Mahee again disappears, leaving Jack to contemplate the very real danger they’re both facing. He phones his mom and ex-wife, then slips into an essential realization.

Escaping back to the hot springs, Jack encounters an ancient hermit. Then Michael comes and throws the jade phallus into the lake for Mahee to find – then she appears and she and Jack finally consummate their passion.

Realizing just how dangerously real Bernardo’s psych-tech takeover plot is, Jack tries to talk sense into Ursula – then gets roughed up by the weird CIA/embassy guy, Nate Wingster, and Quemado, the government cop.

Mahalena’s dangerous twin brother Bernardo arrives by helicopter, and the two men battle verbally – until Jack experiences directly the scary power of Bernardo’s psych-tech inventions.

Jack agrees to participates in Ursula’s holographic chakra experiment – and is shocked when he taps into the mythic Mayan Nokalito presence that Mahee had mentioned.

With Mahee still missing, Jack wakes up in seeming paradise and meets a seductive young scientist named Ursula who lures him over to Bernardo’s secret research lab.

Escaping El Maestro’s compound, Jack has an intense mystic encounter in the local church, and ends up mysteriously welcomed by El Maestro’s old lover – and taken to her seemingly-safe hot springs resort.

Jack tries to helps El Maestro access the ancient power and wisdom of the jade phallus – and witnesses Michael’s traditional male approach to the phallus explode into confusion and disaster.

Jack fights against Michael’s shaman/therapist dominance and ceremonies while urgently awaiting Mahalena’s arrival at the lake.

Driving alone down to the magnificent Lago Atitlan in highland Guatemala, Jack locates Mahee’s father Michael Bernhardt (El Maestro) and gets pulled into the man’s lucid but bizarre private scene.