12.21 (14 page)

W
HAT DID IT SAY ABOUT HER, CHEL WONDERED, THAT EVEN
now she was fixated on the codex and the fact that she’d probably never be allowed to see it again? That she might never get a chance to find out who the writer was and why he risked his life to go against his king? What did it say about her that even now, as she and the doctor drove toward Gutierrez’s house, she was still focused on all the wrong things? To Stanton, sitting silently in the driver’s seat, Chel knew she was beneath contempt. He’d spent his life trying to stop disease from spreading, and her little academic exercise had put the whole city at risk.

Strangely, it was Patrick’s voice she now heard in her head. They were in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a meeting about the Mayan Epigraphic Database Project, and they were planning to hike the Appalachian Trail after it was over. When Chel told him she’d agreed to head another committee and couldn’t go, Patrick gave it to her. “Someday you’ll realize you’ve sacrificed too much for your work, and you can’t get it back,” he’d said. Chel thought he was speaking out of spite, and that it would blow over like all the other times. He’d moved out a month later.

She shifted in her seat and felt something catch on the heel of her shoe: a dog’s leash. From the size of the collar, it looked like the dog wasn’t a small one.

“Throw it in the back,” Stanton said, no warmth discernible in his
voice. It was the first he’d spoken on their journey south. Chel watched him as he drove, both hands on the wheel like a driving-school student. Probably he was the type who never broke any rule. Stanton seemed to her to be a stern man, and Chel wondered if he was as lonely as he appeared. At least he had a dog. Chel stared out the windshield at the billboard-dotted Pacific Coast Highway. Maybe she’d get a pet once they fired her from the Getty and she had more time on her hands.

“Give it to me,” Stanton said.

Chel glanced over. “What?” Then she realized she was still clutching the dog’s leash, ridiculously. Stanton reached for it and tossed it into the backseat as he accelerated.

Chel had remembered that Hector Gutierrez lived in Inglewood, north of the airport. As they pulled up in front of the two-story Californian, she didn’t know what to expect. It was still possible the man’s family had no idea what had happened; no one had come forward yet to ID him.

“Let’s go,” Stanton said, turning off the car engine.

At the front door, he knocked, and a minute later a light went on inside. A raven-haired Latina woman came to the door in a long navy robe. Her puffy eyes suggested she’d been crying. It was clear to Chel that she already knew. And Chel also realized why she hadn’t gotten in touch with the authorities: Not only had the woman lost her husband, she was in danger of losing everything else. ICE and the FBI were unrelenting in their seizures of black-market profits.

“Mrs. Gutierrez?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Dr. Stanton from the Centers for Disease Control. This is Chel Manu, who has done business with your husband. We’re here with some very difficult news. Did you know your husband was involved in an accident today?”

Maria nodded slowly.

“May we come in?” Stanton asked.

“Outside is fine,” she said. “My son is trying to sleep.”

“We’re very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Gutierrez,” Stanton said. “I can only imagine what you and your son must be going through right now,
but I have to ask you some questions.” He paused, and when she finally nodded, he continued. “Your husband was very sick, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Have
you
been having any trouble sleeping?” Stanton asked.

“My husband was awake the entire night for the last two nights. Now I have to explain to my son that he’s dead. So, yes, I have had a little trouble sleeping.”

“Any unusual sweating?” Stanton pressed.

“No.”

“Have you heard what’s happening at Presbyterian Hospital?”

Maria pulled the robe tighter around her. “I’ve seen the news.”

Stanton said, “Well, another man was very sick and died this morning, and we now know that he and your husband had the same disease. We believe the disease is spreading through some food item that could have been given to your husband by the first patient when he came up from Guatemala. Do you have any idea when or where your husband might’ve done business with a man named Volcy?”

Maria shook her head. “I didn’t know any of Hector’s business.”

“We need to search your house, Mrs. Gutierrez, to see if we can find out anything more. And we need to sample everything in your refrigerator.”

Maria covered her face with her hand, rubbing her eyes, as if she couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.

“This is an emergency,” Stanton said. “You have to help us.”

“No,” Maria said, resisting weakly. “Please leave.”

“Mrs. Gutierrez,” Chel said. “Yesterday morning your husband came to me with a stolen object and asked me to hold it for him. And I did it. I did it, and then I lied about it, and it turns out my lie might mean more people are sick now. I’ll have to live with that. But you won’t if you listen to us. Please let us come in.”

Stanton turned back to Chel, surprised by the commitment in her voice.

Maria opened the door.

THEY FOLLOWED HER DOWN
a narrow hallway lined with photographs of soccer games and backyard birthday parties. In the kitchen, Stanton pulled everything out of the refrigerator and had Chel do the same with the pantries. They soon had more than sixty items on the countertop, including many with dairy in them, but none came from Guatemala, and none was unusual or imported. Stanton quickly searched through the trash and found nothing of interest there either.

“Is there anywhere your husband worked when he was home?” Stanton asked.

Maria led them to a study on the far end of the house. A stained white couch, a metal desk, and a few low bookshelves sat on top of an imitation Oriental rug. The small room reeked of cigarette smoke. The rest of the house was a shrine to the family, but there were no pictures inside the office. Whatever he did in here, Gutierrez didn’t want his son or his wife watching him do it.

Stanton started with the desk drawers. Tearing each one open, he found office supplies, a mess of bills, and other household paperwork: mortgage documents, payroll forms, electronics manuals.

Chel pulled her glasses out and focused on the computer. “There isn’t a dealer in the world who doesn’t sell online now,” she told Stanton.

She went on eBay. Log-in
HGDealer
popped up, asking for a password.

“Try
Ernesto
,” Maria said from the doorway.

A list of items appeared on the screen.

“It stores sold items for sixty days,” Chel said. “This is what he’s unloaded or tried to unload over the last two months.”

“This is what Gutierrez was selling, right?” Stanton asked. “But he
bought
the book. Do we have to get into Volcy’s account for that?” Scanning the interface, he asked, “How would Volcy have even known how to use a site like this? Where would he have gotten access?”

“Everyone down there knows how it works,” Chel said. “People will travel for days to get to a computer if they have items to sell. But he wouldn’t have sold a codex on eBay anyway. It would draw too much attention. The most expensive item here costs less than fifteen hundred dollars; there’s a limit to what people are willing to pay for something online. So sellers with high-end items find a way to make contact on eBay, then do their business in person.”

She clicked on a tab at the top and up popped an eBay email window, with an in-box full of nearly a thousand messages. Many of them were exchanges about items Gutierrez had listed here. But there were also messages with places and dates and times he was planning to meet people looking to sell items to him.

“They all use screen names,” Chel said.

“How can we find out which one could be Volcy?”

Stanton looked for Maria, but she had left the room.

“Look,” Chel said. She moved the cursor over a message that had been sent a week ago from screen name
Chuyum-thul
.

The hawk.

“It looks like it was translated for him by the computer,” said Chel. “The way he’s writing is basically Mayan syntax.”

“Where is country code fifty-two?”

“Mexico,” Chel said. “And the area code is Mexico City. It’s an antiquities hotbed, and probably Volcy’s best chance south of the border at getting a decent price for the book. If he couldn’t get what he wanted there, then he’d have turned to the States.”

The sound of a child crying came from upstairs. Stanton and Chel exchanged a look of pity, but continued searching. When Chel found an email addressed to
Chuyum-thul
, the circle started to close:

Chel said, “Gutierrez must have bought Volcy this ticket.”

Stanton pieced together the chronology. Volcy got on a plane from Mexico, sold Gutierrez the codex, then holed up in a Super 8, waiting for his flight back. Only that night the cops were called, and they took him to the hospital. He never got on AG 126 back to Mexico City.

“What happened to the money Gutierrez paid him? The cops didn’t find any money in the hotel room.”

Chel said, “He would have known better than to try to fly across the border with that much cash. Probably deposited it into an account of a bank here that has branches in Central America.”

But then Stanton glanced back at Volcy’s itinerary, and suddenly something else struck him: AG flight 126. It was strangely familiar.

Then he realized why. “The return flight
crashed
yesterday morning.”

Chel looked up. “What are you talking about?”

Stanton pulled out his smartphone and showed her proof of the impossible: Aero Globale 126 was the flight that ended up in the Pacific Ocean.

“Is that some kind of coincidence?” Chel asked. “They have to be linked somehow.”

“Volcy didn’t even get on that plane.”

“Maybe not,” Stanton said. “But what if he still brought it down?”

“How?”

His mind raced as the logic came into focus. Human error was the suggested cause, they’d said again and again on the news.

“Volcy got on the
first
flight,” Stanton said. “Pilots fly regular routes back and forth. What if the pilot who crashed also flew the Mexico City-to-L.A. plane Volcy was on? Volcy could have come in contact with him or her on that leg.”

“You think Volcy gave the pilot whatever was contaminated?” Chel asked.

Only now Stanton was already considering another possibility—a vastly more terrifying one. These were the kinds of connections seen in clusters of TB. Or Ebola. If two men Volcy came in casual contact with both became infected in two different places, there was only one epidemiological possibility.

Stanton had a vertiginous feeling. “Volcy gets infected in Guatemala, flies from Mexico City, and crosses paths with the pilot. Maybe they shake hands on his way off the plane and the prion passes. Volcy meets up with Gutierrez. They make a deal, go their separate ways. A day later, the pilot gets sick. Then Gutierrez does too. A few days later, the pilot crashes the plane, then the next day Gutierrez crashes his car.”

“But what got them sick?” Chel asked.

“
Volcy
did,” Stanton said, darting for the door. “Volcy himself.”