The Codex (45 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

75

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He entered the ruined city.

76

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

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

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

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

What he had to do was to ambush the ambusher.

Hauser thought for a moment. The Indian was smart. He would already have anticipated this. He would know that Hauser would be expecting an ambush on this trail. Therefore, the Indian was not waiting in ambush on this trail. No. Rather, he expected Hauser to circle in and come around from the other side. Therefore, the Indian was waiting on the other side of the gigantic mass of growth to ambush Hauser.

Hauser slowly began circling the edge of the creeper colony, moving as silently and smoothly as an Indian himself. If his assumptions were correct, the Indian would be found on the far side, probably up high, waiting for him to pass below. He would finish the Indian first—who was by far the greater danger—and then he would flush out the others and drive them toward the bridge, where they would be easily trapped and killed.

Hauser circled at a distance, stopping every few moments to scan the middle story of the jungle. If the Indian had done as he anticipated, he would be somewhere to his right. He moved with great caution. It took time, but time at least was on his side. He had at least seven hours until dark.

He moved forward, scanned again. There was something in a tree. He paused, moved a little, looked again. Just the corner of the Indian’s red shirt was visible, on a limb about fifty yards to his right, and there—he could just see it—was the tip of a little reed blowgun aiming downward, waiting to nail Hauser as he came through.

Hauser moved sideways until he had more of the Indian’s shirt in sight to make a target. He raised his rifle, took careful aim, and fired a single round.

Nothing. And yet he knew he had hit it. A sudden panic seized him: It was another trap. He flung himself sideways at the very moment the Indian came dropping down on him like a cat, sharpened stick in hand. Using a jujitsu move, Hauser threw himself forward and to the side, turning the Indian’s own momentum against him, neatly throwing him off—and then he was up and placing an arc of automatic-weapon fire across where the Indian had been.

The Indian was gone, vanished.

He reconnoitered. The Indian had still been one step ahead of him. He glanced up and saw the tree with the little bit of red cloth, the tip of the blowgun dart, all still in place exactly where the Indian had put them. Hauser swallowed. Now was not the time for fear or anger. He had a job to do. He would no longer play the Indian’s cat-and-mouse game, which Hauser now suspected he would lose. The time had come to flush out the Broadbents with brute force.

He turned and walked along the edge of the creeper colony, planted his feet, and took aim with the Steyr AUG. First one burst, then a second, and then he walked on, pouring fire into the thick vegetation. It had exactly the effect he anticipated: It flushed out the Broadbents. He could hear their panicked flight, noisy, like partridges. Now he knew where they were. He sprinted along the mass of growth to cut them off as they emerged and herd them toward the bridge.

There was a sudden sound behind him, and he spun toward the greater danger, squeezing the trigger and pouring firepower into the dense cover where the sound had come from. Leaves, vines, arid twigs jittered off the branches and flew in all directions, and he could hear the snick and thok of bullets striking wood everywhere. He saw some movement and raked the vegetation with fire again—and then he heard a squeal and some thrashing.

Coatimundi, damn it! He had shot a coatimundi!

He turned now, focusing his attention ahead, lowered his gun, and fired in the direction of the fleeing Broadbents. He heard the coati squealing in pain behind him, the crackling of twigs, and then he realized, just in time, that this was no wounded coati—it was the Indian again.

He dropped, rolled, fired—not to kill, for the Indian had vanished into the vines, but to drive the Indian to his right, toward the open area in front of the bridge. He would drive him in the same direction as the Broadbents. He now had the Indian on the run, herding him together with the others. The trick was to keep them moving, firing steadily, preventing them from peeling off and coming back around behind him. He ran, crouching and firing short bursts, left and right, cutting off any possibility of escape back into the ruined city. By sweeping in from their left he was driving them ever closer to the chasm, crowding them, flushing them toward open ground. His clip empty, he paused to slam another in. As he ran, he heard, through the foliage ahead, the crash of the Broadbents in their flight in exactly the direction he hoped they would go.

He had them now.

77

Tom was already halfway back across the plateau when he heard the staccato fire from Hauser’s gun. He instinctively ran toward the sound, fearful of what it might mean, knocking aside ferns and vines, jumping fallen logs, scrambling over wrecked walls. He heard the second and third bursts of gunfire, closer and more to his right. He veered toward it, hoping in some way to defend his brothers and father. He had a machete, he’d killed a jaguar and an anaconda with it—why not Hauser?

Unexpectedly he burst out of the foliage and into sunlight; fifty yards away lay the edge of the precipice, a sheer drop of more than a mile into a dark coil of mists and shadow. He was now at the edge of the great chasm. He looked to the right and saw the graceful catenary of the suspension bridge dangling over the canyon, swaying gently in the updrafts.