The Codex (44 page)

As they shuffled back in this ridiculous fashion, Hauser stepped forward. They had bunched up, instinctively, as people did when in danger—especially family members herded under gunpoint. He had seen it before, and it made everything so much easier.

“Everything’s just fine,” he said softly. “I don’t want to hurt anybody—all I want is Max’s grave goods. I’m a professional, and like most professionals I dislike killing.” Right. His finger caressed the smooth plastic curve of the trigger, found its place, began to tighten it back to full auto position. They were in place. There was nothing they could do now. They were as good as dead.

“Nobody’s going to get hurt.” And then he couldn’t help adding: “Nobody’s going to feel a thing.” He squeezed for real now, felt that imperceptible give in the trigger that he knew so well, that millisecond release after the feeling of resistance, and simultaneously Hauser saw a swift movement in his peripheral field of vision, and there was an explosion of sparks and flame and he fell, firing wildly as he went, the bullets ricocheting off the stone walls, and he had a terrifying glimpse of what had struck him before he hit the stone ground.

The thing had come straight out of the tomb, half naked, face white as a vampire, sunken-eyed, stinking of decomposition, its bony limbs as gray and hollow as death, holding aloft a burning brand that it had just struck him with, and it was still coming at him with a shrieking mouth full of brown teeth.

Damned if it wasn’t the ghost of Maxwell Broadbent himself!

72

Hauser rolled when he hit the ground, still clutching his weapon. He twisted, trying to get back into firing position, but it was too late and the ragged specter of Maxwell Broadbent had fallen on top of him, roaring and stabbing and slashing him across the face with the burning brand; there were showers of sparks, and he smelled burning hair as he tried to ward off the blows with one hand, clutching his gun with the other. It was impossible to get off a shot while the attacker was trying to gouge out his eyes with the burning brand. He managed to wrench free, and then fired blindly, from on his back, wildly sweeping the muzzle back and forth, hoping to hit something, anything. But the specter seemed to have vanished.

He stopped firing and gingerly sat up. His face and right eye felt like they were on fire. He yanked the canteen out of his pack and doused his face.

Christ, how it hurt!

He dabbed the water off his face. Hot coals and sparks from the brand had lodged inside his nose, under one eyelid, in his hair and his cheek. The monstrous thing that had come out of the tomb—could it really have been a ghost? He opened, painfully, his right eye. As he gently probed around it with his fingertip, he realized the damage was all to the eyebrow and lid. The cornea was intact, and he hadn’t lost his vision. He poured some water into his handkerchief, wrung it out, and blotted his face.

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.