Book 1: Revelation at Tikal – Ch 14: Operation PB Success: episode 1

Tikal, Guatemala. 1977. Cutty wakes in a thatched bohío hollowed out by dysentery, marooned with a dead BMW, a missing sister he hasn't found, and an outhouse that smells like flat soda. Civilization arrives in the form of a battered VW bus and a campground full of fellow wanderers — Conrad the Canadian mechanic, Raul the Madrid snob, Kevin the Australian veteran of worse scrapes, and two art historians who know both Maya glyphs and campground gossip. Over eggs, beans, and recycled jokes at Comedor Florecita, Cutty learns that no one has seen a barefoot woman in a gray habit. Floey hasn't reached Tikal yet. He has time he isn't sure he deserves. At the tiny Aviateca office, chasing a rear-wheel bearing, Cutty meets Don Ernesto López — an older clerk in a pilot's shirt who quietly rewires the whole journey. Between part numbers and quetzales, Don Ernesto talks about fools on motorcycles, CIA flights, and the 1954 coup that turned Guatemala into a company town. The hunt for Floey starts to tangle with an older story: a brother who vanished here decades earlier, and the damage Cutty is already doing to the woman who still hasn't given up on him. New episodes every Wednesday. Read and narrated by Cutty Braughn. Goleta Time Press.