Remi had been listening. “What is parótidas?” she asked.
“It’s a common viral illness. In English, it’s called mumps. I told him you had a case at its most contagious stage. In adult males, it can cause impotence.”
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
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 combat with drug gangs is the government’s job, not mine.”