Temple Read online

  PRAISE FOR MATTHEW REILLY’S

  ICE STATION

  “It takes a really good action thriller to shove its way into this space, but ICE STATION made it with ease. What follows are some of the wildest and most sustained battles in an action thriller in a long time.”

  —The Chicago Tribune

  “Employing crude but effective prose, a nonstop spray of short punchy paragraphs, and cliffhangers galore, this is grade-A action pulp.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A fabulous Hovercraft chase ensues, followed by even more spectacular movie-style stunts (with a genuine cliff-hanger, just for fun). Alistair MacLean meets The X-Files, in a first novel by Australian writer Reilly that’s as satisfying as a wide-screen Hollywood block-buster.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “ICE STATION grabs you like seeing a Glock pointed at your head. If you want action—and I mean serious action with hard-as-nails marines and cutting-edge weapons—then pick up Matt Reilly’s ICE STATION.”

  —Richard Marcinko, author of the Rogue Warrior

  “Once you start reading ICE STATION, you’re not going to want to be interrupted by anything. The whole thing moves at the speed of light Matthew Reilly instantly catapults himself into the top rank of adventure/suspense writers”

  —Warren Murphy, GRANDMASTER and THE FOREVER KING

  “The pace is frantic, the writing snappy, the research thorough. Deaths and derring-do aplenty, plus high-tech gadgetry and old-fashioned heroics. Unputdownable.”

  —The Weekend Australian Review of Books

  “Supersonically paced . . . This is a seriously good book.”

  —The Daily Telegraph

  “Indiana Jones goes to Antarctica . . . ICE STATION is a ripping read . . . fast and inventive, with lots of action, and is obviously backed by good research about weaponry, science, and international jealousies.”

  —NW Magazine

  ST. MARTIN’S PAPERBACKS TITLES

  BY MATTHEW REILLY

  ICE STATION

  TEMPLE

  AREA 7

  CONTEST

  SCARECROW

  TEMPLE

  MATTHEW

  REILLY

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  First published in Australia by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  TEMPLE

  Copyright © 1999 by Matthew Reilly.

  Excerpt from Area 7 copyright © 2002 by Matthew Reilly.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  ISBN: 0-312-98126-0

  EAN: 80312-98126-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  St Martin’s Press hardcover edition / January 2001

  St Martin’s Paperbacks edition / February 2002

  St Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 17S Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6

  FOR MY BROTHER, STEPHEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks are due to several people this time around.

  To Natalie Freer—she is always the first person to read my pages and she reads them in 40-page chunks. Thanks again for your extraordinary patience, generosity and support. To my brother, Stephen Reilly—for his unsurpassed loyalty and his razor-sharp comments on the text (Have I ever mentioned that he has written the best screenplay I have ever read?)

  To my parents, as always, for their love, encouragement and support. To my good friend John Schrooten for being the guinea pig for the third time. (John is the first person to read my books in toto—I still remember him reading Ice Station while we were watching a cricket match at the Sydney Cricket Ground.) Also to Nik Kozlina for her early comments on the text and to Simon Kozlina for letting me give the hero of this book his face!

  For technical assistance, I am deeply indebted to GySgt. Kris Hankinson, USMC Ret. and Captain Paul M. Woods. Providing technical advice to a writer like me is not easy—chiefly because I will always say, “Well, I know it’s not technically correct, but wouldn’t it be cool if . . .” As such, any mistakes in this book are not only mine, and mine alone, but they were probably made over Kris and Paul’s protests.

  Lastly, mention must be made of the good folk at Pan Macmillan and Thomas Dunne Books. To Cate Paterson, my Australian publisher, for—well—making all of this possible really. Her endeavors to publish mass-market thriller fiction in this country are unmatched. To Pete Wolverton, my U.S. publisher, for taking a chance on a young Aussie in the very daunting task of cracking the U.S. techno-thriller market. The ride continues! To Anna McFarlane, my editor, for bringing out the best in me. To every single sales rep at Pan—they’re out there, every day, working the front lines in bookstores around the country. And last of all, a very special thank you to Jane Novak, my publicist at Pan, for guarding me like a mother hen and for seeing the irony when Richard Stubbs and I talked about her—our mutual publicist—on national radio!

  Well, that’s it. Now, on with the show . . .

  TEMPLE

  INTRODUCTION

  From: Holsten, Mark J.

  Civilization Lost—The Conquest of the Incas

  (Advantage Press, New York, 1996)

  “CHAPTER I: THE CONSEQUENCES OF CONQUEST . . . What cannot be emphasized enough is that the conquest of the Incas by the Spanish conquistadors represents perhaps the single greatest collision of cultures in the history of human evolution.

  Here was the most dominant seafaring nation on earth—bringing with it all the latest steel technology from Europe—clashing with the most powerful empire ever to have existed in the Americas.

  Unfortunately for historians, and thanks largely to the insatiable gold lust of Francisco Pizarro and his bloodthirsty conquistadors, the greatest empire to have inhabited the Americas is also the one about which we know the least.

  The plunder of the Incan empire by Pizarro and his army of henchmen in 1532 must rank as one of the most brutal in written history. Armed with that most overwhelming of colonial weapons—gunpowder—the Spaniards cut a swathe through Incan towns and cities with ‘a lack of principle that would have made Machiavelli shudder’ to use the words of one twentieth-century commentator.

  Incan women were raped in their homes or forced to work in filthy makeshift brothels. Men were routinely tortured—their eyes would be burned out with hot coals or their tendons cut. Children were shipped to the coast by the hundred, to be loaded onto the dreaded slave galleons and taken back to Europe.

  In the cities, temple walls were stripped bare. Gold plates and holy idols were melted into bars before anyone even thought to inquire as to their cultural significance.

  Perhaps the most famous of all the tales of quests for Incan treasure is that of Hernando Pizarro—Francisco’s brother—and his Herculean journey to the coastal town of Pachacámac in search of a fabled Incan idol. As described by Francisco de Jérez in his famous work, the Verdadera relación de la conquista de la Peru, the riches that Hernando plundered on his march to the temple-shrine at Pachacámac (not far from Lima) are of almost mythic proportions.

  From what little remains of the Incan empire—buildings that the Spaniards did not destroy, golden relics that the Incas spirited away in the dead of night—the modern historian can only garner the barest of glimpses of a once great civilization.

  What e
merges is an empire of paradox.

  The Incas did not have the wheel, and yet they built the most extensive road system ever seen in the Americas. They did not know how to smelt iron ore, yet their metal-work with other substances—in particular, gold and silver—was second to none. They had no form of writing, and yet their system of numerical record-keeping—multi-colored string formations known as a quipus—was incredibly accurate. It was said that the quipucamayocs, the empire’s feared tax collectors, would know even when something so small as a sandal went missing.

  Inevitably, however, the greatest record of everyday Incan life comes from the Spaniards. As Cortez had done in Mexico only twenty years previously, the conquistadors in Peru brought with them clergymen to spread the Gospel to the heathen natives. Many of these monks and priests would ultimately return to Spain and commit what they saw to writing, and indeed, these manuscripts can still be found in monasteries around Europe today, dated and intact . . .” [p. 12]

  From: de Jérez, Francisco

  Verdadera relación de la conquista de la Peru

  (Seville. 1534)

  “The Captain [Hernando Pizarro] went to lodge, with his followers, in some large chambers in one part of the town. He said that he had come by order of the Governor [Francisco Pizarro] for the gold of that mosque, and that they were to collect it and deliver it up.

  All the principal men of the town and the attendants of the Idol assembled and replied that they would give it, but they continued to dissimulate and make excuses. At last they brought very little, and said they had no more.

  The Captain said that he wished to go and see the Idol they kept, and he went. It was in a good house, well painted, decorated in the usual Indian style—stone statues of jaguars guarded the entrance, carvings of demonic catlike creatures lined the walls. Inside, the Captain found a dark foul-smelling chamber, in the center of which stood a bare stone altar. On our journey, we had been told of a fabled Idol that was housed inside the temple-shrine at Pachacámac. The Indians say that this is their God who created them and sustains them, and who is the source of all their power.

  But we found no Idol at Pachacámac. Just a bare altar in a foul-smelling room.

  The Captain then ordered the vault in which the pagan Idol had been housed be pulled down and the principal men of the town be executed at once for their dissembling. So, too, the attendants to the Idol. Once this was done, the Captain then taught the villagers many things touching our Holy Catholic Faith, and taught them the sign of the cross . . .”

  From: The New York Times

  December 31,1998, p. 12

  Scholars Go Ga-Ga Over Rare Manuscripts

  TOULOUSE, FRANCE: Medieval scholars were presented with a rare treat today when monks from the San Sebastian Abbey, a secluded Jesuit monastery in the Pyrenees Mountains, opened up their magnificent medieval library to a select group of non-ecclesiastical experts for the first time in over three hundred years.

  Of key interest to this exclusive gathering of academics was the chance to see first-hand the abbey’s renowned collection of handwritten manuscripts, notably those of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus.

  It was, however, the discovery of certain other manuscripts—long since believed to have been lost—that sparked cries of delight from the select group of historians who were granted entry to the abbey’s labyrinthine library: The lost codex of St. Aloysius Gonzaga, or a heretofore undiscovered manuscript believed to have been written by St. Francis Xavier, or—most wonderfully of all—the discovery of an original draft copy of the fabled Santiago Manuscript

  Written in 1565 by a Spanish monk named Alberto Luis Santiago, this manuscript commands almost legendary status among medieval historians—principally because it was assumed to have been destroyed during the French Revolution.

  The manuscript is believed to outline in the most stark, brutal detail the conquest of Peru by the Spanish conquistadors in the 1530s. Famously, however, it is also understood to contain the only written account (based on its author’s first-hand observations) of a murderous Spanish captain’s obsessive hunt for a precious Incan idol through the jungles and mountains of Peru.

  Ultimately, however, this was to be a “look-but-don’t-touch” exhibition. After the last scholar was (reluctantly) escorted from the library, its massive oak doors were firmly sealed behind him.

  One can only hope that it won’t be another three hundred years before they are opened again.

  PROLOGUE

  San Sebastian Abbey

  High in the French Pyrenees

  Friday, January 1,1999,3:23 a.m.

  The young monk sobbed uncontrollably as the cold barrel of the gun was placed firmly against his temple.

  His shoulders shook. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “For God’s sake, Philippe,” he said. “If you know where it is, tell them!”

  Brother Philippe de Villiers knelt on the floor of the abbey’s dining area with his hands clenched behind his head. To his left knelt Brother Maurice Dupont, the young monk with the gun to his head, to his right, the other sixteen Jesuit monks who lived in the San Sebastian Abbey. All eighteen of them were on their knees, lined up in a row.

  In front of de Villiers and a little to his left stood a man dressed in black combat fatigues and armed with a Glock-18 automatic pistol and a Heckler & Koch G-11 assault rifle, the most advanced assault rifle ever made. Right now the black-clad man’s Glock was resting against Maurice Dupont’s head.

  A dozen other, similarly garbed, similarly armed men stood around the wide dining room. They all wore black ski masks and they were all waiting upon Philippe de Villiers’s response to a very important question.

  “I don’t know where it is,” de Villiers said through clenched teeth.

  “Philippe . . .” Maurice Dupont said.

  Without warning, the gun at Dupont’s temple went off, the shot ringing out in the silence of the near-deserted abbey. Dupont’s head exploded like a watermelon and a wash of blood splattered all over de Villiers’s face.

  No one outside the abbey would hear the gunshot.

  The San Sebastian Abbey lay perched on a mountaintop nearly 6000 feet above sea level, hidden among the snowcapped peaks of the French Pyrenees. It was “as close to God as you could get,” as some of the older monks liked to say. San Sebastian’s nearest neighbor, the famous telescope platform the Pic du Midi Observatory, was nearly twenty kilometers away.

  The man with the Glock moved to the monk on de Villiers’s right and placed the barrel of the gun against his head.

  “Where is the manuscript?” the man with the gun asked de Villiers a second time. His Bavarian accent was strong.

  “I don’t know, I tell you,” de Villiers said.

  Blam!

  The second monk jolted backward and smacked down against the floor, a puddle of red liquid fanning out from the jagged, fleshy hole in his head. For a few seconds, the body shuddered involuntarily—spasming violently—flopped against the floor like a fish that had fallen out of its bowl.

  De Villiers shut his eyes, offered up a prayer.

  “Where is the manuscript?” the German said.

  “I don’t—”

  Blam!

  Another monk fell.

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Blam!

  All of a sudden, the Glock came around so that it was now pointed directly at de Villiers’s face.

  “This will be the last time I ask you this question, Brother de Villiers. Where is the Santiago Manuscript?”

  De Villiers kept his eyes closed. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy—”

  The German squeezed the trigger.

  “Wait!” someone said from the other end of the line.

  The German assassin turned and saw an older monk step up and out from the line of kneeling Jesuit monks.

  “Please! Please! No more, no more. I will tell you where the manuscript is, if you
promise you will kill no more.”

  “Where is it?” the assassin said.

  “It is this way,” the old monk said, heading off into the library. The assassin followed him into the adjoining room.

  Moments later both men returned, the assassin carrying in his left hand a large leather-bound book.

  Although de Villiers couldn’t see his face, it was clear that the German assassin was smiling broadly behind his black ski mask.

  “Now, go. Leave us in peace,” the old Jesuit said. “Leave us to bury our dead.”

  The assassin seemed to ponder that for a moment. Then he turned and nodded to his cohorts.

  In response the squad of armed assassins raised their G-11s as one and opened fire on the line of kneeling Jesuit monks.

  A devastating burst of supermachine-gun fire cut the remaining monks to ribbons. Heads exploded, jagged rags of flesh were ripped clear from the monks’ bodies as they were assailed by a force of gunfire never before witnessed.

  In seconds, all of the Jesuits were dead, save for one: the elderly monk who had brought the Germans the manuscript. He now stood alone in a pool of his comrades’ blood, facing his tormentors.

  The lead assassin stepped forward and leveled his Glock at the old man’s head.

  “Who are you?” the old monk said defiantly.

  “We are the Schutz Staffeln Totenkopfverbände” the assassin said.

  The old monk’s eyes went wide. “Good God . . .” he breathed.

  The assassin smiled. “Not even He can save you now.”

  Blam!