The 2012 Codex

by Gary Jennings, Robert Gleason, Junius Podrug

Overview

An Ancient Mayan Codex Holds the Key to Humanity's Survival in this Gripping Historical Thriller

In the scorching desert canyons of Mexico, a race against time unfolds as Rita Critchlow and Cooper Jones hunt for an ancient Mayan codex—the final 1000-year-old prophecy of the god-king, Quetzalcoatl. Simultaneously, 500 years in the past, Pacal, a young slave-scholar, embarks on the same perilous quest, knowing that the fate of the Aztec civilization hangs in the balance.

Montezuma's vast empire faces war, catastrophic drought, and the brutal sacrifices of death-cult priests. The arrival of red-bearded conquistadors, armed with powerful weapons and bearing devastating plagues, threatens to bring about the end of the Aztec world. Pacal must find the codex to save his people, while Rita and Cooper believe it holds the key to humanity's survival in their own time.

As they battle the unforgiving desert, drug-cartel warlords, and the relentless passage of time, the shocking similarities between Quetzalcoatl's prophecies and the Book of Revelation become increasingly apparent. Could they be one and the same? The countdown to crack the 2012 code is on, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance in 2012 Codex, a gripping historical thriller that spans centuries and cultures.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429938488
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/31/2010
Series:	Aztec , #7
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	561 KB

About the Author

Gary Jennings was known for the rigorous and intensive research behind his books, which often included hazardous travel—exploring every corner of Mexico for his Aztec novels, retracing the numerous wanderings of Marco Polo for The Journeyers, joining nine different circuses for Spangle, and roaming the Balkans for Raptor. Born in Buena Vista, Virginia in 1928, Jennings passed away in 1999 in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, leaving behind a rich legacy of historical fiction and outlines for new novels.

Robert Gleason was Gary Jennings' editor for a number of years. He lives in New York City.

Junius Podrug is an accomplished writer of both fiction and nonfiction. He lives on Cape Cod.

Gary Jennings was known for the rigorous and intensive research behind his books, which often included hazardous travel-exploring every corner of Mexico for his Aztec novels, retracing the numerous wanderings of Marco Polo for The Journeyers, joining nine different circuses for Spangle, and roaming the Balkans for Raptor. Born in Buena Vista, Virginia in 1928, Jennings passed away in 1999 in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, leaving behind a rich legacy of historical fiction and outlines for new novels.

Robert Gleason, author of End of Days, has worked for 40 years in the New York book industry, where he has published many scientists, politicians and military experts. He starred in and hosted a two-hour History Channel special, largely devoted to nuclear terrorism and has discussed the subject on many national TV/radio talk shows, including Sean Hannity’s and Lou Dobbs’s TV shows and George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM. He has also spoken on nuclear terrorism at major universities, including Harvard.

Junius Podrug is the author of Frost of Heaven, Presumed Guilty, and The Disaster Survival Bible. He has experienced two major earthquakes, a flash flood, a blizzard of historical significance, a shipboard emergency, and a crazy with a gun. He considers his paranoia to be heightened awareness and habitually checks where the life vests are stored when boarding a ship and where the fire escapes are located before unpacking in a hotel room. He lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

LAND OF THE MAYA: PRESENT DAY
1
From a high escarpment just below the cliff’s rim, Cooper Jones studied her team resting on the trail below: Rita “Reets” Critchlow—a fellow archeolinguist—flanked by Hargrave and Jamesy. All three wore dusty fatigues, camouflage T-shirts with the sleeves cut off, heavy boots, and sweat-stained dirty-white baseball caps. Reets’ and Coop’s caps bore the Diablos Rojos del México’s team logo, while Jamesy’s and Hargrave’s caps rooted for the Leones de Yucatán.
Mexico City Red Devils and Yucatán Lions, Coop thought grimly. Right now I feel more like a heat-sick Gila monster.
No shade protected them from the blistering sun, and Jamesy was pulling his shirt off. Both men’s bodies were graphic studies in macabre violence—specifically, knife and gunshot wounds—but Jamesy’s chest and back scars were an unnervingly turned-out oeuvre. The first time she stumbled on him bathing in a stream with his shirt off—and had seen the knife slash diagonally traversing his chest, the barely healed bullet hole entering and exiting his broad right shoulder, and the wide white stripes of some long-forgotten prison hellhole disfiguring his back—she’d understood the kind of men he and Hargrave were.
Not that she’d needed scars to garner that insight. Their eyes said everything—eyes that neither asked nor gave, and stares hard enough to crack concrete.
“Eyes that diced at the foot of the cross,” she’d once told Reets.
“And slogged the long road back from Stalin grad,” Reets had said.
“Hard enough to crack concrete,” Coop had concluded.
Then, of course, there were the mirthless grins that never reached those eyes.
Men she and Reets now trusted with their lives.
… Reets had summed up their situation two nights before:
“We’re hunted by the most sadistic, pistol-whipping, water-boarding mercenaries north of the Rio; by Mexico’s most sadistic, gonad-electrocuting, mordida-stealing, child-pimping federales; by the most sadistic, prodigiously powerful drug cartel in two continents—the Apachureros.”
“You mean we’re hunted by… sadists?” Hargrave asked.
“No,” Reets said, “cloistered nuns.”
“We’re not in some kind of trouble, are we?” Jamesy asked.
“Not unless you call drawing and quartering, hot coals and knives, followed by death of a thousand cuts … trouble.” Reets replied.
“They have their side of it,” Hargrave countered.
Reets nodded her assent. “After all, we’ve stolen some of their homeland’s most historically important, preposterously priceless relics.”
“The ‘2012 Apocalyptic Codices,’ as our intrepid president describes them,” Hargrave said. “You can understand why they want them back and us dead?”
“I blame the president,” Jamesy said. “Some hijo de puta on his staff’s ratting us out.”
“Telling the Apachureros, what those codices are worth and where to find us,” Hargrave said.
“Codices we now control,” Coop said.
“And which our bandit buddies want,” Jamesy said.
“There’s also those dozen or so of their bullet-riddled friends we so carelessly left on our back-trail,” Hargrave threw in.
“Someone in Washington put a bounty on us,” Jamesy said coldly.
“Those Pach want us muy malo,” Hargrave said.
“So they can steal the stuff we stole,” Reets said….
… Well, onward and upward, Cooper Jones thought. At the top of the jungle-shrouded cliff waited a man who she hoped had the last of the Quetzalcoatl codices.
The inestimable Jack Phoenix.
The bravest, cleverest, most outrageous archeologist the gods ever made—his detractors often added psychopathic to those adjectives—Jack Phoenix was also one of Coop’s and Reets’ two closest friends.
“One of our two only friends,” Reets once remarked after eight tequila shooters.
They’d begun pooling resources almost a decade ago and they now trusted him with their most confidential findings. Through a covert communications network of seemingly innocuous weblogs, they passed information critical to their work and careers—so much so, they encrypted their e-mails to keep other archeologists from ripping off their findings.
Phoenix typically sought her and Reets’ help in translating indecipherable pre-Columbian glyphs, knowing that Coop, in particular, was preeminently, almost preternaturally gifted in such linguistics. In exchange, he passed data on to them, describing unpublicized digs and sites, which he himself had often uncovered but kept secret.
His last posts contained information that had shaken them to their souls.
At his Chiapas meeting place—an unexplored site deep in Apachurero country—he believed they’d find their missing codex.
Coop allowed herself another quiet sigh. Working her way up to the cliff’s rim, she pulled herself up over the boulder-strewn, outwardly jutting cliff top. Crawling over rocks, through brush, over fallen trees toward the ruin, she surveyed the terrain, looking for intruders.
Until a blast of harsh laughter stopped her.
Hiding behind a log, she spotted the source—a group of raucously drunken bandits.
She counted at least ten of them.
Grizzled inebriated Apachureros in phony federales uniforms, they were armed to the teeth with automatic weapons and pointing at Jack Phoenix’s partially excavated temple.
Waiting for Jack Phoenix to emerge from the subterranean tunnel entrance he had written them about.
Waiting for their friend.
Excerpted from The 2012 Codex by Gary Jennings.
Copyright © 2010 by Gary Jennings.
Published in September 2010 by A Tom Doherty Associates Book.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.

Editorial Reviews

In Gleason and Podrug's undistinguished fourth entry in the Jennings franchise (after Apocalypse 2012), set mostly in 16th-century Mexico, Pakal the Storyteller saves the life of the king's architect by killing a rare white jaguar. This heroic act leads to Pakal's getting an assignment to track down the Dark Rift Codex, a document crucial to the survival of Mayan society. In the present, covert U.S. operatives search for the codex, believed to contain details about how the world will end in 2012. At tedious length, the American president receives lectures on the growing signs of ecological catastrophe. Overwrought prose doesn't help (e.g., "Reets... took out a fleeing bandit herself, Coop still doing the heavy work, the hard precision shooting, firing that weapon like she and the PDW were born together, conceived together in the same uterus, her eyes unblinking over its iron sights, empty and expressionless as the Martian moons, cold and compassionless as her violent moonshiner youth"). (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"The authors do an imaginative job of interweaving the dual narrative threads without sacrificing either pacing or timing."

—Booklist

From the Publisher