In one of the photographs, a dark sliver was visible amid the thick jungle canopy. As Mae zoomed in, he realized that one of the enormous one-hundred-fifty-foot trees had fallen and taken down several other trees with it, leaving a break in the canopy. Mae continued to move in closer, curious if he could see any wildlife in this rare window into the jungle floor. He spotted a few monkeys, but that wasn’t what made him bite down on the cheap pen in his mouth so violently that ink spilled onto his lips.

Mae zoomed in until the entire frame of the computer screen was filled by the object. Half buried in the dirt was a golden statue.

A jaguar.

This was the photo Roth received.

Roth hadn’t let himself rush to judgment. Of course, Paititi and all that golden treasure of the Incas was the first thing that came to mind, but one lone statue in the jungle could easily prove incidental. For one thing, the statue was in northeastern Bolivia, several hundred miles from the area where Paititi was thought to be located. And, moreover, who knew if the statue was even Incan? There were hundreds of different Indian tribes who had lived in the jungles of the Amazon over the past few centuries.

But it was Incan, at least according to Professor Heliant, who had been studying and teaching ancient Inca history for almost thirty-seven years.

“So,” Roth said to Andy over the phone, “I put together a team to do a lidar survey over the surrounding area.”

Lidar—light detection and ranging—is a relatively new technology with a vast array of commercial applications; from acting as the eyes for autonomous vehicles to guiding surface-to-air missiles to mapping the surface of Mars. Basically, lidar measures the distance to a target by illuminating it with pulsed laser light and measuring the reflected pulses with a sensor. Differences in laser return times can then be used to create a three-dimensional representation of the target, exposing formations invisible to the naked eye.

This tool was proving revolutionary for climate monitoring, city planning, meteorology, mining, and, of course, archaeology. Just a few years back, lidar had helped unearth one of the greatest archaeological finds in Egypt.

Earlier that May, Roth, his production assistant, and a lidar technician had flown into La Paz. They hired a pilot, and over the course of four days, they flew surveys over a fifty-square-mile area around the site where the statue was located.

“Did anything come up on the scans?” Andy had asked hesitantly, though he knew that if nothing had shown up, he wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Hell yeah, it did!” Roth had exclaimed.