And Then I Found Out the Truth

by Jennifer Sturman

  “Uh, yes, I heard about that,” I said, confused.

  “It also has not escaped our attention that you have become quite friendly with one of the seniors suspected of playing a pivotal role in these regrettable activities.”

  Mr. Seton obviously wasn’t referring to Grey — he’d already been caught and confessed, so he wasn’t “suspected.” Besides, it was impossible to become “quite friendly” with somebody who seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open most of the time.

  Which meant Mr. Seton was referring to Quinn, who was the only other senior I really knew apart from Gwyneth. But since I still didn’t understand what was happening, I only said, “Do you mean Quinn?”

  “Correct. And I’ve asked you here to give you the opportunity to come forward of your own volition and share with me any knowledge of the inappropriate activities to which you were privy as a function of your relationship with Mr. Riley.”

  If I’d had my wits more about me, I might have asked how summoning me to his office constituted giving me the opportunity to come forward of my own volition, but I was too busy being baffled. “I wasn’t privy to anything.”

  “You’re certain of that?” he said, like he was certain of something very different.

  “I’m certain.”

  “Completely certain?”

  “Completely certain.” And then, because I really couldn’t figure out what was going on, I asked, “Did Quinn say I knew something?”

  “No. Mr. Riley has been less than forthcoming on this matter. I was hoping you would be more cooperative.”

  And maybe because this had all come from so out of the blue and maybe because of the ridiculously large quantity of other things I was stressed about, I stopped being baffled and started being angry. In fact, I might have lost it. “So, Quinn hasn’t told you anything, but you called me in here because you hoped I’d narc on him?”

  “I don’t believe ‘narc’ is the accurate term —”

  “Is this what you did to him?” “Excuse me?”

  “Did you call him in here and say you were giving him the opportunity to come forward of his own volition and then when he wouldn’t tell you anything you suspended him?”

  “That’s hardly a fair descrip —”

  “Are you going to suspend me, too, for not telling you what I don’t know?”

  “Miss Truesdale, I have no interest in suspending you. Unless, of course, I discover that you have engaged in activities that merit suspension —”

  “I haven’t. And I don’t know anything about what Quinn did or didn’t do. How can I be privy when I never see Quinn or talk to Quinn or get so much as a complete message from Quinn?”

  Mr. Seton didn’t answer that. He just waited a moment, as if to make sure I really was done. Then he spoke. “Thank you, Miss Truesdale. That will be all for now. You may go.”

  Seventeen

  Charley was waiting in the reception area, since when she’d called to get me out of class she’d been told I was already in Mr. Seton’s office. And as soon as I explained what had happened, she wanted to march in there and tell him off herself, but I managed to convince her that would be overkill. Two Truesdale tantrums in one day might be more than Mr. Seton could handle, and I didn’t want to give him any reason to get Patience involved. It seemed wisest to flee before it occurred to anyone to question Charley’s excuse for taking me out of school. I mean, how many sixteen-year-olds actually needed to be rushed to emergency appointments with their herbalists?

  Not that we were doing any such thing. In reality, Charley had arranged for us to meet Rafe nearby, at the oval-shaped boat pond in Central Park. The rain had stopped, but the weather was still misty and gray, so there wouldn’t be too many people out — we’d be able to talk in relative privacy.

  Rafe, however, had arrived at the boat pond before us, and he’d been unable to resist renting one of the radio-controlled miniature sloops from the concessions stand. He’d also challenged a bunch of little kids to a race, and he was crowing in victory when we showed up. Of course, then one of the kids started to cry, so he felt obligated to stage a rematch and let her win.

  That done, he trotted over to join us at the table we’d found in the café area and gratefully accepted a cup of the hot chocolate we’d bought at the counter. And as he was working through his initial blushing and stammering in Charley’s presence, we brought him up-to-date on everything we’d learned while he was gone.

  By the time we’d finished, Rafe had restored himself to a functioning condition, and he addressed my most immediate fears first. “Your mother is quite safe,” he said. “I assure you, there is no cause for concern. She is understandably frustrated by her inability to act more directly, but she recognizes the need for caution. In the meantime, she and Mark are well disguised and in comfortable accommodations, and they are taking the most stringent of measures to protect their welfare. And Mark is highly skilled in Krav Maga.”

  “What’s Krav Maga?” I asked.

  “It’s a form of martial arts that draws from both boxing and wrestling,” Rafe explained. “It originated in Bratislava in the nineteen thirties but is now widely deployed among elite military units around the globe. Mark became proficient when he trained with the Israeli Defense Forces.”

  “What kind of climate change specialist trains with the Israeli Defense Forces?” asked Charley.

  “Mark is not your typical climate change specialist,” said Rafe. “You’ll enjoy meeting him.”

  Given T.K.'s situation, I was glad Mark knew martial arts, but I was less interested in meeting him than in figuring out what we were going to do to get him and my mother back to their respective homes. “Did you find out about the people from the Polar Star?” I asked.

  Rafe removed his glasses and wiped them on his tie. Today it was spotted leopards on a navy background. “When I landed in Buenos Aires, I checked in with your mother, to make sure she was well and to apprise her of your own status and our investigation. She concurred that the Polar Star was a logical starting point, and she was able to provide me with the name of the captain she’d originally hired, an Alejandro Frers. I then took another flight to Tierra del Fuego, as this man lived in Ushuaia, the primary port in the region.”

  “And did you find him?” asked Charley.

  Rafe put his glasses back on. “I assumed this would be a simple task, as Ushuaia is quite small — a town rather than a city. Yet Frers is a common name in the area, especially among the seafaring classes. When I ultimately arrived at the correct address, his landlady said he had moved out in August, leaving no forwarding information. Nor were the local authorities able to provide further details.”

  “Oh,” I said, not sure what to make of that. “Then it was a dead end?”

  Rafe held up a finger in gentle admonishment. “I did not give up so easily, Delia. I spent that night and the next in every drinking establishment along the docks. I am still feeling the effects of those two nights, but it was not without purpose. I struck up a number of conversations with men who work on the ships sailing in and out of the port. Most of these conversations were fruitless, but eventually I found a man who could help.”

  “Did he know how to find Alejandro Frers?”

  “He didn’t, no. But he told me a curious story.”

  Apparently, the guy Rafe met at the bar knew somebody who knew somebody who knew one of the original crew members on the Polar Star, so the story he told Rafe was more hearsay than any of Gwyneth’s information about Edward. But it fit in so well with everything else, it seemed like it had to be true. Even better, it ended up giving me a way to act on Carolina’s dream without having to explain I’d been speaking to Carolina.

  The reason Alejandro Frers was nowhere to be found was that he’d hightailed it out of town, shortly after a mysterious brown-haired woman showed up and exchanged an enormous sum of money for the title to the Polar Star and his guarantee that he’d disappear for good.

  “That sort of thing really h
appens?” Charley asked, like she hadn’t been paying attention to all of the other crazy things that had occurred in the last six weeks. “People just agree to disappear?”

  “Was it the same brown-haired woman I saw here in New York?” I said. “It had to be, right?”

  “Your description and the description of the woman in Ushuaia were uncannily similar,” said Rafe. “It would be a tremendous coincidence to find two individual women matching the same description playing a role in this plot. I am inclined to believe they are one and the same. The man I met called her ‘La Morena.’ ”

  I wondered how much of a coincidence Rafe would think it was if he knew Carolina called her the same thing.

  “Her trench coat must have deep pockets,” said Charley. “Buying an entire ship and convincing someone to leave his entire life behind can’t come cheap.”

  “And the deep pockets support the entire EAROFO theory,” I added. “A group of oil companies wouldn’t have a hard time coming up with that much cash.”

  “Delia, I hope you remember what I said about shooting the messenger, but neither would Hunter Riley,” said Charley.

  “I know, but while we have no idea what Hunter’s up to, and it probably is bad since he lied to his family and everyone in his office, we still haven’t heard about him hanging out with a brown-haired woman, and we know for a fact that she was in Navitaco’s offices.” Then I added, not even trying to be subtle, “It sounds like she’s more important than we realized. Maybe we should be trying to locate her, too.”

  “I agree,” said Rafe. “If this woman is paying people off, odds are that she’s created an electronic trail — records of bank withdrawals and wire transfers and the like. And this trail is precisely the type of evidence we require. If we can connect Alejandro Frers to La Morena and La Morena to the source of the money, whether it’s EAROFO or Hunter Riley or someone else altogether, we’ll have what we need.”

  “So how can we do that?” asked Charley. “Do we have any chance of ever finding Alejandro Frers?”

  “Possibly. There are a few leads I will follow when I return to South America. And the reason I came back to New York was to talk to a colleague who is skilled in investigating financial records. But it would be useful to try to identify La Morena in parallel. Perhaps she is employed directly by one of the EAROFO member companies?”

  “Not Navitaco,” I said. “That’s one thing I know for sure. And not by Hunter Riley, either.” While I’d been waiting for the sun to rise that morning, I’d done my best to remember every single detail of our five encounters, hoping I’d think of something that would help us locate this anonymous woman. But the best I’d come up with was less of a lead than an antilead. Now I explained.

  “At the office building where Navitaco and Hunter Riley both have their offices, I had to sign in as a visitor on the ground floor, and they gave me a pass for security. There was a specific entrance and exit for visitors, and on the way in, you had to swipe your pass, and on the way out, you had to return it to the guard. And when I saw her that day, leaving Navitaco’s offices, La Morena went through the visitors’ gate and turned in a visitors’ pass.”

  Rafe and Charley both looked impressed by my powers of deduction, though they just as quickly reached the same conclusion I had, that this specific deduction didn’t bring us any closer to identifying the woman.

  And then it came to me.

  “They made me sign in,” I said.

  “What?” said Charley.

  “When I was a visitor, to the office building. They made me sign in and show my ID, and they had my name on a list of people they were expecting. So, if La Morena was a visitor —”

  “Then she also would have appeared on the visitors’ list,” said Rafe, finishing my thought.

  “So we need to get our hands on the list,” said Charley, catching on. “But how can we do that?”

  I knew exactly how we could do it.

  Or, more accurately, I knew someone who might be able to do it for us.

  Eighteen

  I was worried Natalie would be so busy either moping over Edward or figuring out how to try him before a jury of his peers that she wouldn’t be interested in some friendly hacking. But she responded to my text right when school ended, like she was eager for the distraction. She was doing a research internship at Columbia and had to go there for a couple of hours first, but she promised she’d head for the loft as soon as she was done.

  True to her word, she arrived at Laight Street a little after six. And in typical Natalie fashion, she’d stopped home to pick up some computer equipment she knew I’d never have, but she hadn’t bothered to change out of her Prescott uniform. I could tell Charley was already planning where we’d take her shopping to thank her for what she was about to do, though Charley had no idea what she’d be up against — Natalie would probably wear Garanimals if they came in her size, so she wouldn’t have to waste valuable time trying to match outfits herself.

  “It was the weirdest thing,” said Natalie as she walked in. “I took a taxi here, and the inside was covered in stickers with pictures of the two of you. There were seventeen on the partition between the driver and the backseat, three on one door, four on the other door, and seven on the rear window. Why would somebody paste thirty-one stickers with your pictures on them in the back of a taxi?”

  “Stickers,” said Charley, resigned. “I should have seen that coming.”

  “What should you have seen coming?” asked Rafe from the kitchen. He was booked on an overnight flight back to Buenos Aires, but he was hanging out with us until it was time to leave for the airport. He said it was to help Natalie, but since Natalie was an accomplished hacker and Rafe still hadn’t mastered the lock on his briefcase, it was pretty obvious he was just trying to squeeze in every possible moment he could with Charley. He’d even offered to cook dinner. Now he was rummaging through the refrigerator for ingredients, though we’d warned him all he’d find was leftover takeout.

  Anyhow, Charley began telling Rafe about Dieter harnessing the power of visual media, and Natalie and I got to work. Which really meant that I brought out my laptop so Natalie could work on both of our computers at once while I tried not to get in her way.

  It didn’t take long for me to explain to Natalie what we were trying to accomplish and why. “What’s the address of the office building?” she asked, her fingers poised over one of the keyboards. “First we need to determine who handles security for the property.”

  I gave her the building’s address on West 40th Street, across from Bryant Park and the main branch of the New York Public Library, and from there it only took her a couple of Web searches to identify the firm that managed the property and then the vendor the firm used for security.

  “Perfect,” she said, pulling up the vendor’s site and giving it a quick scan. “They have an intranet so their clients can log in remotely and access their records. Once I’ve accessed the intranet, I should be able to get exactly what you need.”

  It seemed like breaching the security of a security firm should be extra challenging, but the prospect didn’t faze Natalie at all. She almost seemed disappointed that her mission was so straightforward.

  “Great,” I said. “What should I do to help?”

  “I’d love a glass of water,” Natalie said, which was her way of telling me to leave her alone. She was already rummaging in her bag, pulling out an assortment of complicated-looking gadgets and wiring our laptops together to construct a makeshift highspeed data processor. So I got her a glass of water and went to join Charley and Rafe over at the kitchen end of the loft.

  Charley was sitting on one of the stools at the counter, keeping Rafe company as he sorted through the items he’d unearthed in the refrigerator. His pleasant expression was strained, as if he was trying not to show how horrified he was by what he was learning about our eating habits.

  “I can’t believe we didn’t think of this before,” Charley said to me when I climbed up on
the stool next to her.

  “Think of what?” I asked. “Getting Rafe to clean out the refrigerator?”

  “No, though it is very sweet of him. I was talking about getting him to help us find Dieter. He had the most fabulous idea.”

  The combination of the “sweet” and the “fabulous idea” made Rafe start blushing and stammering all over again. “It was only a suggestion,” he managed to say. “And perhaps not a practical one.”

  “I think it’s brilliant,” said Charley. “It would never have occurred to me to reach out to the Department of Homeland Security.”

  Putting Dieter on a terrorist watch list seemed like an extreme solution to an only somewhat extreme problem, but Charley was happy, and that was all Rafe cared about.

  Maybe twenty minutes later, as Rafe was insisting he could make a casserole from leftover schnitzel and kung pao chicken if only he had some ketchup, and Charley and I were suggesting we might be better off ordering in from the taco place, Natalie called out. “Delia, I think you’ll want to see this.”

  I rushed over to where she was working at the big table in the middle of the room. “Did you get access to the intranet?”

  “No, not yet. But this just popped up on your computer,” she said, turning one of the laptops toward me so I could see the instant message on the screen.

  OLIVICE: yt?

  The cursor blinked impatiently, waiting for my reply. “Who’s Olivice?” asked Natalie.

  “Yes, Delia. Do you know this Olivice?” asked Rafe. He and Charley had followed me over, and now the four of us were huddled in front of the screen.

  “No. But it can’t hurt to write back, can it?” I said.

  None of us could think of a reason why I shouldn’t, so I typed in a wary response.

  DELIATRUE: ?

  The answer came practically before I’d hit return.