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"I really must work on my vocabulary," Pitt murmured. He slouched into a comfortable position and stared at the computer genius who stood behind a podium under a large wall screen.
"As I was about to explain," Yaeger continued, "a few of the knots and coils are indecipherable. After applying the most sophisticated and advanced information and data analysis techniques known to man, the best I can offer is a rough account of the story."
"Even a mastermind like you?" asked Gunn, smiling.
"Even Einstein. Unless he'd unearthed an Inca Rosetta Stone or a sixteenth-century how-to book on the art of creating your very own quipu, he'd have worked in a vacuum too."
"If you're going to tell us the show ends with no grand climax," said Giordino, "I'm going to lunch."
"Drake's quipu is a complex representation of numerical data," Yaeger pushed on, undaunted by Giordino's sarcasm, "but it's not strong on blow-by-blow descriptions of events. You can't narrate visual action and drama with strategically placed knots on a few coils of colored wire. The quipu can only offer sketchy accounts of the people who walked on and off this particular stage of history."
"You've made your point," said Sandecker, waving one of his bulbous cigars. "Now why don't you tell us what you sifted from the maze?"
Yaeger nodded and lowered the conference room lights. He switched on a slide projector that threw an early Spanish map of the coast of North and South America on the wall screen. He picked up a metal pointer that telescoped like an automobile radio aerial and casually aimed it in the general direction of the map.
"Without a long-winded history lesson, I'll just say that after Huascar, the legitimate heir to the Inca throne, was defeated and overthrown by his bastard half-brother, Atahualpa, in 1533, he ordered his kingdom's treasury and other royal riches to be hidden high in the Andes. A wise move, as it turned out.
During his imprisonment, Huascar suffered gr
eat humiliation and grief. All his friends and kinsmen were executed, and his wives and children were hanged. Then to add insult to injury, the Spanish picked that particular moment to invade the Inca empire. In a situation similar to Cortez in Mexico, Francisco Pizarro's timing couldn't have been more perfect. With the Inca armies divided by factions and decimated by civil war, the disorder played right into his hands. After Pizarro's small force of soldiers and adventurers slaughtered a few thousand of Atahualpa's imperial retainers and bureaucrats in the square at the ancient city of Caxanarca, he won the Inca empire on a technical foul."
"Strange that the Inca simply didn't attack and overwhelm the Spanish," said Gunn. "They must have outnumbered Pizarro's troops by a hundred to one.
"Closer to a thousand to one," said Yaeger. "But again, as with Cortez and the Aztecs, the sight of fierce bearded men wearing iron clothes no arrow or rock could penetrate, riding ironclad horses, previously unknown to the Incas, while slashing with swords and shooting matchlock guns and cannons, was too much for them. Thoroughly demoralized, Atahualpa's generals failed to take the initiative by ordering determined mass attacks."
"What of Huascar's armies?" asked Pitt. "Surely they were still in the field."
"Yes, but they were leaderless." Yaeger nodded. "History can only look back on a what-if situation.
What if the two Inca kings had buried the hatchet and merged their two armies in a do-or-die campaign to rid the empire of the dreaded foreigners? An interesting hypothesis. With the defeat of the Spanish, God only knows where the political boundaries and governments of South America might be today."
"They'd certainly be speaking a language other than Spanish," commented Giordino.
"Where was Huascar during Atahualpa's confrontation with Pizarro?" asked Sandecker, finally lighting his cigar.
Imprisoned in Cuzco, the capital city of the empire, twelve hundred kilometers south of Caxanarca."
Without looking up from the notations he was making on a legal pad, Pitt asked, "What happened next?"
"To buy his liberty, Atahualpa contracted with Pizarro to cram a room with gold as high as he could reach," answered Yaeger. "A room, I might add, slightly larger than this one."
"Did he fulfill the contract?"
"He did. But Atahualpa was afraid that Huascar might offer Pizarro more gold, silver, and gems than he could. So he ordered that his brother be put to death, which was carried out by drowning, but not before Huascar ordered the royal treasures to be hidden."
Sandecker stared at Yaeger through a cloud of blue smoke. "With the king dead, who carried out his wish?"
"A general called Naymlap," replied Yaeger. He paused and used the pointer to trace a red line on the map that ran from the Andes down to the coast. "He was not of royal Inca blood, but rather a Chachapoyan warrior who rose through the ranks to become Huascar's most trusted advisor. It was Naymlap who organized the movement of the treasury down from the mountains to the seashore, where he had assembled a fleet of fifty-five ships. Then, according to the quipu, after a journey of twenty-four days, it took another eighteen days just to load the immense treasure on board."
"I had no idea the Incas were seafaring people," said Gunn.
"So were the Mayans, and like the Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans before them, the Incas were coastal sailors. They were not afraid of open water, but they wisely beached their boats on moonless nights and during stormy weather. They navigated by the sun and stars and sailed with prevailing winds and currents up and down the shoreline, conducting trade with the Mesoamericans in Panama and perhaps beyond. An Inca legend tells of an early king who heard a tale about an island rich in gold and intelligent people, that lay far out beyond the horizon of the sea. With loot and slaves in mind, he built and rigged a fleet of ships, and then sailed off with a company of his soldiers acting as marines to what is thought to be the Galapagos Islands. Nine months later he returned with scores of black prisoners and much gold."
"The Galapagos?" wondered Pitt.
"As good a guess as any."
"Do we have any records of their ship construction?" Sandecker queried.
