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“The water should be quite pure,” Cameron said. “But you'd better use a water purification tablet anyway.”

While Lobo checked their position on the GPS, two of the SEALs approached the water to fill up their canteens. Susan and Cameron sat side by side and browsed in their backpacks for their purification pills.

6

For Joao the strangers grew more interesting by the minute. Eight were soldiers, judging from their weapons and the manner in which they moved. The couple was not, although they did wear the same camouflage clothing. Their tactics reminded Joao of left-wing guerrillas from the 1980s.

The more he observed them and listened, the more curious he grew. What was their mission? They seemed well trained for jungle warfare, but there was really no war to be fought here. Even during the worst years of the civil war between the leftists and government forces, the fighting never made it past the highlands separating the Petén from the valleys leading to Guatemala City to the south. This was worthless land as far as the world was concerned. Yet, the soldiers' sense of urgency, and the determination with which they plowed forward, could only mean they were after an important target. But what it was, Joao could not guess.

Now the strangers rested by the water's edge, and he wished he could warn them about the dangers lurking below the surface of the river's deceivingly peaceful waters. But for the moment, the Mayan guardian chose to remain hidden from view.

7

Standing sideways to the water's edge, Cameron applied the tip of a lit cigarette to a tick attached right below Susan's left knee. The parasite fell off instantly. While he worked on two more ticks on her left ankle, Susan absently watched another one of Lobo's men lean down by the shore and dip his canteen into the water. In that same instant, she noticed the strange five-toed prints on the brownish sand.

“Look, Cameron,” she said, pointing at the strange tracks.

He leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “Ah … Lieutenant?”

Lobo looked up from his glowing GPS receiver. “What is it?”

“Tell your men to be care—”

Abruptly Cameron bolted to his feet, rushing across the sand just as a long and dark creature surged from beneath the water in an explosion of foam and sand, jaws wide open. The canteen flying in the air, the soldier jerked back, but not far enough to avoid the oncoming beast. Cameron collided with him with the force and speed of a seasoned linebacker, shoving him away from the shore, missing the snapping jaws by inches, rolling in the sand as the beast disappeared below the boiling surface.

There had been no warning, no scream, just a flash attack that left zero time for any of the soldiers to react, to reach for their weapons, to fire at the reptile as its tail thrashed for a second before disappearing beneath the water.

“Oh, my God!” Susan shouted as Lieutenant Lobo and two of his men helped Cameron and the stunned SEAL to their feet. Many pairs of ruby eyes, like hot coals, broke the surface.

“Caimans,” Cameron said with amazing calmness. “The river's full of them.”

One of the SEALs pointed at the torsos and tails of several reptiles a dozen feet from shore.

Susan approached Cameron. “Are you—” she began to ask.

“I'm all right,” the archaeologist replied, brushing off the gray sand from his gear vest.

She put a hand to her mouth.

Visibly shaken, Lieutenant Lobo walked over to Cameron. “Thank you, sir.”

He shrugged. “Got lucky.”

“Luck my ass,” the SEAL commander replied, his eyes no longer conveying indifference, but respect.

8

Guatemala City, Guatemala

“El equipo es muy, muy importante. Lo nesesitamos para nuestro trabajo en el Petén. ¿Entiendes?”
explained Ishiguro Nakamura to the two customs officials as he stood next to Jackie in a poorly illuminated hangar at the crowded airport, where a Learjet owned by Sagata Enterprises had dropped them off at dusk. Kuoshi Honichi stood to the side looking impatient because he could not follow the conversation. Unlike Ishiguro and Jackie, who'd learned Spanish after spending four years running Cerro Tolo and shopping in nearby Santa Maria, the corporate liaison did not venture beyond the very essentials, and his pronunciation had already drawn laughs from the customs agents.

The lead inspector, a short and stubby man in a light green uniform, sporting a beer belly and a mustache, regarded Ishiguro from behind his glasses.

“¿Y para qué es el equipo?” What's the equipment for?

Ishiguro relaxed, having rehearsed the answer to that question multiple times in the past twenty-four hours.
“Es un equipo sísmico, para medir los temblores en esta región.” Seismic equipment, to measure tremors in the region.

“Ah, okay,” said the agent.
“Está bien, pero tienes que pagar impuestos de importación.” All right, but you have to pay import tax.

“¿Cuánto?” How much?

The official glanced at his assistants before looking in the distance while smoothing his mustache with an index finger.
“Como … mil quinientos dólares.”

Ishigoro turned to Kuoshi. “Need fifteen hundred dollars.”

“
What?
Fifteen hundred dollars? Why?”

“To let us take our gear to the helicopter. Import tax, he calls it.”

The corporate liaison turned red with anger. “That's preposterous! I checked with my people before coming down here. There's no such thing as an entry tax on research equipment when the equipment will not remain in the country for more than two weeks.” He pulled out a small booklet in Japanese titled
International Customs Laws.
“It's right here.”

Ishiguro looked at Jackie, who shrugged and said, “You don't get it, do you, Kuoshi? This guy doesn't give a damn about your little booklet in Japanese. First of all, he can't read it. Second of all, even if he could, he would still come up with some excuse to make some money today. These guys are way underpaid, and they want Sagata Enterprises to subsidize their income today. So, you better fork out fifteen Ben Franklins now or the equipment is not going anywhere.”

With a heavy sigh, the corporate liaison pulled out a company checkbook for a bank in the United States.

“No, no,”
the customs agent said.
“Cheques no. En efectivo, por favor.”

“What did he say?”

“No checks. He wants cash,” said Jackie.

“I can't believe—”

“
Now,
Kuoshi. Or you'll piss him off,” said the female scientist. “And don't expect a receipt.”

Fuming, the liaison pulled out a manila envelope and extracted fifteen crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.

Five minutes later the customs official, and his three smiling agents, assisted the Japanese trio to the waiting helicopter, patting them on the back as they climbed inside.

As their chartered craft left the ground and headed toward northern Guatemala, Ishiguro said, “I hope you brought plenty of bills. You're going to need them to pay the local guides once we get to Tikal.”

“Plus whatever bribes we might need to offer local officials to stay out of our way,” added Jackie.

Ishiguro had called ahead and found out that there were a few Mayan settlements around Tikal, mostly tour guides, vendors at the large souvenir markets, and street performers—all catering to the affluent tourists taking a break from their Caribbean scuba-diving vacations in neighboring Belize. They planned to pick up a couple of locals as guides and also to help them haul their gear to their destination, near the Rio San Pedro, about fifty miles west of Tikal.

“Ready?” Ishiguro asked Jackie, sitting next to him in the rear of the craft.

“As ready as I'm ever going to be.”

“Nervous?”

The northern Californian gave him a slight nod, her Asian eyes widening as she smiled. “A little. Are you?”

“I guess. I've never been in the jungle before.”

“Great,” she said. “It'll be a new experience for both of us, and we'll do it together.”

“Don't forget
him,
” he whispered into her ear. “He's the eyes and ears of Sagata Enterprises, sent here to make certain that we do things right.”

Jackie stared at him long and hard before saying, “The right thing, my dear husband, is
precisely
what I intend to do.”

Chapter Eleven

001011

1

December 15, 1999

Natural wonders always have a way of making people feel small, meek, insignificant. The Grand Canyon, the Himalayas, Niagara Falls, the Amazon rain forest, Mount Everest, Yosemite National Park, the Great Barrier Reef, Mount Fuji, natural marvels that for centuries have dazzled the human race with their grandness, their splendor, their vastness.

These magnificent sights, unfolded as the surface of the Earth changed over hundreds of millions of years, captivated the imagination of the civilizations of the ancient world, sparking their ideas, feeding their dreams, fueling their determination to leave their marks on the world. It was these natural wonders that inspired the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Romans to create marvels of their own, monuments to the will, the passion, the skill, and the strength of their cultures. This man-driven desire to leave his legacy on an ever-changing world created such magnificent sights as the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World, all of them now a memory, save for the Great Pyramid of Giza. But the human race continued to build, continued to create beyond those ancient architectural marvels. Civilizations sought to leave behind silent testimonies of their existence, of their legacy. Across the globe, beyond the lands of Homer, Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar, other societies converted their dreams into edifices of stone. Wonders such as the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal in Agra, and the Temple of Angkor in Cambodia changed the landscape of the Old World forever.

But while those architects, artists, and skilled laborers transformed stone into legacies, across the ocean, in what was to become the New World, other civilizations carried out their own immortal works of architecture. The Incas built the city of Machu Picchu high among the clouds in the Peruvian mountains. The Aztecs erected their monumental temple in Tenochtitlán, which later became Mexico City. The Maya created their vast cities across Mesoamerica, filled with monumental structures, like the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, the Pyramid of the Giant Jaguar at Tikal, and the Kukulcan Pyramid at Chichén Itzá. And man continued this monument-building legacy across the millennia, erecting larger and taller structures, shadowing the works of their ancestors, pushing the envelope and the laws of physics to create breathtaking masterpieces like the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Cristo Redentor overlooking Rio de Janeiro, and the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, the world's tallest buildings. Other structures challenged the imagination, like the epic sculpture at Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota's Black Hills, one of the world's greatest mountain carvings, testament to the ingenuity, dedication, and God-given talent of its creator. Great works of engineering combined the elements of beauty, ingenuity, and man's ability to transform the landscape in the name of progress, to improve the quality of life, to serve his own needs, like the Panama Canal, the English Channel tunnel, the Suez Canal, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Hoover Dam.

New marvels. Old marvels. Silent affirmations of man's relentless desire to leave behind symbols of times to be remembered, to be admired, to set a standard for future generations to challenge.

And the Earth continued to spin, bringing ancient and modern marvels through periods of light and darkness, through the years, the centuries, the millennia. The new became the old. The old became the ancient. The ancient became just a memory, like most of the wonders of the ancient world. But one wonder had remained intact from pre-Columbian times, surviving the destructive colonization period, enduring the passage of time, hidden deep within the jungle's protective mantle, out of reach to all but those who knew of its precise location.

Tonight, washed by the greenish glow of her night-vision goggles, Susan Garnett saw this unique marvel concealed beneath the array of branches of towering ceiba and mahogany trees crowding the lowlands of the Petén. They had found this site only because Lieutenant Lobo's handheld GPS claimed that their destination lay beyond a wall of densely packed trees cluttered with vines, moss, and other hanging vegetation, requiring the use of machetes to cut through fifty feet of thick greenery, carving out a narrow gap between trunks that forced the team to constantly twist their bodies to conform to the winding, humid corridor.

“Dear God,” Susan muttered, staring at the vastness beyond the natural barrier.

The American team stood at the center of a large stone courtyard overlooking a huge, craterlike pit. A small palace stood to the east of the crater. A pyramid stood to the west, adorned by dozens of freestanding stone slabs along the front of the structure. A large temple, its many columns rising twenty feet in the air, its domelike roof grazing the canopies of ceibas and mahoganies, spanned the entire north side of this hidden site, opposite to where they stood. The branches of dozens of trees projected over all structures, reaching the edge of the crater, their canopies forming a circle that matched the shape of the pit below. Beyond this break in the canopy Susan could see the evening stars.

“Amazing,” Cameron said. “No one can see this place from the sky. The opening in the trees is just large enough for the pit. The rest is hidden from view.”

Standing next to Cameron, Lobo nodded. “That would explain why no one has spotted it before.”

“But someone definitely knows of its existence.”