Inca Gold - Cussler Clive (читаем полную версию книг бесплатно txt) 📗

    "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 generalization," 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."

    Gaskill lay stretched out in bed, a cold cup of coffee and a dish with a half-eaten bologna sandwich beside him on the bed stand. The blanket warming his huge bulk was strewn with typewritten pages. He raised the cup and sipped the coffee before reading the next page of a book-length manuscript. The title was The Thief Who Was Never Caught. It was a nonfiction account of the search for the Specter, written by a retired Scotland Yard inspector by the name of Nathan Pembroke. The inspector spent nearly five decades digging through international police archives, tracking down every lead, regardless of its reliability, in his relentless hunt.

    Pembroke, hearing of Gaskill's interest in the elusive art thief from the nineteen twenties and thirties, sent him the yellowed, dog-eared pages of the manuscript he had painstakingly compiled, one that had been rejected by over thirty editors in as many years. Gaskill could not put it down. He was totally absorbed in the masterful investigative work by Pembroke, who was now in his late eighties. The Englishman had been the lead investigator on the Specter's last known heist, which took place in London in 1939. The stolen art consisted of a Joshua Reynolds, a pair of Constables, and three Turners. Like all the other brilliantly executed thefts by the Specter, the case was never solved and none of the art was recovered. Pembroke, stubbornly insisting there was no such thing as a perfect crime, became obsessed with discovering the Specter's identity.

    For half a century his obsession never dimmed, and he refused to give up the chase. Only a few months before his health failed, and he was forced to enter a nursing home, did he make a breakthrough that enabled him to write the end to his superbly narrated account.

    A great pity, Gaskill thought, that no editor thought it worth publishing. He could think of at least ten famous art thefts that might have been solved if The Thief Who Was Never Caught had been printed and distributed.

    Gaskill finished the last page an hour before dawn. He lay back on his pillow staring at the ceiling, fitting the pieces into neat little slots, until the sun's rays crept above the windowsill of his bedroom in the town of Cicero just outside Chicago. Suddenly, he felt as if a logjam had broken free and was rushing into open water.

    Gaskill smiled like a man who held a winning lottery ticket as he reached for the phone. He dialed a number from memory and fluffed the pillows so he could sit up while waiting for an answer.