Charlie Thorne and the Lost City

by Stuart Gibbs

  Charlie had known, even before coming to the Galápagos, that tortoises on different islands had evolved radically different shells. Some carapaces were domed, while others were shaped more like saddles; some had large openings behind the neck, while others had smaller ones. And of course, the tortoises themselves varied greatly in size. According to history, this was one of the things that had intrigued Darwin upon visiting the Galápagos; he had wondered why each island had a completely different type of tortoise living on it.

  While questions like this had led Darwin to develop his theory of evolution, scientists who visited the islands later had determined that the ecology of each island had driven the evolutionary change in the shells. For example, on some islands, the tortoises grazed on grass, while on others they ate taller plants. A taller-plant-eating tortoise would evolve a carapace with a larger opening around the neck, which would allow the tortoise to lift its head higher, while a tortoise that ate grass had a lower opening behind the neck, since the tortoise was always looking down.

  Since her arrival, Charlie had learned to differentiate the species of tortoise by island. The one in the photos had a domed shell with a lower space for the neck. She asked, “That’s a tortoise from Santa Cruz island?”

  “Yes. From the highlands above where the research station is located.”

  Charlie nodded acceptance, although something struck her as odd about this. Darwin had visited four of the Galápagos islands: San Cristóbal, Floreana, Santiago, and Isabela—the island on which they now stood. But Darwin hadn’t visited Santa Cruz. So how had a tortoise that lived there wound up with his name scratched into its shell?

  Charlie didn’t bring this up, however, because Esmerelda had moved on to the next photos, the ones with the carving in question.

  In the photos, both pieces of the shell—the carapace and the plastron—had been removed from the tortoise. Esmerelda clicked past a few that showed some researchers holding the plastron to give an idea of how big it was. It was twice the size of a manhole cover.

  Esmerelda was one of the people in the photos. Charlie noted, once again, that she had taken care with her appearance and was smiling brightly for the camera, while the others were somewhat unkempt, while trying to present themselves as stoic and serious.

  The next photos showed the carving more closely. The letters were messy and ragged, as one might have expected, given that they had been etched into the shell of a living animal. The tortoise would have been much smaller in 1835, Charlie figured, so perhaps Darwin wouldn’t have had much trouble flipping it over, but it still wouldn’t have been an easy surface to carve on—and the tortoise probably wouldn’t have been happy about it. A considerable amount of time and energy must have been spent on the effort: The carvings were deep enough to last for the next nearly two hundred years. The letters had grown as the shell had, the same way that letters carved into a tree would grow larger as the tree expanded, but they had also been worn down over the decades of being dragged across the ground, so that they were quite faint now.

  The message was in two parts. One set of words curved around the perimeter of the plastron:

  The Greatest Treasure in Human History.

  The others were a block of text in the center of the plastron:

  If in death, Eros

  and evil shall rest on earth.

  Minds quit obeying.

  —C. Darwin

  “You can see why we think it’s a coded message,” Esmerelda said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Gotcha,” Charlie said. “But what’s more intriguing to me is the part that’s not coded. What’s all this about a treasure?”

  Esmerelda shrugged. “At this point, you know as much about it as I do. Given those words, it seems that Darwin must have discovered one. And we’re assuming that the next part is the clue to finding it.”

  “The Greatest Treasure in Human History,” Charlie read aloud. As she did, she caught a glimpse of something beyond the computer screen, in the distance through the windows of her house.

  A man was walking down the main street of Puerto Villamil. He looked like the locals, with dark hair and skin bronzed by the sun, and he was dressed in shorts, a short-sleeved button-down shirt, sunglasses, and a well-worn baseball cap. But he wasn’t a local. Charlie assumed he was one of the people who had arrived on the speedboat.

  The man was chatting amiably with Russell and Benita, who were fellow surfers. They were still in their wet suits, looking like they had bailed after seeing the hammerheads arrive. As Charlie watched, the man showed Russell and Benita what might have been a photograph. Russell and Benita both nodded, then pointed toward Charlie’s house.

  The strange man smiled pleasantly, like they had just done him a favor.

  Meanwhile, Esmerelda was still fixated on the photo of the tortoise plastron, zooming in with her laptop to show the etching better. “I do have some theories about this treasure…,” she was saying.

  “Why don’t you explain them to me on the plane?” Charlie asked.

  Esmerelda looked at her, surprised. “What plane?”

  “The one you came here on,” Charlie explained calmly. “You didn’t come by boat. I’ve been surfing near the marina all morning. And you can’t drive anywhere from Puerto Villamil. There aren’t any roads. But there is an old seaplane float dock on the far side of the rescue station.” It surprised Charlie that she had missed the arrival of a plane, as planes were loud and Puerto Villamil was very quiet. But there were times when the surf had been noisy and distracting, and a plane that had come in from the north would have its approach mostly hidden by the volcano.

  Out in the street, two blocks away, the strange man whistled in the way you did to get the attention of other people. In response, two other men who looked kind of like him appeared from around the corner and joined him in heading toward Charlie’s house.

  A large male marine iguana lazed in the middle of the street in their path. The first man could have easily gone around it, but instead he kicked it roughly, then laughed as it scuttled away.

  “I do have a plane at that dock,” Esmerelda was saying. “But…”

  “To decrypt this code, I need to see the actual plastron,” Charlie told her. “It’s possible there are additional clues that I can’t see in this photo. Can we go there now?”

  “Well… sure,” Esmerelda replied, slightly thrown. “How long will it take you to pack?”

  “Already done.” A large backpack sat by the bedroom door, stuffed with everything Charlie needed to leave in a hurry. Because Charlie was always ready to go, just in case trouble showed up. Which seemed to be happening now.

  Out in the street, the three men were two blocks away from Charlie’s house. Not running, because that would have grabbed attention. But walking with purpose.

  Charlie grabbed the backpack, then opened a cabinet under the kitchen sink and turned a valve on something hidden there. Esmerelda didn’t notice what that was, because the next thing Charlie did was head to her bedroom window, which faced the opposite side of the house from the men in the street. She opened the window, tossed the backpack out, then started through after it.

  “Why are you going out the window?” Esmerelda asked.

  “It’s faster to get to the plane this way,” Charlie said casually, then jumped out onto the sandy ground behind the house.

  Esmerelda had heard rumors that the girl from Puerto Villamil was a bit strange. Brilliant, but strange. Like her brain was functioning on a level that other people couldn’t quite grasp. Therefore, Esmerelda had expected some eccentricities. And she desperately wanted any help the girl could give. So she quickly closed her computer, stuffed it into her backpack, and followed Charlie out the window.

  Charlie was already heading down the path that led through the marsh, walking briskly in the direction of the floating dock where the plane would have been, casually stepping over the marine iguanas that were lying in her way.

  Esmerelda hurried aft
er her. “It’s only about a ten-minute flight to Santa Cruz.”

  “Cool,” Charlie said, although the truth was, she didn’t really care about Santa Cruz at all. Everything she had said about needing to see the plastron was a lie. Charlie had already cracked Darwin’s code.

  She just needed an excuse to get out of Puerto Villamil fast.

  FOUR

  Ivan Spetz was Russian, but even his closest friends didn’t know that.

  He had been working for his country’s external intelligence service, the SVR, in Central and South America for more than twenty-four years now, advancing the Russian agenda in the region. He had been one of the top agents in his class, intelligent and capable, but the real reason he’d been assigned to the Americas was his appearance: He was from the southernmost portion of Russia, a small town on the border of Azerbaijan, close to the Middle East, and with his dark-brown skin and thick black hair, he looked far more Hispanic than most of his fellow agents. All of them were from farther north, with pale complexions and blue eyes, which would have made them stick out in South America like polar bears in the desert.

  Ivan had never complained. He liked working in the Americas—while he had hated Moscow, especially in the winter, where the temperatures were often below zero, the streets were piled with snow, and the sun was out for only a few hours a day. Meanwhile, the Americas were almost always sunny and warm, the food was delicious, the beaches were lovely, and the people were kind and friendly. So Ivan had done the best job he could and thus had never been reassigned.

  But after spending more than half of his life pretending to be something he wasn’t, he often felt more like a South American than a Russian. Even though he had never heard a word of Spanish until he was eighteen, he now thought in Spanish, rather than in his native tongue. (He was also fluent in Portuguese, as that was the main language of Brazil.) He almost never thought of himself as Ivan, but instead as Juan or Pablo or Enrique, or whomever he was pretending to be at the time. He had a current girlfriend—and a dozen ex-girlfriends—who didn’t have the slightest idea he was Russian; every single thing he had told them about his background was a lie, but he could say it all with ease, as though he had actually lived that life.

  During his time in the Americas, Ivan had been assigned a wide variety of missions. He had helped topple governments that weren’t friendly to Russia and helped establish governments that were; he had supported the illegal drug trade, because Russian oligarchs made money off it; he had sabotaged oil fields so that more people would buy petroleum from Russia. But the mission he was on now was the strangest he could remember.

  All he had been asked to do was kidnap a girl.

  His handlers at the SVR had made it clear that this girl wasn’t a normal girl, that she was possibly smarter than anyone else on earth. And yet… she wasn’t even thirteen yet. A girl so young might have book smarts, but she wouldn’t know anything about how the world worked. Ivan had taken down enemy agents with decades of training; capturing a girl should have been no trouble at all.

  He’d had plenty of questions about why this girl was so important. His handlers had answered some of them and pretended they didn’t know the answers to the others, which was standard procedure at the SVR.

  The basic story was that the girl knew something important. She had information that the SVR wanted, information that could help cement Russia’s status as a superpower, information that no one else on earth knew. Ivan’s handlers called it Pandora. Russia wasn’t the only country after this asset; two months before, there had been some heated activity in Israel involving the girl, the CIA, the Mossad, and a sect of radical terrorists. The SVR had learned about it all via a mole in the Mossad.

  After that, the girl had disappeared. The official story was that she had died in a fire in California, but the SVR suspected that was only a cover story. An operative in California had failed to locate her but found evidence that she might have gone south. The girl had done an impressive job of covering her tracks, but still, there was a faint trail leading to South America.

  So Ivan had been put on the job. The SVR had said it was highest priority, so he was working day and night, pursuing every lead he could find, no matter how slight. It wasn’t easy, finding someone smart who wanted to stay hidden. But people noticed young girls on their own.

  After two months of dead ends, Ivan had gotten a bite in the Galápagos, of all places.

  He knew someone who knew someone who worked at the Charles Darwin Research Station on Isla Santa Cruz. A day before, the researchers there had found some sort of code carved into the shell of a tortoise and been stumped by it. So they had got to talking about how to best crack the code, and someone had mentioned there was a girl at another one of the tortoise facilities, this time out on Isla Isabela, who was crazy smart and good at puzzles. The girl was rumored to be a bit strange, a loner who kept to herself, spending most of her time surfing or reading. It was believed that the girl was in her late teens, possibly early twenties, but Ivan figured that made sense because a twelve-year-old girl who wanted to stay hidden certainly wouldn’t advertise her real age. Even in Ecuador, the authorities still weren’t going to let a twelve-year-old live on her own like that.

  At first Ivan had found it perplexing that the girl he was hunting would be off in the Galápagos, but then he consulted a map of the islands. On second consideration, it began to make sense. If the girl was looking to hide from civilization, there were few places farther away from it than Puerto Villamil. The town was as small as towns got, thousands of miles from just about everything.

  So Ivan Spetz decided to check things out for himself. It took him nearly twenty-four hours to make the trip, as he’d been in Nicaragua when he’d gotten the tip, and it wasn’t easy to get to Puerto Villamil from there. Frankly, it wasn’t easy to get to Puerto Villamil from anywhere. Ivan had needed three flights and had to spend one night sleeping in the airport in Panama City to make it all work.

  In all the time that Ivan had been working in the Americas, his job had never taken him to the Galápagos. Which made sense. The Galápagos were just some far-flung islands. They might have been important to science and tourism, but they had no bearing on politics. The only reason anyone usually visited them was to see the wild animals there, and Ivan didn’t care much for wild animals.

  The main airport in the Galápagos was a refurbished air force base on a sun-blasted speck of rock named Isla Baltra. From there, Ivan had to take a boat to Puerto Ayora, the biggest town in the Galápagos, which the Darwin Research Station sat on the outskirts of. Ivan always carried plenty of false identification, and in Puerto Ayora, he pretended to be a police officer from Guayaquil on the mainland, looking for a young girl wanted for drug smuggling. He had rounded up two local policemen to help him. They were the ones who had suggested a speedboat would be the fastest way to get to Isla Isabela, possibly because the Puerto Ayora police department didn’t have a plane of its own.

  So that was how Ivan had finally arrived in Puerto Villamil, which was about the worst excuse for a town he’d ever encountered. The streets were dirt, the houses were falling apart, and the place was crawling with marine iguanas, which might have been the most butt-ugly animals imaginable. They looked like something straight out of a nightmare, and yet everyone was letting the disgusting things hang out on their porches and sidewalks.

  But Ivan seemed to be on the right track.

  The only photo Ivan had of the girl was a grainy copy of a video grab from a Mossad camera. And yet the moment he’d showed it to the two surfers walking down the street, they had immediately recognized her.

  “That’s Mariposa,” one had said. “Did she do something wrong?”

  Ivan had assured the guy that it wasn’t anything major, he only needed to talk to the girl, and the guy had dutifully pointed out her house, a run-down shack at the end of the town, right on the edge of what looked like a swamp. Ivan had called to the police officers and they had headed that way, nice and
casual, not wanting to cause a commotion, keeping their guns out of sight, tucked under their shirts. Then they came up the front steps and knocked on the door.

  There was no answer. The front door was locked, but the jamb was so old and weather-beaten, it broke apart when Ivan yanked hard on the knob. The door swung open and Ivan stepped inside.

  He could hear water dripping in the shower and went to check it. The shower floor was still wet and a damp towel dangled on a hook. The girl had used it recently.

  The policemen were searching the main room. Ivan could hear them rooting roughly through the cabinets. Ivan stepped out of the bathroom just as one of the policemen was checking under the kitchen sink. As the man yanked open the cabinet door, Ivan saw something spark.

  Ivan had been in the spy game long enough to know what he was seeing. The girl had rigged a booby trap, the kind of thing a professional would do.

  “Get down!” Ivan yelled, while he flung himself into the bathroom.

  The policeman was too close and too surprised to react. He had never encountered anything like this before.

  The trap was simple enough. Charlie Thorne had fixed a piece of metal to the door and a flint rock to the jamb. When the metal scraped the flint, it sparked.

  Which ignited the gas from the small propane tank that Charlie had opened under the sink, right before fleeing out the bedroom window.

  The resulting explosion blew the policeman off his feet, throwing him across the tiny kitchen. The cabinets all burst open, spilling glasses and plates, which shattered on the floor, while the building trembled enough to topple all the stacks of books.

  Ivan waited in the bathroom for a few seconds, then emerged into the kitchen to assess the aftermath of the explosion. The scorched propane tank lay in what remained of the cabinet, a small jet of flame still flickering from the open valve. Ivan noticed something was written on it in black Sharpie: