Read Online The Codex by Douglas Preston - Free Book Online Page B

prestige, nothing splendid about it. Here I’d taken his money to go to vet school and cheated him by coming out here.”
    He stopped. Now he’d really said too much.
    “And so that’s it? You’re just going to let the whole inheritance go, Codex and all?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Just like that?”
    “Most people live their lives without a legacy. My vet practice isn’t a bad living. I love this life, this country. Look around. What more could you want?”
    He found Sally looking at him instead, her hair faintly luminous in the silvery light of the moon. “How much are you giving up, if I may ask?”
    He felt a twinge, not for the first time, at the sheer size of it. “A hundred million, give or take.”
    Sally whistled. There was a long silence. A coyote howled somewhere in the canyons below them, answered by a further howl. She finally said, “Jesus, you’ve got guts.”
    He shrugged.
    “And your brothers?”
    “Philip’s joined with my father’s old partner to go find the hidden tomb. Vernon’s going it alone, I hear. Why don’t you team up with one of them?”
    He found her looking at him rather intently in the dark. Finally she said, “I already tried. Vernon left the country a week ago, and Philip’s also disappeared. They went to Honduras. You were my last choice.”
    Tom shook his head. “Honduras? That was fast. When they return with the loot, you can get the Codex from them. I’ll give you my blessing.”
    Another long silence. “I can’t risk it. They have no idea what it is, what it’s worth. Anything could happen.”
    “I’m sorry, Sally, I can’t help you.”
    “Professor Clyve and I need your help. The world needs your help.”
    Tom stared into the dark cottonwood groves in the floodplain of the San Juan River. An owl called from a distant juniper.
    “My mind is made up,” he said.
    She remained looking at him, her hair in heavy disarray down her shoulders and back, her lower lip firmly set. The cottonwoods were casting a dappled moonlight over her body, the fuzzy silver spots of light rippling and shifting with the breeze. “Really?”
    He sighed. “Really.”
    “At least give me a little help here. I’m not asking for much, Tom. Come to Santa Fe with me. You can introduce me to your father’s lawyers, his friends. You can tell me about his travels, his habits. Give me two days. Help me do this. Just two days.”
    “No.”
    “Ever had a horse die on you?”
    “All the time.”
    “A horse you loved?”
    Tom immediately thought of his own horse Pedernal, who died from an antibiotic-resistant strain of strangles. He would never again own a horse as beautiful.
    “Would better drugs have saved it?” Sally asked.
    Tom looked toward the distant lights of Bluff. Two days wasn’t much, and she did have a point. “All right. You win. Two days.”
    9
    Lewis Skiba, CEO of Lampe-Denison Pharmaceuticals, sat motionless at his desk, looking down the file of gray skyscrapers along Avenue of the Americas in midtown Manhattan. A late-afternoon rain was darkening the city. The only sound in his paneled office was the mutter of a real wood fire in an eighteenth-century Siena marble fireplace, a sad reminder of fatter times. It was not a cold day, but Skiba had cranked up the A/C in order to have the fire. He found it soothing. It reminded him somehow of his childhood, of the old stone fireplace in the battenboard cabin by the lake, with the crossed snowshoes over the mantelpiece and the loons calling off the water. God, if only he could be there now ...
    Almost without knowing it, his hand unlocked the little front drawer of his desk and closed on a cool plastic bottle. He popped the top off with his thumbnail, fished out a dry little ovoid, put it in his mouth, and chewed. Bitter, but it cut the wait. That and a scotch chaser. Skiba reached to his left, slipped open a wall panel and took out a bottle of sixty-year-old Macallan and a whiskey glass, and poured himself a good slug. It