by Stuart Gibbs
Segundo swallowed hard, aware that Ivan wasn’t bluffing. And when he looked at the angry, blistered faces of the Castellos, he saw people who would be more than happy to make good on Ivan’s threats.
So he told them what the code had said. Segundo was no fool, either. He didn’t want to lose his lodge—and he certainly didn’t want any of his family to be hurt.
Keeping the secret of the code wasn’t worth all that. And to be honest, he wondered if sharing the information really mattered.
After all, there was a very good chance that if these people went up the river, they wouldn’t come back alive.
TWENTY-THREE
Along the Anaconda River
Somewhere in the Amazon wilderness of Peru
It took eleven days before Charlie found what she was looking for.
Up until then she had been the perfect member of the team, foraging for food, cooking, and helping navigate without ever complaining.
And there was plenty that she could have complained about.
Traveling through the rain forest was the most difficult thing Charlie had ever done.
After five days on the Anaconda River, they had to abandon their motorboat. The Anaconda had stopped being much of a river at all and became what was known as flooded forest, which composed a significant amount of the Amazon basin. In it, the water level fluctuated greatly throughout the year; sometimes there was dry land, but just as often it could be more like a swamp. That was the case now. The water was two feet deep, but there were trees everywhere in it, making it too narrow and shallow to get the boat through. Instead, they had to resort to a canoe, which Segundo had sold them and which they had been pulling behind the speedboat, aware this time would come.
The canoe was a lot more work than the speedboat, of course. They paddled until their arms ached and their hands blistered, and then they paddled more. Even though the canoe was a modern one, made in a factory and designed to be light and maneuverable and comfortable, navigating through the maze of flooded trees was extremely difficult. They often found themselves stuck in an impassable tangle of foliage, from which they would have to back out and try to find another route, or at a point where the water got too shallow to paddle through, forcing them to hoist the canoe and their gear up onto their shoulders and portage it through the ankle-deep muck. And despite the padded seats, Charlie still felt like someone had spent the last few days kicking her in the rear end.
Then there was the weather. It was either swelteringly hot and humid or raining in buckets. When the rains came, they got soaked, and due to the humidity, they never quite dried out, so everything they owned was starting to get slightly moldy and smell like cheese.
And finally, there were the insects. Everywhere. If you so much as leaned against a tree, you were likely to end up with ants crawling all over your body. If you lit a candle at night, flying insects would arrive by the thousand, throwing themselves into the flame like tiny kamikazes, in numbers so great that it was hard to keep the candle going. The insects worked their way into the gear and the food. And they were always swarming around you. In addition to the mosquitoes, there were sweat bees, which were attracted to your perspiration; scorpions, which would crawl into your boots if you took them off in a vain attempt to dry them out; and spiders, which Charlie knew weren’t technically insects, but that didn’t make them any less disgusting when you walked straight into a web and then found one the size of a walnut crawling through your hair.
Hundreds of times a day, if not thousands, Charlie thought about telling the others that coming this way had obviously been a bad idea and asking if they would mind turning back. Dante and Milana were putting on a good show of being tough, but Charlie sensed that both of them were miserable as well and would be happy to pack it in.
But neither of them suggested that they turn around, because neither of them ever gave up on a mission.
And Charlie never suggested turning around either, because she wanted answers.
She wanted to know if she was right in her suspicions about what Darwin had really found. And there was no way to do that except to keep following the clues to where they led.
The other questions she had were slightly easier to get answers to. That was where the quicksand came in.
In truth, what she was looking for wasn’t technically quicksand. It was a feature of the Amazonian flooded forests that Segundo had referred to as “pechado,” but it worked in a similar fashion and was even more dangerous. Essentially, it was a slurry of soil and water that looked stable—until you stepped into it.
Charlie and Dante were on a foraging expedition, looking for food, while Milana stayed with the canoe. (Segundo had warned them against ever leaving their supplies unattended. Even in the most remote stretches of the rain forest, there still might be other people who would make off with their things. And the monkeys had a tendency to steal as well.) Even though there were thousands of different plants in the Amazon basin, only a small percentage had fruits that were edible for humans, and they tended to be few and far between. The best way to find them was to follow the monkeys, which also ate them. It wasn’t particularly hard to know when monkeys were around, as they were noisy, chattering constantly as they thrashed their way through the trees. However, spotting them was surprisingly difficult. The forest canopy was thick and had many layers, and the monkeys spent most of their time in the upper reaches. Following them required looking high above you at all times, keeping your neck craned back and your eyes alert for the slightest glimpse of fur flashing through the branches.
Unfortunately, keeping your gaze locked on what was above you meant that you couldn’t watch what was on the forest floor, which was dangerous. The flooded forest was full of obstacles, like pools of water, slicks of mud, tree roots, vines, rocks, and the occasional pit, any of which you could stumble over or fall into. And then there were all the biological hazards: plants with sharp thorns or serrated leaves that cut like knives, venomous snakes, spiderwebs, hornets’ nests, caimans, and maybe even jaguars. In addition, the forest floor was dark. Even in broad daylight, few of the sun’s rays filtered down through the millions of leaves above; being on the ground of the forest meant living in permanent dusk—so you had to work even harder to observe the world around you.
So Charlie, Dante, and Milana had worked out a system: One of them would keep an eye on the monkeys, figuring out which way they needed to go, while the other kept an eye on the ground and worked out the path of least resistance.
At the time, Dante was doing the tracking, watching a group of long-limbed spider monkeys crash through the canopy, while Charlie was navigating, as usual. Dante claimed that he had Charlie navigate most of the time because she was shorter and therefore better suited to seeing things close to the ground, but the truth was that Charlie had a better spatial memory. Finding the fruit was the easy part; finding your way back to camp again was much more difficult. A few days before, Dante and Milana had learned this the hard way. They had tracked down a moriche palm full of aguaje fruit within only a few minutes—and then spent another two hours trying to retrace their steps.
So now Charlie was keeping an eye on the ground ahead of them, while consistently looking behind them to remember the route back as well. Occasionally, she would pause to mark a tree to signal where the path was. Segundo had shown her the traditional way to do this, which was to hack a slash in the bark with a large knife; he had even given her one as a gift, which she was carrying right now. But Charlie had discovered something that worked even better: She used nail polish.
Milana had brought a few different colors. Charlie found that hot pink with sparkles worked the best, given that it was a color that didn’t occur much in nature, even out here in the most biodiverse place on earth. A dab of it on the bark of a tree could be seen from a long distance away.
As for herself, Charlie was partial to the more muted tones of polish. For the first time in her life, she was letting her nails grow, and Milana had helped he
r paint them olive green the night before. (Although the official name of the color was Verdant Lawn. Charlie wasn’t crazy about calling it that, but she had to admit that she liked the look of it.)
She had just steered Dante around a thicket of particularly nasty saw-bladed grass when she spotted the pechado. It looked at first like an unusually nice, smooth patch of dirt overlaid with fallen leaves, but Charlie realized it was potentially hazardous.
Then she let Dante walk right into it.
He had gone only two steps when the ground seemed to give out beneath him. It didn’t quite collapse, but almost seemed to come alive, sucking his feet down into it. This was accompanied by an eruption of air that sounded like an enormous belch. Within seconds, Dante found himself up to his ankles in muck, like a man who had suddenly had his feet locked into concrete. He tried to lift a leg out, but couldn’t. Instead, the movement agitated the pechado and he sank a little deeper.
He swiveled around to Charlie. She could see that he was frightened but was trying his best to appear as though he wasn’t. “Don’t take another step!” he warned.
“I wasn’t about to,” Charlie replied calmly. “You look like you’re in some trouble there.”
Dante looked down at his feet, concerned, trying to remember the survival lessons Segundo had given him. “This is pechado, right? It works kind of like quicksand.”
“Exactly. The more you move, the more you sink.”
“Segundo said the trick to escaping it is to distribute my weight more evenly. So if you could find a log or something to lay across it, I could use that to pull myself out.”
Charlie nodded agreement, but she didn’t make a move to help. Instead, she said, “How long have you known that Darwin discovered something out here?”
The look on Dante’s face changed from concern to surprise—and then to annoyance. “I learned about Darwin’s discovery from you. Now help get me out of here!”
“You knew about Darwin’s discovery before I told you about it. I could see it in your eyes. Plus, you agreed to come out here and hunt for what he found way too easily. If the CIA was only interested in getting Pandora from me, they would have had you drag me onto the closest plane and haul me back to headquarters. They wouldn’t have let you go poking around the rain forest for weeks for some other discovery—unless they were interested in getting their hands on that, too.”
Now Dante looked like he was annoyed at himself, rather than Charlie; he had underestimated her again. Dante sank another inch and the thick slurry was oozing into his hiking boots. “You led me into this on purpose so you could interrogate me?”
“I didn’t think I could trust you to tell me the truth if I just asked.”
“I don’t need your help to get out of here, you know. I can do it myself.”
“Yes, but that involves lying down and trying to swim through this stuff, which is going to be kind of disgusting. Not only is it muddy, but it stinks. And we’re more than a week from the closest shower, so I don’t think Milana will want to get that close to you.…”
“I don’t have any interest in Milana.”
“Sure you don’t. But if I were you, my real concern would be that bullet ant right there.” Charlie pointed to a large black ant that was working its way across the pechado. Due to its minuscule weight, it didn’t sink, but walked right over the surface toward Dante.
Dante’s eyes went wide in fear. He looked warily at the ant as he sank slightly more. “That’s not really a bullet ant, is it?”
Charlie made a show of scrutinizing it from the safety of the solid ground. “Sure looks like one to me. Without my help, you won’t be able to get out of there before that guy reaches you.”
“You have to be kidding. You’re honestly blackmailing me right now?”
“I thought you were a fan of blackmail,” Charlie said. “I mean, you blackmailed me into helping you find Pandora.”
“That was different,” Dante said angrily. “The safety of the world was at stake!”
“You still could have tried asking nicely.” Charlie considered the bullet ant once again. “I’ve heard their sting feels like walking across a bed of nails that has been set on fire. Or skinny-dipping in a volcano…”
“All right!” Dante exploded. “Yes! I knew about Darwin’s discovery before! Now get me out of here!”
Charlie stayed put. “How did you know about it?”
Dante huffed in exasperation.
Charlie sat down on a nearby tree stump, indicating that she had plenty of time. “I’d speak quickly if I were you. That ant’s not very far away.”
Dante considered his options—and gave in. “After you broke Einstein’s code, the CIA figured that, maybe, he had left other messages behind that no one had noticed before.…”
“Or maybe clues to other equations he’d hidden?”
“Yes. That too. So teams of agents were sent to repositories of his work all over the world to comb through his papers. And a team in Princeton found something. Some notes he’d made to himself, using the same code, much later in his life. As you know, the way he wrote the code, it didn’t look like words; it looked like a mathematical equation that didn’t work, so no one had ever realized what it really was. And when they decoded it, it said that there had been other scientists before him who had discovered things like Pandora.…”
“That’s exactly what it said?”
“I can’t recall exactly what it said. I don’t have a photographic memory like you. All I can give you is the gist: Einstein wasn’t the first scientist to find something that humanity couldn’t be trusted with. And the others had hidden their discoveries too.”
Charlie got to her feet again and walked over to the remains of a tree that had fallen long before, a palm trunk that had been rotted by mold and gnawed by termites until it was only six feet long. “Did Einstein say how he knew this?”
“No. Only that he knew it. And Darwin was the only other scientist he mentioned.”
Charlie gave him a skeptical look. “Really?”
“Well, he might have listed others, but the book that the note was found in had been damaged. So only Darwin’s name could be made out.”
Charlie studied Dante for a moment, assessing whether he was telling the truth or not, then grabbed one end of the palm trunk and dragged it toward the pechado. “Did Einstein say what Darwin had found?”
“No. Just that he had found something. We assumed that even Einstein didn’t know what it was.”
“But the CIA thinks it’s Paititi? That’s why you studied it before coming here?”
“The CIA has no idea what it is. Although they figure that Paititi is a distinct possibility.”
“What business is it of the CIA’s if Darwin found a lost city? If he did, it’d be the property of Peru or Ecuador or whatever country it’s in. And any gold or artifacts there would be the property of that country as well.”
“The CIA is merely interested in what Darwin found, that’s all. Seeing as the last thing hidden by a genius was an equation that could destroy all life on earth, we figure it’s in our best interests to get to these discoveries before anyone else does. As you’ve noticed, they tend to attract some pretty bad people.”
Charlie reached the edge of the pechado, but stopped before dropping the tree trunk into it. “And you and Milana are now some kind of special team tasked with going out and finding these things?”
“Basically. Seeing as we had success finding Pandora.”
Charlie frowned. “I’m the one who found Pandora.”
“And it was my idea to recruit you.”
“Which is why you had to come looking for me again. Because you guys can’t do this on your own.”
“It certainly helps to have you aboard,” Dante admitted, glancing warily at the bullet ant, which was now only a foot away from him. “Now could you please get me out of here?”
“Okay.” Charlie heaved the palm trunk into the pechado. One end landed with a wet thwack in f
ront of Dante.
Dante had now sunk down to his knees. He bent forward, lying prone across the trunk, which allowed him to distribute his weight more evenly without flopping facefirst into the pechado. However, he still couldn’t keep entirely out of it. The palm trunk sank a bit, and it was too narrow for him to keep his entire body on it. His broad shoulders stuck out on both sides, and his arms dangled into the muck.
“Pull me out,” he ordered Charlie.
“That’s not physically possible,” she replied. “You probably weigh twice what I do, not counting that tree trunk. And it’s not like you’re lying on a frictionless surface. You might as well be asking me to try to pull an elephant out of there.”
Dante frowned, realizing she was right, and then fumbled his way out himself. He had to partially drag himself along the trunk and partially paddle through the pechado with his arms and legs, so he still ended up with foul-smelling gunk on him, although considerably less than if he had done it without the aid of the tree trunk. And he did it quickly enough to escape the bullet ant, leaving it behind on the surface of the pechado.
By the time he reached solid ground again, he was soiled, exhausted, and seething. He got to his feet, grabbed some dead leaves off the ground and attempted to wipe the mud off himself with them. “If you ever try anything like that again, I’ll make you regret it.”
“What are you gonna do?” Charlie asked. “Ground me? Am I not allowed to track down any more discoveries hidden by famous scientists for the next two weeks?”
