The Inca Prophecy

by Preston William Child

  “Sí, Captain,” the desk officer replied, sounding slightly baffled.

  He then sat behind his desk, waiting for his next appointment, contemplating the lengths to which he was going to apprehend this suspect and at the same time, look into speculation usually not of his concern. Usually, Pedro Sanchez only spent his time on that which directly pertained to the actual crime and the people involved. He didn’t know why he was feeling so compelled to get personally involved in this homicide case, not only to arrest the killer, but also to find out why it all happened the way it did.

  “Captain Sanchez?” he heard from his doorway. Surprised from his brief contemplation, Sanchez tried to look unassuming.

  “Oh, hello Javier,” he smiled. “Thank you for coming in on such short notice. I just want to make sure we cover all bases.”

  He looks like a walking dead man. My God, the captain thought at the sight of the pasty-skinned Javier Mantara. It was clear that he had not been sleeping much, or eating, perhaps, in days? His eyes were sunken and his cheeks too pronounced, especially since only three days had elapsed since they last met.

  “Sir, did you give some thought to my point of view since the other day?” Javier asked, jumping right in. “He’s mad, calling me and saying nothing but his usual stupid mumblings like ‘inaquosum!’ or ‘perpello’. Asshole.”

  But the captain gave him a waving gesture. “Please, Javier, let me just get the formalities out of the way for which I asked you here,” Sanchez told the troubled young man. “Then we can talk about things, okay?”

  Javier reluctantly agreed with a shrug.

  “Come, I must take your prints, just to make sure we have your current biometric information,” Sanchez said. “Did they also take your personal effects at the front?”

  “Yes, that was strange,” Javier frowned, standing still while the captain tried to get him to accompany him into the corridor. “What’s going on, Captain?”

  “Just a precaution for today. I am not at liberty to say, but we had to clamp down a bit with the public freely walking in,” Sanchez lied. “Come, I need your prints.”

  “Why don’t you get an officer to do the dirty work, sir?” Javier asked innocently as he followed the captain into an interrogation room. Sanchez had expected the question, so he chuckled, “I have taken a special interest in this case, as you know, Javier. Maybe I just want to make sure that all the details are obtained correctly so that we don’t have any foul ups.”

  Javier accepted the reason. In truth, he was too tired to second-guess the police captain. He had slept well and still maintained his healthy eating habits, yet the fatigue was on him like a psychotic ex-lover. No amount of rest could rejuvenate him, but he chalked it up to the unusual heat this summer had brought with her. Even for Spaniards the heat had begun to sting.

  “Please, have a seat. I’ll be right back. I forgot the inkpad,” Sanchez told Javier. The captain went to the front desk. “Javier Mantara’s effects, please. I’m done with him, so I’ll take them back to him in the office.” On his way back to his office, the police captain looked at the few items in the plastic basket belonging to Javier. He selected the young man’s digital diver’s watch, the best bet for what he had planned.

  Prying the back of the watch open, Sanchez used his old skills in special tactics to place the bug with the SIM card inside and replaced the case cover without signs of tampering. Once he had done this, he opened his desk drawer and retrieved the special inkpad he’d bought from Labyrinth Technologies in London. It contained a substance that looked like ink, but infiltrated the skin of the subject for a period of approximately seventy-two hours, depending on the amount applied.

  Walking back, his cotton shirt gave no reprieve from the sweltering heat. It clung to his back, reminding him that it was more than high temperatures causing him to perspire. His level of concentration was also provoking his body’s reaction, for he had to get everything just right or his plan would fail.

  15

  Tales of Perdition

  Solar Eclipse Imminent: 53%

  On board the Cóndor, an interesting development was unfolding. Purdue and Sam had both mistook the trawler’s flag for that of the sinister organization they had been battling in secret for the past few years—The Order of the Black Sun. They soon found out, however, that the sigil flying from the finial represented something entirely different—the Children of the Sun. The only question was if it called on equally wicked support.

  “That’s right!” Vincent cried after Hannah guessed at it. “The lady wins a bottle of Aragh Sagi, courtesy of my own collection!” Hannah smiled, taking a sip of her as yet untouched wine.

  “Where do you get Arak from? It’s rare, is it not?” Purdue asked, referring to the ancient Persian distilled drink, traditionally not easy to come by in conventional corners.

  “Why would you ask that?” Sam jested. “Can’t you see the man has the robust voice of a pirate?” Sam winked at Vincent, who found him very amusing.

  “Your friend is correct, Mr. Purdue,” Vincent cheered. “I travel almost everywhere at sea, and by the sea I obtain my desires. In this case, the batch Miss Hannah here will be rewarded with was produced by my good friend Amat in Shiraz, a man I worked with on fishing charters for eight years.

  While the men were talking, Hannah’s eye fell on a beautiful gilded item that reminded her of a cartoon-shaped dog bone. It fanned out on both ends of a flat strip, upon which illegible carvings had suffered some erosion.

  “My father-in-law gave me that,” Vincent commented when he saw her staring.

  “He lives in the most beautiful place, the eye of Pachamama, I tell you!” With a mischievous twinkle in his eye, he leaned forward and asked them all, “Would you like some Arak?”

  Purdue vehemently declined as gracefully as he could, citing the wine as plenty for his sensitive palate. Sam, however, was a sport. Both he, Peter, and Hannah agreed to the challenge, on the condition that the captain would relate to them all the superstitious basis of the region’s waters.

  “What is Patama-what?” Sam asked, wishing he had his voice recorder with him. It had been salvaged, but it was still below deck in the bunk where he had rested after the Cóndor rescued him from the rubble of the crash.

  “Pachamama,” Vincent said sincerely. He leaned over to one of his deckhands. “Adrian, go get the Arak for us, would you? Um, Pachamama is the name given by some of the indigenous peoples of South America to Mother Earth. You know, like Gaia, for instance,” he explained to his guests.

  “Ah,” Purdue replied. “So you are from South America?”

  “With those baby blues?” Hannah chuckled. “I doubt that.”

  Vincent smiled and shook his head. “My wife is. My wife is from Lima, born and raised, but her parents are a bit more . . . ,” he cocked his head and winced a bit, “. . . traditional. It is from my father-in-law that I got the name of this boat, you see?”

  “The prophecy of the condor and the eagle?” Hannah asked.

  “My, my, young lady, you know a lot more than your quiet way leads on.” The skipper looked immensely impressed.

  “Oh, please do not look so amazed, Vincent,” she objected coyly. “It is all from my brother’s rants and the information he forced into me over the years that stuck all this stuff in my head. In fact, the reason I took this particular gig with Mr. Purdue was because I heard that he was planning to traverse this part of the waters. I wanted to make my brother jealous by sailing across the Alboran Sea.”

  Purdue was elated that the traumatized woman was finally loosening up a bit, hopefully putting the tragedy behind her as best she could now that they were safe from the perils of the elements and the gods that controlled them. Vincent looked a bit solemn at Hannah’s words. He blinked slowly and replied in a soft voice, “You might change your mind if you knew what slept under these waves, Miss Hannah.”

  Sam and Peter received their Arak with enthusiasm, but soon they regretted their zeal. The drin
k rendered them breathless for a good few seconds, ripping their chests open with a ghastly rush of ethanol and raisins.

  “Oh my God!” Sam choked, slamming down the glass to the skipper’s amusement. Hannah had not liked what Vincent had to say about her wanting to sail here, but she hoped it was just an alpha-male response and nothing more. Peter was leaning over, halfway to the floor as he coughed profusely. He could not utter a word, and Purdue was in stitches.

  “What is sleeping under us?” Hannah asked abruptly, partly because she felt shirked by Vincent and his confidence, and also because she wished to know more about the artifact. “Did you get that under the waves too?”

  “I told you, it was a gift from my father-in-law,” Vincent told her.

  “It exhibits signs of deterioration: marine corrosion, most likely,” she added.

  Vincent scoffed, changing the cheerful atmosphere to one of uncomfortable silence. His demeanor looked labored, and his male guests hoped that he would be tolerant of the lady and not let his temper flare again. To their surprise the skipper answered with lenience, “It was discovered by divers in 1958, off the coast of Peru, my dear girl. One of those divers was my father-in-law, Harim. If you have to find something bad about it, about my possession of it . . . Harim stole that relic, alright? It is a stolen item from a find over sixty years ago, and part of the reason why he gave it to me was because he was on his deathbed.”

  The cabin was silent.

  The only sound was the night waves crashing invisibly in the darkness that surrounded their solitary, floating haven. Hannah felt like shit for prying. She cleared her throat and reached for her wine. Vincent waited for a counter-argument, but she had abandoned her pursuit, it seemed. Sam broke the stalemate. “Tell us about this cursed stretch of water, oh captain.”

  As always, Sam’s boyish jesting quickly recovered the merriment, much to Hannah’s relief. Peter attempted another shot of Arak with her, while Vincent gathered his thoughts. He took a few sheets of paper from a small treasure chest made of finely crafted wood and ivory inlays, By the looks of them, they were very old, and by the correlating holes punched along their sides, they appeared to have come from the same book. Without introduction, Vincent began to read.

  “Phantom ships hosting soldiers from a hundred nations across the Great Sea, across the measures of that before the Lord and that after, came to fall where the devil has blue eyes. No matter the breed and color of men at arms, they fell to the lost world as soon as their journeys made way past the Pillars of Hercules, whether hither or thither. The hand of the Great Giantess claimed all what had not gold to appease.

  Not ‘ere the Sun could not sate the belly of the blue-eyed devil with its insatiable craving for gold. Not ‘ere the Sun, the Great Almighty, could satisfy the floor of the hellish waters. From Pharaoh to Queen Isabelle, they all sent men to find gold and with gold as their anchor, they sank to the depths where Scylla’s children feared passage.”

  “It is said that since antiquity, Egyptian pharaohs dispatched ships to sail into the Strait of Gibraltar to battle with unknown hordes,” Vincent reported as he looked up. “Have you heard of the “solar barge” boats?”

  The group shook their heads. Vincent explained, “In ancient Egypt, they were ritual vessels used during the funerary rites of kings to carry them across the heavens along with Ra, the sun god. Gold. They were all obsessed with gold. Many of the battles waged here were between Spanish armadas and so-called phantom vessels, across many centuries, even since the Gauls and Visigoths. They would sink and be devoured by the sea before trace could be found,” he said hastily, “which, as we all know, is impossible unless you speed up time by a century per day.”

  “And all that is said to have happened here,” Peter asked, hardly able to control his tongue after two shots of Arak. Vincent nodded, “Or they would simply disappear.”

  “This explains the chopper pilot going insane and heading for the blue, hey?” Purdue nudged Sam sincerely.

  “My brother told me similar stories,” Hannah declared. “But he said that gold seemed to be like chum in this part of the Mediterranean Sea. But chum for what?”

  “Intriguing question,” Purdue replied, his mind adrift with possible answers locked in science or physics. “If this is indeed similar to the Bermuda Triangle, nothing should be left. But they found remnants of ships. Besides, whatever is claiming these vessels is feeding on war and digests gold like fodder.”

  “You see, part of why we came here, is because of this artifact,” Vincent confessed, holding up the prayer stick, “but when you showed up, we had to suspend our search for the prophecy it speaks of. We had to wait at a distance for you to leave.”

  “Why?” Purdue asked.

  “Because your yacht had anchored precisely where we were bound to dive, David,” the roughshod skipper replied categorically. He looked terrifying with his light eyes shining through the blackness of the shadows playing on his features. “This prayer stick Miss Hannah is so infatuated by was recovered from a World War II shipwreck off the coast of Peru, as I said. But with it came many other treasures, and among that salvage cargo were ledgers of German officers, claiming that some of their ships had disappeared on their way through the Strait of Gibraltar. Two identical ships were dispatched in secret by the SS High Command to divert attention from one another’s gold hoards. Both sank at the same time, to the hour! One off the western coast of South America. The other, short of the passage through the Gibraltar Straits.”

  “That is a stone’s throw from here,” Peter mentioned.

  “Correct,” Vincent said, “but that is why we are sailing west for now. Had we stayed where the crash occurred, the authorities may have questioned our presence there and our prospective scout would be compromised.”

  “So you are just waiting for the dust to settle?” Sam asked.

  “Yes,” Vincent affirmed. “We cannot abandon our exploration because of this glitch.”

  “So, how did you know that we had found the gold?” Peter asked. Purdue’s eyes grew wide in exasperation. He could not believe that Peter had so carelessly ratted out their find to strangers they could not yet fully trust.

  Vincent’s expression changed. “We did not know . . . until you just told me.”

  16

  Breakthrough

  Javier Mantara could not pay attention in class. It was not the first time. Since his sister had committed the unspeakable crime outside her nature, he’d been having trouble functioning even on the most basic level. Even his classmates kept their distance, concerned that his erratic habits and subsequent deterioration was the result of drug abuse or some other mysterious malady.

  By the looks of him the young man was ill, yet he exhibited no symptoms of any well-known diseases. His skin grew paler by the day, while his eyes had begun to look slightly milky, a dreadful vision to any observer. Javier was lurching about, unlike the way in which his usual rigid posture would carry him like a smooth conveyer belt. It was alarming to see how his usual outgoing and friendly manner had diminished into little more than a withdrawn glare, coupled with the odd sniffle.

  It was not long before his lecturer, Prof. Loreno, asked Javier to stay behind after one of the evening classes to have a word with him. Prof. Loreno was genuinely concerned for the young man and wished to find out what was burdening him. In the buzzing white light of the small office behind the classroom, once but a storeroom, Prof. Loreno waited for Javier to enter before closing the door behind him.

  “Thank you for staying behind. It won’t take long, Javier.” The professor smiled.

  “Por favor, the lights,” Javier rasped.

  “Why?” Prof. Loreno asked. “Does the light hurt your eyes?”

  “Sí,” Javier replied softly, holding his hands over his brow to shield himself from the crass illumination. “It feels like needles in the back of my ocular cavities, Professor. Hurts like hell.”

  “Your voice also,” the lecturer remarked, as she turn
ed off the light and switched on her desk lamp, “sounds affected by your condition. What’s the matter, then? Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Is that why you called me in?” Javier was laboring to speak clearly.

  “Yes. I was concerned about your welfare and preferred to find out from you than to get outside opinions from speculative strangers,” she told him.

  “I’m very grateful, Professor. The last thing I need is for people to make assumptions about me. To tell you the truth, I’m just relieved that this meeting is not about my progress in the curriculum. You had me worried that I was failing the course, or that my conduct was in question,” Javier said.

  “Oh, no, no,” she dismissed his presumption with a smile and a waving hand, “there’s nothing lacking in your work at all, Javier. I’m quite impressed with your aptitude for psychology. As a matter of fact, I was thinking about talking to you regarding your further studies. You would do great in pursuing psychology as a vocation.”

  “That’s good to hear. Gracias, Professor.”

  “You deserve to be given the chance, but that’s why I’m so worried about your health,” she conveyed. Her silver hair was taken up in a bun, tucked neatly back above the collar of her white cotton blouse. She wiped her hands on a small towel to get rid of the moist annoyance the heat had brought.

  “To be honest, Professor,” he shrugged, “apart from the pain I feel in my eyes when the light is too sharp, I feel alright. My throat is a little sore, but I figure that is from the choking heat we’ve been having. I mean, it’s been debilitating on most of us over the last few days, hasn’t it?”