by Stuart Gibbs
“Because it was in the middle of a city and he didn’t want random people stumbling across it. This one is way out in the wilderness. The only people who’d be poking around this tree are the ones Darwin sent to look for his clue.… Yikes!” As Charlie rounded one of the giant roots, something scuttled across her path and disappeared into the underbrush. It happened so fast, Charlie didn’t even have time to tell what it was.
“Charlie!” Dante yelled, alarmed. There was already enough of the tree between them that he sounded sort of far away.
“I’m okay!” Charlie yelled back. “I just got spooked by something. It was either a medium-size reptile or a really big bug…” She trailed off as her flashlight illuminated something on the bark of the tree trunk.
“Charlie!” Dante yelled again, sounding more aggravated now.
Charlie ignored him. She was staring at the tree trunk. There were more insects crawling across it, which wasn’t surprising, as there were insects everywhere. Multiple trails of ants were filing up and down the tree while a centipede the size of a hot dog passed through them like a freight train. Several vines snaked across the trunk as well, because there were also vines almost everywhere you looked in the forest, spiraling around trees and dangling from the branches. But underneath all the foliage, there were numbers.
They had obviously been carved into the tree long before. They looked similar to the words that had been left on the tortoise shell, in that they had widened and split as the trunk had expanded, so what might have once been thin cuts in the bark were now an inch across. Despite the decades since they had been left there, they had remained at the exact same height above the ground, because trees grew from the top.
It was definitely Darwin’s work. It was the same code that had appeared on the Devil’s Stone: the numbers 1 through 5 in the same sort of patterns.
“I found it!” Charlie exclaimed. “The next part of Darwin’s code! I told you guys it wouldn’t take too long!”
“Charlie!” Dante yelled again, and this time Charlie realized that he wasn’t yelling her name in exasperation, like he was annoyed at her. There was fear in his voice. And concern.
She reluctantly turned away from the numbers etched in the kapok tree and immediately discovered the reason Dante sounded so worried.
There were four men standing behind her. And they all had guns pointed her way.
NINETEEN
Chempro Refinery
The Napo River
25 miles south of Coca
Tell me what happened here today,” Oz told his foreman.
“I already have,” Jose replied. “Twice.”
“Then tell me again,” Oz said. “I need to understand.”
Oswald Crutcher ran the oil refinery where Dante and Milana had deposited the Castello family that day, although he hadn’t been on duty when that had happened—or when the company’s tanker trucks had been blown to bits, for that matter. He had been upriver at the time, in Coca, getting a much-needed break from work. At the refinery, he worked five days straight, on call twenty-four hours a day, and then got two days off, which he tried to make the most of. There wasn’t much to do in Coca, but Oz always enjoyed his time there, because any time away from the refinery was a joy. Life at the refinery was awful. It was dull and exhausting and the refinery was brutally hot and always stank of petroleum fumes. But the job paid well, so Oz stuck with it.
Oz had come to the Amazon from about as far away as you could get. He had grown up in Point Barrow, Alaska, where his parents had both worked at refineries. The oil business was all Oz knew, so there had never been any doubt that he’d go into that line of work. But he had never liked the cold, so when the chance came to shift to the Amazon, he had jumped at it.
Oz was a big, strapping man, and well muscled from a lifetime of physical labor, although now that he was a manager, he didn’t work quite as hard and thus he’d developed a sizable beer belly. He was only in his thirties; he had originally thought he’d been given the job running the Napo refinery because he knew the business well, but in truth, no one else wanted to work at that plant. In fact, Oz wasn’t that smart, but he knew how a refinery worked and he was good at keeping the workers in line. Plus, he spoke Spanish, as many of the refinery workers in Point Barrow had been migrants. Oz simply ended up migrating in the opposite direction.
It was certainly warmer than Alaska down here. The coldest it ever got in the Amazon was a good twenty degrees warmer than it ever got in Point Barrow. And the surroundings were staggeringly different. Point Barrow was up above the arctic circle, farther north than most plants could grow. Trees had been rare up there; now Oz was surrounded by billions of them. But the jobs themselves had an eerie similarity. Refinery work was the same pretty much wherever you were.
Oz had been here fifteen months, and not much had happened, save for the grind of working day in and day out. As the only American, and the boss, he wasn’t accepted into the social circle of his workers—and the refinery was too far from the closest town to visit except on his days off—so he spent most of his downtime alone, gaming on his computer. He often found himself calculating how many days it would be until he’d have enough money socked away to retire. At last count, it was more than seven thousand.
So when he had returned to the refinery and found everyone buzzing about the excitement of the day, he had been extremely intrigued. He had asked each of his employees to visit him in his office, one at a time, to explain what had happened.
Their stories had conflicted a great deal. Oz presumed that sometimes this was due to none of them knowing what had really happened, as when they tried to explain how his tanker trucks had blown up. And sometimes it was because they were lying to him, as when they explained what had occurred with the prisoners who had been brought there.
Oz didn’t really care too much about the tanker trucks. Yes, losing them was a problem, but they were old and insured for much more than they’d been worth, so ultimately, Chempro would make money on their loss.
But the story of the prisoners was something else. He listened intently as Jose explained once again how two people claiming to be CIA agents accompanied by a teenager had brought two men and a woman to the refinery and then some police officers from Coca had come to get them.
“Which police officers?” Oz asked suspiciously. He knew all the officers in Coca, as many of his employees had a tendency to get into trouble on their days off.
“I forgot their names,” Jose said evasively.
“So these officers showed up and you just handed the prisoners over to them?”
“Yes.”
“So if I called the chief of police in Coca right now, the prisoners would be in his jail?”
Jose’s eyes shifted away from Oz’s. “Maybe not. Now that I think about it, maybe they weren’t police. They might have been federal agents.”
Oz drummed his fingers on his desk, letting Jose sweat for half a minute. Then he said, “Here’s what I’m going to do, Jose. I’m going to pick up the phone and call the chief of police. And I’m going to tell him to come here and arrest you—unless you tell me the truth about who really picked up the prisoners.”
Jose cracked: The man who had come for the prisoners wasn’t local police or a federal agent. Jose had no idea who he worked for or where he was from. He had spoken perfect Spanish—although Jose was pretty sure the man wasn’t local. And he’d had money. Plenty of money. He had bribed each and every one of the refinery employees to hand over the prisoners to him and then to keep their mouths shut.
When Jose finished his story, Oz didn’t say anything for a while. He let Jose keep sweating while he thought things through.
The man who had come to collect the criminals might have been a criminal himself—but there was an equally good chance that he represented a big corporation. There were lots of corporations looking to make money in the Amazon, and they were always willing to spread money around—in the short term, at least. They’d come in, make
the locals feel like they were all going to get rich, and then sucker them into deals they didn’t understand and rob them blind.
That’s what Chempro had done to get the oil leasing rights in this area. Other petroleum companies had done the same. There were also companies after logging rights or mining rights or making simple land grabs to raise cattle or grow palm oil. There were a lot of natural resources at stake in the Amazon basin, and people were doing anything they could to get them while they were still around.
Because they wouldn’t last forever. Even though the rain forest seemed endless, it was disappearing fast. Sooner or later everything would be claimed, or the locals would wise up and stop letting corporations bully them, or the countries that owned the land would buckle under pressure to protect the environment from countries that probably hadn’t protected theirs and now felt guilty about it.
So if someone was interested in cashing in on natural resources, this was the time to do it. The land rush was on. Oz had spent many hours wondering how to become a part of it and get rich himself.
That seemed like a far better option than spending another seven thousand days at this refinery.
Jose was now squirming in his seat, wondering if Oz was going to punish him or not.
Oz asked, “When these people left, did they go upriver, toward Coca?”
“No, sir. They went the other way.”
Away from civilization, Oz thought. “In what type of boat?”
“An older cargo boat. Medium size.”
“Did you by any chance take down the identification number?”
Jose looked at him curiously, wondering where this was going. “Yes.”
“So you’d be able to recognize this boat again if you saw it?”
“Yes.”
Oz smiled. “Then let’s go find it.”
TWENTY
Agua Rojo Eco-Lodge
Anaconda River
Sorry about the guns,” Segundo said. “We thought you were thieves.”
“What kind of thieves would be working all the way out here?” Milana asked.
“There is plenty worth stealing out here,” Segundo replied. “People steal the animals for the illegal pet trade. Or hunt them for their skins. But more often than not, they’re loggers after our trees. We’ve chased dozens away from that kapok this year alone.” He shifted his gaze to Charlie. “I hope we didn’t scare you too badly.”
“It’s cool,” Charlie said.
She liked Segundo a lot. The moment he had realized she was only a girl, he had lowered his gun and then stepped in front of the others to protect her.
Now they were all at the eco-lodge that Segundo ran with the other members of his village. It was located a half mile up the tributary from where it met the Napo River. The tributary was known locally as the Anaconda River, in part because the snakes were plentiful along it, but also because it twisted and turned like an anaconda, so that half a mile along the river was only a five-minute walk across land.
The eco-lodge was a blend of traditional architecture and modern technology. All the buildings were simple and spare, with mud walls and thatch roofs, but the lodge also had electricity and Wi-Fi powered entirely by solar panels. In the very center was a great dining hall built around an even more enormous kapok tree than the one where Darwin had left his code. A viewing deck had been built in the upper canopy of the tree, so high up that it required seven flights of stairs to access. That was where Segundo and Charlie were sitting now, along with Dante, Milana, and the three other men who had found them at the tree. The adults were all drinking beer, while Charlie had a Coke. The drinks were refreshingly cold, thanks to a solar-powered refrigerator. (When Dante had expressed surprise that precious power was being used to cool beer, Segundo had replied, “Our lodge might be primitive, but we’re not heathens.”)
The lodge had been the idea of Segundo’s parents, who had realized that eco-lodges were being built throughout the region, but they were all run by corporations and the local tribes got nothing. So they had decided their community should build their own lodge. Although they were still living in much the same way that they had for generations, they were well aware of the modern world and figured someone should venture out to learn the hotel business. Segundo had volunteered. He had done well at the small school in their village and spoke English fluently. He had been accepted into the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell, studied there for four years, then worked in the hotel business in New York City for another six. By the time he returned home, he had planned the eco-lodge down to the finest detail. It had taken four years to fund and build, and now it was turning a tidy profit for the community.
The view from the platform in the tree, even at night, was well worth the climb. It seemed to Charlie that she could see every star in the Milky Way.
Like most indigenous people of the Amazon, Segundo was of short stature, with a mop of black hair and dark-brown skin. He wore a button-down denim shirt and a baseball cap, both emblazoned with the Agua Rojo Eco-Lodge logo. He spoke English perfectly, although to Charlie’s amusement, he had a slight New York accent after all his years in the city.
“Illegal logging has been a huge problem in this area,” he explained. “So we make nightly patrols to check on all our big trees. However, we have always paid particular attention to the one where we found you. Since it’s so close to the Napo River, it’s an easy target for loggers. Plus, my community has been wondering about those markings for generations.”
“How long has your community been here?” Dante asked.
“For as long as anyone can remember,” Segundo replied. “Hundreds of years, at least.”
They had passed the community on the way to the lodge. The homes there were simple one-room huts, some of which had been used for decades, although there had been some modernization over the years. The community now had a central bathroom with a rain collection system, which allowed for flush toilets and showers with hot water, a cultural center for guests from the lodge to visit, a schoolhouse, and a soccer field.
“Does your community have any theories about the markings on the tree?” Milana asked.
“There is a story,” Segundo said. “But it is probably more myth than fact.”
“What is it?” Charlie pressed.
Segundo took a sip of his beer and stared off in the direction of the great tree. “My great-grandfather says a man came in the time of his great-grandfather. A white explorer. Back then no one in the village had ever seen a white man before. At first they thought he might be a ghost. The young man was accompanied by some other white people, but he was very different from them. He was young and wild and fascinated by everything he saw, filling notebooks with drawings and strange words. He stayed here for five days and then continued up the river toward the Dark Lands.”
“The Dark Lands?” Dante interrupted, sitting forward in his chair.
“Yes,” Segundo said. “It is a region at the headwaters of the Anaconda River. My people have always stayed away from it.”
“Why?” Milana asked.
“Our ancestors believed there was something dangerous there.”
Charlie asked, “Do you know what it is?”
Segundo didn’t answer right away. It seemed to Charlie that he was weighing how much to tell them. Finally, he said, “My ancestors’ knowledge of this forest has always served us well. This forest is vast. If we have to avoid one small area of it, that’s no big deal.”
Charlie recognized that Segundo hadn’t answered her question, but she didn’t call him on it. Instead, she looked to Dante and Milana for their reactions.
Milana didn’t appear very concerned by Segundo’s fear of the Dark Lands—while Dante looked unusually ill at ease. But then, Dante’s unsettled state might have also been due to the bats. He obviously had issues with bats, and now there were hundreds around them. Most were small ones, swarming around the viewing deck, snatching insects from the air, but there were also a dozen large fruit bats
in the canopy of the kapok tree, eating the kapok’s fruit. These bats were the size of small dogs, and even though they were harmless to humans, Charlie had to admit that the sounds of their gluttonous eating were a little disturbing.
“Anyhow,” Segundo went on, “the story goes that the white explorer journeyed to the Dark Lands with ten other men—but only three of them returned. They carried a mysterious chest they had carved from a tree, although the explorer wouldn’t reveal what was inside. This time, he and his men didn’t stay in my community; they were in a great hurry to leave the forest. The young explorer stopped only long enough to carve those numbers into the tree—and then they headed back up the river and never returned.”
Charlie had been focused on Segundo as he spoke, but now she shifted her attention to Milana and Dante again. Dante remained unsettled, but Milana’s eyes were alive with excitement. Charlie guessed that Milana was thinking the same thing that she was: The white explorer sounded like Charles Darwin, which meant they were on the right track.
Segundo said, “My people have been waiting a very long time for someone to come and explain the numbers to us. Now it appears that day has come. Do you know what they mean?”
“We know how to translate them,” Charlie said.
Segundo’s eyes lit up. He spoke to his friends in a language that Charlie didn’t know, and they grew excited as well.
“I didn’t get a chance to see all the numbers back in the forest,” Charlie said. “Can we go back tonight?”
“There’s no need for that,” Segundo told her. He reached into a backpack and fished out a laptop computer. “I have what you need right here.”
He set the computer on a table and began to search through his photos.
While they waited, Charlie asked, “Just out of interest, did you like New York City?”
“I did,” Segundo replied. “I enjoyed my time there a great deal. But I couldn’t have spent my whole life there. I missed this place.”
Charlie asked, “Is there anything you miss about New York, now that you live here?”