The Codex

by Douglas Preston

  What the hell happened? Hauser, who always expected the unexpected, had never been more shocked in his life. He knew that face, even after forty years; he knew every detail of it, every expression, every tic. There was no doubt: It was Broadbent himself who had come shrieking out of that tomb like a banshee—Broadbent, who was supposed to be dead and buried. White as a sheet, ragged hair and beard, hollow, skeletal, wild.

  Hauser swore. What had he been thinking? Broadbent was alive and at this very moment escaping. Hauser shook his head in a sudden fury, trying to clear it. What the hell was wrong with him? He had allowed himself to be blindsided and now, sitting here, he’d given them at least a three-minute head start.

  He quickly reshouldered his Steyr AUG, took a step forward, and stopped.

  There was blood on the ground—an attractive, half-dollar-sized splotch. And farther along another generous splash. Hauser felt the semblance of calm return. As if he needed further confirmation, the so-called ghost of Broadbent was bleeding real blood. He had managed to hit him and perhaps some of the others after all, and even a grazing shot from the Steyr AUG was no joke. He took a moment to analyze the spray pattern, the amount, the trajectory.

  The wound was not trivial. All in all, the advantage was still very much his.

  He looked up the stone staircase and began running, taking it two steps at a time. He would get on their trail, he would track them down, and he would kill them.

  73

  They ran up the carved staircase, the sound of the shots still echoing from the distant mountains. They reached the trail at the top of the cliffs and sprinted for the green walls of lianas and creepers that covered the ruined ramparts of the White City. As they reached the covering shade, Tom saw his father stumble. Streaks of blood were running down one of his legs.

  “Wait! Father’s hit!”

  “It’s nothing.” The old man stumbled again and grunted.

  They stopped briefly at the base of the wall.

  “Leave me alone!” the old man roared.

  Ignoring him, Tom examined the wound, wiping away the blood, locating the entrance and exit wounds. The bullet had passed through the right lower abdomen at an angle, traversing the rectus abdommus and coming out the back, where it seemed to have avoided the kidney. It was impossible to tell yet whether the peritoneal cavity had been nicked. He pushed that possibility aside and palpated the area; his father groaned. It was a serious wound and he was losing blood, but at least no arteries or major veins had been cut.

  “Hurry!” Borabay cried.

  Tom took off his own shirt and with one savage pull tore a strip of cloth away, then another. He bound them as best he could around his father’s midriff, trying to stem the loss of blood.

  “Put your arm around my shoulder,” Tom said.

  “I’ll take the other,” Vernon said.

  Tom felt the arm go around him—it was skinny and hard, like a cable of steel. He bent forward to take some of his father’s weight. He felt his father’s warm blood trickling down his leg.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Uff,” Broadbent said, staggering a little as they set off.

  They jogged along the base of the wall, looking for an opening. Borabay plunged through a liana-draped doorway, and they scrambled across a courtyard, through another doorway, and along a collapsed gallery. With the double support of Tom and Vernon, Maxwell Broadbent was able to move rapidly enough, wheezing and grunting with pain.

  Borabay headed straight into the thickest, deepest part of the ruined city. They ran through dark galleries and half-collapsed underground chambers with massive roots bursting through their coffered stone ceilings. As they ran, Tom thought of the Codex and all the other things they were leaving behind.

  They took turns supporting Broadbent as they moved on, passing through a series of dim tunnels, Borabay leading them in sharp turns and doubling back in an effort to throw off their pursuer. They came out into a grove of giant trees, surrounded on two sides by massive stone walls. Only the dimmest green light filtered down. Stone stelae, decorated with Mayan glyphs, dotted the grove like sentinels.

  Tom heard his father’s ragged breath and a muffled curse.

  “I’m sorry that it hurts.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  They traveled for another twenty minutes and arrived at a place where the jungle became riotously luxuriant and thick. Creepers and climbing vines smothered the trees, giving them the appearance of huge, muffled green ghosts. At the top of each suffocated tree, tendrils of vine seeking a new purchase grew straight out, like spiky hair. Heavy flowers hung everywhere. Water dripped incessantly.

  Borabay paused, peering around. “This way,” he said, pointing to the thickest part.

  “How?” Philip said, looking at the impenetrable wall of growth.

  Borabay dropped to his knees and crawled ahead, into a small opening. They did likewise, Max grunting with pain. Tom saw that hidden under the matted vines was a network of animal trails, tunnels going every which way through the vegetation. They crawled into the thickest of it, squeezing through the tunnels the animals had made. It was dark and rank. They crawled for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably no more than twenty minutes, through a fantastical maze of branching and rebranching trails, until they came to an open area, a cave in the vegetation underneath a vine-choked tree whose lower branches created a tentlike space, impenetrable on all sides.

  “We stay here,” Borabay said. “We wait until night.”

  Broadbent sagged back against the tree trunk with a groan. Tom knelt over his father, stripped off the blood-soaked bandages, and examined the wound. It was bad. Borabay knelt next to him and carefully examined it himself. Then he took some leaves he had plucked from somewhere during their flight, crushed and rubbed them between his palms, and made two poultices.

  “What’s that for?” Tom whispered.

  “It stop bleeding, help pain.”

  They packed the poultices over the entrance and exit wounds. Vernon volunteered his shirt, and Tom tore it into strips, using them to tie the poultices into place.

  “Uff,” said Broadbent.

  “I’m sorry, Father.”

  “Quit saying you’re sorry, all of you. I want to groan without having to listen to apologies.”

  Philip said, “Father, you saved our lives back there.”

  “Lives that I put into danger in the first place.”

  “We’d be dead if you hadn’t jumped on Hauser.”

  “The sins of my youth, come back to haunt me.” He winced.

  Borabay squatted on his heels and looked around at all of them. “I go now. I come back in half hour. If I no come back, when night come you wait till rain start and cross bridge without me. Okay?”

  “Where are you going?” Vernon asked.

  “To get Hauser.”

  He sprang up and was gone.

  Tom hesitated. If he was going to go back for the Codex, it was now or never.

  “There’s something I have to do, too.”

  “What?” Philip and Vernon looked at him incredulously.

  Tom shook his head. He couldn’t find the words or the time to defend his decision. Maybe it wasn’t even defensible. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll meet up with you at the bridge tonight, after the storm hits.”

  “Tom, have you gone crazy?” Max rumbled.

  Tom didn’t answer. He turned and slipped off into the jungle.

  In twenty minutes he had crawled back out of the vine maze. He stood up to get his bearings. The necropolis of tombs was to the east: That much he knew. This close to the equator the late morning sun would still be in the eastern sky, and it gave him a general direction. He didn’t want to think about the decision he had just made: whether it was right or wrong to leave his father and brothers, whether it was crazy, whether it was too dangerous. It was all beside the point: Getting the Codex was something he just had to do.

  He went east.

  74


  Hauser’s eyes scanned the ground ahead, reading it like a book: a seedpod pressed into the earth; a creased blade of grass; dew brushed from a leaf. He had learned how to track in Vietnam, and now every detail told him exactly where the Broadbents had gone as clearly as if they had left a trail of breadcrumbs. He followed their route rapidly but methodically, Steyr AUG at the ready. He felt better now, relaxed, if not at peace. Hauser had always found hunting a strangely compelling activity. And there was nothing to compare with the feeling of hunting the human animal. It was indeed the most dangerous game.

  His worthless soldiers were still digging and blasting away at the far end of the city. Good. It would keep them busy. Tracking and killing Broadbent and his sons was a job for a lone hunter slipping unseen through the jungle, not for a noisy group of incompetent soldiers. Hauser had the advantage. He knew the Broadbents were unarmed, and he knew they would have to cross the bridge. It was only a matter of time before he caught up with them.

  With them gone, he could loot the tomb at his leisure, bring out the Codex and the portable artworks, leave the rest for later. Now that he had softened up Skiba he was pretty sure he could extract more than fifty million from him, perhaps a lot more. Switzerland would be a good base to operate from. That was how Broadbent himself used to do it, launder questionable antiquities through Switzerland, claiming they were from an “old Swiss collection.” The masterworks couldn’t be sold on the open market—they were too famous and Broadbent’s ownership too widely known—but they could be quietly placed here and there. There was always some Saudi sheik or Japanese industrialist or American billionaire who wanted to own a beautiful painting and who wasn’t too particular where it came from.

  Hauser abandoned these pleasant fantasies and turned his attention back to the ground. More dew swiped from a leaf; a spot of blood on the soil. He followed the traces into a ruined gallery and turned on his lamp. Moss scraped from a stone, an imprint in the soft ground—any idiot could follow these tracks.

  He followed the signs as fast as he could, putting, as they said, as much pressure on the trail as possible. As he emerged into a broad forest, he saw one particularly clear trace, where they had stirred up some rotten leaves in their headlong flight.

  Too clear. He froze, listened, and then crouched and minutely examined the ground ahead. Amateurish. The Viet Cong would laugh at this one: a bent sapling, a loop of vine hidden under leaves, an almost invisible trip wire. He took one careful step back, picked up a stick lying conveniently nearby, and lobbed it at the trip wire.

  There was a snap, the sapling shot up, the loop jerked. And then Hauser felt a sudden breath of air and a tug on his pantleg. He looked down. Embedded in the loose crease of his pant was a small dart, its fire-hardened tip dribbling a dark liquid.

  The poisoned dart had missed him by less than an inch.

  For several minutes he remained frozen. He examined every square inch of ground around him, every tree, every limb. Satisfied there was no other trap, he leaned over and was about to pluck the dart out of his khakis when he stopped himself yet again—and just in time. The sides of the dart had imbedded in them two nearly invisible spines, also wet with poison, ready to prick the finger of whoever tried to grasp it.

  He took a twig and flicked the dart off his pantleg.

  Very clever. Three multilayered traps in one. Simple and effective. This was the Indian’s work, no doubt about it.

  Hauser moved forward, a little more slowly now, and with newfound respect.

  75

  Tom ran through the forest, speed taking precedence over silence, swinging wide of their earlier trail to avoid running into Hauser. His path took him through a maze of ruined temples buried under thick mats of vines. He had no light, and sometimes he had to feel his way down dark passageways or crawl under fallen stones.

  He soon arrived at the eastern edge of the plateau. He paused, catching his breath, and then crept to the cliff and looked down, trying to orient himself. It seemed to him that the necropolis should lie somewhere to the south, so he went to the right, following the trail that skirted the cliffs. In another ten minutes he recognized the terrace and walls above the necropolis and found the hidden trail. He scurried down, listening at each switchback in case Hauser was still there, but he had long gone. A moment later he came to the dark opening to his father’s tomb.

  Their backpacks still lay in a pile on the ground where they had dropped them. Tom picked up his machete and resheathed it and then kneeled, rifling through the packs, taking out some reed bundles and a pack of matches. He lit one of the bundles and stepped into the tomb.

  The air was pestilential. He breathed through his nose and ventured deeper inside. A tingle of horror crawled up his spine as he realized this was where his father spent the last month, locked up in pitch darkness. The flickering light illuminated a raised funeral slab of dark stone, carved with skulls, monsters, and other strange motifs, surrounded by stacked boxes and crates banded with stainless steel and bolted shut. This was no King Tut’s tomb. It looked more like a crowded, filthy warehouse.

  Tom stepped closer, overcoming his sense of revulsion. Behind the boxes his father had set up a crude living space. It looked as if he had scraped together some dry straw and dust to form a kind of bed. Along the back wall stood a row of clay pots, which evidently contained food and water; the stench of rot rose from them. Rats came leaping out of the pots and fled before the light. Sick with fascination and pity, Tom peered into one and found a scattering of dried plantains at the bottom; the food was crawling with greasy black cockroaches, which bumped and chittered in a panic from the torchlight. Dead rats and mice floated in the water jugs. Against one wall was a pile of rotting rats—obviously killed by his father in what must have been the daily competition for food. In the back of the tomb Tom could see the gleaming eyes of live rats, waiting for him to leave.

  What his father had endured in here, waiting in the pitch-dark for his sons who might not ever come ... It was far more horrifying than he could possibly imagine. That Maxwell Broadbent had endured and lived—and even hoped—told Tom something about his father that he had not known before.

  He wiped his face. He needed to get the Codex and get out.

  The boxes were stenciled and labeled, and it took Tom only a few minutes to find the crate containing the Codex.

  He dragged the heavy crate outside into the light and rested, gulping in the fresh mountain air. The box itself weighed eighty pounds, and it contained other books besides the Codex. Tom examined the quarter-inch bolts and wing nuts holding together the steel bands that clamped down the fiberglass-wrapped wood sides of the box. The wing nuts were tight and hard. It would take a wrench to unscrew them.

  He found a rock and gave one of the nuts a sharp blow, loosening it. He repeated the process and in a few minutes had removed all the wing nuts. He pulled off the steel bands. A few more massive blows cracked the fiberglass covering, and Tom was able to wrench it free. A half dozen precious books spilled out, all carefully wrapped in acid-free paper—a Gutenberg Bible, illuminated manuscripts, a book of hours. He shoved aside the books and reached in, grasped the buckskin-covered Codex, and pulled it out.

  For a moment he stared at it. He remembered so clearly how it had sat in a little glass case in the living room. His father used to unlock the case every month or so and turn a page. The pages had pretty little drawings of plants, flowers, and insects, surrounded by glyphs. He remembered staring at those strange Mayan glyphs, the dots and thick lines and grinning faces, all wrapped and tangled around each other. He hadn’t even realized it was a kind of writing.

  Tom emptied one of their abandoned backpacks and shoved the book in. He shouldered the pack and started back up the trail. He decided to head southwest, keeping an eye out for Hauser.

  He entered the ruined city.

  76

  Hauser followed the trail more carefully now, all his senses alert. He felt a tingling of excitement and fear. The Indian had
been able to rig up a trap like that in less than fifteen minutes. Amazing. The Indian was still out there somewhere, no doubt readying another ambush for him. Hauser wondered at the rather interesting loyalty shown by this Indian guide to the Broadbents. Hauser never underestimated native skills in forestcraft, ambush, and killing. The Viet Cong had taught him respect. As he followed the Broadbents’ trail he took every precaution against ambush, by walking off to one side and pausing every few minutes to examine the ground and undergrowth ahead, even smelling the air for human scent. No Indian up in a tree was going to surprise him with a poison dart.

  He saw that the Broadbents were headed toward the center of the plateau, where the jungle was thickest. No doubt they hoped to hole up there and wait for nightfall. They would not succeed: Hauser had almost never encountered a trail he couldn’t follow, particularly one made by a panicked group of people, one of whom was bleeding heavily. And he and his men had already thoroughly explored the entire plateau.

  Soon the rainforest ahead became choked by a wild overgrowth of creepers and lianas. At first glance it looked impenetrable. He approached cautiously and peered down. There were small animal trails running every which way—mostly coatimundi trails. Fat, pendulous drops of water hung off every leaf, vine, and flower, waiting for the slightest vibration to fall. No one could walk through such a minefield without leaving evidence of his passage in the form of leaves brushed clean of their dew. Hauser could see exactly where they had gone. He followed their trail into the dense overgrowth, where it seemed to vanish.

  Hauser scrutinized the ground. There, in the damp litter of the forest floor, were two almost invisible indentations, formed by a pair of human knees. Interesting. They had crawled into the heart of the creeper colony along the animal trails. He squatted and peered into the green darkness. He sampled the air with his nose. He examined the ground. Which trail had they taken? There, three feet in, was a tiny crushed mushroom, no bigger than a dime, and a scraped leaf. They had gone to earth in this mass of vegetation, waiting for nightfall. Without a doubt, Hauser thought, the Indian had set up his ambush in here. It was a perfect place. He stood back up and examined the layers of rainforest. Yes, the Indian would be hiding somewhere on a branch above this warren of trails, poison dart at the ready, waiting for him to crawl past below.