12.21

by Dustin Thomason

  Not tonight, though. Just after two A.M., Chel stood in Getty research lab 214A with Dr. Rolando Chacon, her most experienced antiquities-restoration expert, surrounded by high-def cameras, mass spectrometers, and conservation tools. Normally, every one of the long wooden tables set up in rows throughout the room was covered with lumps of jade, pottery, and ancient head masks, but now they’d cleared several in the back to make room for the codex. On the walls hung photographs from ruins, which Chel had taken during fieldwork, quiet reminders of the emotional ride that returning to her people’s ancient home always was.

  She and Rolando had delicately removed the contents of Gutierrez’s box piece by piece, lifting and separating each fragment using sets of long tweezers and metal specula, then spreading them out onto glass plates sitting atop illuminated light tables. Some were as small as a postage stamp, but even these were heavy, dense fig-bark paper weighed down even more by the dust and moisture of a tomb.

  They’d been at it four hours and had gotten through only the top of page one, but, staring down at the assembled fragments, Chel was pulled back to the former glory of her ancestors. The first words, already coming together, seemed to be an invocation of rain and the stars—a prayer—a magic carpet to another world.

  “So I assume we’ll have to work on this at night?” Rolando asked. Chel’s restorer was a six-foot-two, hundred-fifty-pound sliver of a man with a week’s worth of stubble.

  “Sleep during the day,” she told him. “With apologies to your girlfriend.”

  “I just hope she notices I’m gone. Maybe it’ll inject a little mystery into our relationship. And you? When will you sleep?”

  “Whenever. There’s no one who’ll notice I’m gone.”

  Rolando placed another fragment carefully onto the glass. Chel knew no one with a greater knack for handling delicate objects or with better instincts when it came to reconstructing fragile antiquities. She trusted him implicitly; he’d been a loyal member of her team longer than anyone else. She didn’t like putting him at risk, but she needed his help.

  “You wish I’d called someone else?” Chel asked him.

  “Hell no,” Rolando said. “I’m your one and only ladino, and I’m not going to let you squeeze me out of this bombshell.”

  Ladino was slang for all seven million non-indigenous descendants of the Spanish living in Guatemala. All her life Chel had listened to her mother talking about how ladinos supported the army-sponsored genocide of the Maya and how they used the indígenas as scapegoats for their economic woes. But despite the tensions that still existed between the two groups, working so closely and for so long with Rolando had shifted her perspective. During the revolution, his family protested on behalf of the indigenous people. His father had even been arrested for it once before moving the family to America.

  “I don’t see how this could be from any of the major ruins,” he said, tinkering with the edges until he’d jigsawed a match.

  Chel agreed. The more than sixty known sites of classic-era Maya ruins in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Belize, and El Salvador were packed with archaeologists, tourists, and locals year-round. Not even the most sophisticated looters could operate in those conditions, so Chel believed the book had to have been taken from a newly discovered site. Every year, satellites, helicopter tourists, and loggers stumbled across long-hidden architectural features in the jungle, and she guessed that the looter—likely a professional scout—had stumbled on the site and then returned with a crew.

  “You think the looter could have discovered a lost city?” Rolando asked.

  Chel shrugged. “If they did, every indígena in Guatemala will claim it as their own.”

  So many Maya villages had oral histories that told of an incredible lost city where their ancestors had once lived. During the revolution, a cousin of Chel’s father even claimed to have found Kiaqix’s lost city, from which the Original Trio had supposedly fled. The reality was less sexy: Many Maya had always lived in small villages in the forest, and, for Chel’s people, claiming a connection to a lost city was like white Americans saying they had an ancestor on the Mayflower—easy (and desirable) to say, harder to prove.

  “So I’m not asking again where the hell you got this …” Rolando said as he matched another fragment, “but, based on the iconography, this does look like it’s from the end of the classic. Maybe 800 to 925? It’s unbelievable.”

  Chel said, “Hope the carbon dating agrees.”

  Rolando put down his tweezers. “And I know we can’t tell anyone, but … there’s a lot of complicated syntax here. We could really use Victor on this. No one knows classic syntax better than he does.”

  From the moment she saw the codex, Chel had wanted to call Victor Granning, but she was too afraid of how he might react. They hadn’t spoken in months; she had good reasons for avoiding him. “We’ll be just fine on our own,” she told Rolando.

  “Okay,” he said. He knew better than to press. Granning was a sore spot. Chel loved her old mentor, but he was too much of a diehard. And a little nuts.

  Trying to put Granning out of her mind, Chel studied the puzzle of “stacked” glyphs Rolando had started to assemble from the first page:

  Mayan glyphs came in two basic varieties. They could be combinations of syllables strung together to approximate the sound of words (just like English or other alphabetical systems). But often they were more like Chinese, with each glyph or glyph combination symbolizing an object or idea. Once Chel had broken the blocks down and deciphered each component, using the established catalogs of one hundred fifty decoded syllables and the catalog of the eight hundred-plus known “picture” glyphs, she strung them into sentences.

  Words like jäb were entirely familiar; it was the same word the modern Qu’iche used for rain. Some, like wulij, could only be loosely translated, because there was no corresponding word in English: to take down was the closest she could get, carrying none of the religious implications the word had in Mayan. Researchers had identified about a hundred fifty glyphs that still hadn’t been deciphered, and not only did a few of these appear on the very first page of the codex, there were others Chel had never seen before. When the entire text was reconstructed, she suspected there would be dozens of new glyphs to analyze.

  Three hours later, Chel’s legs had cramped, and her eyes were so dry and irritated that she had to replace her contacts with the glasses she hated. But finally they had a rough translation of the first glyph block:

  Come rain is none, ___ of nourishment, ___ star’s half cycle. Harvest, take down fields of Kanuataba, raze ___ and trees, push out deer, birds, jaguar, land guardians. Rededication ___ tracts. Destroy hillsides, swarm insects, fed leaves soils are not. Have none, shelter, animals, butterflies, plants given by Holy Bearer for spirit lives. Bear no flesh, animals, cook us.

  Yet for Chel, these literal words weren’t enough—a completed translation had to capture the essence of what the scribe was trying to convey. Codices were written from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, and they were often very formal in tone. So she did her best to insert missing words from context and typical word pairings seen in the other books until they had a better rendering of the first paragraph:

  No rain has come to give nourishment in a half cycle of the great star. The fields of Kanuataba have been harvested and destroyed, the trees and plants razed, and the deer and birds and jaguar guardians of the land have been pushed out. Farming tracts cannot be rededicated. Hillsides have been ruined, insects swarm, and soils are no longer fed by falling leaves. The animals and butterflies and plants given by the Holy Bearer have nowhere to go to continue their spirit lives. The animals bear no flesh for cooking.

  “It’s talking about a drought,” Rolando said. “Who would’ve been allowed to write something like this?”

  Chel had never seen anything like it. Written Maya records were generally ancient press releases for kings. The royal “scribes” who wrote them—half press secretaries, half religious lea
ders—didn’t dare mention anything that undermined their rulers.

  Never before had Chel seen a scribe writing about the difficulties of daily life. Predictions of rain were inscribed on stone columns at the ruins and in the Madrid and Dresden Codices, but for a scribe to report an ongoing drought was unheard of. It was a king’s job to bring the rains, and such a discussion would embarrass any king who couldn’t deliver.

  “Only a scribe could have this kind of skill,” Rolando said, gesturing at a perfectly executed picture of the maize god.

  Chel studied the words again. The penalty for writing this could well have been death. No rain has come to give nourishment in a half cycle of the great star. The great star was Venus, and a half cycle was almost fifteen months. What the scribe was describing would be by far the longest drought in the known Mayan record.

  “What is it?” asked Rolando.

  “It’s not just the drought. He’s talking about the depletion of the maize stores,” Chel said. “He’s talking about endangered animals and diminishing amounts of arable land. No one would have been permitted to write something like this. It’s basically a description of the end of the civilization.”

  Rolando flashed another grin. “You think …”

  “He’s writing about the collapse.”

  OVER THE COURSE of Chel’s career, the question that had bedeviled her more than any other was the “collapse” of her ancestors’ civilization at the end of the first millennium. For seven centuries, the Maya had built cities and innovated in art, architecture, agriculture, mathematics, astronomy, and commerce. But then, six hundred years before the Spanish conquistadores arrived, city-states stopped expanding, construction halted, and scribes in the lowlands of Guatemala and Honduras stopped writing. Within a span of only half a century, urban centers were abandoned, the institution of kingship disappeared, and the classic era of Maya civilization came to an end.

  Colleagues of Chel’s had a variety of theories about what caused the collapse. Some suggested eco-recklessness: aggressive farming practices and disregard for deforestation. Others claimed that, through continuous warfare, hyper-religiosity, and sacrificial bloodlust, the ancients brought on their own demise.

  Chel had a skeptical view of all these ideas. She believed they were rooted in a European inclination to belittle indígenas. Exaggerations of human sacrifice had plagued the Maya since the Spanish landed, and the collapse had been used for centuries as proof that the conquistadores were more evolved than the savages they’d conquered. Proof the Maya couldn’t be trusted to rule themselves.

  Chel believed that the collapse was caused by natural mega-droughts that spanned decades and made large-scale agriculture impossible for her ancestors. Studies done on riverbeds in the area suggested that the end of the classic era was the driest in seven millennia. When these extended dry periods made cities uninhabitable, the Maya simply adapted. They reverted to subsistence farming and migrated to small villages like Kiaqix.

  “If we could prove this is an actual description of the collapse,” Rolando said giddily, “it would be a landmark.”

  Chel imagined what else they might find on these pages. Imagined how far the codex would go toward answering what had, to date, been unanswerable. Imagined how she could one day show it to the world.

  “And if we could prove the collapse was the result of mega-droughts,” Rolando continued, “it would cut the balls right off those generals too.”

  This possibility gave Chel yet another surge of adrenaline. In the last three years, tensions had flared again between ladinos and the indígenas. Civil-rights activists had been killed, crimes perpetrated by the same ex-generals who’d murdered Chel’s father. Politicians had actually invoked the collapse on the floor of Parliament: The Maya were savages who’d destroyed their environment once, they’d claimed, and would do it again if they were allowed to keep their valuable land.

  Could the book prove otherwise once and for all?

  The phone rang in Chel’s office at the back of the lab. She checked the clock. It was just after eight A.M. They needed to pack up the codex and put it in the vault. People would start filtering into the museum soon, and they couldn’t risk questions.

  “I’ll get it,” Rolando said.

  “I’m not here,” she called after him. “You have no idea when I will be back.”

  A minute later, Rolando returned with a curious look on his face. “It’s a translator service from a hospital,” he said.

  “What do they want?”

  “They have a sick man who was brought in three days ago, and no one’s been able to talk to him. Now somehow they’ve concluded he’s speaking Qu’iche.”

  “Tell them to call the church in the morning,” she told him. “Someone over there can translate for them.”

  “They told me the patient keeps saying one word over and over again, repeating it like some kind of mantra.”

  “What word?”

  “Wuj.”

  12.19.19.17.11

  DECEMBER 12, 2012

  FIVE

  THEY REPEATED THE GENETIC TESTING AT THE PRION CENTER. John Doe’s chart, lab tests, and MRI scans were scrutinized at CDC headquarters in Atlanta. By the following morning, after all-night meetings and emergency conference calls, the doctors all agreed with Stanton: The patient had a new strain of prion disease, and it came from tainted meat.

  After dawn, Stanton reviewed the case with his deputy, Alan Davies, a brilliant English doctor who’d spent years studying mad cow across the Atlantic.

  “Just got off with USDA,” said Davies. They were in Stanton’s office at the Prion Center. “No positive tests for prion at any of the major meat packagers. Nothing suspicious in the herd records or feed logs.”

  Davies wore the vest and pants from a pin-striped three-piece suit, and his long brown hair was so perfectly set on his head, it looked like a toupee. He was the only lab rat Stanton had known who wore a suit, his way of showing Americans how much more civilized their British cousins were.

  “I want to see the tests myself,” Stanton said, rubbing his eyes. He was having trouble fighting his exhaustion.

  “That’s just the big farms,” Davies replied, smirking. “USDA couldn’t cover all the small farms if they had a year. Never mind the sheep and pigs. Somewhere out there, some careless bugger is probably still grinding up contaminated brains or whatever the hell else and shipping them to God-knows-where.”

  Tracking the original source was crucial in any food-borne illness. Vegetables with E. coli had to be traced back to the farms where they were grown, so the farms could be shut down and their wares pulled from the shelves. Salmonella had to be traced back to the chicken coop, so every egg could be recalled. It could be the difference between one victim and thousands.

  Stanton and his team didn’t even know what animal source to concentrate on. Cows’ prions could obviously cross the species barrier, so beef was the first suspect. But pigs had prions remarkably similar to those of cows. And a prion disease called scrapie had killed hundreds of thousands of sheep throughout Europe; Stanton had long feared lamb might one day carry mutated prions to humans too.

  Once they figured out what got John Doe sick, the real work of containment would begin. The unnatural way meat was processed and packaged meant flesh from a single animal could be distributed across thousands of different products and end up all over the world. Stanton had traced meat from a single cow to jerky in Columbus and hamburgers in Düsseldorf.

  “I want people on the ground checking all the local hospitals,” he told Davies. John Doe was the only case so far, but prion disease was difficult to diagnose, and Stanton was convinced there could be more out there. “See if they’ve had any unusual cases of insomnia. Or any other unusual admissions. And check the psych ERs for anyone coming in with delusions or strange behavior.”

  Davies smiled. “That would be everyone in L.A.” After matters sartorial, making fun of the Southland was his primary amusement.

&
nbsp; “What else?” Stanton asked.

  “Cavanagh called.”

  As head of prion investigations for the CDC, Stanton reported to the deputy director. Emily Cavanagh was known for her preternatural calm, but she also understood how serious prion disease was and took nothing lightly. After butting countless heads over money and treatment protocols, Stanton had enemies in Atlanta; Cavanagh was one of the few who remained an ally.

  “What are we calling this thing anyway?” Davies asked.

  “VFI for now,” Stanton said. “Variant fatal insomnia. But you find me where it came from and we’ll call it Davies’s disease.”

  STANTON LISTENED TO a dozen new investigation-related voice mails before he heard Nina’s voice.

  “Got your messages,” she said, “and I assume this is another one of your ploys to get me to go vegan or whatever. Don’t worry. Most of the meat in the fridge was ancient and needed to be thrown out anyway. Guess your furry friend and I’ll survive on fish out here for a while. Call me back when you can. And be careful.”

  Stanton glanced at his team, seated at their microscopes. Per orders from CDC headquarters in Atlanta, they weren’t supposed to tell anyone about the possibility of meat-borne illness yet. Every time there was even a hint of a possibility of mad cow, the public panicked, beef futures collapsed, and billions of dollars were lost. So Stanton hadn’t told Nina about John Doe. He’d just hinted that it would be a very good idea to listen to what he’d been saying all these years about not eating meat.

  “Dr. Stanton, I’ve got slides.”

  One of his postdocs waved him over. Stanton hung up the phone and hurried to a protective hood on the opposite side of the lab. Jiao Chen was sitting next to Michaela Thane. Stanton had invited Thane to the lab after her shift at Presbyterian ended so she could stay in on the ground floor of the investigation. If and when a case of meat-borne FFI broke, he wanted to make sure credit was given where it was due.