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“It doesn’t belong to us, for starters. It belongs to Mexico.”
“Surely you aren’t serious. You’ve already smuggled it all the way here. It’s in your house, in your possession. Why would you go to that trouble, risk arrest and imprisonment, if you don’t want it?”
Sam said, “It was an emergency. We did what we could to preserve the find. What we could do was to remove what was movable away from the site before it got carried off by thieves or the earthquakes and the volcano destroyed it. We also enlisted the local people to protect the shrine. Once we’ve given the experts a chance to study and preserve the codex, it has to go back to Mexico.”
Sarah Allersby leaned toward him as though she were about to spit. “Seven million?”
“May I?” asked Fyffe, the British attorney. “Virtually nobody knows that you have the codex. All you have to do is sign a sale agreement and a nondisclosure agreement and the money will be wired to a bank, or collection of banks, of your choice in the next few hours.”
“We’re not selling anything,” said Remi.
“Careful,” said Sarah. “When I walk out that door, it will mean that we couldn’t agree. Since you’ve demonstrated that you weren’t above smuggling it out of Mexico, I have to assume that the true obstacle was that you want a higher price.”
The Mexican lawyer Escobedo said, “I assure you, this is the best way to proceed. At some point, the Mexican government will take an interest. We can deal with them far better than you can. You’ve been in the Mexican newspapers. If you have the codex, you must have stolen it from the shrine on Tacaná. If Miss Allersby has it, she can say it came from anywhere—one of her plantations in Guatemala, perhaps. And Tacaná is on the Guatemalan border. A few yards this way or that and transporting the codex becomes perfectly legal.”
Salazar took his turn. “If you’re worried that the codex will be locked away where it won’t be studied by scientists, don’t be. The codex will be in a museum and scientists will be able to apply for access to it just as they do all over the world. Miss Allersby simply wants to be the legal owner and is willing to protect you from any litigation or government inquiry.”
“I’m very sorry,” Sam said, “but we can’t sell what we don’t own. The codex has to go to the Mexican government. I believe there’s information in it that might be used by grave robbers, pot hunters, and thieves to locate and destroy important sites before archaeologists could ever hope to reach them. We’re not rejecting your offer, we’re rejecting all offers.”
Sarah Allersby stood and looked at her watch. “We’ve got to be going, I’m afraid.” She sighed. “I made you such a large offer because I didn’t want to wait years to buy it from some Mexican institution at auction. But if waiting is necessary, I can do that. At some point, rationality sets in, and bureaucrats realize that a whole new library is better than one old book. Thank you for the tea.”
She turned and in a moment she was out the door. Her lawyers had to hurry to get out and down the sidewalk in time to open the car door for her.
Remi said, “I have a feeling about her.”
“So do I.”
Zoltán stared out the window at the limousine and growled.
Sam and Remi walked back to the climate-controlled room, put on surgical gloves again, took the pot and the codex and carried them out. They went through the secret door in the bookcase, down the stairs to the lower level of the new firing range. Sam opened the gun cabinet, put the codex on a shelf with the pot, closed the safe, and spun the dial of the lock.
They went back upstairs, and Remi said to Selma, “Are all the new security systems up and running yet?”
“Yes.”
“Good. But don’t sleep here tonight. Arm all the systems and go to your apartment. We’re going to have a break-in tonight.”
It was only quarter to eleven, so Sam and Remi drove to the campus of the University of California, San Diego. They found a parking structure not far from the Anthropology Department, then walked there.
As they approached David Caine’s office, they saw the door open and a male student leave his office, looking down at a paper and frowning. Caine said to the student, “Just get the bibliography and notes in shape before you hand it in.” Then he saw the Fargos. “Sam! Remi! What’s up?” He beckoned them into his office and shut the door, then moved piles of books off chairs for them. “I thought we were going to meet at your house.”
Sam said, “We had a visit about an hour ago from a woman named Sarah Allersby.”
“You didn’t.”
“You know her?” a
sked Remi.
“Only by reputation.”
Sam said, “She’s apparently been fed information by at least one of the colleagues you spoke with. She offered us seven million dollars for the codex. She knew what was in it.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “I only spoke with people I thought I could trust. I never took into account the sort of temptation a person like that can offer.”
“What do you know about her?” asked Remi.
“More than I want to. She’s one of a whole class of people who have been filling gigantic houses in Europe and North America with pilfered artifacts for over a hundred years. They used to travel to undeveloped countries in the nineteenth century and take what they wanted. In the twentieth century, they paid galleries huge prices for objects that grave robbers dug up. By buying some, they created a market for more. They couldn’t be bothered to wonder what some object really was, where it came from, or how it was obtained. As things stand today, if I were in a hurry to find the most sacred objects in existence, I wouldn’t dig for them and I wouldn’t search in museums. I’d look in the homes of people in Europe and America whose families have been wealthy for the last hundred or so years.”