In movies, these drug lords always have the local police forces pretty much under their thumb. These are the kind of guys who can kill a man and frame some local guy, probably someone who’d gotten on the wrong side of them once too often. But then again, Carlos Montoyo wrote to Dad, Web searches and e-mails are routinely monitored by organizations whose interest in the I* Code* might surprise you. He didn’t even dare write out the phrase “Ix Codex,” for fear it would be picked up by snooping programs on the Internet. Dad couldn’t have been too surprised to hear that drug lords were interested in a Mayan relic. It was part of his ordinary life—he’d often told me that he’d been offered bribes to pass Mayan artifacts on to these people. Also—how the heck are cocaine barons going to have the kind of technology to snoop on e-mails? That kind of thing has to be done by the government, and the military, right?
