Temple

'What happened here?' Van Lewen asked.

'Ehrhardt used the idol to arm the Supernova. Then he set it to detonate,' Renee said, her voice sad and soft. 'Professor Race managed to stop the detonation sequence, but no sooner had he neutralised the Supernova than the whole cabin just exploded.'

Van Lewen turned to look out at the destroyed control booth, at the last place William Race had been seen alive.

'The device was in there?' he asked.

'Uh-huh,' Renee said. 'You wouldn't have believed it. He stopped the countdown. He was amazing.'

'What about the idol?'

'Destroyed in the blast, I presume, along with the Supernova and Professor Race.'

There came a rustling sound from their right.

Van Lewen and Doogie spun, guns up.

But when they turned, they saw nothing but trees and foliage.

And then suddenly a drum-like cylindrical object—a capsule of some sort, about the size of a regular garbage bindropped out of the upper branches of a tree and bounced softly onto the thick foliage about twenty yards away from them.

Van Lewen, Renee and Doogie all frowned, went over to it.

The capsule must have been inside the control booth when it blew, and been blasted all the way here by the concussion wave.

The warhead capsule rolled to a halt in the foliage, and ten, oddly, it began to wobble back and forth, as if there were someone inside it wriggling around, trying to get out—

Suddenly the lid of the capsule popped open and Race tumbled out of it and went sprawling butt-first onto the wet, muddy ground.

Renee's face broke out into a thousand-watt grin and she and the two Green Berets rushed over to where Race was lying in the foliage.

The professor lay on his back in the mud—soaking wet and exhausted beyond belief. He was still wearing his cap and his black kevlar breastplate.

He looked up at his three comrades as they came over, offered them a tired half-smile.

Then he pulled his right hand out from behind his back and placed an object on the ground in front of him.

Droplets of water glistened all over it, but there was no mistaking the shiny black-and-purple stone and the fierce features of the rapa's head that had been carved into it.

It was the idol.

The Goose flew through the air, soaring gracefully over the Amazon rainforest.

It was heading west in the early dark of night. Back toward the mountains, back toward Vilcafor.

Doogie sat up front in the cockpit, flying the plane, while Van Lewen, Race, Renee and the wounded Uli sat in the back.

Race pondered his escape from the control booth.

In the five seconds he'd had between disarming the Supernova and the mixing of the hypergolic fuels, he had desperately searched the cabin for a way out.

As it happened, his eyes fell upon one of the warhead capsules—a container capable of withstanding 10,000 pounds-per-square-inch of pressure since its purpose was th.e protection of explosive nuclear warheads.

With nothing else to call on, he'd dived for it—snatching the idol sitting on the workbench on the way and snapping shut the capsule's lid just as the five-second countdown expired.

The fuels mixed and the control booth blew and he was launched high into the sky, inside the capsule. Thankfully, it had landed relatively softly in the trees surrounding the mine.

But he was alive and that was all that mattered.

Now, as he sat in his seat in the back of the seaplane, Race also held in his hands a tattered leather-bound book that he had found in the boat-house after his spectacular escape. It had been sitting on a shelf inside the office overlooking the mine.

It was a book that he'd insisted on searching for before they headed back to Vilcafor.

It was the Santiago Manuscript.

The original Santiago Manuscript—written by Alberto Santiago in the sixteenth centur stolen from the San Sebas tian Abbey by Heinrich Anistaze in the twentieth, and copied by Special Agent Uli Pieck of the Bundes Kriminal Amt not long after that.

As he sat in the back of the little seaplane, Race gazed at the manuscript in a kind of subdued awe.

He saw Alberto Santiago's handwriting. The strokes and flourishes were familiar, but now he saw them on beauti fully textured paper and written in rich blue ink, not some harsh, scratchy photocopy.

He wanted to read it immediately, but no, that would have

to wait. There were some other things he had to settle first.

'Van Lewen,' he said.

'Yes.'

'Tell me about Frank Nash.”

'What?'

'I said, tell me about Frank Nash.'

'What do you want to know?'

'Have you worked with him before?'

'No. This is my first time. My unit was pulled out of Bragg to come on this mission.'

'Are you aware that Nash is a colonel in the Army's Special Projects Unit?“

'Yeah, sure.'

'So you knew it was a lie when Nash came to my office yesterday morning with a DARPA ID and a story saying that he was a retired Army colonel now working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency?'

'I didn't know he said that.'

'You didn't know?'