I mentally strapped New Thomas into his rollerblades and pushed him off a twenty-story building. “Sit the fuck down.”

Roth slowly lowered himself back into his seat.

“If you stand up again before you answer every question I ask, I’m going to hit you really, really hard in the face.”

“What? You can’t talk to—”

“And then I’m going to break two fingers. Not one of your fingers, two of your fingers.”

“Who do you think—”

“Then I’m going to go into your tent, find your fancy beard trimmer, and I’m going to shave your entire fucking head.”

I was 60 percent sure I wasn’t going to do any of these things, but Roth didn’t know that. He blinked his eyes twice and said, “Fine, okay. Um, yeah, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Nothing to hide here.”

“Okay, good. Start at the beginning.”

He took a nice long breath, then said, “Jordan Mae at Yewed Global sent me a picture earlier this February. His company had been commissioned by an environmental group to take a series of photos over the Bolivian Amazon. The group wasn’t able to come up with the financing for the pictures, and Jordan, who’d helped me with some photos for a previous documentary, got to scanning the images. In one of the images there was a small window onto the jungle floor, and stuck in the earth was a golden statue of a jaguar. He thought I’d be interested in it, so he sent it my way.”

“Just for free?”

“He said if I ended up making a documentary on it, he wanted an executive producer credit and a couple points on the back end. I agreed.”

“You put this in writing?”

“Of course. But I didn’t think much of it at the time. It was a single statue in the jungle. But then I sent a picture of the statue to a professor of Inca studies at the University of Chicago, and he verified that, without a doubt, the statue was Incan.”

“And that’s when you started thinking about Paititi?”

“Yes. This was the farthest east anyone had ever found an Inca relic.”

“Did the professor have access to the coordinates?”

“No, I just sent him a cropped picture of the statue.”

“Okay, so at that point you were the only one who knew the coordinates?”

“Correct.”

“But then you put together the lidar survey, and you had to bring in other people? Vern for one?”

“Who’s Vern?”

“Papagayo.”

“Oh, he never told me his real name.” He paused. “A friend of a friend gave me Vern’s contact info, and said he could help with the lidar permit to do an archaeological survey.”

“Did you have to give the government the coordinates?”

“Vague coordinates. We gave a fifty-square-mile sector.”

“Who gave out the permit?”

“The Ministry of Culture and Tourism.”