Remi looked down over the rim of the cenote. “Throw me the rope when it’s ready,” she said. “I’ve got a tree up here.”

“Take this first,” he said. He removed the waterproof pack from his dive belt, held it in both hands, and performed something like a basketball jump shot to sail it up through the opening to the surface. He tied his neoprene rope to his belt with its one remaining weight, then called, “Ready?”

“Ready,” she said.

He swung the rope back and forth a couple of times, then swung it up toward Remi.

“Got it.” Then she disappeared again, pulling the rope with her. After thirty seconds, she came back to the edge. He could see she had her dive knife in her hand. “We need some more. This will take a minute.”

Several minutes later, Sam could see Remi’s face, looking down at him again. “It’s tied on. Time to do it.”

Sam climbed the rubber rope upward. Initially, it stretched as it took his weight, so the first two or three feet of climbing got him nowhere, but then the stretched rubber remained taut. He climbed it to the cenote, then used it as a handhold to drag himself up onto the ground. He rolled on his back, looked up at the sky, and then at Remi. His eyes widened. “Nice to see you used your wet suit too.”

“Stop staring, naked boy,” she said. “At least blink once in a while.” She opened the waterproof bag and tossed a pair of khaki shorts and a T-shirt on his chest, took out her own clothes, stepped into her shorts and pulled her T-shirt over her head. “Put on some clothes so we can start hunting for civilization.”

He sat up and looked around him. “I think we’re in it.”

She turned, stepped in a little circle, and noticed for the first time the rows and rows of tall, bright green leafy plants that surrounded them and extended in all directions, as far as she could see, under the starlit night.

Sam said, “I think we’re in the middle of the biggest marijuana field in the world.”

Chapter 13

SAN DIEGO

Professor David Caine sat in an archive room in the university library, trying to decipher the Mayan glyphs on the third page of the codex. He had seen nearly all of the glyphs in the first two columns before. They were among the eight hundred sixty-one that had appeared in other codices or as carved inscriptions at Mayan archaeological sites and translated in the context of those inscriptions. He had found two glyphs on the first page that he believed had not been found before. In old languages and writing systems, there were always a few words susceptible to competing interpretations. Even in the surviving texts of Old English, there were a few words appearing only once, and scholars had been arguing about them for centuries.