Текст книги "The Mayan Secrets"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

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 combat 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. “ YourMayan 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 her?”

“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.”

“Who’s that?”

“Bartolomé de Las Casas.”

Chapter 16

SAN DIEGO

Sam and Remi stepped out to the curb at the airport and found Selma waiting for them in the Volvo sedan. Zoltán was sitting sedately on the backseat of the car. Remi ducked into the backseat and sat beside Zoltán, who licked her face while she hugged and petted him. “Zoltán. Hianyoztal.”

“What did you say?” Selma asked.

“I said I missed him. I missed you too, but you aren’t a Hungarian dog.”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” said Selma. “Hi, Sam.”

“Hi, Selma. Thanks for coming to meet us.”

“It’s a pleasure. Zoltán and I have been moping around the house since the robbery at the university. David Caine calls every day, but I told him you’d get in touch when you were home.”

“That reminds me. We won’t be here long. We’re going to Spain,” said Sam. “But first we want to meet with you and David. We can bring one another up to date on everything and then get busy on the next step.”

“All right. When we’re home, I’ll get going on your reservations,” said Selma. “It’s a shame you’re leaving. While you were in Guatemala, the workmen completed the painting and finish work. Your house is, well, your house again.”

“No carpenters, painters, or electricians left?” said Remi.

“Not one,” Selma said. “I even had a cleaning crew in to be sure there’s not a dimple of a bullet hole, a microscopic stain from a drop of blood, or a sliver of broken glass anywhere. Everything’s new.”

“Thanks, Selma,” said Remi. “We’re grateful.”

Sam said, “We’ll try to keep it nice by not discharging firearms in the living room.”

Remi said, “Selma, I want you to spend some time with me before we meet with David Caine. I need to know everything you’ve got about Bartolomé de Las Casas and about the four known Mayan codices.”

“I’ll be delighted,” said Selma. “I’ve been hoarding information on those topics since you were in Mexico.”

Six hours later, they were on the ground floor of the house, sitting around the conference table. In the center was a photocopy of the letter from Bartolomé de Las Casas.

Sam said to David Caine, who had just arrived, “I think Remi would like to start.”

“I just want to say thank you to Selma for having photographed the letter before turning it over to me,” David interjected.

Remi began. “By the time the Dresden Codex’s existence became widely known, an Italian scholar had made a tracing of it. Before the Madrid Codex ever got to the Museo América de Madrid, a French abbot made a copy. The Paris Codex was copied by the same Italian scholar who traced the Dresden. Somebody at the Bibliothèque Nationale actually threw the original in a bin in a corner of a room, which damaged it, so it’s a good thing there was a copy.”

“An interesting set of coincidences,” said David Caine. “Where are you going with it?”

Remi said, “We know that this codex was at one point in the hands of Bartolomé de Las Casas. This letter proves that he touched it, that he knew it was important and thought it must be saved.”

Selma said, “We know that he was a passionate defender of the native people’s rights and a believer in the value of their cultures and that he studied and spoke their languages.”

David Caine slapped his hand to his forehead. “Of course! You’re saying there’s a chance that Las Casas might have made a copy.”

“We can’t be sure,” said Remi, “but we think it’s worth checking.”

“It’s a long shot,” said Caine. “As far as I know, there’s no mention in any of his writings of his making a copy of a Mayan book. He does mention seeing the priests burning them.”

“That would be a good reason not to mention his copy,” said Selma. “Books weren’t the only things getting burned in those days.”

Remi said, “After Las Casas left the mission at Rabinal, he became bishop of Chiapas, Mexico. From there, he went back to the Spanish court, where he was a very powerful adviser on issues having to do with the Indians in the colonies. And here’s the promising part. When he died in 1566, he left a very large library to the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid.”

David Caine considered. “You know, I think your observation about human nature may be right. Everybody in Europe who saw the importance of the Mayan codices seems to have made a copy. Even I made photographic copies. It was practically the first thing I did. If only I hadn’t given them up to those fake officials.”

Selma quickly diverted the conversation back to Las Casas. “Then we’re agreed. We know Las Casas saw it and was somebody who would have wanted a copy. If he made one, then it was almost certainly kept with his own books and papers rather than, say, submitted to the Spanish court. His books and papers are in Valladolid, Spain. If the copy existed, and if it’s been in a library in Spain all this time instead of the hot, humid Guatemalan jungle, then it will probably have survived.”

David Caine said, “That’s a lot of ifs. But to bolster the argument a bit, we know he would not have left any susceptible or incriminating papers in the New World, where his enemies, the Franciscans or the encomiendas, could find them. He definitely would have taken them with him to Spain.”

Remi said, “A lot of ifs, all right, but each one has a lot of arguments in its favor and not many against.”

“Let’s call it an educated, long-shot guess,” Selma said. “It really should be checked.”

Sam said, “Okay, Selma. Please make arrangements to get Remi and me to Valladolid. Make us a copy of the letter so we can recognize his handwriting if we see it.”

* * *

Sarah Allersby sat in the giant office of the Empresa Guerrero in the old part of Guatemala City. It had once been the business office in the capital of the powerful and wealthy Guerrero family. They had occupied the building from colonial days, until the modern civil war bled many of its businesses and made the younger generation leave for lives of leisure in Europe. The office was near the Palacio Nacional because the big ranching families, of necessity, had been involved in the government.

Through all of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, a man in the Guerrero family would push out his chair from the big mahogany desk in the office, take his hat and cane from the rack near the door, light a cigar, and walk up the street to government headquarters to protect and further the interests of the Guerrero family companies. The building had an impressive but low baroque façade, a set of double doors that were so heavy that Sarah Allersby had to have an electric motor installed to help her push them open, and floors of antique tiles made and decorated by the same craftsmen who had done the Iglesia de La Merced. The ceilings were fifteen feet high, and every few feet a big lazy fan still provided the proper subtropical atmosphere even though the air it circulated was air-conditioned to seventy-two degrees.

Sarah used a 1930s-era desk telephone with a scrambled line that was checked by her security people twice each day to detect a change in ohms of resistance that would indicate a listening device. She said, “Good morning, Russell. This line is safe so you can speak freely.”

The man on the other end had a contract with the Estancia Guerrero, but Sarah’s family had used his services many times in the years before they had acquired the Guatemalan holdings. He was the man who had impersonated an FBI agent in San Diego. “What can I do for you, Miss Allersby?”

“It’s more trouble over the item we picked up in San Diego. Sam and Remi Fargo have been here in Guatemala and even managed to find their way onto the Estancia. They’ve been defaming me and my company to anyone who will listen. They seem to think that the marijuana operation on the Estancia is mine, as though I were some tawdry drug dealer. They wanted the police to search my house and all of my properties, if you can imagine.”

“Is there any chance the police will do that?”

“Of course not,” she said. “But I can’t simply ignore them. They left for the United States yesterday. I know they won’t get anywhere with the authorities here, but I have no way of knowing what they can do there. I need to have them watched for a while.”

“Certainly,” he said. “There are two ways to go about this kind of thing. We can simply hire some local San Diego private detectives. That would mean leaving a record that we had hired them and taking the risk that they might have to reveal who hired them in court sometime. Then there’s—”

“The other way, please,” she said. “What we’ve already done in San Diego could generate terrible legal problems. And I worry about this Sam Fargo. He’s vindictive. He won’t be able to let this go. And if he wanted to, his wife wouldn’t let him. I think she’s developed a jealous fear that I’m a threat to her marriage. She’s got nothing going for her but her looks, and as soon as somebody prettier is around, she knows she’s in trouble.”

“All right,” Russell said. “The Fargos haven’t seen me. I can do this myself with one good man. We can be in San Diego in a couple of hours.”

“Thank you, Russell. I’ll have some money sent to your company to cover the initial expenses.”

“Thank you.”

“Just knowing you’re personally paying attention to the problem will make me sleep better. I’m just one person, and I can’t be expected to pay attention to everybody everywhere who wants to harm me.”

“Would you like to set a limit on how expensive this gets?”

“No. If they leave the United States, send people wherever they go. I want to know where they are. And I never want them suddenly showing up on my doorstep again. But I don’t want to leave a record that I had them followed. I really can’t have them ruining my reputation.”

Russell was already preparing for the trip while he listened. He took a suitcase out of his closet and set it on the bed. “I’ll let you know as soon as there’s anything to report.”

“Thank you, Russell.”

Next, Russell called the number of Jerry Ruiz, the man who had impersonated the Mexican Minister of Culture when they had confiscated the codex. “Hi, Jerry. This is Russ. I’d like you with me on a surveillance job.”

“Where?”

“It’s back in San Diego, but it could go anywhere from there. We’re to keep track of a couple, period. We can split what Sarah gives us, even.”

“It’s for her? Okay, I’m in.”

“I’ll pick you up in a half hour.”

Russell hung up and returned to his suitcase. He packed the sets of clothes he used for surveillance – black jeans and navy blue nylon windbreaker and black sneakers, baseball caps in several colors, some olive drab hiking pants that unzipped into shorts, a couple of sport coats in navy and gray, some khaki pants. He and Ruiz would fly down and rent a car and after a couple of days he would turn it in and get another one. He had found over the years that even a minor change in his appearance had a dramatic effect. Just putting on a hat and a different jacket made him a new person. Alternating drivers, getting out of the car and sitting at a restaurant table, made him invisible.

He completed his packing by throwing in some equipment: a shooter’s 60-power spotting scope, with a small tripod, and his personal weapons and some ammunition. He knew that Ruiz would come prepared. Ruiz habitually carried a pistol, even in Los Angeles, and had a boot knife, because that was the way he had come up. He had been a collector for a street gang as a teenager and then he became a cop for a while. It was a strange twist that as he’d come into middle age, he had begun to look like a Mexican politician or a judge. His appearance made him a good man for the job. He wasn’t automatically a suspect. He was also fluent in Spanish and that helped many times.

When Russell took this kind of job, he liked to have more time to prepare, but he would manage. He threw in his passport, five thousand dollars in cash, and a laptop computer. He closed his suitcase and went out to his car. He locked the house, then stopped for a second to be sure he’d forgotten nothing essential. Then he got into the car and drove toward Ruiz’s house, thinking about the job.

Sarah Allersby was on the verge of taking a big step toward learning who she was. That was the way he thought about it. He had worked for many bosses over the years and he had seen the way they learned. They started out with the proposition that they were better than other people and therefore had a responsibility to lead them. In exchange for that brave work, they gained most of the available wealth. Once they had the wealth, it was theirs, and they had a right to protect it and the privileges it bought. If that was true, then they also had a right to get more in the same way – or, really, in any way, including taking it. They got involved in businesses that killed people indirectly, where they didn’t have to see it. Diego San Martin, the drug lord who paid Sarah for the security of being able to raise marijuana on the land of a rich, respectable woman, had killed people. He was probably killing people all the time. Little by little, she was getting used to the idea that it didn’t matter. Russell had met Sarah’s father after Mr. Allersby had already reached that point. Russell’s first job for the older Allersby was to kill a man – a business rival who was preparing to file a patent infringement suit.

Russell knew, although Sarah hadn’t taken the step yet, that she was very nearly ready to buy the deaths of these Fargo people. That could happen at any time. It occurred to him that he had better stop at the office and pick up a couple of additional items. He drove to the back of the building and went up the exterior stairway, unlocked the door and turned on the light.

He went to a locked filing cabinet and opened it. He took a pair of razor-sharp ceramic knives, which wouldn’t set off metal detectors, and a diabetic’s travel kit, with needles and insulin bottles, in a leather case. The insulin in the bottles had been replaced with Anectine, a drug that surgeons used to stop the heart. They would restart it with Adrenaline, but, of course, restarting hearts wasn’t the business Russell was in so he had none of that. He opened the leather case and looked at the prescription date. It was the new one, only a month old. He took the kit with him and put it in his suitcase.

As Russell drove on toward Ruiz’s house, he felt better. When Sarah got around to recognizing what she really wanted done, Russell and Ruiz would be able to take care of it without uncertainty or delay. Upper-class customers like her hated uncertainty, and they hated waiting. They wanted to be able to signify their will and have it carried out right away, like gods.