The Source

by Michael Cordy

  85

  The next morning Ross awoke in panic. It was six eighteen and something had happened.

  Something that wasn't good.

  The alarms on Lauren's life support were bleeping more insistently than they had last night, and her vital signs oscillated erratically.

  Dr Gunderson tried to appear calm, but her voice was shrill. 'Ross, we must prepare Lauren for surgery now. We can't wait another minute. We must get the child out immediately. It may already be too late.'

  He wiped sleep from his eyes. 'What's happening? What's wrong?'

  Gunderson and other doctors were wheeling Lauren out of the room and heading for the lift. 'OR nine,' shouted Gunderson. 'Hurry. Hurry.'

  Ross followed. 'I want to come.'

  'That's not a good idea. Wait here. We'll update you as soon as we know more.'

  He stepped into the lift. 'I want to be there. It's a birth. I'm the father. I should be there.'

  Gunderson's eyes were cold. 'It's not a birth. It's an operation.

  Chances are it'll be the opposite of a birth.'

  Ross didn't flinch. 'If this is the last I'm going to see of my wife and child I want to be there.'

  'I really don't think it's a good idea,' she sighed, 'but if you insist.'

  'I do.' Ross couldn't understand what was happening. After finding the fragment in the crucifix he had taken it to the main washroom and steeped it in a beaker of water, then poured the solution into Lauren's feeding tube. He'd done it three times. The water should have catalysed the Source. It should have worked. But it hadn't. Not only had the Source not helped Lauren but it had exacerbated her condition.

  What had Dr Gunderson said? Every day inside the womb would increase the baby's – his daughter's – chance of survival. So being delivered now, today, was the worst possible outcome.

  In the operating room, Ross was given surgical greens and a face mask and told to stand away from the table. He watched them roll Lauren from her bed on to it. Suddenly, a nurse looked up. 'We might not need to do a Caesarean.'

  Gunderson called from the scrubbing suite. 'Why?'

  'Her waters have broken.'

  A midwife, present more out of hope than necessity, stepped forward. She was an older woman and something about her eyes, visible above her mask, reminded Ross of Sister Chantal. Compassionate and wise, they seemed to have seen everything there was to see. She examined Lauren and smiled. Ross loved that smile. It spoke of confidence and possibility. 'Her waters have broken. She's going into labour.'

  'You sure?' Gunderson said, approaching the table where her instruments had been laid out. She reached for a scalpel.

  'It's happening,' said the midwife. 'She's almost nine centimetres dilated.' She didn't wait for a reaction from Gunderson. She attached sensors to the baby's head and checked the monitor. 'Heartbeat's stable.' She pointed at Gunderson's surgical instruments. 'You won't need those. The mother's having contractions.'

  'She's in a coma,' said a nurse.

  'Her body appears to be taking over,' said the midwife. 'I think she can do this.'

  Gunderson hesitated, then put down the scalpel.

  Ross watched in amazement as Lauren's body began to push and, for the next twelve minutes, the midwife coaxed the baby into the world. Eventually she gave a whoop of joy and the baby emerged. She picked her up and, as she handed her to the paediatrician, asked Gunderson, 'How many weeks is this baby?'

  'Twenty-six.'

  'That's incredible. I've delivered thousands of babies. She may be tiny but she looks full-term to me.'

  As the paediatrician examined the baby at the far end of the room, Ross watched Lauren. Her face was so peaceful that he felt an overwhelming rush of love and sadness. When he heard the baby cry for the first time he felt like crying with it. He walked over and she cried again, louder. A nurse handed her to him, and as he held his daughter in his arms he wondered what he should call this miracle of life. Lauren and he had once agreed that if they had a son she would name him, and if they had a daughter he would.

  'Ross!' Gunderson sounded pinched and breathless.

  He looked back at the operating table. Everyone was white, staring at him, gauging his reaction. His heart sank. It had happened. He thought of the nymphs, how when one was born another died. Briefly, he couldn't bring himself to look at Lauren. Then he held his daughter, took strength from her and turned to his wife.

  Lauren's eyes were open. And she was looking at him.

  'She opened them when the baby cried,' said Gunderson, testing Lauren's legs. 'Her reflexes are fine, too.' Her voice cracked with emotion. 'This is impossible. It's a miracle.' She stroked Lauren's left sole and the foot moved away. 'She has feeling and she can move her legs.'

  He moved closer and Lauren's eyes followed him. 'Where have I been?' she whispered weakly.

  He knelt by the table, not trusting his legs to hold him. 'It doesn't matter now. You're back,' he said. He showed her the baby. 'And now here's someone I want you to meet. Our daughter, Chantal.'

  86

  Six months later

  As the plane landed in Lima's Aeroporto Internacional Jorge Chávez, Ross smiled at Zeb. So much had changed since the first time they had flown here with Sister Chantal.

  It had been hard to leave Lauren and the baby at home, but this time it was only for a couple of nights and he was excited about joining up with Hackett again – though not as excited as Zeb.

  For the last six months, while he had been engrossed with Lauren and Chantal, Zeb and Hackett had been in Peru working tirelessly on the project; however, they had returned to the States from time to time to talk with the New York banks, visit Lauren and admire Zeb's new goddaughter. Last week, Zeb had joined Lauren at Yale's Beinecke Library for the triumphant presentation of their officially recognized translation of the Voynich Cipher Manuscript. It was now accepted in academic circles that the final section, written in a totally invented synthetic language, would never be translated without the author's original notes. In their submission, neither Lauren nor Zeb revealed the author's name or suggested that the document was anything other than an allegory.

  Hackett was waiting for them at the airport, tanned and fit: a different man from the pale asthmatic who had first approached them in Cajamarca. Zeb ran into his arms with such enthusiasm that it dispelled any doubts Ross might have had about how serious an item they had become.

  Hackett shook Ross's hand, then embraced him. 'How are Lauren and the little one?'

  'They're fine.' And they were fine, thought Ross. They really were. Lauren had made a full recovery and Chantal was a delight. Despite her size at birth she was now of average weight for her age and she was going to be tall. 'How are things this end?'

  'Everything's prepared. Come. I'll show you.'

  Hackett drove them to the anonymous offices he and Zeb had hired in Lima. Inside the main room, pinned to a corkboard behind the desk, there was a large map of the world. On it, a significant section of the Peruvian Amazon had been sectioned off with red pins linked with ribbon. Ross smiled. It stood slap-bang in the path of Alascon's proposed pipeline. The company would have to go round the area now or abandon the project. On the desk a pile of stationery bore the logo of a stepped pyramid, a ziggurat made of gold bricks. Hackett unlocked a drawer, took out a cheque and handed it to Ross.

  He looked at it and whistled. Made out to the Peruvian government, it was for an enormous amount of money. 'I've never seen so many zeroes.' Both Hackett and Zeb had signed it, but there was space for a third signature. Hackett passed him a pen. 'It needs to be signed by all three trustees.'

  Ross scribbled his name. 'What now?'

  Hackett checked his watch. 'I'll drive you to the hotel so you can freshen up. We're meeting the Minister of the Interior at six to hand over the cheque, followed by a press conference. Though we're paying them shedloads of money, the government wants to gain some environmental Brownie points for enabling a large swathe of virgin jungle to be protected
in perpetuity.'

  Ross studied the cheque, then handed it back to Hackett. He thought of the gold in the lost city, and how it was finally doing what its ancient owners had originally intended when they had stacked it in the ziggurat: protecting their city and the source of the fountain that had once sustained it. 'How many tears of the sun did that cheque soak up?'

  Hackett smiled and led him to the door. 'It barely dented the pyramid. There's loads left. And we found more gold there. My contacts can sell it, without alerting the authorities, but I don't know how we're going to spend it all.'

  Glancing over his shoulder at the map, Ross considered the endangered areas of the world. 'I'm sure we'll think of a few things.'

  The Vatican, the next day

  Cardinal Prefect Guido Vasari hurried down the long, wide corridors of the Apostolic Palace to the Holy Father's office. Ignoring the guards, he pushed open the door and strode in. The pope looked up, pen hovering over a pile of unsigned documents. 'Cardinal Prefect, what is it?'

  Vasari placed an open copy of Time on the desk. 'It's about the Superior General.'

  'Have they found him?'

  'No.'

  'Then what? I thought this unfortunate matter was closed and that we'd put it down to over-zealousness on his part.'

  'Look at the article.'

  The pope skimmed it. 'So? The Voynich has been translated but there's no mention of the Church's involvement. No suggestion that the garden exists. What's the problem?'

  'The person who translated it, the person in the picture holding the baby, is the geologist's wife, the one who was paralysed with a broken neck and comatose, the one who was dying, the one the geologist sought out the garden to save.'

  'She recovered. It happens. You're not suggesting . . .?'

  Vasari threw a copy of the International Herald Tribune, open at page four, on to the desk. There was a picture of two men and a red-haired woman standing with the Peruvian Minister of the Interior. The pope began to read the article Vasari had ringed with blue ink.

  'The man in the left of the photograph is the geologist, Dr Kelly,' said Vasari. 'He and his colleagues have done what the Superior General planned to do and bought a tract of virgin jungle. Their land is now protected in perpetuity and can only be entered with the trustees' permission.' He paused. 'I fear the Superior General's obsession with the Garden of God may have been justified.'

  At first the pope didn't respond or react. Then his face changed and Vasari knew the Holy Father had seen what he had seen: the name of the trust that had bought the land. A name that – apart from the missing Superior General – only they were supposed to know.

  It was the name of a man their predecessors had burnt at the stake four and a half centuries ago for claiming to have discovered a miraculous Garden of God in the Amazon jungle, a man whose Devil's book had become known as the Voynich Cipher Manuscript: Orlando Falcon.

  Epilogue

  The jungle surrounding the eye-shaped crater is a vibrant lush sea of green splashed with primary tints. The crater, however, is a patch of desert in the forest, a negative oasis devoid of life or colour – only grey and black.

  As the sun penetrates its hidden depths, its rays reveal the desolation: white ash and black charcoal. It is said that the purging power of fire can revitalize life, encourage new, more vigorous growth. However, the ash is so thick on the ground it is hard to imagine anything ever growing there again. And the circular black lake in the centre, the pupil of the eye, looks stagnant, blind.

  But all is not as it seems in the eye-shaped crater. Some parts of its soot-covered floor are blacker than others, particularly beside the fallen rocks blocking the caves at one end. Ironically, it is in these blackest sections, where a trickle of phosphorescent green water seeps out through the fallen rocks to darken the ash, that the first signs of life can be found.

  Pushing up through the black ash is a small flower with unique leaves. It is unlike any other plant in the surrounding jungle, unlike any other plant in the world.

  Acknowledgements

  I plundered many books and periodicals to research the scientific and historical aspects of this novel, but I found the most inspirational source material in the pages of the Voynich Manuscript, which the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has generously reproduced and presented on its website.

  I want to thank Patrick Walsh and Jake Smith-Bosanquet, at the Conville & Walsh Literary Agency in London, and Nick Harris at the RWSH film agency in Los Angeles for their sterling efforts in selling this novel around the world.

  I also thank Bill Scott-Kerr for his perceptive editing and continued encouragement, and Hazel Orme for the final polish.

  My greatest thanks, however, are reserved for my wife, Jenny, who has always been my most ruthless critic and most ardent supporter, and for our daughter, Phoebe, who makes everything worthwhile.