Page 48 of The Lost Guardian

Santiago grinned. “Back to where it all began. To Atahualpa’s Ransom Room.”

15

“‘A cage of stone once embracing riches’ has to be the Ransom Room.” Santiago reviewed his notebook as Ali steered them through the busy city streets of Lima. The car she had “borrowed” was a beat-up Toyota with a hefty layer of dust over its exterior.

“The hall that needed to be filled with gold and treasure for his release,” he added as Ali guided them farther north.

“I am familiar with the Ransom Room,” Ali said, not unkindly, but Santiago still flushed. He knew he had a bad habit of lecturing people when he got excited, but Ali was Peruvian. And they had covered it already.

“What do you think the rest of the riddle means?” she asked him after a brief pause. He wasn’t sure if she was taking pity on him, but he was happy to oblige.

“A ‘broken chain’ could symbolize a separation or hostage situation. Or maybe the disconnect of the emperor and his people?” Santiago thought aloud.

Ali looked uncertain.

“‘Follow the way of the ancients and find the path that leads to its end…where stone embraces ghosts and gold again,’” he recited. “That has to mean that this next clue will put us on the path to Atahualpa’s tomb. And the lost treasure.”

“Okay, so we begin in the Ransom Room,” she agreed. “But it isn’t very big, and people have had access to the ruin for decades. If there was an obvious map or marker, we would have heard about it.”

Santiago furrowed his brow, fighting a twinge of jealousy. It’s not like he didn’t want Ali to have seen the Ransom Room; he just wished he had, too. Then he smiled. Despite its myriad horrors, Santi was on a trip that he had always dreamed of taking.

But Ali was right—how were they meant to spot something other archeologists and historians had missed?

“Well, anyway, first things first,” Ali said. “We need to get to Cajamarca, and it’s no easy drive.”

“How long?” he asked.

Her hesitant pause made his stomach clench with apprehension.

“About fifteen hours,” she finally answered.

“What?” Santiago gasped. That was almost an entire day!

“We couldn’t go back to the airport!” she argued defensively. “Now that Torres’s people know you’re here, they’ll have men waiting. And Lima’s is not as large or as safe as LAX.”

Santiago knew she was right, but the prospect of spending that long stuck in a car—with only a week until Inti Raymi—was devastating. They only had one piece of the map, and he didn’t even know how many there were.

Still, it was better than an airplane.

“We can only hope that it’s harder for them to decipher the translated clue than it was for you,” Ali said. “And that it buys us some time.”

“But they heard us say Cajamarca,” Santiago reminded her. “They’ll be headed there, too.”

Ali didn’t reply.

Santiago let the conversation fade as he quietly worried. He worried about their delay, about having to find and interpret whatever clues came next. He worried about José and whether the more experienced historian would actually meet them there. He worried about failing his grandfather.

And, possibly, the world?

Over time, his anxieties trickled away as Santiago was enchanted by the changing world around them. The busy streets of Lima faded, and the great vastness of the Pacific Ocean stretched far and wide beyond his window.

Foamy waves crashed against rocks. People strolled up and down the coastal walkway that snaked around the beach. A thin mist clung to the outside of the car. Santiago rolled down his window and breathed in the salty tang of the sea.

But before long, the scorched and dusty expanse of a desert unfurled around them.

They surfed a long and lonely stretch of highway, a river of cracked asphalt cutting through the arid landscape. Now and then, they passed clusters of adobe houses and patches of sparse green farmland where irrigation systems breathed life into an otherwise desolate land.

The terrain was monotonous and yet, Santiago found himself enraptured.