The Mayan Secrets - Cussler Clive - Страница 41

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“Are you sure they got on the flight at Madrid?”

“Quite sure,” he said. “Otherwise, by now there would be a refund or an additional charge for a change in reservations.”

“All right. Call me with an update tomorrow.” She hung up, then dialed another number.

“Hello?” It was Russell’s voice again. He sounded as though he had been asleep.

“Hello, Russell. It’s me. After the Fargos painted you blue, they took a plane to New York. They’re booked on a second flight to San Diego in the late afternoon. So don’t waste your time searching the tapas bars, looking for revenge. Go home and take care of this problem.”

It was early morning, and Remi and Sam sat at an outdoor table overlooking the Pacific at the Valencia Hotel, only a few hundred yards from their house, where they often ate breakfast with Zoltan, their German shepherd. They’d already finished a morning run along the beach and now they were having cups of espresso and a breakfast of smoked salmon on bagels with capers and onions. Zoltan had eaten his breakfast at home before they’d gone out and was content at this hour with a bowl of water and a few of the biscuits that Remi carried in her pocket for treats. When Sam and Remi had finished, they paid their bill and started walking across the vast green lawn and on toward their house.

Zoltan, always alert, stopped and stared in the direction of the beach, then moved forward again to lead the way home. Remi said, “What is it, Zoltan? Did you see somebody that Sam painted blue? The one I wish you’d paint blue is Sarah Allersby,” she added. She looked at her watch, then at the stretch of lawn ahead. “We’d better move a little faster. David Caine will be there in a few minutes.”

“Selma will let him in,” he said. “Before he gets here, we should talk about what we’re willing to do on this project and what we’re not willing to do.”

“Have we given adequate consideration to painting Sarah Allersby blue? I, for one, don’t think so,” she said.

“The idea is growing on me. But, seriously, we’re reaching the point where we may decide something is the next logical move but not want to do it. If a person takes enough risks, the time could come when he loses.”

“Who are you and what have you done with my husband?”

Sam smiled. “I know I’m usually the one who wants to do something rash. But I can’t forget what it felt like that day when our only way out was to dive into an underground river.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” she said. “By the way, that was pretty romantic when you tried to give me your air tank. I don’t know if I’ve ever given you adequate credit for that. Who knew that the way to a girl’s heart is through her lungs?”

“Let’s talk things over with David, hear what he thinks but make a decision about what we do only after we’ve taken some time to think it through.”

“Okay.” She looked up at Sam as they walked, then suddenly stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

“What was that for?”

“You know.”

They let Zoltan lead them home and arrived just as David Caine’s car pulled up in front of their house. He got out carrying a big, string-tied accordion envelope under his arm. He shook Sam’s hand, hugged Remi, and patted Zoltan.

When they were inside, he said, “What you’ve done — deducing that a copy might have existed and then going to find it — was brilliant. And I’ve always been an admirer of Bartolome de Las Casas, but even he has risen in my estimation. The copy he made seems to me to be nearly perfect. Tracing and copying a hundred thirty-six pages of pictures and symbols that he couldn’t have understood must have taken months. But as far as I can tell, he missed nothing.”

They went to a long table in the first-floor office area, and Caine laid out a series of digital images from Sam and Remi’s library transmission. He had enlarged the images so it was possible to see each pen stroke and every mark on the vellum, including pores on the outer side of the hide.

Sam and Remi recognized the four-page map of the Mayan sites, with its text of Mayan glyphs and its stylized pictures.

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.”

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