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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 thyrium261.'

'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.

Nash and Race turned in their seats to see Troy Copeland, one of
the other scientists, come striding quickly down the centre aisle
from the cockpit. Copeland was a tall man, lean, with a thin,
hawk-like face and intense, narrow eyes. He was one of the DARPA
people—a nuclear physicist, Race recalled—and he appeared to Race
to be a completely humourless individual.

'Colonel, we have a problem,' he said.

'What is it?' Nash said.

'We just caught a priority alert from Fairfax Drive,'

Copeland said.

Race had heard of 'Fairfax Drive' before. It was short hand for
3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, Virginia.

DARPA headquarters.

'About?' Nash said.

Copeland took a deep breath. 'There was a break-in there early this
morning. Seventeen security staff dead. The entire night crew
killed.' .

Nash's face went ashen white. 'They didn't—'

Copeland nodded seriously. 'They stole the Supernova.'

Nash stared off into space for a second.

'It was the only thing they took,' Copeland said. 'They knew
exactly where it was. They knew the codes to the vault room and had
cardkeys for the clamp-down locks. We must assume that they also
know the codes to the titanium

airlock on the device itself, and maybe how to detonate it.'

“Any idea who it was?'

'NCIS are there now. Early indications are that it might be

the