A dedicated female archaeologist and a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officer must recover priceless South American artifacts that could bring deadly chaos into the world.

Two weeks before the end of the world predicted by the ancient, Maya calendar, Dr. Gabriel Stanton receives a call from a hospital resident alerting him to the presence of a patient whose every symptom confounds and terrifies him. Meanwhile, Chel Manu, a Guatemalan American researcher at the Getty Museum, finds herself in possession of an illegal ancient artifact: a priceless codex from a lost city of her ancestors. This record seems to hold the...

Documents the true story of the nineteenth-century rediscovery of the Mayan civilization by American ambassador John Lloyd Stephens and British architect Frederick Catherwood, illuminating how their findings profoundly changed Western understandings about human history.