Remi and Sam put on the two cameras disguised as glasses and went back to the first page. As they turned pages, Sam and Remi were sending digital video with the camera glasses. They could see that the copy Las Casas had made was done with extreme care. He had not made an attempt to reproduce the colors of the original, but everything else was the same. The pages had been scored with a straightedge to divide the space into columns, usually six but sometimes eight, as the original had been. The pages had not been given Arabic folio numbers, but Sam and Remi could tell from memory that at least the beginning thirty pages seemed to be in order. Selma’s voice came through the tiny earphones embedded in the stems of their eyeglasses. “I’m receiving everything clearly. Keep going.”
Sam and Remi kept turning pages and filming until they reached the one hundred thirty-sixth and final page. Then they started over again at the end of the section and took still photographs of each spread of open pages, using the cameras in their wristwatches.
When they had finished, Sam folded his glasses and put them into his jacket pocket. “I’m getting tired. Let’s go back to our hotel.”
They returned the volume to the librarian for reshelving and then retrieved Remi’s purse and the briefcase Sam had brought. They thanked the librarian and left the building.
As they went down the steps in the late afternoon and turned to walk along the street toward their hotel, Sam reminded Remi, “No matter what happens in the next few minutes, don’t be startled, and hold on to your glasses and wristwatch.”
As they walked along the Calle de las Cadenas de San Gregorio to the Plaza Mayor, they were only two tourists in a large, open space with hundreds of people. When they were about halfway across the plaza, they heard a new sound — the deep, throaty sound of a motorcycle engine. The engine grew louder as the motorcycle came around a corner somewhere behind them. Remi started to turn to look over her shoulder, but Sam put his arm around her and whispered, “Don’t look or you’ll scare them off.”
The motorcycle sped up directly behind them, and Sam turned suddenly. On the cycle were a driver and a man riding behind him. Both men were wearing helmets with tinted visors over their faces. As the motorcycle swooped in, the driver made an attempt to snatch Sam’s briefcase out of his hand, but Sam held on to it, tugging back, as the driver pulled. The power of the cycle added to the driver’s force, but Sam trotted alongside, still holding on. When the second man saw the way Sam held on, he joined the struggle, grasped the briefcase with both hands, and wrenched it away. The driver gunned the engine and accelerated, and the motorcycle roared off around the side of the Plaza, turned, and disappeared up a narrow street between tall buildings.
Sam held up his empty hand so Remi could see it.
“Sam! He stole your new briefcase!”
He smiled. “A little engineering project.”
“What are you talking about? Those men stole your briefcase! We’ve got to call the police!”
“No need,” he said. “Those are the two we noticed about a week ago outside San Gregorio. I saw them watching us a few times since then. They were too interested to be nobody. So I bought the briefcase and began my project.”
“Your briefcase is an engineering project?”
“Didn’t I say that?”
“Stop being mysterious and tell me what you’ve done.”
“You know those booby-trapped bags of money that banks give to bank robbers?”
“The ones that blow up and cover the thief with indelible ink? Oh, no. How did you even get an explosive on the plane?”
“I didn’t use explosives. This one works with springs. Undo the latch and the first spring pops the case open wide, and that allows the second to spring upward and push a piston, like a jack-in-the-box. The cylinder is full of ink. I bought the briefcase, the springs, and the ink here.”
“What would have happened if the librarian had inspected it?”
“He didn’t open anything for the first two days, so why do it later?”
“What would have happened to him?”
“He would have a bright blue face. ‘Azul,’as they say here.”
“You couldn’t just watch these men and not play some dumb prank?”
“I did watch them. I noticed they spoke English to each other, and one of them spoke Spanish to everybody else — rapid, fluent Spanish that didn’t leave anybody looking confused. I thought about who would spend several days watching us like that without doing anything. The only answer is that Sarah Allersby must have sent them.”
“Why would she do that? She has the codex. She doesn’t need a copy.”
“To find out what we’re doing and what we’ve accomplished.”
“And?”
“And now she knows. Once her men followed us to Valladolid, I’m sure she could figure out what else might be here. All I could do is make sure we know them if we see them again in the next few days.”
They walked quickly to their hotel, downloaded the photographs from the digital cameras to Remi’s laptop computer, and then sent two versions to Selma’s computer in San Diego as a backup. While Remi waited for the transfers to be completed, she made a reservation to fly to San Diego on the red-eye leaving in four hours.
As she and Sam finished packing, Remi’s phone rang. She said, “Hi, Selma. Are the pictures all clear? Good. We’re coming home.” There was a pause. Then she said, “Because a couple of men stole Sam’s briefcase. When they open it, they’re going to want to kill us. If they don’t succeed, we’ll see you tomorrow night.”
Chapter 18
Russell was in the bathroom of the hotel suite in Valladolid, dabbing at his blue face with a cotton ball soaked in acetone. The thick nail-polish-remover smell stung his sinuses. Added to the smell of the isopropyl alcohol and the turpentine he had tried first, it made the small, enclosed space unbearable. He looked in the mirror above the sink. “This isn’t working either. And it stinks.”
“Maybe if you rub a little harder,” said Ruiz. He could see through the blue dye on Russell’s face that his chin was getting blotchy and irritated, but Ruiz didn’t feel like going out again searching Valladolid for more chemicals and solvents.
Russell handed him the bottle and then used soap and water to wash the acetone off his face. “Get something else.”
Ruiz said, “This stuff almost always works. We used it to wash checks years ago. It would take off the ink in a couple minutes.”
“We’re not washing checks now,” said Russell. “This is my face. But you gave me an idea. Remember, there was a secret to washing checks. If the dye in the ink was polar, the best thing to get it off was a polar solvent, like alcohol and acetone. Well, we’ve tried those. So let’s try a nonpolar solvent like toluene.”
“Toluene?” said Ruiz. “What’s another name for it?”
“Methylbenzene.”
“Where do I go for that?”
“A paint store, the kind for artists, might have it. You go in and ask for paint thinners. Get every kind they have. Try that first. If you pass by a dry cleaner, try them too. Say you spilled ink on a couch and you’ll pay for some of the stuff they use for ink stains.”
“I’m getting hungry,” said Ruiz.
“Buy something to eat on the way, then. I can’t go out like this and shop for thinners, and the smells are making me sick, so I couldn’t eat anyway. Just get me something that will take the ink off. We’ve got to fix this now.”
Ruiz picked up his jacket off the chair and went down the hall to the narrow, cagelike elevator. When Russell heard the elevator’s grating slide to the side to admit Ruiz, he rinsed his face again and looked in the mirror. His face felt hot, that if the blue were removed, it would be glowing.
The trap had sprung when he had unlatched the briefcase. One spring mechanism had snapped the briefcase open, and the other had pushed the circular bottom of an ink-filled cylinder upward like a piston. It had been sealed at the top with only a layer of wax paper. Ink had shot out onto his face and chest.