The Crimson Code

“Oh, goodie.”

Assif looked at him, then nodded. “Exactly.”

Renate spoke, feeling a flame-lick of the fury that had filled her since Christmas. Assif, she was sure, had no idea how close to the edge he was walking with her. “Are you saying this is impossible?”

“If I thought it was impossible, I would not have come. I am here. It is not impossible. But don’t expect it to be fast.”

They were standing on the chilly, windblown concrete platform at the Frankfurt Airport, awaiting a train to take them to the Frankfurt Main Station. From there they would catch a tram to the business suite Office 119 had rented for them.

Right now there were only a few people inside the steel-and-glass tunnel, farther along the tracks, but Renate glanced toward the escalators and saw more arrivals beginning to appear. The sky through the overhead glass remained gray and uninviting, maybe even promising snow. The chill nipped at her nose.

“Let us talk later,” she said to Assif. Then, surprising Lawton, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes, moved toward the smoking area on the platform and lit one.

Lawton exchanged looks with Assif, who was a handsome Indian with the friendly features of the Punjab. Assif shrugged; then they both followed her.

“Local color,” she said when they joined her. “And the smoking section is here at the end of the platform, where we’re most likely to have privacy.”

Assif laughed. “Then give me one, please? I haven’t smoked since I left New Delhi.”

Lawton stepped upwind. Renate noticed the movement, and something almost like amusement flickered in her eyes before dying. Dying again beneath the ice of death.

They let the first, and then a second, train leave for Frankfurt. Assif and Renate were still chatting casually when a compact, powerfully built man joined the growing number of travelers in the smoking area. He watched indifferently as another train arrived and departed. A short time later, he alone remained with them.

He turned and took a couple of strides their way. “Renate,” he said, holding out his ticket as if he were asking directions. “Are we all here?”

“Yes, Niko. You know everyone?”

He nodded. “By reputation, at least. You must be Lawton Caine.”

Lawton did not extend his hand but simply gave an affirmative glance, as did Assif when Niko greeted him.

When they at last boarded the train to the city, they took seats in separate cars. The essence of the team was now together.

Guatemalan Highlands

Paloma drew Steve Lorenzo away from the rest of the villagers. Most were already asleep, wrapped in colorful wool blankets they carried with them nearly everywhere, blankets that now provided the only protection they had from the elements, except for the tree canopy above. As was so often the case, water dripped steadily from a light rain, and the lanolin in the wool repelled it.

Steve was grateful for his own blanket, a gift from Paloma, the tribe’s elderly bruja. The word could be translated as witch, but in Steve’s estimation it would be fairer to call her a shaman, or, better yet, curandera, healer.

Hundreds of generations of knowledge lay behind Paloma’s lively dark eyes, knowledge of curative properties that U.S. pharmaceutical companies would give—or take—nearly anything to discover and patent.

“You are a good man, Padre,” she said to him as they settled on the damp, dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor.

“I only do what I must, Paloma.”

“Only a good man would say that.” Her eyes caught a little of the moonlight that filtered through the canopy and seemed to smile at him. “We are approaching a volcano.”

He nodded reluctantly. “I’ve felt the rumblings.”

“All the volcanoes have become active since the terrible things that happened in Asia.”

Steve had heard the news of the horrifying tsunami in one of his stealthy village visits to buy corn. He had shared it with Paloma, who had accepted it stoically. But what would he have expected? Considering what her people had been facing since the day the village had been attacked in an attempt to arrest Miguel Ortiz, she was hardly likely to care much about hundreds of thousands of dead halfway around the world. These people were in scarcely better straits.

“The gods are angry,” Paloma told him now.

He sighed, then smiled when a quiet laugh escaped Paloma.

“I know,” she said. “You think your God loves us too much to do such things. But have you forgotten your own stories of the Great Flood? The story of Job?”

Job was a bit of Bible lore that Paloma dearly loved and had taken much to heart. To her, his story seemed to symbolize everything Mayan in some way.

“I haven’t forgotten,” he admitted.

“So do not deny your god his anger with us. For we have not been a very faithful people.”

After living all this time with this particular group of Mayans, Steve could see absolutely nothing in them about which God should be angry, unless it was their unspoken insistence that there was more than one god…something the Bible itself left just a bit ambiguous.

“Paloma, your people have done nothing to earn any god’s wrath.”

“Perhaps we have not. But there are others…and the innocent always seem to suffer with them. Do you not feel it?”

Steve hesitated. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go down this path with her. “Bad things sometimes happen to good people,” he said finally, falling back on aphorism. “He makes the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike.”

Paloma nodded. “You asked about the Kulkulcan Codex.”

Steve froze. All of a sudden time vanished, and he remembered Monsignor Veltroni’s charge to him so long ago in Savannah, before he had sent Steve here. “Yes, many months ago. My Church wanted it.”

“They fear it.”

“Yes.”

“And would destroy it.”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t know, Paloma. They might hide it somewhere, but I’m not sure they would destroy it.”

“They cannot destroy it.”

Steve forced himself to wait patiently. With Paloma he was ever the student, and with Paloma he had learned true patience.

“The Codex,” Paloma said presently, “cannot be destroyed. It is impossible. It is so old it predates the Maya, the Olmec. It predates the Viracocha who brought it to us.”

“Viracocha?”

“It is one of his names. You will find he has many and was known throughout this entire part of the world, not just here in the land of the Maya, but among the Inca, also, and perhaps in other ways among our brothers to the north in your country. I do not know. My world is mostly the Mayan world.”

Steve nodded, then murmured his understanding, thinking that in the dark of this darkest of nights, she might not see the gesture.

“Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Kulkulcan…many names. One man. One very holy man. He brought teachings of love, forbade human sacrifice, although many who followed him did not remember that. He brought the Codex to us, as well, and ultimately it was the Codex that caused the wars that sent my people fleeing into jungles for sanctuary.”