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electronic image of the knife?” she asked. “You might be able to run a digital photo through a computer program and clean up the glare from the flash.”
    “I’ll check into it, but I doubt it. Looks like it was taken right after the raid. ICE uses a lot of digital cameras. The photos on the card were probably printed out with the report and then wiped from the card’s memory to make digital room for the next bust. How much does it matter?”
    “Kawa’il wasn’t a common deity. His worship was confined to small areas of the Quintana Roo and, perhaps, Belize. Many Maya scholars don’t even believe Kawa’il existed.”
    “But you do.”
    “Yes. Some glyphs related to Kawa’il have been found on…” Her voice died.
    “Reyes Balam land.”
    It wasn’t a question.
    “If you already know so much, why mousetrap me into helping you?” she asked sharply.
    “The presence or absence of Kawa’il was central to the scandal that got your father thrown out of academia.”
    “He is still a Harvard professor.”
    “Technically,” Hunter agreed. “He’s on indefinite leave to ‘pursue scholarly interests.’ You have to look real hard to find Dr. Philip Taylor’s name attached to a university of any repute, including in Mexico.”
    Lina didn’t say anything. It was the harsh truth, one that had driven Philip to ever greater lengths of obsession and secrecy. He was determined to regain his reputation no matter what it took.
    “If my father knows of these artifacts,” she said quietly, “I’m useless to you. Philip doesn’t confide in anyone, including me.”
    Hunter nodded. “It was a long chance, but one I had to eliminate.”
    “You believe me?”
    “Until I find a reason to do otherwise.” He smiled thinly. “That’s more slack than the academic community will cut you.”
    Again, a harsh truth.
    “Well, at least you don’t fancy things up,” she said.
    “I’m a simple man.”
    “I don’t believe it. The bunch of fabric,” she said, tapping her finger on the photo of the cloth, “could be rubbish or it could be a god bundle. Again, without tests, I can’t be more precise.”
    “If it’s a god bundle?”
    “It would be highly, highly rare. Pretty much unique, as far as I know. Such bundles are represented in glyphs and verbal legends, but none have survived to modern times.”
    “So it’s worth a lot of money on the market,” he said.
    “Without proper provenance, no reputable dealer or establishment would touch it.”
    As Hunter had arrived at the same conclusion himself, he wasn’t surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised.
    “That covers some of the market,” he said. “What about the rest of it?”
    Lina frowned. “Frankly, I doubt anyone would pay or trade anything significant for it. So unique an object is automatically suspect. Fraud is a fact of life when you’re dealing without provenance. And a god bundle…”
    He watched her face, the change in her eyes, like she was looking at something far more distant than the photos.
    “A god bundle was the most sacred of artifacts,” Lina said. “It was believed to contain talismans created by the god himself. The talismans were said to literally hold the strength of that god given in promise to the village or city-state that worshipped and was guarded by the god. The bundle was carried in a carved box at the forefront of soldiers going into battle. Capturing a god bundle meant the end of a deity and the people who followed it. We have no analogue to it in modern times.”
    “National flags?”
    Her short nails drummed on the desk. “Not really. It’s like comparing a tennis game to World War Two. You must realize the depth of the Maya belief system. That god bundle was the god itself. It was real, like birth or death. A fact.”
    She looked at him, saw that he understood what she was saying, and shifted her focus back to the photo.
    “Losers in a war lost their real god,” Lina said after a moment. “The belief that the