The Mayan Secrets

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 thi

“I’m getting hungry,” said Ruiz.

“Buy something to eat on the way, then. I can’t go out like this and shop for thi

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.

Fiendish. What kind of person thought that way? The trap had required that Fargo figure out in advance that somebody was going to take his briefcase. Russell was sure he hadn’t been spotted. Had Ruiz made some stupid mistake? Or did Fargo always walk around in foreign cities carrying a booby trap?

Russell rubbed some cold cream all over his face and neck, desperate to soothe his burning skin. He dialed his satellite phone.

“Hello,” said Sarah Allersby.

“It’s me,” he said. “We went to San Diego and then followed them to the airport. They flew to Spain. That’s where I’m calling from — Valladolid.”

“What are they doing there?”

“We’ve been watching them for a few days. At first, all they did was go sightseeing in the daytime and out to expensive restaurants every night.”

“By now, they must have hit nearly all of them,” Sarah Allersby said.

“Pretty near. For eight days, they’ve been going to the University of Valladolid every day. They seem to be really interested in all the old buildings in town. But they’ve been doing some sort of research.”

“I’m starting to feel uncomfortable. Reassure me. What are they researching?”

“They go to the History Library and look at old books. Everywhere she goes, she has a big leather purse. After a couple of days, he started carrying a briefcase. They had to leave them with the librarian when they got there and pick them up when they left.”

“What was in the cases?”

“I figured they might be pulling a scam. The people who go to these old libraries to steal things like valuable prints or maps or illuminated pages all do it pretty much the same way. They go into a rare book room and read the books. They bring in a razor blade, hide it in one hand, and, when nobody’s looking, run it down a page to cut it loose. Then they slip the page under their clothes. I couldn’t watch them much, so I never saw them do anything.”

“You’re getting me very nervous about this. Did you find out what books they looked at?”

“Ruiz went in once right after they left and took a look. The binding on the book said Las Casas. That means ‘the Houses,’ right?”

She sighed deeply, trying to use up a few seconds to avoid calling him an imbecile. She said calmly, “It’s the name of the Dominican friar who colonized the Alta Verapaz area of Guatemala. He was active around the time when the Mayan codex was buried by the landslide. I’m not sure what they could have thought they were accomplishing by reading about him.”

“I decided today that I was going to find out exactly what they’d been up to. Ruiz and I got on a motorcycle, and while they were walking in the plaza, we went by them fast. I snatched the briefcase out of Fargo’s hand. It’s a kind of robbery that happens all the time in Spain and Italy. Before the mark knows what happened, the bike is gone.”