Charlie Thorne and the Lost City

by Stuart Gibbs

  The locals gathered on the shore watched with amazement. Charlie had been a novice surfer when she had arrived in Puerto Villamil. Even though she had been able to spot where the waves would break, she hadn’t been able to ride them. But within a few weeks, using her natural athleticism and her unnatural skill at reading the waves, she was surfing better than most people could after years of practice. The people watching her now shook their heads and uttered the name they all called her behind her back. “Perfecta.”

  It was warm on the beach, as usual. Since Isla Isabela sat directly on the equator, the temperature didn’t vary much. Charlie peeled off the neoprene suit she had used to stay warm in the water, revealing the bathing suit she wore underneath, then picked up her board and started home barefoot through town.

  There wasn’t much to Puerto Villamil, which made sense, given that it was one of the most remote towns on earth. It sat on the southern fringe of Isla Isabela in the Galápagos Islands, which were well off the coast of mainland South America. Isla Isabela was actually the largest of the Galápagos, but most of it was uninhabitable, as it was quite volcanic and almost devoid of fresh water. The Sierra Negra volcano constituted much of the island; its crater was the second largest on earth, after Ngorongoro in Africa.

  Therefore Puerto Villamil, set at the base of Sierra Negra, was about as far from civilization as one could get. Should a riptide have snapped Charlie away from shore, it was nearly nine thousand miles until she’d see land again. For this reason, it sometimes felt as though the little town was on the very edge of the earth.

  That was one of the reasons that Charlie had chosen to come here. She wanted isolation. She wanted to be as far from other people as possible. It was safer that way.

  There were more marine iguanas in Puerto Villamil than people. The lizards were quite large, growing up to five feet long, and they were everywhere: lazing on the beach, walking along the dusty streets, lounging on porches, and wandering into the stores. They were just as fearless of humans as they had been back when Charles Darwin had arrived, as was the case with most of the wildlife in the Galápagos. Animals often needed a long time to evolve a healthy fear of humans—and here, there hadn’t been enough. As Charlie headed through town, two sea lions were sleeping directly in the middle of the street, while three penguins waddled toward the small marina. Many people were surprised to learn there were penguins in the Galápagos, as opposed to Antarctica, but this species was endemic to the islands. It was endangered, with only 1,500 left, although they were relatively common on Isla Isabela. One of the things that Charlie liked the best about the Galápagos, in addition to its remoteness, was that it was the only place on earth where you could snorkel with an iguana, a sea lion, and a penguin all at once.

  The roar of outboard motors suddenly cut through the town. They were loud enough to startle the penguins, which scurried away frantically, although the sea lions continued snoring loudly. Charlie paused in the street and looked back toward the dock at the eastern edge of Puerto Villamil.

  A speedboat had rounded the southern tip of the island and was headed toward town. It was big for a speedboat, with two enormous engines attached to the stern, and it skimmed across the water like a skipped stone.

  In the four weeks that Charlie had been in Puerto Villamil, she had never seen a boat like this. Every day, a few boats bringing ecotourists would arrive, but those were all small cruise ships, built for comfort rather than speed. Some of the local fishermen had boats as well, but those were all old, battered, and weather-beaten. This boat was very different; It was expensive and built to go at very high speeds, the sort of craft you’d see millionaires racing along the coast in Miami or the Côte D’Azur in France.

  That didn’t necessarily mean anything was wrong, but Charlie was always on the lookout for things that were out of the ordinary. When you lived your life on the run, you had to stay attuned to your surroundings at all times.

  Charlie resumed walking toward her home. She didn’t run, because that would draw attention. But she did pick up her pace, striding briskly through the town.

  The house Charlie rented was small and ramshackle—there really wasn’t anything big or well built in Puerto Villamil—but she didn’t need much. It sat beside the marsh that marked the western boundary of town. Just behind the house, a path snaked through the wetlands to the Tupiza Tortoise Breeding Center, where Charlie volunteered her time, helping to keep the celebrated Galápagos tortoises from going extinct.

  A woman she had never met before was on her porch.

  Charlie noticed her from two blocks away. It wasn’t hard, as the woman apparently wanted to be seen. She was sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, reading a book.

  She wasn’t from Puerto Villamil. Charlie could recognize every one of the town’s residents. The woman had unusually slim features: her face, nose, and lips were all narrow lines, although her eyes were wide and round. She reminded Charlie of a Modigliani sculpture. She was dressed in the same outfit that the volunteers at Tupiza wore: khaki shirt and shorts, although instead of dusty, thick-soled work boots, she wore running shoes. Despite the workmanlike clothing, she was strikingly beautiful.

  A visitor was also an unusual occurrence; Charlie had never had one since arriving in Puerto Villamil. None of her friends or family knew she was here—and ideally, her enemies didn’t either. Combined with the arrival of the speedboat, the visitor’s presence set Charlie’s brain humming, analyzing the probabilities of all that was happening. She didn’t like what she came up with.

  Still, Charlie didn’t run. She had nowhere to run to. And the woman didn’t seem to be a threat. Threatening people tended to ambush you. They didn’t sit on your front porch in broad daylight.

  As Charlie got closer, she noticed that the woman was wearing makeup. Not much, just a bit of eyeshadow and lipstick, but most people around here didn’t bother with makeup at all. The woman had also spent time doing her hair, and her clothes were spotless and expertly pressed. All of it indicated that this was a woman who cared about how she presented herself.

  She looked up as Charlie approached, dog-eared a page of her book, and smiled pleasantly. “Hello, Mariposa. My name is Esmerelda Castle.” There was a slight accent to her words, as if English was not her first language.

  Charlie’s immediate response was to pretend as though she couldn’t speak English at all. Any time a tourist had approached her over the past few weeks, she had quickly said “No hablo inglés” and walked away. But Esmerelda seemed very well aware that Charlie understood English, so Charlie figured there was no point in acting like she didn’t. “Hi,” she said, propping her surfboard against the wall of her house.

  “I work at the Darwin Research Station on Isla Santa Cruz,” Esmerelda said. “We’ve found something of great interest there, and my friends at Tupiza suggested you might be able to help us with it.”

  “Who at Tupiza?” Charlie asked suspiciously.

  Esmerelda smiled again, as though she found Charlie’s suspicions amusing. “Everyone, really. Raoul Cabazon. Stacy Devillers. Arturo and Fred and Johnny. They all say that you have a gift for codes and puzzles and that sort of thing.”

  Charlie nodded. There didn’t seem to be any point in denying this. The names Esmerelda had mentioned were all people who worked at Tupiza, and Charlie often solved puzzles during her breaks there. Crosswords, cryptics, acrostics, and that sort of thing. She was addicted to them. And what Esmerelda was talking about struck her as strange but intriguing. “You found a puzzle at the research station?”

  “Yes. A code of some sort, we believe. It was etched into the shell of a tortoise.”

  Charlie’s eyes widened in surprise. “Who would etch a code into the shell of a tortoise?”

  “That’s where this gets really interesting,” Esmerelda replied. “It appears the code was left by Charles Darwin himself. And we could use your help figuring it out.”

  TWO

  Langley, Virginia

&nb
sp; CIA Director Jamilla Carter was in a bad mood.

  A cold front had slammed into northern Virginia, and she was outside in the middle of it. It was early April, and it should have been spring, but instead the temperature had plummeted into the single digits. The snow was coming down in sheets. And yet Carter was trudging around in it in a park along the Potomac, looking for a stupid dead drop.

  A dead drop was a covert location where agents could leave information for one another without having to meet. It was common to use one in the intelligence game… if you were a field agent. The director of the CIA wasn’t supposed to use dead drops, though. She was supposed to order other people to use them. She was supposed to sit in her nice, warm office and wait for her agents to bring information to her. But Agent Dante Garcia didn’t trust anyone at CIA headquarters besides Jamilla Carter, and Carter had to admit, there was good reason for that. Garcia’s last mission had gone sideways because of a traitorous CIA agent, so now he was exercising extreme caution.

  And Carter was willing to put up with that, willing to come out here and stomp around in the freezing cold on her own, because Pandora was at stake. Pandora was an equation that Einstein himself had discovered, a corollary to his famous E = MC2. While E = MC2 explained that there was a tremendous amount of energy locked away inside every single atom in the universe, Pandora revealed how to access that energy. In the right hands, it could solve the world’s energy problems. But in the wrong hands, it was incredibly dangerous. It would allow governments—or even small groups of zealots—to build weapons of mass destruction. That was why the US government wanted it—and more importantly, they wanted to make sure no one else had it.

  However, Einstein had also realized how dangerous Pandora could be, so he had hidden it. With his great wisdom, he had made it extremely hard to find. Over the next few decades, the CIA had failed to locate the equation—as had every other intelligence agency on earth—until Garcia, a young and innovative agent, had suggested a radical idea: If you wanted to find something Einstein had hidden, then maybe you needed someone as smart as Einstein to do it. And the closest person to Einstein, at least intellectually, was Charlie Thorne.

  Thorne was a wild card, but she had come through—in a way. She had successfully tracked down Pandora, but she hadn’t turned it over to the CIA. During a final battle between the CIA and their enemies, a fire had broken out, and Charlie appeared to have been killed in it—at first. Afterward, Agent Garcia had discovered that she had actually committed the equation to memory, destroyed the original, and escaped. So now the only remaining copy of Pandora in existence was inside Charlie’s mind.

  Therefore, finding Charlie Thorne was of paramount importance to the CIA. And they needed to find her before anyone else did. Because there were lots of dangerous people out there who would do whatever it took to get Charlie to cough up the equation. Carter had assigned Garcia to the operation, but because they knew the CIA had been compromised, the mission was off the books. The only people who knew what Garcia was tasked with—or that Charlie Thorne was alive at all—were Carter, Garcia himself, and Garcia’s fellow agent Milana Moon.

  As a further security measure, Garcia refused to use any direct electronic correspondence with Carter, even with encryption. He didn’t trust it. So there were no emails or phone calls. There was only the dead drop. Like it was 1950 and they were fighting the Cold War.

  Carter had no idea where on earth Garcia and Moon even were. That was secret too.

  The way the dead drop worked was, Garcia had a friend he trusted in Virginia. Carter didn’t know who, but chances were, they weren’t even in intelligence. It might have been Garcia’s best friend from grade school, or his neighbor, or his podiatrist. Garcia would mail his friend an encrypted message in a specially sealed envelope that they wouldn’t open. Instead, they would deliver it to the dead drop at the park near CIA headquarters. Once it was in place, they would let Garcia know, and then Garcia would send Carter an innocuous message from a fake email account. Every time Carter got spam from WorldWide Travel, it was a signal that there was something in the dead drop for her. Today, just before noon, she had received a message from WorldWide Travel offering her incredibly low deals on a weekend in Vegas.

  So Carter had canceled her lunch and headed out into the cold.

  There was one advantage of the crummy weather; no one else was in the park. On a nice spring day, there would have been hikers or picnickers or families out with their kids. But today there hadn’t been a single other car in the parking lot when Carter arrived.

  Since the storm had come late in the year, many of the trees had already sprouted spring leaves, and the snow weighed heavily on the branches. Carter picked her way along a trail through the snow-shrouded forest until she came to a medium-size oak tree, then turned off through the underbrush until she came to a small brook. The brook carved a narrow gully, and when Carter clambered down into it, it was deep enough to hide her from the sight of anyone on the trail—not that anyone else was dumb enough to be out in this weather. Twenty paces upstream, there was an ancient tree stump with a hollow underneath it. The dead drop.

  Carter reached into the hollow and found an envelope wrapped in a plastic baggie to protect it from the elements. She broke the seal on the envelope and removed the small piece of paper inside.

  As if it weren’t enough to have all this other secrecy, the message was encoded, using a cipher that Carter and Garcia had worked out beforehand. Carter sat on the stump in the snow and decrypted the message, too eager now to even return to the warmth of her car. She quickly came up with the translation:

  Tracked down the item you were looking for. Hoping to procure it for you soon.

  Despite the cold and the snow, Director Carter’s mood instantly lifted and a smile spread across her face.

  Dante Garcia had found Charlie Thorne.

  THREE

  Puerto Villamil

  Charlie wanted to hear all about the code on the tortoise, but she also desperately wanted to take a shower. Her body was sticky and briny from the ocean, and she considered the speedboat a bad omen. There was a good chance that she would soon have to be on the move, and she wanted to at least be clean when that happened.

  So she decided to multitask. She got right in the shower and had Esmerelda explain everything at the same time.

  The house Charlie was renting was only three rooms: tiny bedroom, even tinier bathroom, and a combination living room/kitchen/dining room. It was small enough, and the walls were thin enough, that Esmerelda could sit at the dining table and easily converse with Charlie in the bathroom, even with the water running. The shower wasn’t loud because there was no water pressure; only a meager stream of water trickled from the showerhead.

  The house had come furnished. The only personal effects Charlie had were books, most of which she had gotten from tourists; when people finished reading something on vacation, they often didn’t feel like lugging it back home again. There were quite a few books of puzzles as well, which Charlie had bummed off visitors who couldn’t solve the hardest ones. The books were piled everywhere: on the bed, the kitchen counters, the floor. Esmerelda had to remove a stack from the single chair at the dining table before she could sit down.

  She said, “The tortoise died a few days ago, and it was only when we brought it in to autopsy it that we found the words carved into its plastron.”

  In her time volunteering at the breeding facility, Charlie had learned all the parts of a tortoise. The plastron was the lower part of the shell, the flat piece that covered the animal’s belly. “And how do you know it was Darwin who carved them?”

  “Because he signed his name. And though carving isn’t exactly the same as handwriting, there are some similarities. We know what Darwin’s writing looked like. This seems to be a match.”

  Charlie furiously shampooed the salt water from her hair. “Darwin visited these islands in 1835. You think this tortoise was almost two hundred years old?”

&nbs
p; “It’s certainly possible. Our estimates for how old these animals can get are really just guesses. Although we’ve known about them for two centuries, we’ve only been studying them scientifically for a few decades. Some of our researchers think they could live as long as four hundred or five hundred years. We really won’t know for sure until we can observe one for its entire life—which would require several generations of scientists to document.”

  “I guess that makes sense.” Charlie knew there were other species of animal that lived exceptionally long lives. Recently, a Greenland shark had been determined to be at least four hundred by carbon-dating the lenses of its eyes. “And in all those years, no one ever noticed there was something written on this tortoise’s plastron?”

  “Well, it’s not really our policy to go around flipping all the tortoises over. And it’s not easy to do. The big tortoises can weigh nearly half a ton. Plus, the plastron is usually flat on the ground, and the tortoises are often wallowing in mud or half-submerged in ponds, so the carving was hidden from view. If we hadn’t done the autopsy, no one might have ever seen it.”

  “Why did you autopsy it?”

  “We autopsy all the tortoises when they die. It helps us estimate how old they were—and may give us clues to the secrets of their longevity. If we can learn why a creature like a Galápagos tortoise lives so long, that might have ramifications for helping humans live longer too.”

  Charlie finished rinsing herself, turned off the water, and grabbed a towel. “So what did Darwin carve into this shell?”

  “It’s probably better if I show you,” Esmerelda said. “I brought some photographs of what he wrote.”

  “Cool. Give me a few moments.” Charlie toweled herself off—although, it was so humid, she didn’t feel much drier. She quickly pulled on shorts, a T-shirt, and sneakers and emerged from the bedroom to find Esmerelda scrolling through photos on a laptop computer.

  The first photos Charlie saw were of the dead tortoise in what looked like a laboratory. It lay on the floor, with four people standing around it. The tortoise was enormous, about the size of a bumper car. Its carapace—the upper shell—was big enough that several small children could have hidden under it.