The Crimson Code. Rachel Lee

asleep, wrapped in colorful wool blankets they carried with them nearly everywhere, blankets that now provided the only protection they had from the elements, except for the tree canopy above. As was so often the case, water dripped steadily from a light rain, and the lanolin in the wool repelled it.

      Steve was grateful for his own blanket, a gift from Paloma, the tribe’s elderly bruja. The word could be translated as witch, but in Steve’s estimation it would be fairer to call her a shaman, or, better yet, curandera, healer.

      Hundreds of generations of knowledge lay behind Paloma’s lively dark eyes, knowledge of curative properties that U.S. pharmaceutical companies would give—or take—nearly anything to discover and patent.

      “You are a good man, Padre,” she said to him as they settled on the damp, dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor.

      “I only do what I must, Paloma.”

      “Only a good man would say that.” Her eyes caught a little of the moonlight that filtered through the canopy and seemed to smile at him. “We are approaching a volcano.”

      He nodded reluctantly. “I’ve felt the rumblings.”

      “All the volcanoes have become active since the terrible things that happened in Asia.”

      Steve had heard the news of the horrifying tsunami in one of his stealthy village visits to buy corn. He had shared it with Paloma, who had accepted it stoically. But what would he have expected? Considering what her people had been facing since the day the village had been attacked in an attempt to arrest Miguel Ortiz, she was hardly likely to care much about hundreds of thousands of dead halfway around the world. These people were in scarcely better straits.

      “The gods are angry,” Paloma told him now.

      He sighed, then smiled when a quiet laugh escaped Paloma.

      “I know,” she said. “You think your God loves us too much to do such things. But have you forgotten your own stories of the Great Flood? The story of Job?”

      Job was a bit of Bible lore that Paloma dearly loved and had taken much to heart. To her, his story seemed to symbolize everything Mayan in some way.

      “I haven’t forgotten,” he admitted.

      “So do not deny your god his anger with us. For we have not been a very faithful people.”

      After living all this time with this particular group of Mayans, Steve could see absolutely nothing in them about which God should be angry, unless it was their unspoken insistence that there was more than one god…something the Bible itself left just a bit ambiguous.

      “Paloma, your people have done nothing to earn any god’s wrath.”

      “Perhaps we have not. But there are others…and the innocent always seem to suffer with them. Do you not feel it?”

      Steve hesitated. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go down this path with her. “Bad things sometimes happen to good people,” he said finally, falling back on aphorism. “He makes the rain to fall on the just and unjust alike.”

      Paloma nodded. “You asked about the Kulkulcan Codex.”

      Steve froze. All of a sudden time vanished, and he remembered Monsignor Veltroni’s charge to him so long ago in Savannah, before he had sent Steve here. “Yes, many months ago. My Church wanted it.”

      “They fear it.”

      “Yes.”

      “And would destroy it.”

      Steve shook his head. “I don’t know, Paloma. They might hide it somewhere, but I’m not sure they would destroy it.”

      “They cannot destroy it.”

      Steve forced himself to wait patiently. With Paloma he was ever the student, and with Paloma he had learned true patience.

      “The Codex,” Paloma said presently, “cannot be destroyed. It is impossible. It is so old it predates the Maya, the Olmec. It predates the Viracocha who brought it to us.”

      “Viracocha?”

      “It is one of his names. You will find he has many and was known throughout this entire part of the world, not just here in the land of the Maya, but among the Inca, also, and perhaps in other ways among our brothers to the north in your country. I do not know. My world is mostly the Mayan world.”

      Steve nodded, then murmured his understanding, thinking that in the dark of this darkest of nights, she might not see the gesture.

      “Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Kulkulcan…many names. One man. One very holy man. He brought teachings of love, forbade human sacrifice, although many who followed him did not remember that. He brought the Codex to us, as well, and ultimately it was the Codex that caused the wars that sent my people fleeing into jungles for sanctuary.”

      “They warred over the Codex?” Steve found that difficult to believe.

      “Yes,” Paloma said simply. “For the first time in my people’s history, we made war not to take captives but to kill. And all for the power of the Codex.”

      Frankfurt, Germany

      The rented suite in a tall office building in the financial district was already outfitted with standard furnishings. In a back room, however, they found the other equipment Office 119 had quietly arranged to have delivered. They spent several hours opening boxes. Since most of them had been shipped from within Germany, their contents were plain to see as bubble wrap and foam popcorn were removed. But a few items, electronics of some kind, had been shipped from outside the country, hidden beneath false bottoms in wooden crates.

      It wasn’t that the contents were illegal. It was that Office 119 didn’t want to leave a trail to this suite.

      Assif, Niko and Renate set about connecting all the computer equipment, some of which looked as if it had been intended for military use, while Lawton helped as best he could.

      “We have TEMPEST shielding,” Assif remarked as he studied some of the equipment.

      “Good,” Renate said flatly. “I hacked them once before. I am sure they are much more careful now. And if they have any reason to suspect that someone is hacking them now, they will try to track the hacker.”

      She caught Lawton’s confused look and motioned him over to a window that gave him a neck-craning view of some of the surrounding buildings. “You see all the microwave dishes? Many of them are listening, not sending. Without TEMPEST shielding, someone can hear the electronic noise of our computers and decode it to figure out what we’re doing.”

      Lawton nodded. Why did he feel he had just slipped back into the days of the cold war? Maybe he had. The names changed, but the basic plot never varied. “Like the good old bad days of the USSR,” he remarked.

      Renate leaned back on a desk and folded her arms. “You Americans can be so naive.”

      He bristled a little. Any naiveté he had once owned had perished on a beach in Los Angeles when a little girl saw her father killed before her eyes and blamed Lawton for it. “And you Europeans think you have the corner on sophistication.”

      Renate shook her head. “Some do, perhaps. I think we’ve merely warred ourselves into a terminal case of Weltschmerz.”

      World weariness. Lawton might have laughed at that, had he not been so disturbed by the frightening vibes he kept getting from Renate. She needed watching. “So what are you trying to say?”

      “Everyone in Europe wants to say the last pope helped bring down the Soviet Union. Your people want to say it was your President Reagan. Shall I tell you the truth?”

      One corner of Lawton’s mouth lifted. “I can take it.”

      “The USSR was brought down by the Frankfurt Brotherhood.”

      “Oh, come on….”

      “It’s