The Mayan Secrets

Chapter 19

It was early morning, and Remi and Sam sat at an outdoor table overlooking the Pacific at the Valencia Hotel, only a few hundred yards from their house, where they often ate breakfast with Zoltán, their German shepherd. They’d already finished a morning run along the beach and now they were having cups of espresso and a breakfast of smoked salmon on bagels with capers and onions. Zoltán had eaten his breakfast at home before they’d gone out and was content at this hour with a bowl of water and a few of the biscuits that Remi carried in her pocket for treats. When Sam and Remi had finished, they paid their bill and started walking across the vast green lawn and on toward their house.

Zoltán, always alert, stopped and stared in the direction of the beach, then moved forward again to lead the way home. Remi said, “What is it, Zoltán? Did you see somebody that Sam painted blue? The one I wish you’d paint blue is Sarah Allersby,” she added. She looked at her watch, then at the stretch of lawn ahead. “We’d better move a little faster. David Caine will be there in a few minutes.”

“Selma will let him in,” he said. “Before he gets here, we should talk about what we’re willing to do on this project and what we’re not willing to do.”

“Have we given adequate consideration to painting Sarah Allersby blue? I, for one, don’t think so,” she said.

“The idea is growing on me. But, seriously, we’re reaching the point where we may decide something is the next logical move but not want to do it. If a person takes enough risks, the time could come when he loses.”

“Who are you and what have you done with my husband?”

Sam smiled. “I know I’m usually the one who wants to do something rash. But I can’t forget what it felt like that day when our only way out was to dive into an underground river.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” she said. “By the way, that was pretty romantic when you tried to give me your air tank. I don’t know if I’ve ever given you adequate credit for that. Who knew that the way to a girl’s heart is through her lungs?”

“Let’s talk things over with David, hear what he thinks but make a decision about what we do only after we’ve taken some time to think it through.”

“Okay.” She looked up at Sam as they walked, then suddenly stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

“What was that for?”

“You know.”

They let Zoltán lead them home and arrived just as David Caine’s car pulled up in front of their house. He got out carrying a big, string-tied accordion envelope under his arm. He shook Sam’s hand, hugged Remi, and patted Zoltán.

When they were inside, he said, “What you’ve done — deducing that a copy might have existed and then going to find it — was brilliant. And I’ve always been an admirer of Bartolomé de Las Casas, but even he has risen in my estimation. The copy he made seems to me to be nearly perfect. Tracing and copying a hundred thirty-six pages of pictures and symbols that he couldn’t have understood must have taken months. But as far as I can tell, he missed nothing.”

They went to a long table in the first-floor office area, and Caine laid out a series of digital images from Sam and Remi’s library transmission. He had enlarged the images so it was possible to see each pen stroke and every mark on the vellum, including pores on the outer side of the hide.

Sam and Remi recognized the four-page map of the Mayan sites, with its text of Mayan glyphs and its stylized pictures.

Remi pointed at the first spot they had explored. “There’s our swimming pool, the cenote, where we had the shootout.”

Next, Caine laid out a series of enlarged satellite photographs of the same territory, placing each one under its Mayan representation. “Here’s the way these places look from above.”

Then he set out one more. “And here’s what I’m excited about — excited and worried.”

“What is it?” asked Remi.

“You remember I said at the beginning that it looked like there were a few major sets of buildings on these maps?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, I used aerial photographs and satellite images to see if there was anything in those locations to correspond to the drawings. Here are some of the results.”

“There are certainly buildings,” said Sam. He pointed at the photograph. “These hills, here and here, are too tall and steep to be anything but large pyramids.”

Caine laid out three more pairs of photographs. “Here are codex entries for four large complexes that modern scholars don’t know exist.”

“How big is the city?” Sam asked.

“It’s impossible to tell from photographs,” said Caine. “There are possible stone ruins within a mile or two in each direction. Does that mean we’ve discovered a city that was three to five miles across? Probably not. But, then, what have we discovered? There’s only one way to find out.”

Remi looked at the aerial photographs and satellite images. “These things are so deeply hidden by the trees and vines and bushes. You can hardly see them even when you’re standing on them.”

“That’s why so many sites are still undisturbed,” Caine said. “Buildings look like hills covered with vegetation. But the codex tells us which hills aren’t hills. You two have made a huge contribution.”

“I’m just glad it wasn’t wasted effort,” said Sam.

“Hardly,” said Caine. “Using the codex you found in Mexico and the copy you found in Spain, we’ve managed to discover at least five important sites — the complex around the cenote you explored and four ancient cities. The past fifteen years has already been the most productive period of Mayan studies ever. Your find is going to trigger a lot of excavations in short order. I can tell already that just studying the copy of the codex will teach us more about the written languages too. Even that will take years, of course. Linguistic studies require a number of people working to understand one specific grammatical quirk or unfamiliar vocabulary term and then others using that breakthrough to understand other texts. And proper excavation of a city is a job that has to be done with brushes and sifting screens, not bulldozers. We won’t live long enough to see all of the important discoveries you’ve made possible.”

“You don’t look happy about all of this progress,” said Remi.

“I’m worried. We have a copy of the codex, but Sarah Allersby has the original. If she pays the right person, she can get it translated, and I assume that’s what she’s doing. As soon as she can read it, she’ll see everything I’ve just shown you.”

“You mean she’ll find out where these cities are?” said Sam.

“And all of the other sites,” said Caine. “While you were in Spain, I asked a colleague”—Caine saw the alarmed look on Remi’s face—“not the one I mistakenly trusted before. This one is a friend I’ve known for a number of years. His name is Ron Bingham. He’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in Mayan technology. He’s one of the world’s best lithicists. He can examine a piece of obsidian and tell you where it came from and how it was used or look at a structure and tell you how and when it was built, where the quarry was, and even how many times it was rebuilt.”

“Interesting specialty,” said Sam.

“The point is, his reputation is spotless. Integrity isn’t negotiable and doesn’t depend on the situation. But Ron can get invited to join any expedition in Central America, and a fair number anywhere else. He can’t be tempted by Sarah Allersby.”

“If you trust him, we do too,” said Sam. “What did he say?”

“Well, I told him I was planning to visit some of the sites this summer. He said that Sarah Allersby had approached him and several other people he knows to inform them she’s mounting a major expedition that will begin soon. She implied that she knows exactly where she wants to go and what she expects to find there. She’s already hiring people.”

“What sort of people?” Remi asked.

“Nobody like Ron. People like him run their own fieldwork. But this, she was promising, was something special. She’s hiring experienced guides, Guatemalan workers who have been trained on archaeological digs in the past, cooks, drivers, and so on. You can be sure there won’t be anybody who could put up resistance to whatever she wants to do or question her methods or how she treats structures and artifacts. It’s her show.”

“I guess this is the downside of finding the codex,” said Sam. “Even if she hadn’t stolen it, before long everything would have become public.”

“It didn’t have to be this way,” said Caine. “What we’ve done is hand the worst person in the field of Mayan history a virtual monopoly of the biggest finds over the next twenty-five years. Because of her personal fortune, she can be in the field while legitimate scholars are still writing grant proposals. We’ve also given her enough of a head start to loot at least four great Mayan cities and innumerable other sites. We’ll probably never know how much she quietly sells off in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. and never becomes part of the historial record.”

“We can’t let that happen,” Remi said. “We’ve got to stop her.”

Sam put his arm around her shoulders. “Wait a minute,” he said. He spoke to Caine as well as to Remi. “When we were in Guatemala, we barely got out with our lives. I’ve seldom been so glad to get out of anywhere. When we ducked into that cenote, I thought we were going to die. If that unlikely way out hadn’t been there, we would be dead.”

“I know that,” she said. “I’d try to forget, but I know I can’t. But bringing home that pot with the codex inside brought with it some responsibility. You heard David. Between our finding that codex and the university administration handing it over to impostors, we’ve given a whole field of study over to one nasty, spoiled, lying, thieving woman.”

David Caine said, “This is really my responsibility. I’ve been planning my expedition for summer, but I’m afraid summer is going to be too late to head her off entirely. I think once I’m on the scene with a group of reputable colleagues, I can prevent the worst excesses. She’s trying to buy a name for herself as an archaeologist. If eight or ten well-known archaeologists are present, she can hardly dismantle features or loot the tombs.”

“And she’s already working as fast as she can.” Remi turned to Sam. “I’ll never forgive myself if we don’t even try to stop her. About the only thing the Mayans have left is their history. If Sarah Allersby ends up stealing that too, it would be our fault. How are we going to feel in a year when she’s publishing false accounts of her ‘discoveries’ and misleading people about everything she finds?”

Sam sighed but said nothing.

“That’s the one thing we actually know for sure,” said Remi. “All we have to do is look at the four major sites in the codex that David came to show us. We know the way she thinks. She’s greedy. She’ll start with the biggest one.”

Sam looked at Remi, then at Caine. “I have to admit, that seems to be the way Sarah Allersby thinks. Which one is the biggest?”

“I’ll go start packing,” said Remi. “And, this time, I’d like to include a lot more ammunition.”