The Codex (28 page)

He stopped. Fenner’s expression had not changed. If he was thinking, it didn’t show on his face.

“When will you announce this? Can I have a date?”

“No.”

“How certain is it?”

“Very.”

The lie was easy. The Codex was their only hope, and if it fell through nothing else would matter anyway.

A long silence. Fenner allowed something that might have been a smile to form on the fine, astringent features of his face. He collected his briefcase and rose. “I thank you, Lewis. You take my breath away.”

Skiba nodded and watched Fenner make his small, careful way out of the office.

If only he knew.

38

As they came down from the mountains, the rainforest changed. The terrain was extremely rough, a landscape cut by deep ravines and torrential rivers, with high ridges in between. They continued following the animal trail, but it was so overgrown that they had to take turns hacking their way forward. They slipped and fell going up the steep muddy trails and slid and fell going back down.

For days they struggled forward. There wasn’t a level place to camp, and they were forced to sleep on slopes, hammocks strung between trees, sleeping all night in the rain. In the mornings the jungle was dark and foggy. In a hard day’s travel they might make five miles, and by the end of each day they were all brutally exhausted. The hunting was almost nonexistent. They never had enough to eat. Tom had never been so hungry in his life. At night he dreamed of T-bone steaks and french fried potatoes, and by day he thought of ice cream and buttered lobsters, and all they talked about around the campfire at night was food.

The days began to run together. Not once did the rain stop or the mists lift. Their hammocks rotted and had to be rewoven, their clothes began to fall apart, chiggers infested their clothing and dug into their skin, and the stitches of their shoes unraveled. They had no change of clothes, and the jungle would soon reduce them to nakedness. Their bodies were covered with stings, bites, scrapes, cuts, scabs, and sores. On one climb out of a ravine Vernon slipped and grasped a bush to arrest his fall, causing a shower of fire ants to cascade over him; they bit him so viciously that he ran a fever for twenty-four hours and could barely walk.

The only redeeming quality of the rainforest was its plant life. Sally found a wealth of medicinal plants and was able to concoct an herbal ointment from them that worked wonders with bug bites, rashes, and fungal infections. They drank a tea she made that she claimed was an antidepressant, but it didn’t keep them from feeling depressed.

And always, at night and even during the day, they could hear the coughing and prowling of the jaguar. No one spoke about it—Don Alfonso had forbidden it—but it was never far from Tom’s mind. Surely there were other animals for it to eat in the forest. What did it want? Why did it follow and never strike?

On the fourth or fifth night—Tom had begun to lose count—they camped atop a ridge, wedged among massive rotting tree trunks. It had rained, and steam rose from the ground. They ate an early dinner—a boiled lizard with matta root. After dinner Sally stood up with the gun.

“Jaguar or no jaguar, I’m going hunting.”

“I’m coming,” Tom said.

They followed a small stream downhill from camp, through a ravine. The day was gray, and the forest around them was limp and bedraggled, the vegetation steaming. The sound of dripping water mingled with the hollow calls of birds.

For half an hour they picked their way down the ravine, over mossy boulders and tree trunks, until they reached a swift stream. They moved along it, Indian file, through the curling mists. Sally moved a bit like a cat herself, Tom thought, the way she silently insinuated herself through the understory.

Sally paused, held up her hand. Slowly she raised the gun, aimed, and fired.

An animal thrashed and squealed in the undergrowth, the sounds quickly subsiding.

“I don’t know what it was, except that it was stout and furry.” In the bushes they found the animal, lying on its side, its four legs sticking out horizontally.

“Some kind of peccary,” said Tom, looking down at it in distaste. He would never get used to butchering animals.

“Your turn,” said Sally, flashing him a smile.

He pulled out his machete and began cleaning the animal while Sally watched. Steam rose up from the internal organs as Tom scooped them out.

“If we parboil it back in camp, then we can scrape the hair off,” Sally said.

“I can hardly wait,” said Tom. He finished gutting it, cut a pole, and tied the legs together. They slid it on and hefted it over their shoulders. It didn’t weigh more than thirty pounds, but it would make a fine meal with meat left over for smoking. They began heading along the ravine, backtracking the way they had come.

They hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when they were stopped by the jaguar, standing in the middle of the trail directly in front of them. It stared at them with green eyes, the tip of its tail flicking back and forth.

“Back up,” said Tom. “Nice and easy.” But as they backed up, the jaguar took a step forward, and another, pacing them on padded paws.

“Remember what Don Alfonso said?”

“I can’t do it,” Sally whispered.

“Shoot over its head.”

Sally raised the muzzle of the gun and squeezed off a round.

The sound was curiously muffled in the fog and heavy vegetation. The jaguar gave a small shiver but otherwise made no sign it had heard, just continued to stare at them, the tip of the tail twitching as rhythmically as a metronome.

“We’ll go around it,” Sally said.

They edged off the animal trail into the forest. The animal made no move to follow them except with its green eyes, and soon it was lost to sight. After a few hundred yards Tom began to cut back toward the ridgeline. They heard the cat cough twice off to their left, and they moved farther down from the ridge. They went a quarter mile and then stopped. They should have encountered the ravine with the stream, but it wasn’t there.

“We should be cutting more to the left,” said Tom.

They angled left. The forest became heavier, darker, the trees smaller and closer together.

“I don’t recognize this area at all.”

They stopped to listen. The jungle seemed to have fallen eerily silent. There was no sound of a stream, nothing but the patter of water dripping from branches.

A low, booming cough came from directly behind them.

Sally turned angrily. “Get out of here!” she yelled. “Scat!”

They went on, redoubling their pace, Tom in the lead, slashing a path through the undergrowth. From time to time he could hear the cat on his left keeping pace with them, making an occasional purring noise. It wasn’t a friendly sound at all: It was low and thick and sounded more like a growl. He knew they were getting lost, that they weren’t going in the right direction. They were almost running.

And then with a sudden flash of gold it seemed to congeal out of the mist ahead of them. It stood on a low branch, tensed.

They stopped, backed up slowly while the animal watched. Then, with a liquid movement, it leapt to one side of them, and in three bounds it had positioned itself on a branch behind them, blocking their retreat.

Sally kept her gun aimed at the jaguar, but she didn’t shoot. They stared at the animal and the animal stared at them.

“I think maybe the time has come to kill it,” Tom whispered.

“I can’t.”

Somehow, that was the answer Tom wanted to hear. Never had he seen an animal so vital, so supple, or so magnificent.

Then, all of a sudden, the jaguar turned and took itself away, jumping lightly from branch to branch, until it had disappeared into the forest.

They stood there silently, and then Sally smiled. “I told you she was just curious.”

“That’s some curiosity, following us for fifty miles.” Tom looked around. Finally he tucked his machete back into his belt and picked up the pole holding the dead peccary. He felt unsettled, uneasy. It wasn’t over.

They had gone five paces when the jaguar dropped down on them with a piercing shriek, like a shower of gold, landing on Sally’s back with a muffled sound. The gun went off uselessly. Sally twisted while she fell; they hit the ground together, and the force of the blow knocked the jaguar off, but not before it had torn off half her shirt.

Tom threw himself on top of the animal’s back, squeezing it between his legs like a bronco, clawing for its eyes with both thumbs to gouge them out; but before he could do it he felt the massive body flex and snap like a steel spring under him. The animal screamed again, leaping and twisting its body around in midair as Tom drew his machete. Then the animal was on top of him, a smothering of hot, rank fur bearing down on him and the pointed machete; Tom felt its flesh give; he could feel the blade slide up into the jaguar, and there was a powerful rush of hot blood in his face. The jaguar screamed, twisted, and with all his might Tom gave the machete a sideways jerk. The knife must have penetrated the animals’ lungs, because the jaguar’s scream turned into a suffocated gurgle. The animal went limp. Tom pushed it off him and pulled out the machete. The jaguar gave one more kick and then was still.

He rushed over to Sally, who was struggling to get up. She screamed when she saw him. “My God, Tom, are you all right?”

“Are you all right?”

“What did it do to you!” She tried to reach for his face, and he suddenly understood.

“It’s not my blood, it’s hers,” he said weakly, bending over her. “Let me look at your back.”

She rolled onto her stomach. The shirt was in tatters. There were four scores that ran across her shoulder. He pulled what remained of her shirt off.

“Hey, I’m fine,” came her muffled voice.

“Quiet.” Tom stripped off his own shirt and soaked one end in a puddle of water. “This is going to hurt.”

She grunted slightly with pain as he cleaned out the wounds. They were not deep—the danger was mostly from infection. Tom took some moss and made a pad and tied it onto the wound with his shirt. He helped her put her shirt back on and sit up.

She looked at him again and winced. “My God, you’re drenched in blood.” She looked over at the jaguar, stretched out in all its golden glory on the ground, its eyes half open. “You killed her with your machete?”

“I had my machete out, and she jumped on it and did all the work herself.” He put his arm around her. “Can you stand up?”

“Sure.”

He helped her up, and she staggered a little, then recovered. “Give me my gun.”

Tom fetched it. “I’ll carry it.”

“No, I’ll just carry it over the other shoulder. You carry the peccary.”

Tom didn’t argue. He retied the peccary on the pole, slung it over his shoulder, and paused to take one last look at the jaguar stretched out on its side, its eyes glazed over, lying in a pool of blood.

“You’re going to have one hell of a cocktail party story to tell when we get out of here,” said Sally with a grin.

Back at the camp, Vernon and Don Alfonso listened to their story in silence. When Tom was finished Don Alfonso laid a hand on his shoulder, looked into his eyes, and said, “You are one crazy yanqui, Tomasito, you know that?”

Tom and Sally retreated into the privacy of the hut while he redoctored her wound with some of her own herbal antibiotics as she sat cross-legged on the ground with her shirt off, mending it with bark thread Don Alfonso had made. She kept looking at him out of the corner of her eye, trying to suppress a smile. Finally she said, “Have I thanked you for saving my life yet?”

“I don’t need thanks.” Tom tried to hide the flush in his face. It wasn’t the first time he had seen her with her shirt off—they had long ago abandoned pretenses of privacy—but this time he felt an intense erotic charge. He noticed a blush creeping up her chest, spreading between her breasts, her nipples erect. Did she feel the same way?

“Yes, you do.” She put down the shirt she was mending, turned around, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him softly on the lips.

39

Hauser halted his men at the river. Beyond he could see the blue flanks of the Sierra Azul rising into the clouds, like the lost world of Arthur Conan Doyle. He crossed the clearing himself and examined the muddy trail on the far side. The constant rain had washed away most marks, but it had the advantage of telling him that the bare footprints he saw must be very fresh—no more than a few hours old. It looked like a group of six men, a hunting party perhaps.

These, then, were the Indians that Broadbent had allied himself with. No one else lived in these godforsaken jungle mountains.

Hauser rose from his kneeling position and reflected for a moment. He would lose any cat-and-mouse chase in this jungle. He would get nothing from them by negotiation, either. That left only one sensible course of action.

He signaled the soldiers forward, taking the lead himself. They moved swiftly down the trail in the direction the men had gone. He had left Philip in the rear, well manacled, and guarded by a soldier. The Broadbent son was by now too weak to keep up and in no condition to escape, especially with manacles. It was a shame to lose the services of a soldier when he had so few competent ones, but when the time came Philip could be a useful bargaining chip. One should never underestimate the value of a hostage.