Book of Cures (A Thomas McAlister Adventure 2)

by Hunt Kingsbury

  Book of Cures

  By

  Hunt Kingsbury

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity or resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Book of Cures

  A Thomas McAlister “Treasure Hunter” Adventure

  Copyright 2007 by Hunt Kingsbury - TXU1-336-783

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  ISBN: 9780972920117

  First Edition: 2011

  For more information contact: hek3@comcast.net

  The birds came from the East

  They brought disease and soon our livestock died

  Many people in our village got sick, children first, then the elders

  Our priest went to the mountains to consult Tenzin, keeper of the Blue Beryl

  He returned with roots and leaves and seeds never seen before

  He cooked them for two days and two nights

  Everyone in the village drank the medicine and spread it on our faces and bodies

  Everyone was cured and no one was ever sick again

  Song of the Blue Beryl

  Book of Six Miracles

  Tibet, circa 2000 BC

  Chapter 1

  An immaculately dressed man with cotton-candy white hair was perched on the couch when Thomas McAlister quietly entered the apartment. The man was sitting up straight, hands on his knees, a broad pearly smile stretched across face. He wore a dark blue three-piece suit and sat as motionless as a department-store mannequin.

  McAlister had entered silently, knowing there was an intruder, expecting to find a burglar darting about, stuffing priceless artifacts into a duffel bag. When he saw the stranger on the couch it spooked him. He straightened, almost falling backward, as if he’d walked into an invisible wall. His spine tingled.

  The man sat statue-still, looking directly at McAlister. Seeing the man sitting so silent, yet so perfect and alive, frightened McAlister in a way he’d not been since childhood. He tried to take a deep breath but his lungs, surging with adrenaline-filled blood, would not open.

  This man had broken in, somehow disabled the security system, and left the door wide open. He was shiny and clean, hermetic, a laboratory man, and McAlister could see that he knew something worth knowing. He had a broad, toothy smile, which was unfortunate because it meant he was real. Mannequins never show their teeth.

  McAlister had come directly from the Campbell Apartment, a bar at Grand Central Terminal, where he’d met a Chinese ex-pat who claimed to possess a map of the Potala Palace in Tibet, prior to it’s being sacked and burned by the Chinese in 1751. If it was real, McAlister needed the map badly.

  The China Man had smelled sour, his shark-skin colored suit wrinkled from days, maybe even weeks of continual wear. With rounded, grimy fingernails, the man had slid the map across the table in a slow and significant transfer. As he slid it, McAlister had to force himself not to register shock, not to decisively intervene, as he watched the dry, centuries-old parchment soak up and retain the condensation from China Man’s third mojito. Only a man thinking of money alone, with no respect for historical objects, would do such a thing.

  McAlister had watched it without intervening. He didn’t want to spook the man and wind up getting shot.

  McAlister had returned to the sanctuary of his friend Taylor’s apartment fifty thousand dollars lighter with the soggy map.

  In the hall, outside the apartment, he’d been overcome by an undeniable fragrance. He knew what it was—as an archeologist he’d studied botany. It was the scent of a Southern Magnolia flower.

  The fact that the Southern Magnolia flower was not indigenous and only grew a thousand miles to the south needled him, but that feeling was fleeting. In fact it evaporated when, as he approached the apartment door and saw it stood open. Break in. He’d left the door locked, alarm set. He knew the owner, Taylor, was not home. Neither of them was expecting a visitor. No one else had the key or alarm code.

  McAlister had paused and slowly turned his head, closed his eyes, and strained to hear any noise beyond the open door. The air was thick with the fat, pungent scent of Southern Magnolia flower, but aside from the muted drone of the air system, silence.

  Small dust particles drifted through the shaft of sunlight coming through the open apartment door. They were carried by inertia, not a breeze or movement inside. Had the intruder already left?

  Certainly there were portable artifacts in Taylor’s apartment someone who knew what they were doing, who’d come for something specific, could get in and out in minutes with a small fortune.

  McAlister gently pushed the door with the tip of his index finger. He saw the fifty-thousand-dollar Iranian runner on the floor in the hallway. The ancient Grecian vase was still on the table beside the door. The vase was light and valuable. Easy to steal.

  Silence.

  He’d stepped lightly, his throat clenched against the increasingly strong odor. Three steps and he stopped. He saw the motionless intruder. He hit the invisible wall.

  They stared at each other like two wax sculptures.

  Blue pinstriped suit and perfectly arranged puffy silver-white hair. His shirt was French cuffed, with miniature test-tube vials holding the shirt sleeves together. He looked like a lawyer. No, he was too well-manicured for even a lawyer. An undertaker. An undertaker for an extremely successful mortuary.

  He was smiling broadly. At what, McAlister had no idea.

  After a moment, Undertaker looked at his watch as though he’d been expecting McAlister and said, “Why, hello, Thomas.”

  McAlister had spoken to Taylor on his cell phone just prior to entering the building. Taylor would have mentioned it if he was expecting a guest, especially if he’d given the guest his keys and permission to enter his apartment.

  “Unless you’re a friend of Taylor’s I’m not acquainted with, there will be a very short period of time before I throw you out of here in a way you’re not going to like.” It was an overly aggressive statement, uncharacteristic, but he was unnerved.

  McAlister was trained in a little-known Korean martial art called Hapkido, used almost exclusively by police and military. There were a few excellent “escorting techniques” he could use to force the man to leave, if it came to that.

  He took a deep breath to calm himself. He was disoriented and the smell had him off-balance.

  The man smiled wider and raised both hands, palms out. “Don’t worry, Thomas, no weapons . . . and I don’t want any of Taylor’s priceless treasures. No, no, don’t worry about that, Thomas, but believe me when I say that you don’t want to throw me out yet.” He glanced at his watch again, an expensive gold Rolex with a diamond encrusted bezel. “Not just yet.”

  It occurred to McAlister an undertaker would’ve had to embalm a lot of people to afford a Rolex like that.

  The man was confident, comfortable, and totally at ease. Finally, he said, “You’re looking for an ancient document that has the power to heal. There is significant commercial value.”

  It was a statement, not a question.

  McAlister said nothing. The man was dead-on.

  He continued, “You’re searching for an ancient Tibetan healing book, the Blue Beryl. You think it can heal people. You and the researcher you’re working with, Dr. Bertram, are close to finding it. In fact, the map in your pocket right now might be the last piece of the puzzle. Right, Thomas?
”

  It was true. He was close and the map might be final piece. But there was no way this stranger could know it.

  “You think you’ve even found someone who may be using a page torn from the Blue Beryl to heal the blind outside of Lhasa, in Tibet, don’t you?”

  Silence. Who was this man? Everything he’d said was exactly, precisely, correct.

  Undertaker leaned back, closed his eyes, rubbed his temples, and in professorial style said, “In 430 BC, the Athenian Plague ravaged Europe. Pericles died from it, causing Athens to lose the Peloponnesian War. The plague spread to Asia through Constantinople, killing millions. But the people of Tibet were untouched. Why was that, Thomas? Why didn’t the plague kill any Tibetans?”

  McAlister stood motionless. Nervous. He knew, but said flatly, “I don’t know.” It was the first time he’d spoken. His raspy voice surprised him.

  The man continued. “The Justinian Plague, AD 540, one of the worst recorded pandemics ever to afflict humanity. During it, bubonic plague killed twenty-five million people across Europe and Asia. Again, Tibet was unaffected. Not one person in Tibet died. Why?”

  McAlister treated it like a rhetorical question, which it may have been, and didn’t answer.

  “And then the big one. In the early 1330s, bubonic plague broke out in China. It spread to Europe in 1346 and was coined the Black Death due to the large lymphatic buboes that formed in one’s armpits and groin. The purulent sores turned black and then burst, spraying and infecting all around them with deadly pus.”

  Undertaker continued, “One-third the population of Europe and Asia died, some estimates are as high as fifty million people.” He stared at McAlister and said, softly, “Again, Tibet—untouched, Dr. McAlister.”

  McAlister knew the history of the Black Plague well; it had occurred during the Middle Ages, so there was documentation.

  Without thinking, he said, “The philosopher Boccaccio, chronicler of the Plague, said people were killed so quickly, they ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors.”

  Undertaker nodded as if he’d heard the quote, then went on, “In 1918 and 1919 came the Great Influenza, the Spanish Flu. The only global pandemic in modern times. Fifty million to a hundred million dead. How did Tibet fare this time, you ask?”

  McAlister’s face was stoic, immobile.

  Suddenly angry, Undertaker said, “No. You don’t ask, Dr. McAlister; you don’t ask because you already know. Tibet was barely touched. A few sick, no one reported dead.”

  Undertaker raised his voice in a preacher-like crescendo. He was on a roll. “No one died there, Thomas, because in Tibet they had a cure for Spanish Flu!” Louder now, “Just as they did for Black Death, Yellow Fever, Dengue Fever, Typhoid, and Cholera . . . and every other scourge that ever developed on the goddamned face of our good planet! Christ, the average life expectancy in Europe in 1918 was thirty-five. In Tibet it was eighty and it still is.”

  McAlister was sure this man had read his personal research papers, which were hidden in the bedroom closet. The thought infuriated him.

  “More people died in those plagues than in all the world wars combined, Dr. McAlister.

  “And there’s another one coming.” He let the comment hang, and then said, “Soon.”

  McAlister had been ready to respond but the thought of a pandemic silenced him. It was a frightening concept that all epidemiologists agreed was inevitable. It was not an ”if” scenario, but rather a ”when.”

  He’d recently seen an article written in American Scientist by world-renowned virologist Robert Wagner titled, “The World is Teetering on the Edge of a Pandemic that Could Kill a Large Fraction of the Human Population.” Wagner described how certain strains of the Avian flu virus, H5N1, were the most virulent and highly pathogenic viruses ever discovered.

  “When H5N1 jumps to humans, do you realize the power someone who possesses both a vaccine and an antidote will have?” Undertaker whispered in a conspiratorial tone. “God-like power.”

  Some of what this man was saying mirrored thoughts McAlister had only had in private. His private thoughts.

  Continuing in almost a whisper, he said, “You’re very close to finding it now, aren’t you, Thomas? You can taste it, can’t you? How do you think the Blue Beryl cures people? Surely you’ve thought about it. Does it supercharge the immune system? We think it might put the thymus on overdrive somehow, causing it to mass produce macrophages so that all non-self germ cells are annihilated upon entering the body. My goodness, can you even imagine the implications?”

  He had.

  McAlister was surprised by this man’s depth of knowledge. But the man had overlooked a key point; his research showed the Blue Beryl might also have restorative powers.

  “There’s always the chance that it’s some sort of primitive gene therapy, replacing bad DNA proteins with good, you know. Both techniques are on the frontier of medical research now, but maybe the Tibetans figured this out through non-scientific trial and error four-thousand years ago and we’re only now just catching up.”

  Was this man psychic?

  “Why the hell not? The ancient Iranians made a battery three thousand years ago.”

  McAlister was well aware of the astounding Baghdad Battery that had been uncovered in 1936. It was a rudimentary battery dating to 250 BC capable of generating 1.5 to 2 volts of electricity, more when linked together with other batteries.

  “You’ve been through a lot these past few years, Thomas.”

  It was true. A preeminent professor of Egyptology, he’d been fired from his job for teaching unapproved curriculum. He’d decided to spend time pursuing the world’s greatest lost treasures.

  A year ago, he’d stumbled onto an incredible clue carved by Moses into the wall of a temple. The clue led him to one of the most sought-after religious artifacts of all time. After he’d found it, the government had stolen it from him, but he’d stolen it back, and sold it to a religious institution known for its secrecy and ability to preserve ancient artifacts.

  “You’re one of only two people to locate and excavate a new tomb in the Valley of the Kings, in Egypt, in the past decade.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then there was that other find you had—the one the government stole from you.”

  McAlister was shocked. There were very, very few people alive who knew about that. Whoever this man was, he’d done an incredible amount of in-depth research.

  “But you took it back, didn’t you? You showed them. They underestimated you, didn’t they?”

  McAlister stood still, stunned, in silent disbelief.

  “That’s how we know you can help us, Thomas. The planning and the perseverance it took to do what you did to the U.S. government was beyond fantastic. It was extraordinary. Special.”

  “I don’t know how you could know anything about that.”

  Undertaker leaned back. He took a deep breath and let it out. His voice became stern, businesslike. “Well, we do know about it, Thomas. We know more than you could possibly believe. Now, regarding the Blue Beryl . . . some people I work with want it. When you find the Blue Beryl, you will give it to them.”

  “Get out, now, you spook. Get out, or I throw you out!”

  The man looked at his watch, then said, “You don’t want me to leave, Thomas. Trust me, you don’t want me to leave yet.”

  McAlister swiftly closed in on the man.

  “Why do you keep saying that!”

  Undertaker put his hands out, palms forward. In a flash, McAlister had an iron grip on his right hand and was bending and twisting it outward.

  “Stop telling me what I do and don’t want!” He twisted Undertaker’s wrist in a direction it was not meant to go.

  Instantly, a glossy sheen of sweat covered Undertaker’s face. He grimaced and sputtered, “Please! You’re breaking my wrist!”

  Suddenly, the phone rang.

  McAlister hadn’t noticed it. The portable phone was on the coffee table,
directly in front of Undertaker. Clearly, it had been put there with intent. The stranger quickly picked it up with his free hand and held it toward McAlister.

  “Answer it.”

  He slightly reduced his pressure on the wrist.

  “No.”

  “You want to answer it.”

  McAlister was tiring of being told what he did and did not want by this annoying, magnolia-scented stranger.

  “No.”

  Then, Undertaker lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “Thomas, Abigail is calling. It’s about Taylor. He’s dying.”

  McAlister brutally twisted the wrist. “That’s impossible! I just spoke with him. He was walking into the Neptune restaurant with Abigail Devereux not more than fifteen minutes ago.”

  Through a face twisted with pain, the man said, “It doesn’t take long to work, Thomas. It doesn’t take long at all.”

  “What are you talking about? What doesn’t take long to work? He’s fine, I just spoke with him!”

  “It’s true, Thomas, it’s all true. Taylor is at Neptune with Abigail. But by now he’s with paramedics too. He’s in Midtown. They’ll take him to St. Vincent’s Hospital on 51st Street. Trust me, Thomas, trust me as you’ve never trusted anyone. We infected Taylor with the virus, and he’s dying as we speak.”

  Thomas stared at the man, considering the best way to torture him.

  “If anything happens to Taylor, I’ll . . .’’

  Undertaker interrupted, “They’ll need to evacuate the restaurant.”

  “What?”

  The phone continued to ring.

  Undertaker paused, considering how to say what he needed to say. “A Level Four pathogen has been released. They will need to evacuate the restaurant.”

  McAlister moved closer, not believing what he was hearing.

  “The other patrons will be okay. Even Abigail. But, Taylor . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “What about Taylor?” Thomas roared. “Tell me! What about Taylor?”

  Undertaker held up his hand to stop McAlister and in a compassionate, almost conciliatory voice, he said, “Taylor will need to be quarantined . . .”