Temple

'What's more interesting,' Nash continued, 'is what they were after. Apparently, the commandos gathered all the monks together in the abbey's dining room and made them get down on their knees. Then they grabbed one of the monks and demanded to know the location of the Santiago Manuscript. When the monk said he didn't know where it was, they shot two monks—one on either side of him. Then they asked him again. When he again said he didn't know, they killed the next two monks. This would have gone on until they were all killed but then someone stepped forward and said he knew where the manuscript was.'

'Jesus…' Race said.

Nash pulled a photograph from his briefcase. 'We have a reason to believe that the man responsible for this atrocity was this man, Heinrich Anistaze, formerly a major in the East German secret police, the Stasi.

Race looked at the photo. It was an eight-by-ten glossy of man getting out of a car. The man was tall and broad- shouldered, with short black hair that was brushed forward and two narrow slits for eyes. They were hard eyes, cold eyes, eyes that seemed to be set in a perpetual squint. He appeared to be in his mid-forties.

'Notice the left hand,' Nash said.

Race looked at the photograph more closely. The man's left hand rested atop the car door. Race saw it.

Heinrich Anistaze had no left ring finger.

'At one time during the Cold War, Anistaze was captured by members of an East German crime syndicate that the Stasi was trying to shut down. They made him cut off his own finger before they sent it off in the mail to his superiors. But then Anistaze escaped, and returned—with the full force of the Stasi behind him. Needless to say, organised crime was never a problem in communist East Germany after that.

'Of more importance to us, however, are his methods in other circumstances. You see, it seems Anistaze had a peculiar way of making people talk: he was known for executing the people on either side of the person who failed to give him the information he wanted.'

There was a short silence.

'According to our most recent intelligence,' Nash said, 'since the end of the Cold War, Anistaze has been working in a non-official capacity as an assassin for the unified Ger man government.'

'So the Germans have the original manuscript,' Race said. 'How did you get your copy then?'

Nash nodded sagely:

'The monks gave the Germans the original manuscript.

The actual, undecorated, handwritten manuscript written by Alberto Santiago himself.

'What the monks didn't tell the Germans, though, was that in 1599—thirty years after Santiago's death—-another Franciscan monk began transcribing Santiago's handwritten manuscript into a more elaborate, decorated text that would be fit for the eyes of kings. Unfortunately, this second monk died before he could complete his transcription, but what remains is a second copy of the Santiago Manuscript, a partially-completed copy that was also kept at the San Sebastian Abbey. It is this copy of the manuscript that we have a Xerox of.“

Race held up his hand.

'Okay, okay,' he said. 'Wait a minute. Why all this murder and intrigue for a lost Incan idol? What could the U.S. and German governments possibly want with a four-hundredyear-old piece of stone?'

Nash gave Race a grim smile.

'You see, Professor, it's not the idol that we're after,' he said. 'It's the substance that it's made of.'

'What do you mean?'

'Professor, what I mean is this: we believe that the Spirit of the People was carved out of a meteorite.'

'The journal article,' Race said.

'That's right,” Nash said. 'By Albert Mueller of Bonn University. Before his rather untimely death, Mueller was studying a one-mile-wide meteor crater in the jungles of south-eastern Peru, at a site about fifty miles south of Cuzco.

By measuring the size of the crater and the speed of jungle growth over it, Mueller estimated that a high-density meteorite about two feet in diameter impacted with the earth at that site some time between the years 1460 and 1470.'

'Which,' Walter Chambers added, 'coincides perfectly with the rise of the Incas in South America.'

'What is more important for us,' Nash said, 'is what Mueller found in the walls of this crater. Deposited in the walls of the crater were trance samples of a substance known as thyrium-261.'

'Thyrium-261?' Race said.

'It's a rare isotope of the common element thyrium,'

Nash said, 'and it is not found on Earth. In fact, thyrium has only been found here in petrified form, presumably as a result of previous asteroid impacts in the distant past. It is indigenous to the Pleiades system, a binary star system not far from our own. But since it comes from a binary star system, thyrium is of a far greater density than even the heaviest of terrestrial elements.'

Things were beginning to make a little more sense to Race now. Especially the part about the Army sending a team of physicists down to the jungle.

'And what exactly can you do with thyrium?' Race asked.

“Colonel!' a voice called suddenly.