The Codex

21

Lewis Skiba remained alone in his office. It was still early in the afternoon, but he had sent everyone home to get them away from the press. He had unplugged his office phone and shut the two outer doors to his office. Now, while the company was crumbling around him, he was locked in a cocoon of silence, wrapped in a golden glow of his own making.

The Securities and Exchange Commission hadn’t even waited until the close of trading to announce the investigation into accounting irregularities at Lampe-Denison Pharmaceuticals. The announcement had fallen like a hammer blow on the stock, and now Lampe was at seven and a quarter and ticking down. The company was like a dying whale, paralyzed, wallowing, surrounded by a frenzied, mindless cluster of sharks — short sellers — tearing it apart, chunk by chunk. It was a primitive, Darwinian feeding frenzy. And every dollar they chewed out of the stock price ripped a hundred-million-dollar hole in Lampe’s market cap. He was helpless.

Lampe’s lawyers had done their duty and issued the usual statement that the allegations had “no merit” and that Lampe was eager to cooperate and clear its name. Graff, the CFO, had played his part, issuing a statement that Lampe had scrupulously followed generally accepted accounting principals. Lampe’s auditors expressed shock and dismay, saying that they had relied on Lampe’s financial declarations and avowals and that if there were any irregularities they had been as thoroughly deceived as everyone else. All the stock phrases Skiba had heard from every other crooked company and their legions of enablers got trotted out. It was all as stilted and programmed as a Japanese Kabuki drama. Everyone had followed the script but him. Now they all wanted to hear from him, the great and terrible Skiba. They wanted to jerk back the curtain. Everyone wanted to glimpse the charlatan working the controls.

It wasn’t going to work that way. Not as long as he was still breathing. Let them jabber and haw; he would remain silent. And then, when the Codex arrived and their stock doubled, tripled, quadrupled…

He checked his watch. Two minutes.

Hauser’s voice came in so clear over the satellite connection that the man could have been calling from next door, except that the scrambler made him quack like Donald Duck. Nevertheless the man’s bully-boy bluster, his insolent familiarity, came through.

Hauser said, “Lewis! How’re you doing?”

Skiba allowed a frosty moment to pass. “When am I going to have the Codex?”

“Skiba, here’s the situation. The middle brother, Vernon, just as I thought, got his ass lost in the swamp, and he’s probably done for. The other brother, Tom—”

“I didn’t ask about the brothers. I don’t care about the brothers. I asked about the Codex.”

“You should care. You know the score. Anyway, as I was saying, Tom managed to slip past some soldiers I’d hired to stop him. They’re pursuing him upriver and may yet catch him before he goes into the swamp, but he’s proving a lot more resourceful than I anticipated. If he’s going to be stopped, the last place to do it is at the far end of the swamp. I can’t risk losing track of him and the girl in the mountains beyond. You follow?”

Skiba turned down the volume on the arrogant, quacking voice. He didn’t believe he had ever hated a man as much as he hated Hauser right now.

“A second problem is the oldest son, Philip. At some point I’m going to have to deal with him. I’ll need him for a while longer, but when he’s outlived his usefulness, well, we can’t have him ‘popping up’ (that was your phrase, or was it mine?) claiming ownership of the Codex. Nor can Vernon or Tom. And that goes for the woman Tom’s traveling with, Sally Colorado.”

There was a long silence.

“You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

Skiba waited, trying to control himself. These conversations were a colossal waste of time. Even more, they were dangerous.

“You there, Lewis?”

Skiba said angrily, “Why don’t you just get on with it? Why these calls? Your job is to deliver the Codex to me. How you do it is your business, Hauser.”

The chuckle swelled to a laugh. “Oh, that’s beautiful. You’re not going to get away so easily. You’ve known all along what has to happen. You’ve been hoping that I’d take care of it on my own. No such luck. There isn’t going to be any deniability here, no selling out the little guy, no plea bargaining. When the time comes, you’re going to tell me to kill them. It’s the only way, and you know it.”

“Stop this kind of talk immediately. There will be no killing.”

“Oh, Lewis, Lewis…”

Skiba felt sick. He felt the nausea contracting his stomach in waves. Out of the corner of his eye the stock was ticking down again. The SEC hadn’t even halted trading, had hung Lampe out to twist in the wind. There were twenty thousand employees depending on him, millions of sick people who needed their drugs, there were his wife and children, his house, his own two million stock options and six million shares…

He heard a loud honk on the line — evidently a laugh. He suddenly felt very weak. How had he allowed this to happen? How had this man escaped his control?

“Don’t kill anyone,” he said, swallowing before he could even finish the sentence. His stomach was going to heave at any moment. There was a legal way to do this; the sons would bring out the Codex, and then he’d negotiate with them, strike a deal… But he knew it wouldn’t happen, not with Lampe under a cloud of rumor and investigation, with a collapsing stock price…

The voice suddenly became gentle. “Look, I know it’s a tough decision. If you really feel strongly about this, I’ll turn around and we’ll forget all about the Codex. Really.”

Skiba swallowed. That knot in his throat felt like it was going to choke him. His three towheaded sons smiled at him from the silver frames on his desk.

“Just say the word and we’ll head back. Call it a day.”

“There’s to be no killing.”

“Look, no decision has to be made just yet. Why don’t you sleep on it?”

Skiba staggered to his feet. He tried to make it to his leather-covered gold-tooled Florentine wastebasket but only got as far as the fireplace. With the vomit crackling and sizzling in the fire, he came back to the phone, picked it up to say something, then changed his mind and slowly placed it back in its cradle with a shaky hand. The hand snaked out toward the top drawer of his desk, and searched out the cool bottle of plastic.