It was morning when Sarah Allersby’s plane descended over London and then reached Biggin Hill Airport southeast of the city.

The plane landed smoothly on the suburban airport’s main runway and taxied to the flight line, where its only passenger would disembark. The plane stopped, and the ground crew chocked its wheels and attached the grounding wire to the electrical ground. Then the steps were lowered.

Sarah could breathe in the cool, damp British air that came in through the open hatch. She stood up just as the British Customs men arrived. They collected the customs declaration that Morgan the steward had filled out and initialed for her. She had brought, as always, fifty Cuban cigars for her father that had been miraculously marked down to less than three hundred pounds. The fully stocked bar in the plane was said to be less than two liters.

The head customs man said, “Is that your suitcase, miss?”

“Yes it is,” said Sarah Allersby.

“May I look inside?”

She hesitated, her eyes suddenly unblinking and her lips parted. Usually the customs people didn’t bother looking so closely. She was a person of importance from an ancient family. She wasn’t going to be bringing in explosives or a bag of cocaine. She wasted a tenth of a second wanting to say, “You never asked before.” And she sensed that her instant of hesitation might be enough to doom her.

The head customs man opened her suitcase on the built-in table. He flipped the jewel box open, apparently just confirming that she’d be carrying more jewels than a Spanish treasure ship. He saw the banded stacks of money and set them aside. Of course she’d have money. No matter. But what’s this?

The customs man popped the plastic cover and examined the folded strip of ancient fig bark, caught sight of the paintings inside, and closed it. “Miss Allersby, this appears to be a genuine Mayan artifact. A codex.”

She looked at the man closely and saw that he was an educated man. She was not going to talk him out of his appraisal of the codex by saying it was a copy or a decoration or something. He was right and he knew it.

Three hours later, a gang of her father’s solicitors and barristers, men famous for keeping every kind of inconvenient question unanswered, had rescued her. She was not going to be allowed to leave the country. Her passport was being held for ransom. But most irritating of all was the fact that the codex, her precious Mayan codex, had been confiscated as evidence that she had broken the international law against transporting historical treasures.