As it turned out, a little luck had not been forthcoming, and the NRI group searched the banks of the river for a week after passing the rapids.

McCarter knew the problem. “The jungle swallows things,” he said. “A hundred years ago cities like Palenque, Copán and Tikal were so covered in vegetation that the monuments looked like rugged green hills. Dirt piles up and the weeds and trees grow out of it. Eventually the place is covered from head to toe. Left alone, the jungle creeps in and simply takes the land back.”

He explained how they should proceed. “One thing you have to avoid looking for is the finished product, a monument or a temple of some kind. You won’t find that out here. It’ll be something subtle—a small hill that doesn’t flow with the land the way it should, or a bit of rock sticking out where it shouldn’t.”

These had been McCarter’s instructions five days before. Since then, they’d split into teams, scouring different sections of the river’s bank on foot, hiking and slashing their way through the tangled foliage, moving slowly upriver in a systematic search. It was all to no avail, until Polaski discovered a squared-off stone at the edge of the river. McCarter and Susan stared at it with approval.

McCarter smiled as he inspected it, then turned to Susan. “The two of us experts out here, and he finds the first clue.”

“Beginner’s luck,” she said, smiling. “And thank God for it.”

McCarter looked around. “Luck” was the word. A month earlier the stone would have been submerged in ten feet of water.

“Not bad for a systems nerd,” Polaski proclaimed.

“No,” McCarter said. “Not bad at all.” He looked skyward. Dusk was approaching fast. He considered calling the others but they were spread out along the river’s edge, and in the fifteen minutes it would take them to gather he would lose the remaining light.

McCarter gazed up the sloping bank. It was quite steep. “It probably tumbled down in a deluge at some point.” He looked at Susan and Polaski. “We have to go up,” he said. “Straight up.”

Susan went first. Younger, lighter and more athletic, she outclimbed both McCarter and Polaski as they struggled to scale the steep, tangled embankment. She paused on a flattish section, pointing to something.

As McCarter reached her he was gasping but energized, especially as Susan directed his attention to another jumble of stones. A few feet away they found a second pile, uneven and dislodged, but it seemed as if they might have once been a flight of stairs. With his hands on his hips, McCarter took a deep breath and then began to climb again. “Up,” he said.

This time he led the assault, pushing forward, tripping and stumbling on the steep ascent, almost causing a minor avalanche at one point. Near the top, he arrived at a tangled spread of vines that hung over the bluff like falling water. With the light fading around them, McCarter swung his machete and the vines fell. In their place, two empty eye sockets stared back at him from the mottled brown countenance of an ancient human skull. He stepped back.

“Well, this is something,” Polaski said, wide-eyed.

“Isn’t it?” Susan said. “Can you believe we found it?”

McCarter looked at her. He had begun to think it was all just a waste of time. “And to think, you could have been in Paris instead.”

“Listening to my mother go on about clothes,” she said. “No thanks. Much better here.”

McCarter turned back to the vines and hacked through another section. Next to the first skull, they saw another, this one with a broken cheekbone and a missing jaw, and beside that another. The skulls were set into a wall of stone—placed into sections that had been left open, cemented and braced into position somehow.

Susan and Polaski stepped back as McCarter swung the machete again and again, hacking at the brush and revealing more skulls or the remnants of them with each slash. He stopped as his shoulder began to hurt, wondering when he’d gotten so out of shape.

Breathing hard, he said, “Now that we’ve staked our claim,” he said, “someone call the others.”

CHAPTER 15

That night, after a celebration that included repeated toasts and a bottle of champagne, the camp was quiet. Pik Verhoven stood watch, covering the north side of the camp, while one of his men stood seventy yards downstream, covering the south end.

If and when they decided on a permanent site, Danielle had promised all kinds of equipment to help—motion detectors, heat sensors and other electronic devices, the type of equipment that often failed at precisely the wrong moment in places like the rainforest. Verhoven insisted he’d put more faith in a pack of trained dogs, and so Danielle had promised that as well, but until then Verhoven and his men would guard the camp the old-fashioned way—watching the forest day and night, easy money for a group more accustomed to hard fighting in close combat.

Verhoven and his men were mercenaries in the truest, hardest sense of the word. All five were former South African Special Forces members who had drifted abroad in the years after apartheid. Under Verhoven’s leadership they’d become a sought-after group. Their résumé included places like Somalia, Angola and the Congo. They’d stormed their way into the Rwandan carnage of the mid-’90s to rescue members of the TransAfrican mining corporation. A decade later they’d fought in Liberia, pointedly searching for Charles Taylor, the nation’s faltering, maniacal leader, first on a contract to aid his escape, and then, after being stiffed on the payment, attempting to catch him and collect the million-dollar bounty that had been placed on his head.

Verhoven smiled as he remembered that particular dustup. So close, too bad it hadn’t worked out. Still, he figured they’d get their chance again someday, and when they did, he’d leave the world with one less madman, and he’d do it for free.

In the meantime, he and his men would go where the money led them, and if it meant a fight, so be it, the bloodier the better. For the right price, they would storm the gates of hell.

As Verhoven scanned the quiet jungle around him, he saw nothing that would force him to do that tonight. He’d seen no sign of danger since the body in the river; not the natives on the warpath or the competing parties that Danielle had warned him about, not even any wildlife to speak of.

Only the last part struck him as odd.

With a dearth of rainfall over the interior, the animals should have been plentiful near the streams that still flowed. This wasn’t Africa, where the herds crowded water holes until the monsoons arrived, but the principle was the same: lack of rain brought animals to the water, concentrating them in a restricted area. They should have found tracks and droppings and heard them day and night at the riverbanks and in the areas of forest around them. But the jungle had been strangely vacant and muted. Plenty of birds, along with fish in the streams and reptiles on the banks, but the animals seemed to be missing, the mammals in particular. Verhoven had seen nothing much larger than a rat. Maybe the rainforest was dying, like all the tree-huggers said. A shame if it was, but not really his problem.

Verhoven put a thermal scope to his eye and scanned the broad swath of jungle that lay ahead of him. Little blips of heat could be seen here and there in the undergrowth, phosphorescent flares in the red tint of the eyepiece; more rodents and other tiny mammals. He panned along a wide arc and saw nothing more. As he lowered the device something rustled the trees.

He brought the scope back up. Deeper in the forest, almost at eye level, he saw a spread of branches swaying in a vertical recoil, the way they did when a monkey launched itself from them. He scanned across an arc, looking up into the trees and then back down. Nothing. No sign of anything that might have bent the branches in such a manner.