When they were inside, he said, “What you’ve done—deducing that a copy might have existed and then going to find it—was brilliant. And I’ve always been an admirer of Bartolomé de Las Casas, but even he has risen in my estimation. The copy he made seems to me to be nearly perfect. Tracing and copying a hundred thirty-six pages of pictures and symbols that he couldn’t have understood must have taken months. But as far as I can tell, he missed nothing.”

They went to a long table in the first-floor office area, and Caine laid out a series of digital images from Sam and Remi’s library transmission. He had enlarged the images so it was possible to see each pen stroke and every mark on the vellum, including pores on the outer side of the hide.

Sam and Remi recognized the four-page map of the Mayan sites, with its text of Mayan glyphs and its stylized pictures.

Remi pointed at the first spot they had explored. “There’s our swimming pool, the cenote, where we had the shootout.”

Next, Caine laid out a series of enlarged satellite photographs of the same territory, placing each one under its Mayan representation. “Here’s the way these places look from above.”

Then he set out one more. “And here’s what I’m excited about—excited and worried.”

“What is it?” asked Remi.

“You remember I said at the beginning that it looked like there were a few major sets of buildings on these maps?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, I used aerial photographs and satellite images to see if there was anything in those locations to correspond to the drawings. Here are some of the results.”

“There are certainly buildings,” said Sam. He pointed at the photograph. “These hills, here and here, are too tall and steep to be anything but large pyramids.”

Caine laid out three more pairs of photographs. “Here are codex entries for four large complexes that modern scholars don’t know exist.”

“How big is the city?” Sam asked.

“It’s impossible to tell from photographs,” said Caine. “There are possible stone ruins within a mile or two in each direction. Does that mean we’ve discovered a city that was three to five miles across? Probably not. But, then, what have we discovered? There’s only one way to find out.”

Remi looked at the aerial photographs and satellite images. “These things are so deeply hidden by the trees and vines and bushes. You can hardly see them even when you’re standing on them.”

“That’s why so many sites are still undisturbed,” Caine said. “Buildings look like hills covered with vegetation. But the codex tells us which hills aren’t hills. You two have made a huge contribution.”

“I’m just glad it wasn’t wasted effort,” said Sam.