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?” asked 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.”

“Is that the Allersbys?” asked Remi.

“They’re among the worst,” Caine said. “They’ve been at it since the British arrived in India. It wasn’t even frowned upon until about thirty years ago. Even now, if an object left its country of origin before the United Nations treaty signed in the 1970s, you can do anything you want with it—keep it, sell it, or put it in your garden as a birdbath. That loophole exists because rich people like the Allersbys exerted influence on their countries’ governments.”

“Sarah seemed pretty comfortable with the idea that we’d smuggled the codex out of Mexico for sale,” said Remi.