The Mayan Secrets fa-5 Page 15

  Remi laughed. “Very quick thinking.” She pulled the blanket aside so Sam could sit up beside her.

  An hour later, Dr. Huerta dropped them off in a larger village, and soon they were sitting in the back of a bus heading down toward the city of Cobán. From Cobán to Guatemala City was another hundred thirty-three miles, a five-hour trip.

  When they reached Guatemala City, they checked into the Real InterContinental Hotel in the center of the Zona Viva, the tenth zone, where the best restaurants and nightlife can be found. When Sam and Remi were up in their room and could plug in their telephones to replenish their charges, Sam called the Guatemala City branch of an American bank where he had an account and arranged to rent a safe-deposit box.

  He and Remi walked the three blocks to the bank, rented the box, and placed the gold and jade artifacts they’d found in the underground river in it, where they would be safe.

  They walked back to their hotel, stopping in fashionable shops along the way to buy new clothes and a pair of suitcases, and then they called Selma.

  “Where have you two been?” she asked. “We’ve been trying to call you for two days.”

  “Our phone batteries ran down when we took them for a swim,” said Remi. She gave Selma the name of their hotel, their room number, and a brief version of how they had come to be there. She ended with, “And how is everything at home?”

  “Bad,” said Selma. “I’m almost afraid to tell you.”

  “I’m going to put you on speaker so Sam can hear too,” said Remi.

  “All right,” said Selma. “Someone arranged to have four men come to the university and impersonate FBI and U.S. Customs agents and two Mexican cultural officials. They showed credentials, and the university administrators looked up the names to verify these people existed. So—”

  “Did they get the codex?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. I hope you won’t blame David Caine. The university’s lawyers said the codex had to be turned over to legitimate Mexican officials, so the academic vice chancellor led these men right to the archival room where David had the codex under a magnifier. We found out that the administrators even had the campus police standing by in case David had to be restrained.”

  “We’re not blaming David,” Sam said. “See if you can find out where Sarah Allersby was at the time. The fact that we had a prowler right after she and her lawyers tried to buy the codex makes her my favorite suspect.”

  “Her private plane took off from Los Angeles late the night after the theft,” Selma said. “She had been scheduled to fly out the evening after she came to the house, but a new flight plan was filed the night she actually left.”

  “Where was she headed?” asked Sam.

  “The flight plan was for Guatemala City.”

  “So she’s here?” Remi said. “She brought the codex here?”

  “It would seem so,” said Selma. “That’s an advantage of a private plane. You don’t have to hide what you steal in your luggage.”

  Chapter 15

  GUATEMALA CITY

  For over two hundred years, Sarah Allersby’s mansion in Guatemala City had been the home of the wealthy Guerrero family. It was a Spanish palace, built with a massive set of stone steps, a carved façade, and high double doors in front. The wings of the two-story house continued all the way around to enclose a large courtyard.

  When Sam and Remi knocked, a tall, muscular man in his mid-thirties with the face and build of a boxer, and who might have been the butler but was probably the chief of security, opened the door. “Mr. and Mrs. Fargo?”

  “Yes,” said Sam.

  “You’re expected. Please come in.” He stepped back to let them pass and then looked up and down the street as he shut the door. “Miss Allersby will see you in the library.” Dominating the foyer were a pair of eight-foot-high stone slabs with carvings of particularly fierce-looking Mayan deities that seemed to be guarding the house. He led the Fargos past them to a doorway off the foyer that had a high, ornately carved stone lintel that Remi judged was from a Mayan building. Inside was the sort of library that could be found in English country houses, if they were old enough and the owners were rich enough. The man waited until Sam and Remi were seated on a large, old-fashioned leather couch and went out.

  The room was designed to convey long tenure and social standing. There was an antique globe, about four feet in diameter, on a stand. Antique lecterns along the side of the room held large, open books — one an old Spanish dictionary and the other a hand-tinted, seventeenth-century atlas. The walls were lined with tall bookshelves that held thousands of leather-bound books. Hung along the inner wall, above the bookcases of nineteenth-century works, were portraits of Spanish ladies, with mantillas over their hair and in lace gowns, and Spanish gentlemen in black coats. It occurred to Remi that this room was not Sarah Allersby’s doing. She had simply got the Guerrero house and occupied it. Remi verified the impression by looking at the nearest shelf of books, which had Spanish titles embossed on their spines in gold.

  At the far end of the room, a glass case displayed beaten gold and carved jade ornaments from the costume of a classic period Mayan dignitary, a selection of fanciful Mayan clay pots shaped like frogs, dogs, and birds, and eight figurines of cast gold.

  They heard the pock-pock of high heels striking the polished stone floor as Sarah Allersby crossed the foyer. She entered the room at a fast walk, smiling. “Why, it really is Sam and Remi Fargo. I think I can honestly say that I never expected to see either of you again, and certainly not in Guatemala.” She wore a black skirt from a suit but without the jacket, black shoes, and a white silk blouse with a ruffle at the neck, an outfit that conveyed the impression that she had been occupied with business in another part of the house. She looked at her watch as though starting a timer and then back at them.

  Sam and Remi stood. “Hello, Miss Allersby.”

  Sarah Allersby stood where she was, making no attempt to shake hands.

  “Enjoying your stay in our country?”

  “Since we met you in San Diego, we’ve been exploring in Alta Verapaz,” said Remi. “I suppose the codex raised our consciousness of Mayan country and we decided to take a closer look.”

  “How adventurous of you. It must be wonderful to be able to drop everything and go off to satisfy your curiosity on a whim. I envy you.”

  “It comes with retirement,” said Sam. “You should take more time away from acquiring things.”

  “Not just yet,” said Sarah. “I’m still in the building phase. So you came down here and the first one you decided to visit was me. I’m flattered.”

  “Yes,” said Sam. “The reason we’re here is that our trek took us close to an estate that you own — the Estancia Guerrero.”

  “How interesting.” Her expression was guarded, alert but emotionless.

  “The reason we had to pass that way was that a contingent of heavily armed men were chasing us. They opened fire as soon as they saw us, so we had to run and we took a shortcut through your property. What we saw when we crossed your land was a very large marijuana plantation with about a hundred workers, harvesting the crop, drying, packing, and shipping.”

  “What a wild day you had,” she said. “How, pray tell, did you escape from all these armed men?”

  “Don’t you think what you should be asking is what are all these criminals doing on my ranch?” said Remi.

  Sarah Allersby smiled indulgently. “Think about the Everglades National Park in your country. It’s about one-point-five million acres. The Estancia Guerrero is more than twice that size. It’s just one of several tracts that I own in different regions of Guatemala. There’s no way to keep everyone off that land. Parts of it are unreachable except on foot. The peasant people have been in and out of there for thousands of years, no doubt plenty of them up to no good. I do employ a few men in the district to prevent commercial logging of rare woods, poaching of endangered species, the looting of archaeological sites. But armed com
bat with drug gangs is the government’s job, not mine.”

  Sam said, “We thought we’d let you know about the illegal activity going on inside your property.”

  Sarah Allersby leaned forward, an unconscious posture that made her look like a cat about to spring. “You sound as though you have doubts.”

  Remi shrugged. “All I can be sure of is that you’re informed now.” She offered her hand to Sarah, who took it. “Thank you for giving us a few minutes of your time.” They stepped through the door to the foyer, and Sarah emerged behind them.

  “It’s not likely to happen again,” she said. As she walked across the old tiles in the other direction, she added, “I just assumed you were here to say something amusing about my Mayan codex.”

  Remi stopped and turned. “Your Mayan codex?”

  Sarah Allersby laughed. “Did I say that? How silly of me.” She kept walking. As she disappeared through another doorway, the front door opened behind the Fargos. The servant who had let them in appeared. Now he was accompanied by two other men in suits. They held the heavy door open so the Fargos’ exit would not be delayed.

  As soon as they were outside, Remi said, “Well, that wasn’t very satisfying.”

  “Let’s try another way to get some action,” Sam said.

  Sam and Remi walked down the steps and out to the street. They turned to the right and walked another hundred yards, and then Sam stopped and waved down a taxi. “Avenida Reforma. The embassy of the United States.”

  At the embassy, the receptionist behind the desk asked them to wait while she tried to get a member of the staff to speak with them. Five minutes later, a woman appeared from a door beyond the desk and walked up to them. “I’m Amy Costa, State Department. Come to my office.” When they were inside, she said, “How can I help you today?”

  Sam and Remi told her the story of what had happened on and near the Estancia Guerrero. They told her about the men who had tracked and attacked them, the vast plantation of marijuana plants and coca trees, the truck convoys. They described the doctor and the priest who had asked them to submit their pleas to Sarah Allersby and her response. And, finally, Sam told her about the Mayan codex.

  “If the codex is in her possession, or is found to have ever been in her possession, then she got it by having men impersonate federal officials at the University of California in San Diego and steal it.”

  Amy Costa wrote a report as she listened, only interrupting to ask for dates or approximate location data that had been recorded on their phones. When they had finished their story, she said, “We will be passing this information on to the Guatemalan government. But don’t be too impatient about results.”

  “Why not?” asked Remi.

  “The government has been doing a valiant job of trying to control the drug traffickers and growers, who are also destroying the forests, particularly in the Petén region, to make giant cattle ranches. But the drug gangs have them outnumbered and outgunned. In the past couple of years, the police have taken back about three hundred thousand acres from the drug lords, but that’s a tiny fraction of the total.”

  “What about Sarah Allersby?”

  “We’ve been aware of her since she arrived in the country, of course. She’s a very visible personality on the European party scene — beautiful, rich, uninhibited, flamboyant. She’s almost a celebrity in this city. And I’d not be at all surprised if she is behind the theft of the Mayan codex. She thinks laws are local customs for the unintelligent and unimaginative. But like aristocrats everywhere, she doesn’t do the unpleasant things herself. She hires people like the impostors who took the codex. It’s highly unlikely that she would ever be charged with a crime here.” She paused. “Any crime.”

  “Really?” said Remi. “But she’s a foreigner just like us.”

  “There’s a difference.” She paused. “What I’m about to tell you is off the record. She’s been here for years, making herself socially and financially useful to lots of powerful people. She’s a huge landowner, and while you can’t buy the old owner’s social status with the land, obvious wealth is certainly a good way to get invitations. She’s always contributed to the political campaigns of potential winners — and, even more important, to the sure losers who are well connected. She can accomplish a lot with a phone call, or even a hint dropped at a party.”

  Sam said, “Can’t we at least get the Guatemalan police to take a look at the Estancia? Thousands of acres of plants in the fields and tons of buds in the drying barns are pretty hard to hide. And if they examined her operations, her offices, her houses, they couldn’t help but find—”

  “The Mayan codex?”

  “Well, that’s what we’d hope. But certainly evidence that she’s been profiting from these drug operations.”

  Amy Costa slowly shook her head. “That would be too vast an undertaking. The authorities know that in the north and the west, the cartels have been operating in the big stretches of wilderness. The police would love to stop them. But what you’re describing won’t happen. If they found every single thing you saw, they still wouldn’t arrest Sarah Allersby. Don’t you see? She would be the prime victim. They could arrest a hundred poor Mayan peasants who took jobs tending the crop. All the action — the dirty deals, the money changing hands — took place in somebody’s fancy house here in the capital. In Guatemala, if you’re rich enough to own millions of acres in the countryside, you’re too rich to live there.”

  “But you’ll pass on the information to the police?”

  “Of course,” she said. “This isn’t one crime, it’s a war. We just keep on trying. What you’ve told me may turn out to be helpful, even important, sometime. It may put somebody away.”

  Sam said, “Do you think we should go to the federal police too?”

  “You can if you want. But maybe we can do it together. Are you free for an hour or so?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Give me a minute to call ahead and then we’ll go.” She dialed a number and spoke briefly in rapid Spanish. Then she buzzed the receptionist. “Please have a car for me. We’ll leave as soon as it’s ready.” She explained to the Fargos, “It’s in zone four, a bit too far to walk.”

  They were driven to the federal police station on Avenida 3-ll. The police officer at the door recognized Amy Costa and let them in. Costa walked up the hall to an elevator, which took them to an office.

  The uniformed officer, who stood as they entered, was young and clear-eyed. “This is Commander Rueda. This is Sam and Remi Fargo. They’re two American visitors who saw some things you might wish to know about. Mr. Fargo…?”

  Sam told the story, and Remi filled in details and supplied the GPS locations of the places described. Whenever the commander looked puzzled, Amy Costa translated the words into Spanish. At the end of the Fargos’ recitation, the commander said, “Thank you very much for bringing this information to our attention. I will file a report, conveying your experiences, to the central command.” He stood to terminate the visit.

  Sam remained seated. “Will anything happen? Will Sarah Allersby’s properties be searched or her bank accounts audited?”

  The commander looked sympathetic. He sat down again. “I’m sorry, but those things will not happen. The armed gang was certainly one of the groups who patrol the north to protect the ranches where drugs are grown and shipped. Marijuana is a stable, reliable crop that can be grown in any remote area by anyone. But there’s no proof of a connection with Sarah Allersby. Any piece of jungle — including national parkland — can be infiltrated by these criminals. We raid them and they turn up elsewhere. When we go away, they come back. Do they pay a landlord for the privilege? Sometimes, but not always. Your report of seeing coca trees, frankly, disturbs me most. We haven’t had coca growing here. Until now, we’ve only been a stop on the route from South America.”

  “If you were to have a reason to search the Allersby houses, banks, and businesses for one thing and found another, could you still arrest he
r?”

  “Yes, provided we had a good legal reason to search. This time, we don’t have a direct connection to her.” He seemed to make a decision. “I’m going to tell you something confidential. Like many rich and active businesspeople, she has been investigated from time to time. In fact, it’s happened twice that I know of in this office. We found nothing.”

  Remi said, “No money she couldn’t explain? No Mayan artifacts? She calls herself a collector, and we saw plenty in her house.”

  The commander said, “If she has money she didn’t declare here, it’s no mystery. She has interests in many countries, and a wealthy family. If there are Mayan artifacts, she could say they were part of the estate she bought from the Guerrero family or some things her workers found recently that she would have reported. There’s nothing criminal there unless she did something definite and final — sell them or take them out of the country.”

  “What would you advise us to do?” asked Remi.

  “What Miss Costa undoubtedly told you to do. Go home. If you want to, you could search the online markets for codices or parts of them. Often, things are broken up and sold. If the codex turns up, we’ll file charges and confiscate it.”

  “Thank you,” said Remi.

  Sam shook the commander’s hand. “We appreciate your willingness to listen.”

  “Thank you for your evidence. And please don’t be discouraged. Justice is sometimes slow.”

  Amy Costa had the embassy car drop them off at their hotel. Once they were in the room, they called Selma and asked her to get them a flight back to the United States. While they were waiting to hear from her, they went out to an English-language bookstore to buy books to read on the long flight home.

  Their itinerary included a stop in Houston, but the flying time was only seven hours and forty-one minutes. Sam slept through most of the flight to Houston while Remi read a book on the history of Guatemala. On the second flight, Remi slept while Sam read. When the plane lost altitude on its approach to the runway in San Diego, Remi’s eyes opened. She said, “I know what’s wrong. We’re missing our best ally in this.”