Sam and Remi moved up the trail again to the clearing. As they crouched in the brush, looking at what must have been the great plaza of the ancient Mayan city, they heard the distant chop of another helicopter. This one came from the south like the other, but its engine sounded different. The helicopter came straight in over the jungle, hovered above the center of the plaza, and then came down not far from the first helicopter.
The four-man camera crew that had been loitering under the sun awning snatched up their equipment and trotted to the helicopter, where the rotors were just slowing down, and began to film. Among them were a soundman, carrying a microphone on a long pole, a cinematographer with a video camera on his shoulder, a lighting man with battery-operated lights and a white umbrella on a tripod, and a fourth man with a large pack who paid out a length of insulated cord that led to a box under the awning.
The helicopter’s engine stopped, and a door on the side opened. The first one out was Sarah Allersby’s security guard, who looked like a cage fighter. He was broad and muscular, wore olive drab pants and a khaki shirt, and carried a small weapon on a sling that looked like a machine pistol. He stood by with the open door at his back while the main occupant of the helicopter stepped down.
Sarah Allersby’s golden blond hair was tied straight back in a ponytail that shone on the back of her handmade, light blue cotton work shirt. She wore a pair of slacks of tropical khaki, but they were tailor-fitted. She wore tie boots designed like combat boots but made of a soft brown, polished leather. Her costume looked perfect for an adventure but would not have stood up to a strenuous hour in this jungle.
As Sarah Allersby stepped away from the helicopter, the cameraman and his assistant sidestepped along beside her, recording her arrival as if she were General MacArthur stepping off the landing craft onto the beach at Leyte. As she walked, men in jungle gear, who had been waiting for her, approached and spoke to her with exaggerated respect, bowing, and then joined her entourage as she advanced, pointing out parts of the pyramid that towered above them.
The group walked all the way to the bottom of the great stairway and climbed a few steps upward. The cameraman said something, and Sarah Allersby stopped. She conferred with the man. Then they all walked back to the helicopter.
Once again, the crew filmed Sarah Allersby, swinging her legs and hopping out of the helicopter, then chatting knowledgeably with the overseers of her excavation crew, as she walked with heroic determination to the foot of the pyramid. The cameraman stopped the action, talked to Sarah Allersby, played back some of the tape for her, and pointed out various aspects of it. They all returned to the helicopter, and the drama was repeated once more.
After the first scene, in which she took symbolic ownership of the pyramid, had been perfected, there were a few other scenes. Sarah Allersby sat at a table under the awning. She and her supposed colleagues had a large paper, unfolded and spread on the table, with stones from the nearby temple holding down the corners. She pointed at various spots on the map, or diagram, as though she were explaining her plan of attack to a group of lieutenants.
Sam and Remi could not hear what was being said, and they assumed it was beyond their Spanish comprehension, but they watched, fascinated, as Sarah Allersby documented her discovery of the ancient Mayan city.
The filming took a couple of hours. Between takes, a woman Sam and Remi had assumed to be an archaeologist when she’d followed Sarah Allersby from her helicopter, would open a large black chest and redo Sarah Allersby’s makeup and hair. At one point, the two of them entered a tent and returned a half hour later. Sarah had changed into a different outfit, a pair of designer jeans and a silk blouse. The cameraman filmed her pretending to excavate a shallow hole that had been dug before she arrived and divided into squares with strings on stakes. There were close-ups of her using a brush to clean dirt off a set of obsidian tools that had been planted in the hole for her to find.
During this process, Sam and Remi took their own brief movies of the action. But as Sam was aiming Remi’s telephone in the direction of the false dig, he saw in the viewfinder the head of one of the guards across the plaza suddenly turn toward him. The guard pointed and shouted something to his companions. Sam covered the phone. “I’m afraid that guy caught a reflection off the phone,” he whispered.
Sam took Remi’s arm and began to back away into the jungle. They could easily outrun the men, who were hundreds of yards away, but others on the pyramid repeated the alarm, and men who were only a few yards from Sam and Remi heard and dashed toward them.
“Ditch your gun,” said Sam, and they both dropped their guns in the brush and covered them with a thick layer of leaves.
“Now what?” asked Remi.
“Now we can arrive for a peaceful surprise visit with our pal Sarah instead of a shootout with thirty guards.”
Sam and Remi walked out of the jungle and onto the ground that was once the great plaza. They walked toward the pyramid with open, smiling faces, pointing up at various features and commenting to each other. Remi said, “So what do we say to them?”
“Whatever comes to mind. We’re taking up time until the cavalry arrives.” He pointed up the long staircase, and said, “That temple really is incredible, though, isn’t it?”
“Maybe we can arrange to be sacrificed instead of shot and improve next year’s harvest.”
Just as they were approaching the shallow dig, Sarah Allersby glanced up at the commotion and saw them. She threw down her brush, bobbed to her feet, and stood with her hands on her hips, her face contorted with rage. She stepped up out of the dig just as the armed men arrived to surround Sam and Remi.
The Fargos simply stopped and waited for Sarah Allersby to push through the ring of men from the other side.
“You two!” she said. “What does it take to make you leave me alone?”
Sam shrugged. “You could give back the codex or we could surrender it to the Mexican government with your good wishes. That would probably do.” He turned to Remi. “How about you? Would you be satisfied if she gave the codex back?”
“I think I would,” Remi said. “Of course I don’t agree that we’ve been bothering you, Miss Allersby. How could we possibly know in advance that you would be here today?”
The armed men who were standing by were exchanging dark looks. It wasn’t possible to be sure which ones understood English, but they seemed to see that whatever Remi had said had enraged their employer.
Sam said, “Since we’re all here, would you like to show us around the site? We’d be interested in seeing what your men have uncovered so far. Since you’re busy filming, maybe we could just walk along behind the crew.”
Sarah Allersby was so angry that her jaw muscles seemed to be flexing over and over. She stared down at the ground for a second, raised her head, and shouted, “Russell!”
From somewhere behind her, among the film people, came a voice. “Yes, Miss Allersby?”
The man who appeared had a bright red face. From the roots of his hair to the neck of his shirt, his outer layer of skin had been removed. It seemed so tender and inflamed that it hurt to look at it. Over the red skin was a thick, shiny layer of Vaseline. He wore a hat with a wide brim to keep any hint of direct sunlight off his face.
Sarah Allersby said, “These visitors want to be taken on a tour. Can you please take them on a tour?”
“I’ll be happy to, Miss Allersby.”
The man turned and gave Sam a hard push on the back to send him stumbling toward the jungle across the plaza. As a second man took a step toward Remi, she turned and caught up with Sam. The second man called out something in Spanish, and about ten of the armed men came along too.
The man with the red face wore a .45 pistol in a holster and he kept his right hand beside it as he walked, occasionally brushing the handgrip with his thumb as though to reassure himself that it was always in reach.
&nb
sp; One of the armed escorts spoke in Spanish to the red-faced man’s companion. The man called to his friend, “Hey, Russ? He said they’re bored. If you don’t want to do it, they will.”
“Thanks, Ruiz. Tell them they can go back now. I’d like to finish this ourselves.”
“What for?”
“There are some things I like to do myself. If you don’t feel up to this, why don’t you go back with them?”
“No, I’ll stick with you.” Ruiz turned and dismissed the others in Spanish. One of the men handed him an entrenching tool, a short handle with a shovel blade. He took it, and said, “Gracias.” The group went back toward the pyramid while Sam, Remi, and their two captors continued walking.
“Maybe you should have let those guys do it,” said Sam. “It’s a lot easier to rat out two men than ten.”
“What are you talking about?” said Russell.
“You just got Sarah’s permission to kill us,” said Remi. “Once you do, then anybody who knows about it owns you. That includes all of those men who just left.”
“No,” said Russell. “They own you if they see you do it.”
“Oh come now,” said Sam. “You march us off, they hear gunshots, and only you come back. Not exactly the perfect crime.”
“Keep walking,” said Ruiz.
Remi said, “We’re a bit too well prepared to be the sort of people you can just kill and nobody asks questions. The United States Embassy knows the exact GPS position where we were going to be today.”
“Don’t worry about us,” said Russell. “We’ll manage.”
“By the way, what happened to your face?”
“You did.”
“Really?” said Sam. “How did I do that?”
“Your little booby trap in Spain. The blue ink didn’t come off, so I had a chemical peel.”
“Does it hurt?” asked Remi.
“Of course it hurts. But it’s feeling better every second. Pain is easier to take when other people feel it with you.”
He led them into the jungle, and they walked on a path that took them through thick stands of trees and across a couple of ditches that must have been streams during the rainy season. When they were a mile or more from the archaeological site, they reached a secluded valley with a dry streambed at the center of it. Russell said to Ruiz, “Give him the shovel.”
Ruiz kept his distance and tossed the small olive drab tool at Sam’s feet.
“Dig,” said Russell.
Sam looked at Russell and Ruiz, never at Remi. He was beginning the process of getting them to forget about her. Sam and Remi had, for some years, known that when they were in dangerous places, they were always possible targets of kidnapping, robbery, or other violence. They had discussed and practiced a number of different tactics to use in tight situations and many of them involved getting opponents to underestimate Remi.
She was a slim, delicately beautiful woman. She was also very smart. Now Remi was waiting for the proper moment to do what she had always done in athletic competitions: match her superior reflexes, speed, balance, flexibility, and coordination against an opponent who didn’t dream that her advantages even existed and who was—only for the moment—living under the mistaken impression that all the advantages were his.
Sam dug. He was right-handed, and he pushed the shovel’s blade in with his right boot, lifted the dirt and tossed it to his left, the side where their captors stood. He didn’t look directly at them or at Remi, but he could see that she had already picked out the right kind of stone. It was at her feet, and she had worked it free as she’d sat there, looking weak and weepy.
As he dug, Sam thought he heard the faint sound of a helicopter. No, he thought. It’s more than one this time. The sound was deeper and throatier, and, as they approached, he became sure they weren’t Sarah Allersby’s helicopters.
Ruiz looked up in the air, but the tall trees formed a roof above them. Ruiz observed, “That noise could help cover a gunshot.”
As Sam and Remi both instantly knew he would, Russell reflexively turned to look in their direction while he considered Ruiz’s suggestion.
Sam moved his shovel in exactly the same arc as he had fifty times before, except faster and higher, and propelled a few pounds of fine, sandy dirt toward Russell’s raw, wounded face. Then he charged out of the shallow hole, swinging the shovel toward Ruiz’s legs.
Russell raised both hands and forearms to fend off the dirt flying toward him. That kept his hands up and far from the pistol in its holster at his belt, and it kept his eyes closed as Remi hurled the stone at him and leapt.
The stone hit the side of Russell’s head and knocked him off balance. Remi leapt forward and, as Russell toppled, she was already plucking the pistol out of his holster.
Sam completed his swing, slicing the shovel in hard at Ruiz’s right leg. The fear made Ruiz jump to avoid it, and the impact brought him to the ground. As Ruiz reached for the pistol stuck in the front of his belt, Sam jabbed that hand with the shovel blade, dropped his knees on Ruiz’s chest, snatched the pistol and stepped backward, aiming at Ruiz.
The helicopter rotors beat harder and louder as Sam and Remi stood over their two injured opponents.
“Now that we’ve got them, what do we do with them?” asked Remi.
“Hold this.” Sam handed her his pistol so she now had one pistol aimed at each fallen enemy. Sam knelt, tugged off the two men’s boots, then pulled the long leather laces out and used them to hog-tie the two. He stood. “I guess that’s the best we can do for the moment,” he said. “We’ve got to get back to the site while they search. We’re the only ones who’ve seen the codex.”
Sam walked up the jungle path, carrying the two pairs of boots. Remi looked back once at the two incapacitated men, then hurried after him.
THE RUINED CITY
Sam and Remi approached the forested edge of the open plaza and stopped for a moment to exchange a brief embrace. Remi said, “Remind me never to get a chemical peel.”
“I doubt that you’ll forget, but I think his was worse than most,” Sam said.
“Yes. It’s amazing what some men will do for a little extra beauty.”
Sam chuckled. They returned to the great plaza and saw it was dominated by two big CH-47 Chinook troop carrier helicopters that had set down on both ends of the cleared space. Soldiers in battle dress had taken positions in various parts of the ruin, and there was a squad surrounding the sun awning, where Sarah Allersby and her group stood uneasily while Commander Rueda spoke with her.
Sarah Allersby raised her eyes and looked stricken when she saw Sam and Remi arrive, looking a bit disheveled, sweaty, and dirty.
“Hello, Sarah,” said Remi.
“How dare you come back here?” Sarah Allersby turned toward Commander Rueda. “I just had some men escort these interlopers away from this vulnerable site.”
Sam said, “What she means is that she gave two of her thugs her blessing to murder us in the jungle.”
“That’s absurd! Me? That’s laughable.” As though to prove it, Sarah managed an unconvincing laugh.
Commander Rueda said, “Everyone save this conversation for headquarters.” He turned to the lieutenant in charge of the squad. “You and your men search everything—tents, helicopters, every bag, box, or case.”
“You have no right to do that,” Sarah Allersby protested.
“You’ll have your chance to argue with our methods in court.”
“I’ll remember you said that,” she said coldly.
Sam said, “Commander, we left the two men who were supposed to kill us tied up in the jungle. We shouldn’t really leave them like that.”
“Of course,” said Commander Rueda. He turned to the lieutenant again. “Assign three men to go with the Fargos and take the suspects into custody.”
Remi took a step, but Sam held h
er back. “You’ve earned a rest.” He moved his eyes in the direction of the men searching Sarah Allersby’s campsite.
Remi nodded in agreement, and Sam kissed her cheek. “Nice work back there. See you in a little while.”
Sam walked across the plaza with the three soldiers. As he walked, he noticed that Rueda’s soldiers had lined up the armed guards in a shaded area by the pyramid. Their rifles were stacked in a pile a hundred feet away.
Sam led the men along the path. The distance Ruiz and Russell had taken them came as a bit of a surprise to Sam. On the first trip, he had been trying to make the walk as slowly as possible to give the federal police time to get here. On the way back, he and Remi had been running. This time, the mile of jungle path seemed to take forever. But at last he reached the little valley where Ruiz and Russell had taken them.
Russell and Ruiz were gone. Sam was silent for a moment while the three soldiers looked at him. He pointed at the spot. “This is where we left them tied up. I guess I did a bad job of tying.”
The sergeant said, “Are you sure this is the place?”
Sam pointed. “There’s the grave they had me dig.”
One of the soldiers squatted nearby. “I found something,” he said. “One of them rolled from there to here, where the other one was.” He picked up a strip of leather from the ground and examined it closely. “He chewed through the other one’s leather cord.”
“I should have thought of that and tied them to trees,” Sam said. “Maybe we can pick up their trail.”
The soldier who seemed to be a tracker walked around the perimeter of the clearing, staring at the ground, then touching the foliage. He started into the jungle, then came back, tried another place and came back. “I can’t find any footprints. I don’t know which way to go.”
“They’re barefoot,” said Sam. “We took their boots, so there won’t be any boot prints.”
The sergeant shrugged. “They won’t get far barefoot. They’ll have to go back to the camp or die out here.”
Sam stared at the ground for a few seconds, reluctant to give up. The three soldiers began to move off up the path, and Sam turned to follow. He stopped, walked through the bushes around the clearing but found nothing. Finally, he sighed, then trotted off after the soldiers.