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Julio Álvarez del Vayo, about Morde, who, he claimed, “has had a very interesting adventure in which you may be interested.” The ambassador recommended that the two meet, describing Morde’s intelligence as “very confidential.”
    The contents of this top secret material and the meeting it inspired are unknown. But the missive is the earliest suggestion of Morde’s future life as a spy. In fact, it is possible that by then he had already begun to work as a state operative in at least an informal role.
    The notion of a journalist moonlighting as a spook was not exactly far-fetched. Since at least the nineteenth century, governments around the world enlisted reporters and writers as an effective way to get a secret agent into another country. They were skilled at reconnaissance and digging up sources. They could blend into foreign milieus and disappear if necessary. Reader’s Digest and Time were often rumored to be home to U.S. agents during both world wars. Journalists weren’t the only ones. Missionaries, geographers, mapmakers, and adventurers too were tapped for espionage efforts. The British government, for instance, was reported to employ explorers from the Royal Geographical Society.
    Whatever his relationship with the U.S. government at the time, Morde kept traveling, writing, making radio broadcasts, searching for something, though he never seemed to be quite sure of what. That changed in 1939, on an ocean liner plowing across the Atlantic, when he encountered an explorer named Captain R. Stuart Murray, who told him about the lost city.
     
    BY THEN, CAPTAIN MURRAY was already a legend among explorers. Wiry and perpetually tan, with wavy beach-blond hair, he had spent much of his life tromping around the wilderness of Central and South America, searching for traces of ancient civilizations. He was a member of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, two of the most prestigious explorer groups in the world, as well as the American Ethnological Society. Camel Cigarettes featured him in a national ad campaign dressed in desert-colored explorer garb and the words: “When I’m trekking through the wilds of Honduras, I like to take a break and smoke a Camel.” In interviews Murray cited Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World , likening himself to a character embarked on his own great drama. The St. Petersburg Times once described him as inhabiting a “world of poison arrows and blow guns.” It was a scary place to be, but Murray told the paper that he was actually more afraid of himself. “The main thing that gets on one’s nerves in the jungle is solitude,” he mused.
    When Murray ran into Morde on the Stella Polaris in late 1939, he must have seen a bit of his own wandering self. As the 445-foot boat rolled through high seas, the men exchanged stories about what they’d seen abroad. “I used to sit night after night on the deck of the Stella Polaris talking with Murray,” Morde recalled later to the Sunday Standard-Times , his hometown paper. Murray was on board as a lecturer, Morde as a writer. Conversation soon veered to Honduras, where Murray said he had recently been on two expeditions.
    The U.S. State Department, the Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of the American Indian had sponsored his three-month-long journeys—the first in 1934, the second a year later. The jungle was unpredictable, he said. And fascinating. While traveling, he had come upon obscure native tribes with languages and rituals he did not understand. But the most remarkable part of those journeys had been the rumor Murray kept hearing about a secret ancient city: Ciudad Blanca.
    Murray’s original mission to survey the unfamiliar land and hunt for artifacts had morphed almost fully into a quest for the lost city. Ciudad Blanca consumed him. At times, he told Morde that he felt he was getting close. He found clues scattered all over the leafy wilderness, like a puzzle waiting to be put together.