Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden deep in the Honduran interior. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders and warn that the legendary city is cursed: to enter it is a death sentence. They call it the Lost City of the Monkey God. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the city, but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012, he climbed aboard a single-engine plane carrying highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy in an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains.