by Stuart Gibbs
Thus they accepted the care that Dante and Milana gave them.
The CIA had fished them out of the river, bound their wrists and ankles with the lines from the boat, and then tended to their burns while Charlie drove the boat back upstream. Dante had asked them many questions, but the Castellos had responded to all of them by giving them baleful stares and pretending that they didn’t understand English.
Dante and Milana were surprised by the family’s unusual response to pain. Milana had read about it but had never encountered it, while it was entirely new to Dante.
Eventually, Dante gave up the interrogation and relieved Charlie at the helm.
The plan wasn’t to return all the way to Coca; that would waste too much time. Instead, they were only heading to the refinery, which was close enough to see. They also stopped to pick up the crew from the barge so they could return them to the refinery as well.
During the brief time she had, Charlie went and sat next to Esmerelda. “Sorry about your face,” she said.
Esmerelda glared hatefully at her in response.
“I get that you’re angry,” Charlie said. “But it was self-defense. You were trying to kill us. If you knew how to share, none of this would have happened.”
Esmerelda spat at her.
Charlie leapt to her feet to avoid it. “I’m just saying, if you hadn’t double-crossed me, we could have found this treasure together. But now that will never happen. That’s on you, not me.” She returned to the pilot deck.
Esmerelda couldn’t control her rage anymore. She unleashed a torrent of insults and threats in Italian. Charlie wasn’t fluent in the language, but she could understand enough of it. Esmerelda wanted her dead many times over. But it wasn’t the words so much as the tone that unsettled Charlie. Esmerelda sounded as though she really wanted to kill her.
Dante docked at the refinery’s rotted pier. Almost everyone who worked there had gathered, staring downriver, wondering what had happened to the barge and the oil tankers. They immediately crowded around the speedboat, peppering the crew of the barge with questions.
In Spanish, Dante asked to speak to whoever was in charge of security at the refinery.
A heavyset middle-aged man stepped forward.
Dante flashed his CIA badge, along with Milana, and said that he was part of a joint task force working with the Ecuadorean government, and that the Castello family were ecoterrorists who had blown up the refinery’s barge and tankers. He then claimed they were in search of more ecoterrorists and didn’t have time to return to Coca, so they wanted the refinery’s security to call the police in Coca and keep an eye on the Castellos until someone could come get them. The head of security didn’t seem pleased about this until Dante slipped him a hundred-dollar bill, at which point his attitude changed dramatically.
He said he had a place to hold the prisoners and then went to call the police.
Dante stayed right beside him so he could eavesdrop on the call, listening to him make arrangements for the police to come at the end of the day. Then he had the head of security show him the area he intended to hold the Castellos. It was a full-on holding cell; the refinery occasionally had looters, or employees who got caught stealing. Dante watched as the Castellos were locked up inside, thanked the head of security for his time, and then returned to the boat with Milana and Charlie.
Charlie suggested there was only about a 50 percent chance that everything would work out as Dante hoped, but she didn’t want to go all the way back to Coca to deliver the Castellos into custody, and neither did Dante and Milana. It would cost them the rest of the day.
Dante told Charlie she ought to have a little more faith in humanity and then steered the boat downriver again.
As it turned out, it was only an hour before someone showed up at the refinery to get the Castellos.
Only, it wasn’t a member of the Coca police force.
It was Ivan Spetz.
EIGHTEEN
The Napo River
290 miles downriver from Coca
Peru
Since the rivers in the Amazon basin descended so slowly, there were no rapids and the water was invariably calm. This meant the speedboat could travel at its top speed.
Charlie could make a few educated assumptions about how fast Darwin might have traveled downriver in 1835. Given how flat the Amazon basin was, the current of the river was almost nonexistent. They might as well have been in a pond. That meant the only real method of locomotion would have been manpower. Darwin had probably traveled with other people, most likely in a raft or a canoe. More men meant more muscle, but also more goods to move and thus more weight. And given the thick vegetation along the riverbanks, it seemed that making camp would have been an ordeal, meaning they’d have to stop every day well before nightfall.
Therefore, thirty miles a day seemed like the maximum a team of men could do, and many days, they would have surely covered far less ground. Which meant that after four hours on the motorboat at top speed, they had probably gone as far as Darwin had in ten days. So Charlie was on the alert, watching the river and the forest, searching attentively for what Darwin had mentioned in his coded message:
Follow the Napo River east from Coca for ten days until the water turns to blood.
Then find the tree built like King’s College Chapel.
That far downriver, the rain forest was much wilder. They still passed the occasional barge loaded with trucks or construction materials, but onshore, the signs of modern civilization had vanished. While Charlie enjoyed the feeling of the breeze on her skin as the boat raced downriver, she wished they had more time to take in their surroundings. The rain forest was only a blur as they sped by, and the roar of the motors was probably scaring off any wildlife.
At one point, she caught a glimpse of the pink dolphins that lived in the Amazon, leaping from the water in the distance, but Dante wouldn’t even slow down for a few minutes to see them.
“We’re running out of daylight,” he had explained.
Which was true. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, meaning that they would soon have to find a place to dock for the night.
Charlie began to grow concerned.
She had assumed she knew what Darwin’s clue meant… but now she began to have doubts. The river wouldn’t really turn to blood, of course; that was certainly just a metaphor. And yet she hadn’t seen what she had expected. There were three reasons that might be true:
1) Darwin had traveled faster than she had calculated, so they had not reached the right spot yet.
2) She had misinterpreted what Darwin meant.
3) The river no longer turned to blood.
The third possibility concerned her the most. The physical world changed more than most people realized. Rivers shifted course, mountains grew, volcanoes created new land while earthquakes fractured the old. And the Amazon, with its seasonal flooding, probably changed more than most places on earth. Not to mention that humans had begun to affect the natural world in increasingly destructive ways. If the spot where the river turned to blood no longer existed, it would be virtually impossible to find the tree Darwin had indicated; there were certainly billions of trees in the Amazon basin.
Plus, the concern that Milana had voiced was also a possibility: Maybe the tree wasn’t there anymore. Since Darwin’s time, the tree could have died. Or, more likely, it had been chopped down.
However, even if the tree had been cut down, there might still be a stump indicating where it had been. Or perhaps some other remnant of it. But they would never find that without knowing where to look first, and to do that they had to find the place where—
“Look up there!” Milana exclaimed suddenly. She was seated on the bow of the speedboat, pointing downstream.
Charlie and Dante looked that way and instantly understood her excitement.
A short distance ahead of them, a large tributary flowed into the Napo River. Its water was dark red. Charlie presumed this was because it carried silt
with a great deal of iron in it. It wasn’t uncommon for rivers to run red; the Colorado River in the western United States got its name from the Spanish for “color red” for this very reason. As the red water of this tributary met the dark-brown water of the Napo, the currents didn’t blend right away. Instead, the tributary created a great red patch that truly looked like the color of…
“Blood,” Dante said. “The river’s turned to blood.” He cut the engines. Thanks to its inertia, the boat didn’t stop right away, but continued moving down the river at a far faster rate than the current.
Without the noise of the motors, the river was startlingly quiet. It made Charlie realize, not for the first time, how loud the human world was. Now there was almost no sound at all, and what little there was carried a long way. Charlie could hear tree branches shaking as a troop of monkeys crashed through them on the distant bank, as well as the calls of a flock of parrots that looked to be a half mile away.
The speedboat drifted into the bloodred patch of water, cutting a swath through it.
Milana was carefully studying their surroundings as well. “This has to be the place Darwin meant in his message. But there must be ten thousand trees here. How are we supposed to find the right one?”
“I’ll know it when I see it,” Charlie said confidently.
“Why don’t you just explain Darwin’s clue to us?” Dante asked testily. “So we’ll know it when we see it?”
Charlie shot him a look of disbelief. “You really haven’t figured it out?”
“We can’t all be geniuses like you. I have no idea how a tree is supposed to look like a church.”
“Not a church. King’s College Chapel.”
“Which is a church…,” Dante began, getting annoyed at Charlie’s smug attitude.
“Yes, but a very special one. It’s located at Cambridge University, which is where Darwin got his education.”
“What’s so special about it?” Dante asked.
“The way it was built.”
Milana sighed with exasperation. “Why couldn’t Darwin have just said what type of tree we’re looking for? So that someone who isn’t an architect could find it?”
“He probably didn’t know what type of tree it was,” Charlie explained. “He wrote that message in 1835. Most of the Amazon basin hadn’t been explored yet. Darwin might have been one of the first Europeans to visit this area—if not the first—and practically everything he saw would have been new to him. And even if he did know what type of tree it was, maybe the person he was leaving the clue for wouldn’t. So he tried to describe it in terms he thought another British citizen would understand.”
“Why British specifically?” Dante asked.
“He wrote his clues in English,” Charlie replied. “So that rules out a lot of the world. And at the time, the British were the English speakers who were doing all the exploring. Every other country that spoke English had been colonized by them. And the Americans were busy exploring their own country, not poking around down here.”
Dante nodded understanding. “So what, exactly, did King’s College Chapel look like?”
“Like that,” Charlie said, pointing to the riverbank.
Dante and Milana looked that way. They instantly knew exactly which tree Charlie meant—and understood why Darwin had described it that way.
The tree sat just south of the junction of the red-water tributary and the Napo River—and it was massive, towering another seventy feet above the rest of the canopy. Its upper branches formed a great canopy and had hundreds of other plants growing on them; they were bedecked with bromeliads and orchids and draped with vines. But it was the lower section of the tree that held their attention. It was as wide as a house—and its enormous roots flared out around it, forming wedges that were up to fifteen feet tall. It was obvious that their design provided stability to the tree, shoring up its great bulk, and thus they served the same purpose as—and looked exactly like—the flying buttresses on a cathedral.
“That must be our tree,” Dante said.
Charlie nodded in response. She could see other large trees in the area, but they were much farther from the bank of the river, and this tree’s resemblance to the design of King’s College Chapel was inescapable. “It’s called a kapok, I think.”
To the west, the sun sank into the forest, casting them—and most of the river basin—into shadow. However, the kapok tree was so tall, it still remained in the sunlight, which illuminated thousands of pink flowers in its canopy.
It seemed to Charlie that a great shift came over the rain forest as twilight began, occurring so quickly, it was as though someone had flipped a switch. There was a sensation of a great stirring in the trees, of life awakening. Noises arose from the forest: the peeping of frogs, the calls of birds, the chirr of insects.
A splash in the river nearby drew Charlie’s attention. Some pink dolphins were frolicking, performing aerobatic leaps into the air—but there was other movement too, like a dark tide sweeping down the water.
It took Charlie a moment to figure out what it was, and then a smile spread across her face.
“Hope you guys are okay with bats,” she said.
“Bats?” Milana and Dante asked at once, although Milana was excited while Dante was unsettled. Which made sense; Milana had grown up in the wilderness, while Dante was a city boy. Charlie noticed him reflexively reach for his gun.
“Relax,” she told him. “They’re not going to mug you. They’re just here for the insects.”
Then the bats were upon them. They were huge, far bigger than any bats Charlie had ever seen before, with wingspans eighteen inches across. They came in low over the surface of the water, like fighter planes on a strafing run, gulping down the insects that were skimming about.
“Holy cow,” Dante said, staring at them in shock. He hadn’t relaxed at all. If anything, the size of the bats had made him even more nervous. “They’re mutants.”
“These are nothing,” Charlie teased. “Wait until the fruit bats show up.”
Even in the dim twilight, she could see Dante go pale at the thought.
Then Dante got ahold of himself, caring less about what Charlie thought of him than Milana, most likely, and started the engines again.
He didn’t crank them all the way up, as the riverbank wasn’t far away. Instead, he motored the boat slowly toward the kapok tree. The iron-rich water from the tributary no longer looked red in the darkening gloom, but instead an inky black.
The bats immediately adjusted to the boat’s movement, sweeping around it with effortless grace.
As the boat pulled into the mouth of the tributary, Charlie was struck by how big it was. At first the tributary had seemed puny compared to the great, wide Napo River, which itself was only a tributary of the Amazon. But now Charlie recognized that the vastness of the Amazon basin was already skewing her sense of what was normal. In other places, like the western United States, this tributary would have been a major river, perhaps the lifeline for millions of people; but here it was merely one of thousands of branches of the Amazon, so insignificant it might not even have a name.
The bank of the tributary was thick with plant life, although there was a small gap hacked into the greenery where it appeared that someone might have moored a boat before. Milana hopped ashore with a bowline and cinched it around a tree trunk. Charlie and Dante then leapt to solid ground, and the three of them made their way to the kapok tree.
Even though night hadn’t completely fallen yet, the rain forest was surprisingly dark. Charlie realized this was due to the cover of the trees. Above them, the sky was still blue and the upper reaches of the kapok remained in direct sunlight, but she could barely see that through the canopy of leaves. It was so thick, Charlie figured that the rain forest floor was probably dim even in the middle of the day; the sunlight simply couldn’t get through. Now, due to the darkness, it was already getting hard to see where they were going—which was a concern given that they were on a hunt fo
r a clue Darwin might have hidden.
However, Charlie, Milana, and Dante were the type of people who came prepared. Each had brought a flashlight. Dante and Milana had small handheld ones, while Charlie’s was the type that strapped to her head with an elastic band, allowing her to keep her hands free. They all flipped them on. The beams barely made a dent in the darkness, but it was enough for them to at least find their way to the kapok without tripping over a root or falling into a hole.
It didn’t take long to reach the tree, but the size of its base was immediately daunting. It was even bigger around than they had expected, with more than a dozen buttressing roots, each one of which was significantly taller than Dante.
“I hate to say this,” Dante observed. “But we might have to wait until daylight to find this clue. I can barely see anything as it is… and we’re about to get eaten alive out here.”
Sure enough, the flashlights were attracting flying insects by the thousands, luring what appeared to be every mosquito in the Amazon. On their way down the river, Charlie had doused herself and her clothes in repellant, but the insects appeared to be either immune or impervious. Within seconds, she had suffered multiple bites.
And yet she wasn’t ready to give up. “We can at least take a few minutes…”
“It’ll take far more time than that to search this whole tree,” Milana said, smacking mosquitoes off her arms. “And these little jerks have already siphoned a pint of blood out of me.”
Despite the insects, Charlie still wasn’t about to return to the boat. Not when they were so close. Instead, she began to circle the tree, aiming her light back and forth between the ground she was covering and the tree itself. “In theory, it shouldn’t take that long to find the next clue. If this is the right tree, then Darwin probably wouldn’t have hidden it.”
“He hid the last one back in Quito,” Dante countered.