IT WAS ALMOST MIDDAY WHEN PAT, accompanied by George Pyke and his man, boarded Pat’s Gulfstream ready to take off at London’s City Airport. The terminal building was eerily empty at a time of day when it should normally have been packed with excited Londoners heading for Ibiza. The traffic was down 90%, which meant there were no delays, a situation that arranged Pat Kennedy who had seen traffic from what was once an almost private airport explode, transforming it into a bus station for mostly younger travellers heading for a rave in Palma de Mallorca or Ibiza.
A couple of hours later the Gulfstream landed at San Sebastian’s small airport on the banks of the Bidassoa, the river that separated Spain from France. After disembarking they were greeted by a funereal silence, the terminal was even quieter than London and barely five minutes after the passport formalities they exited arrivals where Anna warmly greeted Pat and his friends.
They were just 18 kilometres from San Sebastian’s La Concha area, just enough time for Anna to fill Pat in on the story of the manuscript.
*
Sir Patrick Kennedy, was not only head of INI Hong Kong, an international banking giant, he was also a generous patron of the arts, a collector with a real interest in history and archaeology. Two years earlier he had backed Anna’s excavation of a Spanish galleon that had sunk off the Caribbean coast of Colombia at the beginning of the 18th century, salvaging its extraordinary cargo, now known as the Treasure of the Espiritu Santo, and housed in a museum in Cartagena de Indias built by his bank.
Anna Basurko through her research had located the site of the wreck and Pat Kennedy had provided the scientific and logistical backup along with the Colombian government during the operations.
Towards the end of the underwater excavations and the salvage of the treasure, the divers discovered a cache of rare pre-Columbian artefacts that had been on their way to Spain aboard the Espiritu Santo, artefacts that had their origin in the north, either in the Mayan or Aztec regions of Central America. This brought Pat Kennedy and Anna to Honduras and Belize, accompanied by Scott Fitznorman and the renowned French archaeologist René Veil who identified the objects as Mayan, similar to discoveries already made in what is now Belize.
Pat’s interest in Mesoamerican civilisations had grown following a strange encounter with Ken Hisikawa in Nicaragua a few years earlier. They had become good friends, and Ken, a professor of archaeology at Colombia University in New York, had subsequently invited Pat to join him on several expeditions in Meso and South America.
Ken had taught Pat how numerous like civilisations had evolved over a period of nearly 3,000 years, rising and falling, in the vast region that now lay between Texas and the Yucatan Peninsula and the Guatemalan Lowlands. Amongst them were the Aztecs and their predecessors to the north, and the Maya to the south.
The Aztecs, or Mexica as they called themselves, were a Nahuatl people, whose powerful empire emerged in Central Mexico, and who dominated the peoples around them at the time the Cortes and his conquistadors disembarked on the Caribbean coast at the beginning of the 16th century.
They had originated in the semi-arid region of Northern Mexico, one of the many semi-nomadic tribes that had long inhabited that region. In the 14th century they migrated south and occupied the fertile Valley of Mexico, where they were seen as Chichimecs, or barbarians, by the already advanced peoples established in their cities along the valley.
There the Aztecs built their own city, Tenochtitlan, on the wetlands surrounding Lake Texcoco, and adopted the culture of the pre-existing peoples, which included a writing system developed over the centuries, used by other peoples of Central Mexico.
*
‘Tell me Barry, who is the legal owner of the codex,’ asked Pat Kennedy.
‘A Cayman Island company, Cavendish Holdings.’
Simmo, after being caught out by Anna’s question, had not wasted his time during the night, setting up a cascade of screen companies, firstly in Belize, then Panama and finally the Cayman Islands, covering the trail of the codex in a series of transactions that effectively obscured its origin.
Pat Kennedy needed little convincing, the codex was undoubtedly a sensational discovery. He agreed to advance one million dollars, deposited in the Cayman Island account indicated by Simmo, followed by 50% of the final valuation. The confidential agreement between Cavendish Holdings and a company named by Kennedy included a hold harmless clause that would protect Simmonds from claims that could arise relating to the origin and ownership of codex and the sums paid to him by Kennedy.
Simmonds was a lawyer and protecting the ownership of assets, offshore companies and bank accounts, was his stock-in-trade. With near on 30 years experience in the Caribbean under his belt he knew all the tricks of the business. At the same time Pat Kennedy was no slouch in offshore transactions, his bank was built around such business and he respected an old fox like Simmonds. He had his own lawyer, James Herring, who he could count on to protect his interests in any court of law.
The only thing that puzzled Pat was Simmond's apparent evident need for cash, after all a long career in Belize as a lawyer should have assured him of a comfortable retirement. Little did he known of Simmo’s difficulties in paying for the villa he had bought on the Spanish Island of Ibiza the previous year, before the Covid pandemic struck, and the disaster it presaged for his plans following his disastrous foray into real estate development.