The Codex by Douglas Preston Read Free Book Online

puffing on his cigar.
    Philip paused. “Has he been in touch with you?”
    Hauser shook his head, took another puff. “Not for forty years.”
    “Sometime last month,” Philip said, “Maxwell Broadbent disappeared, along with his collection. He left us a video.”
    Hauser raised his eyebrows.
    “It was a last will and testament of sorts. In it, he said he was taking it with him into the grave.”
    “He did what?” Hauser leaned forward, his face suddenly interested. The mask had fallen for a moment: He was genuinely astonished.
    “He took it with him. Everything. Money, artwork, his collection. Just like an Egyptian pharaoh. He buried himself in a tomb somewhere in the world and then issued us a challenge: If we find the tomb, we can rob it. That, you see, is his idea of making us earn our inheritance.”
    Hauser leaned back and laughed long and loud. When he finally recovered, he took a couple of lazy puffs on his cigar, then reached out and tapped a two-inch ash off. “Only Max could come up with a scheme like that.”
    “So you don’t know anything about this?” Philip asked.
    “Nothing.” Hauser seemed to be telling the truth.
    “You’re a private investigator,” said Philip.
    Hauser shifted the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.
    “You grew up with Max. You spent a year with him in the jungle. You know him and how he worked better than anyone. I wondered if you’d be willing, as a PI, to help me find his tomb.”
    Hauser eased a stream of blue smoke out of his mouth.
    Philip added, “It doesn’t seem to me that this would be a difficult assignment. An art collection like that wouldn’t travel inconspicuously.”
    “It would in the hold of Max’s Gulfstream IV.”
    “I doubt he buried himself in his plane.”
    “The Vikings buried themselves in their ships. Maybe Max packed his treasure in an airtight, pressure-resistant container and ditched his plane in the ocean over the mid-Pacific abyssal plain, where it sank in two miles of water.” He spread his hands and smiled.
    Philip managed to say, “No.” He dabbed his brow, trying to suppress the image of the Lippi, two miles deep, wedged in the abyssal muck. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”
    “I’m not saying that’s what he did. I’m just showing you what ten seconds of thinking can turn up. Are you working with your brothers?”
    “Half-brothers. No. I’ve decided to find this tomb on my own.”
    “What are their plans?”
    “I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. I’ll share what I find with them, of course.”
    “Tell me about them.”
    “Tom’s probably the one to watch out for. He’s the youngest. When we were children, he was the wild one. He’s the kid who would be the first to jump off the cliff into the water, the first to throw the rock at the wasp’s nest. Got kicked out of a couple of schools but cleaned up his act in college and has been on the straight and narrow ever since.”
    “And the other one, Vernon?”
    “Right now he’s in some pseudo-Buddhist cult run by an ex-philosophy professor from Berkeley. He was always the lost one. He’s tried it all: drugs, cults, gurus, encounter groups. When he was a kid he’d bring home crippled cats, doggies that had been run over by cars, little birdies that had been pushed out of the nest by their bigger siblings—that sort of thing. Everything he brought home died. In school, he was the kid the others loved to pick on. He flunked out of college and hasn’t been able to hold down a steady job. He’s a sweet kid but ... incompetent at adulthood.”
    “What are they doing now?”
    “Tom went home to his ranch in Utah. The last I heard he had given up on searching for the tomb. Vernon says he’s going to find the tomb on his own, doesn’t want me to be part of it.”
    “Anyone else know about this besides your two brothers?”
    “There were two cops in Santa Fe who saw the videotape and know the whole