“Come on, let’s go,” said Remi. “I don’t want to be standing here when Sarah Allersby comes out, gloating over her great victory.”

Remi and Sam walked along the street in the direction of their hotel. “So, what do you want to do?” she asked.

Sam shrugged. “I don’t think we can let her go on doing this kind of thing, do you?”

“No, but what can we do about it?”

“We use the Las Casas copy of the Mayan codex to figure out where she’s going and beat her to it.” He smiled. “Then we do it again. And again. And again.”

Chapter 24

ALTA VERAPAZ, GUATEMALA

Sam and Remi sat in the passenger seats of the Bell 206B3 Jet Ranger helicopter with their earphones on to cut the noise while Tim Carmichael, president and chief pilot of Cormorant 1 Air Charter, guided the craft above the endless miles of green treetops. Carmichael spoke over the radio in his Australian accent. “We should be at your next set of coordinates in a few minutes.”

“Great,” said Sam. “We spend one day at each site. At the end of each day, we climb aboard the helicopter and get out of the jungle for the night. The following morning, we fly to a new site.”

“It’s the perfect job for a charter,” said Carmichael. “Fly in, take a nap, fly out.”

“The sites have all been pretty remote,” said Remi. “And all of them are in heavily forested parts of the highlands.”

Carmichael smiled. “No worries. We’ve been in this business since the 1960s and we haven’t lost anyone this week.”

“Good enough for me,” said Sam. “Here’s the aerial shot.” He handed Carmichael an enlarged photograph with the coordinates marked on it in the white border.

Carmichael stared at it, checked the coordinates on his GPS, and handed the photograph back. “We should be there in under five minutes.”

They looked out at the treetops. There were ranges of low bluish mountains in the distance, a deep blue sky, and puffs of unthreatening white clouds. Earlier, they had seen a few roads and small towns, but it had been a long time since they had seen any signs of human inhabitants. Carmichael looked at the GPS.

“There.” Remi pointed at a place in the jungle canopy where gray stone protruded between trees. “It’s right over there.”

Carmichael brought the Jet Ranger around, tipped at an angle so they could look at the site as he circled it. “I definitely see something the color of limestone,” he said. “It comes right up through the trees.”

“That’s it,” said Sam. “Let’s find a place to land.”

Carmichael widened the circles, spiraling outward from the ruins. After a few minutes, he said, “I don’t see anything that looks like clear ground.”

“No,” Remi said. “It’s all thickly forested.”