you. But it could be worth trying to deal with them while you have the chance.”

  The older man’s tone made Eddie suspect there was more behind his words than he was saying. “Sounds like something that’s been on your mind.”

  A silence, then: “It has,” Mac admitted. “I got in touch with Angela recently.”

  “After so long? You’ve been divorced for, what, seven years?”

  “Eight. But we met up a couple of months ago. It went rather well, actually.”

  “Are you thinking about getting back together?” asked Eddie in surprise.

  “No, nothing like that—it’s been too long, too much water under the bridge. But it was … nice. It reminded me how much we had in common. And in all honesty, the older I get, the more I’ve realized how easy it is to lose contact with people. You can’t rely on them just being there anymore—you have to make an effort. It might be hard, but it can be worth it.”

  “And you reckon I should make an effort with my dad?”

  Mac took another drink. “Just a thought.”

  “It might get Nina off my back, I suppose.” Eddie’s phone rang; he recognized the ringtone. “Speak of the devil …” He answered it. “Hey, love. Where are you?”

  “Just leaving Glastonbury with Macy,” said Nina. “Heading back to Bournemouth.”

  “Did you find anything interesting?”

  “You could say that.” Enthusiasm was clear in her voice. “We need to get back to New York. I think we’re going to be busy.”

  FIVE

  New York City

  You know, if these things react to earth energy,” said Eddie, peering at the statuettes inside their display case in Nina’s office, “maybe we should ask DARPA where to look. They know how to find the stuff, after all.”

  “I don’t think they’d be too happy to hear from us,” Nina replied sarcastically, looking up from her laptop. “Since we blew up their top-secret billion-dollar ship.”

  “All right, Christ, just a suggestion,” Eddie snapped back. The bad feelings left over from the disastrous dinner had faded, but things were still prickly. “How about President Cole, then? He owes us a favor—we saved his life. And a whole bunch of other world leaders too. Come to think of it, the Russian president was one of ’em. Ask him if we can go back to Grozevny. We can get a triangulation from there.”

  “Oh yeah, great idea. Remember the nuclear submarine that sank there? Still kind of a sore point with the Russians.”

  “Hey, it wasn’t our fault it sank. Well, not entirely …”

  “Besides,” she said, going to a large map of the world on one wall, “even if we got another result from Grozevny, I don’t think it would help much.” A red thread had been strung from a pin placed over Glastonbury, angling southwest across the map to South America. “We got the best bearing we could, but it was still only an approximation. And Grozevny”—she tapped the map on the northern coast of Russia—“isn’t that far off the same bearing. Even if we got a triangulation from there, it still wouldn’t be accurate enough. The search area would cover hundreds of square miles.”

  “Better than half a continent.”

  “I know, but …” She sighed. “We need a break, more information.”

  The phone rang. Nina put the call on speaker; it was Lola. “Ankit Jindal from Interpol is here to see you. He says it’s about the statues.”

  Eddie raised his eyebrows. “That was quick.”

  “Send him in!” Nina said.

  “We need a million dollars, an’ all,” said Eddie with a hopeful glance at the phone. It remained silent. “Tchah! Worth a try.”

  A knock, and Ankit Jindal entered. The handsome Indian’s glossy black hair had developed into even more of a quiff since they had last seen him. “Hello,” he said, beaming.

  They shook hands. “This is an unexpected pleasure, Kit,” said Nina. “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming to New York?”

  “I could have, but what would be the fun in that? Besides, considering why I’m here, I thought it would be better to discuss it face-to-face.”

  “So why are you here?” Eddie asked.

  Kit indicated the display case. “Your little purple friends. Mr. Penrose sent me a copy of your report about what you discovered in England.”

  “He did?” Nina was slightly surprised. Certainly, it was part of Penrose’s job to keep other international bodies like Interpol informed of the UN’s activities, but he didn’t normally do so with such promptness. “What’s Interpol’s interest?”


  Kit opened his briefcase, taking out several files. “After that business with the Khoils, the Cultural Property Crime Unit tried to track down the owners of the unidentified items found in their vault. Most of them we eventually located, but a few we couldn’t find.” He opened a file. “But we had a breakthrough. Most of the Khoils’ computer records had been wiped or encrypted, but our experts managed to recover a shipping manifest.”

  He handed Nina a copy of a document. Much of it was gibberish to her, the computerized tracking of a container from port to port, but the final destination—Nuuk in Greenland, the country where the Indian billionaires had been preparing to sit out a global collapse—was clear enough. “It doesn’t specifically name the container’s contents, although that’s not surprising if it was filled with stolen art treasures. But the shipping agent is based in Singapore.”

  She found a name at the top of the page. “Stamford West?”

  “Sounds like a Tube station,” said Eddie.

  “Interpol has been watching Mr. West for some time,” Kit told them. “He’s been linked to the smuggling of artworks and antiquities from several countries, although there has never been enough evidence against him to make a case.”

  “But you’re sure he was involved with the Khoils?” said Nina. Kit nodded. “Which might mean that he knows where the second statue came from originally.”

  “He might. But that’s only part of the reason I came here.” The Indian opened another file. “There is also evidence—only circumstantial, unfortunately—linking him to another black-market operation. Look at these.” He laid several glossy photographs on the desk.

  Nina picked one up. “Oh, this is beautiful,” she said, fascinated. The image was of a small statue of a broad-faced man sitting cross-legged, eyes closed as if in meditation. The figure gleamed under the photographer’s lights; it was made of pure gold. “Inca?”

  “Yes.” He indicated the other photos, which showed similarly spectacular pieces. “Our experts confirmed they’re genuine, dating from no later than the sixteenth century.”

  “And these were found on the black market?”

  “No, in a drug 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 said. “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 artifacts had come onto 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 artifacts. 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 artifacts, 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 conquistadores, 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 neighboring 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 conquistadores weren’t exactly shining beacons of integrity. But the thing was, when Pizarro took control of Cuzco, the capital, the Spanish realized 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 secondhand, 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 that it was somewhere in the jungle, but since we’re talking about the Amazon rain forest, that doesn’t really narrow things down.”

  Eddie shrugged. “So much for that, then.”

  “Ah,” said Nina with a knowing smile, “but there’s more to it. About sixty years after Atahualpa’s execution, Sir Walter Raleigh went to South America in search of El Dorado, which he thought was somewhere along the Orinoco River.” She indicated the river on the map; the red thread crossed it inland of its massive delta—and again much farther to the southwest, along the border between Venezuela and Colombia. “He was exploring there because of the story of a Spanish sailor who was set adrift on the river by his men. He claimed that he was rescued by an Indian tribe, the Manoans, who took him to a city deep in the jungle … where he met a man who said he was the last heir of the Inca empire.”

  “Did Raleigh find the city?” Kit asked.

  “No, he never did. He met the Manoans, though. They were traders who covered hundreds of miles of rivers and could easily have been in regular contact with the Incas.”

  “And maybe told them a good place to hide a city?” Eddie wondered. “Even helped them shift the gold?”

  “Maybe. But Paititi could well have been the city Raleigh was searching for. The timescale fits with the fall of the empire.” She turned to Kit, thoughtful. “So, there’s a possible connection bet
ween the Khoils’ statue and the Inca artifacts on the black market—this guy West.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “The reason I came here is because in your report you said a third statue may be somewhere in South America. Perhaps the second was there too—Stamford West would have been able to smuggle it out of the country without it being found by customs agents.”

  Nina pursed her lips. “I’m not sure about that. There’s been nothing to suggest that the second statue came from there.”

  “Well, it is just a theory,” Kit said with a shrug. “But the third statue could be in southern Venezuela, and these Inca treasures are coming from southern Venezuela. Perhaps the same place. I think—Interpol thinks—it is worth investigating. Mr. West may have some answers.”

  “He’s in Singapore, you said?” Eddie asked. “I’ve got a friend in the Singapore police; she’ll be able to help us out when we go and see this bloke.”

  “Wait. We?” said Nina. “We are not going anywhere—there’s too much to do here.”

  Eddie waved dismissively at the piles of books and papers on her desk. “That’s not exactly my kind of reading. If I go to Singapore with Kit, at least I’ll be doing what I’m good at.”

  Kit looked between them, noting Nina’s glare at her husband. “A personal connection with the Singapore police could be very useful.” The glare turned on him. “But I will, er … let you both decide what you want to do. I’ll be in New York until tomorrow, so call me. Good to see you again.” He gathered up his files and left the office.

  Nina rounded on Eddie. “So you’re going to Singapore, huh?”

  “Oh, so it’s all right for you to jet off round the world whenever you feel like you need a break, but not me?”

  “You think you need a break?”

  “I didn’t mean it in a Ross and Rachel sense,” Eddie said irritably. “You heard Kit. I can help him out.”

  “But you still meant it in an I don’t want to deal with my issues, so I’m going to run off to the other side of the world sense, right?”