Charlie Thorne and the Lost City

by Stuart Gibbs

  But this letter referred to a discovery of some sort—one that Captain FitzRoy had handled in a way that had greatly upset Darwin. It was well known to historians that FitzRoy and Darwin had not gotten along after their return to England, but no one was sure of the exact reason. If FitzRoy had forced Darwin to keep a great discovery a secret, that certainly would have explained the bad blood between them.

  Next, there was the reference to the departure from Guayaquil. Until that point, there had been no documented evidence that the Beagle had ever visited mainland Ecuador at all.

  And finally, there was the reference to Darwin’s strange behavior on the Galápagos Islands. Darwin’s throwing lizards into the sea was well documented. The world’s only marine iguanas lived on the islands, and they had seen so few humans that they had no fear of them. (In fact, this remained the case in the modern day as well.) Darwin had famously thrown one into the sea, watched it swim right back to him, and had then thrown it in again several more times, fascinated by the behavior. He had also performed other odd experiments to show how docile the island’s wildlife was, such as riding on a giant tortoise or shoving a hawk off the branch of a tree with the barrel of his gun.

  But no one had ever mentioned him etching nonsense into the shell of a tortoise.

  “I’ll bet you it wasn’t nonsense!” Esmerelda’s father had exclaimed. “It was something about the treasure!”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Esmerelda had cautioned.

  “What else could it be? Darwin was angry, not crazy! And he was brilliant! Perhaps this Jeffords only thought it was nonsense, but it was something else entirely! Something he couldn’t understand!”

  Esmerelda had many other questions, but her father had answers to all of them: Darwin had carved the clue in the tortoise because he was upset at FitzRoy for hiding his discovery and wanted others to find it. The letter had probably been burned on purpose to hide the evidence; the crewman who had written it had even left instructions to destroy it. People had always wondered why Darwin had spent so much of the final year of the Beagle’s voyage in his cabin, presuming it was seasickness, but being in a foul mood and angry at the captain and crew would have also explained it.

  And as for the big question—What had Darwin found?—her father was emphatic. “Treasure! The Spaniards looted tons of gold from South America. More than any Europeans had ever seen in history! But no explorer could ever find the source of it. The natives wouldn’t share that information. Darwin must have discovered it.”

  “But why would the sailors keep it a secret?” Esmerelda asked.

  “So they could return and collect it for themselves. The Beagle was a government ship. Anything they brought back on it would have been the property of the British government. And it was too small to haul a load of gold. The excess weight would have sunk it the moment they hit a storm.”

  “Then why didn’t they go back?”

  “Because Darwin and FitzRoy had a falling-out. Darwin was the only one who knew where the gold was. If he refused to go, then no one else could find it.”

  Although there was logic to her father’s argument, Esmerelda had her doubts about it. But she believed Darwin had discovered something of great value, and her father’s passion for finding it had kindled her own. She wanted to unravel the mystery herself—and garnering fame and fortune would be nice side benefits.

  As they spoke, her father had suddenly begun gasping for breath, as if this burst of excitement had been too much for him. Esmerelda put her hand on his to calm him and felt his pulse racing like a rabbit’s. “Father!” she had cried. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he had insisted, and he’d meant it. Even though his body was failing, his final discovery had made him delirious with joy. “After all this time, here’s proof that I wasn’t crazy. Now you and your brothers can continue my work.”

  “You mean, go to the Galápagos?”

  “Yes! Find what Darwin left on the tortoise! And then follow that to find what he discovered!”

  Although Esmerelda was excited about the new clues, she considered telling her father that he was asking a tremendous favor from her. The Galápagos Islands were on the other side of the world. And for all she knew, the clue on the tortoise shell might not exist anymore. Or perhaps it had never existed at all.

  But then her father clasped her hand. “Promise me,” he gasped. “Promise me you will go.”

  Esmerelda could see in his eyes that the life was quickly fading from him. She couldn’t deny the last wish of a dying man. “I promise,” she said.

  Her father managed a smile, which was the last thing he ever did.

  So Esmerelda had headed to the Galápagos, motivated by the promise she had made, the desire to finish what her father had started, and the lure of fame and fortune.

  Even so, she had never intended to stay as long as she had. She had expected to spend only a few weeks in the islands, perhaps a few months at most. But finding the tortoise shell Darwin had carved a message into had proved far more difficult than she had expected. And yet her father’s passion for the hunt burned deep within her, too. With every day, she grew more determined to find Darwin’s treasure, no matter the cost. She also became obsessed with it, reading everything she could about Darwin’s life, poring over her father’s notes time and again, chasing down every lead she could find in the islands.

  She hid all this from everyone else at the Darwin Research Station, of course. Instead, she presented herself as an enthusiastic worker with no hidden agenda and quickly parlayed her volunteer position into a full-time job doing community outreach. But with each day, she grew more determined to find what Darwin was looking for, no matter what.

  Meanwhile, her brothers had joined her in the islands. Paolo captained a scuba boat, while Gianni worked on a farm. Both helped Esmerelda with the family quest, although they knew she was the smart one and relied on her to find all the leads. They were only the muscle.

  The difference, Esmerelda realized, was that they were happy with their lives in the Galápagos, while she was not.

  She hated it there, out on the edge of the earth, so far from the things she loved, like art and culture and good food and wine. She missed the beauty of the Tuscan countryside, where she had grown up, and found the mostly barren volcanic landscapes of the islands to be ugly and depressing. She longed for concerts and soccer games. She found marine iguanas to be repulsive.

  But she still couldn’t bring herself to leave. She felt as though she had invested too much time to turn back, even though with all her searching she had come up empty. So she stuck it out, grinding out the days, pretending to be cheerful and happy at work when in reality she hated everything about the islands and couldn’t wait for the day when she could leave it all behind.

  And then, three days earlier, the clue she had sought for all those years had presented itself. A farmer had called the research station to report that an enormous tortoise on his property had died, and when the team brought it in for an autopsy, Darwin’s engraving was discovered.

  It had never occurred to Esmerelda to search the shells of tortoises that were living. Until that point, she had never realized that one Darwin had touched might still be alive. She had been searching for the shell of a dead tortoise.

  Still, she was thrilled by the discovery—and then frustrated when she couldn’t translate Darwin’s code.

  However, by that time she had learned of the girl on Isla Isabela who had a gift for codes. Esmerelda didn’t want to waste another day in the islands, trying to crack a code when there was someone who could do it for her. So she had talked her boss into letting her borrow the research station’s seaplane, then flown over to meet the girl. It had paid off better than she could have ever imagined.

  Until the girl had dropped off the spire at the Basilica.

  The most upsetting thing of all wasn’t that the girl had figured out a way to escape. It was that she hadn’t seemed particularly surprised to fi
nd Esmerelda holding a gun on her. She’d even had a mountain bike at the ready to flee the scene—as if, somehow, she had been expecting all of this to happen.

  Now she was gone, having left Paolo and Gianni in her dust. Which was certainly a problem.

  But not an insurmountable one. Despite her escape, the girl had still done what Esmerelda had hoped she would do: She had found the next clue Darwin had left behind.

  Another thing that Esmerelda had lied to the girl about was her rock-climbing ability. In truth, Esmerelda was an adept climber; it was one of the few passions she had that she could indulge in the Galápagos. She had simply felt she should let the girl take the risk of climbing the spire; plus, that had allowed Esmerelda the opportunity to ambush her.

  So after the girl had escaped, Esmerelda had returned to the Basilica with Paolo, who belayed her while she climbed the spire and found what was etched in the Devil’s Stone. Her first reaction was excitement to see that something was there, followed by dismay as she realized it was encoded, and using a far different code than the first clue she had encountered. But as she stared at the numbers that Darwin had etched into the stone so long ago, she was overcome by a new emotion: excitement.

  Esmerelda knew how to crack this code. Her father had taught it to her when she was a little girl. He had been fascinated with codes and ciphers, always thinking that his quest for Darwin’s treasure might eventually require knowing them. Therefore, Esmerelda could figure out where Darwin would be sending her next.

  Of course, she wasn’t going to crack the code right then. Not while she was clinging to a spire high above the rest of the city, where she was at risk of tumbling to her death.

  She took out her phone and snapped dozens of pictures of the Devil’s Stone, making sure that she had covered it from every angle, then climbed back down and quickly left the Basilica.

  By now the Good Friday processional was underway, and downtown Quito was overrun with people. Esmerelda and her brothers had to shove their way through the crowds for a few blocks until they found a café quiet enough for them to examine the photos and think.

  But first Esmerelda went to the bathroom to examine herself in the mirror. When Charlie had dropped off the spire, the climbing rope had hit Esmerelda in the face. The friction had left a burn mark across her cheek, which infuriated Esmerelda. She had no regrets about her vanity; she knew she was beautiful and that her beauty was an asset. Men and women often did things for her that they wouldn’t do for someone less attractive. And now there was a blemish on her otherwise gorgeous face. It would heal, but it might take a week or two, drawing people’s attention. Esmerelda hated the look of it and swore that if she ever ran into Charlie Thorne again, she wouldn’t give the girl a chance to get the jump on her.

  She then rejoined her brothers.

  It took Esmerelda a little while to work the code out, but as she did, her excitement grew and grew. After all these years, she was finally making progress. She had the next step to finding Darwin’s great treasure.

  Although she worried that Charlie had also cracked the code. Given her gifts, it was a distinct possibility. But she was only a girl. A girl on her own. Even if she did know where Darwin said to go next, it wouldn’t be easy for her to get there. Whereas Esmerelda could handle it. She didn’t have tons of money, but she and her brothers had lived frugally during their years in the Galápagos and had amassed some savings. In addition, they weren’t above breaking the law now and then if it furthered their interests.

  Esmerelda checked her translation of Darwin’s work several more times. She wasn’t quite sure what it all meant, but she was sure she had it correct. And the first few lines made perfect sense, giving her explicit directions about how to begin her quest.

  “Let’s go,” she told her brothers. “We need to find a plane.”

  TWELVE

  Latitude 0

  Just outside Quito, Ecuador

  I see you’ve gotten yourself into trouble again,” Dante Garcia told Charlie. “You’re lucky we were here to bail you out.”

  “I would have gotten away from them all just fine if you hadn’t come along and screwed up my escape route,” Charlie said petulantly. “I thought you were one of them. How’d you even find me?”

  She was standing directly on the equator. They were a few miles outside Quito, at a roadside attraction, where there were several busloads of tourists to blend in with. The attraction was one of many in the area set on the equator; an entire tourist industry in Ecuador was based on standing on the exact line where the northern and southern hemispheres met. Here, there was a wide stone plaza with a thick red line that represented the equator running straight through it. A thirty-foot-tall cylinder marked 0 DEGREES LATITUDE stood in the direct center of the plaza. The tourists were from all over the world, and every single one of them was taking selfies with the cylinder in the background.

  There were also three flea-bitten llamas for people to take selfies with.

  Agent Milana Moon sat at the side of the plaza, keeping an eye on the entry for any sign of trouble, letting Dante and Charlie hash things out. In Charlie’s experience, Milana rarely spoke unless she had to.

  On the other hand, Dante often wouldn’t shut up.

  Charlie had an unusual relationship with Dante. Even though he was her half brother, he was sixteen years older than her and they had grown up on opposite ends of the country. They had met only four times in their lives, most recently when Dante had blackmailed her into helping him track down Pandora. Dante’s leverage was that he knew Charlie had stolen more than forty million dollars from the Lightning Corporation. Charlie had argued that she never would have stolen the money if Lightning hadn’t stolen something from her first, but Dante didn’t see things that way. Dante tended to see things in black or white, good or bad, whereas Charlie felt that pretty much everything was gray.

  For example, Dante had thought he was doing the right thing, blackmailing Charlie into helping the CIA find the equation. Charlie could respect that Dante’s intentions might have been virtuous but thought that the way he had handled everything left a lot to be desired.

  “Technically, I didn’t find you,” Dante admitted. “Ivan Spetz did. We were monitoring him.”

  “Who’s Ivan Spetz?” Charlie asked.

  Dante gave Charlie an incredulous look. “Ivan’s the guy who was trying to turn you into roadkill back in Quito. You didn’t know who he was?”

  “All I knew was that he was after me. But in my hurry to get away from him, I didn’t have time to ask for his ID.”

  “Ivan’s SVR. And he wants Pandora.”

  “Oh. Just like you.”

  “No,” Dante said, looking offended. “Ivan’s not like me at all. If he gets his hands on you, he’ll happily cause you a world of pain to get you to cough up Pandora. And once Russia has that information, they’re not going to play nice with it. They’re going to build weapons.”

  “That’s funny,” Charlie said. “As I recall, the USA was going to use Pandora to build weapons too.”

  “To keep the world safe!” Dante snapped.

  “You want to keep the world safe?” Charlie asked. “There’s only one way to do that. Keep Pandora locked away nice and tight. That’s what Einstein did with it. Because he knew humans couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing.”

  “That’s what you were doing in the Galápagos? Keeping the world safe?” Dante asked sarcastically. “You weren’t just surfing all day and squandering your potential again?”

  Charlie stared bullets at him. “You think I want to live on the edge of the earth for the rest of my life? You think I want to be the only person alive who knows the most dangerous equation in human history? I was trying to stay away from the Ivan Spetzes of the world. Unfortunately, that seems to be impossible.”

  “I can help you protect it.”

  “How? By getting me to share it with the CIA? You might as well tweet it to the entire world. The more people who know about Pandor
a, the better the chance that it ends up in the wrong hands. People make mistakes. Or they do bad things on purpose.”

  “Not always.”

  “The agent who was assigned to find Pandora before you switched sides! And he was one of the best the CIA had! If he couldn’t be trusted, then who can?”

  Dante held his tongue, steaming mad. Although Charlie suspected he wasn’t just mad at her; he was mad because he knew she was right. Or at least, she wasn’t completely wrong.

  “I hate to interrupt,” Milana Moon said. She had approached so stealthily from where she had been sitting that Charlie hadn’t even noticed her coming. “While this is definitely an important issue, there are more urgent things we need to discuss.” She fixed her piercing gaze on Charlie. “What were you doing on the Basilica in Quito?”

  Charlie wondered how long Dante and Milana had been watching her that day. “That was personal business.”

  “I’ll give you a choice,” Dante warned. “You can either tell us here—or in a detention cell at CIA headquarters. Which will it be?”

  Charlie sighed heavily. “I was taking an architectural tour designed for adrenaline junkies. After this, we were going to hang glide over the Iglesia de San Francisco.…”

  “Cuff her,” Dante told Milana. “Let’s see how funny she thinks all this is then.”

  Milana snapped a pair of handcuffs from her belt.

  “Okay!” Charlie said quickly. “No more jokes. It turns out, Einstein wasn’t the only great scientist who discovered something and kept it secret.”

  Dante and Milana exchanged a curious look.

  It seemed to Charlie that neither was as surprised by this information as she would have expected.

  “Who else did?” Dante asked. “And what did they find?”