The Codex Page 6

  “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 the K’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 800 A.D., at the height of the Classic Maya civilization. It contains two thousand 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, it will revolutionize 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 countries billions 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’s Republic. 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. He managed 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 I love 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, nothing splendid 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. “How much 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. The world 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 it would 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 creeping lightness 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 in Forbes, courted by analysts and investment bankers, his wine cellar featured in Bon Appétit and his house in Architectural 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 price now. 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—”