A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK – NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THE CODEX

Copyright © 2004 by Splendide Mendax, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

A Forge Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Preston, Douglas J.

The codex / Douglas Preston

p. cm.

“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

ISBN: 0-765-30700-6 (alk. paper)

I. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 2. Pharmaceutical industry—Fiction. 3. Archaeological thefts—Fiction. 4. Manuscripts, Maya—Fiction. 5. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 6. Mission persons—Fiction. 7. Treasure-trove—Fiction. 8. Tombs—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3566.R3982C63 2004

813’ 54—dc22

2003049427

First Edition: January 2004

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To

Aletheia Vaune Preston

And

Isaac Jerome Preston

Contents

Contents.4

Acknowledgements.6

1.8

2.10

3.13

4.18

5.21

6.23

7.27

8.29

9.33

10.36

11.37

12.39

13.41

14.43

15.47

16.49

17.52

18.54

19.58

20.59

21.64

22.66

23.68

24.70

25.73

26.74

27.77

28.81

29.83

30.85

31.88

32.90

33.93

34.96

35.98

36.102

37.104

38.106

39.109

40.110

41.112

42.114

43.116

44.118

45.122

46.125

47.126

48.130

49.132

50.134

51.135

52.137

53.138

54.139

55.141

56.142

57.145

58.146

59.147

60.150

61.151

62.152

63.153

64.155

65.157

66.158

67.160

68.161

69.164

70.165

71.166

72.167

73.168

74.170

75.171

76.172

77.174

78.175

79.176

80.177

81.178

82.179

83.181

84.184

85.186

86.188

87.189

About the e-Book.190

Acknowledgements

There is one person above all others who must be thanked for the existence of this novel, and that is my good friend the inestimable Forrest Fenn—collector, scholar, and publisher. I will never forget that lunch of ours, many years ago in the Dragon Room of the Pink Adobe, when you told me a curious story—and thereby gave me the idea for this novel. I hope you feel I have done the idea justice.

Having mentioned Forrest, I feel it necessary to make one thing clear: My character Maxwell Broadbent is a complete and total fictional creation. In terms of personality, ethics, character, and family values, the two men could not be more different, a fact I wish to emphasize for anyone who fancies he sees aroman à clef in this novel.

Many years ago a young editor received a half-finished manuscript calledRelic from a pair of unknown writers; he bought the manuscript and mailed the writers a modest editorial letter, outlining how he thought the novel should be rewritten and finished—a letter that propelled those two authors on the road to bestsellerdom and a number-one box-office hit movie. That editor was Bob Gleason. I owe a great debt to him for those early days and for guiding this novel to completion. In a similar vein I would like to thank Tom Doherty for welcoming back a prodigal son.

I wish to acknowledge here the incomparable Mr. Lincoln Child, truly the better half of our belletristic partnership, for his excellent and most insightful criticism of the manuscript.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to Bobby Rotenberg, not only for his insightful and detailed help with the characters and story, but also for his great and enduring friendship.

I would like to acknowledge my agents Eric Simonoff at Janklow & Nesbit in New York and Matthew Snyder in Hollywood. I want to thank Marc Rosen for helping me develop some of the ideas in this novel and Lynda Obst for her vision in seeing its possibilities in a seven-page treatment.

I owe a great debt to Jon Couch, who read the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions, particularly in regard to weaponry and firearms. Niccolo Capponi offered some of his usual brilliant ideas regarding several tricky scenes in the book. I am also indebted to Steve Elkins, who is searching for the real White City in Honduras.

Several books were useful to me while writingThe Codex, in particular Redmond O’HanlonsIn Trouble Again andSastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer by Rosita Arvigo—an excellent book that I would recommend to anyone interested in the subject of Mayan medicine.

My daughter Selene read the manuscript several times and offered top-notch criticism, for which I am immensely grateful. And I wish to thank my wife, Christine, and my other children, Aletheia and Isaac. I thank all of you for your constant love, kindness, and support, without which this book, and everything else wonderful in my life, wouldn’t exist.

1

Tom Broadbent turned the last corner of the winding drive and found his two brothers already waiting at the great iron gates of the Broadbent compound. Philip, irritated, was knocking the dottle out of his pipe on one of the gateposts while Vernon gave the buzzer a couple of vigorous presses. The house stood beyond them, silent and dark, rising from the top of the hill like some pasha’s palace, its clerestories, chimneys, and towers gilded in the rich afternoon light of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“It’s not like Father to be late,” said Philip. He slipped the pipe between his white teeth and closed down on the stem with a little click. He gave the buzzer a stab of his own, checked his watch, shot his cuff. Philip looked pretty much the same, Tom thought: briar pipe, sardonic eye, cheeks well shaved and after-shaved, hair brushed straight back from a tall brow, gold watch winking at the wrist, dressed in gray worsted slacks and navy jacket. His English accent seemed to have gotten a shade plummier. Vernon, on the other hand, in his gaucho pants, sandals, long hair, and beard, looked uncannily like Jesus Christ.

“He’s playing another one of his games with us,” said Vernon, giving thebuzzer a few more jabs. The wind whispered through thepiñontrees, bringing with it a smell of warm resin and dust. The great house was silent.

The smell of Philip’s expensive tobacco drifted on the air. Heturned to Tom. “And how are things, Tom, out there among the Indians?”

“Fine.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“And with you?”

“Terrific. Couldn’t be better.”

“Vernon?” Tom asked.

“Everything’s fine. Just great.”

The conversation faltered, and they looked around at each other, and then away, embarrassed. Tom never had much to say to his brothers. A crow passed overhead, croaking. An uneasy silence settled on the group gathered at the gate. After a long moment Philip gave the buzzer a fresh series of jabs and scowled through the wrought iron, grasping the bars. “His car’s still in the garage. The buzzer must be broken.” He drew in air. “Halloo! Father! Halloo! Your devoted sons are here!”

There was a creaking sound as the gate opened slightly under his weight.

“The gate’s unlocked,” Philip said in surprise. “Henever leaves the gate unlocked.”

“He’s inside, waiting for us,” said Vernon. “That’s all.”

They put their shoulders to the heavy gate and swung it open on protesting hinges. Vernon and Philip went back to get their cars and park them inside, while Tom walked in. He came face-to-face with the house—his childhood home. How many years since his last visit? Three? It filled him with odd and conflicting sensations, the adult coming back to the scene of his childhood. It was a Santa Fe compound in the grandest sense. The graveled driveway swept in a semicircle past a massive pair of seventeenth-century zaguan doors, spiked together from slabs of hand-hewn mesquite. The house itself was a low-slung adobe structure with curving walls, sculpted buttresses, vigas, latillas, nichos, portals, real chimney pots—a work of sculptural art in itself. It was surrounded by cottonwood trees and an emerald lawn. Situated at the top of a hill, it had sweeping views of the mountains and high desert, the lights of town, and the summer thunderheads rearing over the Jemez Mountains. The house hadn’t changed, but it felt different. Tom reflected that maybe it was he who was different.

One of the garage doors was open, and Tom saw his father’s green Mercedes Gelaendewagen parked in the bay. The other two bays were shut. He heard his brother’s cars come crunching around the driveway, stopping by the portal. The doors slammed, and they joined Tom in front of the house.

That was when a troubled feeling began to gather in the pit of Tom’s stomach.

“What are we waiting for?” asked Philip, mounting the portal and striding up to the zaguan doors, giving the doorbell a firm series of depresses. Vernon and Tom followed.

There was nothing but silence.

Philip, always impatient, gave the bell a final stab. Tom could hear the deep chimes going off inside the house. It sounded like the first few bars of “Mame,” which, he thought, would be typical of Father’s ironic sense of humor.

“Halloo!” Philip called through cupped hands.

Still nothing.

“Do you think he’s all right?” Tom asked. The uneasy feeling was getting stronger.

“Of course he’s all right,” said Philip crossly. “This is just another one of his games.” He pounded on the great Mexican door with a closed fist, booming and rattling it.

As Tom looked about, he saw that the yard had an unkempt look, the grass unmowed, new weeds sprouting in the tulip beds.

“I’m going to take a look in a window,” Tom said.

He forced his way through a hedge of trimmed chamisa, tiptoed through a flower bed, and peered in the living room window. Something was very wrong, but it took him a moment to realize just what. The room seemed normal: same leather sofas and wing chairs, same stone fireplace, same coffee table. But above the fireplace there had been a big painting—he couldn’t remember which one—and now it was gone. He racked his brains. Was it the Braque or the Monet? Then he noticed that the Roman bronze statue of a boy that held court to the left of the fireplace was also gone. The bookshelves revealed holes where books had been taken out. The room had a disorderly look. Beyond the doorway to the hall he could see trash lying on the floor, some crumpled paper, a strip of bubble wrap, and a discarded roll of packing tape.

“What’s up, Doc?” Philip’s voice came floating around the corner.

“You better have a look.”

Philip picked his way through the bushes with his Ferragamo wingtips, a look of annoyance screwed into his face. Vernon followed.

Philip peeked through the window, and he gasped. “The Lippi,” he said. “Over the sofa. The Lippi’s gone! And the Braque over the fireplace! He’s taken it all away! He’s sold it!”

Vernon spoke. “Philip, don’t get excited. He probably just packed the stuff up. Maybe he’s moving. You’ve been telling him for years this house was too big and isolated.”

Philip’s face relaxed abruptly. “Yes. Of course.”

“That must be what this mysterious meeting’s all about,” Vernon said.

Philip nodded and mopped his brow with a silk handkerchief. “I must be tired from the flight. Vernon, you’re right. Of course they’ve been packing. But what a mess they’ve made of it. When Father sees this he’s going to have a fit.”

There was a silence as all three sons stood in the shrubbery looking at each other. Tom’s own sense of unease had reached a high pitch. If their father was moving, it was a strange way to go about it.

Philip took the pipe out of his mouth. “What say, do you think this is another one of his little challenges to us? Some little puzzle?”

“I’m going to break in,” Tom said.

“The alarm.”

“The hell with the alarm.”

Tom went around to the back of the house, his brothers following. He climbed over a wall into a small enclosed garden with a fountain. There was a bedroom window at eye level. Tom wrestled a rock out of the raised flower-bed wall. He brought it to the window, positioned himself, and hefted it to his shoulder.

“Are you really going to smash the window?” said Philip. “How sporting.”

Tom heaved the rock, and it went crashing through the window. As the tinkling of glass subsided they all waited, listening.

Silence.

“No alarm,” said Philip.

Tom shook his head. “I don’t like this.”

Philip stared through the broken window, and Tom could see a sudden thought blooming on his face. Philip cursed and in a flash had vaulted through the broken windowframe—wingtips, pipe, and all.

Vernon looked at Tom. “What’s with him?”

Without answering, Tom climbed through the window. Vernon followed.

The bedroom was like the rest of the house—stripped of all art. It was a mess: dirty footprints on the carpet, trash, strips of packing tape, bubble wrap, and packing popcorn, along with nails and the sawed butt ends of lumber. Tom went to the hall. The view disclosed more bare walls where he remembered a Picasso, another Braque, and a pair of Mayan stelae. Gone, all gone.

With a rising feeling of panic he ventured down the hall, stopping at the archway to the living room. Philip was there, standing in the middle of the room, looking about, his face absolutely white. “I told him again and again this would happen. He was so bloody careless, keeping all this stuff here. So damn bloody careless.”

“What?” Vernon cried, alarmed. “What is it, Philip? What’s happened?”

Philip said, his agonized voice barely above a whisper, “We’ve been robbed!”

2

Detective Lieutenant Hutch Barnaby of the Santa Fe Police Department placed a hand on his bony chest and kicked back in his chair. He raised a fresh cup of Starbucks to his lips, the tenth one of the day. The aroma of the bitter roast filled his hooked nose as he looked out the window to the lone cottonwood tree. A beautiful spring day in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States of America, he thought, as he folded his long limbs deeper into the chair. April 15. The Ides of April. Tax Return Day. Everyone was home counting their money, sobered up by thoughts of mortality and penury. Even the criminals took the day off.

He sipped the coffee with a huge feeling of contentment. Except for the faint ringing of a phone in the outer office, life was good.

He heard, at the edges of consciousness, the competent voice of Doreen answering the phone. Her crisp vowels floated in through the open door: “Hold on, excuse me, could you speak a little slower? I’ll get you the sergeant—”

Barnaby drowned out the conversation with a noisy sip of coffee and extended his foot to his office door, giving it a little nudge shut. Blessed silence returned. He waited. And then it came: the knock.

Damn that phone call.

Barnaby placed his coffee on the desk and rose slightly from his slouched position. “Yes?”

Sergeant Harry Fenton opened the door, a keen look on his face.Fenton was never one to like a slow day. The look was enough to tell Barnaby that something big had just come down.

“Hutch?”

“Hmmm?”

Fenton went on, breathlessly. “The Broadbent place was robbed. I got one of the sons on the phone now.”

Hutch Barnaby didn’t move a muscle. “Robbed of what?”

“Everything.”Fenton’s black eyes glittered with relish.

Barnaby sipped his coffee, sipped again, and then lowered his chair to the floor with a small clunk.Damn.

As Barnaby and Fenton drove out the Old Santa Fe Trail, Fenton talked about the robbery. The collection, he’d heard, was worth half a billion. If the truth were anything close to that, Fenton said, it would be front-page-New-York-Times. He, Fenton, on the front page of theTimes. Can you imagine that?

Barnaby could not imagine it. But he said nothing. He was used to Fenton’s enthusiasms. He stopped at the end of the winding driveway that led up to the Broadbent aerie. Fenton climbed out the other side, his face shining with anticipation, his head forward, his huge hatchet nose leading the way. As they walked up the road, Hutch scanned the ground. He could see the blurred tracks of a semi, coming and going. They had come in bold as brass. So either Broadbent was away or they had killed him—more likely the latter. They’d probably find Broadbent’s stiff in the house.

The road went around a corner and leveled out, and a pair of open gates came into view, guarding a sprawling adobe mansion set among a vast lawn dotted with cottonwoods. He paused to examine the gate. It was a mechanical gate with two motors. It didn’t show any signs of having been forced, but the electrical box was open, and inside he could see a key. He knelt and examined it. The key was in a lock, which had been turned to deactivate the gate.

He turned to Fenton. “What do you make of that?”

“Drove a semi up here, had a key to the gate—these guys were professional. We’re probably going to find Broadbent’s cadaver in the house, you know.”

“That’s why I like you, Fenton. You’re my second brain.”

He heard a shout and glanced up to see three men crossing the lawn, coming toward him. The kids, walking right across the lawn.

Barnaby rose in a fury. “Jesus Christ! Don’t you know this is a crime scene!”

The others halted, but the lead character, a tall man in a suit, kept coming. “And who might you be?” His voice was cool, supercilious.

“I’m Detective Lieutenant Hutchinson Barnaby,” he said, “and Sergeant Harry Fenton. Santa Fe Police Department.”

Fenton flashed them a quick smile that did little more than bare his teeth.

“You the sons?”

“We are,” said the suit.

Fenton gave them another feral twitch of his lips.

Barnaby took a moment to look them over as potential suspects. The hippie in hemp had an honest, open face; maybe not the brightest bulb in the store but no robber. The one in cowboy boots had real horseshit on the boots, Barnaby noted with respect. And then there was the guy in the suit, who looked like he was from New York. As far as Hutch Barnaby was concerned anyone from New York was a potential murderer. Even the grandmothers. He scanned them again: Three more different brothers could not be imagined. Odd how that could happen in a single family.

“This is a crime scene, so I’m going to have to ask you gentlemen to leave the premises. Go out through the gate and go stand under a tree or something and wait for me. I’ll be out in about twenty minutes to talk to you. Okay? Please don’t wander around, don’t touch anything, and don’t talk to each other about the crime or what you’ve observed.”

He turned, and then as an afterthought turned back. “Thewhole collection is missing?”

“That’s what I said on the phone,” said the suit.

“How much—ballpark—was it worth?”

“About five hundred million.”

Barnaby touched the rim of his hat and glanced at Fenton. The look of naked pleasure on Fenton’s face was enough to scare a pimp.

As Barnaby walked toward the house he considered that he had better be careful—there was going to be a lot of second-guessing on this one. The Feds, Interpol, God knows who else would be involved. He figured a quick look around before the crime-lab people arrived would be in order. He hooked his thumbs into his belt and gazed at the house. He wondered if the collection had been insured. That would bear some looking into. If so, maybe Maxwell Broadbent wasn’t quite so dead after all. Maybe Maxwell Broadbent was sipping margaritas with some piece of ass on a beach in Phuket.

“I wonder if Broadbent was insured?” asked Fenton.

Hutch grinned at his partner, then looked back at the place. He looked at the broken window, the confusion of footsteps on the gravel, the trampled shrubbery. The fresh tracks were the sons’, but there were a lot of older traces here as well. He could see where the moving van had parked, where it had laboriously backed around. It looked as if a week or two had passed since the robbery.

The important thing was to find the body—if there was one. He stepped inside the house. He looked around at the packing tape, bubble wrap, nails, discarded pieces of wood. There was sawdust on the rug and faint depressions. They had actually set up a table saw. It had been an exceptionally competent piece of work. Noisy, too. These people not only knew what they were doing, but they had taken the time to do it right. He sniffed the air. No sweet-and-sour-pork smell of a stiff.

Inside, the robbery felt just as old as it did outside. A week, maybe even two. He bent down and sniffed the end of a cut piece of lumber lying on the floor. It lacked that just-cut fresh-wood smell. He picked up a piece of grass that had been tracked into the house and crumbled it between his fingers—dry. Clots of mud tracked in by a lugged boot were also thoroughly dry. Barnaby thought back: Last rainfall was two weeks ago today. That’s when it had happened; within twenty-four hours of the rain, when the ground was still muddy.

He wandered down the huge vaulted central hall. There were pedestals with bronze labels where statues had once stood. There were faint rectangles with hooks on the plastered walls where paintings had once been. There were straw rings and iron stands where antique pots had once sat, and empty shelves with dust holes where treasures had once stood. There were dark slots on the bookshelves where books had been removed.

He reached the bedroom door and looked at the parade of dirty footprints coming and going. More dried mud. Christ, there must’ve been half a dozen of them. This was a big moving job, and it must have taken a day at least, maybe two.

A machine sat inside the bedroom. Barnaby recognized it as a foam-in-place machine, of the kind you see at UPS. In another room, he found a shrink-wrapping machine for doing the really big stuff. He found stacks of lumber, rolls of felt, metal strapping tape, bolts and wing nuts, and a couple of skill saws. Couple of thousand dollars’ worth of abandoned equipment. They hadn’t bothered taking anything else; in the living room they’d left a ten-thousand-dollar television, along with a VCR, DVD, and two computers. He thought of his own crappy TV and VCR and the payments he was still making, while his wife and her new boyfriend were no doubt watching porno flicks on them every night.

He carefully stepped over a videotape cassette lying on the floor. Fenton said, “Lay you three to five the guy’s dead, two to five it’s an insurance scam.”

“You take all the fun out of life, Fenton.”

Someone must have seen the activity up here. The house, sitting on its mountaintop, was visible to all of Santa Fe. If he himself had bothered to look out the window of his double-wide in the valley two weeks ago he might have seen the robbery, the house ablaze all night long, the truck headlights winding down the hill. Again, he marveled at the moxie of the robbers. What made them so sure of pulling it off? It was too casual by half.

He glanced at his watch. He didn’t have much time before the crime-scene van arrived.

He moved swiftly and methodically through the rooms, looking but taking no notes. Notes, he had learned, always came back to bite you. Every room had been hit. The job had gone to completion. In one room a bunch of boxes had been unpacked and paper lay scattered on the floor. He picked up a piece; some kind of bill of lading, dated a month ago, for twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of French pots and pans, German and Japanese knives. Was the guy starting a restaurant?

In the bedroom, in the back of a walk-in closet, he found a huge steel door, partway open.

“Fort Knox,” said Fenton.

Barnaby nodded. With a house full of million-dollar paintings, it kind of made him wonder what was so valuable that it had to go into a vault.

Without touching the door he slipped inside. The vault was empty save some scattered trash on the floor and a bunch of wooden map cases. Slipping out his handkerchief, he used it to open a drawer. The velvet bore indentations where objects had once nested. He slid it shut and turned to the door itself, giving the lock a quick examination. There were no signs of a forced entry. None of the locked cases he’d seen in the rooms had been forced, either.

“The perps had all the codes and keys,” said Fenton.

Barnaby nodded. This was no robbery.

He went outside and made a quick circle of the gardens. They looked neglected. Weeds were coming up. Nothing had been tended to. The grass hadn’t been cut in a couple of weeks. The whole place had a seedy air about it. The neglect, it seemed to him, stretched back even more than the two weeks since the so-called robbery. It looked like the place had been going downhill for a month or two.

If insurance was involved, so were the sons. Maybe.

3

He found them standing in the shade of the piñon tree, arms crossed, silent and glum. As Barnaby approached, the guy in the suit asked, “Did you find anything?”

“Like what?”

The man scowled. “Do you have any idea what’s been stolen here? We’re talking hundreds of millions. Good God, how could anyone expect to get away with this? Some of these areworld-famous works of art. There’s a Filippo Lippi worth forty million dollars alone. They’re probably on their way to the Middle East or Japan. You’ve got to call the FBI, contact Interpol, shut down the airports—”

He paused to draw in air.

“Lieutenant Barnaby has some questions,” said Fenton, taking up the role he played so well, his voice curiously high and soft, with an undercurrent of menace. “State your names, please.”

The one with the cowboy boots stepped forward. “I’m Tom Broadbent, and these are my brothers, Vernon and Philip.”

“Look, officer,” the one named Philip said, “these artworks are obviously headed for some sheik’s bedroom. They could never hope to sell these paintings on the open market—they’re too well known. No offense, but Ireally don’t think the Santa Fe Police Department is equipped to handle this.”

Barnaby flipped open his notebook and checked his watch. He stillhad almost thirty minutes before the crime-lab truck arrived from Albuquerque.

“May I ask a few questions, Philip? Okay if I use first names here?”

“Fine, fine, just get on with it.”

“Ages?”

“I’m thirty-three,” Tom said.

“Thirty-five,” said Vernon.

“Thirty-seven,” said Philip.

“Tell me, how is it that all three of you just happened to be here at once?” He directed his gaze toward the New Age type, Vernon, the one who looked like the least competent liar.

“Our father sent us a letter.”

“What about?”

“Well ...” Vernon glanced at his brothers nervously. “He didn’t say.”

“Any guesses?”

“Not really.”

Barnaby switched his gaze. “Philip?”

“I haven’t the slightest.”

He swiveled his gaze to the other one, Tom. He found he liked Tom’s face. It was a no-bullshit face. “So Tom, you want to help me out here?”

“I think it was to talk to us about our inheritance.”

“Inheritance? How old was your father?”

“Sixty ...”

Fenton leaned forward to interrupt, his voice harsh. “Was hesick?”

“Yes.”

“Howsick?”

“He was dying of cancer,” said Tom coldly.

“I’m sorry,” said Barnaby, putting a restraining arm on Fenton as if to stop him from asking more tactless questions. “Any of you got your copy of the letter?”

All three produced the same letter, handwritten, on ivory laid paper. Interesting, Barnaby thought, that each one had his copy. Said something about the importance they attached to this meeting. Barnaby took one and read:

Dear Tom,

I want you to come to my house in Santa Fe, on April 15, at exactly 1:00P.M., regarding a very important matter affecting your future. I’ve asked Philip and Vernon as well. I have enclosed funds to pay for your travel. Please be on time: one o’clock sharp. Do your old man this one last courtesy.

Father

“Any chance of a recovery from the cancer, or was he a goner?” Fenton asked.

Philip stared at Fenton and then turned to Barnaby. “Who is this man?”

Barnaby shot a warning glance at Fenton, who often got out of hand. “We’re all on the same side here, trying to solve this crime.”

“As I understand it” Philip said grudgingly, “there was no chance of recovery. Our father had gone through radiation treatments and chemotherapy, but the cancer had metastasized and there was no getting rid of it. He declined further treatment.”

“I’m sorry,” said Barnaby, trying unsuccessfully to summon up a modicum of sympathy. “Getting back to this letter, it says something here about funds. How much money came with it?”

“Twelve hundred dollars in cash,” said Tom.

“Cash?In what form?”

“Twelve one-hundred-dollar bills. Sending cash like that was typical of Father.”

Fenton interrupted again. “Howlong did he have to live?” He asked this question directly at Philip, thrusting his head forward. Fenton’s was an ugly head, very narrow and sharp, with thick eyebrow ridges, deep-set eyes, a huge nose with each nostril projecting a thicket of black nosehairs, crooked brown teeth, and a receding chin. He had olive skin; despite the Anglo name, Fenton was a Hispano from the town of Truchas, way back up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He was scary, if you didn’t know he was the kindliest man alive.

“About six months.”

“So he invited you here for what? To do a little eeny meeny meiny moe with his stuff?”

Fenton could be awful when he wanted. But the man got results.

Philip said icily, “That’s a charming way of putting it. I suppose that’s possible.”

Barnaby broke in smoothly. “But with a collection like this, Philip, wouldn’t he have made arrangements to leave it to a museum?”

“Maxwell Broadbentloathed museums.”

“Why?”

“Museums had taken the lead in criticizing our father’s somewhat unorthodox collecting practices.”

“Which were?”

“Buying artwork of dubious provenance, dealing with tomb robbers and looters, smuggling antiquities across borders. He even robbed tombs himself. I can appreciate his antipathy. Museums are bastions of hypocrisy, greed, and cupidity. They criticize in everyone else the very methods they themselves employed to get their collections.”

“What about leaving the collection to a university?”

“He hated academics. Tweedy-dums and tweedy-dees, he called them. The academics, especially the archaeologists, accused Maxwell Broadbent of looting temples in Central America. I’m not spilling any family secrets here: It’s a well-known story. You can pick up just about any copy ofArchaeology magazine and read about how our father was their version of the devil incarnate.”

“Was he planning to sell the collection?” Barnaby pushed on.

Philip’s lip curled with contempt. “Sell? My father had to deal with auction houses and art dealers all his life. He would die the death of a thousand cuts before he’d consign them one mediocre print to sell.”

“So he planned to leave it all to you three?”

There was an awkward silence. “That,” said Philip finally, “was the assumption.”

Fenton broke in. “Church? Wife? Girlfriend?”

Philip removed the pipe between his teeth and, in a perfect imitation of Fenton’s clipped style, answered him: “Atheist. Divorced. Misogynist.”

The other two brothers broke out laughing. Hutch Barnaby evenfound himself enjoying Fenton’s discomfort. It was so rare that anyone got the better of him during an interrogation. This Philip character, despite his pretensions, was tough. But there was something sad in the long, intelligent face, something lost.

Barnaby held out the bill of lading for the shipment of cookware. “Any idea what this is all about or where the stuff might have gone?”

They examined it, shook their heads, and handed it back. “He didn’t even like to cook,” said Tom.

Barnaby shoved the document into his pocket. “Tell me about your father. Looks, personality, character, business dealings, that sort of thing.”

It was Tom who spoke again. “He’s ... one of a kind.”

“How so?”

“He’s a physical giant of a man, six foot five, fit, handsome, broad shoulders, not a trace of flab, white hair and white beard, solid as a lion with a roaring voice to match. People say he looks like Hemingway.”

“Personality?”

“He’s the kind of man who’s never wrong, who rides roughshod over everyone and everything to get what he wants. He lives by his own rules in life. He never graduated high school, but he knows more about art and archaeology than most Ph.D’s. Collecting is his religion. He despises other people’s religious beliefs, and that’s one reason why he takes so much pleasure in buying and selling things stolen from tombs—and robbing tombs himself.”

“Tell me more about this tomb robbing.”

Philip spoke this time, “Maxwell Broadbent was born into a working-class family. He went to Central America when he was young and disappeared into the jungle for two years. He made a big discovery, robbed some Mayan temple, and smuggled the stuff back. That’s how he got started. He was a dealer in questionable art and antiquities—everything from Greek and Roman statues that had been spirited out of Europe to Khmer reliefs chiseled out of Cambodian funerary temples to Renaissance paintings stolen in Italy during the war. He dealt not to make money but to finance his own collecting.”

“Interesting.”

“Maxwell’s methods,” Philip said, “were really the only way a person nowadays could acquire truly great art. There probably wasn’t a single piece in his collection that was clean.”

Vernon spoke: “He once robbed a tomb that had a curse on it. He quoted it at cocktail parties.”

“A curse? What did it say?”

“Something likeHe who disturbs these hones shall he skinned alive and fed to diseased hyenas. And then a herd of asses will copulate with his mother. Or words to that effect.”

Fenton let a laugh escape.

Barnaby shot him a cautionary glance. He directed his next question to Philip, now that he had the man talking. Funny how people liked to complain about their parents. “What made him tick?”

Philip frowned, his broad brow furrowing. “It was like this. Maxwell Broadbent loved his LippiMadonna more than he loved any real woman. He loved his Bronzino portrait of little Bia de’ Medici more than he loved any of his real children. He loved his two Braques, his Monet, and his Mayan jade skulls more than the real people in his life. He worshiped his collection of thirteenth-century French reliquaries containing the alleged bones of saints more than he worshiped any real saint. His collections were his lovers, his children, and his religion. That’s what made him tick: beautiful things.”

“None of that’s true,” said Vernon. “He loved us.”

Philip gave a little snort of derision.

“You say he was divorced from your mother?”

“You mean ourmothers? He was divorced from two of them, widowed by the other. There were also two other wives he didn’t breed with and any number of girlfriends.”

Any fights over alimony?” Fenton asked.

“Naturally,” said Philip. “Alimony, palimony, it never ended.”

“But he raised you kids himself?”

Philip paused, then said, “In his own unique way, yes.”

The words hung in the air. Barnaby wondered just what kind of father he might have been. Better stick to the main thread: He was running out of time. The SOC boys would be here any moment, and then he’d be lucky ever to set foot on the crime scene again.

“Any woman in his life now?”

“Only for purposes of mild physical activity in the evening,” said Philip. “She will get nothing, I assure you.”

Tom broke in. “Do you think our father is okay?”

“To be honest, I haven’t seen any evidence of a murder here. We didn’t find a body in the house.”

“Could they have kidnapped him?”

Barnaby shook his head. “Not likely. Why deal with a hostage?” He glanced at his watch. Five, maybe seven minutes left. Time to ask the question. “Insured?” He made it sound as casual as possible.

A dark look passed over Philip’s face. “No.”

Even Barnaby couldn’t hide his surprise.“No?”

“Last year I tried to arrange for insurance. No one would cover the collection as long as it was kept in this house with this security environment. You can see for yourself how vulnerable the place is.”

“Why didn’t your father upgrade his security?”

“Our father was a very difficult man. No one could tell him what to do. He had a lot of guns in the house. I guess he thought he could fight ’em off, Wild West style.”

Barnaby shuffled through his notes and checked his watch again. He was disturbed. The pieces were not fitting together. He was sure it wasn’t a simple robbery, but without insurance, why rob yourself? Then there was the coincidence of the letter to the sons, calling them in for this meeting at just this moment. He recalled the letter ...a very important matter affecting your future ...very disappointed if you do not come ... There was something suggestive about the wording.

“What was in the vault?”

“Don’t tell me they got into the vault, too!” Philip dabbed at his sweating face with a trembling hand. His suit had wilted, and the devastation on his face looked genuine.

“Yes.”

“Oh, God. It held gemstones, jewelry, South and Central American gold, rare coins and stamps, all extremely valuable.”

“The burglars seem to have had the combination to the vault as well as keys to everything. Any idea how?”

“No.”

“Did your father have anyone he trusted—a lawyer, for example—who might have kept a second set of keys or had the combination to the vault?”

“He trusted nobody.”

This was an important point. Barnaby looked at Vernon and Tom. “You agree?”

They both nodded.

“Did he have a maid?”

“He had a woman who came daily.”

“Gardener?”

“A full-time man.”

“Any others?”

“He employed a full-time cook and a nurse who looked in three days a week.”

Fenton now interrupted, leaning forward and smiling in that feral way of his. “Mind if I ask you a question, Philip?”

“If you must.”

“How come you’re talking about your father in the past tense? You know something we don’t?”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Philip exploded. “Who will rid me of this Sherlock Holmesmanqué?”

“Fenton?” murmured Barnaby, casting him a warning glance.

Fenton looked over and saw Barnaby’s look, and his face fell. “Sorry.”

Barnaby asked, “Where are they now?”

“Where are who?”

“Maid, gardener, cook. This robbery took place two weeks ago. Somebody dismissed the help.”

Tom said, “The robbery occurredtwo weeks ago?”

“That’s right.”

“But I only got my letter by Federal Express three days ago.”

This was interesting. “Did any of you notice the sender’s address?”

“It was some kind of drop-shipping place, like Mail Boxes Etc.,” said Tom.

Barnaby thought for a moment. “I have to tell you,” he said, “that this so-called robbery has insurance fraud written all over it.”

“I already explained to you the collection wasn’t insured,” said Philip.

“You explained it, but I don’t believe it.”

“Iknow the art insurance market, Lieutenant—I’m an art historian. This collection was worth about half a billion dollars, and it was just sitting in a house in the country protected by an off-the-shelf security system. Father didn’t even have a dog. I’m telling you,the collection wasn’t insurable .”

Barnaby looked at Philip for a long time, and then he looked at the other two brothers.

Philip let out a hiss of air and looked at his watch. “Lieutenant, don’t you think this case is a little big for the Santa Fe Police Department?”

If it wasn’t insurance fraud, then what was it? This was no damn robbery. A crazy idea began to form, still vague. A truly nutty idea. But it was starting to take shape almost against his will, assembling itself into something like a theory. He glanced at Fenton. Fenton didn’t see it. For all his gifts, Fenton lacked a sense of humor.

Barnaby then remembered the big-screen television, the VCR, and the videotape lying on the floor. No, not lying:placed on the floor, next to the remote. What was the hand-lettered title?WATCH ME.

That was it. Like water freezing, it all locked into place. He knew exactly what had happened. Barnaby cleared his throat. “Come with me. The three sons followed him back into the house, into the living room.

“Have a seat.”

“What’s this all about?” Philip was getting agitated. Even Fenton was looking at Barnaby quizzically.

Barnaby picked up the tape and the remote. “We’re going to watch a video.” He flicked on the television set and slid the tape into the VCR.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Philip asked, refusing to sit, his face flushed. The other two stood nearby, confused.

“You’re blocking the screen,” said Barnaby, settling himself on the sofa. “Have a seat.”

“This is outrageous—”

A sudden burst of sound from the video silenced Philip, and then the face of Maxwell Broadbent, larger than life, materialized on the screen. All three sat down.

His voice, deep and booming, reverberated in the empty room.

“Greetings from the dead.”

4

Tom Broadbent stared at the life-size image of his father slowly coming into focus on the screen. The camera gradually panned back, revealing Maxwell Broadbent seated at the giant desk in his study, holding a few sheets of paper in his large hands. The room had not yet been stripped; the Lippi painting of the Madonna was still on the wall behind him, the bookshelves were still filled with books, and the other paintings and statues were all in their places. Tom shivered: Even his father’s electronic image intimidated him.

After the greeting his father paused, cleared his throat, and focused his intense blue eyes on the camera. The sheets shook slightly in his hands. He seemed to be laboring under a strong emotion.

Maxwell Broadbent’s eyes dropped back to the papers, and he began to read:

Dear Philip, Vernon, and Tom,

The long and short of it is this: I’ve taken my wealth with me to the grave. I’ve sealed myself and my collection in a tomb. This tomb is hidden somewhere in the world, in a place that only I know of.

He paused, cleared his throat again, looked up briefly with a flash of blue, looked down, and continued reading. His voice took on that slightly pedantic tone that Tom remembered so well from the dinner table.

For more than a hundred thousand years, human beings have buried themselves with their most valuable possessions. Burying the dead with treasure has a venerable history, starting with the Neanderthals and running through the ancient Egyptians and on down almost to the present day. People buried themselves with their gold, silver, art, books, medicine, furniture, food, slaves, horses, and sometimes even their concubines and wives—anything they thought might he useful in the afterlife. It’s only in the last century or two that human beings stopped interring their remains with grave goods, thus breaking a long tradition.

It is a tradition I am glad to revive.

The fact is, almost everything we know of the past comes to us through grave goods. Some have called me a tomb robber. Not so. I’m not a robber, I’m a recycler. I made my fortune on the wealth that foolish people thought they were taking with them to the afterworld. I’ve decided to do just what they did and bury myself with all my worldly goods. The only difference between me and them is that I’m no fool. I know there’s no afterworld where I can enjoy my wealth. Unlike them, I die with no illusions. When you’re dead you’re dead. When you die you’re just a duffel bag of rotting meat, grease, brains, and bones—nothing more.

I’m taking my wealth to the grave for another reason entirely. A very important reason. A reason that concerns the three of you.

He paused, looked up. His hands were still shaking slightly, and the muscles in his jaw were flexing.

“Jesus Christ,” Philip whispered, half rising from his seat, his hands clenched. “I don’t believe this.”

Maxwell Broadbent raised the papers to read some more, stumbled over the words, hesitated, and then abruptly stood and tossed the papers onto the desk.Screw this, he said, shoving back the chair with a violent motion.What I’ve got to say to you is too important for a damn speech. He came around the desk with several great strides, his enormous presence filling the screen and, by extension, the room where they were sitting. He paced in front of the camera, agitated, stroking his close-cropped beard.

This isn’t easy. I don’t quite know how to explain this to you three.

He turned, strode back.

When I was your age, I had nothing. Nothing. I came to New York from Erie, Pennsylvania, with just thirty-five dollars and my father’s old suit. No family., no friends, no college degree. Nothing. Dad was a good man, but he was a bricklayer. Mom was dead. I was pretty much alone in the world.

“Notthis story again,” moaned Philip.

It was the fall of 1963. I pounded the pavement until I found a job, a shitty job, washing dishes at Mama Gina’s on East 88th and Lex. A dollar and twenty-five cents an hour.

Philip was shaking his head. Tom felt numb.

Broadbent stopped pacing, planted himself in front of the desk, and faced the camera, slightly hunched, glowering at them.I can just see you three now. Philip, you’re no doubt shaking your head sadly, Tom, you’re probably up and swearing. And Vernon, you think I’m just plain nuts. God, I can just see the three of you. I feel sorry for you, I really do. This isn’t easy.

He resumed his pacing.Gina’s wasn’t far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I went in there one day on a whim, and it changed my life. I spent my last dollar on a membership, and I began going to that museum every day. I fell in love with the place. What a revelation! I’d never seen such beauty, such —He waved his large hand.Christ, but you know all this.

“We certainly do,” said Philip dryly.

The point is, I started with nothing.Nada.I worked hard. I had a vision for my life, a goal I read everything I could get my hands on. Schliemann and the discovery of Troy, Howard Carter and King Tut’s tomb, John Lloyd Stephens and the city of Copán, the excavation of the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii. I dreamed of finding treasures like these, digging them up, owning them. I cast around: Where in the world were there lost tombs and temples still to be found? The answer was Central America. There you could still find a lost city. There was still a chance for me.

Now he paused to open a box on his desk. He withdrew a cigar, trimmed and lit it.

“Jesus Christ,” said Philip. “The old man’sincorrigible .”

Broadbent waved out the match, tossed it onto the desk, and grinned. He had beautiful teeth, and they glinted white.I’m going to die anyway, why not enjoy my last few months. Right, Philip? Still smoking that pipe? I’d give it up if I were you.

He turned and paced, trailing little puffs of blue.Anyway, I saved my money until I had enough to go to Central America. I went there not because I wanted to make money —although that was part of it, I’ll admit—but because I had a passion. And I found it. I found my lost city.

He spun, turned, paced.

That was the beginning. That got me started. I dealt in art and antiquities only as a way to finance my collecting. And look:

He paused, gesturing open-palmed to the unseen collection in the house around him.

Look. Here’s the result. One of the greatest private collections of art and antiquities in the world. These aren’t just things. Every piece in here has a story, a memory for me. How I first saw it, how I fell in love with it, how I acquired it. Each piece is part of me.

He seized a jade object on his desk and held it toward the camera.

Like this Olmec head, which I found in a tomb in Piedra Lumbre. I remember the day ... the heat, the snakes...and I remember seeing it for the first time, lying there in the dust of the tomb, where it had been for two thousand years.

Philip snorted. “The joys of theft.”

He put the piece back down.For two thousand years it had rested there —an object of such exquisite beauty it makes you want to cry. I wish I could tell you my feelings when I saw that flawless jade head just lying there in the dust. It wasn’t created to vegetate in the darkness. I rescued it and brought it back to life.

His voice cracked with emotion. He paused, cleared his throat, put the head down. Then he fumbled for the back of his chair and sat down, laying his cigar aside in the ashtray. He turned back to face the camera, leaning forward on the desk.

I’m your father. I’ve watched you three grow up. I know you better than you know yourselves.

“Not likely,” said Philip.

As I’ve watched you grow up, I’ve been dismayed to see in you a feeling of entitlement. Privilege. A rich-kid’s syndrome. A feeling that you don’t have to work too hard, study too hard, exert yourselves—because you’re the sons of Maxwell Broadbent. Because someday, without lifting a goddamn finger, you’ll be rich.

He rose again, restless with energy.Look, I know it’s mostly my fault. I’ve catered to your whims, bought you everything you wanted, sent you to all the best private schools, dragged you around Europe. I felt guilty about the divorces and all that. I wasn’t born to be a married man, I guess. But what have I done? I’ve raised three kids who, instead of living splendid lives, are waiting for their inheritance. Great Expectationsredux.

“Bullshit,” said Vernon angrily.

Philip, you’re an assistant professor of art history at a junior college on Long Island. Tom? A horse vet in Utah. And Vernon? Well, I don’t even know what you’re doing now, probably living in some ashram somewhere, giving your money to a fraudulent guru.

“Not true!” said Vernon. “Not true! Go to hell!”

Tom could say nothing. He felt a nauseous tightening somewhere in his gut.

And on top of that,the father went on,you three don’t get along. You never learned to cooperate, to be brothers. I started to think: What have I done? What have I done? What kind of father have I been? Have I taught my sons independence? Have I taught them the value of work? Have I taught them self-reliance? Have I taught them to take care of each other?

He paused and fairly shouted out,No!

After all this, after everything, the schools, Europe, the fishing and camping trips, I’ve raised three quasi-failures. Christ, it’s my fault that it ended up this way, but there it is. And then I found out I was dying, and that put me in a panic. How was I going to fix things?

He paused, turned. He was breathing hard now, and his face was flushed.

Nothing like having death poke his stinking mug into your face to make you think about things. I had to figure out what to do with my collection. I sure as hell wasn’t going to give it to a museum or some university for a bunch of tweedy-dums to gloat over. And I wasn’t going to let some scummy auction house or dealer get rich from all my hard work, break it up and disperse it to the four corners after I’d spent a lifetime assembling it. Absolutely not.

He mopped his brow, wadded up the handkerchief in a fist, and gestured at the camera with it.

I had always planned to leave it to you. But when it came down to it, I realized it would be the very worst thing I could do to you. No way was I going to hand over to you half a billion dollars that you hadn’t earned.

He went back behind the desk, eased his enormous frame into the chair, and took another cigar from a leather box.

Look at me, still smoking. Too late now.

He clipped the end, lit it. The cloud of smoke confused the automatic focus on the camera, and it went blurry, shifting back and forth, trying to find its focus. When the smoke drifted leftward out of the frame, Maxwell Broadbent’s square, handsome face leapt back into focus.

And then it came to me. It was brilliant. All my life I’d been excavating tombs and dealing in grave goods. I knew all the tricks for hiding tombs, every booby trap, everything. I suddenly realized that I, too, could take it with me. And then I could do something for you that would really be a legacy.

He paused, clasped his hands, and leaned forward.

You’re going to earn this money. I’ve arranged to bury myself and my collection in a tomb somewhere in the world. I challenge you to find me. If you do, you can rob my tomb and have it all. That’s my challenge to you, my three sons.

He inhaled, tried to smile.

I warn you: It’s going to be difficult and dangerous. Nothing in life worth doing is easy. And here’s the kicker: You’ll never succeed unless you cooperate.

He brought his massive fist down on the desk.

That’s it in a nutshell. I didn’t do much for you in life, but by God I’m going to fix that with my death.

He got up again and walked over to the camera. His arm reached out to turn it off, and then, as an afterthought, he paused, his blurry face looming gigantically on the screen:

I’ve never been much on sentiment, so I’ll just say to you, good-bye. Good-bye, Philip, Vernon, and Tom. Good-bye and good luck. I love you.

The screen went dead.

5

Tom remained on the sofa, momentarily unable to move. Hutch Barnaby was the first to react. He rose and coughed delicately by way of breaking the shocked silence.

“Fenton? Seems we’re not needed here any longer.”

Fenton nodded, rising awkwardly, actually blushing.

Barnaby turned to the brothers and politely touched the brim of his cap. “As you can see, this isn’t a police matter. We’ll leave you to, ah, sort things out on your own.” They began edging toward the door archway that led to the hall. They couldn’t wait to get away.

Philip rose. “Officer Barnaby?” His voice was half choked.

“Yes?”

“I trust you won’t mention this to anybody. It wouldn’t be helpful If ... if the whole world started looking for the tomb.”

“Good point. No reason to mention it to anyone. No reason at all. I’ll call off the SOC boys.” He backed out, and disappeared. A moment later they could hear the sound of the great front door of the house clanking shut.

The three brothers remained.

“The son of a bitch,” Philip said quietly. “I can’t believe it. The son of a bitch.”

Tom glanced at his brother’s white face. He knew that he’d been living rather well on his assistant professor’s salary. He needed the money. And no doubt he had already been spending it.

Vernon said, “What now?”

The word hung in the silence.

“I can’t believe the old bastard,” Philip said. “Taking a dozen old master paintings to the grave like that, not to mention all that priceless Mayan jade and gold. I’m floored.” He slipped a silk handkerchief out of his vest pocket and dabbed his brow. “He had noright .”

“So what do we do?” Vernon repeated.

Philip stared at him. “We go find the tomb, of course.”

“How?”

“A man can’t bury himself with half a billion dollars of art without help. We find out who helped him.”

“I don’t believe it,” Tom said. “He never trusted anybody in his life.”

“He couldn’t have done it on his own.”. :

“It’s so ...him ,” said Philip suddenly.

“Maybe he left clues.” Vernon strode over to the breakfront drawers, jerked one open, and rummaged through it, swearing. He pulled out a second, and a third, becoming so agitated that the drawer came out all the way, spilling its contents to the floor—playing cards, Parcheesi, chess, Chinese checkers. Tom remembered them all—the old games of their childhood, now yellowed and shabby with age. He felt a cold knot in his chest; this is what it had come to. Vernon cursed and gave the scattered mess a kick, sending pieces all over the room.

“Vernon, trashing the house is pointless.”

Vernon, ignoring him, kept opening drawers, sweeping their contents onto the floor, moving on.

Philip slipped his pipe out of his trouser pocket and lit it with a shaking hand. “You’re wasting your time. I say we go talk to Marcus Hauser. He’s the key.”

Vernon paused. “Hauser? Father hasn’t been in contact with him in forty years.”

“He’s the only one who really knew Father. They spent two years together in Central America. If anyone knows where Father went, it’s him.”

“Fatherhates Hauser.”

“I expect they had a reconciliation, with Father sick and all.” Philip flicked open a gold lighter and sucked the flame into the bowl of his pipe with a gurgle.

Vernon moved into the den. Tom could hear cupboards being opened and shut, books being pulled from shelves, things crashing to the floor.

“I’m telling you, Hauser’s involved. We’ve got to move fast. I’ve got debts—I’ve got obligations.”

Vernon came back from the den carrying a boxful of papers, which he slammed down on the coffee table. “It figures you’d already be spending your inheritance.”

Philip turned to him coolly. “Who was it took twenty grand from Father just last year?”

“That was a loan.” Vernon started shuffling through the papers, rifling folders, scattering them on the floor. Tom saw their old elementary school report cards spilling from a file. It surprised him that their father had bothered to save those—particularly when he had been none too pleased with their grades to begin with.

“Have you paid it back yet?” Philip asked.

“I will.”

“Of course you will,” said Philip sarcastically.

Vernon colored. “What about the forty thousand that Father spent on sending you to graduate school? Have you paid that back yet?”

“That was a gift. He paid for Tom’s veterinary school, too—right, Tom? And ifyou had gone to graduate school he would have paid for yours. Instead, you went and lived with that swami woo-woo in India.”

There was a tense silence.

“Go to hell,” said Vernon.

Tom stared from one brother to the other. It was happening, just as it had happened a thousand times before. Usually he stepped in and tried to be peacemaker. Just as often it did no good.

“The hell with you, too,” Philip said. He put the pipe back between his teeth with a click and turned on his heel.

“Wait!” Vernon called, but it was too late. When Philip got mad, he left, and he was doing it again. The great door boomed shut with a dying rattle.

“For God’s sake, Vernon, can’t you pick a better time to fight?”

“Screw him. He started it, didn’t he?”

Tom couldn’t even remember who started it.

Back in the office, Hutch Barnaby sat in his chair, a fresh cup of coffee resting on his paunch, looking out the window. Fenton sat in the other chair, with his own cup, staring gloomily at the floor.

“Fenton, you gotta stop thinking about it. These things happen.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“I know, it’s some crazy shit, the guy burying himself with half a billion dollars. Don’t worry. Someday someone in this town’ll commit aNew York Times front-page crime, and your name’ll be there. This just didn’t pan out.”

Fenton nursed his coffee—and his disappointment.

“I knew it, Fenton, even before I saw that video. I figured it out. When I realized it wasn’t an insurance scam, it was like a lightbulb went on in my head. Hey, it would make a great movie, don’t you think? Rich guy takes his shit with him.”

Fenton said nothing.

“How do you think the old guy did it? Think about it. He needed help. That was a lot of stuff. You can’t move a few tons of artwork around the world without someone noticing.”

Fenton sipped.

Barnaby glanced up at the clock and then down at the papers strewn about his desk. “Two hours to lunch. How come nothing interesting ever happens in this city? Look at this. Drugs and more drugs. Why don’t these kids rob a bank for a change?”

Fenton drained the cup. “It’s out there.”

Silence.

“What are you trying to say? What do you mean by that comment?It’s out there. So what? Lot of things areout there .”

Fenton crushed the cup.

“You aren’t suggesting something, are you?”

Fenton dropped the cup in the trash can.

“You said,It’s out there. I want to know what you meant by that.”

“We go get it.”

“And?”

“We keep it.”

Barnaby laughed. “Fenton, I’m amazed at you. In case you didn’t notice, we’relaw enforcement officers. Did that little fact slip your mind? We’re supposed to behonest .”

“Yeah,” said Fenton.:.

“Right,” said Barnaby after a moment. “Honesty. If you don’t have that, Fenton, then what do you have?”

“Half a billion dollars,” said Fenton.

6

The building wasn’t an old brownstone as it would have been in a Bogart film but a glass and steel monstrosity that teetered into the sky above West Fifty-seventh Street, an ugly eighties skyscraper. At least, thought Philip, the rent would be high. And if the rent was high, it meant Marcus Aurelius Hauser was a successful private investigator.

Strolling into the lobby was like walking into a giant polished granite cube. The place reeked of cleaning fluids. A stand of sickly bamboo grew in one corner. An elevator whisked him up to the thirtieth floor, and he was soon at the cherry doors leading into the offices of Marcus Hauser, PI.

Philip paused inside the doorway. Whatever he had imagined as the office of a private investigator, this colorless postmodern interior of gray slate, industrial carpeting, and black polished granite was not it. How could anyone work in such a sterile space? The room appeared empty.

“Yeah?” came a voice from behind a half-moon wall of glass bricks.

Philip came around and found himself staring at the back of a man sitting at a vast kidney-shaped desk, which instead of facing the door to his office faced in the opposite direction toward a wall of windows that looked west over the dull zinc sheen of the Hudson River. Without turning, the man gestured toward an armchair. Philip crossed the floor, seated himself, and settled in to study Marcus Hauser: ex-Vietnam Green Beret; ex-tomb robber; ex-lieutenant, BATF, Manhattan field office.

In his father’s photo albums he had seen pictures of Hauser as a young man, blurry and indistinct, dressed in jungle khakis, packing some kind of firearm on his hip. He was always grinning. Philip felt a little disconcerted finally seeing him in the flesh. He looked even smaller than Philip had imagined him, and he was overdressed in a brown suit with collar pin, vest, gold chain, and watch fob. A working-class man aping the gentry. There was the scent of cologne about him, and what little hair he had was excessively pomaded and curled, each strand individually arranged to provide maximal coverage to his bald spot. Gold rings winked on no fewer than four of his fingers. His hands had been manicured, his nails cleaned and polished, his nose carefully trimmed of hair. Even his bald pate, gleaming under the screen of hairs that covered it, gave every appearance of having been waxed and buffed. Philip found himself wondering if this was the same Marcus Hauser who had tramped through the jungles with his father in search of lost cities and ancient tombs. Perhaps there had been some mistake.

He cleared his throat. “Mr. Hauser?”

“Marcus,” came the rapid reply, like a cracking good tennis volley. His voice was equally disconcerting: high, nasal, working-class accent. His eyes, however, were as green and cool as a crocodile’s.

Philip felt flustered. He recrossed his legs and, without asking permission, took out his pipe and began to fill it. At this, Hauser smiled, slid open his desk drawer, turned out a humidor, and removed an enormous Churchill. “So glad you smoke,” he said, rolling the cigar between his perfect fingers, sliding a gold monogrammed clipper out of his pocket, and giving the end a snip. “We mustn’t let the barbarians take over.” When he had lit up, he leaned back in his chair and, looking at him through a skein of smoke, said, “What can I do for the son of my old partner, Maxwell Broadbent?”

“May we speak in confidentiality?”

“Naturally.”

“Six months ago my father was diagnosed with cancer.” Philip paused, observing Hauser’s face to see if he had already known. But Hauser’s face was as opaque as his mahogany desk. “Lung cancer,” Philip continued. “They operated, and he got the usual chemo and radiation. He gave up the stogies and went into remission. For a while it seemed like he had it licked, and then it came roaring back. He started on the chemotherapy again, but he hated it. One day he ripped out the TVs, decked a male nurse, and left. He picked up a box of Cuba Libres on the way home and never went back. They had given him six months to live, and that was three months ago.”

Hauser listened, puffing on his cigar.

Philip paused. “Has he been in touch with you?”

Hauser shook his head, took another puff. “Not for forty years.”

“Sometime last month,” Philip said, “Maxwell Broadbent disappeared, along with his collection. He left us a video.”

Hauser raised his eyebrows.

“It was a last will and testament of sorts. In it, he said he was taking it with him into the grave.”

“He didwhat?” Hauser leaned forward, his face suddenly interested. The mask had fallen for a moment: He was genuinely astonished.

“He took it with him. Everything. Money, artwork, his collection. Just like an Egyptian pharaoh. He buried himself in a tomb somewhere in the world and then issued us a challenge: If we find the tomb, we can rob it. That, you see, is his idea of making us earn our inheritance.”

Hauser leaned back and laughed long and loud. When he finally recovered, he took a couple of lazy puffs on his cigar, then reached out and tapped a two-inch ash off. “Only Max could come up with a scheme like that.”

“So you don’t know anything about this?” Philip asked.

“Nothing.” Hauser seemed to be telling the truth.

“You’re a private investigator,” said Philip.

Hauser shifted the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

“You grew up with Max. You spent a year with him in the jungle. You know him and how he worked better than anyone. I wondered if you’d be willing, as a PI, to help me find his tomb.”

Hauser eased a stream of blue smoke out of his mouth.

Philip added, “It doesn’t seem to me that this would be a difficult assignment. An art collection like that wouldn’t travel inconspicuously.”

“It would in the hold of Max’s Gulfstream IV.”

“I doubt he buried himself in his plane.”

“The Vikings buried themselves in their ships. Maybe Max packed his treasure in an airtight, pressure-resistant container and ditched his plane in the ocean over the mid-Pacific abyssal plain, where it sank in two miles of water.” He spread his hands and smiled.

Philip managed to say, “No.” He dabbed his brow, trying to suppress the image of the Lippi, two miles deep, wedged in the abyssal muck. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“I’m not saying that’s what he did. I’m just showing you what ten seconds of thinking can turn up. Are you working with your brothers?”

“Half-brothers. No. I’ve decided to find this tomb on my own.”

“What are their plans?”

“I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. I’ll share what I find with them, of course.”

“Tell me about them.”

“Tom’s probably the one to watch out for. He’s the youngest. When we were children, he was the wild one. He’s the kid who would be the first to jump off the cliff into the water, the first to throw the rock at the wasp’s nest. Got kicked out of a couple of schools but cleaned up his act in college and has been on the straight and narrow ever since.”

“And the other one, Vernon?”

“Right now he’s in some pseudo-Buddhist cult run by an ex-philosophy professor from Berkeley. He was always the lost one. He’s tried it all: drugs, cults, gurus, encounter groups. When he was a kid he’d bring home crippled cats, doggies that had been run over by cars, little birdies that had been pushed out of the nest by their bigger siblings—that sort of thing. Everything he brought home died. In school, he was the kid the others loved to pick on. He flunked out of college and hasn’t been able to hold down a steady job. He’s a sweet kid but ...incompetent at adulthood.”

“What are they doing now?”

“Tom went home to his ranch in Utah. The last I heard he had given up on searching for the tomb. Vernon says he’s going to find the tomb on his own, doesn’t want me to be part of it.”

“Anyone else know about this besides your two brothers?”

“There were two cops in Santa Fe who saw the videotape and know the whole story.”

“Names?”

“Barnaby and Fenton.”

Hauser made a note. A light on the phone blinked once, and Hauser picked up the receiver. He listened for a long time, spoke softly and rapidly, made a call, another, and then another. Philip felt annoyed that Hauser was doing other business in front of him, wasting his time.

Hauser hung up. “Any wives or girlfriends in the picture?”

“Five ex-wives: four living, one deceased. No girlfriends to speak of.”

A faint curl stretched Hauser’s upper lip. “Max was always one with the ladies.”

Again the silence stretched on. Hauser seemed to be thinking. Then, to Philip’s annoyance, he made another call, speaking in low tones. Finally he set down the phone.

“Well now, Philip, what do you know about me?”

“Only that you were my father’s partner in exploration, that you both knocked around Central America for a couple of years. And that you two had a falling-out.”

“That’s right. We spent almost two years in Central America together, looking for Mayan tombs to excavate. This was back in the early sixties when it was more or less legal. We found a few things, but it was only after I left that Max made his big strike and became rich. I went on to Vietnam.”

“And the falling-out? Father never talked about it.”

There was a faint pause. “Max never talked about it?”

“No.”

“I can hardly remember it now. You know how it is when two people are thrown together for a long stretch of time, they get on each other’s nerves.” Hauser laid his cigar down in a cut crystal ashtray. The ashtray was as big as a dinner plate and probably weighed twenty pounds. Philip wondered if he had made a mistake coming here. Hauser seemed like a lightweight.

The phone blinked again, and Hauser picked it up. This was the last straw; Philip rose. “I’ll come back when you’re less busy,” he said curtly.

Hauser wagged a gold-ringed finger at Philip to wait, listened for a minute, and then hung up. “So tell me, Philip: What’s so special about Honduras?”

“Honduras? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Because that’s where Max went.”

Philip stared at him. “So youwere in on it!”

Hauser smiled. “Not at all. That was the substance of the phone call I just received. Almost four weeks ago today his pilot flew him and a planeload of cargo to a city in Honduras called San Pedro Sula. From there he took a military helicopter to a place called Brus Lagoon. And then he vanished.”

“You found all this out just now?”

Hauser generated a new and mighty cloud of smoke. “I’m a PI.”

“And not a bad one, it seems.”

Hauser emitted another meditative cloud. “As soon as I talk to the pilot, I’ll know a lot more. Like what kind of cargo the plane was carrying and how much it weighed. Your father didn’t make any effort to cover his tracks going down to Honduras. Did you know he and I were there together? I’m not surprised that’s where he went. It’s a big country with the most inaccessible interior in the world—thick jungle, uninhabited, mountainous, cut by deep gorges, and sealed off by the Mosquito Coast. That’s where I expect he went—into the interior.”

“It’s plausible.”

Hauser added after a moment: “I’m taking the case.

Philip felt irritated. He didn’t recall having offered Hauser the job yet. But the guy had already demonstrated his competence, and since he now knew the story, he would probably do. “We haven’t talked about a fee.”

“I’ll need a retainer. I expect the expenses in this case are going to run high. Anytime you do business in a shitcan Third World country you have to pay off every Tomás, Rico, and Orlando.”

“I had in mind a fee based on contingency,” Philip said quickly. “If we recover the collection, you get, say, a small percentage. I also should mention that I plan to divide it with my brothers: That’s only fair.”

“Contingency fees are for car-crash lawyers. I need a cash retainer up front. If I succeed, there will be an additional fixed fee.”

“A retainer? Like how much?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Philip almost laughed. “What makes you think I’ve got that kind of money?”

“I neverthink anything, Mr. Broadbent. I know. Sell the Klee.”

Philip felt his heart stop for a moment. “What?”

“Sell the large Paul Klee watercolor you own,Blau Kirk. It’s a beaut. I should be able to get you four hundred for it.”

Philip exploded. “Sell it? Never. My father gave me that painting.”

Hauser shrugged.

“And how did you know about that painting anyway?”

Hauser smiled and opened the soft white palms of his hand, like two calla lilies. “You do want to hire the best, don’t you, Mr. Broadbent?”

“Yes, but this is blackmail.”

“Let me explain how I work.” Hauser leaned forward. “My first loyalty is to the case, not the client. When I take a case, I solve it, regardless of the consequences to the client. I keep the retainer. If I succeed, I get an additional fee.”

“This discussion is irrelevant. I’m not selling the Klee.”

“Sometimes the client loses his nerve and wants to back out. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. I kiss the babies and attend the funerals and keep going until the case is solved.”

“You can’t expect me to sell that painting, Mr. Hauser. It’s the only thing I have of any value from my father. I love that painting.”

Philip found Hauser gazing at him in a way that made him feel odd. The man’s eyes were vacant, his face calm, emotionless. “Think of it this way: The painting is the sacrifice you need to make to recover your inheritance.”

Philip hesitated. “You think we’ll succeed?”

“I do.”

Philip gazed at him. He could always buy the painting back. “All right, I’ll sell the Klee.”

Hauser’s eyes narrowed further. He took another careful puff. Then he removed the cigar from his mouth and spoke.

“If successful, my fee will be one million dollars.” Then he added, “We don’t have much time, Mr. Broadbent. I’ve already booked us tickets to San Pedro Sula, leaving first thing next week.”

7

When Vernon Broadbent finished chanting, he took a few moments to sit quietly in the cool, dark room with his eyes closed, allowing his mind to resurface after its long meditation. As consciousness returned, he began to hear the distant boom of the Pacific and smell the salt air just penetrating the myrrh-fragrant confines of the vihara. The glow of candles on his eyelids filled his internal vision with a reddish, flickering glow.

Then he opened his eyes, took a few deep breaths, and rose, still cradling the fragile feeling of peace and serenity that the hour of meditation had given him. He went to the door and paused, looking out over the hills of Big Sur, dotted with live oaks and manzanita, to the wide blue Pacific beyond. The wind off the ocean caught his robes and filled them with cool air.

He had been living at the Ashram for more than a year, and now, in his thirty-fifth year, he finally believed he had found the place he wanted to be. It had been a long journey, from those two years in India through Transcendental Meditation, Theosophy; EST, Lifespring, and even a brush with Christianity. He had rejected the materialism of his childhood and had tried to find some deeper truth to his life. What to others—especially his brothers—seemed a wasted life, had been to him a life of richness and striving. What else was the point of life, if not to find outwhy?

Now he had the chance, with this inheritance, to do some realgood. Not just for himself this time but for others. It was his chance to do something for the world. But how? Should he try to find the tomb on his own? Should he call Tom? Philip was an asshole, but maybe Tom would want to join forces with him. He had to make a decision, and quickly.

He tucked up his linen robes and started down the path to the Teacher’s hut—a sprawling redwood structure set in a gentle vale, nestled among a stand of tall oaks, with a view of the Pacific. On the way he passed Chao, the cheerful Asian boy who ran the Teacher’s errands, bouncing up the trail carrying a bundle of mail. It was the life he sought: peaceful and uncomplicated. Too bad it was so expensive.

As he rounded the side of the hill, the Hut came into view. He paused—he was a little intimidated by the Teacher—but then resolutely carried on. He knocked on the door. After a moment, a low, resonant voice called out from the depths of the compound, “Come in, you are most welcome.”

He removed his sandals on the veranda and stepped inside. The house was Japanese in style, simple and ascetic, with sliding screens of rice paper, floors covered with beige mats, and expanses of polished wood planking. The interior smelled of beeswax and incense. There was the gentle sound of water. Through a series of openings Vernon could see down the length of the house to a Japanese garden beyond, with mossy rocks standing among raked pebbles, and a pool with blooming lotus flowers. He could not see the Teacher.

He turned and peered down another hallway to his left, through successive doorways, which disclosed a teenage girl in bare feet and robes, with a long blond French braid down her back entwined with wilting flowers. She was chopping vegetables in the Teacher’s kitchen.

“Are you there, Teacher?” he called.

The girl went on chopping.

“This way,” came the low voice.

Vernon went toward the sound and found the Teacher sitting in his meditation room, cross-legged on a mat, his eyes closed. He opened them but did not rise. Vernon stood, waiting respectfully. The Teacher’s fit, handsome figure was draped in a simple robe of undyed linen. A fringe of long gray hair, combed straight down, fell from a small bald spot, giving him a Leonardo da Vinci look. Astute blue eyes crinkled under strongly arched orbital ridges carved out of the broad dome of his forehead. A trimmed salt-and-pepper beard completed the face. When he spoke his voice was soft and resonant, underlain by a pleasing bed of gravel, with a faint Brooklyn accent that stamped him as a man of humble origins. He was about sixty—no one knew his exact age. Formerly a professor of philosophy at Berkeley named Art Brewer, he had renounced tenure to retreat into a life of the spirit. Here, at the Ashram, he had founded a community devoted to prayer, meditation, and spiritual growth. It was pleasantly nondenominational, loosely based on Buddhism, but without the excessive discipline, intellectualism, celibacy, and fatalism that tended to mar that particular religious tradition. Rather, the Ashram was a beautiful retreat in a lovely location, where under the gentle guidance of the Teacher each worshiped in his own way, at a cost of seven hundred dollars per week, room and board included.

“Sit down,” the Teacher said.

Vernon sat.

“How can I help you?”

“It’s about my father.”

The Teacher listened.

Vernon collected his thoughts and took a breath. He told the Teacher about his father’s cancer, the inheritance, the challenge to find his tomb. When he finished there was a long silence. Vernon wondered if the Teacher would tell him to forgo the inheritance. He remembered the Teacher’s many negative comments about the evil effects of money.

“Let’s have tea,” said the Teacher, his voice exceptionally tender, placing his gentle hand on Vernon’s elbow. They sat and he called for tea, which was brought in by the girl with the braid. They sipped silently, and then the Teacher asked, “How much, exactly, is this inheritance worth?”

“I figure that after taxes my share would probably be worth a hundred million.”

The Teacher seemed to take a very long sip of tea, and another. If the sum surprised him he didn’t show it. “Let us meditate.”

Vernon, too, closed his eyes. He had trouble concentrating on hismantra, feeling agitated by the questions facing him, which only seemed to grow more complex as he thought about them. One hundred million dollars. One hundred million dollars. The phrase, not dissimilar in sound from the mantra, got tangled up with his meditating, preventing him from achieving either peace or internal silence.One hundred million. Om mani padme hum. One hundred million.

It was a relief when the Teacher raised his head. He took Vernon’s hands and enclosed them within his own. His blue eyes were unusually bright.

“Few are given the opportunity that you have been given, Vernon. You must not let this opportunity pass you by.”

“How so?”

The Teacher stood and spoke with power and resonance in his voice. “We need to recover that inheritance. We need to recover it now.

8

By the time Tom had finished doctoring the sick horse, the sun was setting over Toh Ateen mesa, casting long golden shadows across the sagebrush and chamisa. Beyond rose up a thousand-foot wall of sculpted sandstone, glowing red in the dying light. Tom gave the animal another quick lookover and patted him on the neck. He turned to the Navajo girl—the horse’s owner. “He’s going to make it. Just a touch of sand colic.”

She broke into a relieved smile.

“Right now he’s hungry. Lead him around the corral a few times and then give him a scoop of psyllium mixed in with his oats. Let him water afterwards. Wait half an hour, then give him some hay. He’ll be fine.”

The Navajo grandmother who had ridden on horseback five miles to the vet clinic to get him—the road was washed out, as usual—took his hand. “Thank you, doctor.”

Tom gave a little bow. “At your service.” He thought ahead to the ride back to Bluff with anticipation. He was glad the road had washed out, giving him the excuse for a long ride. It had wasted half his day, but the trail had taken him through some of the most beautiful red-rock country in the Southwest, through the Jurassic sandstone beds known as the Morrison Formation, rich with dinosaur fossils. There were a lot of remote canyons running up into Toh Ateen mesa, and Tom wondered if any paleontologists had ever explored up there.Probably not. Someday, he thought, he’d take a little side trip up one of those canyons ...

He shook his head and smiled to himself. The desert was a fine place to clear your mind, and he had had a lot of clearing to do. This crazy business with his father had been the biggest shock of his life.

“What do we owe you, doctor?” the grandmother asked, breaking his reverie.

Tom glanced around at the shabby tar-paper hogan, the broken-down car half sunk in tumbleweeds, the skinny sheep milling in the pen.

“Five dollars.”

The woman fished into her velveteen blouse and removed some soiled dollar bills, counting out five for him.

Tom had touched his hat and had just turned to get his horse when he noticed a tiny cloud of dust on the horizon. The two Navajos had also noticed it. A horse and rider were approaching fast from the north, from the direction he had come, the dark speck getting bigger in the great golden bowl of the desert. He wondered if it was Shane, his vet partner. It alarmed him. It would have to be one hell of an emergency for Shane to ride out there to get him.

As the figure materialized, he realized it wasn’t Shane but a woman. And she was riding his horse Knock.

The woman trotted into the settlement, covered with dust from her journey, the horse lathered up and blowing. She stopped and swung down. She had been riding bareback without even a bridle across almost eight miles of empty desert. Absolutely, totally crazy. And what was she doing with his best horse and not one of Shane’s glue-plugs? He was going to kill Shane.

She strode toward him. “I’m Sally Colorado,” she said. “I tried to find you at your clinic, but your partner said you’d ridden out here. So here I am.” With a rustle of honey-colored hair, she held out her hand. Tom, caught off guard, took it. Her hair had spilled down her shoulders over a white cotton shirt, now powdered with dust. The shirt was tucked in at a slender waist, which itself was snugged into a pair of jeans. There was a faint scent of peppermint about her. When she smiled it seemed her eyes had changed color from green to blue, so bright was the effect. She wore a pair of turquoise earrings, but the color in her eyes was even richer than the color of the stone.

After a moment Tom realized he was still holding her hand, and released it.

“I just had to find you,” she said. “I couldn’t wait.”

“An emergency?”

“It’s not a vet emergency, if that’s what you mean.”

“Then what kind of emergency is it?”

“I’ll tell you on the ride back.”

“Damn it,” Tom exploded, “I can’t believe Shane let you take my best horse and ride it like that, without a saddle or bridle. You could have been killed!”

“Shane didn’t give him to me.” The girl smiled.

“How did you get him, then?”

“I stole him.”

It took a moment of consternation before Tom could bring himself to laugh.

The sun had set by the time they headed north, riding together, back to Bluff. For a while they rode in silence, and then Tom finally said, “All right. Let’s hear what was so important that you had to steal a horse for it and risk your neck.”

“Well ...” she hesitated.

“I’m all ears, Miss ... Colorado. If that’s really your name.”

“It’s an odd name, I know. My great-grandfather was in vaudeville. He did the patent medicine circuit dressed as an Indian, and he took Colorado as his stage name. It was better than our old name—Smith—and so it kind of stuck. Call me Sally.”

“All right, Sally. Let’s hear your story.” Tom found himself watching her ride with a feeling of pleasure. She looked like she’d been born on a horse. A lot of money must have gone into that straight, easy, and centered seat of hers.

“I’m an anthropologist,” Sally began. “More specifically, I’m an ethnopharmacologist. I study indigenous medicine with Professor Julian Clyve at Yale. He was the man who cracked Mayan hieroglyphics a few years ago. A really brilliant piece of work. It was in all the papers.”

“No doubt.” She had a sharp, clean profile, a small nose, and a funny way of sticking out her lower lip. She had a little dimple when she smiled, but only on one side of her mouth. Her hair was dark gold, and it bent in a glistening curve over her slender shoulders before heading down her back. She was an amazingly beautiful woman.

“Professor Clyve has assembled the largest collection of Mayan writing in existence, a library of every inscription known in ancient Mayan. It consists of rubbings from stone inscriptions, pages from Mayan codices, and copies of inscriptions on pots and tablets. His library is consulted by scholars from all over the world.”

Tom could just see the doddering old pedagogue shuffling among his heaps of dusty manuscripts.

“The greatest of the Mayan inscriptions were contained in what we call codices. They were the original books of the Maya, written in glyphs on bark paper. The Spanish burned most of them as books of the devil, but a couple of incomplete codices managed to survive here and there. A complete Mayan codex has never been found. Last year, Professor Clyve foundthis in the back of a filing cabinet that belonged to one of his deceased colleagues.”

She drew a folded sheet of paper out of her breast pocket and handed it to him. Tom took it. It was an old, yellowing photocopy of a page of a manuscript written in hieroglyphics, with some drawings of leaves and flowers in the margins. It looked vaguely familiar. Tom wondered where he had seen it before.

“Writing was invented only three times independently in the history of the human race. Mayan hieroglyphics was one of them.”

“My Mayan reading skills are a little rusty. What does it say?”

“It describes the medicinal qualities of a certain plant found in the Central American rainforest.”

“What does it do? Cure cancer?”

Sally smiled. “If only. The plant is called theK’ik’-te, or blood tree. This page describes how you boil the bark, add ashes as an alkali, and apply the paste as a poultice to a wound.”

“Interesting.” Tom handed the sheet back to her.

“It’s more than interesting: It’s medically correct. There’s a mild antibiotic in the bark.”

They were now on the slickrock plateau. A pair of coyotes howled mournfully in a distant canyon. They had to go single file now. Sally rode behind while Tom listened.

“That page comes from a Mayan codex of medicine. It was probably written around 800A.D., at the height of the Classic Maya civilization. It contains twothousand medical prescriptions and preparations, not just from plants but from everything in the rainforest—insects, animals, and even minerals. There may in fact be a cure for cancer in there, or at least some types of cancer. Professor Clyve asked me to locate the owner and see if I couldn’t arrange for him to translate and publish the codex. It’s the only complete Mayan codex known. It would be a stunning cap to his already distinguished career.”

“And for yours, too, I imagine.”

“Yes. Here’s a book that contains all the medicinal secrets of the rainforest, accumulated over centuries. We’re talking about the richest rainforest in the world, with hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals—many still unknown to science. The Maya knew every plant, every animal, everything in that rainforest.And everything they knew went into this book!”

She trotted her horse alongside him. Her loose hair spilled and swung as she caught up. “Do you realize what this means?”

“Surely,” said Tom, “medicine has advanced a long way from the ancient Maya.”

Sally Colorado snorted. “Twenty-five percent of all our drugs originally came from plants. And yet, only one-half of one percent of the world’s 265,000 plant species have been evaluated for their medicinal properties. Think of the potential! The most successful and effective drug in history—aspirin—was originally discovered in the bark of a tree used by natives to cure aches and pains. Taxol, an important anti-cancer drug, also comes from tree bark. Cortisone comes from yams, and the heart medication digitalis comes from foxglove. Penicillin was first extracted from mold. Tom, this codex could be the greatest medical discovery ever.”

“I see your point.”

“When Professor Clyve and I translate and publish this codex, itwillrevolutionize medicine. And if that doesn’t convince you, here’s something else. The Central American rainforest is disappearing under the loggers’ saws. This book will save it. The rainforest will suddenly be worth a lot more standing up than cut down. Drug companies will pay those countriesbillions in royalties.”

“No doubt keeping a tidy profit themselves. So what’s this book got to do with me?”

A full moon was now rising over the Hobgoblin Rocks, painting them silver. It was a lovely evening.

“The Codex belongs to your father.”

Tom stopped his horse and looked at her.

“Maxwell Broadbent stole it from a Mayan tomb almost forty years ago. He wrote to Yale asking for help in translating it. But Mayan script hadn’t been cracked then. The man who got the letter assumed it was a fake and shoved it in an old file without even answering. Professor Clyve found it forty years later. He instantly knew it was real. No one could fake Mayan script forty years ago for the simple reason that no one could read it. But Professor Clyve could read it: He’s the only man on earth, in fact, who can read Mayan script fluently. I’ve been trying to reach your father for weeks, but he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. So finally in desperation I tracked you down.”

Tom stared at her in the gathering twilight, and then he began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she asked hotly.

Tom took a deep breath. “Sally, I’ve got some bad news for you.”

When he had finished telling her everything, there was a long silence. Sally said, “You’ve got to be joking.”

“No.”

“He had no right!”

“Right or not, that’s what he did.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

Tom sighed. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you mean,nothing? You’re not giving up your inheritance, are you?”

Tom didn’t answer at once. They had reached the top of the plateau, and they paused to look at the view. The myriad canyons running down to the San Juan River were etched like dark fractals into the moonlit landscape; beyond, he could see the yellow cluster of lights of the town of Bluff and, at the edge of town, the cluster of buildings that made up his modest veterinary practice. To the left the immense stone vertebrae of Comb Ridge rose up, ghostly bones in the moonlight. It reminded him all over again of why he was here. In the days following the shock of learning what his father had done with their inheritance, he had picked up one of his favorite books: Plato’sRepublic. He read once again the passages on the myth of Er, in which Odysseus was asked what kind of existence he would choose in his next life. What had the great Odysseus, warrior, lover, sailor, explorer, and king, chosen to be? An anonymous man living in some out-of-the way corner, “disregarded by the others.” All he wanted was a life of peace and simplicity.

Plato had approved. And so did Tom.

That, Tom reminded himself, was why he had originally come to Bluff. Life with Maxwell Broadbent as a father was impossible: a never-ending drama of exhortation, challenge, competition, criticism, and instruction. He had come here to escape, to find peace, to leave all that behind. That, and of course, Sarah. Sarah: His father had even tried to select their girlfriends—disastrously.

He ventured a glance at Sally. A cool night breeze was stirring her hair, and her face was turned into the moonlight, her lips slightly parted in pleasure and awe at the stupendous view. One hand lay on her thigh, her slender body resting lightly in the saddle. God, she was beautiful.

He angrily pushed that out of his mind. His life was now pretty much how he wanted it. He hadn’t managed to become a paleontologist—his father had scotched that—but being a vet in Utah was the next best thing. Why screw it up? He’d been down that road before. “Yes,” he finally responded. “I’m giving it up.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure I can explain it.”

“Try.”

“You have to understand my father. All my life, he tried to control everything my two brothers and I did. Hemanaged us. He had big plans for us. But no matter what I did, what any of us did, it was never good enough. We were never good enough for him. And now this. I’m not going to play his game any longer. Enough is enough.”

He paused, wondering why he was telling her so much.

“Go on,” she said.

“He wanted me to become a doctor. I wanted to be a paleontologist, to hunt for dinosaur fossils. Father thought that was ridiculous—‘infantile,’ he called it. We compromised on vet school. Naturally, he expected me to go to Kentucky and doctor million-dollar racehorses and maybe become an equine medical researcher, making great discoveries and putting the Broadbent name in the history books. Instead I came out here to the Navajo reservation. This is what I want to do; this is what Ilove doing. These horses need me and these people need me. And this landscape, southern Utah, is the most beautiful in the world, with some of the greatest Jurassic and Cretaceous fossil beds anywhere. But my father thought that me coming out here to the rez was a huge failure and disappointment. There was no money in it, no prestige, nothingsplendid about it. Here I’d taken his money to go to vet school and cheated him by coming out here.”

He stopped. Now he’d really said too much.

“And so that’s it? You’re just going to let the whole inheritance go, Codex and all?”

“That’s right.”

“Just like that?”

“Most people live their lives without a legacy. My vet practice isn’t a bad living. I love this life, this country. Look around. What more could you want?”

He found Sally looking at him instead, her hair faintly luminous in the silvery light of the moon. “Howmuch are you giving up, if I may ask?”

He felt a twinge, not for the first time, at the sheer size of it. “A hundred million, give or take.”

Sally whistled. There was a long silence. A coyote howled somewhere in the canyons below them, answered by a further howl. She finally said, “Jesus, you’ve got guts.”

He shrugged.

“And your brothers?”

“Philip’s joined with my father’s old partner to go find the hidden tomb. Vernon’s going it alone, I hear. Why don’t you team up with one of them?”

He found her looking at him rather intently in the dark. Finally she said, “I already tried. Vernon left the country a week ago, and Philip’s also disappeared. They went to Honduras. You were my last choice.”

Tom shook his head. “Honduras? That was fast. When they return with the loot, you can get the Codex from them. I’ll give you my blessing.”

Another long silence. “I can’t risk it. They have no idea what it is, what it’s worth. Anything could happen.”

“I’m sorry, Sally, I can’t help you.”

“Professor Clyve and I need your help. Theworld needs your help.”

Tom stared into the dark cottonwood groves in the floodplain of the San Juan River. An owl called from a distant juniper.

“My mind is made up,” he said.

She remained looking at him, her hair in heavy disarray down her shoulders and back, her lower lip firmly set. The cottonwoods were casting a dappled moonlight over her body, the fuzzy silver spots of light rippling and shifting with the breeze. “Really?”

He sighed. “Really.”

“At least give me a little help here. I’m not asking for much, Tom. Come to Santa Fe with me. You can introduce me to your father’s lawyers, his friends. You can tell me about his travels, his habits. Give me two days. Help me do this. Just two days.”

“No.”

“Ever had a horse die on you?”

“All the time.”

“A horse you loved?”

Tom immediately thought of his own horse Pedernal, who died from an antibiotic-resistant strain of strangles. He would never again own a horse as beautiful.

“Would better drugs have saved it?” Sally asked.

Tom looked toward the distant lights of Bluff. Two days wasn’t much, and she did have a point. “All right. You win. Two days.”

9

Lewis Skiba, CEO of Lampe-Denison Pharmaceuticals, sat motionless at his desk, looking down the file of gray skyscrapers along Avenue of the Americas in midtown Manhattan. A late-afternoon rain was darkening the city. The only sound in his paneled office was the mutter of a real wood fire in an eighteenth-century Siena marble fireplace, a sad reminder of fatter times. It was not a cold day, but Skiba had cranked up the A/C in order to have the fire. He found it soothing. It reminded him somehow of his childhood, of the old stone fireplace in the battenboard cabin by the lake, with the crossed snowshoes over the mantelpiece and the loons calling off the water. God, if only he could be there now ...

Almost without knowing it, his hand unlocked the little front drawer of his desk and closed on a cool plastic bottle. He popped the top off with his thumbnail, fished out a dry little ovoid, put it in his mouth, and chewed. Bitter, but it cut the wait. That and a scotch chaser. Skiba reached to his left, slipped open a wall panel and took out a bottle of sixty-year-old Macallan and a whiskey glass, and poured himself a good slug. It was the color of rich mahogany. A dash of cool Evian released the flavor, and he brought it to his lips, sucked in a goodly amount, savoring the taste of peat, hops, the cold sea, the Highland moors, fine Spanish Amontillado.

As the feeling of peace stole over him he thought longingly of the big swim, of floating away on a sea of light. If it came to that, all itwould take would be two dozen more of those tablets followed by the rest of the Macallan and he’d be sinking forever into the blue deep. No pleading the Fifth before Congress, no claiming to be just another poor misled incompetent CEO before the SEC, none of that Kenneth Lay shit. He’d be his own judge, jury, and executioner. His father, an army sergeant, had taught him the value of honor.

The one thing that could have saved the firm, but had sunk it instead, was that big breakthrough drug they thought they had. Phloxatane. With that in hand, the bean counters figured it was safe to start cutting long-term R&D to jack up current profits. They said the analysts would never notice, and at first they didn’t. It worked like a dream, and their stock price shot through the roof. Then they started shifting current marketing costs to amortizable R&D, and still the analysts didn’t notice and still the stock price rose. Then they assigned losses to paper-thin, off-the-books partnerships in the Cayman Islands and Netherland Antilles, booked loans as profits, and blew whatever cash was left over to buy back company stock to innate the price even more—also inflating (naturally) the value of executive stock options. The stock soared; they cashed out, they made millions. God, it had been a heady game. They broke every law, rule, and regulation on the books and had a creative genius of a CFO who invented new ones to break. And all those high-flying stock pickers—they turned out to be about as perceptive as Br’er Bear,he a-earnin’a dollah a minute.

Now they’d come to the end of the line. There were no more rules to bend or break. Finally the market woke up, the stock crashed, and they had no more tricks up their sleeve. The carrion crows were circling above the Lampe Building at 725 Avenue of the Americas, cawing his name.

A shaking hand slipped the key into the lock; the drawer slid open. Skiba chewed up another bitter pill, took a second slug of scotch.

There came a buzz, announcing Graff.

Graff, the CFO genius who had gotten them to this point.

Skiba took a swig of Evian, swilled it around, swallowed, took another swig, and a third. He swept his hand over his hair, leaned back in the chair, and composed his face. He was already feeling that creepinglightness of being that started in his chest and moved outward to his fingertips, buoying him up, filling him with a golden glow.

He swiveled his chair, his eyes falling briefly on the photographs of his three bright little children smiling from their silver frames. Then his eye reluctantly traveled from the desk to rest on the face of Mike Graff, who had just entered the room. The man stood before Skiba, oddly delicate, encased from head to toe in impeccable worsted wool, silk, and cotton. Graff had been Lampe’s rising young protégé, profiled inForbes, courted by analysts and investment bankers, his wine cellar featured inBon Appétit and his house inArchitectural Digest. Now his protégé was no longer rising: He was holding hands with Skiba as they swan-dived off the edge of the Grand Canyon.

“What is it, Mike, that was so important it couldn’t wait until our afternoon meeting?” Skiba spoke pleasantly.

“I’ve got a fellow outside you need to meet. He’s got an interesting proposition for us.”

Skiba closed his eyes. He suddenly felt tired almost unto death. All the good feeling was gone. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough of your ‘propositions,’ Mike?”

“This one’s different. Trust me.”

Trust me,Skiba waved his hand in a gesture of futility. He heard the door open and looked up. There, standing in front of him, was a cheap hustler in a wide-lapel suit wearing too much gold. He was one of those types who combed five hairs across half a continent of bald skull and thought that solved the problem.

“Jesus Christ, Graff—”

“Lewis,” said Graff, forging ahead, “this is Mr. Marcus Hauser, a private investigator formerly with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He has something he wants to show us.” Graff took a piece of paper from Hauser’s hands and passed it to Skiba.

Skiba stared down at the page. It was covered with strange symbols, the margins drawn with curling vines and leaves. This was insane. Graff was cracking up.

Graff pushed on. “That’s a page from a ninth-century Mayan manuscript. It’s called a codex. It’s a two-thousand-page catalog of rainforest drugs, how to extract them and use them.”

Skiba felt a sensation of heat on his skin as the import sank in. It simply could not be true.

“That’s right. Thousands of indigenous pharmaceutical prescriptions identifying medically active substances found in plants, animals, insects, spiders, molds, fungi—you name it. The medical wisdom of the ancient Maya in a single volume.”

Skiba looked up, first at Graff, then at Hauser. “Where’d you get this?”

Hauser stood with his plump hands folded in front of him. Skiba was sure he smelled some kind of aftershave or cologne. Cheap.

“It belonged to an old friend of mine,” said Hauser. His voice was high and irritating, with what sounded like a Brooklyn accent. A pre-pubescent Pacino.

Skiba said, “Mr. Hauser, it’ll be ten years and half a billion in R&D before any of these drugs come on-line.”

“True. But think what it’ll do to your stock pricenow. As I understand it, you’ve got a bargeful of shit drifting down your little river here.” He swept a plump hand in a circle, taking in the room.

Skiba stared at him. The insolent son of a bitch. He should throw him out now.

Hauser went on. “Lampe stock opened this morning at fourteen and three-eighths. Last December it was trading at fifty. You, personally, have two million stock options at a strike price of between thirty and thirty-five laddered out to expire over the next two years. All of which are now worthless unless you can get the stock price back up. On top of that, your major new cancer drug, Phloxatane, is a dog and is about to be disapproved by the FDA—”

Skiba rose from his chair, his face red. “How dare you speak these lies to me like this, in my office? Where are you getting this false information?”

“Mr. Skiba,” said Hauser mildly, “let’s cut the bullshit. I’m a private investigator, and this manuscript will be coming into my possession in about four to six weeks. I want to sell it to you. And Iknow you need it. I could just as easily take it to GeneDyne or Cambridge Pharmaceuticals.”

Skiba swallowed hard. It was amazing how fast clear-headedness could return. “How do I know this isn’t some kind of swindle?”

Graff said, “I’ve checked it out. It’s as good as gold, Lewis.”

Skiba stared at the huckster in the tasteless suit. He swallowed again, his mouth dry. This was how far they had sunk. “Tell me your proposal, Mr. Hauser.”

Hauser said, “The Codex is in Honduras.”

“So you’re selling a pig in a poke.”

“To get it, I need money, weapons, and equipment. I’m running a big personal risk. I’ve already had to undertake one urgent piece of business. This isn’t going to come cheap.”

“Don’t hustle me, Mr. Hauser.”

“Who’s the hustler here? You’re up to your neck in accounting irregularities as it is. If the SEC were to hear about how you and Mr. Graff here have been booking marketing costs as long-term amortizable R&D these past few quarters, you’d both be leaving the building in handcuffs.”

Skiba stared at the man, and then at Graff. The CFO had turned white. In the long silence, a piece of wood popped in the fire. Skiba felt a muscle twitching somewhere behind his left knee.

Hauser went on: “When I deliver the Codex to you and you’ve authenticated it, as you will naturally insist on doing, you’ll wire fifty million dollars to an offshore account of my selection. That’s the deal I’m offering. No negotiations—just a yes or a no will suffice.”

“Fifty million? That’s totally insane. Forget it.”

Hauser rose and headed for the door.

“Wait,” Graff called, jumping up. “Mr. Hauser? None of this is engraved in stone.” The sweat was trickling down from his well-groomed scalp as he chased after the man in the cheap suit.

Hauser kept walking.

“We’re always open to—Mr. Hauser!”

The door closed in Graff’s face. Hauser was gone.

Graff turned toward Skiba. His hands were shaking. “We’ve got to stop him.”

Skiba said nothing for a moment. What Hauser had said was true: If they got their hands on the manuscript, the announcement alone would turn around their stock. Fifty million, however, was blackmail. Dealing with a man like this was odious. But some things couldn’t be helped. Skiba said, “While there’s only one way to pay a debt, there are a million ways not to pay it. As you well know, Mike.”

Graff couldn’t quite muster a smile through the sheen of sweat on his face.

Skiba spoke into his intercom. “That man who was just here, don’t let him leave the building. Tell him we agree to his terms and escort him back up here.”

He laid the phone back in its cradle and turned to Graff. “I hope for both of our sakes this guy is for real.”

“He is,” said Graff. “Believe me, I looked into this very thoroughly. The Codex exists, and the sample page is real.”

In a moment Hauser was standing in the door.

“You’ll get your fifty million,” Skiba said brusquely. “Now take a seat and tell us your plan.”

10

Charlie Hernandez felt drained. The funeral had been long, the interment longer. He could still feel the grit of the dirt on his right hand. It was always hell when one of their own had to be buried, let alone two. And he still had a court appearance and half a shift to get through. He glanced over at his partner, Willson, catching up on paperwork. Smart guy; too bad his handwriting looked like a kindergartner’s.

The buzzerrang, and Doreen said, “Two people to see, ah, Barnaby and Fenton.”

Christ, this was just what he needed. “What about?”

“They won’t say. Won’t talk to anyone but Barnaby and Fenton.”

He sighed heavily. “Send them in.”

Willson had stopped writing and was looking up. “You want me—?”

“You stay.”

They appeared in the doorway, a stunning blond and a tall guy in cowboy boots. Hernandez grunted, sat up, smoothed a hand over his hair. “Sit down.”

“We’re here to see Lieutenant Barnaby, not—”

“I know who you’re here to see. Please take a seat.”

They sat down, reluctantly.

“I’m Officer Hernandez,” he said, addressing the blond. “May I ask what your business with Officer Barnaby is?” He spoke with the practiced voice of officialdom, slow, stolid, and final.

“We’d prefer to deal directly with Officer Barnaby,” said the man.

“You can’t.”

“Why not?” He flared up.

“Because he’s dead.”

They stared back at him. “How?”

God, Hernandez felt tired. Barnaby had been a good man. What a waste. “Automobile accident.” He sighed. “Perhaps if you told me who you were and how I could help you?”

They looked at each other. The man spoke. “I’m Tom Broadbent, and about ten days ago Lieutenant Barnaby investigated a possible break-in at our house off the Old Santa Fe Trail. Barnaby handled the call, and I wondered if he filed a report.”

Hernandez glanced over at Willson.

“He didn’t file a report,” Willson said.

“Did he say anything?”

“He said it had been some kind of misunderstanding, that Mr. Broadbent had moved some artworks and his sons mistakenly assumed they had been stolen. As I explained last week to your brother, a crime hadn’t been committed, so there was no reason to open a file.”

“My brother? Which one?”

“The name escapes me. Long hair, beard, hippie type—”

“Vernon.”

“Right.”

“Can we talk to his partner, Fenton?”

“He also passed away in the accident.”

“What happened?”

“Car went off the Ski Basin Road at Nuns Corner.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So are we.”

“So there’s no paperwork, nothing on the investigation up at the Broadbent house?”

“Nothing.”

There was a silence, and then Hernandez said, “Is there anything else I can do for you folks?”

11

Trash burned in a row of fifty-five-gallon drums along the filthy beach at Puerto Lempira, each sending a stream of acrid smoke into the town. A fat woman cooked on a comal over one of the drums; the smell of frying pork cracklings carried toward Vernon on a fetid breeze. He walked with the Teacher along the dirt street that paralleled the beach, trailed and jostled by a crowd of children, followed in turn by a groveling pack of dogs. The children had been trailing them for almost an hour, crying out “Gimme sweet!” and “Gimme dollar!” Vernon had dispensed several bags of candy and given out all his dollar bills in an effort to placate them, but the generosity had succeeded only in swelling the crowd to ever more hysterical proportions.

Vernon and the Teacher arrived at a rickety wooden pier that stuck out into the muddy lagoon, at the end of which was tied a gaggle of dugout canoes with outboard motors. Men lounged in hammocks, and dark-eyed women eyed them from doorways. A man pushed up to them, a boa wrapped around his neck.

“Snake,” he said. “Fifty dollar.”

“We don’t want a snake,” said the Teacher. “We want a boat.Barca. Boat. We’re looking for Juan Freitag Charters. Yousale Juan Freitag?”

The man began unwrapping the snake and holding it out as if he were offering a string of sausages. “Snake. Thirty dollar.”

The Teacher brushed past him.

“Snake!” the man cried, pursuing. “Twenty dollar!” His shirt wasalmost falling off his shoulders, it had so many holes. He clutched at Vernon with long brown fingers as he passed. Vernon, fishing in his pocket for change and dollar bills, could only find a fiver. He gave it to the man. The children surged forward, redoubling their hollering, streaming down to the quayside from the teeming barrios above. “Damn you, stop handing out money,” said the Teacher. “We’re going to be robbed.”

“Sorry.”

The teacher seized an older child by the scruff of his neck. “Juan Freitag Charters!” he cried impatiently. “Where?Donde?” He turned to Vernon. “How do you say boat in Spanish again?”

“Barca.”

“Barca! Donde barca?”

The boy, frightened, pointed a dirty finger toward a cinderblock building across from the pier.

The Teacher released him and hurried along the dusty quayside, Vernon following, pursued by children and dogs. The door to the office was open, and they went in. A man behind a desk got up, went to the door with a flyswatter, swatted the pursuing children away from the door, and slammed it. By the time he had resumed his seat, he was all smiles. He had a small, neat head and body and blond, Aryan features. But when he spoke, it was with a Spanish accent.

“Please accommodate yourselves.”

They took a couple of wicker chairs, next to an end table piled with copies of scuba magazines.

“What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

“We want to rent a couple of boats with guides,” the Teacher said.

The man smiled. “Scuba diving or tarpon fishing?”

“Neither. We want to go upriver.”

The smile seemed to gel on the man’s face. “Up the Patuca?”

“Yes.”

“I see. You are adventure travelers?”

The Teacher glanced at Vernon. “Yes.”

“How far do you wish to go?”

“We don’t know yet. A long way. Perhaps as far as the mountains.”

“You must take motorized dugout canoes, because the river is too shallow for a regular boat. Manuel!”

After a moment a young man came in from the back. He blinked in the light. He had fish blood and scales on his hands.

“This is Manuel. He and his cousin Ramón will guide you. They know the river well.”

“How long will it take to get upriver?”

“You can go as far as Pito Solo. One week. Beyond that is the Meambar Swamp.”

“And beyond that?”

The man waved his hand. “You do not want to cross the Meambar Swamp.”

“On the contrary,” said the Teacher, “it’s quite possible we do.”

The man inclined his head, as if humoring crazy Americans was all in a day’s work. “As you wish. Beyond the swamp are mountains and more mountains. You will need to take at least a month of supplies and food.”

A wasp buzzed in the whitewashed room, tapping on the cracked window, swinging around, and colliding with it again. With a lightning motion the man smacked it with the flyswatter. It fell to the ground, writhing and stinging itself in agony. A polished shoe was extended from under the desk and ended its life with a little crunch.

“Manuel! Get Ramón.” He turned to the Teacher. “We can outfit you here, señor, with everything you need. Tents, sleeping bags, mosquito netting, gas, food, GPS, hunting gear—everything. We can put it all on credit card.” He laid his hand reverently on a brand-new credit-card machine connected to a shiny jack in the wall. “You do not worry about anything because we take care of it all. We are a modern operation.” He smiled. “We give you adventure, but not too much adventure.”

12

The car hummed northward through the San Juan Basin Desert toward the Utah border, along a vast and lonely highway between endless prairies of sagebrush and chamisa. Shiprock towered in the distance, a dark thrust of stone into blue sky. Tom, driving, felt a great relief that it was over. He had done what he promised, he had helped Sally find out where his father had gone. What she did next was up to her. She could either wait until his brothers came out of the jungle with the Codex—provided they found the tomb—or she could try to catch up to them herself. He, at least, was now out of it. He could get back to his life of peace and simplicity in the desert.

He cast a surreptitious glance at her sitting in the passenger seat. She had been silent for the past hour. She hadn’t said what her plans were, and Tom wasn’t sure he wanted to know. All he wanted to do was get back to his horses, to the routine of the clinic, to his cool adobe house shaded by cottonwoods. He had worked hard at creating the undemanding life he wanted, and he was more determined than ever not to let his father and his crazy schemes overturn it. Let his brothers have the adventure and, if they wanted, let them even keep the inheritance. He had nothing to prove. After Sarah, he wasn’t about to jump into deep water again.

“So he went to Honduras,” Sally said. “You still have no idea, no guess, as to where?”

“I’ve told you all I know, Sally. Forty years ago he spent some time in Honduras with his old partner, Marcus Hauser, looking for tombs and picking bananas to earn money. They got swindled, so I heard, buying a fake treasure map of some kind, and they spent a few months tramping through the jungle and nearly died. They had some kind of falling-out, and that was that.”

“And you’re sure he didn’t find anything?”

“That’s what he always said. The mountains of southern Honduras were uninhabited.”

She nodded, her eyes looking ahead at the empty desert.

“So what are you going to do?” Tom finally asked.

“I’m going to Honduras.”

“All by yourself?”

“Why not?”

Tom said nothing. What she did was her business.

“Did your father ever get in trouble for looting tombs?”

“The FBI investigated him on and off over the years. Nothing stuck. Father was too smart. I remember once when the agents raided our house and seized some jade figurines my father had just brought back from Mexico. I was ten at the time, and it scared the hell out of me, the agents pounding on the door before dawn. But they couldn’t prove anything and had to return all the stuff.”

Sally shook her head. “People like your father are a menace to archaeology.”

“I’m not sure I see a big difference between what my father did and what archaeologists do.”

“There’s a big difference,” said Sally. “Looters wreck a site. They remove things from their context. A dear friend of Professor Clyve was beaten in Mexico while trying to stop some local villagers from looting a temple.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but you can’t blame starving people for trying to feed their children—and taking exception to somenorteamericano coming down and telling them what to do.”

Sally set her lip, and Tom could see she was angry. The car hummed along the shimmering asphalt. Tom cranked up the A/C. He would be glad when this was over. He didn’t need a complication like Sally Colorado in his life.

Sally shook her heavy gold hair back from her head, unleashing a faint scent of perfume and shampoo. “There’s something still bothering me. I just can’t get it out of my head.”

“What’s that?”

“Barnaby and Fenton. Doesn’t it seem strange to you that right after they investigate your father’s so-called robbery they come up dead? There’s something about the timing of their ‘accident’ that I don’t like.”

Tom shook his head. “Sally, it’s just one of those coincidences.”

“It doesn’t feel right to me.”

“I know the Ski Basin Road, Sally. Nun’s Corner is a hellacious curve. They aren’t the first ones to get killed there.”

“What were they doing on the Ski Basin Road? Ski season’s over.”

Tom sighed. “If you’re so worried, why don’t you call that policeman, Hernandez, and find out?”

“I will.” Sally slipped her cell phone out of her bag and dialed. Tom listened while she was transferred half a dozen times, from one slack receptionist to the next, until she finally reached Hernandez.

“This is Sally Colorado,” she said. “You remember us?”

Pause.

“I wanted to ask you a question about Barnaby and Fenton’s death.”

Another pause.

“Why did they go up there to the ski basin?”

A very long wait. Tom found himself trying to listen, although he felt it was a waste of time.

“Yes, it was tragic,” Sally said. “And where were they about to go on this fishing trip?”

A final silence.

“Thanks.”

Sally slowly shut the phone and looked at Tom. Tom felt a knot in his stomach; her face had gone pale.

“They went up to the ski basin to check on a report of vandalism. Turned out to be phony. Their brakes failed on the way down. They tried to slow themselves down by banking off the guard rails, but the road was just too steep. When they reached Nun’s Corner they were going close to ninety.”

“Jesus.”

“There wasn’t much left of the car after the four-hundred-foot drop and explosion. No foul play is suspected. It was especially tragic, coming as it did the day before Barnaby and Fenton were about to go on the tarpon-fishing trip of a lifetime.”

Tom swallowed and asked the question he didn’t want to ask. “Where?”

“Honduras. A place called Laguna de Brus.”

Tom slowed, checked his rearview mirror, and with a screech of tires, manipulating both the brakes and the gas, pulled a one-eighty.

“Are you crazy? What are you doing?”

“Going to the nearest airport.”

“Why?”

“Because someone who would kill police officers could sure as hell kill my two brothers.”

“You think someone found out about the hidden inheritance?”

“Absolutely.” He accelerated toward the vanishing point on the horizon. “Looks like we’re going to Honduras. Together.”

13

Philip Broadbent shifted his position, trying to get comfortable in the bottom of the dugout, arranging some of the softer bundles of gear for the fourth or fifth time to form a chair of sorts. The boat slid upriver between two silent walls of green vegetation, the engine humming, the prow cutting the smooth black water. It was like traveling through a hot green cave, echoing with the unholy screeches, hoots, and whistles of jungle animals. The mosquitoes formed a permanent whining cloud around their boat, trailing behind. The air was dense, muggy, sticky. It was like breathing mosquito soup.

Philip removed the pipe from his pocket, reamed out the dottle, rapped it on the side of the boat, and refilled it from the Dunhill can he had stored in one of the pockets of his Barbour safari khakis. He took his time lighting it, then blew a stream of smoke into the mosquito cloud, watching it cut a clear area in the whining mass, which instantly closed up as the smoke drifted away. The Mosquito Coast had lived up to its name, and even the deet that Philip slathered on his skin and clothes provided less than adequate protection. On top of that it was oily and smelled frightful, and it was probably leaching into his bloodstream and poisoning him to boot.

He muttered a curse and took another hit off the pipe.Father and his ridiculous tests.

He adjusted himself, unable to get comfortable. Hauser, carrying a Discman, came back from the prow of the dugout and eased himselfdown next to him. He smelled of cologne instead of bug juice, and he looked as cool and fresh as Philip felt hot and sticky. He removed the earphones to speak.

“Gonz has been picking up traces of Max’s passage all day. We’ll learn more when we get to Pito Solo tomorrow.”

“How can they follow a trace on a river?”

Hauser smiled. “It’s an art, Philip. A cut vine here, a landing place there, the mark of a barge pole on a submerged sandbar. The river is so sluggish that marks on the bottom persist for weeks.”

Philip sucked irritably on his pipe. He would endure this one last torture of his father’s and then he would be free. Free, finally, to live the life he wanted to live without that old bugger interfering, criticizing, doling out niggardly parcels of money like Scrooge. He loved his father and at one level felt bad about his cancer and his death, but that didn’t change his feelings about this scheme. His father had done many asinine things in his life, but this took the cake. It was vintage Maxwell Broadbent, this partingbeau geste.

He smoked and watched the four soldiers in the front of the boat gambling with a greasy pack of cards. The other boat with its complement of eight soldiers was fifty yards ahead of them, laying a foul trail of blue exhaust over the water. Gonz, the lead “tracker,” lay on his belly in the prow, staring down into the dark water, occasionally dipping a finger into the water to taste it.

Suddenly a shout went up from one of the soldiers in the front of their dugout. He had stood up and was pointing excitedly at something swimming in the water. Hauser winked at Philip and leapt to his feet, withdrawing the machete he kept strapped to his waist, and scrambled to the bow. The boat angled toward the swimming animal while Hauser positioned himself, legs apart, in the prow. As the boat drew alongside the now desperately swimming animal he leaned over and, with a sudden movement, slashed into the water with his machete, then reached down and pulled out an animal that looked like a two-foot-long rat. It had almost been decapitated by the blow, its head hanging by a flap of skin. It gave one convulsive jerk and then went still.

Philip watched with a vague sense of horror as Hauser tossed the dead animal toward him. It landed with a thud on the bottom, the head jouncing free, rolling to a stop at Philip’s feet, mouth open, yellow rat’s teeth gleaming, blood still draining out.

Hauser rinsed the machete in the river, stuck it back in his belt, and walked back to Philip, stepping over the dead animal. He grinned. “Ever eaten agouti?”

“No, and I’m not sure I care to begin.”

“Skinned, gutted, split, and roasted over the coals—it was one of Maxwell’s favorites. Tastes a bit like chicken.”

Philip said nothing. That’s what Hauser claimed about all the revolting bush meat they had been forced to eat—tastes like chicken.

“Oh!” said Hauser, looking at Philip’s shirt. “I beg your pardon.”

Philip glanced down. A single drop of fresh blood had struck his shirt and was now soaking into the material. Philip wiped at it, which only spread it. “I’d appreciate it if you were a little more careful when tossing around decapitated animals,” he said, dipping his handkerchief into the water and giving the spot a scrubbing.

“It’s so difficult to keep one’s hygiene in the jungle,” Hauser said.

Philip scrubbed a little more and then gave up. He wished Hauser would leave him in peace. The man was starting to give him the creeps.

Hauser slid a couple of CDs out of his pocket. “And now, to stave off the ever encroaching savagery surrounding us, would you care to hear some Bach, or some Beethoven?”

14

Tom Broadbent wallowed on an overstuffed sofa-chair in the “executive suite” in the Sheraton Royale de San Pedro Sula, examining a map of the country. Maxwell had flown with all his cargo to the town of Brus Laguna on the Mosquito Coast, at the mouth of the Rio Patuca. And then he had disappeared. They said he had gone upriver, which was the only route into the vast, mountainous, and wild interior of southern Honduras.

He followed the wandering blue line of the river on the map with his finger, through swamps and hills and high plateaus until it vanished in a web of tributaries pouring out of a rugged line of parallel mountain ranges. The map showed no roads or towns; it was truly a lost world.

Tom had discovered they were at least a week behind Philip and almost two weeks behind Vernon. He was deeply worried about his brothers. It took balls to kill two police officers, and do it so quickly and successfully. The killer was clearly a professional. His two brothers were surely next on the killer’s list.

Sally, wrapped in a towel, came out of the bath humming to herself and crossed their sitting room, her glossy wet hair spilling down her back. Tom followed her with his eyes as she disappeared into her bedroom. She was even taller than Sarah ...

He stepped down hard on that thought.

In ten minutes she was back out, dressed in lightweight khakis, a long-sleeved shirt, a canvas hat with mosquito netting rolled down around her face, and a pair of heavy gloves, all bought during a shopping expedition that morning.

“How do I look?” she asked, turning around.

“Like you’re in purdah.”

She rolled up the mosquito netting and took off the hat.

“That’s better.”

She tossed the hat and gloves on the bed. “I have to admit I’m very curious about this father of yours. He must’ve been a real eccentric.”

“He was.”

“What was he like? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Tom sighed. “When he walked into a room, every head turned. He radiated something—authority, power, assurance. I’m not sure what. People were awed by him, even if they had no idea who he was.”

“I know the type.”

“Wherever he went, whatever he did, journalists chased him around. There were sometimes paparazzi waiting outside the gate to our house. I mean, here we were going to school and the damn paparazzi are chasing us down the Old Santa Fe Trail like we’re Princess Diana or something. It was ridiculous.”

“What a burden for you.”

“It wasn’t always a burden. At times it was even fun. Father’s marriages were always big news, a time for head shaking and tongue clucking. He married extremely beautiful women no one had ever seen before—no models or actresses for him. My mother, before he met her, was a dental receptionist. He loved the attention. Once in a while, just for fun, he’d take a swing at some paparazzo and have to pay damages. He was proud of himself. He was like Onassis, larger than life.”

“What happened to your mother?”

“She died when I was four. Some rare and sudden form of meningitis. She was the only one of his wives he didn’t divorce—didn’t have enough time, I guess.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I hardly remember her, except, well, as feelings. Warm and loving, that sort of thing.”

She shook her head. “I still don’t get it. How could your father do this to his sons?”

Tom stared down at the map. “Everything he did and everything he owned had to be extraordinary. That applied to us, too. But we didn’t turn out like he wanted. Running off and burying himself with his money was his last gasp, trying to force us to do something that would ring down through history. Something that would make him proud.” He laughed bitterly. “If the press ever got wind of this, it would be incredible. Gigantic. A half-billion-dollar treasure, buried in a hidden tomb somewhere in Honduras. The whole world would be down here looking for it.”

“It must’ve been difficult having a father like that.”

“It was. I don’t know how many tennis matches I played when he left early because he didn’t want to see me lose. He was a ruthless chess player—but if he realized he was going to beat one of us, he’d quit the game. He couldn’t bear to see us lose, even to him. When the grades arrived he never said anything, but you could see the disappointment in his eyes. Anything less than straight A’s was such a catastrophe that he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it.”

“Did you ever get straight A’s?”

“Once. He laid his hand on my shoulder and gave me an affectionate squeeze. That was all. But it said volumes.”

“I’m sorry, how terrible.”

“Each of us found a refuge. I found mine first in fossil collecting—I wanted to be a paleontologist—and then in animals. They didn’t judge you. They didn’t ask you to be someone else. A horse accepts you for what you are.”

Tom fell silent. It was amazing to him how much it hurt to think back on his childhood, even now at thirty-three.

“I’m sorry,” said Sally, “I didn’t mean to pry.”

Tom waved his hand. “I don’t mean to tear him down. He was a good father in his own way. Maybe he loved us too much.”

“Well,” said Sally after a moment, standing up. “At the moment, we need to find ourselves a guide to take us up the Patuca River, and I have no idea where to start.” She picked up the phone book and began leafing through it. “I’ve never done this sort of thing before. I wonder if there’s a listing in here for ‘Adventure Travel’ or something.”

“I’ve a better idea. We need to find the local watering hole for foreign journalists. They’re the savviest travelers in the world.”

“Chalk one up to you.”

She bent over and pulled out a pair of pants and tossed them at him, followed by a shirt, a pair of socks, and a pair of lightweight hiking shoes. They all landed in a pile in front of him. “Now you can take off those macho cowboy boots.”

Tom scooped up his clothes and went into his room and put them on. They seemed to be mostly pockets. When he emerged, Sally eyed him sideways and said, “After a few days in the jungle, maybe you won’t look quite so silly.”

“Thanks.” Tom went to the phone and called the front desk. The journalists, it seemed, hung out in a bar called Los Charcos.

Tom was surprised to find Los Charcos not the cheap dive he imagined but an elegant, wood-paneled affair off the lobby of a fine old hotel. It was air-conditioned to just above Arctic conditions, and the place was filled with the aroma of fine cigars.

“Let me do the talking,” Sally said. “My Spanish is better than yours.”

“You’re better looking, too.”

Sally frowned. “I don’t find gender jokes very funny.”

They took seats at the bar.

“Hola”said Sally cheerfully to the bartender, a man with a heavy-lidded face. “I’m looking for the man from theNew York Times .”

“Mr. Sewell? I haven’t seen him since the hurricane, señorita.”

“How about the reporter for theWall Street Journal?”

“We have noWall Street Journal reporter here. We are but a poor country.”

“Well, what reporters do you have?”

“There is Roberto Rodriguez fromEl Diario .”

“No, no, I’m looking for an American. Someone who knows the country.”

“Would an Englishman suffice?”

“Fine.”

“Over there,” he murmured, pointing with his lips, “is Derek Dunn. He is writing a book.”

“What about?”

“Travel and adventure.”

“Has he written any other books? Give me a title.”

“Slow Waterwas his last book.”

Sally dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and headed toward Dunn. Tom followed.This is going to be good, he thought. Dunn was sitting by himself in a snug, working on a drink, a man with a shock of blond hair over a beefy red face. Sally halted, pointed, and exclaimed, “Say, you’re Derek Dunn, aren’t you?”

“I have been known to answer by that name, yes,” he said. His nose and cheeks were flushed a permanent pink.

“Oh, how exciting!Slow Water is one of myfavoritebooks! I loved it!”

Dunn rose, exposing a robust frame, trim and fit, dressed in worn khaki pants and a simple short-sleeved cotton shirt. He was a handsome man of the British Empire type.

“Thank you very much indeed,” he said. “And you are?”

“Sally Colorado.” She pumped his hand.

She’s already got him grinning like an idiot,thought Tom. He felt foolish in his new clothes that smelled of a menswear shop. Dunn, in contrast, looked like he had been to the ends of the earth and back.

“Won’t you join me for a drink?”

“It would be an honor,” cried Sally.

Dunn guided her into the banquette next to him.

“I’ll have what you’re having,” she said.

“Gin and tonic.” Dunn waved at the bartender and then glanced up at Tom. “You’re welcome to sit, too, you know.”

Tom took a seat, saying nothing. He was starting to lose his enthusiasm for this idea. He did not like the red-faced Mr. Dunn, who was looking very intently at Sally—and not just at her face.

The bartender came over. Dunn spoke in Spanish. “Gin and tonic for me and the lady. And—?” He glanced at Tom.

“Lemonade,” said Tom sourly.

“Y una limonada,”added Dunn, his tone conveying exactly what he thought of Tom’s choice of beverage.

“I’m so glad to have run into you!” Sally said. “What a coincidence!”

“So you readSlow Water ,” said Dunn, with a smile.

“One of the best travel books I’ve ever read.”

“It certainly was,” said Tom.

“You read it, too?” Dunn turned to him with an expectant look.

Tom noted that Dunn had already polished off half his drink.

“I certainly did read it,” said Tom. “I especially liked the part where you fell in the elephant shit. That was hilarious.”

Dunn paused. “Elephant shit?”

“Wasn’t there elephant shit in your book?”

“There are no elephants in Central America.”

“Oh. I must be mixing it up with another book. Beg your pardon.”

Tom saw Sally’s green eyes fixed on him. He couldn’t tell if she was angry or suppressing a laugh.

Dunn turned in his chair, placing his square back to Tom, devoting his attention to Sally. “You might be interested to know I’m working on a new book.”

“How exciting!”

“I’m calling itMosquitia Nights. It’s about the Mosquito Coast.”

“Oh, that’s just where we’re going!” Sally clapped her hands in excitement, like a girl. Tom took a sip, regretting his choice of drink. He was going to need something a little stronger to get through this. He should never have agreed to let Sally do the talking.

“There are more than five thousand square miles of swamps and highland rainforest in eastern Honduras that remain completely unexplored. Parts of it are not even mapped by air.”

“I had no idea!”

Tom shoved the lemonade aside and looked around for the waiter.

“My book chronicles a journey I took along the length of the Mosquito Coast, through the maze of lagoons that mark where the jungle meets the sea. I was the first white man to make the trip.”

“Incredible. How on earth did you do it?”

“Motorized dugout. The only mode of transportation in those parts besides foot travel.”

“When did you make this amazing journey?”

“About eight years ago.”

“Eight years?”

“I’ve had a bit of publisher trouble. You can’t rush a good book, you know.” He polished off the drink and waved his hand for another round. “It’s tough country down there.”

“Really?”

Dunn seemed to take this as his cue. He leaned back. “For starters, there are the usual mosquitoes, chiggers, ticks, blackfly, and botfly. They don’t kill you, but they can make life a trifle nasty. I had a botfly bite once, on my forehead. Felt like a mosquito at first. It began to swell and turn red. Hurt like the devil. A month later it erupted, and inch-long botfly maggots started squirming out and dropping to the ground. Once you’re bitten, the best thing to do is let it run its course. If you try to dig ’em out you only make a muck of it.”

“I sincerely hope the experience didn’t affect your brain,” said Tom.

Dunn ignored him. “Then there’s Chagas disease.”

“Chagas disease?”

“Trypanosoma cruzi.An insect carrying the disease bites you and shits at the same time. The parasite lives in the shit, and when you scratch the bite you infect yourself. You aren’t aware anything is wrong—until ten or twenty years later. First you notice your belly swelling up. Then you become short of breath, can’t swallow. Finally your heart swells up—and bursts. No known cure.”

“Lovely,” said Tom. He had finally got the waiter’s attention. “Whiskey. Make it a double.”

Dunn continued looking at Tom, a smile playing about his lips. “Are you familiar with the fer-de-lance?”

“Can’t say that I am.” Gruesome stories of the jungle, it seemed, were Derek Dunn’s stock in trade.

“The most poisonous snake known to man. Brown and yellow bugger; the locals call it abarba amarilla. When young they live in trees and branches. Drop down on you when disturbed. The bite stops your heart in thirty seconds. Then there’s the bushmaster, the largest poisonous snake in the world. Twelve feet long and as thick as your thigh. Not nearly as deadly as the fer-de-lance—with a bushmaster bite, you might live, say, twenty minutes.”

Dunn chuckled and took another gulp.

Sally murmured something about how dreadful it sounded.

“Naturally you’ve heard of toothpick fish? This isn’t a story for the ladies.” Dunn glanced over at Tom, winked.

“Do tell,” said Tom. “Sally’s no stranger to crudity.”

Sally flashed him a look.

“Lives in the rivers around here. Let’s say you go for a nice morning dip. The toothpick fish swims right up your Johnson, then flares out a set of spines and anchors itself in your urethra.”

Tom’s drink paused halfway to his mouth.

“Blocks the urethra. If you don’t find a surgeon damn quick, your bladder bursts.”

“Surgeon?” Tom said weakly.

Dunn leaned back. “That’s right.”

Tom’s throat had gone dry. “What kind of surgery?”

“Amputation.”

The drink finally made it to Tom’s mouth, where he took a slug, and then another.

Dunn laughed loudly. “I’m sure you’ve heard all about the piranhas, leishmaniasis, electric eels, anacondas, and that sort of thing.” Dunn waved his hand disparagingly. “The dangers of those are greatly exaggerated. The piranhas only go after you if you’re bleeding, and anacondas are rare this far north and don’t eat people. There is one advantage to the Honduran swamps: no leeches. Watch out for the monkey spiders, though—”

“So sorry, but we’ll have to leave the monkey spiders for another day,” said Tom, looking at his watch. He realized that Mr. Derek Dunn had his hand under the table, resting on Sally’s knee.

“Not having second thoughts are you, old chap? This is not a country for pantywaists.”

“Not at all,” said Tom. “It’s just that I’d rather hear about your encounter with the toothpick fish.”

Derek Dunn stared at Tom unsmiling. “That’s a rather stale joke, my friend.”

“Well!” said Sally brightly. “Did you make the trip alone? We’ve been looking for a guide and wondered if you could recommend someone.”

“Where are you chaps headed?”

“Brus Laguna.”

“Youare getting off the tourist trail.” Suddenly his eyes narrowed. “You’re not a writer, are you?”

Sally laughed. “Oh no, I’m an archaeologist, and he’s a horse vet. But we’re just here as tourists. We like to have adventures.”

“An archaeologist? There aren’t many ruins around here. You can’t build in a swamp. And no civilized people would ever live in those interior mountains. Up there in the Sierra Azul there’s no denser rainforest on earth, and the hills are so steep you can hardly crawl up and down them. There isn’t a flat place to pitch a tent for a hundred miles. You’ve got to cut your way through, and in a hard day of travel you’re lucky to make a mile. A trail macheted through there will knit itself up so tight in a week you’d never know it existed. If it’s ruins you’re after, Sally, why don’t you head over to Copán? Perhaps I could tell you more about it over dinner.”

The hand was still on her knee, squeezing and rubbing.

“Right,” said Sally. “Maybe. Getting back to the guide. Do you have any recommendations?”

“Guide? Oh yes. The man for you is Don Orlando Ocotal. A Tawahka Indian. Absolutely reliable. Won’t cheat you like the others. Knows the country like the back of his hand. He was with me on my last trip.”

“How do we find him?”

“He lives up the Patuca River, a place called Pito Solo, the last real settlement on the river before the big interior swamps begin. That’s forty, maybe fifty miles upriver from Brus. Stay in the main channel of the river or you’ll never get out alive. This time of year the forests are flooded, and there’re a zillion side channels going every which way. That country is virtually unexplored, from the swamps all the way past the Sierra Azul down to the Guayambré River. Forty thousand square kilometers of terra incognita.”

“We haven’t really decided where we’re going.”

“Don Orlando. He’s your man.” Then Derek Dunn revolved in his seat and faced Tom with his big sweaty face. “Say, I’m a bit short of funds—royalty check in the mail and all that. Perhaps you could spot us another round, what say?”

15

On the computer screen nestled discreetly among the cherrywood paneling in his office, Lewis Skiba watched the progress of Lampe-Denison Pharmaceuticals on the New York Stock Exchange. Investors had been hammering the stock all day, and it was now trading at close to ten. Even as he watched, the stock ticked down another eighth of a point to trade at ten even.

Skiba did not want to see his company go into single digits. He flicked off the screen. His eyes flickered to the wood panel that hid the Macallan, but it was too soon for that. Too soon. He needed a clear head for the call.

Rumors were circulating that Phloxatane was in trouble at the FDA. The short sellers were all over the stock, like maggots on a corpse. Two hundred million dollars of R&D had gone into that drug. Lampe had worked with the best medical researchers and scientists at three Ivy League universities. The double-blind tests had been well conceived, the data massaged and patted into the best possible shape. Their friends at the FDA had been wined and dined. But nothing in the end would save Phloxatane. No matter which way you cut the data, Phloxatane was a failure. And here he was sitting on six million shares of Lampe stock he couldn’t unload—no one had forgotten what happened to Martha Stewart—as well as two million paper options so far out of the money that they would be more useful as toilet tissue in his Carrara marble bathroom.

More than anything else in this world, Skiba loathed short sellers. They were the vultures, the maggots, the carrion flies of the market. He would give anything to see Lampe’s stock turn against them and start rising; he would love to see their panic as they were forced to cover their positions. He would love to think of all the margin calls they would be receiving. It would be a beautiful thing. And when he got his hands on the Codex and made the announcement, this beautiful thing would happen. It would burn the short sellers so badly that it would be months, maybe years, before they came back.

A soft trill came from the phone on his desk. He glanced at his watch. The satellite call was right on time. He really hated talking to Hauser; he loathed the man and his principles. But he had to deal with him. Hauser had insisted on “keeping him in the loop”; even though Skiba was usually a hands-on CEO, he had hesitated. Some things were better left in the dark. But in the end he agreed, if only to keep Hauser from doing something stupid or illegal. When he got the Codex, he wanted it clean.

He picked up the receiver.

“Skiba here.”

The voice of Hauser, made Donald-Duckish by the scrambler, came over the line. As usual, the PI wasted no time on pleasantries.

“Maxwell Broadbent went up the Patuca River with a bunch of highland Indians. We’re on his track. We don’t know yet where he was headed, but my guess is somewhere in the interior mountains.”

“Any problems?”

“One of the sons, Vernon, jumped the gun and got ahead of us upriver. It seems the jungle might take care of that problem for us, though.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He hired two drunken guides from Puerto Lempira, and they’ve gotten themselves lost in Meambar Swamp. It seems unlikely they will, ah, ever see sunshine again.”

Skiba swallowed. This was a lot more information than he needed to know. “Look, Mr. Hauser, just stick to the facts and leave the opining to others.”

“We had a minor setback with the other one, Tom. He’s got a woman with him, a graduate student in ethnopharmacology from Yale.”

“Ethnopharmacology? She knows about the Codex?”

“You bet your ass she does.”

Skiba winced. “That’s rather inconvenient.”

“Yeah, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”

“Look, Mr. Hauser,” he said briskly, “I’ll leave it all in your capable hands. I’ve got a meeting to go to.”

“Those people will have to be taken care of.”

Skiba didn’t like the way the conversation kept doglegging back to that subject. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, and I don’t want to know. I’m content to let you handle the details.”

There was a small chuckle at the far end. “Skiba, how many people are dying in Africa right now because you insist on charging twenty-three thousand dollars a year for that new TB drug that costs you a hundred and ten dollars to make? That’s all I’m talking about. When I say ‘take care of them,’ all I mean is adding a few more numbers to your total.”

“Damn you, Hauser, that’s outrageous—” Skiba broke off and swallowed. He was just letting Hauser bait him. This was talk, nothing more.

“This is beautiful, Skiba. You want your Codex nice and clean and legal, you don’t want anyone popping up to claim ownership, and you don’t want anyone hurt. Don’t worry, no white people will be killed without your permission.”

“You listen to me. I will not countenance the killing of anyone, white or nonwhite. This reckless talk has got to stop.” Skiba could feel the sweat trickling down his neck. How had he allowed Hauser to take control of the situation like this? His hand fumbled with the key. The drawer slid open.

“I understand,” said Hauser. “Like I said—”

“I’ve got a meeting.” Skiba ended the connection, his heart pounding. Hauser was down there, out of control, with no supervision, liable to do anything. The man was a psychopath. He bit down, chewed, washed the bitterness down with a slug of Macallan, and sat back, breathing deeply. The fire was burning merrily in the fireplace. The talk of killing made him feel agitated, sick to his stomach. He gazed into the flames, seeking their soothing influence. Hauser had promised to ask his permission, and Skiba would never give it. Neither the company nor even his own personal fortune was worth taking that step. His gaze wandered over to the row of silver photographs on his desk: his three children, gazing back at him with towheaded grins. He regulated his breathing. Hauser was full of tough talk, but it was just that: talk. Nobody was going to get killed. Hauser would retrieve the Codex, Lampe would recover, and in two or three years he would be the toast of Wall Street for pulling his company back from the brink.

Skiba glanced at his watch: The markets had closed. With a feeling of anxiety and reluctance he flicked on the computer screen. Late bargain hunting had pushed the stock up in the last twenty minutes. It had closed at ten and a half.

Skiba felt a wisp of relief. It hadn’t been such a bad day after all.

16

Sally looked skeptically at the junk heap of a plane being rolled out of the shabby hangar by two workers.

“Maybe we should have checked out the plane before we bought tickets,” Tom said to her.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” said Sally, as if trying to convince herself.

The pilot, a lean expatriate American with a torn T-shirt, cutoffs, two long braids, and a beard, came sauntering over and introduced himself as John. Tom eyed him and then cast a sour look toward the plane.

“I know, I know. Looks like shit,” John said with a grin, giving the plane’s fuselage a rap with his knuckles, which made it rattle. “What matters is what’s under the hood. I do all my own maintenance.”

“You don’t know how that reassures me,” said Tom.

“So you’re headed for Brus?”

“That’s right.”

John squinted at the luggage. “Going tarpon fishing?”

“No.”

“Best tarpon fishing in the world. Not much else, though.” John opened a compartment in the side of the plane and began shoving in their luggage with his skinny arms. “So what are you doing there?”

“We’re not sure,” Sally said quickly. The less said about what they were doing, the better. No sense in starting a treasure stampede upriver.

The pilot shoved the last bag in, gave it a few blows to make it fit,and slammed the hatch with a great noise of cheap tin. It took three tries before it latched. “Where you staying in Brus?”

“Haven’t decided that either.”

“Nothing like planning ahead,” said John. “Anyway, there’s only one place and that’s La Perla.”

“How many stars does Michelin give it?”

John gave a little laugh. He opened the passenger hatch and swung down the steps, and they climbed aboard. John followed, and as he entered Tom detected what he thought was a faint whiff of marijuana.Great.

“How long have you been flying?” Tom asked.

“Twenty years.”

“Ever had an accident?”

“Once. Hit a pig in Paradise. Jokers hadn’t mowed the strip, and the damn thing was sleeping in the tall grass. And he was abig pig.”

“Are you instrument rated?”

“Let’s just say I know how to use my instruments. There isn’t much call for official ratings down here, not for bush flights.”

“Have you filed a flight plan?”

John shook his head. “All I have to do is follow the coast.”

The plane took off. It was a splendid day. Sally felt a thrill as the plane banked and the sunlight shimmered off the Caribbean. They turned to follow the coastline, low and flat with many lagoons and offshore islands that looked like green pieces of jungle that had broken off the mainland and were drifting out to sea. Sally could see where roads ran up into the interior, bordered by irregular fields or ragged patches where the trees had recently been clear-cut. Deep in the interior, she could see a ragged line of blue mountains, their tops sprinkled in clouds.

Sally glanced at Tom. The sun had bleached his light brown hair, streaking it with gold, and he had a lean, tall, wiry, cowboy sort of way of moving that she liked. She wondered how someone could just kiss a hundred million dollars good-bye. That had impressed her more than anything else. She had lived long enough to realize that people who had money cared a lot more about it than people who had never had it.

Tom turned and glanced at her, and she quickly smiled and looked back out the window. As the coast ran farther eastward, the landscape below became wilder, the lagoons larger and more intricate. Finally the largest lagoon so far came into view, dotted with hundreds of tiny islands. A large river fed into the far end. As they banked to make their approach, Sally could see a town where the river joined the lagoon, a cluster of shining tin roofs surrounded by a hodgepodge of irregular fields lying on the landscape like torn bits of rags. The pilot circled once and aimed down toward a field, which as they approached resolved into a grass landing strip. He made his descent, but Sally thought it was awfully fast. Closer and closer they got to the ground, but the plane only seemed to accelerate. She gripped the armrests. The runway flashed underneath them, but still the plane did not drop. She watched the wall of jungle foliage at the far end approach at high speed.

“Jesus Christ,” Sally yelled, “you’re overshooting the runway!”

The plane made a quick easy rise, and the jungle came skimming past them, the treetops no more than fifteen feet below the plane. As they climbed, Sally heard John’s dry laugh in her earphones. “Relax, Sal, just buzzing to clear the airstrip. I learned my lesson.”

As the plane banked and came around again to land, Sally sat back, mopping her brow. “Nice of you to warn us.”

“Itold you about the pig, man.”

They left their luggage at La Perla, a cinderblock barracks that called itself a hotel, and then went down to the river to see about renting a boat. They wandered down through the muddy lanes of Brus. It was afternoon, and the heat had rendered the air dead and listless. All was quiet, and steaming puddles of water lay on the ground. The sweat was dripping out of her sleeves, running down her back, and between her breasts. All sensible people were having a siesta, it seemed to Sally.

They found the river at the far end of town. It lay between steep earthen banks, about two hundred yards across and the color of mahogany. The river curved away between two thick walls of jungle, and it smelled of mud. The thick water moved sluggishly, the surfacedimpled with whorls and eddies. Here and there a green leaf or a twig slowly made its way downstream. A trail made of logs descended the steep embankment, ending at a platform of bamboo sticks constructed over the water, forming a rickety dock. Four dugout canoes were tied up. They were each about thirty feet long and about four feet across, hewn from a single gigantic tree, tapering to a spearlike prow in front. The stern had been cut off flat and had a mounted board designed to accommodate a small outboard engine. Boards were laid athwartship fore and aft for seats.

They scrambled down the embankment to take a closer look. She noticed that three of the dugouts had six-horsepower Evinrude engines bolted to the sterns. The fourth, longer and heavier, sported an eighteen-horse.

“There’s the local hotrod,” said Sally, pointing. “That’s the one for us.”

Tom looked around. The place seemed deserted.

“There’s somebody.” Sally pointed to an open-sided bamboo shed fifty yards down the riverbank. A small fire smoked next to a pile of empty tin cans. A hammock had been strung between two trees in a spot of shade and inside the hammock a man slept.

Sally advanced.“Hola,” she said.

After a moment the man opened one eye.“Si?”

“We want to talk to someone about renting a boat.” She spoke in Spanish.

With a flurry of grunts and mutterings of displeasure he sat up in the hammock, scratched his head, and grinned. “I speak good American. We talk American. Someday I go to America.”

“That’s good. We’re going to Pito Solo,” said Tom.

He nodded, yawned, scratched. “Okay. I take you.”

“We’d like to rent the big boat. The one with the eighteen-horsepower engine.”

He shook his head. “That stupid boat.”

“We don’t care if the boat is stupid,” said Tom. “That’s the one we want.”

“I take you in my boat. That stupid boat belong to army mans.” He held out his hand. “Got candy?”

Sally removed a bag she had bought earlier, expressly for that purpose.

The man’s face lit up in a smile. He put a withered hand into it, sorted through the candies, selected five or six, unwrapped them, and put them all in his mouth at once. They formed a great lump in his cheek.“Bueno,” he said in a muffled voice.

“We’d like to leave tomorrow morning,” Tom said. “How long is the journey?”

“Three days.”

“Threedays? I thought it was forty or fifty miles.”

“Water going down. Maybe get stuck. Have to pole. Much wading. Cannot use engine.”

“Wading?” Tom asked. “What about that toothpick fish?”

The man looked at him blankly.

“Don’t worry, Tom,” Sally said, “you can wear tight underwear.”

“Ah,si! The candiru!” The man laughed. “That favorite gringo story. Candiru. I swim in river every day and I still got mychuc-chic . It working fine!” He swayed his hips licentiously, winking at Sally.

“Spare me,” said Sally.

“So this fish is a hoax?” Tom asked.

“No, it’s real! But you gotpiss in river first. Candiru smell piss in river, swim up, andchop! If you no piss when you swim, you got no problem!”

“Anyone else come through here lately? Any gringos, I mean.”

“Si.We very busy. Last month, white man come with many boxes and Indians from the mountains.”

“What Indians?” Tom asked excitedly.

“Naked mountain Indians.” He spat.

“Where did he get his boats?”

“He bring many new dugouts from La Ceiba.”

“And did the boats return?”

The man smiled, rubbed his fingers together in the universal gesture, and held out his hand. Sally put a five-dollar bill in it.

“Boats not return. Mans go upriver, never come back.”

“Anyone else come through?”

“Si.Then last week Jesus Christ came through with drunken guides from Puerto Lempira.”

“Jesus Christ?” Sally asked.

“Yes, Jesus Christ with long hair, beard, robes, and sandals.”

“That’s got to be Vernon,” said Tom, with a smile. “Was he with anyone else?”

“Yes. He with St. Peter.”

Tom rolled his eyes. “Any others?”

“Si.Then come two gringos with twelve soldiers in two dugouts also from La Ceiba.”

“What did the gringos look like?”

“One very tall, smoke pipe, angry. Other one shorter with four gold rings.”

“Philip,” said Tom.

They quickly made a deal for a boat to Pito Solo, and Tom gave him a ten-dollar advance. “We leave at first light tomorrow.”

“Bueno!I be ready!”

As they came back from the river to the cinderblock barracks that passed as the local hotel, they were surprised to see a jeep parked there with an army officer and two soldiers. Nearby a crowd of children, jostling and whispering, waited for something to happen. The landlady stood to one side, her hands clasped, her face pale with fright.

“I don’t like the look of this,” said Sally.

The officer stepped forward, a man with a very straight back, a spotless uniform, and little polished boots. He gave a crisp bow. “Do I have the honor of greeting Señor Tom Broadbent and Señorita Sally Colorado? I am Lieutenant Vespán.” He took their hands, one at a time, then stepped back. The wind shifted, and Tom suddenly smelled a mixture of Old Spice, cigars, and rum.

“What’s the problem?” said Sally.

The man smiled broadly, exposing a row of silver teeth. “I am devastated to inform you that you are under arrest.”

17

Tom stared at the diminutive military officer. A little dog, which had taken a dislike to one of the soldiers, crouched in front of him, baring his teeth and yapping. The officer kicked it away with a dainty boot, and the soldiers laughed.

“On what charge?” Tom asked.

“We will discuss that back in San Pedro Sula. Now, if you will please come with me.”

There was an awkward silence. Sally said, “No.”

“Señorita, let us not make difficulty.”

“I’m not creating any difficulties. I’m just not going. You can’t force me.”

“Sally,” Tom said, “may I point out these men have guns?”

“Good. Let them shoot me and then explain it to the U.S. government.” She spread her arms out to make a target.

“Señorita, I pray you.”

The two soldiers with him shifted nervously.

“Go ahead, make my day!”

The officer nodded at his two men, and they set their guns down, briskly stepped forward, and seized Sally. She yelled and struggled.

Tom took a step forward. “Get your hands off her.”

The two men hoisted her up and began carrying her, struggling, to the jeep. Tom took a swing at the first man and sent him flying. Sally wrenched free while Tom tackled the other man.

The next thing Tom knew he was lying on his back, looking up into the hot blue sky. The officer stood over him, red faced and angry. Tom could feel a throbbing sensation at the base of his skull where the man had struck him with the butt of his gun.

The soldiers pulled him roughly to his feet. Sally had stopped struggling and looked pale.

“Macho bastards,” she said. “We’re going to report your assault to the American Embassy.”

The colonel shook his head sadly, as if at the folly of it all. “Now, may we please go peacefully?”

They allowed themselves to be taken to the jeep. The colonel shoved Tom into the backseat and pushed Sally in next to him. Their backpacks and bags had already been collected from the hotel and were piled in the back. The jeep started down the road to the airstrip. There, a shabby military helicopter was sitting on the grass. A metal panel on the side of the helicopter was off, and a man with a wrench was fiddling with the engine. The jeep came sliding to a stop.

“What are you doing?” the colonel asked sharply in Spanish.

“I am sorry, Teniente, but there is a small problem.”

“What problem?”

“We need a part.”

“Can you fly without it?”

“No, Teniente.”

“Mary whore of Jesus! How many times does this helicopter have to break down?”

“Shall I radio for them to send a plane with the part?”

“By the balls of Joseph! Yes, you deficient, radio for the part!”

The pilot climbed into the chopper, radioed, and then came out. “It will be coming tomorrow morning, Teniente. That is the earliest.”

The lieutenant locked them in a wooden shed at the airstrip and put the two soldiers outside to guard them. After the door clapped shut, Tom sat down on an empty fifty-five-gallon drum and held his aching head.

“How are you feeling?” Sally asked.

“Like my head is a brass gong that was just rung.”

“That was a nasty blow he gave you.”

Tom nodded.

There was a rattle, and the door was flung open again. The lieutenant stood aside while one of the soldiers tossed in their sleeping bags and a flashlight. “I truly regret the inconvenience.”

“You’ll truly regret the inconvenience when I report you,” Sally said.

The lieutenant ignored this. “May I advise you not to do anything foolish. It would be disappointing if someone were shot.”

Sally said, “You wouldn’t dare shoot us, you tinhorn Nazi.”

The lieutenant’s teeth glinted silvery yellow in the feeble light. “Accidents have been known to occur, especially to Americans who come to La Mosquitia unprepared for the rigors of the jungle.”

He backed out of the door, and the soldier slammed it. Tom could hear the muffled voice of the lieutenant telling the soldiers that if they fell asleep or drank on the job he would personally cut their testicles off, dry them, and hang them up as door knockers.

“Damn Nazis,” said Sally. “Thanks for defending me back there.”

“Didn’t do much good.”

“Did he hit you hard?” She looked at his head. “That’s a nasty lump.”

“I’m fine.”

Sally sat down next to him. He felt the warmth of her presence. He looked at her and could see her faint profile, just outlined in the semidarkness of the shed. She looked at him. They were so close that he could feel the warmth of her face on his, see the curl of her lip, the faint dimple on her cheek, the scattering of freckles on her nose. She still smelled of peppermint. Without even thinking of what he was doing, he leaned forward, his lips just brushing hers. For a moment there was stillness, and then she sharply pulled away. “That’snot a good idea.”

What the hell was he thinking?Tom pulled away, angry and humiliated.

The awkward moment was interrupted by a sudden banging at the door. “Dinner,” cried one of the soldiers. The door opened briefly, letting in light, then slammed shut. He heard the soldier relock the padlock.

Tom shined the flashlight over and picked up the tray. Dinner consisted of two warm Pepsis, some bean tortillas, and a heap of tepid rice. Neither of them felt like eating. For a moment they sat there in the darkness. The aching in Tom’s head subsided, and as it did he began to get mad. The soldiers had no right. He and Sally had done nothing wrong. He felt that their phony arrest had probably been engineered by the nameless enemy who had killed Barnaby and Fenton. His brothers were in even more danger than he thought.

“Give me the flashlight.”

He shined it around. The shed couldn’t have been more shoddily built, just a post-and-beam frame with boards nailed over it and a tin roof. An idea began to take shape—a plan of escape.

18

At three o’clock that morning they took their places, Sally by the door and Tom braced at the back wall. He whispered a three-count and they both kicked simultaneously, Sally’s assault on the door masking the sound of Tom’s kick to the boards on the back wall. The combined blows sounded like one, ringing loudly in the confined space. The shabby board popped off, just as Tom hoped.

Dogs began to bark in the village, and one of the soldiers cursed. “What are you doing?”

“I have to go to the bathroom!” Sally cried.

“No, no, you must go in there.”

Tom whispered the countdown again,one, two, three, kick. Sally gave the door another blow while he kicked out a second board.

“Stop!” said the soldier.

“But I have to go,cabrón!”

“Señorita, I am sorry, but you must take care of it in there. I am under orders not to open the door.”

One, two, three, kick!

The third board popped off. The opening was now big enough to squeeze through. The dogs in town were barking hysterically.

“One more kick and I call theteniente!”

“But I have to go!”

“There is nothing I can do.”

“You soldiers are barbarians.”

“It is our orders, señorita.”

“That’s just what Hitler’s soldiers said.”

“Sally, let’s go,” hissed Tom, gesturing to her in the dark.

“Hitler was not such a bad man, señorita. He made the trains run on time.”

“That was Mussolini, you idiot. You two will end up on the gallows, and good riddance.”

“Sally!” Tom called.

Sally came back. “Did you hear what those Nazis just said?”

He pushed her through the hole and handed out their sleeping bags. They ran at a crouch down the jungle track toward the town. The town had no electricity, but the sky was clear and moonlight bathed the empty streets. The dogs were already barking, and they were able to pass through without creating a further alarm. Despite the noise nobody was stirring.

These people have learned to mind their own business,Tom thought.

In five minutes they were down by the boats. Tom flashed the light over the army dugout, the one with the eighteen-horse engine. It was in good order, with two large plastic tanks of gasoline, both full. He began untying the prow. Suddenly he heard a voice, speaking low, from the darkness.

“You no want that boat.”

It was the man they had hired earlier that day.

“We sure as hell do,” hissed Tom.

“Let stupid army mans take that boat. Water going down. At every bend in river they get stuck. You take my boat. You no get stuck. That way you escape.” He leapt like a cat onto the dock and untied a slender dugout with a six-horsepower engine. “Get in.”

“Are you coming with us?” Sally asked.

“No. I tell stupid army mans you rob me.” He started unhooking the gas tanks from the army boat and loading them into the back of their dugout canoe. He also gave them the gas tank from the other boat. Tom and Sally climbed in. Tom fished in his pocket and offered the man some money.

“Not now. If they search me and find money, I get shot.”

“How can we pay you?” Tom asked.

“You pay me million dollar later. My name Manuel Waono. I always here.”

“Wait a minute. A million dollars?”

“You rich American, you easy pay me million dollar. I, Manuel Waono, save your life. You go now. Fast.”

“How do we find Pito Solo?”

“Last village on river.”

“But how do we know—”

The Indian wasn’t interested in making any more explanations. He pushed them off with a big bare foot, and the boat slid into the blackness.

Tom lowered the engine into thewater, primed it, choked it, gave it a pull. Instantly it roared into life. In the silence, the sound was high pitched and loud.

“Go!” said Manuel from shore.

Tom threw the boat into forward. He turned the throttle as far as it would go, and the tinny engine whined and shuddered. The long wooden canoe began to move through the water. Tom steered while Sally stood in the bow, probing the river ahead with the flashlight.

Not a minute later, back at the dock, Manuel began shouting in Spanish: “Help! I am robbed! My boat, they stole my boat!”

“Christ, he didn’t wait long,” Tom muttered.

Soon a cacophony of excited voices came drifting toward them over the dark river. Then the bright light of a gas lantern came bobbing down the embankment, along with flashlights, illuminating a knot of people gathering on the makeshift dock. There was some angry and confused shouting and then a sudden hush. A voice rang out in English: the voice of Lieutenant Vespán. “Turn around or I order my men to shoot, please!”

“He’s bullshitting,” said Sally.

Tom didn’t feel quite so sure.

“Do not think I am joking!” theteniente shouted.

“He’ll never shoot,” said Sally.

“One ... two ...”

“It’s a crock,” said Sally.

“Three ...”

There was a silence.

“What did I tell you?”

There was a sudden burst of automatic-weapons fire coming across the water, shockingly loud and close.

“Shit!” Tom yelled, throwing himself down. As the boat began to yaw, he quickly reached up with one hand and steadied the engine handle.

Sally was still standing in the prow, unconcerned. “Tom, they’re shooting into the air. They’re not going to risk hitting us. We’re Americans.”

There was a second burst of gunfire. This time Tom distinctly heard the slap of bullets hitting the water around them. Instantly Sally landed on the floor of the dugout next to him. “Jesus Christ, theyare shooting at us!” she cried.

Tom reached up and shoved the tiller sideways, sending the dugout into a sharp evasive maneuver. There were two more short bursts of gunfire. This time he heard the whine of bullets overhead and to the left, like bees. They were evidently aiming for the sound of the engine, raking the water back and forth with their automatic weapons. And they were most definitely shooting to kill.

He steered the boat on a zigzag course, trying to throw the shooters off their aim. At each lull, Sally raised her head and shined the light ahead so they could see where they were going. They would be safe, at least for the moment, once they got around the bend in the river.

There was another burst, and this time several rounds nicked the gunwale, showering them with splinters.

“Shit!”

“We will come and get you!” rose up the voice of the lieutenant, fainter now. “We will find you, and then you will be very sorry for the very short remainder of your very miserable lives.”

Tom counted to twenty and risked another look ahead. Slowly the boat came around the bend, out of the line of fire. Tom steered as close to the wall of vegetation as he dared. As they went around the bend, the lights at the little landing flickered through the leaves and then were gone.

They had made it.

There was another halfhearted burst of gunfire. Tom heard a snipping and cracking in the jungle to their left as the bullets were stopped by the trees. The sounds echoed away and the river fell silent.

Tom helped Sally up. Her face looked white, almost ghostly, in the dim light. He shined the flashlight around. Two walls of trees rose up on either side of the dark river. A single star burned for a moment in a patch of exposed sky, then blinked and flickered through the canopy as they moved. The little engine whined away. For now they were alone on the river. The dark, humid night enfolded them.

Tom took Sally’s hand. He found it was shaking, and then he realized his own hand was shaking, too. The soldiers had shot at them, trying to kill them. He had seen it a million times in the movies, but to actually be shot at was something else entirely.

The moon was setting behind the wall of jungle, and darkness suffocated the river. Tom flicked on the flashlight to see what lay ahead, guiding the boat around snags and riffles. A growing cloud of mosquitoes whined around them. They seemed to be sweeping up thousands as they traveled.

“I don’t suppose you have a can of bug repellent in one of those pockets of yours?” Tom asked.

“As a matter of fact, I did manage to snag my fanny pack in the jeep. I shoved it in my pants.” She fished the small pack out of an enormous pocket on her thigh and unzipped it. She began rummaging through, pulling out a miscellany of things—a bottle of water-purification tablets, some packs of waterproof matches, a roll of hundred-dollar bills, a map, a chocolate bar, a passport, some useless credit cards.

“I’m not even sure what’s in here.”

She began sorting through the jumble of items while Tom held the flashlight. There was no bottle of bug stuff. She swore and began putting everything back. As she did so, a photograph fell out. Tom shined the light on it. It showed a strikingly handsome young man with dark eyebrows and a chiseled chin. The grave expression that furrowed his dark eyebrows, the firm full set of his lips, the tweed jacket, and the way he tilted his head all showed him to be a man who took himself very seriously indeed.

“Who’s that?” Tom asked.

“Oh,” said Sally. “That’s Professor Clyve.”

“That’s Clyve? Why, he’s so young! I imagined him to be some dotty old man in a cardigan puffing on a pipe.”

“He wouldn’t be happy to hear you say that. He’s the youngest full professor in the history of the department. He entered Stanford at sixteen, graduated at nineteen, and had his Ph.D. by the time he was twenty-two. He’s a true genius.” She carefully tucked the photo back into her pocket.

“Why are you carrying around a photo of your professor?”

“Why,” said Sally lightly, “we’re engaged. Didn’t I tell you?”

“No.”

Sally looked at him curiously. “You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

“Of course not.” Tom felt his face flushing and hoped the darkness would hide it. He was aware she was glaring at him in the dim light.

“You seemed surprised.”

“Well, I was. After all, you’re not wearing an engagement ring.”

“Professor Clyve doesn’t believe in those bourgeois conventions.”

“And it was okay with him that you just come on this trip with me—?” Tom broke off, realizing he had said exactly the wrong thing.

“You think I have to getpermission from ‘my man’ to go on a trip? Or are you somehow implying that I’m not to be trusted sexually?” She tilted her head, looking at him with narrowed eyes.

Tom looked away. “Sorry I asked.”

“So am I. Somehow I thought you were more enlightened than that.”

Tom busied himself driving the boat, hiding his embarrassment and confusion. The river was silent; the swampy night heat flowed past them. A bird cried in the darkness. In the silence that followed, Tom heard a noise.

Tom immediately switched off the engine, his heart pounding. The sound came again, the sputter of an outboard starter being pulled. A hush fell over the river. The boat coasted.

“They found some gas. They’re coming after us.”

The boat was starting to drift back down with the current. Tom unshipped a pole from the bottom of the boat and stuck it in the water. The boat swung a little to the current and steadied. Holding the boat still in the current, they listened. There was another sputter and then a roar. The roar subsided into a hum. There could be no doubt: It was the sound of an outboard.

Tom went to restart their engine.

“Don’t,” said Sally. “They’ll hear it.”

“We can’t outpole them.”

“We can’t outrace them either. They’ll be on us in five minutes with that eighteen-horse.” Sally flashed the light along the wall of jungle on either side of the water. The water extended into the trees and spread out, drowning the jungle. “We can hide instead.”

Tom poled the dugout toward the edge of the flooded forest. There was a small opening—a narrow lane of water that looked like it might have been a stream in drier times. He poled up it, and the boat promptly bumped into something: a sunken log.

“Out,” Tom said.

The water was only a foot deep, but underneath it was another two feet of mud, which they sank into with a flurry of bubbles. A foul stench of marsh gas rose up. The back of the boat was still sticking out into the river, where it would be instantly spotted.

“Lift and push.”

They struggled to get the nose of the boat up on the log and then, heaving together, pushed the boat across. Then they scrambled over it themselves and climbed back in. The sound of the Evinrude grew louder. The soldiers’ boat was coming up the river fast.

Sally picked up the second pole, and they both poled forward, deeper into the flooded forest. Tom switched off the flashlight, and a moment later a powerful light came blinking through the trees.

“We’re still too close,” said Tom. “They’ll see us.” He tried to pole, but the pole sank into the muck and stuck. He jerked it out and laid it in the bottom of the boat, grabbing some hanging vines instead and using them to pull the boat deeper into the forest, halfway into a thicket of ferns and bushes. The Evinrude was almost on them. The spotlight flashed through the forest just as Tom grabbed Sally and pulled her down to the bottom of the dugout, and they lay side by side, his arm around her. Tom prayed that the soldiers wouldn’t see their engine.

The sound of the motorboat grew very loud. The boat had slowed down, and the spotlight was probing the forest where they were hidden. Tom could hear the crackle of a walkie-talkie, the murmur of voices. The spotlight lit up the jungle around them like a movie set—and then slowly moved on. Blessed darkness returned. The sound of the engine passed and grew fainter.

Tom sat up in time to see the flash of the spotlight in the forest up ahead as the boat went around a bend. “They’re gone,” he said.

Sally sat up, brushing her tangled hair out of her face. The mosquitoes had gathered around them in a thick, whining cloud. Tom could feel them everywhere, in his hair, crawling into his ears, trying to get up his nose, crawling down his neck. Each blow killed a dozen, instantly replaced. When he tried to breathe, he breathed mosquitoes.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Sally said, slapping.

Tom began pulling dry twigs off the bushes around them.

“What are you doing?”

“Building a fire.”

“Where?”

“You’ll see.” When he’d collected a pile of twigs, he leaned over the side and scooped up some mud from the swamp. He patted it into a pancake on the bottom of the dugout, covered it with leaves, and then built a small teepee of sticks and dry leaves on top.

“Match.”

Sally handed him a match, and he lit the fire. As soon as it was going well, he added some green leaves and twigs. A curl of smoke drifted up and gathered in the still air. Tom plucked a large leaf from a nearby bush and used it as a fan to wave the smoke over Sally. The furious cloud of mosquitoes was driven back. The smoke had a pleasant smell, sweet and spicy.

“There’s a nice trick,” said Sally.

“My father showed it to me on a canoe trip in northern Maine.” He reached up, yanked some more leaves off the bush, and added them to the fire.

Sally took out the map and began examining it by flashlight. “It looks like there are a lot of side channels to the river. I think we should stick to those until we reach Pito Solo.”

“Good idea. And I think we’ll have to pole from now on. We can’t risk using the engine.”

Sally nodded.

“You tend the fire,” said Tom. “I’ll pole, and then we’ll switch off. We won’t stop until we reach Pito Solo.”

“Right.”

Tom pushed the boat back into the river and poled close to the flooded forest, listening for the motorboat. Soon they came to a small side channel winding away from the main one, and took it.

Tom said, “Somehow I don’t think Lieutenant Vespán had any intention of bringing us back to San Pedro Sula. I think he planned to have us fall out of his helicopter. If it weren’t for that missing part, we’d be dead.”

19

Fenton looked up into the vast canopy that arched above his head and noted that night was falling in the Meambar Swamp. With it came the whine of insects and a steamy miasma of rot that rose up from the shivery acres of muck that surrounded them, drifting like poison gas among the giant tree trunks. Somewhere in the depths of the swamp he could hear the distant shriek of an animal, followed by the roar of a jaguar.

It was the second night in a row that they could find no dry land to camp. Instead, they had tethered the dugout under a group of giant bromeliads in the hope that their leaves would help keep out a steady rain. They did no such thing, instead channeling the rain into streams that could not be avoided.

The Teacher lay in the bottom of the dugout, in the rain, huddled against the heap of supplies, wrapped in a wet blanket and shivering despite the suffocating heat. The cloud of mosquitoes that enveloped them in a mewling fog was especially thick about his face. Vernon could actually see them crawling about his mouth and eyes. Vernon reached out and spread some more deet on his face, but it was a hopeless task. If the rain didn’t wash it off, the sweat did.

He glanced up. The two guides were in the front of the boat, playing cards by flashlight and drinking. They had hardly been sober since the beginning of the trip, and Vernon was horrified to discover thatone of the ten-gallon plastic jugs that he thought contained water was actually full of homemadeaguardiente.

Vernon hunched over, swaying and hugging himself. It wasn’t quite dark; night seemed to be coming very slowly. There was no sunset in the swamp: The light went from green to blue to purple and then black. At dawn it was reversed. Even on sunny days there was no sun, just a deep green gloom. He felt desperate for a bit of light, a breath of fresh air.

After four days of wandering in the swamp, their guides had finally admitted that they were lost, that they had to turn around. And they had turned the boats around. But they only seemed to go deeper into the swamp. This certainly wasn’t the way they had come. The guides were impossible to talk to; although Vernon spoke Spanish fairly well and the guides knew some English, they were often too drunk to speak any language. For the past few days, the more lost they seemed to become, the more loudly the guides denied it and the more they drank. And then the Teacher had gotten sick.

Vernon heard a curse from up front. One of the guides threw down his cards and staggered to his feet, rifle in hand. The boat rocked.

“Cabrón!”The other one had swayed to his feet, gripping a machete.

“Stop,” Vernon yelled, but as usual they ignored him. They cursed and came together in a drunken scuffle; the rifle went off harmlessly, there was more grunting and scuffling, and then the two guides, none the worse for their altercation, settled back down in the boat, gathered up their spilled cards, and redealt as if nothing had happened.

“What was that shot?” the Teacher asked belatedly, opening his eyes.

“Nothing,” said Vernon. “They’re drinking again.”

The Teacher shivered, drawing the blanket tighter. “You should take away that gun.”

Vernon said nothing. It would be stupid to try to take away their gun, even when they were drunk. Especially when they were drunk.

“The mosquitoes,” the Teacher whispered, his voice quavering.

Vernon squirted some more deet into his hands and gently smoothed it over the Teacher’s face and around his neck. The Teacher sighed with relief, gave a quick shiver, and closed his eyes.

Vernon pulled his wet shirt about himself, feeling the heavy rain on his back, listening to the sounds of the forest, the alien cries of mating and violence. He thought about death. It seemed that the question he had been seeking an answer to all his life was about to be answered for him, in an unexpected and quite horrifying way.

20

For two days, a deep and protective cloak of mist lay on the river. Tom and Sally poled upstream, following winding side channels and keeping a strict policy of silence. They traveled day and night, taking turns sleeping. They had little to eat except Sally’s two candy bars, which they rationed, bit by bit, and some fruit Sally collected on the way. They saw no sign of the soldiers pursuing them. Tom began to hope that they had given up and gone back to Brus, or had gotten hung up somewhere. The river was riddled with sandbars, mudbanks, and sunken logs to hang up a boat. Waono had been right.

The morning of the third day the mists began to lift, exposing two dripping walls of jungle lining the blackwater river. Shortly thereafter, they spied a house on stilts built over the water, with wattle walls and a thatched roof. Beyond that a riverbank appeared, with granite boulders and a steep embankment—the first dry land they had seen in days. A dock appeared at the water’s edge like the one at Brus—a rickety platform of bamboo poles lashed to slender tree trunks sunk in the muck.

“What do you think?” Tom asked. “Should we stop?”

Sally stood up. A boy was fishing from a platform with a small bow and arrow.

“Pito Solo?”

But the boy had seen them and was already running away, abandoning his rod.

“Let’s give it a try,” said Tom. “If we don’t get something to eat, we’re finished.” He poled into the dock.

Sally and Tom jumped out, and the platform creaked and swayed alarmingly. Beyond, a rickety gangplank led to a steep dirt bank, which rose out of the flooded jungle. There was nobody to be seen. They scrambled up the slippery embankment, slipping and sliding in the mud. Everything was soaking wet. At the top was a small open hut and a fire, with an old man sitting in a hammock. An animal was roasting on a spit of wood. Tom eyed it, smelling the delicious aroma of roasting meat. His appetite was tempered only slightly when he realized it was a monkey.

“Hola,”said Sally.

“Hola,”said the man.

Sally spoke in Spanish. “Is this Pito Solo?”

There was a long silence while the man looked at her blankly.

“He doesn’t speak Spanish,” said Tom.

“Which way is the town?Donde? Where?”

The man pointed into the mist. There was the sharp Cry of an animal, and Tom jumped.

“There’s a trail here,” Sally said.

They started up the trail and soon came to the town. It sat on a rise above the flooded rainforest, a motley collection of wattle-and-daub huts with roofs of tin or thatch. Chickens strutted away from them, and skinny dogs slunk along the walls of the houses, eyeing them sideways. They wandered through the village, which seemed deserted. It ended as quickly as it began in a wall of solid jungle.

Sally looked at him. “What now?”

“We knock.” Tom picked a door at random, knocked.

Silence.

Tom heard a rustle and looked around. At first he saw nothing, and then he realized that a hundred dark eyes were peering at him from the jungle foliage. They were all children.

“I wish I had my candy,” Sally said.

“Take out a dollar.”

Sally removed a dollar. “Hello? Who wants an American dollar?”

A shout went up, and a hundred children burst from the foliage, shouting and jostling, their hands extended.

“Who speaks Spanish?” asked Sally, holding up the dollar.

Everyone shouted at once in Spanish. Out of the hubbub an older girl stepped forward. “Can I help you?” she said, with great poise and dignity. She looked about thirteen and was pretty, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and two gold earrings. Thick brown braids went down her back.

Sally gave her the dollar. A greatahhh of disappointment went up from the group, but they seemed to take it with good humor. The ice, at least, was broken.

“What is your name?”

“Marisol.”

“That’s a nice name.”

The girl smiled.

“We are looking for Don Orlando Ocotal. Can you take us to him?”

“He went away with theyanquis more than a week ago.”

“Whichyanquis!”

“The tall angry gringo with the bites all over his face and the smiling one with the gold rings on his fingers.”

Tom swore and looked at Sally. “Sounds like Philip got our guide first.” He turned back to the girl. “Did they say where they were going?”

“No.”

“Are there any grown-ups in town? We’re going upriver and we need a guide.”

The girl said, “I will take you to my grandfather, Don Alfonso Boswas, who is the head of the village. He knows everything.”

They followed her. She had about her an air of self-possession and competence, reinforced by her straight posture. As they passed among the crooked huts, there was a smell of cooking that made Tom almost faint with hunger. The girl led them to what looked like the worst hut in the village, a leaning pile of sticks with almost no mud remaining in the cracks. It was built next to a muddy expanse that served as the town plaza. In the middle of the plaza stood a bedraggled cluster of lemon and banana trees.

The girl stood aside at the door, and they stepped inside. An old man sat in the center of the hut, on a stool too low for him, his bony knees sticking out of the great holes in his pants, a few wisps of white hair coming off his balding skull in random directions. He was smoking a corncob pipe, which had filled the hut with a tarry smell. A machete lay on the ground next to him. He was small and wore glasses that magnified his eyes, giving him a wide-eyed look of surprise. It was impossible to imagine he was the chief of the village; he looked, instead, like the village’s poorest man.

“Don Alfonso Boswas?” Tom asked.

“Who?” The old man cried, picking up the machete and waving it about. “Boswas? That scoundrel? He’s gone. They ran him out of town long ago. That good-for-nothing was living too long, and he just sat and smoked his pipe all day and looked at the girls passing his hut.”

Tom stared at the man in surprise, then turned to look for the girl. She stood in the doorway, suppressing a giggle.

The old man laid down the machete and laughed. “Come in, come in. I am Don Alfonso Boswas. Sit down. I’m just an old man who likes to tell a joke. I have twenty grandchildren and sixty great-grandchildren, and they never come to visit me, so I must tell jokes to strangers.” He spoke a curiously formal, old-fashioned Spanish, using theusted form.

Tom and Sally took two rickety stools. “I’m Tom Broadbent,” he said, “and this is Sally Colorado.”

The old man stood, bowed formally, and reseated himself.

“We’re looking for a guide to go upriver.”

“Humph,” he said. “All of a sudden theseyanquis are all crazy to go upriver and get lost in the Meambar Swamp to be eaten by anacondas. Why?”

Tom hesitated, nonplussed by the unexpected question.

“We’re trying to find his father,” said Sally. “Maxwell Broadbent. He came through here about a month ago with a group of Indians in dugout canoes. They probably had a lot of boxes with them.”

The old man looked at Tom, squinting. “Come here, boy.” He reached out with a leathery hand and grasped Tom’s arm in a viselike grip, drawing him closer. He peered at him, his eyes magnified grotesquely by the glasses.

Tom felt as if the old man were peering right into his soul.

After a moment’s scrutiny, he released him. “I see that you and your wife are hungry. Marisol!” He spoke to her in an Indian language. The girl left. He turned back to Tom. “So that was your father who came through here, eh? You don’t look crazy to me. A boy with a crazy father is usually crazy, too.”

“My mother was normal,” said Tom.

Don Alfonso laughed uproariously and slapped his knee. “That is good. You are a joker, too. Yes, they stopped here to buy food. The white man was like a bear, and his voice carried half a mile. I told him he was crazy to go on into the Meambar Swamp, but he did not listen. He must be a great chief from America. We had a good evening together with many laughs, and he gave methis”

He reached over to where some burlap sacks were folded up, fumbled about with his hands, and held something toward them in the palm of his hand. The sun struck it, and it glinted the color of pigeons blood, with a perfect star shining in it. He placed it in Tom’s hand.

“A star ruby,” breathed Tom. It was one of the gems in his father’s collection, worth a small, perhaps even a large, fortune. He felt a sudden rush of emotion: It was so like his father to make an extravagant gift to someone he liked. He had once given a panhandler five thousand dollars because the man amused him with a witty remark.

“Yes. A ruby. With it my grandchildren will go to America.” He carefully squirreled it away among the dirty burlap sacks. “Why is your father doing this? He was as evasive as a coati when I tried to find out.”

Tom glanced at Sally. How could he possibly explain it? “We’re trying to find my father. He’s ... sick.”

At this Don Alfonso’s eyes opened wide. He removed his glasses, wiped them with a filthy rag, and put them back on, dirtier than before. “Sick? Is it infectious?”

“No. As you say, he’s just a littleloco, that’s all. It’s a game he wanted to play with his sons.”

Don Alfonso thought for a while, then shook his head. “I have seen theyanquis do many strange things, but this is more than strange. There is something you’re not telling me. If I am to help you, you must tell me all.”

Tom sighed and glanced at Sally. She nodded. “He’s dying. He went upriver with all his possessions to be buried, and he issued a challenge to us that if we wanted our inheritance, we would have to find his tomb.”

Don Alfonso nodded, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. “Yes, yes, this is something we Tawahka Indians once did. We buried ourselves with our property, and it always made our sons angry. But then the missionaries came and explained to us that Jesus would give us new things in heaven so we didn’t need to bury anything with the dead. So we stopped doing it. But I believe the old way was better. And I am not sure that Jesus has all these new things for people when they die. The pictures I have seen of him show a poor man without cooking pots, pigs, chickens, shoes, or even a wife.” Don Alfonso sniffed loudly. “But then, perhaps it is better to bury yourself with your possessions than letting the sons fight over them. Even before you are dead they are fighting. That is why I already gave everything I owned to my sons and daughters and live like a wretch. This is the respectable thing to do. Now my sons have nothing to fight over, and, what is more important, they do not wish me dead.”

He finished his speech and put his pipe back in his mouth.

“Did any other white people come by?” Sally asked.

“Ten days ago two dugouts with four men, two mountain Indians and two white men, stopped. I thought the younger one might be Jesus Christ, but at the missionary school they said he was only a type of person called ahippie. They stayed a day, and they went on. Then a week ago four dugouts with army soldiers and two gringos arrived. They hired Don Orlando to guide them and left. This is why I ask myself: Why are all these crazyyanquis suddenly going into the Meambar Swamp? Are they all looking for your father’s tomb?”

“Yes. They’re my two brothers.”

“Why are you not cooperating?”

Tom didn’t answer.

Sally spoke. “You mentioned mountain Indians with the first white man. Do you know where they come from?”

“They are naked savage Indians from the highlands who paint themselves red and black. They are not Christians. We are a little bit Christian here in Pito Solo. Not much, just enough to get by when the missionaries come with North American food and medicine. Then we sing and clap for Jesus. That is how I got my new glasses.” He removed them and held them out to Tom for inspection.

Tom said, “Don Alfonso, we need a guide to take us upriver, and we need supplies and equipment. Can you help us?”

Don Alfonso puffed and puffed, then nodded. “I will take you.”

“Oh no,” Tom said, looking at the feeble old man with alarm. “That isn’t what I was asking. We couldn’t take you away from the village where you’re needed.”

“Me? Needed? The village would like nothing more than to get rid of old Don Alfonso!”

“But you’re their chief.”

“Chief? Puah!”

“It’ll be a long, hard journey,” said Tom, “not suitable for a man of your age.”

“I am still as strong as a tapir! I’m young enough to marry again. In fact, I need a sixteen-year-old who will fit right in that empty place in my hammock and bounce me to sleep every night with little sighs and kisses—”

“Don Alfonso—”

“I need a sixteen-year-old to tease me and poke her tongue in my ear to wake me up in the morning so I get up with the birds. Do not concern yourselves any longer: I, Don Alfonso Boswas, will take you through the Meambar Swamp.”

“No,” said Tom as firmly as he could. “You will not. We need a younger guide.”

“You cannot avoid it. I dreamed you would come and that I would go with you. So it is decided. I speak English and Spanish, but I prefer Spanish. English frightens me. It sounds like one is being choked.”

Tom glanced at Sally, exasperated. This old man was impossible.

At that moment Marisol returned with her mother. They were each carrying wooden trenchers laid with palm leaves, on which were piled fresh hot tortillas, fried plantains, roasted meats and nuts, and fresh fruit.

Tom had never been so hungry in his life. He and Sally tucked into the feast, joined by Don Alfonso, while the girl and her mother watched in satisfied silence. All conversation ceased while they ate. When he and Sally had finished, the woman silently took their plates and refilled them, and then refilled them a third time.

When the meal was over, Don Alfoso leaned back and wiped his mouth.