by Diana Renn
“I’m sure they would. They’re really nice.”
She gave a short nod and looked away. “It’s funny. I came here just wanting some freedom. But being around a family actually sounds sort of okay right now. Just for a night,” she added quickly. “Just to get a good night’s sleep.”
“Of course.”
We turned to go, rounded a corner, and almost bumped into Santiago, who was jogging toward us. “What happened to you two? Did you fall off the chiva or something?”
It almost sounded funny, the whole idea of it, but Santiago wasn’t joking. He wasn’t smiling at all.
47
WE ALL stood blinking at each other under a streetlight, like stunned moths, and finally Mari spoke.
“It’s not what you think,” she said to Santiago. “Tessa got sick, and I wanted to help.”
“Really? I thought you ditched the chiva party. And our group,” said Santiago, looking at me more than Mari. “We have volunteers who do this sometimes. They jump off the bus in La Zona and run off to a nightclub. I didn’t think you would do that. But when we realized you two were missing, my father asked me to go back and find you. I’ve been in every club for four blocks.”
Santiago didn’t seem angry in the way Jake used to get angry. His voice didn’t turn into acid. He wasn’t playing mind games. He was just legitimately bewildered. If I were in his shoes, and were responsible for the safety of foreign volunteers, I’d feel the same way.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “We should have told someone we needed to go. And we did go to a nightclub. But it’s not what you think. It was for a meeting. I can explain.”
“Can you explain this, too?” Santiago held up a small black box, about the size of a pack of cards. “I found this attached beneath my car earlier today.”
“What is that?” Mari said, reaching for it. “A garage door opener?”
“No. A GPS tracker,” he said. “It attaches by magnet.” He showed her.
“A GPS tracker!” I grabbed the device from Mari and inspected it. It didn’t look like anything special. “You mean this could tell someone where your car is?”
“That’s high-tech spy gadget stuff!” Mari exclaimed.
“No, it’s not,” said Santiago. “You can buy them online for three hundred dollars or less. Sometimes people buy them to track a grandparent who has dementia, or a cheating lover, or a teenage driver.”
“You’re a teenage driver,” Mari reminded him. “Maybe your parents put it there.”
“They would never,” said Santiago. “My mother does not drive a car. My sisters do not yet drive. My father takes his bike almost everywhere. I am the family chauffeur. My family, they would not even know what this thing is.”
That lie Mari told about my getting sick was possibly about to come true. I felt seriously nauseated as the meaning of that gadget hit me. “The airport,” I said slowly. “They put it on at the airport. Darwin and his crew. They watched me go to your car, and one of them probably put it on there when you were calling my host family.”
Mari’s eyes widened. “That’s how Balboa found us at El Panecillo yesterday!” she exclaimed. “I was wondering about that. Santiago drove us there. Now it all makes sense.”
“And that’s how they found the Ruiz house. Santiago had driven me there. So they knew where to leave me a note.”
“Wait—who came to the Ruiz house and put that note on the gate? I thought you said that was from Mari?” said Santiago. “What is all this you are saying?”
I rubbed my forehead and looked away, unable to meet his gaze. All my efforts to protect Santiago, to avoid dragging another nice person into this mess, had been useless. He was now a target of this spy ring, too. Literally. And now I looked like a liar on top of everything else.
“Let’s go back to Mari’s place so she can pack,” I finally said. “We’ll explain everything there.”
“But first?” Mari took the tracking device, with its blinking green light, and affixed it to a parked taxi cab with nobody in it. “There,” she said, with a grim expression. “Let them chase after that for a while. That should keep them busy.”
Back at Mari’s empty apartment, while Mari stuffed a change of clothes in a bag, Santiago and I sat in the kitchen, amid the piles of take-out food containers and rotting fruit. I was glad Mari would be taking a break from this place. The air felt rank and toxic. I swatted at fruit flies and told Santiago everything, going all the way back to Chain Reaction.
“So we weren’t behind Juan Carlos’s death, in case you were wondering,” I concluded.
“Yeah, we’re not international fugitives or anything like that,” Mari called out from behind the partition. I could hear her opening and closing drawers.
“And we helped launch the criminal investigation, by finding the sabotaged bike frame,” I added.
“I didn’t think you were fugitives,” said Santiago. “But I’ve been following the case in the news. I had to wonder when you were both acting misteriosas, since both of you had a personal connection to el Cóndor. Now I understand. Chuta.” He had been twirling a pencil around in his fingers while he listened, and suddenly it snapped in two, he’d been gripping it so hard. “You are having a serious problem.”
“Now do you believe me? That I’m not just here for clubbing adventures?”
“I do. I believe you.” Santiago held my gaze. “You do not wish to go to the police with this?”
“No way,” I said. “Darwin’s got plants in the police force.”
“I agree. There are problems with our police right now, and it is too big a risk,” Santiago said. “If people are desperate for cash, they can be persuaded to do all kinds of things.”
Or paid to look the other way. Even the military officer at the protest the night I arrived had been easily bribed; Santiago had slipped him a twenty to let us around the blockade. Is that how Darwin’s note on Saturday night had arrived at the Ruizes’ gate? Had Victor, the night guard, been paid to ignore it?
“The consulate,” I said, thinking out loud. “I saw on the State Department website that there’s a hotline you can call to report crimes.”
“They’ll contact the local police anyway,” said Santiago. “The embassy does not have jurisdiction.”
“Then I’ll go straight to the top. Who’s the U.S. ambassador?” Excited by my new plan, I stood up and started pacing, thinking out loud. “I’m sure he’s in touch with FBI field agents or customs people. They can go after Darwin and then find the links back to Juan Carlos’s murder.”
Mari popped her head around the side of the bookshelf partition. “His name is Michael Carver. I thought of that already, and I even called to try to get an appointment,” she said. “But he’s on vacation, in Venezuela this week, watching the PAC Tour. Turns out he’s a big cycling fan. He won’t be back until the PAC Tour comes to Quito in a couple of days.”
My hopes for a speedy resolution shattered.
“But the ambassador knows Preston Lane,” Santiago added. “I am sure when he returns he will be willing to talk with us if we tell him that you know Preston personally.”
“Wait, how does the ambassador know Preston Lane?” I asked.
“Ambassador Carver knows all the foreigners who do a lot of business with Ecuador,” Santiago replied. “The EcuaBar cacao farms are all based in El Oriente, and Preston Lane gives to many charities and nonprofits here. Such as Vuelta. Have you seen the picture of them with my father, in my father’s office?”
I shook my head.
“Preston Lane got the ambassador interested in cycling. This is why the ambassador is away now. But I wish you had told me of this spy situation earlier,” Santiago said to me quietly when Mari went back to her packing. “I am more than a getahead vehicle. I am deeply interested in what happened to Juan Carlos.”
I winced at the mention of how I
’d used him for his wheels. “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to keep relying on you to take me places. But why are you so interested?”
“Why?” He looked surprised. “For the same reason everyone in Ecuador is interested. One of our heroes has fallen. But I have a special interest as well. Juan Carlos helped Vuelta become visible internationally. And Preston Lane has donated large sums of money to Vuelta. Now, with his star rider gone, we don’t expect donations to continue for long. My father is worried he will go back to struggling to keep the organization continuing. He wants to use Juan Carlos’s name to help as long as he can, but if there is something wrong about his death, it is something we need to know.”
I gave him a long look. “What’s wrong about Juan Carlos’s death, Santiago, is that Juan Carlos is dead.”
“I know.”
“But I’m at the end of the road after tonight. There’s nothing more I can do.”
Mari emerged from her makeshift bedroom lugging an overstuffed duffel bag. Clearly more than a day’s change of clothes.
“I thought you were only staying one night,” I said.
“I am. Do you think they’d let me do some laundry at the house?”
“Of course. Got Juan Carlos’s flash drive in there, too?” I made a feeble attempt at a joke.
“No! Tessa!”
“Sorry. Just doing my job. Now I can call Darwin tomorrow and report our revealing conversation. I’m sure he’ll faint from shock.”
Santiago had been tipping back in a chair, but suddenly he brought all legs down with a crash. “There are two choices here, I think,” he said. “We look for the information Juan Carlos stole. Or we look for the person he stole it from, the person Darwin is trying to protect. The first choice seems easier, and less dangerous. They are looking for one single flash drive. But don’t you think Juan Carlos was smart enough to make extra copies of the information? Or send it to somebody else? Darwin said Juan Carlos talked to a friend in Ecuador. That was before Mari arrived.”
“So if Juan Carlos didn’t give it to Mari, who else could have it?” I asked.
Mari sank into a kitchen chair. “His best friend. El Ratón. Why didn’t we think of that before?”
“Yes!” Santiago thumped the table so hard in his excitement that a pile of take-out containers slid onto the floor. “Why aren’t Darwin and his spies bothering that guy?”
“Maybe they are,” I said slowly, as a new realization dawned on me. “Darwin said he’d intercepted correspondence between Juan Carlos and a friend here, and that’s how he got the idea Mari might have this information. The local friend? I bet you anything it’s el Ratón.”
Mari sat up straighter. “I bet you’re right. And since el Ratón was Juan Carlos’s best friend, he’s probably sitting on his friend’s information, doing all he can to protect him.”
“We must find him at the urban downhill race tomorrow,” said Santiago. “We’ll ask him if Juan Carlos sent him any files, and tell him to give us a copy. I’m sure he’ll want to help us finish his best friend’s mission.”
“But even if we get a copy of the information from el Ratón, we can’t just hand it over to Darwin,” Mari pointed out. “Right? Otherwise he wins! That’s not what Juan Carlos would want.”
“Right,” agreed Santiago. “So we need to find out what kind of information Juan Carlos was trying to leak. Then, if we agree with his cause, we can finish his work and leak it ourselves. We can give it to the U.S. ambassador when he returns to Quito. If he has hard evidence, the chief of police in Quito will have to take this seriously, as well as the immigration and customs enforcement officials.”
“That bike coming in the container’s important, too,” Mari added. “If the flash drive is so important to Darwin, it might explain where the cash in the bike came from, and link Darwin and whoever Darwin’s client is to Juan Carlos’s murder. I’m sure there was some reason Juan Carlos was trying to expose both the cash and the flash drive to the media at the same time. We need to follow through on his plan. We need to get both the flash drive and the bike into the U.S. ambassador’s hands. Together.”
I nodded eagerly. Even though everything we talked about sounded scary, it felt good to have a plan again, to be out of that place of despair. “Juan Carlos was looking for a media person to expose something. But I think we should show it to the authorities who can actually prosecute. Darwin’s crimes—cyberstalking, physical stalking, smuggling, maybe murder—these are international crimes. We have to make sure the ambassador is at the container unload on Friday.”
“I can send him a special invitation from Vuelta and tell him it’s an important cultural exchange,” Santiago promised.
“And don’t forget, Preston Lane will be at the unloading, too,” Mari added. “I think he’ll be very interested to see what comes out of that shipping container in four days and what it might show about his top cyclist’s death.”
Outside, Santiago hailed a taxi, and we all rode back to the Vuelta office to pick up his car. Santiago sat between Mari and me. My head turned to look at Salsoteca Mundial as we passed. There was a longer line at the door now, and the bouncer in the cream suit was gone.
“Too bad Darwin picked that as his hangout,” said Mari, following my gaze. “I always thought it looked like a fun place to dance. Is it?” she asked, turning to Santiago.
“What? Oh. I wouldn’t know,” he said, looking embarrassed.
“You’ve never been there?” said Mari.
“No.” He gave a half smile and scratched his head. “Actually? I do not dance.”
“What? Why? I thought all Latin guys danced,” said Mari in a teasing voice.
“All but me,” he admitted. “I think I have the honor of being the worst dancer in all of Ecuador. Maybe all of South America.”
I had a fleeting thought of my red sundress still folded up in my suitcase. In the next moment, I packed that thought away. There would be no dancing for me on this trip—my surreal spin with Pizarro did not count. And I definitely would not be practicing any hot dance moves with Santiago. I felt a twinge of disappointment. Then I packed up that feeling, too.
48
AFTER SANTIAGO dropped us off at the Ruiz house, Mari was instantly welcomed into their home. Amparo and Andreas wanted to hear all about the chiva—how it was before we both got sick and had to rush into a café restroom to throw up.
Street vendor food. That was the story the three of us had concocted to explain our disappearance, and to explain why Santiago was bringing us both home.
I hated the idea of lying to the Ruizes—again—but I didn’t know what else to do. They were parents. They’d worry. They’d call my mom and dad. Confessing the truth to the Ruizes would only put them at risk and get me in trouble. I might even get sent back home. Then I’d really feel like a failure. Filming for my vlog was now impossible—I’d never see my camera again. Buying a new one, in Quito, was out of the question; my parents had me on a tight budget of spending money, and after all they’d done for me, I didn’t dare ask for anything more. Yet I didn’t want to lose the chance to solve the mystery of Juan Carlos’s death—the one good thing I could still manage to do here. I had to finish this race.
After making us tea, Hugo and Lucia spoke in Spanish with Mari, asking about her cousin and her family’s roots in Ecuador. Even Peludo the poodle snuggled up against her, wriggling excitedly. I felt invisible, and exhausted from speaking so much Spanish. No one seemed to notice when I slunk off to Amparo’s room to get ready for bed. They were too busy howling with laughter over Mari’s funny stories about Compass Bikes, bonding with the homestay daughter of their dreams.
As laughter floated in from the living room, I went with my laptop to the patio, where the Internet signal seemed strongest, and checked my email. I found another note from Kylie. The subject line was a series of exclamation points.
Amazin
g news—I got the Lane Scholarship!!!!!!
Preston Lane actually called me into his office this afternoon to give me the good news personally!
So fast—can you believe it?? He just wrote out a check right then and there and handed it to me.
Senior year is PAID FOR. We’re graduating together!!!
Funny thing I thought I’d pass on to you—when he wrote the check, I saw a pamphlet on his desk. For Gamblers Anonymous. It’s a group like Alcoholics Anonymous, I think, for people with gambling addiction. I think he saw me notice it and got embarrassed because he moved a Wall Street Journal over it, like to cover it up. Hard to picture someone like him wasting money on gambling—and maybe the pamphlet wasn’t even for him. But if it is, do you think it’s okay to take the scholarship money? I suddenly got scared that the check might not go through. Ha. Paranoid. I know. Never mind.
Sarita and I are going out to celebrate! We miss you! Hope you’re living it up down there! PS—Sarita wants to know if you’ve worn The Dress yet???
I couldn’t stop smiling. Out of today’s many failures, it was great to hear of one success. I wrote back right away to congratulate Kylie. At the same time, I felt strange twinges inside me, like the minor keys on a keyboard. I’d seen kids my age at La Casa with no shoes, or going out to do hard labor instead of going to school, or taking care of babies. I’d seen kids in the street, barely six years old, approaching strangers to shine their shoes. I wanted the best for my friend, of course, and I was thrilled that she’d stay at Shady Pines now. But part of me kept thinking: How much does it matter? Just going to public school in our city was a privileged opportunity.
I reread the stuff Kylie had written about the gambling pamphlet. That was so strange. Preston Lane seemed like the last person on earth to have a gambling addiction. He was too careful, too into conservation of resources to waste his money on casinos. Not to mention too busy running his company and the bike team, giving motivational talks, and supporting various good causes. That pamphlet had to be for somebody else, maybe a troubled employee.
