The Codex

61

Marcus Aurelius Hauser felt in his musette bag for another Churchill and selected one, rolling it between thumb and forefinger before taking it out. He went through the sacrament of trimming, moistening, and lighting it, and then he held it out in the dark so that he could admire the big fat glowing tip while allowing the aroma of fine Cuban longleaf to surround him like a cocoon of elegance and satisfaction. Cigars, he mused, always seem to become better, richer, deeper tasting in the jungle.

Hauser was well hidden at a strategic point above the suspension bridge in a thicket of ferns, where he had a good view of the bridge and the soldiers in their little stone fort on the far side. He pushed aside some plants and raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes. He had a strong feeling that the three Broadbent brothers were going to make their break to cross the bridge tonight. They wouldn’t wait; they couldn’t wait. They had to get to the tomb before he did, if they wanted any chance at all of saving some of the masterpieces for themselves.

He puffed contentedly, thinking back to Maxwell Broadbent. He had lugged half a billion dollars’ worth of fine art and antiquities up here, all on a whim. As outrageous at it was, it was perfectly in character. Max was the man of the big gesture, the spectacle, the show. He lived large and he died large.

Hauser remembered back to that defining fifty-day trek in the jungle, those harrowing days that he would never forget as long as he lived. They had heard there was a Mayan temple somewhere up in the Cerros Escondidos in the Guatemalan lowlands. Fifty days and fifty nights, hacking their way along overgrown trails, stung and bitten and scratched, starving and sick. When they stumbled into that Lacandon village, the villagers wouldn’t talk. The temple was there somewhere, all right. No doubt about it. But the villagers were silent. Hauser had just about gotten a girl to the point of talking when Max had thwarted him. Pointed a gun right at his head, the bastard, disarmed him. That was the break, the final straw. Max had ordered Hauser away like he was some dog. Hauser had no choice but to give up their search for lost cities and go home — while Max went on to find the White City. He looted a rich tomb up here, and that tomb, forty years later, had become his own.

It had come full circle, though, hadn’t it?

Hauser enjoyed another long suck on the cigar. In his years in combat, he had learned something important about people: When things got tough, you could never tell who was going to make it and who was going to fold. The big Army Ranger guys in their crew cuts and pumped-up Arnold Schwarzenegger pecs and big-dick talk sometimes fell apart like so much overcooked meat, while the geek in the company, the intel guy or the electronics nerd, turned out to be the real survivor. So you never knew. This was how it was with the three Broadbent kids. He had to hand it to them. They had done well. They would perform this final service and then their road would come to an end.

He paused, listened. There was a faint sound of ululating, whooping, and yelling. He raised the binoculars. Far to the left of the stone fort, he could see a shower of arrows come sailing out of the jungle. One of them struck a klieg light with a distant ping!

The Indians were attacking. Hauser smiled. It was a diversion, of course, designed to draw the attention of his soldiers away from the bridge. He could see his own men huddling behind the stone walls, guns at the ready, loading their grenade launchers. He hoped to hell they could pull it off. At least they had an assignment to fake what they were already good at: failure.

More arrows came sailing out of the forest, followed by another eruption of bloodcurdling yells. The soldiers answered with a panicky burst of gunfire, and another. A grenade went sailing uselessly into the forest, and there was a flash and a bang.

For once the soldiers were getting it right.

Now that the Broadbents had made their move, Hauser knew exactly how it was going to unfold. It was as predetermined as a series of forced moves in chess.

And there they were, right on schedule. He raised his binoculars again. The three brothers and their Indian guide were running low across the open ground behind the soldiers, heading for the bridge. How clever they thought they were, racing with all their hearts and souls into a trap!

Hauser just had to laugh.