THEY REPEATED THE GENETIC TESTING AT THE PRION CENTER. John Doe’s chart, lab tests, and MRI scans were scrutinized at CDC headquarters in Atlanta. By the following morning, after all-night meetings and emergency conference calls, the doctors all agreed with Stanton: The patient had a new strain of prion disease, and it came from tainted meat.
After dawn, Stanton reviewed the case with his deputy, Alan Davies, a brilliant English doctor who’d spent years studying mad cow across the Atlantic.
“Just got off with USDA,” said Davies. They were in Stanton’s office at the Prion Center. “No positive tests for prion at any of the major meat packagers. Nothing suspicious in the herd records or feed logs.”
Davies wore the vest and pants from a pin-striped three-piece suit, and his long brown hair was so perfectly set on his head, it looked like a toupee. He was the only lab rat Stanton had known who wore a suit, his way of showing Americans how much more civilized their British cousins were.
“I want to see the tests myself,” Stanton said, rubbing his eyes. He was having trouble fighting his exhaustion.
“That’s just the big farms,” Davies replied, smirking. “USDA couldn’t cover all the small farms if they had a year. Never mind the sheep and pigs. Somewhere out there, some careless bugger is probably still grinding up contaminated brains or whatever the hell else and shipping them to God-knows-where.”
Tracking the original source was crucial in any food-borne illness. Vegetables with E. coli had to be traced back to the farms where they were grown, so the farms could be shut down and their wares pulled from the shelves. Salmonella had to be traced back to the chicken coop, so every egg could be recalled. It could be the difference between one victim and thousands.
Stanton and his team didn’t even know what animal source to concentrate on. Cows’ prions could obviously cross the species barrier, so beef was the first suspect. But pigs had prions remarkably similar to those of cows. And a prion disease called scrapie had killed hundreds of thousands of sheep throughout Europe; Stanton had long feared lamb might one day carry mutated prions to humans too.
Once they figured out what got John Doe sick, the real work of containment would begin. The unnatural way meat was processed and packaged meant flesh from a single animal could be distributed across thousands of different products and end up all over the world. Stanton had traced meat from a single cow to jerky in Columbus and hamburgers in Düsseldorf.
“I want people on the ground checking all the local hospitals,” he told Davies. John Doe was the only case so far, but prion disease was difficult to diagnose, and Stanton was convinced there could be more out there. “See if they’ve had any unusual cases of insomnia. Or any other unusual admissions. And check the psych ERs for anyone coming in with delusions or strange behavior.”
Davies smiled. “That would be everyone in L.A.” After matters sartorial, making fun of the Southland was his primary amusement.
“What else?” Stanton asked.
“Cavanagh called.”
As head of prion investigations for the CDC, Stanton reported to the deputy director. Emily Cavanagh was known for her preternatural calm, but she also understood how serious prion disease was and took nothing lightly. After butting countless heads over money and treatment protocols, Stanton had enemies in Atlanta; Cavanagh was one of the few who remained an ally.
“What are we calling this thing anyway?” Davies asked.
“VFI for now,” Stanton said. “Variant fatal insomnia. But you find me where it came from and we’ll call it Davies’s disease.”
STANTON LISTENED TO a dozen new investigation-related voice mails before he heard Nina’s voice.
“Got your messages,” she said, “and I assume this is another one of your ploys to get me to go vegan or whatever. Don’t worry. Most of the meat in the fridge was ancient and needed to be thrown out anyway. Guess your furry friend and I’ll survive on fish out here for a while. Call me back when you can. And be careful.”
Stanton glanced at his team, seated at their microscopes. Per orders from CDC headquarters in Atlanta, they weren’t supposed to tell anyone about the possibility of meat-borne illness yet. Every time there was even a hint of a possibility of mad cow, the public panicked, beef futures collapsed, and billions of dollars were lost. So Stanton hadn’t told Nina about John Doe. He’d just hinted that it would be a very good idea to listen to what he’d been saying all these years about not eating meat.
“Dr. Stanton, I’ve got slides.”
One of his postdocs waved him over. Stanton hung up the phone and hurried to a protective hood on the opposite side of the lab. Jiao Chen was sitting next to Michaela Thane. Stanton had invited Thane to the lab after her shift at Presbyterian ended so she could stay in on the ground floor of the investigation. If and when a case of meat-borne FFI broke, he wanted to make sure credit was given where it was due.
“The shape is identical to FFI,” Jiao said, surrendering her seat. “But you won’t believe the progression. It’s moving so much faster.”
Stanton looked through the sights of the powerful electron microscope. Normal prion proteins were shaped like helices, like DNA, but here the helices had unwound and refolded into what looked like accordion fans.
“How long’s it been since the baseline was taken?” Stanton asked.
Jiao answered, “Only two hours.”
The prions he was used to progressed over a course of months or longer. In investigating mad cow victims, he often had to go back three or four years to find the contaminated meat. But these proteins were changing faster than anything Stanton had ever seen. With the speed of a virus.
“At this rate,” Jiao said, “it’ll take over the entire thalamus within a matter of days. And then only a few more days before brain death.”
“The infection must have been recent,” Stanton said.
Jiao nodded. “If it weren’t, he’d be dead already.”
Stanton looked up at Davies. “We have to try the antibodies.”
“Gabe…”
“What antibodies?” Thane asked.
It was their most recent attempt at a cure, Stanton explained. Humans couldn’t mount an “antibody” defense against foreign prions because the immune system confused them with the normal prion proteins in the brain. So the Prion Center team had “knocked out” these normal prions in mice (one of the side effects was making them unafraid of snakes) and then injected them with abnormal prions. The mice produced antibodies to the foreign prion, which could be harvested and theoretically used as a treatment. Stanton and his team hadn’t gotten it to work in a human yet, but it had shown considerable potential in a petri dish.
Davies said, “Believe me, no one wants to tell the FDA to go screw themselves more than I do. But, Gabe, you don’t need another lawsuit.”
Thane asked, “What lawsuit?”
“We don’t need to go into this,” Stanton said.
“It’s quite relevant,” Davies said. He turned to Thane. “He gave a victim of genetic prion disease an unapproved treatment.”
“The family asked for antibody therapy,” Jiao interjected, “and then after he gave it, and the patient didn’t make it, they changed their minds.”
Thane shook her head. “Gotta love patient families. The old hypocritic oath.”
They were interrupted by another of the postdocs. Christian wasn’t wearing the earbuds through which he usually played hardcore rap at all hours—an undeniable sign of the heightened tension in the lab. “The cops called again,” he said. “They searched the Super 8 motel room where they picked up our John Doe, and they found a receipt from a Mexican restaurant. It’s right by the hotel.”
“Where do they source their meat from?” Stanton asked.
“Industrial farm in the San Joaquin. They put out about a million pounds of beef a year. They haven’t had any breaches, but they also do their own rendering.”
Stanton glanced at his partner.
“It’s possible,” Davies said.
“Rendering?” Thane asked.
“You know the toothpaste you use?” Davies said, all too delighted to discuss the nastier side of the meat business. “And the mouthwash you gargle with? How about the toys little children play with? They’re all made with the byproducts of rendered meat after animals have been slaughtered.”
“Rendering was probably the original source of the mad cow outbreak,” Stanton explained. “Cows were fed remains of other cow brains.”
“Cannibalism by force,” Thane said.
Stanton turned back to his postdoc. “Which industrial supplier is it?”
“Havermore Farms,” said Christian.
Stanton sat up in his chair. “The Mexican restaurant sources from Havermore?”
“Why? Do you know that name?” Thane asked.
He reached for his phone. “They supply all the meat for the Los Angeles Unified School District.”
HAVERMORE FARMS nestled in the valley of the San Emigdio Mountains, where the wind couldn’t carry its smell anywhere near civilization. It took Stanton and Davies an hour to get there in morning traffic, which left them two hours to prove that the mutated prion had come from here, before the L.A. public schools served Havermore Farms lunch meat to a million students.
The doctors sped past the cow pens, where thousands of cattle were crowded together. These were the slaughter animals Stanton was worried about; they were being force-fed corn, and their diets were likely being supplemented with protein cakes from the other side of the facility, a potential source of the new strain of prion.
They’d arranged to go directly to the rendering floor, where the protein cakes were made, the likeliest place for contamination. Stanton and Davies followed Mastras, the floor manager, past conveyor belts on which sat heads, and hooves that once belonged to pigs, cattle, and horses, and euthanized cats and dogs. Men wearing bandannas, goggles, and masks yelled to one another in Spanish while bulldozing skinned and defleshed carcasses into a large pit where cow limbs were mixed with pig jaws, hair, and bone. Only the traces of Vicks VapoRub they’d placed beneath their noses upon arrival kept the smell tolerable.
“We’ve been open with the inspectors,” Mastras said. “They poke around, we give them feed logs, the whole thing. We’ve always come up clean.”
“You mean the tiny fraction of samples the USDA tests has come up clean,” Davies said.
“You know we’ll be screwed as soon as word gets out you guys are investigating us,” Mastras yelled over the bulldozers. He had red hair and pasty skin, and Stanton had taken an instant dislike to him. “It won’t even matter if it’s true or not.”
“We’re not making anything public until we find the source,” said Davies. “CDC is keeping this all under wraps.”
Stanton ran a quick calculation of the animal remains he could see scattered throughout the room. “This is a lot more than what you’re slaughtering here,” he said. “Are you rendering material from other farms?”
“Some,” Mastras said. “But we don’t take any meat that’s still in the plastic from supermarkets, and we don’t grind up any flea collars with those insecticides either. The pound takes off the collars before dropping their animals off, or we don’t take them. Bosses insist, because they want the highest standards.”
Davies said, “Or, as we call it, the law.”
They arrived in front of a series of conveyor belts, on which carcasses of different animals came in off the trucks once they were skinned. All the belts were covered with indistinguishable organs, bloody skin, masses of mixed bones, and broken sets of teeth.
Davies started with the belt on which the pig remains were carried inside. Using forceps and an X-Acto knife, he cut samples from the belt and dropped them into a specimen retrieval cup for the ELISA—enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay—a test they’d developed years ago for finding traces of mad cow. Stanton focused on the cattle remains, placing pieces of flesh on a plastic plate with twenty different holes, each of which contained a clear protein-infused liquid. If there was any mutated prion, the solution would turn dark green.
Ten minutes later, after checking a dozen samples coming in on the conveyor belt, there was no change in any of the solutions. When Stanton repeated the process, the result was the same.
“No reaction,” Davies said as he came back across the floor.
Stanton turned to the floor manager. “Where are your trucks?”
Out on the loading docks, they worked over every inch of the vehicles used to cart the remains in from the slaughterhouse. They swabbed and tested the bloodstained walls and floors of all twenty-two trucks.
But swab after swab was negative, and when they got through all of them, the ELISA solutions stayed clear.
Mastras was smiling now. He hopped out of the last truck and called upstairs to report that they could begin serving to LAUSD immediately.
“I told you,” Mastras said. “We’ve always been clean.”
Stanton prayed they hadn’t missed anything and chided himself for believing they’d find the answer so quickly. Rendering was only one of the dangerous ways man manipulated meat. They’d just have to widen their search for what made John Doe sick. With every passing hour, others could be infected.
When Stanton stepped out of the truck, he saw that Mastras had left the loading dock and walked off down the road. He was staring at something in the distance. Stanton followed the manager until he had a clear look. Dust rose up in clouds beneath the tires of vans with antennas pointed in all directions.
“Motherfucker,” Mastras said, looking back at Stanton.
News crews were speeding toward them.
THE MASS OF PRESS CONGREGATED OUTSIDE PRESBYTERIAN HOSPITAL made Chel even more nervous than she already was. The doctor she’d spoken to on the phone told her the case was highly confidential, which suited her perfectly. Her motives here were complicated, and the less attention drawn to them the better. Still, it was clear some big news story had broken; in the parking lot there were news crews and cameras and reporters everywhere.
She sat in her car, considering the odds that the press presence had anything to do with why she was here. If she went inside and there was a connection between the sick man and the book, she could end up in serious trouble. But if she didn’t, she might never know how it was possible that a sick indigenous man was repeating the Mayan word for codex a day after Gutierrez showed up with possibly the most important document in her people’s history. Her curiosity trumped her fear.
Ten minutes later, Chel stood in the patient’s room on the sixth floor of the hospital with Dr. Thane, her curiosity forgotten. They hovered over the patient’s bed, watching a man who was suffering terribly, sweating and in obvious pain. How he had ended up here, Chel didn’t know, but to die in an unfamiliar place, far from home, was the worst of all fates.
“We need to find out his name, how long he’s been in the States, and when he got sick,” Thane said. “And anything else you can tell us. Any detail could be important.”
Chel looked back at John Doe. “Rajawxik chew…” he mumbled in Qu’iche.
“Can we get him some water?” Chel asked Thane.
Thane motioned at his IV. “He’s more hydrated than I am right now.”
“He says he’s thirsty.”
The doctor picked up the pitcher on John Doe’s tray table, filled it in the sink, and then poured water into his cup. He grabbed it in both hands and gulped it down.
“It’s safe to get close to him?” Chel asked.
“It’s not contagious that way,” Thane told her. “The disease spreads through tainted meat. The masks are so we don’t give him another infection while his defenses are down.”
Chel adjusted the straps on her face mask and moved closer. It was unlikely the man worked in commerce; Maya who peddled their wares to tourists along the roads of Guatemala picked up some Spanish. He had no tattoos or piercings, so he wasn’t a shaman or a daykeeper. But his palms were callused, hardened across the base of each finger, with strips of cracked skin extending from the knuckle to the butt of the thumb. It was the sign of the machete, the hand tool indígenas used to clear land for farming. It was also what looters used to search the jungles for ruins.
Was it possible she was looking at the man who discovered the codex?
Thane said, “Okay, let’s start with his name.”
“What is your family’s name, brother?” Chel asked him. “I am a Manu,” she said. “My given name is Chel. What do they call you?”
“Rapapem Volcy,” he whispered hoarsely.
Rapapem, meaning flight. Volcy was a common surname. From the inflection of his vowels, Chel believed he was from somewhere in the south Petén.
“My family comes from El Petén,” she said. “Does yours?”
Volcy said nothing. Chel tried asking a few different ways, but he’d gone silent.
“What about when he came to the United States?” Thane asked.
Chel translated and got a clearer answer. “Six suns ago.”
Thane looked surprised. “Only six days ago?”
Chel looked back at Volcy. “You came across the border through Mexico?”
The man squirmed in his bed and didn’t answer. Instead, he closed his eyes. “Vooge,” he repeated again.
“What about that?” Thane asked. “Vooge, is it? What does it mean? I looked it up with every spelling I could imagine and couldn’t find anything.”
“It’s w-u-j,” Chel explained. “W is pronounced like a v.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s the Qu’iche word we use to refer to the Popol Vuh, the holy creation epic of our people,” Chel said. “He knows he’s sick, and he probably wants the comfort the book gives him.”
“So he wants us to bring one to him?”
Chel reached into her bag, pulled out a tattered copy of the holy book, and set it on the nightstand. “Like a Christian might want a Bible.”
No indígena would use only the word wuj—what the Maya called their ancient books—for the proper name of the Popol Vuh. But no one would question her here.
“See if he can tell us anything about when he got sick,” Thane said. “Ask him if he remembers when he first had trouble sleeping.”
As Chel translated the doctor’s questions into Qu’iche, Volcy opened his eyes a little. “In the jungle,” he said.
Chel blinked, confused. “You were sick in the jungle?”
He nodded.
“You were sick when you came here, Volcy?”
“For three suns before I came here, I had not slept.”
“He was sick in Guatemala?” Thane asked. “You’re sure that’s what he said?”
Chel nodded. “Why? What does that mean?”
“It means I need to make some calls.”
CHEL PUT A HAND on the crease between Volcy’s neck and shoulder. It was a technique her mother had used when Chel was a little girl, to calm her after a nightmare or a bad scrape; her grandmother had done the same for her mother. As Chel rubbed her hand back and forth, she felt the tension in Volcy’s body loosening. She didn’t know how long the doctor would be gone. This was her chance.
“Tell me, brother,” she whispered. “Why did you come from El Petén?”
Volcy spoke. “Che’qriqa’ ali Janotha.”
Help me find Janotha.
“Please,” he continued. “I have to get back to my wife and my daughter.”
She leaned in. “You have a daughter?”
“A newborn,” he said. “Sama. Now Janotha must care for her alone.”
Chel knew that, but for a twist of fate, she could easily have been Janotha, waiting with a newborn in a palm-thatched house for a man to come home, watching his empty hammock hanging from the roof. Somewhere in Guatemala, Janotha was pressing corn into tortillas over a hearth and promising her infant daughter that her father would return to them soon.
Volcy seemed to fade in and out, but Chel decided to press her advantage. “Do you know the ancient book, brother?”
His eyes suddenly focused on her in a way they hadn’t before.
“I have seen the wuj, brother,” Chel continued. “Can you tell me about it?”
Volcy stared at her. “I did what any man does to help his family.”
“What did you do to help your family?” she asked. “Sell the book?”
“It was broken into pieces,” he whispered. “On the floor of the temple… dried up by a hundred thousand days.”
So Chel had been right: The man lying here in front of her was the looter. Tensions in Guatemala had left indígenas like Volcy—manual laborers—with little option. Yet somehow, against all odds, he’d found a temple with a book that he understood would command a fortune in America. The amazing thing was that he had managed to bring it here himself.
“Brother, you brought the book to America to sell?”
“Je’,” Volcy said. Yes.
Chel glanced back over her shoulder to make sure she was still alone before asking, “Did you sell it to someone? Did you sell it to Hector Gutierrez?”
Volcy said nothing.
“Tell me this,” Chel said, trying a different tack. She put a finger to her cheek. “Did you sell it to a man with red ink on his cheek? Just above his beard?”
He nodded.
“Did you meet him here or in the Petén?”
He pointed down at the floor, at this foreign land he would no doubt die in. Volcy found the tomb, looted the book, made his way here, and somehow hooked up with Gutierrez. Within a week, the book was sitting in Chel’s lab at the Getty.
“Brother, where is this temple?” she asked. “There is so much good that could come to our people if you will tell me where the temple is.”
Instead of answering, Volcy whipped his body toward his side table, his arms flailing at the pitcher of water. The phone and alarm clock crashed to the ground. He grabbed the top off the pitcher and poured the rest of the water into his mouth. Chel stumbled back and her chair fell to the floor.
When Volcy finished drinking, Chel reached for the end of his blanket and dried his face. She knew she had little time to get the answers she needed. He was calm again, so she pressed on. “Can you tell me where Janotha lives?” she asked. “What village are you and Janotha from? We can send word to your family and let them know you are here.” The temple couldn’t be far from his own home.
Volcy looked confused. “Who will you send there?”
“We have many from all over Guatemala in Fraternidad Maya. Someone will know the way to your village, I promise.”
“Fraternidad?”
“This is our church,” Chel said. “Where Maya here in Los Angeles worship.”
Volcy’s eyes filled with distrust. “That is Spanish. You worship with ladinos?”
“No,” Chel said. “Fraternidad is a safe place of worship for the indígenas.”
“I will tell ladinos nothing!”
Chel had made a mistake. Fraternidad meant brotherhood in Spanish. Living here in Los Angeles, commingling of Spanish, Mayan, and English was common. But where Volcy had come from, it was reasonable to doubt a Maya church with such a word in its name.
“Fraternidad cannot know,” Volcy continued. “I will never lead the ladinos to Janotha and Sama…. You are ajwaral!”
There was no single English word for it. It meant literally, You are a native of here. But Volcy intended it as an indigenous slur. Even though Chel had been born in a village like his, even though she devoted her life to studying the ancients—to men like him, she would always be an outsider.
“Dr. Manu?” said a voice from behind her.
She turned and found a white-coated figure standing in the doorway.
“I’m Gabriel Stanton.”
CHEL TRAILED THE new doctor past the masked security guard and out into the hallway. His voice was full of purpose, and his height gave him a commanding presence. How long had he been watching? Had he sensed the uncomfortable direction her conversation with Volcy had taken?
Stanton turned. “So Mr. Volcy says he was sick before he got to the States?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“We have to know for sure,” Stanton told her. “We’ve been looking for a source here in L.A. If what he says is true, we need to be looking in Guatemala instead. Did he say where in the country he was from?”
“Based on his accent, I have to assume he’s from the Petén,” she told him. “It’s the largest department—the equivalent of states. But I haven’t gotten anything more about the village he’s from. And he won’t say how he got into America.”
“Either way,” Stanton said, “we could be talking about Guatemalan meat as our vector. And if he’s from some small indigenous village, then it has to be something he would have had access to. Far as I understand, thousands of acres of tropical forest have been cut to make way for cattle farms down there. That right?”
Chel nodded. His knowledge was impressive, and he was clearly a smart guy, if intimidating.
“Volcy could’ve been exposed to tainted meat from any of those cattle farms,” Stanton said. “We need to know all the meat he ate before his symptoms began. Far back as he can remember. Beef especially, but also chicken, pork—anything.”
“Villagers can eat meat from half a dozen different animals at a single meal.”
Dr. Stanton appeared to be studying her. She noticed that the doctor’s glasses were crooked and felt an unaccountable urge to fix them. He was at least a foot taller than she was, and she had to crane her neck to gaze at him.
“I need you to get him to dig as deep as he can,” Stanton said.
“I’ll do my best.”
“Did he say what he’s doing here? Did he come looking for work?”
“No,” she lied. “He didn’t say. He was fading in and out by the end and not really answering my questions.”
“People with this kind of insomnia can wax and wane by the minute. Let’s try it another way.”
Inside the room, Volcy now lay with his eyes closed, his breathing hard and labored. Chel was afraid of how he would react when he saw her, and for a split second she considered telling Stanton the truth—coming clean about the codex and Volcy’s connection to it.
But she didn’t. She was too worried about ICE or the Getty finding out. She was too afraid of losing everything she’d worked for and the codex at the same time.
“We’ve learned from Alzheimer’s that patients with this kind of brain damage sometimes respond better to questions if there are triggers,” Stanton said. “The key is to go one step at a time and lead them from question to question.”
Volcy opened his eyes and looked at Stanton before turning his gaze to Chel. When they locked stares, she waited for his hostility to surface.
Nothing.
“Start with his name,” Stanton said.
“We know his name.”
“Exactly. Tell him: Your name is Volcy.”
Chel turned to the patient. “At, Volcy ri’ ab’i’.”
When Volcy said nothing, she repeated it again. “At, Volcy ri’ ab’i’.”
“In, Volcy ri nub’i’,” he said finally. My name is Volcy. There was no hostility in his voice. It was as if he’d forgotten about their Fraternidad exchange.
“He understood,” Chel whispered.
“Now ask him: Did your parents call you Volcy?”
“ My parents called me Daring One.”
“Keep going,” Stanton said. “Ask him why.”
So she went on, and with each back-and-forth, Chel was amazed at how Volcy’s eyes became clearer, more focused.
“Why did they call you Daring One?”
“Because I always dared to do what no boy would.”
“What was it no other boy would dare to do?”
“Go into the jungle as fearlessly as I did.”
“When you fearlessly went into the jungle as a boy, how did you survive?”
“I survived by the will of the gods.”
“The gods protected you in the jungle when you were a boy?”
“Until I offended them as a man, they protected me.”
“What happened when they stopped protecting you as a man?”
“In the jungle they would not let me pass to the other side.”
“The other side, into the dream state?”
“They would not let my soul rest or gather strength in the spirit world.”
Chel stopped the back-and-forth. She wanted to make sure she’d heard right, and she leaned in closer. “Volcy. You were unable to pass into the dream state since you were in the jungle? Since you got the ancient book?”
He nodded.
“What’s going on?” Stanton asked.
Chel ignored him. She had to know the answer. “Where was the temple in the jungle?” she asked Volcy.
But he had gone silent again.
Stanton sounded impatient. “Why’d he stop talking? What’d you say?”
“He said he first got sick in the jungle,” Chel said.
“Why was he in the jungle? Is that where he’s from?”
“No.” Chel paused only a beat. “He was there to do a kind of meditation. He says that during this ritual was when he first had insomnia.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I’m sure.”
What did it matter if she lied about why he was in the jungle? Whether he was there to get the book or to meditate, either way he’d gotten sick.
“Then he left the jungle and came north?” Stanton asked.
“That’s what it sounds like.”
“Why did he come across the border?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Would there be cattle ranches near the jungle where he was… meditating?”
“I don’t know what part of the Petén we’re talking about,” Chel said truthfully. “But there are cattle ranches everywhere in the highlands.”
“What would he have been eating during this jungle ritual?” Stanton asked.
“Whatever he could trap or find.”
“So he’s camping, living in the jungle or on the outskirts of one of these cattle ranches. He’s there for weeks, and he has to eat something. So maybe he decides to kill one of the cows.”
“I guess that’s possible.”
Stanton told her to keep pursuing this line of inquiry, continuing with his word-linking technique. Which she did, steering clear of any discussion of why Volcy was in the jungle in the first place.
“Did you eat the meat of a cow in the jungle?”
“There was no cow meat to eat.”
“Did you eat the meat of a chicken in the jungle?”
“What chickens are found in the wild?”
“Wild deer are found in the jungle. Did you eat the meat of a deer?”
“I have never cooked the meat of a deer on my hearth.”
“When you were in the wild, did you bring a stone hearth to cook on?”
“We cooked only tortillas on the hearth.”
“Was this hearth used to prepare meat back in your village?”
“Chuyum-thul would not allow meat on the hearth. I am Chuyum-thul, who presides over the jungle from the sky, who has guided my human form since birth.”
Chuyum-thul was a hawk and must be Volcy’s spirit animal, which Chel knew he would have been assigned by the village shaman. A man’s wayob was a symbol of who he was: The brave man, like a king, was a jaguar; the funny man, a howler monkey; the slow man, a turtle. For both their ancerstors and the modern Maya, a man’s name and his wayob could be used interchangeably, exactly as Volcy was now doing.
“I am Pape, the tiger-stripe butterfl y,” Chel said. “My human form honors my wayob form daily. Chuyum-thul knows you have shown him reverence, if you have followed his guidance about what to prepare on your hearth.”
“I have followed his guidance for twelve moons,” Volcy said, his eyes softening again when he saw she understood. “He has shown me the souls of the animals of the jungle and how he watches over them. He told me how no human shall destroy them.”
Stanton cut in. “What is he saying?”
Again Chel ignored him. She had earned back Volcy’s trust, and she needed answers of her own before he faded away again.
“Was it the hawk who led you to the great temple, to the place where you could provide for your family?” she asked. “For Janotha and Sama?”
Slowly he nodded.
“How far from the village was this temple Chuyum-thul led you to?”
“Three days’ walk.”
“In which direction?”
He didn’t answer.
“Please, you must tell me in which direction you went three days’ walk.”
But Volcy had shut down again.
Frustrated, Chel shifted gears. “You followed the guidance of Chuyum-thul for twelve moons? What was his guidance?”
“He commanded I subsist for twelve moons, that he would give me guidance to bring splendor to the village,” Volcy said. “Then he led me to the temple.”
When she heard the words, Chel was confused. Subsist for twelve moons?
How could that be?
Subsistence was a practice that went back to the ancients, in which shamans would retreat to their caves to commune with the gods and survive on only water and a few fruits for months at a time.
“You have subsisted for twelve moons, brother?” Chel asked Volcy slowly. “And have you kept that oath?”
He nodded.
“What the hell is he saying?” Stanton demanded.
Chel turned to him. “You said this disease came from meat, right?”
“All non-genetic prion disease comes from meat. That’s why I need to know what kind of meat he’s eaten. As far back as he can remember.”
“He hasn’t been eating any meat.”
“What are you saying?”
“He’s been on a subsistence diet. For our people that means no meat.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I’m telling you,” Chel said. “He says he’s been a vegetarian for the past year.”
VOLCY’S MOUTH, HIS THROAT, AND EVEN HIS STOMACH WERE AS dry as if he’d sowed plots for two days straight. Like the thirst Janotha said she had felt when she delivered Sama, a thirst that couldn’t be quenched. The lights flickered in and out as he opened and closed his eyes, trying to grasp how he’d gotten into the bed in the first place.
I’ll never see Sama again. I’ll die here, and she won’t know I took the book from the ancients for her, only for her.
When the drought came, the shaman chanted and made offerings to Chaak every day, but still no rain came. Families broke up, children got shipped off to relatives in the cities, elders died from the heat. Janotha worried her milk would dry.
But you—the hawk—would never let that happen—never.
When Volcy was a boy, and his mother would go hungry to feed the children, he would creep across the floor of their hut while his parents slept, sneak out of their house, and steal maize from a family with more than they needed.
The hawk, never afraid.
Years later, Volcy had heeded the call of his wayob when his family was in need again. While he fasted, the hawk heard the call that would lead him to the ruins. He and his partner, Malcin, traveled three days into the forest, searching. Only Ix Chel, goddess of the moon, gave light. Malcin was afraid they might anger the gods. But slivers of pottery were being sold for thousands to white men because of the coming end of the Long Count cycle.
The gods had led them to the ruins, and, between towering trees, they found the building with walls wrecked by wind and rain. Inside the tomb was glory: obsidian blades; stucco-painted gourds and crystals; beads and pottery. A head mask and jade teeth on skulls. And the book. The cursed book. They had had no idea what the designs or words on the bark paper meant, but they were mesmerized.
Now Volcy was alone in the darkness—but where? The man and the Qu’iche woman were gone. Volcy reached for his water glass again. But the glass was empty.
He threw his legs onto the floor and lurched away unsteadily. His limbs were failing him like his vision. But he had to drink. He dragged the pole he was attached to into the bathroom, got to the sink, threw the handles wide, and shoved his head under the stream, forcing gulps. But it wasn’t enough. Water doused his nostrils and mouth and ran down his face, but he needed more. The curse of the book was sucking him dry, parching every inch of his skin. He had let the white man’s obsession with the Long Count compel him to sacrifice the honor of his ancestors.
The hawk lifted up from beneath the faucet and saw his face in the mirror. His head was soaked, but his thirst was still there.
STANTON, ON THE PHONE with Davies, paced in the courtyard in front of the hospital. Red and blue lights flashed everywhere; LAPD had been called in to hold back the metastasizing press. The leak about John Doe and his mysterious medical condition had apparently come from an orderly, who’d overheard Thane talking to an attending physician and posted something in a mad cow chat room. Now every major news organization in the country had dispatched reporters here as well.
“What if John Doe is lying?” Davies asked.
“Why would he lie?”
“I don’t know—maybe his wife’s some kind of rabid vegan, and he doesn’t want her to know he’s been chowing down on Big Macs.”
“Come on.”
“Okay then, maybe he got sick before he stopped eating meat?”
“You saw the slides. He got sick much more recently than a year ago.”
Davies sighed. “Your translator said it’s possible he could have had cheese or milk, right? It’s time to start talking about dairy.”
They had only the testimony of one patient up against decades of research, and Stanton was still skeptical of a vector other than meat. But they had to explore the possibility. E. coli, Listeria, and salmonella had all been found in cow’s milk, and Stanton had long feared that prion could get into the dairy supply. Per capita beef consumption in the United States was forty pounds a year; dairy was over three hundred. And milk from a single cow was often used in thousands of different products over its life-span, making finding the source that much more complicated.
“I’ll see what infrastructure the Guatemalans have for tracking their dairy,” Davies said. “But we’re talking about a Third World health service investigating a disease they won’t want anyone to know came from inside their borders. Not a recipe for good epidemiology.”
“How’s the hospital search here going?”
“Still nothing,” Davies said. “Team called every ER in L.A., and I sent Jiao down to look at a couple of suspicious patients, but they were false alarms.”
“Have them check again,” Stanton said. “Every twenty-four hours.”
They hung up, and Stanton hurried around the edge of the building. The press weren’t the only ones crowding the parking lot; a cavalcade of ambulances was outside the ER, lights blazing. Paramedics swarmed, and doctors and nurses barked orders as patients were unloaded on stretchers. There’d been a major car accident on the 101 freeway, and dozens of critically injured patients had been transported here.
Stanton made another quick call as he headed back for the front door of the building. “It’s me,” he said quietly when he got Nina’s voice mail again. He glanced around to make sure no one was listening. “Do me a favor and throw your milk and cheese overboard too.”
INSIDE THE ER, Stanton squeezed himself against the wall to make room for gurneys from the car accident flying by. An elderly man, with his arm wrapped in gauze and a tourniquet, screamed in pain. Surgeons were operating in the non-sterile ER on patients too critical to get to the ORs. He gave silent thanks that triage wasn’t his area of expertise.
Back on the sixth floor, Stanton found Chel Manu in the waiting area. Even in her heels she was tiny, and he again found his eyes drifting down to the nape of her neck,where her black hair fell. It wasn’t just that she was attractive—she was clearly sharp too. She’d already managed to get key information from Volcy, so he’d asked her to stay.
“You want coffee while we wait for the nurses to finish?” he asked, motioning toward the vending machine.
“No, but I could use a cigarette,” Chel said.
Stanton dropped quarters into the slot, filling a Styrofoam cup. It was hardly Groundwork, but it would have to do. “Probably won’t find many of those in here.”
She shrugged. “Promised myself I’d quit by the end of the year anyway.”
Stanton sipped the weak coffee. “Guess that means you don’t believe the Mayan apocalypse is coming.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Me neither.” He smiled, thinking they were just making easy banter, but didn’t get one in return. Maybe it wasn’t something she wanted to joke about.
“So what now?” she asked, deadpan.
“Soon as the nurses are done in there,” Stanton said, “we should try to get Volcy to tell us all the dairy items he might have had in the last month or so.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, “but I’m not sure he completely trusts me.”
“Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
STANTON WAS SURPRISED to find no one standing outside Volcy’s room. Mariano, the security guard, was nowhere to be seen, and no replacement had arrived. Every guard in the building must have been called down to control the crowd from the freeway accident.
Inside, Stanton and Chel found nothing but an empty bed.
“Did they move him?” Chel asked.
Stanton flipped on the lights and scanned the room. Seconds later they heard a hissing coming from behind the bathroom door. He put his ear to it. “Volcy?” The hissing was high-pitched and sounded like a leak, but there was no answer.
Turning the doorknob, Stanton found it unlocked. Then he saw Volcy. The man was facedown on the ground as if he’d been cold-cocked. The room itself was destroyed: drywall everywhere, the basin of the sink detached from the base, copper pipes protruding from the wall and leaking water onto the floor.
“Masam… ahrana… Janotha…” Volcy mumbled.
Stanton dropped to the ground and touched the patient’s shoulder.
“Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
No answer.
He pulled the man’s arm around his neck to lift him up. Stanton could feel how distended Volcy’s body was; the man’s arms, legs, and torso all looked like they had been pumped too full of air. Like they were desperate to be punctured. The skin was cold.
“Get the care team!” Stanton yelled to Chel.
She seemed paralyzed.
“Go!”
Chel darted, and Stanton turned back to the patient. “I need you to hold on to me, Volcy.” Stanton tried to get him back to the bed, where they could put him on a ventilator. “Come on,” he grunted, “stay with me.”
By the time the rest of the medical team got there, Volcy was barely breathing. He had ingested so much water that it was overloading his heart, and he was close to cardiac arrest. Two nurses and an anesthesiologist joined Stanton at the bedside, and they began to inject drugs. They covered Volcy’s face with an oxygen mask, but it was a losing battle. Three minutes later, Volcy’s heart stopped.
The anesthesiologist applied a series of electric pulses, each stronger than the last. The defi brillator paddles left scorch marks as the patient’s body arched up. Stanton began chest compressions, something he hadn’t done since his residency. He threw his weight down from his shoulders and delivered a series of rapid pulses to Volcy’s chest, just above the sternum. The body rose and fell with each, one, two, three, four…
Finally the anesthesiologist grabbed Stanton’s arm and urged him back from the bed. She said the words: “Time of death twelve twenty-six p.m.”
MORE AMBULANCES SCREAMED from the 101 freeway toward the ER. Stanton tried to block out the sounds while he and Thane watched the orderly team lifting Volcy’s corpse into the body bag.
“He’s been sweating for a week straight, right?” Thane said. “He must have been dehydrated.”
Stanton looked down at the blue, bloated corpse. “This didn’t come from his kidneys. It came from his brain.”
Thane looked confused. “You mean like a polydipsia?”
Stanton nodded. Patients with psychogenic polydipsia were driven to drink excessively: Sinks had to be disabled, toilets drained. In the worst cases, like this one, the heart failed due to fluid overload. Stanton had never seen an FFI patient do it before, but he was angry at himself for not considering the possibility.
“I thought that was a symptom of schizophrenia.” Thane was rummaging through the man’s chart, trying to grasp what had happened.
“After a week without sleep, he might as well have had schizophrenia.”
As the orderlies zipped the body bag, Stanton imagined Volcy’s horrific last minutes. Schizophrenia caused abnormalities in the perception of reality; FFI patients exhibited many of the same symptoms. Stanton had often wondered if sleep was all that kept healthy people out of insane asylums.
“What happened to Dr. Manu?” Thane asked.
“She was here a minute ago.”
“Guess you can’t blame her for freaking when she saw this.”
“She was the last person to talk to him,” Stanton said. “We need her to write down everything he said as precisely as possible. Track her down.”
The orderlies lifted Volcy’s body onto the gurney and wheeled it out. After the corpse was prepared, Stanton would meet the pathologists down in the morgue for the autopsy.
“I should’ve been here,” Thane said. “I got pulled down to the ER. They’re sending way too many critical patients here from that accident. It looks like an Afghan fucking field clinic down there now.”
“Nothing you could’ve done,” Stanton said, pulling off his glasses.
“Some asshole falls asleep in his SUV on the freeway, and the rest of our patients suffer,” Thane said.
He walked to the window, moved the curtain aside, and gazed down below. A siren blared as yet another ambulance pulled into the ER bay. “The driver that caused the crash fell asleep at the wheel?” he asked.
Thane shrugged. “That’s what the cops said.”
Stanton focused on the flashing lights below.
IT WAS PAINFUL FOR HECTOR GUTIERREZ TO LIE TO HIS WIFE about the trouble he was in and even more painful to think that, if he got caught, their little boy probably wouldn’t even recognize him by the time his father got out of prison. Hector thanked God he’d already emptied the storage unit before the cops had raided it. But he was sure his house was next. His source at ICE who’d tipped him off (and been paid handsomely for doing so) said they’d been gathering evidence against him for months. If they found everything, Hector could face up to ten years.
Maria wasn’t working on Monday, so he couldn’t move the goods out of the house until the next day. Instead, he took Ernesto to Six Flags, where the two of them hurtled around on old roller coasters. It made Hector happy that his son had a blast, but he was convinced someone was following them, tracking them through the park. There were shadows in the funnel-cake lines and lingering faces at the arcade. He sweated anxiously all day, despite the fact that winter had finally come to L.A. By the time they got back home, he’d soaked through his shirt and socks.
That night, he cranked up the air-conditioning and watched an hour of sitcoms with Maria, desperately trying to figure out how to tell her what was going on. By two a.m., she’d already been asleep for hours, blissfully unaware, while Hector was still wide awake in front of the TV and covered in sweat. Not since his teenage love affair with cocaine had he felt so on edge. His ears stung with every noise: the hum of the cable box, the teeth-clenching sound Ernesto made when he slept, the cars out on 94th Street, each of which sounded like it was coming for him.
Past three, Hector climbed into bed. His mouth was dry, and he could barely keep his eyes open. But still he couldn’t sleep, and every turn of the clock was another reminder of how little night was left—he had a huge day of moving everything out of the house ahead of him. Finally he woke his wife in a last-ditch effort to tire himself out.
Even after the most electric sex they’d had in months, he couldn’t sleep. Hector lay naked next to Maria for almost two hours, soaking through the sheets, flesh and fabric glued together by sweat. He rapped his head against the mattress. Then he got up and surfed the Internet, where he found pills from Canada that promised sleep within ten minutes. But of course you had to call during regular business hours.
Soon came the chirping of birds, and behind the shades Hector saw the first rays of a new day. He lay awake for another hour. When he got up, he cut himself shaving. His hands were shaking from exhaustion. Fortunately, after downing oatmeal and coffee in the kitchen, he experienced a surge of energy. When he stepped outside to catch the bus, the breeze was a balm.
By seven a.m., he was at a garage near LAX, where he picked up the green Ford Explorer with fake plates he used when he needed to covertly transport antiquities. When he was sure Maria and Ernesto had left for work, he returned to the house to cart the rest of the items he had hidden in his home to the new facility he’d rented in West Hollywood that nobody knew about.
The sweating was bad again by the time he reached Our Lady of the Angels, where he had found Chel Manu. But he’d managed to hide his suffering and to convince her to take the codex. Either she’d find a way to pay, or she was the perfect solution to his problem. If he got pulled in, she was a far bigger fish for ICE. There was no one they’d rather make an example of than a curator. He’d get full immunity if he testified against her.
Following his visit to the church, Hector tried to focus on the traffic speeding by. The neon billboards on the 101 appeared dull to him, as if someone had bled the colors out. The regular noises of the car and its engine were hammers on his eardrums. He spent the rest of the day checking places he frequently did business with buyers and sellers. Paying bribes to motel clerks and body shop mechanics and strip club bouncers. Trying to get rid of any evidence ICE could use against him.
Halfway home that night, Hector panicked when he saw a black Lincoln in his rearview. By the time he got back to Inglewood and parked several blocks from the house, he’d gone back and forth a dozen times in his mind on whether the car had been following him.
Maria was watching him from the window when he walked up the driveway. She started yammering and wouldn’t let him get a word in. It’d been almost thirty-six hours since Hector had last slept, and she could see it in his eyes. She immediately gave him a glass of red wine, turned the stereo to classical music, and lit candles. Her mother was an insomniac, and she’d learned all the tricks.
Yet at two a.m., Hector lay awake next to her in their bed, reflecting on his life. Each hour became a referendum: At three, he judged himself a good father; at four, a bad husband.
Finally he nestled against Maria again, stroking her breasts. But when she put her hand between his legs, Hector couldn’t get an erection. Even when she straddled him, nothing happened. Every part of Hector’s body was betraying him, all the things he never thought to doubt. He apologized to Maria, then, with his hands shaking, his eyes blurry, and his breathing labored, he went out to the stoop and sat alone in the chilly night. When he saw the first planes swooping in from overhead, signaling another dawn without sleep, Hector felt something else he hadn’t in years: the urge to cry.
He heard a voice coming from somewhere behind him. Who the hell was in his house at five o’clock in the morning? Hector stormed back into the kitchen. It took him a second to process who in the hell the man standing there was.
It was the birdman. The birdman was at Hector’s dinner table.
“What are you doing in my house?” Hector demanded. “Get out!”
The birdman stood up, and before the man could respond, Hector threw a quick blow across his chin, knocking him onto the floor.
Maria ran into the room. “What did you do?” she screamed. “Why did you hit him?”
When Hector pointed at the birdman to try to explain, nothing made sense. The crumpled person on the floor was Ernesto, looking back at him in shock.
“Papa,” the boy cried.
Hector felt as if he might vomit. Long ago he’d sworn to Maria he’d never take his anger out on her or their son the way his father did on him. She started flailing at him. He wasn’t even thinking as he threw his wife to the floor.
The last time Maria Gutierrez saw her husband, he was running down the street toward the Ford Explorer.
EVERY CORNER OF THE PRESBYTERIAN ER WAS FILLED WITH TRAUMA patients. Stanton hurried through the aftermath of the highway accident. Bumping into techs. Knocking over crash carts. Frantically searching for the man who caused this. Car accidents were common in FFI case reports; in one German case, it was the first sign that the insomnia had become complete. From a witness’s perspective it appeared the driver had fallen asleep on the autobahn.
Stanton ripped back curtain after curtain in the overwhelmed ER, behind which he saw unsupervised surgical residents performing operations they had no business attempting and nurses making medical decisions alone because there weren’t enough doctors. The one thing he didn’t see was anyone who could tell him who caused the accident and whether the person had been brought here.
Stanton stopped and scanned the room. Two paramedics stood across the bay, conscripted into service because the hospital was so understaffed.
He ran over. They were squeezing oxygen through a patient’s mask. “Were you guys on the scene? Who caused the accident?”
“Latino guy,” one of them said.
“Where is he? Here?”
“Look for a John Doe.”
Stanton studied the patient board. Another John Doe? Even if there was no ID on the driver, they should’ve tracked his car already.
Near the bottom of the board, he found an unnamed patient. He darted back toward curtain 14. Tore it open. There was a flurry of motion inside—doctors yelling orders and moaning coming from the bloody, writhing man.
“I have to talk to him.” Stanton flashed his CDC ID.
They looked confused but gave him room to approach.
He leaned close to the man’s ear. “Sir, have you had trouble sleeping?”
No answer.
“Have you been sick, sir?”
The monitors beeped loudly. “His pressure’s falling,” warned one of the nurses.
An ER doc pushed Stanton out of the way. Injected the man’s IV with more drugs. They all watched the monitor. Pressure continued to drop as the man’s heart slowed.
“Crash cart!” yelled the other doctor.
“Sir!” Stanton called out from behind them. “What is your name?”
“Ernesto had his face,” the driver groaned finally. “I didn’t mean to hit him….”
“Please,” Stanton said, “your name!”
The driver’s eyes flickered. “I thought Ernesto was the birdman. The birdman did this to me.”
These words sent a shiver through Stanton that he couldn’t explain.
“The birdman,” he pressed. “Who is the birdman?”
A long sigh came from the driver’s throat, then the familiar sequence followed: flatline, yelling, crash cart, paddles, injections, more yelling. Then silence. And time of death.
CHEL SAT IN HER OFFICE at the Getty, smoking her pack’s last cigarette. She’d never watched a man die before. After seeing Volcy expire on the table, she’d fled without a word to the doctors. For hours, she’d ignored phone calls from the hospital, including two from Stanton. She just stared numbly at her computer screen, refreshing the relevant sites again and again.
The CDC knew Volcy was a vegetarian, but the press was still focusing their coverage on how his disease probably came from tainted meat. The blogosphere was on fire with headlines about the Long Count and nutty theories about how it couldn’t be a coincidence that some new strain similar to mad cow had appeared only a week before 12/21.
There was a quiet knock on her office door, followed by Rolando Chacon popping his head inside. “Got a minute?”
She waved him in. He’d listened without judgment as she told him about the hospital, including how she’d lied to the doctors about Volcy’s reasons for coming to the States.
“You okay?” Rolando asked, taking the seat in front of her.
She shrugged.
“Maybe you should go home and get some sleep.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “What is it?”
“The C-14 dating came back: 930 plus or minus 150. Exactly what we thought. Middle of the terminal classic.”
Chel should have been ecstatic. This was the proof they’d been waiting for. Everything she’d learned and understood about her work had come together, and the codex could be a portal to immense understanding. Still, she felt nothing.
“Great,” she told Ronaldo without emotion.
“I’m also moving forward with the reconstruction,” he said. “But there’s a problem.” He passed Chel a piece of paper, on which he’d drawn two symbols:
In ancient Mayan, they were pronounced chit and unen. “A father, and a male child of the father,” Chel said absently. “A father and his son.”
“But that’s not how the scribe is using it.” Rolando handed her another page. “That’s a rough translation of the second paragraph.”
The father and his son is not noble by birth, and so there is much the father and his son will never fathom about the ways of the gods that watch over us, there is much the father and his son does not hear that the gods would whisper in the ears of a king.
“So it has to be one thing he’s referring to,” Rolando said. “One noble. One king. Something like that. Whatever it is, the pair of symbols appears all over the manuscript.”
Chel studied the glyphs again. Scribes commonly used word pairings in new ways for stylistic flourish, so it was likely this one was using the pair to signify something other than the literal translation.
“Could it have something to do with noble titles being passed down from fathers to their sons?” Rolando asked. “Patrilinearity?”
Chel doubted it but was having trouble focusing. “Let me think about it.”
Rolando tapped on her desk. “I know you don’t want to hear this, and I understand your concerns, really. But this is really a syntax question, and Victor’s the best there is. He could be very helpful with this, and I think you have to put your personal issues aside.”
“You and I can figure it out,” Chel said.
“Until we know what this is, it’ll be diffi cult to make much more progress. On the first page alone the combination appears ten times after the first paragraph. On some of the later pages it shows up two dozen times.”
“I’ll work on it,” Chel told him. “Thanks,” she added.
Rolando retreated into the lab, and Chel went back to her laptop.
Checking the Los Angeles Times site, she found newly posted articles about Volcy and Presbyterian. But something else caught her attention: photographs of cars piled up atop one another on the 101 freeway, and people being pulled from the wreckage. In the middle of it all was a green SUV.
STANTON STOOD WITH Davies in the morgue, deep in the basement of the hospital. The driver’s body lay on one metal table; beside them, on a second table, lay Volcy’s.
Davies made an incision from ear to ear on the driver’s skull, then draped the flap of skin and removed the skullcap to expose the brain.
“Ready,” he said.
Stanton stepped forward, cut the central cortex away from the cranial nerves, and disconnected it from the spinal cord. Reaching inside, he removed the brain from its skull. Hidden in the folds of this organ was his best hope for figuring out VFI. He placed the brain on a sterile table, trying to ignore the fact that it was still warm.
Stanton and Davies began to slice. During his gross exam of the thalamus, Stanton saw clusters of tiny holes; under the microscope he saw a wasteland of craters and deformed tissue. Textbook FFI. Only much, much more aggressive.
“Anything?” Davies asked.
“Give me a second.” Stanton rubbed his eyes.
“You look knackered,” Davies said.
“I have no idea what that means.”
“You look like shit. You need to sleep, Gabe.”
“We all do.”
Davies snickered. “I’ll sleep when I’m like these blokes.”
“Come on.”
“Too soon?”
Once they finished with the driver’s brain, they performed the same operation on Volcy’s distended body. When they had sections from both brains ready, Stanton put his eye to the microscope again, upping the background light. The craters in Volcy’s brain ran deeper and the cortex looked more deformed. He had definitely been infected first.
Stanton had suspected as much, but until now he hadn’t realized what he could do with the information. “Make images of all these sections,” he told Davies. “And I want you to find the MRIs we took of Volcy when he was still alive. Figure out how fast the disease was spreading in his brain, then model everything backward. If we can figure out the rate of progression, then we can estimate when they both got sick.”
Davies nodded. “A timeline.”
If they could determine when Volcy took ill, they might be able to figure out where he’d gotten sick. With luck, they could do the same for the driver. The driver was the key: Someone in this city knew him. Once the driver was identifi ed, there’d be bank statements and credit-card receipts showing where he bought his groceries, where he ate. A paper trail leading straight to the source.
“Cavanagh’s on the line,” Davies said, holding out his cellphone.
Stanton peeled off his second layer of gloves. Into the phone he said one word: “Confirmed.”
Cavanagh took a deep breath. “You’re sure?”
“Same disease, different stages.”
“I’m getting on a plane right now. Tell me what you need to keep this under control.”
“An ID on the driver. We have two patients, and they were both John Does when they came in.” The Explorer was unregistered, and its driver, like Volcy, carried nothing to identify him. The worry was that this somehow wasn’t a coincidence. But what would that mean?
“The police are working on it,” Cavanagh said. “What else?”
“The public needs to know we found a second case. And they need to know it from us. Not from some blogger who makes half of it up.”
“If you’re asking for a press conference, the answer is no. Not yet. Everyone in the city will think they’re sick.”
“Then at least get the grocery stores to put a hold on dairy, and meat too, just to be safe. Get USDA to investigate all possible imports from Guatemala. And tell people they need to throw away the milk and all the rest in their refrigerators.”
“Not until we confirm the source of the disease.”
“If you want confirmation, get all of our agents here checking the pupil size of every patient in every hospital,” he said. “And I’m not just talking about L.A. I’m talking about the valley, Long Beach, Anaheim. I need more than two data points.”
“I’m supervising agents on the ground there already. Let them do their jobs.”
Stanton pictured Cavanagh’s unflappable stare. She’d become the brightest star at CDC in 2007, when an airplane passenger was suspected of carrying drug-resistant TB. She was one of the few at the center to remain levelheaded until the scare passed and had been a favorite in Washington ever since. But now wasn’t the time to be levelheaded.
“How can you be so calm?” Stanton asked Cavanagh.
“Because I have you to not be,” she said. “Now tell me something. How much sleep have you gotten? I’ll be on the ground in six hours, and I’m going to need you sharp and rested. If you haven’t slept, do it now.”
“Emily, I don’t—”
“I wasn’t making a suggestion, Gabe. That was an order.”
BACK IN VENICE, Stanton was surprised to see that nothing had changed. The evening crowds were in the beer gardens. Homeless drifters sat beneath the retail-shop awnings. Out on the boardwalk, men were still hawking charms to ward off the Maya apocalypse. For a moment, all this life made Stanton feel a bit better.
Just after eleven p.m., he stood in his kitchen, on the phone with the chief medical officer for the Guatemalan Health Service, Dr. Fernando Sandoval.
“Mr. Volcy told us that he came across the border after he was already sick,” Stanton said. “He was clear about that. You need to search clinics, facilities on the Pan-American Highway, and every local doctor’s office that serves indigenous people.”
“We have teams searching the area where he says he got sick,” Sandoval told him. “Despite the fact that it will cost us millions of dollars we don’t have, we’ve got people visiting every farm in the entire Petén and sampling cattle. So far they’ve come up with nothing, of course. Not a single trace of prion of any kind.”
“Not yet. But you understand how urgent this is, don’t you? From what we’re seeing here, you could have an epidemic soon.”
“There’s zero evidence that your second patient was ever here, Dr. Stanton.”
They’d broadcast the second victim’s photograph everywhere on the evening news, but no family or friends of the driver had come forward. “We haven’t ID’d him yet, but—”
“We have no other cases, and it is irresponsible of you to suggest anything of the kind. Neither of your patients got sick here. Though of course we will do everything we can to aid you in your investigation.”
The call ended abruptly, leaving Stanton frustrated. With no reported cases, the Guatemalans weren’t scared enough yet to take real action. Until they had a confirmed case of their own, Stanton knew it would be hard to get much at all from them, and, even then, their public-health capabilities were poor.
Stanton heard a key going into the lock and animal feet scurrying across the floor. He hurried to the living room, where he found Nina in worn jeans, a windbreaker, and still-glistening galoshes. Dogma ran toward him, and Nina followed, looping her arms around Stanton’s neck.
“Guess you found a place to dock, Captain,” he said, kissing her on the cheek.
“Should be fine until sunrise. You look like shit.”
“So everyone keeps telling me.”
Dogma started to whine, and Stanton rubbed the dog’s ears in circles.
Nina peeled off her coat. “When was the last time you ate something?”
“No idea.”
Nina beckoned him into the kitchen. “Don’t make me use force.”
There was a half-eaten container of Chinese delivery in the fridge, and she made Stanton eat it but let him listen to NPR updates while he did. The news program’s host was interviewing a CDC communications specialist Stanton had never heard of. They were talking about VFI in a way that made it obvious neither one of them had any real knowledge of prion science. A tightness grew in Stanton’s chest.
“What’s wrong?” Nina asked.
He fiddled with his fork, pressing liquid from the microwaved cubes of tofu. “This is going to get worse.”
“Good thing they’ve got you, then.”
“Soon people’ll realize we don’t know how to control a disease like this.”
“You’ve been warning them about this day forever.”
“I don’t mean CDC. I mean everyone else who’ll ask why we have no vaccine. Congress will go crazy. They’ll want to know what we’ve been doing since mad cow.”
“You did everything you could. Always have.”
Her voice was comforting. He reached out and took her hand. There was so much he wanted to say.
Nina kissed the back of his hand, led him into the living room, and turned on the TV. She leaned her head on his shoulder. Wolf Blitzer reported from the Situation Room, explaining that the identity of the second patient was still unknown.
“Do you have enough supplies on the boat?” Stanton asked her.
“For what?” she said. “Don’t get glass-half-empty on me. It depresses the dog.”
Looking at her, Stanton felt something he’d never expected before tonight. After a decade in the lab, a decade of fighting for funding to improve prion-disease readiness, a decade of warning that an outbreak was always just one accident away, now the unavoidable had come, and all Stanton wanted was to follow Nina back to the dock, get on Plan A with her and Dogma, and forget prion disease forever.
“What if we left?” Stanton asked.
Nina lifted her head. “And went where?”
“Who knows? Hawaii?”
“Don’t do this, Gabe.”
“I’m serious,” he said, staring into her eyes. “All I want is to be with you right now. I don’t care about anything else. I love you.”
She smiled, but there was something sad in it. “I love you too.”
Stanton leaned forward to kiss her, but before he could plant his lips on hers, Nina turned away.
“What?” he asked, pulling back.
“You’re under a lot of pressure, Gabe. You’ll get through this.”
“I want to get through it with you. Tell me what you want.”
“Please, Gabe.”
“Tell me.”
She didn’t look away as she spoke. “I want someone who doesn’t care if he shows up late to work because we spent too long in bed. Someone who’d actually get on that boat and leave all this behind. You’re the most driven man I’ve ever known, and I love that about you. But even if you came with me, in two days you’d be swimming back to the lab. You wouldn’t really walk away. Especially now.”
Stanton wanted to prove to her that the man she was describing didn’t exist, that it was a made-up version of him she’d concocted long ago. But at some level he knew she was right. He wasn’t getting on any boat right now.
Nina laid her head on his shoulder again. They sat in silence, and soon Stanton heard the slow breathing he knew so well. He wasn’t surprised; Nina could sleep anywhere, anytime—on park benches, in theaters, on crowded beaches. Stanton closed his eyes too. The tenseness in his jaw lessened. He thought of calling Davies, to ask how the timeline was going. But the notion floated away in a wave of exhaustion and sadness. He wanted to hide in the comfort of unconsciousness.
Still, sleep wouldn’t come. As he watched the minutes tick by, he found himself reiterating all the reasons he couldn’t be sick. He hadn’t consumed dairy in months. He hadn’t had meat in years. Yet he found himself appreciating Cavanagh’s concerns about how easy it might be for people to believe they had VFI.
Stanton picked up Nina and carried her into the bedroom, putting her on her old side of the bed. Dogma wandered in, and although he rarely allowed the dog on the bed, Stanton patted the mattress several times, and Dogma came bounding up and lay next to Nina.
Stanton was heading to his study to check email again when his cell-phone buzzed with a number he didn’t recognize.
“Dr. Stanton? It’s Chel Manu. Sorry to disturb you so late.”
“Dr. Manu. Where did you go? We’ve been calling you.”
“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.”
Stanton heard something in her voice. “Are you all right?”
“I need to talk to you.”
THE STREET VENDORS WHO’D WON A LOTTERY SPOT ON THE SEAWARD side of the boardwalk were gone, their African reeds and bird-houses and octopus bongs packed in crates until morning. It was just after midnight, and the police were sweeping the beaches for partyers and the homeless. Stanton opened his front door to find Chel standing on his stoop.
He motioned her toward two weathered wicker chairs on the porch of his condo. Barefoot men and women poured toward them like newly hatched amphibians crawling onto the land, searching for a place to curl up until the beach reopened at five.
As Stanton and Chel sat, a hulking Asian man wearing a heavy overcoat and camouflage pants stepped onto the boardwalk, carrying a sign: party like it’s 2012. He plopped down in the middle of Ocean Front Walk, directly across from them. “It will be completed the thirteenth b’ak’tun,” he chanted.
Stanton shook his head and turned to Chel, who stared at the man with a look he couldn’t categorize.
“What can I do for you?” Stanton asked her.
He listened in disbelief as she told him her story, beginning with the codex, through the real reason for her trip to the hospital. Once she finished, he had trouble resisting the urge to shake her. “Why the hell did you lie to us?”
“Because the manuscript was looted, so it’s illegal for me to have it,” she said. “But there’s something else you should know too.”
“What?”
“I think the man who caused the accident on the 101 is the man who gave me the codex in the first place. His name’s Hector Gutierrez. He’s an antiquities dealer.”
“How do you know it was him?”
“I watched him drive away from my church in that same car.”
“Jesus. Was Gutierrez sick when you saw him?”
“He just seemed anxious to me. I’m not sure.”
Stanton processed this. “Did Gutierrez ever travel to Guatemala?”
“I don’t know. He may well have.”
“Wait a second. Were you lying about Volcy being sick before he came here?”
“No, that was what he told me. The only thing I didn’t tell you was that he started having trouble sleeping near the temple he looted the book from. He wasn’t out there meditating. But he really hadn’t been eating meat for a year.”
Stanton was furious. “The Guatemalans have teams on the ground searching every dairy farm in the Petén because of the information you gave us. And they already think we’re wasting their time and money. Now we have to tell them our translator lied, and they should be searching for ruins in the jungle?”
A skateboarder rolled down the boardwalk and called out, “Chill, bro.”
“I’ll tell immigration everything,” Chel whispered after the kid had passed.
“You think I give a shit about immigration? This is about public safety. If you hadn’t lied, we could have asked him more questions, and we could already be searching the jungle for the real source.”
Chel ran a shaky hand through her hair. “I know that now.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“He said the temple where he got the book was three days’ walk from his village in the Petén,” she said. “Less than a hundred miles, probably.”
“Where’s his village?”
Hair strands blew across Chel’s face in the ocean wind. “He wouldn’t say.”
“So somewhere in the vicinity of those ruins,” Stanton said, “could be VFI’s original source. Some sick cow putting off milk that’s being shipped all over the world. Hell, for all we know, the runoff could be going into the water supply down there. Did he tell you anything that could point us toward it? Anything at all?”
Chel shook her head. “The only other things he told me were that his spirit animal was a hawk and that he had a wife and daughter.”
“What’s a spirit animal?”
“It’s an animal every Maya gets paired with at birth. He said his was Chuyum-thul. The hawk.”
Stanton was pulled back to the ER, where he’d watched the other victim die. “Gutierrez said, The birdman did this to me,” he told Chel. “He was blaming Volcy for getting him sick.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Maybe Volcy brought some kind of food across the border with him, not realizing it was what got him sick in the first place.”
“And what could that be?”
“You tell me,” Stanton said. “What would a Maya man give to someone he does business with? Something Gutierrez could’ve eaten or drunk with dairy in it?”
“There are a lot of possibilities,” Chel said.
Suddenly Stanton turned for his door. “Meet me at my car,” he told her, his voice full of purpose. “Around back.”
“Why?”
“Because before you turn yourself in to the police, we’re going to find out.”
WHAT 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 up all night every night for the last four. 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 twenty 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.
1. Authentic Pre-Columbian flint - $1,472.00 - sale completed
2. Mayan sarcophagus section - $1,200.00 - auction expired
3. Authentic Mayan stone planter - $904.00 - sale completed
4. Jade Mayan necklace - $1,895.00 - sale completed
5. Honduran clay jar artifact - $280.00 - auction expired
6. Classic Mayan jaguar bowl - $1,400.00 - sale completed
“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.
from: Chuyum-thul
sent: Dec. 5, 2012 10:25 a.m.
something very valuable I possess, definitely you will want.
reach phone +52 553 77038
“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:
from: HGDealer
sent: Dec. 6, 2012 2:47 p.m.
Friday, December 7, 2012
AG Flight 224
Depart Mexico City, Mexico (MEX) 6:05 a.m.
Arrive Los Angeles, CA (LAX) 9:12 a.m.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
AG Flight 126
Depart Los Angeles, CA (LAX) 7:20 a.m.
Arrive Mexico City, Mexico (MEX) 12:05 p.m.
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, fl ies 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.”
The boy was crying again, and now Stanton hurried for the stairs, yelling to Maria not to touch anything in her home.