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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.”
