BooksBarbecue
Back Jungle Up Save as PDF
Chapters (63)
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. Author’s Note

“According to Andy—he’s the expedition anthropologist—it sounds like they have a pretty good lead on something.”

“Best lead I’ve heard of,” Vern said. “Might not be Paititi, but there’s something there, that’s for sure. That’s actually how I met Roth. I flew the lidar survey, and let me tell you, four days in an airplane with that asshole is four too many.”

“Did he ask you to go to the Maldives with him?”

Vern started laughing so hard I thought he might choke. After his fit, he looked up and said, “You know what? That son of a bitch did ask me to go to the Maldives with him!”

This got me good and I buckled over. When I recovered from my laughter, I asked, “How many miles did you survey?”

“Fifty square miles. But it takes forever because the lidar machine doesn’t have a very wide scanning field. So you have to fly a grid back and forth, back and forth, like you’re mowing a lawn.”

“You’ve seen the photographs?”

“Actually, they’re not photographs, they’re three-dimensional scans. But yeah, I’ve seen them. Looks like there are all kinds of man-made formations down there. Pyramids, enclosures, plazas. Could be millions of dollars’ worth of artifacts.”

“Yeah, but doesn’t all that stuff belong to the Bolivian government? Or will all those artifacts get looted and sold?”

He let out a loud laugh and said, “The Bolivian government is the biggest looter of them all.”

I glanced out of the plane. We were now flying over dense, dark jungle. It was easy to believe there could be a lost city hidden in there somewhere. Heck, Miami could be cloaked beneath the sea of green, and you wouldn’t have any idea.

But honestly, I didn’t care about any lost cities or who looted what. All I cared about was finding Gina.

“So, level with me here,” I said. “Have you ever dealt with someone being kidnapped in the jungle?”

He nodded. “Just once.”

“And did you recover them?”

“Yeah, we did,” he said. “In twenty different pieces.”

10

10

la paz, bolivia
august 13, 7:16 p.m.

There was a giant snake projected on the screen at the front of the room. It was several shades of brown and easily camouflaged among the dried leaves in the photo.

“The fer-de-lance,” Mark Holland said in an English accent.