The Codex

86

Lewis Skiba sat in the rocking chair on the crooked porch of the battenboard cottage, looking out over the lake. The hills were cloaked in autumnal glory, the water a darkened mirror reflecting the curve of evening sky. It was exactly as he remembered it. The dock ran crookedly into the water, with the canoe tied up at the end. The scent of warm pine needles drifted through the air. A loon called from the far shore, its forlorn cry dying among the hills, and it was answered by another loon at an immense distance, its voice as faint as starlight.

Skiba took a sip of fresh spring water and rocked back slowly, the chair and porch both creaking in protest. He had lost everything. He had presided over the collapse of the ninth largest pharmaceutical company in the world. He had watched its stock drop to fifty cents before trading was suspended forever. He had been forced into filing Chapter 11, and twenty thousand employees saw their pension funds and life savings vanish. He had been fired by the board, vilified by shareholders and congressional committees, and made the butt of latenight television. He was under criminal investigation for accounting fraud, stock manipulation, insider trading, and self-dealing. Skiba had lost his home and his wife, and the lawyers had almost finished chewing through his fortune. Nobody loved him now except his children.

And yet Skiba was a happy man. No one could understand this happiness. They thought he had lost his mind, that he was having some kind of breakdown. They did not know what it was like to be pulled out of the very flames of hell.

What was it that had stayed his hand, three months ago, in that dark office? Or in the three months that followed? Those three months of silence from Hauser had been the darkest months of Skiba’s life. Just when it seemed the nightmare would never end, suddenly there was news. The New York Times had run a little article, buried in the B section, which announced the creation of the Alfonso Boswas Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to translating and publishing a certain ninth-century Mayan codex found in the collections of the late Maxwell Broadbent. According to the foundation’s president, Dr. Sally Colorado, the Codex was a Mayan book of healing that would prove tremendously useful in the search for new drugs. The foundation had been established and funded by the four sons of the late Maxwell Broadbent. The article noted that he had passed away unexpectedly while on a family holiday in Central America.

That was all. There was no mention of Hauser, the White City, the lost tomb, the crazy father burying himself with his money — nothing.

Skiba had felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders. The Broadbents were alive. They had not been murdered. Hauser had failed to get the Codex and, most important, had failed to kill them. Skiba would never know what happened, and it would be too dangerous to inquire. The only thing he knew was that he was not guilty of murder. Yes, he was guilty of terrible crimes and he had much to atone for, but the irrevocable taking of a human life — even his own — wasn’t among them.

There was one other thing. By being stripped of everything — money, possessions, reputation — he could finally see again. The scales had fallen. He could see as clearly as if he were a child once more: all the bad things he had done, the crimes he had committed, the selfishness and greed. He could trace in perfect clarity now the spiraling ethical descent he had made in his successful career in business. It was so easy to become confused, to conflate prestige with honesty, power with responsibility, sycophancy with loyalty, profit with merit. You had to be an exceptionally clear-minded human being to keep your integrity in such a system.

Skiba smiled as he gazed out over the mirrored surface of the lake, watching it all disappear in the evening twilight, everything he had worked for, everything that had once been so important to him. In the end, even the battenboard cabin would have to go, and he would never gaze on this lake again.

It didn’t matter. He had died and been reborn. Now he could begin his new life.