And Then I Found Out the Truth

by Jennifer Sturman

  Samantha didn’t respond, and Thad turned to Hunter. “Thad Wilcox,” he introduced himself. Then, in the mirror, I saw him pause. “You look familiar. Have we met before?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Hunter as they shook hands. “I’m Hunter Riley.”

  Anyhow, they all sat themselves down and talked about the weather until the waitress delivered more coffees and left them alone.

  Samantha glanced around. The café was noisy with conversation and clinking coffee cups, and only one of the tables directly adjacent to theirs was occupied, by a group of German college students who were speaking energetically in their native language. She seemed satisfied it was safe to talk without being overheard.

  “Hunter, I appreciate your joining us, especially on such short notice,” she said, her voice coolly professional. “And no need to worry about Thad. We’ve known each other for ages — we were even in the same social club at Princeton. He’s fully up to speed on our project, so you can include him in anything you tell me.”

  “‘Up to speed’?” repeated Thad. “I made your ‘project’ possible.” And, yes, he did use air quotes around “up to speed” and “project.” “If I hadn’t tipped you off that T.K. was onto you, you would have been exposed before you got started.”

  “And without me you would never have gotten rid of your boss, and you definitely wouldn’t be running TrueTech,” snapped Samantha. “We both benefited.”

  “Most people don’t have the luxury of sitting around waiting for their daddy to kick off so they can get a company handed to them on a silver platter,” said Thad.

  “I’m the brains of Arquero Energy, and you know it,” said Samantha.

  Hunter cleared his throat before they could get on too much of a roll. “I was just glad I could make it this morning,” he said. “Working out the payments to the different regulators so they’ll turn a blind eye to what’s happening in Antarctica has kept me busy, and I know how eager you and your colleagues at EAROFO are for the drilling to begin. What’s the status on that front? When do you think the wells will start producing?”

  Samantha shot Thad a glare before answering. “The necessary equipment is on its way to the Ross Sea as we speak. Except there seems to be a minor complication.”

  “What sort of complication?” asked Hunter.

  “A potential breach of confidentiality,” she said. “You remember how we requested your assistance with the satellite photos a few weeks ago?”

  “Sure. We arranged for doctored time stamps on images of the Polar Star, so that nobody could tell the ship never sank. And then we suggested to a few bloggers that it would be best for them not to continue their discussions of the matter.”

  “I know what we asked you to do. There’s no need to keep repeating the details of everything back to me,” Samantha said. Her tone was getting testy — I guessed Thad had annoyed her so much already that her cool facade was showing its cracks even when she spoke to Hunter. “But it wasn’t enough. Who knows what the odds are —”

  Thad interrupted. “A billion to one, by my calculations.”

  “Thank you, Thad,” she said drily. “Against odds of a billion to one, it appears the threat from the two activists on the Polar Star has not been eliminated.”

  “They’re alive, and they’re somewhere in Buenos Aires,” grumbled Thad. “And to make matters worse, the daughter’s here, too, and she might not know everything, but she knows enough to be dangerous.”

  “What?” said Samantha. “The daughter’s here? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “Why didn’t you return my calls?” countered Thad.

  “Because you can’t seem to get it through your skull that I have no interest in a romantic relationship with you.”

  “That’s not how you were acting when this all got started.”

  “The operative word would be ‘acting,’ Thad.”

  Hunter interrupted. “So, the activists are alive and in Buenos Aires?”

  “Yes, T.K. Truesdale and the other one, the Australian. We haven’t located them as yet, but we have confirmation they’re here in the city,” said Samantha. “And that’s where you come in, Hunter.”

  “Oh?” he asked.

  “We need you to help us tie up these loose ends,” she said. “Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” said Hunter. “You’re saying you want me to arrange for these people to be killed. Is that correct?”

  Samantha took another look around, making doubly sure nobody was in earshot. “Precisely,” she said.

  Thirty-three

  There’s probably no good way to prepare yourself for watching your love interest’s father plotting your mother’s murder. I stole a glance at Quinn’s face, but he was motionless, staring at the iPod’s screen with his jaw clenched. Meanwhile, the conversation at the other table wasn’t over.

  “And let’s not forget about the daughter,” Thad was saying.

  “I tried to eliminate the daughter in New York, but it was impossible,” said Samantha. “Those absurd posters made her into a celebrity. Even when she was alone, she was being watched.”

  Okay. Maybe I should actually thank Dieter when I got home.

  “Well, now the posters are here in Buenos Aires, and so is she,” said Thad. “She’s with her boyfriend, too.”

  Under normal circumstances, hearing that term used in reference to Quinn would have me doing a happy mental jig, but I barely noticed just then, though it gave Hunter pause. “Boyfriend?” he repeated.

  “Seemed that way,” said Thad.

  “Do you have a name?” asked Hunter. “Or at least a description?”

  Thad shrugged. “I only got a quick look. The most distinctive feature was his eyes. Even from a distance I could tell they were an unusual color. Sort of a greenish gray —” He cast around for a comparison, but I knew exactly how hard it was to find anything that would do justice to the color of Quinn’s eyes. Thad’s gaze landed back on Hunter. “You know, they weren’t that different from your eyes. The point is, if we can find him, we should add him to that list.”

  Hunter cleared his throat again and set his coffee cup down. “I see. Well, it sounds like I’d better get moving, and sooner rather than later. If there’s nothing else, then I’ll excuse myself so I can begin making the necessary arrangements.”

  He was already pushing his chair back, and as he stood, his knee jostled the table. The cup he’d just set down teetered precariously on the table’s edge, and they all reached to steady it at the same time. Of course, Hunter’s cup turned out to be fine, but in the process Thad managed to sweep his own full cup to the floor, where it landed on Hunter’s briefcase.

  Hunter snatched up the case, and he might have thought he was swearing under his breath, but Quinn and I could hear him even if Samantha and Thad couldn’t. All three of them were on their feet now, with Thad muttering apologies and Samantha waving a busboy over to ask for napkins. “It’s okay,” Hunter said.

  Except it wasn’t okay. The briefcase was starting to smoke.

  Then it made a sort of crackling noise, like when a hair dryer overheats and shorts out.

  “Bombe!” shrieked one of the German students.

  And that’s when all hell broke loose. The entire room erupted into a frenzy of screaming and clattering as customers and staff dived for cover, tipping over chairs and knocking over tables and bringing plates and china crashing to the floor.

  “It’s not a bomb,” Hunter said, hugging the still-smoking briefcase to his chest. “Really. I’ll just be going now.”

  Clutching the briefcase, he started moving toward the door. Not surprisingly, the few people who hadn’t already hit the ground or taken shelter behind the bar backed away from him.

  All except Samantha Arquero. She stepped into his path. “What do you have in there?” she asked, keeping her voice neutral and with a forced little laugh for the benefit of the spectators.

  “Uh — you know, some papers and stuff — no
thing important — I’ll be in touch.”

  Samantha snapped her fingers over her head, two loud clicks, and suddenly her driver materialized by her side. “Where are you headed?” she said. “Why don’t you let us drop you?”

  The driver reached his hand into his jacket, and there was another click, softer this time, but familiar from TV and the movies. It was the noise of a gun being cocked.

  And if all hell hadn’t broken loose before, that’s when it broke loose for real.

  I hadn’t even seen Quinn leave our table, but suddenly he rammed into the driver from behind, knocking him over. I rushed to help, but somebody grabbed my ankle from under one of the tables, nearly tripping me.

  I caught myself right before I fell over, my ankle still held in a viselike grip. I threw one arm around a column to steady myself and tried to shake my ankle free. But as I twisted around for a better look, I saw it was Thad who had hold of me, and he wouldn’t let go. At least, not at first.

  His weasel face was twisted into a grimace as he grasped my ankle with both hands. But while my boots might not have been so practical for the occasional mini-marathon, a few swift kicks were all it took to break his hold. I might also have broken both of his wrists, but I wasn’t going to waste any time feeling guilty about that. Not when Quinn was still wrestling with the driver — along with Hunter and some blond-haired guy who’d apparently decided to leap into the fray — and especially not while Samantha Arquero was quietly slinking toward the entrance.

  I raced after her, skirting upended tables and chairs and broken crockery and skidding in a pool of spilled coffee. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a blur of motion from across the room — another woman moving in the same direction, her hair flying out behind her. We converged on Samantha Arquero right as she reached the door, slamming into her from either side.

  The impact knocked the wind out of me and sent all three of us sprawling: Samantha Arquero headfirst into an umbrella stand and the other woman and I along the slippery floor until we slid to a stop a few feet away from each other.

  I leaped up, readying myself for round two. But Samantha Arquero was lying on the floor, moaning softly, and she didn’t seem interested in moving anytime soon.

  “Good,” I said, at the same moment the other woman said, “Excellent.”

  The voice was as familiar as my own, and so was the satisfied way she said “excellent,” though she’d never, ever used it in reference to my science grades. I spun to face her.

  The sensible bob had grown out to past her shoulders, and instead of a sweater set and loafers she was wearing a brightly colored dress and sandals, but otherwise she hadn’t changed.

  Then my mother was hugging me, and I was hugging her, and we were both crying and laughing at the same time.

  Thirty-four

  And that’s how Charley and Rafe found us.

  They rushed in seconds later, followed by the Buenos Aires police and the local bomb squad — summoned by the café manager — and a bunch of guys in dark suits and mirrored sunglasses. They’d been summoned by Hunter.

  “Look, they have the little wires in their collars,” said Charley, gripping my arm in excitement. “They must be Secret Service.”

  She wasn’t far off. They were from the U.S. Embassy.

  Hunter hadn’t had a bomb in his briefcase — only a recording device that hadn’t appreciated being drenched in coffee. And he wasn’t recording the meeting for evil reasons, either. There had been another reason for his behavior, one that had never occurred to us: He was part of an international task force investigating manipulation of the energy markets, and he’d been on his own ultrasecret mission to entrap Samantha Arquero — so ultrasecret he couldn’t even tell his own wife.

  “Libra,” I said. “Carolina was right about that, too.”

  “What?” asked Charley. “And when did you talk to Carolina?”

  “The scales of justice — that’s a Libra thing, the same way the archer is a Sagittarius thing. And Carolina said Hunter was the Libra.”

  Meanwhile, Hunter hadn’t been the only person besides Quinn and me making a bootleg that morning. We hadn’t seen them, because they’d been behind their own column on the opposite side of the room, but T.K. and Mark had recorded everything as well, though T.K. had built her own surveillance equipment from spare parts while they’d been hiding out — that was the sort of thing my mother enjoyed doing when she had too much free time on her hands. And Mark was the blond guy who’d joined with Hunter and Quinn in beating Samantha Arquero’s driver into submission. The Krav Maga had proved to be a definite plus.

  So that was all good, and Charley wasn’t even angry with me, either. Well, that wasn’t completely true. She said she’d actually been absolutely furious, though once she’d calmed down she realized she’d have done the same thing if our roles had been reversed. And she’d done exactly that, hopping the first flight she could to Buenos Aires.

  Which was why her phone kept going straight to voice mail — she’d been on a plane for most of the previous day. Then, when she arrived at midnight, not only did she make the same discovery I’d made about international cell phone coverage, she was detained at passport control.

  It turned out putting Dieter on the terrorist watch list hadn’t been such a great idea. Somehow our picture had been circulated along with Dieter’s name, and the guy at immigration had thought he’d recognized me, but when he checked I wasn’t in the system. He’d flagged my name, however, and when a second Truesdale arrived so soon after, an alarm had gone off.

  “Have I mentioned I’m going to kill Dieter?” Charley said as we waited at the Café Tortoni for the police to finish talking to T.K. and Mark and Hunter. “I know he meant well in his own ridiculously insane way, but I was trapped at the airport all night trying to explain about mobilizing the power of the masses to the entire Argentinean civil service.” Eventually she’d negotiated her release, and she and Rafe had managed to connect with each other and with Manolo, who’d told them where they could find us.

  “Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m starving, and as soon as we can get out of here, I’m thinking dulce de leche, which is some kind of caramely thing that comes in a variety of formats, including, most important, an ice cream format — I was reading about it in the in-flight magazine — and it would be a tragedy if we missed this opportunity to sample it for ourselves.”

  Between the recordings and the evidence Rafe found documenting how Samantha Arquero paid off Alejandro Frers using EAROFO funds, the authorities had everything they needed to indict both Samantha Arquero and Thad for conspiring to commit murder. It looked like they’d also be able to nail the EAROFO member companies for violations of international law. Not only would they have to call off their plans for drilling anywhere that wasn’t strictly legal, they’d be slapped with hefty fines to be paid into a fund investing in renewable energy technologies.

  We all stayed in Buenos Aires for a couple more days, being debriefed by Hunter and his task force, but then we headed back to New York. And the trip home was a lot more pleasant than the trip there. This was partly because Hunter had chartered a plane, so we traveled in style, and partly because all of the stress and worry and chaos swirling around me had finally been put to rest.

  So on the flight Quinn and Hunter and Mark sat together in one cluster of seats, discussing how James Bond traditionally relied more on sophisticated mechanical devices than hand-to-hand combat skills to thwart his enemies, but Krav Maga might offer him a whole new way to get out of tough situations.

  Charley and Rafe sat in another cluster of seats, and Charley did most of the talking there, about dulce de leche and where she planned to take T.K. shopping since being on the lam had left her with serious holes in her wardrobe and Dieter’s inspired concept for a neo-Surrealist film featuring a private detective who could be modeled on Rafe. Rafe listened adoringly, stammering replies as required, which wasn’t often since Charley’s idea of heaven was eleven hour
s with a captive audience.

  And I got to sit with my mother. Even now, after everything had time to sink in, it was sort of stunning to actually be there with her in person and not worrying that she might be dead or threatened or otherwise in danger.

  “I tried to call you,” she said. “As soon as we landed in Patagonia.”

  “I know — that’s what started everything.”

  And I told her about how I somehow had just sensed the sixteen-second, static-filled message I’d received the day I started at Prescott could only be from her. Moments after I’d listened to the message I’d seen Quinn for the first time, and then I’d met Natalie, and Carolina and Rafe, and from there the knot had unraveled, leading us strand by strand to that morning at the Café Tortoni.

  Of course, it took nearly the entire flight to get through the whole story, especially since we kept getting sidetracked.

  “You’re taking drama?” asked T.K., confused. “Aren’t you supposed to be taking Computer Science as your elective?”

  “It wouldn’t fit into my schedule. And I know it won’t help much on the SATs, but it’s actually turned out to be sort of amazing. Everyone said Quinn and I were incredible in the scene we had to do from Romeo and Juliet, though that probably had more to do with Quinn than me.”

  And maybe the foreign travel she’d been doing really had broadened my mother’s perspective, because instead of talking about how once we returned to Palo Alto we’d get my class schedule back in its proper order, she only said, “So, you’re enjoying Prescott?”

  I thought about that. “Enjoying” might not be exactly the right word, but it wasn’t so far off. “I mean, I miss Erin and people like that, and I’m having problems with physics, but I’d have problems with physics anywhere and Natalie’s been tutoring me, and then there’s Quinn, which is huge, and even Gwyneth isn’t so awful once you get to know her.”