12.21

work full-time with his team.

“Glad to see you made it okay,” he said.

“Had to wait at the checkpoint for about a hundred cop cars and fire trucks heading in the opposite direction. I assume they were on their way down to where those jackholes are setting buildings on fire.”

She stepped inside, saw all the equipment, and looked at Stanton as if he were stitching together Frankenstein’s monster.

“We’ll get you an escort on the way back,” Stanton said.

“Tell me you brought my tea,” Davies called. “Please, God, tell me there is some dignity left in this godforsaken world.”

Thane held up a grocery bag. “What the hell is going on in here?”

Davies smiled. “Welcome to the end of our careers.”

* * *

TEN MINUTES LATER, Thane was still absorbing the makeshift lab—and the fact that Stanton and Davies were having to do it secretly. “I don’t get it. If we can make antibodies, why won’t the CDC let us try them?”

“They could prompt an allergic response,” Stanton told her. “As much as thirty percent of people can react negatively to them.”

Davies seemed to be inhaling his large mug of PG Tips. “It’ll take years before the FDA approves mouse antibodies as therapy in prion disease.”

Thane said, “But the victims are going to die anyway.”

“It won’t be CDC or FDA who kills them, though,” Stanton said.

“We don’t make the rules,” Davies said. “We just break them. Unfortunately, Deputy Cavanagh is monitoring every move we make, and we’ll have someone looking over our shoulders every time we’re in a patient room.”

“But they won’t be watching me,” said Thane, now understanding why she’d been summoned. “I have patients in the ICU still. I could still get in there.”

Merely setting up this lab could get all of their medical licenses suspended, but a helo-medic knew all about taking chances for her patients.

Stanton had watched Thane interact with her patients and with the other staff. He sensed he could trust her.

“You can’t tell a soul,” Davies told her. “Believe me when I tell you I wouldn’t fare well in an American prison.”

“The test can be any group of patients we can access, right?” she asked.

“As long as they haven’t progressed too far,” Stanton told her. “Once the disease goes beyond two or three days, nothing will work.”

“Then I have one condition.”

“We all have it,” Davies said. “I believe the medical term is professional suicide.”

Stanton looked at Thane. “What’s your one condition?”

SIXTEEN

THE GETTY DOUBLED THEIR SECURITY TEAM AS LOOTING AND ARSON spread across the city. The Baghdad Museum had lost irreplaceable treasures during its siege in 2003, and no one wanted to see that happen if L.A. really fell apart. Fortunately, the Getty was perched in the Santa Monica Mountains, almost a thousand feet above the 405 freeway, and the only way up was through the security gates at the bottom of the hill.

So the museum where Chel and her team had been holed up for two days was one of the safest places in the city.

Chel was more worried about the safety of the local indigenas. According to the news on the TV she’d carted into the lab, 2012 New Agers and Apocalypticists were convening across the city, in violation of the mandate to stay home. Before VFI, “Believer” gatherings focused on renewed consciousness or apocalypse readiness; CNN now claimed that many meetings had taken a different tone in the shadow of the quarantine. People were desperate, and searching for scapegoats. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that right before 12/21 a Maya man had brought this disease to America.

In Century City, local indigenas had been threatened and their homes had been vandalized with graffiti. In East L.A., one man brutally attacked his Maya neighbor following an argument about the end of the Long Count cycle. The elderly Honduran was in a coma from the beating. So now Fraternidad leaders had decided that the city’s indigenas needed a place to congregate for mutual protection. The archbishop had offered them shelter, and there were more than 160 Maya living indefinitely at Our Lady of the Angels.

Chel’s mother wasn’t among them. “They say we’re supposed to stay home to keep from getting sick,” she’d replied when Chel called to urge her to join the others at the cathedral. Ha’ana’s factory had closed, and she hadn’t left her bungalow in West Hollywood, declaring she was staying put.

“There’s a doctor checking people for VFI before they let anyone through the doors, Mom. The church is the safest place you can be right now.”

“I’ve lived in this house thirty-three years, and no one has ever bothered me.”

“Then just do it for me,” said Chel.

“And where will you be?”

“At work. I have no choice. There’s a project that’s extremely time sensitive. It’s totally safe here with the museum in lockdown mode.”

“Only you’d be working now, Chel. How long are you going to stay there?”

Chel had gone home and packed a suitcase full of clothes. She’d be here for as long as it took. “I’d feel a lot better knowing you were at the church, Mom.”

Neither woman was satisfied when they hung up, and Chel allowed herself a frustrated smoke break by the Getty’s reflecting pool. There, her phone alerted her to an incoming email from Stanton. His red exclamation point seemed a little superfluous, under the circumstances. All the message said was:

anything?

She started typing a long response, explaining where they were in the decipherment, but thought better of it midway through. He didn’t need a thousand unnecessary details. He had enough details of his own to worry about.

Progress on the translation. No location yet. Won’t stop till we do.

Without thinking, she added, How are you? and sent it off, then immediately felt absurd. It was a ridiculous question to ask the man in charge of the disease investigation. She knew exactly how he was.

But, to her surprise, she had a response within seconds:

working hard to keep up. please keep me posted. take care. need you and your team healthy. call if there’s anything you need. Gabe

It didn’t say much, but something about it was both calming and empowering for Chel. Maybe he was starting to see her as part of the solution to this crisis. Maybe she would be. She stubbed out her cigarette and went back inside.

Rolando was carefully tweezing more tiny fragments of the codex onto the reconstruction table. They’d gotten everything out of the box and taken a complete set of photographs of every piece of the manuscript so they would have it in perpetuity. And once they’d made their breakthrough on the father– son glyph pair, Chel, Rolando,