Lost City of the Templars (8 page)

Roughly ten minutes later Gomes brought the old floatplane down in the center of the river and slowed the engine so that it had just enough power to slowly cruise upriver toward the waterfall.

“There is the place where your friends await you,” said Gomes, nodding toward a muddy beach two hundred yards away. He steered the Cessna toward the starboard bank.

As he did so Garibaldi took the already prepared Biojector from the pocket of his jacket and jammed it against the pilot’s carotid. There was a hiss of CO
₂
as two hundred milligrams of Zemuron was injected into the man’s bloodstream. The drug, usually administered in much smaller doses, was a paralytic used in delicate surgery where mechanical breathing is required.

Gomes was paralyzed instantly, and when Garibaldi pushed him out the pilot’s-side door, every muscle in his body had been immobilized, although he was still fully conscious. He slipped into the river, eyes staring and mouth wide open. Either the drug overdose would kill him, he would drown or something unpleasant in the river would eat him. Garibaldi didn’t care which. He had his escape plan and he had the plane. He took over the copilot’s controls and guided the aircraft to the muddy shore.

Reaching the other side of the Xingu and hiding their boats once again, Holliday and the others were astounded to discover a set of broad steps leading upward beside the cascading waterfall. The steps had been hidden from the eastern side by an overgrowth of brush and vines, but it was easy enough to cut through with their machetes. Beside the steps in a man-made V-shaped cut in the earth, logs, now rotted with age, had been placed in the ground. At the top of the steps, they found the rusted remains of an iron hand-cranked winch and a long rusted chain.

“The crafty old devil,” said Rafi. “He never did follow the eastern trail from the falls; he came and made a portage here with the winch.”

“What about the steps?” Holliday asked. “Fawcett didn’t make them—that’s for sure—and neither did the Indians around here.”

“The Templars?” Eddie suggested.

Rafi cleared away a patch of moss at the top step, revealing a symbol carved deeply into the stone:

“Looks like one of those doodles you made on your notebooks when you were a kid,” said Peggy. “There was usually a bunch of other doodles figuring out a neat logo using your initials.”

“It’s the Phoenician symbol for Venus,” said Rafi.

“You’re saying the Phoenicians were here before the Templars?” Holliday asked. “Is that possible?”

“Why not?” Rafi shrugged. “The Phoenicians were the ones who invented celestial navigation, after all, so they had the skills to reach South America. They also had huge oceangoing ships, and bear in mind that it was the Phoenicians who built the original Temple for Solomon.”

“So maybe it was the Phoenicians who sailed up the river first, built the steps . . . and Fawcett found them.”

“There’s not a word about it in the journals, though,” Rafi said.

“Secrets within secrets,” Holliday muttered, the truth finally dawning. “I don’t think anyone paid Percy Fawcett—I think he was a member of the White Gloves himself.”

“But what about your famous Templars?” Eddie asked. “Why did they come here?”

“The famous
Santo Antonio de Padua
, the
Santo Ovidio de Braga
and the
Santo João de Deus
. With their holds full of loot,” said Peggy. “I thought we dumped that theory.”

“I’m starting to think it was the right one all along,” said Holliday. “The Templar ships came up the Xingu to take something away, not bring it. Something the Phoenicians had carried here almost three thousand years before the Templars even existed.”

The theory was borne out three days later, after they’d made their way through the relentlessly noisy rain forest jungle on the eastern side of the Xingu River. Eddie’s eagle eye caught a strangely even disruption in the current about a mile above a set of steep rapids, and further investigation by Rafi identified it as a roadway just under the surface. The road went from one side of the river to the other and was thirty feet wide.

“Amazing,” marveled Rafi, standing ankle-deep in the water. “The stone is quarried and each one is held together with a dovetail joint. There’s even an upstream cutwater beveled into the stone so the water flows evenly over it. This was meant to last.”

“Phoenician again?” Holliday asked.

“Without a doubt.” Rafi nodded. “The locals couldn’t have done this; they’re barely out of the Stone Age now, and their focus was always nature, not empire building.”

“God bless ’em,” said Peggy under her breath. “The stones have evenly placed runnels carved into their upper surfaces, probably to keep some kind of wheeled cart or something steady as it crossed the river. What would you want a wheeled vehicle in the jungle for?”

“I don’t even want to think about it,” said Holliday.

“Neither do I,” said Rafi.

“You think it’s the Ark of the Covenant, don’t you?” Peggy said.

“Why did you have to say that?” Rafi asked with mock sadness. “It’s not what an archaeologist is supposed to think of. An archaeologist is supposed to be objective and not mix emotions in with his work.”

“Bullshit,” said Peggy. “Why on earth would the Phoenicians, who had a religion with more gods and goddesses than the Egyptians, carry the Ark of the Covenant across an unknown ocean for a man who wasn’t even their own king?”

“Money, of course,” called Rafi. He had walked out onto the road until he was midway across the river. “The Phoenicians were merchants above anything else.” He bent down and examined something at his feet, then pointed to the northeast. “There’s an arrow carved into the stone; I think I know exactly where they were going.”

Holliday’s gaze followed Rafi’s pointing finger. In the distance, at least fifty or seventy-five miles away, a cliff-sided tabletop mountain thrust up out of the surrounding rain forest. A
tepui
as it was called in the ancient language here: “House of the Gods.”

Roraima, Professor Challenger,
The Lost World
of Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination, fueled by Percy Fawcett’s early expeditions. A place where prehistoric creatures still roamed, where giant dragonflies like
Meganeuropsis permiana
still thrived. “Sweet Jesus,” breathed Holliday. “It was all true.”

•   •   •

Cardinal Arturo Ruffino, attired in his favorite silk dressing gown, sat at the breakfast table in his luxury apartment looking down on the Piazza di Spagna, “the Spanish Steps,” while Vittorio Monti, his lover and the head of the Vatican Secret Service, wearing his boxer shorts and an undershirt, stood at the stove and made scrambled eggs and bacon to go with the
cornetti
and the strong Italian coffee already on the table.

Ruffino folded his copy of
La Repubblica
and set the newspaper down beside his coffee. The two men had been lovers for many years, but the cardinal always felt a deep and very powerful sense of “rightness” to their relationship. It defied the Holy Father, it defied the doctrines of the Church, it defied the holy scriptures and it defied God, but between them, two men supposedly given the gift of free will, it was the way the cardinal wanted to feel.

There was more intimacy for him in his moments with Vittorio, even simple, innocent moments like this, than he had ever felt receiving or giving the Sacrament. Even thinking such a thing would send him to the innermost circle of hell and damnation, but at this stage in his life he wasn’t sure he believed in the hell and brimstone of Revelation any more than he believed in Jesus’ Paradise with its many mansions.

Sometimes hell was a mansion like the Vatican, disposed to the most sordid conspiracies, betrayals and even murders, and sometimes paradise was breakfast with Vittorio.

In the end, of course, it was the cardinal who destroyed his small paradise. He watched as the priest lifted the eggs onto waiting plates, added generous portions of bacon and then sat down. Monti poured more coffee for them both, then tore a flaky
cornetto
in half and slathered each piece with butter and the tart fig balsamic jam both men enjoyed so much.

“How bad is it?” Ruffino asked.

“Worse than we could have imagined,” answered Monti.

“Who?”

“Just about all of them,” the head of the Vatican Secret Service responded. He chewed on a piece of the Italian-made croissant, then gently licked a spot of jam from the corner of his mouth. Ruffino found the action almost violently erotic, but he pulled his mind back from prurience and back into the more perfidious world of Vatican finances.

“Neri, Abanndando, the fat little archbishop who plays the stock market too much for his own good, Mancini, who’s up to his neck in it. Even Lamberto. The only way for them to recover is to pray that White Horse completes the dam so the diamond and mineral holdings can be used on all the alluvial soil exposed by the draining of all the tributaries to the river.”

“As chairman of the bank, you would think, Lamberto might have learned his lesson after the Assassini hung Roberto Calvi from Blackfriars Bridge.”

“I don’t think a wholesale lynching from the Ponte Sisto would be useful. The Holy Father would never live it down.” Monti smiled, putting more jam on his
cornetto
.

“What about your man tracking Holliday?”

“The miniature GPS tracker we implanted while he was at Ramstein is working perfectly,” said Monti. “Our man as you call him knows exactly where he is.”

“When the time comes will he be able to do the job?” Ruffino asked.

The innocent, angelic look of his friend and lover lifted for a moment and the cardinal saw something else for a fleeting instant.

“He would put a bullet through the Holy Father’s brain if I ordered it.”

•   •   •

Francisco Garibaldi checked the signal coming from Holliday, then referred to the waterproof topographic map in his hand. He looked up again, nodded to himself, then took the satellite phone out of its holster. “I know where they’re going. Send the help you offered to coordinates twenty-six-nine by thirty-four-seven for pickup. I should be there in an hour.”

Holliday stood at the foot of the enormous cliff and stared upward. The top of the
tepui
was at least a mile above him, and there was only vegetation clinging to the mountain wall for the first two or three hundred feet. Beyond that it was an unclimbable fortress.

“Why wasn’t there a word about this place in Fawcett’s notebooks?” Rafi asked, astonished.

“That is easy enough to answer,” said Eddie, staring up at the mountain. “He did not want anyone who read them to know that this was his final destination.”

“I presume there’s a way up to the top,” said Peggy.

“There is,” said Tanaki. “But I cannot take you.”

“Why not?” Holliday asked.

“This is the Montanha de Deus, the Mountain of God. It is taboo to our people. My grandfather and I will show you the cave and la Garganta do Diablo. From there you must find your own way.”

“La Garganta do Diablo?” Peggy asked.

“The Devil’s Throat,” translated Tanaki.

“What on earth is that?” Rafi asked.

“You will see, I am afraid,” the Indian replied ominously.

The
tepui
was enormous, not only in height but also in its circumference. According to Tanaki it was almost thirty miles around—an upthrust of Precambrian quartzite more than three billion years old. The only fossils it contained were single-celled entities and single proteins. The stone they were walking past literally represented life at the very beginning of life, and had seen a billion species come and go. The
tepuis
had been here before the oldest organism climbed out of the primordial ooze, and even predated the ooze itself.

It took more than another hour of trekking around the perimeter on the mountain before they reached the entrance to a cavern unlike any of them had ever seen before.

“Caca Santa!”
Eddie breathed.

“No kidding,” whispered Peggy, looking up toward the roof of the cave. Even the entrance was beyond cathedral-like proportions, a towering arch four or five hundred feet high and a football field across. The cave itself was twenty times that wide and the roof, barely visible, must have been two thousand feet above them. The cave was easily large enough to land several helicopters, and at the far end of the unbelievably large space, a waterfall dropped down out of the darkness, the water’s nearly mile-high fall turning to a silken mist when it hit the cavern floor, feeding a chain of small black-colored lakes joined together like pearls on a string by a wide bubbling stream.

“Notice anything?” Holliday asked.

“No bats, no stalactites or stalagmites,” said Rafi. “The waterfall looks pure enough, but there’s something in it that turns it black. That can’t be healthy. It usually means high concentrations of sulfur. And notice that the vegetation stops right at the entrance. No sunlight, no photosynthesis. There weren’t even a few birds flying in and out. This place is dead.”

“
Una caverna de fantasma,
” said Eddie. “A cave of ghosts.”

“Well, one thing’s clear,” said Peggy. “Our giant dragonfly didn’t come from here.”

“Where is the Devil’s Throat?” Holliday asked, turning to Tanaki. The young man conferred with his grandfather. Nenderu, leaning on a long stave he’d cut for himself in the past few days, led the way. They walked along the perimeter of the cave for a thousand feet or so, bypassing huge, sharp-edged boulders and long tongues of scree that had fallen from the roof of the cave unknown millions of years ago.

Nenderu pointed with his stave.

“There,” said Tanaki, pointing to yet another pile of rocks and boulders. “Up there.”

They climbed toward a dark shadow that seemed to run the entire height of the cave. As she stepped closer, Peggy’s eyes widened. “That’s the way up? Not a chance.”

“It is your only chance, I am afraid,” Tanaki answered. The way up was a narrow cleft or “chimney” in the rock. It had been pegged with narrow slabs of rock pushed into deeply chiseled cracks in the walls of the crevice, and where there were no pegs there were rickety lengths of stairs between them.

The whole thing looked like a single curling strand of DNA going up into black nothingness. Every few steps there seemed to be a squared-off niche cut into the stone. At the base of the pool was a bubbling pool of bright yellow mud. The smell was foul, like dozens of rotten eggs.

“Sulfur dioxide,” said Rafi, looking down at the bubbling, rotting mess.

“The Devil has this acid reflux you see on television, I think,” said Eddie.

“We don’t have to climb that today, do we?” Peggy asked.

“No, it’s almost sunset. We’ll camp in the cave tonight and start up first thing tomorrow.”

“When we’re climbing, is there any way to avoid the smell?” Peggy asked.

“Climb as fast as you can,” said Holliday.

•   •   •

Lord Adrian Grayle, CEO of White Horse Resources and present grand master of the White Glove, sat in his office on the top floor of the Gherkin, the vibrator-shaped skyscraper at 30 St. Mary Axe in London. At that moment he was in the midst of a closed-circuit video conference with Leo Krall, the head of Jericho Defense Alternatives, White Horse’s security division, in its large, bunkerlike facility in the subbasement of the building. The screen he was using was an enormous black rectangle built into the wall of his office opposite his desk.

“So, what are we dealing with?” Grayle asked.

“It looks like some concentrated effort against the dam,” said Krall, wearing the simple dark blue uniform of the JDA. Krall was in his late fifties, square-faced, lean and with hair the color of streaked granite.

“Show me,” instructed Grayle.

The huge screen instantly switched from a near-life-sized figure of Krall to a satellite image of northeastern Amazonia Province. It zoomed in on a large area of bright green with one fist-sized patch of red in the center right. Striations of dark blue ran through the entire frame of the image like tiny blood vessels leading into larger veins.

“What am I looking at?”

“An infrared image of the area about fifty miles from the dam site,” said Krall.

“The red are the Indians.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many?”

“Approximately three hundred, sir.”

“Excellent.”

“And our personnel at the dam?”

“Evacuate them.”

“The Indians in those kinds of numbers could do a great deal of damage, sir.”

“I should bloody well hope so, Krall. That’s the whole point, after all.”

•   •   •

Yachay, leader of his people, was leading them and four hundred other warriors of the river tribes north to defeat the gray monster. He knew this was the right thing to do from his
xhenhet
vision and had convinced the other shamans in the villages he passed through to reach his destination. Within six days of travel he had every warrior the river tribes could offer, and on the seventh day they reached their quarry and stood looking in awe at the monster from the very edge of the forest. They had seen no place and no thing like it.

“What is this place?” asked Taroya, a Munduruku whose tribe had migrated north many seasons ago.

“It is the place of the beast, the monster.” Beyond the edge of the forest, the jungle had been stripped down to its sandy soil, the roots of every tree torn out of the ground like rotten teeth. The trees were piled in huge pyres that were burned for days, signal fires to the death of the forest. Littered over the barren landscape were dozens of gigantic earthmovers, scrapers and giant dump trucks on wheels the height of a grown man, and through it all ran a wide muddy stream—the source of the river that gave these men life. Beyond all this in the far distance was the monster itself, a great gray slab of concrete eight hundred feet high that ran the width of the Xingu Valley from one side to the other.

“We cannot defeat these things,” said Taroya. “We have only blowpipes and bows and arrows and our spears.”

“We can do it,” said Yachay. “I know this because I have seen it in my vision, and my vision is the future.” Yachay paused, staring out at the desolation. “But my vision says we must wait for the rain and wait for the night, and that is what we shall do.”

•   •   •

They gathered by the Devil’s Throat just as the sun began to rise over the rain forest canopy. Birds outside in the dense jungle were coming into full song, and once again the forest was alive.

“Let’s get this done,” said Peggy. “The longer we wait, the more nervous I get.”

“My grandfather says we must wait. He knows this place,” Tanaki said. “He also asks if you will step back a few feet.”

“Why?” Peggy asked stubbornly.

In response there was a deep rumbling from deep beneath the ground under their feet. It continued for at least a minute, and then the sulfur pool at the foot of the rock chimney seemed to begin boiling.

“What the hell . . . ?”

A gout of ulcerous mud rose fifty feet into the air, steam hissing as it shot up. There was a deeper-rooted explosion under their feet and the sulfur mud became white-hot steam that rose higher and higher within the chamber and then only a few seconds later subsided. The superior pool subsided and there was no sign that anything had happened.

“We would have been killed,” said Rafi.

“My grandfather says you must wait for the steps to cool and to dry before you begin to climb.”

“Does it happen regularly?” Holliday asked, thinking of Old Faithful.

“There is no way to tell,” said Tanaki.

“So either we stay here or we take our chances,” said Holliday. He thought for a moment. “You don’t have to follow, but I’m going up to the top.”

“I will come with you,
compadre
,” said Eddie. “Our fates are bound, I think, my friend.”

“Glad to have the company.” Holliday grinned.

“Well, you’re not leaving us behind,” said Peggy, taking Rafi’s hand in hers.

Nenderu had a brief conversation with his grandson, and Tanaki translated. “My grandfather will lead you,” he said. “He can think of no better place to die than seeking entrance to the heavens, and if not that, he would very much like to see where the gods live. It is forbidden for me to go with you. I will wait for your return here.”

The climb went without incident, except for Peggy’s complaints about becoming hard-boiled like eggs in a pot. The ascent took more than an hour and their lungs were aching when they reached the surface.

“What the hell?” said Holliday, looking around. They seemed to have come up into a formal, well-tended garden of paths and beds of flowers interspersed with fruit trees. The air smelled of blossoms, and the trees surrounding the gardens swayed slightly in a gentle breeze.

“El Jardín del Edén,”
whispered Eddie.

Nenderu fell to his knees and began to chant as a man came out of the surrounding forest and approached. The man was quite short with curly hair flowing past his shoulders and a long, dark and well-oiled beard. He wore a twisted quoit of fabric around his head and a long robe studded with gems. He stopped in front of the group in front of him and bowed. He straightened, put his palms together and introduced himself. When he spoke it was in perfect English with the heavy accents of Spain, even though it was clear that he was not a native of either country.

“Welcome. I am Hiram, king of Tyre and all Phoenicia, the one hundred and twentieth of that name.”