"An international chase... a quest... codes within codes... questions within questions... oxymorons within oxymorons. The Pak Tino Code is a page-scroller... and if you read it alone, you'll be all by yourself!"
-- Do It Three Times Daily

Following are the first few thrilling pages from this latest blogbuster.

All made-up descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate. Except when they're not.

PROLOGUE
Sanggar Seni Lumayan, Tangerang
10:46 PM

Renowned insurance agent Jaques Genaquère staggered through the vaulted archway of the art sanggar. He lunged for the nearest drawing he could see. It was a dog with one leg up in the air. Grabbing the gilded frame, the forty-six-year-old man stopped to admire the dog's perfectly proportional anatomy. Amazing. Kids these days hardly draw like this anymore, he thought. Then he caught the signature. A famous sketch artist from some thirty years ago. Genaquère shrugged and left the drawing alone.

He took the next one. Twin mountains with a road coming out from their midst, rice fields on the right and left. Signature? Dodol Surodol from SD Pelita V Petang. Satisfied, Genaquère heaved the so-not-masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and he collapsed backward in a heap beneath the A4-sized paper.

The insurance agent lay for a moment, grasping for breath, taking stock. I'm still alive. Which was too bad in a way, as he had just bought a new life insurance -- from himself, of course -- and barely started paying the premium.

A voice spoke, chillingly close. "Dude! What did you do that for?"

Genaquère threw the paper aside and rose hurriedly. Then he looked at his shoes and started playing with the hem of his shirt. "Umm, nuttin'."

Only fifteen feet away, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker bent down and picked up the drawing. "I didn't know you could throw a piece of paper this far." He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. Genaquère turned to face him and exclaimed, "Dude! You should go out more! You could do with more sun, you know."

The albino drew a pistol from his coat and aimed the barrel directly at the insurance agent. "Shut up!" His accent was not easy to place, though it sounded like a mixture of Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Batak, Padang, and a few other dialects that were even harder to place.

He turned the paper in his hand. "Drawing of Dodol Surodol from SD Pelita V Petang. Looks like Superman fighting... hmm... must be Wonder Woman." He paused. "Bagus."

Genaquère opened his mouth. He had not heard that since he stopped watching Pak Tino's Gemar Menggambar tens of years ago. "You..."

His attacker laughed diabolically -- because he was the bad guy and that's what bad guys do in stories like this -- then abruptly stopped, crushed the drawing, and dropped it. "You should not have run. Now tell me where it is."

"I told you already," the insurance agent stammered, kneeling defenseless on the floor of the sanggar -- God knows why. "I have no idea what you are talking about! I'm just an insurance agent."

"You are lying." The man stared at him, perfectly immobile except for the glint in his ghostly eyes.

"I'm not," Genaquère pleaded. "Please, check my wallet, my ID is there."

"Why would I need your ID? I know who you are, Monsieur Jacques Genaquère."

Genaquère looked up in surprise. "How do you know my name?"

The man shrugged. "I must have read this novel somewhere, being a bestseller and all."

Is this guy weird or what? "Look, I want you to look at my ID anyway. It proves that I am an insurance agent." He took out his wallet -- not the easiest thing in the world when one was on one's knees -- and threw it in his attacker's direction.

The albino looked at the identity card and scratched his head, losing a few more strands of his precious hair in the process. "You mean you're really just an insurance agent?" Because one can always rely on an insurance agent -- or any salesman for that matter -- to tell the truth. "What on earth is an insurance agent doing in a place like this? Heck, what's a French insurance agent doing in this novel?"

"What's a giant albino doing in this novel?"

The man considered this. "Good point."

Genaquère shook his head. I could do with a higher-quality bad guy here. "All right, all right, I'm lying. Go on, please."

The big man looked relieved. "Boy, for a moment I wasn't sure what to do there. Don't do that again. Now, you and your brethren possess something that is not yours."

The insurance agent felt a surge of adrenaline. It was as if something was vibrating inside his body. "Oh, wait. It's my cellphone. May I?" He fished it out and said, "Genaquère." Then he looked at his attacker. "I have to take this. Do you mind? It's kinda private."

The giant albino threw his arms in exasperation. "And I thought this happened only in Scary Movie!" Grudgingly, he went to the far wall and started looking at the pictures hung there. Every a few seconds he glanced at Genaquère, who kept saying "yes, dear" and "of course, dear" and "at once, dear."

Five minutes later the insurance agent hung up. "Sorry 'bout that," he said, pushing the cellphone back into his pocket. He was getting good at performing this sort of task while kneeling. "It was my wife. You know how women are."

The other man nodded sympathetically, as any man would. "Sure do. Once, my ex-girlfriend refused to speak to me for the entire week just because I rejected her call while in a very important meeting. Would you believe that? Then another time..."

Genaquère cut him off. "Sorry, man. But we don't have much time here." He tapped his watch.

"All right, then. As I was saying, you and your brethren yada yada yada. Tonight the rightful guardians will be restored. Tell me where it is hidden and you will live." The man levelled his gun at the insurance agent's head. "Is it a secret you will die for?"

Genaquère could not breathe.

The man tilted his head, peering down the barrel of his gun.

Genaquère held up his hands in defense. "Wait," he said slowly. "I will tell you what you need to know." The insurance agent spoke his next words carefully. The lie he told was one he had rehearsed many times... each time praying he would never have to use it. Oh, by the way, yes, he could breathe again now.

When the insurance agent had finished speaking, his assailant smiled smugly. "Yes. This is exactly what the others told me."

Genaquère recoiled. The others?

"You know, the others. As in that Nicole Kidman movie." Then -- because that's what bad guys do every five minutes or so -- he laughed out loud again. "I found them, too," the huge man taunted. "All three of them. They confirmed what you have just said."

"Three?" the insurance agent sighed in relief. "There are five of them, you know."

"Huh?" The man lost a few more precious strands of hair. "Are you lying again, man?"

Genaquère looked serious for a while. Then cracked up. "Yes, I am! Geez, where did they find a guy like you anyway?"

"Hey, hey, I'm the one with the gun here," the albino reminded him. Genaquère turned glum again.

It cannot be! The insurance agent's true identity, along with the identities of his three séné... séné... séné-something, was almost as sacred as the ancient secret they protected. Genaquère now realized his séné-whatever, following strict procedure, had told the same lie before their own deaths. It was part of the protocol.

The attacker aimed his gun again. "When you are gone, I will be the only one who knows the truth." He paused. "Well, except for the one who sent me. And those who hired him. And the company's board of directors, of course. Directors insist to know everything, of course."

The truth. In an instant, the insurance agent grasped the true horror of the situation. If I die, the truth will be lost forever. Instinctively, he tried to scramble for cover. Which was very insurance-agent-like, no doubt.

The gun roared.

An antique vase from the Ming Dynasty shattered. The albino had missed. "Oops!" He should've wondered what an antique vase from the Ming Dynasty had been doing in a small art sanggar like this. But he did not. Because he was the loud-type bad guy, not the smart-type one.

The gun roared again.

Another antique vase -- this time from the Tang Dynasty, four-and-a-half centuries before the Ming -- broke apart. "Damn it!"

Genaquère stared in disbelief and almost amusement. Then in horror, as the man was now taking dead aim at his head.

Genaquère closed his eyes, his thoughts a swirling tempest of fear and regret.

There was a sound like a click of an empty gun chamber echoing through the corridor.

The insurance agent's eyes flew open.

Again, the man should've wondered where the sound had come from when the art sanggar did not have any corridors. Instead, he glanced down at his weapon, looking almost afraid. He reached for a second clip.

Suddenly, Genaquère started coughing and choking badly. "I have a terrible case of asthma," he stopped coughing long enough to explain to the bewildered giant. More coughing and labored breathing. "Chronic and very bad." More coughing and labored breathing. "As you can see."

"Ooohhh!" Visibly relieved, the man smirked at Genaquère. "My work here is done, then."

The insurance agent looked down and saw his chest breathing heavily. As an avid watcher of Doogie Howser, MD and ER, he thought he had witnessed this horribly drawn-out death before. For fifteen minutes he would survive as... as... well, as something-something seeped into something-something and another something-something slowly poisoned him from within.

"Pain is good, monsieur," the attacker said.

Then he was gone. But not before he looked closely at each of the drawings on the wall, each time muttering, "Bagus."

Alone now, Jacques Genaquère turned his gaze to the front door. He was not trapped and could open the door any time he wanted to. But for the sake of it he chose to remain still. More dramatic this way, as by the time anyone got to him, he would be dead. Even so, the fear that now gripped him was a fear far greater than that of his own death.

I must pass on the secret.

Staggering -- for the second time since the beginning of this Prologue -- to his feet, he pictured his three murdered brethren. He thought of the generations who had come before them... of the mission with which they had all been entrusted.

An unbroken chain of knowledge.

Suddenly, now, despite all the precautions... despite all the fail-safes... Jacques Genaquère was the only remaining link, the sole guardian of one of the most powerful secrets ever kept.

Shivering and still breathing laboriously, he pulled himself to his feet. Err, didn't I just stand up three paragraphs earlier?

I must find some way...

He had chosen to be trapped inside the art sanggar and there existed only one person on earth to whom he could pass the torch. Well, there existed a few more other persons, he admitted quietly, but that would've made this Prologue less exciting, wouldn't it? Genaquère gazed at the walls of his by-choice prison. A collection of school students' drawings seemed to smile at him like old friends.

Wincing in pain, he summoned all of his faculties -- especially the Faculty of Computer Science -- and strength. The desperate task before him, he knew, would require every remaining second of his life.

So much so that he did not even have time to grab his bronchodilator inhaler in his back pocket, the only thing other than his cellphone and PDA -- for his list of clients -- and credit cards that he never left home without.

Besides, his family would be well supported, thanks to his gut feelings that had suddenly told him to -- after twenty-odd years in the insurance business -- finally get himself a life insurance.

"Oh, damn it!" Genaquère cried suddenly in alarm. There was one burning question to which he had to find the answer now and fast.

"Does my insurance policy cover death from chronic asthma in an art sanggar?"

Note from Amazon.com: customers who bought The Pak Tino Code also bought its spoof

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