Dustin Thomason - 12.21

He gently put a hand on John Doe’s shoulder. “Habla español?”

“Tinimit vooge . Tinimit vooge.”

There would be no getting through to him without a translator, so Stanton began his physical exam. John Doe’s pulse was bounding, his nervous system firing on all cylinders. His breathing was coarse through his mouth, his bowels had ground digestion to a halt, and his tongue was swollen. All further confirmation of FFI.

Thane reappeared, fastening a new mask over her mouth and nose. In her gloved hand she held a printout in Stanton’s direction. “Genetics just came back.”

They’d extracted DNA from John Doe’s blood and mapped out chromosome 20, where the FFI mutation always occurred. This should be the final proof.

When Stanton scanned the results, he saw a normal DNA sequence staring back at him. “There must’ve been a mistake in the lab,” he said, glancing at Thane. He could only imagine what the lab in this place looked like and how frequently there were mix-ups. “Tell them to run it again.”

“Why?”

He handed it back to her. “Because there’s no mutation here.”

“They ran it twice. They knew how important it was,” Thane said as she studied the results. “I know the geneticist, and she doesn’t screw things up.”

Was it possible Stanton had misjudged the clinical signs? How was there no mutation? In every case of FFI he had seen, a DNA mutation caused prions in the thalamus to transform and then cause symptoms.

“Could it be something other than FFI?” asked Thane.

John Doe opened his eyes again, and Stanton caught a glimpse of the pinprick pupils. There’d been no doubt in his mind that this was a case of FFI. All the signs were there. Progressing faster than usual, but there.

“Vooge, vooge, vooge!” the man yelled again.

“We have to find a way to communicate with him,” Stanton said.

“We’ve got a team from the translator service coming in that can identify almost every American language, Central and South,” said Thane. “When we know what he’s speaking, we’ll bring in someone fluent.”

“Get them in here now.”

Thane said, “If he doesn’t have the genetic mutation, he can’t have FFI, right?”

Stanton glanced up at her, his mind racing with new possibilities. “Right.”

“So it’s not prion disease?”

“It is. But if there’s no mutation, he must have gotten it another way.”

“What other way?”

For decades, doctors knew of a rare genetic prion affliction called CJD—Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Then, suddenly, dozens of people who’d all eaten from the same meat supply in Britain came down with symptoms identical to CJD, giving mad cow its proper name— variant CJD. The only difference was that one came from a genetic mutation and the other from contaminated meat. And that one destroyed entire economies and food-supply standards forever. It stood to reason that something similar was happening here with FFI.

“He must have eaten tainted meat,” Stanton said.

John Doe thrashed around, rattling the handrails. Stanton had so many questions: What was the patient saying? Where had he come from? What work did he do?

“Jesus,” Thane said. “You mean a new prion strain that mimics the symptoms of FFI? How do you know it’s from meat?”

“Vooge, vooge, vooge…”

“Because it’s the only other way to get prion disease.”

And if Stanton was right—if this new cousin of FFI was being carried through meat—they had to trace it back to wherever it came from and figure out how it got into the food supply. Most of all, they had to make sure there weren’t other people out there who were already sick.

John Doe was full-on yelling now. “Vooge, vooge, vooge!”

“What do we do?” Thane called out over him.

Stanton pulled out his phone and dialed a number in Atlanta known to fewer than fifty people in the world. The operator picked up on the first ring. “Centers for Disease Control. This is the secure emergency line.”

THE WORN LEATHER COUCH IN CHEL’S STUDY WAS PILED HIGH WITH old academic articles and back issues of Journal of Mayan Linguistics. Her drafting table and desk chair were covered with a broken PC, immigration forms, mortgage applications, and other paperwork for members of Fraternidad . The only space not hidden by books overfl owing from the shelves was a small patch on the Oriental rug. That’s where Chel had been for the last hour, on the floor, staring at the box in front of her.

She’d gotten a glimpse of the marvels inside—the glyphs that would tell some incredible story of the ancients, the artistry used in representing the gods. Chel had devoted her career to Mayan epigraphy—the study of ancient inscriptions—and she wanted so badly to remove the plastic casing once more and to look at the glyphs again, to photograph them, to dig beyond what she’d already seen. But the image of a former colleague languishing in an Italian courtroom under the scrutiny of news cameras had been in Chel’s mind since she’d watched Gutierrez drive away from the church. The Getty’s previous curator of antiquities, who used to work just down the hall from Chel, had become embroiled in a legal battle when she was accused by Italian officials of acquiring illegally excavated artifacts for her collection.

Chel knew that both the Getty and ICE would make an even bigger example of her if they discovered what she’d done. To forge paperwork after the fact, as she’d done with Gutierrez’s turtle shell, was one thing. A codex was different. There wasn’t a museum board in the world that would believe she hadn’t known what she was doing when she accepted it at the church.

Chel gently picked up the box again. It weighed no more than five pounds. How had it even survived? In the mid-sixteenth century, inquisitors for the Catholic Church tried to rid the Maya of pagan influences and presided over an auto-da-fé , a massive bonfire where thousands of sacred Maya books, artworks, and inscriptions were destroyed. Until today, Chel and everyone else in her field believed only four codices had been saved. The Grolier Fragment marked the cycles of Venus; the Madrid Codex referred to omens about crops; and the Paris Codex was a guide to rituals and New Year ceremonies. Chel’s revered Dresden Codex—oldest of the known Maya books, dating to sometime around A.D. 1200—contained astrology, histories of kings, and predictions of the harvest. Yet even the Dresden didn’t come from the classic era of Maya civilization. How could this volume have been preserved for so long?

The doorbell rang.

It was after eight. Could it be Gutierrez already, back to collect his treasure? Why had she not opened the box? Then again, what if it was ICE? What if the dealer had already been arrested? Had ICE been watching when he came to the church?

Chel picked up the box and hurried to the study closet. No one knew about the cubbyhole she’d discovered there, full of stacks of some previous tenant’s 1920s L.A. memorabilia. She buried the codex beneath a collection of black-and-white photographs of Wolfskill Farm—what Westwood was called before the First World War.

The doorbell rang again as she went to answer it.

Chel breathed a sigh of relief when she peeked through the window to see her mother standing in the entryway.

“Want me to stand here all night?” Ha’ana asked as Chel opened the door. She stood just over five feet tall and wore a knee-length navy cotton dress, one of many acquired from the company at which she’d been a seamstress since they’d been in America. Even with her silver hair and several extra pounds, Ha’ana still had a radiance about her.