by Stuart Gibbs
“Charles Darwin discovered a treasure of some sort in South America. I don’t know much more than that. The information I have about it is pretty limited.”
Dante said, “And how did you find out about it?”
Charlie explained everything: Esmerelda, the legend of Darwin’s discovery, the first clue on the tortoise shell, escaping Ivan in Puerto Villamil, the Devil’s Stone, Esmerelda’s betrayal at the Basilica. Dante repeatedly tried to interrupt, but Charlie cut him off each time. Finally, she got to the part where Ivan had ambushed her and concluded, “I guess you know the rest.”
By this point, Dante had so many questions, he wasn’t sure where to start. The first thing that jumped to his mind was “You had a bicycle standing by just in case this Esmerelda turned on you?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know that you couldn’t trust her?”
“That’s easy,” Charlie said. “I don’t trust anybody.”
Dante frowned at that, like it was a personal affront.
Milana said, “Can we see your photos of the code Darwin left on the Devil’s Stone?”
Charlie took her phone from her pocket. The glass had cracked at some point while she was fleeing from her various enemies, probably when she had wiped out to avoid the chicken. She brought up the best photo and handed the phone over so the others could see it:
213431313452442315331135344224511542
15114344214234321334131121344244153314115443
453344243144231552114415424445423343
44341231343414
442315332124331444231544421515
124524314431242515
252433224313343131152215132311351531
Milana pondered it for a few seconds, then said, “It’s a box code.”
Charlie looked to her, impressed. “You know about those?”
“We’re in the CIA,” Dante said. “Codes come up pretty often.”
“And yet you all got stymied by Einstein’s cipher.”
“This is different,” Dante said gruffly. “We know about box codes. This message only uses five digits, and the only way you can use the same five digits to encode the entire alphabet is to use a box.”
That wasn’t quite right, but Charlie didn’t bother to contradict her brother. “Pretty much.”
Dante had a pen and a scrap of paper on him. He found a place to sit and drew a five-by-five grid with the numbers one through five along each side. Then he placed the letters A through Z in the boxes, skipping J, because there were only twenty-five boxes and twenty-six letters, and J was usually the one that was skipped in codes like this. J had been the last letter added to the alphabet, in 1524; up until that point, it had been interchangeable with the letter I, which had been used for both sounds.
1 2 3 4 5
1 A B C D E
2 F G H I J
3 L M N O P
4 Q R S T U
5 V W X Y Z
With that, it was relatively easy to see which number combination stood for each letter: 11 was A, while 12 was B, and so on.
Dante began meticulously transcribing the code, looking back and forth from the photos to the grid he had drawn, but wrote only a few letters before he stopped and turned to Charlie. “You already know what this says, don’t you?”
“Yes. I translated it in the car.”
Dante narrowed his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell us that?”
“I thought you wanted to impress Milana with your code-cracking skills.”
Dante reddened from embarrassment, the way he always did when Charlie brought up his attraction to Milana. Then he quickly changed the subject. “So what does it say?”
To translate the code, Charlie had merely imagined the grid that Dante had drawn. In her mind, the solved code looked something like this:
F
O
L
L
O
W
T
H
E
N
A
P
O
R
I
V
E
R
21
34
31
31
34
52
44
23
15
33
11
35
34
42
24
51
15
42
E
A
S
T
F
R
O
M
C
O
C
A
F
O
R
15
11
43
44
21
42
34
32
13
34
13
11
21
34
42
T
E
N
D
A
Y
S
44
15
33
14
11
54
43
U
N
T
I
L
T
H
E
W
A
T
E
R
T
U
R
N
S
45
33
44
24
31
44
23
15
52
11
44
15
42
44
45
42
33
43
T
O
B
L
O
O
D
44
34
12
31
34
34
14
T
H
E
N
F
I
N
D
T
H
E
T
R
E
E
44
23
15
33
21
24
33
14
44
23
15
44
42
15
15
B
U
I
L
T
L
I
K
E
12
45
24
31
44
31
24
25
15
K
I
N
G
S
C
O
L
L
E
G
E
C
H
A
P
E
L
25
24
33
22
43
13
34
31
31
15
22
15
13
23
11
35
15
31
Charlie told them what it said.
Dante frowned in response. “Water that turns to blood?” he asked, confused. “
And a tree that looks like King’s College Chapel? What on earth does that even mean?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie answered, even though she had a very good idea what Darwin meant. “But the part of the clue that tells us where to start is pretty straightforward. Maybe we’ll figure out what the rest means en route.”
“En route?” Dante repeated. “You think we’re going after this thing?”
“You don’t want to?” Charlie asked. “It’s another discovery made by a really smart guy. I’m sure all your buddies at the CIA would love for you to track it down and see if we can make a weapon out of it.”
“I highly doubt that Darwin discovered a weapon,” Dante said dismissively.
“Well, he still discovered something,” Charlie replied. “And we know where the starting point to search for it is. The Napo River is a tributary of the Amazon that begins not too far from here. The three of us could go find this treasure.”
Dante scratched his chin, mulling this over.
“C’mon,” Charlie teased. “It’ll be just like old times. The three of us will have an adventure, solve some clues, find a treasure. Maybe some bad guys will even try to kill us again.”
In truth, Charlie wasn’t thrilled about bringing the CIA into the hunt for Darwin’s discovery, but she had done the math. She had a far better chance of locating it with Dante and Milana than she did without them.
First of all, it would be a difficult solo voyage. Charlie had enough money and intelligence to get by in civilization, but whatever Darwin had found was out in the Amazon, one of the last great stretches of wilderness left on earth. Money wouldn’t mean anything out there, and her intelligence told her it would be suicidal to attempt a trip that dangerous on her own.
Then, there were other people in the mix. She had ditched Esmerelda, but that didn’t mean Esmerelda was out of the game. The Devil’s Stone was still atop the Basilica. Esmerelda could translate it and pick up the trail again. Charlie wasn’t completely sure what Darwin’s treasure was, but she suspected that if Esmerelda—or anyone else—found it first, that would be a bad thing.
Plus, Ivan Spetz was after her. If the Russian agent had the smarts to track her down in Isla Isabela and again in Quito, he might be able to track her into the Amazon as well.
Finally, Charlie was a girl. Though she hated to admit it, in most of the world, women got treated far worse than men did. Having Dante along would make things easier.
Charlie wanted to find what Darwin had discovered. She had been bored much of her time in Puerto Villamil. Her mind had barely been challenged. She had stayed offline to protect herself, so she’d had almost no contact with the outside world. And her only mental stimulation had been the books and puzzles she had scrounged. Now she felt alive again, intrigued by the thrill of matching wits with another great thinker and uncovering his secret. She had sequestered herself at the edge of civilization in an attempt to keep Pandora safe. Since that had failed, she might as well embrace life again.
She knew Dante wanted to go after the treasure too, even though he was acting like he didn’t. She wasn’t quite sure how to read Milana yet, but she had the sense that Milana was at least intrigued by the prospect.
Luckily, Charlie knew how to put them over the edge.
“Do this with me,” she said, “and I’ll give you Pandora.”
An enormous grin spread across Dante’s face. “Sounds good to me,” he said. “Let’s go to the Amazon.”
THIRTEEN
Ivan Spetz knew how to track people.
He had found the wreckage of the mountain bike near the road where it crossed the ravine, but Charlie was gone. Footprints led through the dirt to the shoulder, the right print slightly lighter than the left, as if the girl had gotten banged up and was favoring one leg. Then they vanished. Which meant she had gotten into a car. Ivan would have bet several million dollars it was the silver car that had also been chasing her through the city.
There was no sign of a struggle. The girl had gotten in of her own free will.
So she had friends.
The car had a good head start on Ivan. Two or three minutes would have been more than enough. He wasn’t going to catch up to them.
But there were other ways to figure out where they had gone.
He returned to Quito. The Good Friday procession had begun, so the streets were impassable, meaning he had to park on the outskirts of town and walk back to the Basilica, where he knew the Devil’s Stone was now located.
In Ivan’s experience, people rarely looked up. They kept their heads down, looking at the road in front of them. Or even more often, they were looking at their phones. They barely noticed what was going on directly around them, let alone high above their heads.
That was the case now. Though there were tens of thousands of people in the streets, they were all watching the procession, or talking to their friends, or getting food from vendors. No one but him seemed to notice that there was a woman perched on the spire of the Basilica.
Ivan always carried a small pair of binoculars. Now he studied the woman through them. He instantly recognized her as the woman from the Darwin Research Station, the one whose photo he had stolen: Esmerelda Castle, who, he had learned with a little bit of research, was really Esmerelda Castello from Siena, Italy. She was roped to the spire, and another person who looked enough like her to be her brother was belaying her from below.
As Ivan watched, Esmerelda began rappelling down the spire. She had a satisfied look on her face, as though she was pleased with how things were going.
Ivan went to the doors of the church and blended into the crowd until he saw Esmerelda come out. She and her brother joined a third person, obviously yet another brother, and worked their way through the crowds, heading across the city to a café.
The Castello family were not professional spies. They were amateurs. None of them noticed Ivan following them, even though he wasn’t bothering to stay hidden. It didn’t seem to occur to any of them that someone might want to be following them at all.
Similarly, they didn’t take any notice of Ivan when he sat down in the café two tables away from them, well within earshot. By now they were focused on what they had found atop the Basilica. Another of Darwin’s clues.
They spoke in Italian. Ivan wasn’t fluent in Italian, but it was a romance language, like Spanish and Portuguese, so he could follow most of what they were saying. He overheard them express excitement about the first part of the clue, how they were supposed to start down the Napo River from Coca, and confusion about the second part, finding a river that turned to blood and a tree that looked like King’s College Chapel.
Ivan had no idea what that meant either.
Once they had figured out the clue, the Castellos quickly paid their check, preparing to leave.
Ivan considered his options.
It wouldn’t be hard to follow them out of the café, wait until they got away from the crowds, and kill them all. Even though the Castello boys were big and tough and Esmerelda looked like she could handle herself in a fight, they would be no match for Ivan, who had been trained to kill people in a variety of ways.
But killing people was always messy. You either had to get rid of the bodies, which was time-consuming, or you had to leave them, which would attract the notice of the police.
Plus, even though Ivan didn’t want anyone getting to the treasure before him, he wasn’t concerned about rivals. Not at this point in the game. Sometimes you could get your rivals to do your work for you, the way he had just let the Castellos take all the risk to find the Devil’s Stone and do all the work of translating it.
So, as the Castellos got up from their table, Ivan got up too. When Paolo went to the bathroom, Ivan “accidentally” bumped into him, swiping his mobile phone. Then he acted like he was on his way to the bathroom as well, but he graciously allowed Paolo to use the restroom first. While the idiot was in there, Ivan popped the back off the phone, slipped a tracking device inside, and t
hen reassembled it. The entire process took thirty-two seconds.
Paolo took three minutes in the bathroom, so Ivan had to stand around, twiddling his thumbs, until he came back out. When he did, Ivan deftly slipped the phone back into his pocket.
He didn’t bother following the Castellos after that. He already knew where they were going, and thanks to the tracker, he would know if they changed their plans.
In the meantime, he had his own travel arrangements to make.
Over his many years in South America, Ivan had spent a good amount of time in the Amazon. While he was excited by the thought of tracking down this treasure and finding Charlie Thorne again, he wasn’t thrilled to be heading back into the wilderness. The Amazon could be a nasty, miserable, and dangerous place. There were a million ways to die in it. He needed to be prepared.
If there really was something hidden in the Amazon, it wasn’t going to be easy to find. But Ivan Spetz was determined to beat the competition and find it.
And then he’d deliver Charlie Thorne to the SVR.
PART TWO THE END OF THE AMAZON
Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man.
—CHARLES DARWIN,
Voyage of the Beagle
FOURTEEN
The Napo River, Ecuador
Sixty miles downstream from Coca
The Amazon rain forest is the most diverse ecosystem on earth.
Three square acres of it could contain more than seven hundred and fifty types of tree—which was more types than existed in all of North America. A single Amazonian pond had been found to harbor more species of fish than lived in all of Europe, a single forest preserve in Peru had more species of birds than there were in all of the United States, and a single tree had been found to host more species of ants alone than lived in all the British Isles. Scientists hadn’t even come close to cataloging all the varieties of life. It was said that if you picked a tree in the Amazon at random and examined all the insects living in it, at least one would be new to science.
The reason for this incredible array of diversity was the Amazon River itself. While it was slightly shorter than the Nile, it was by far the biggest and widest river on earth. At the point where it reached the ocean, it could be two hundred to three hundred miles wide, depending on the season, and even a thousand miles upstream, it was seven miles across. It had eleven hundred tributaries, seventeen of which were over a thousand miles long. Nearly two-thirds of all the liquid fresh water on earth at a given time was in the Amazon.
