Charlie Thorne and the Lost City Page 5

  Luis didn’t know exactly where the plane was heading, but he did know who had taken it—and why. Once the code on the tortoise shell had been discovered, the news had traveled quickly through the station. Luis had spent quite a bit of time staring at the shell himself, trying to crack the code. So he had heard that Esmerelda Castle had gone to find a girl who could maybe help decipher Darwin’s message. Esmerelda had always been nice to Luis, so he didn’t want to cause her any trouble—but Ivan was hurting him and seemed like he wouldn’t hesitate to cause more pain. So he obediently led the SVR agent across the property to the tortoise research laboratory, a single-story white stucco and stone building.

  There was a sign out front saying EMPLOYEES ONLY, but the doors weren’t locked. Ivan and Luis walked right through the small entry foyer and directly into one of the labs, where a scientist was hunched over a table, dissecting a marine iguana.

  She was visibly upset by the intrusion. “You can’t come in here!” she shouted in Spanish. “This is a restricted area.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Salinas,” Luis said. “This man wants to know where Esmerelda is going with the plane.”

  Dr. Salinas registered the fear in Luis’s voice and grew concerned herself. However, she remained calm and directed her attention to Ivan. “Ms. Castle is on a scientific mission to one of the other islands.”

  Ivan could recognize a lie when he heard one. His patience was already wearing thin. In one swift movement, he spun Luis around, wrenching the young man’s arm behind his back so that he cried out in pain. “The truth, please,” he told Dr. Salinas calmly. “What is Ms. Castle really doing?”

  Dr. Salinas hesitated a moment, as if wondering whether Ivan was bluffing or not. Her eyes nervously flicked toward something across the room.

  Ivan looked that way. The shell from an enormous tortoise sat in the corner. There were two parts to it: the rounded part that covered the back of the tortoise, which sat on the floor, and the flat part that covered the belly, which was propped against the wall. At first glance, the shell didn’t seem important, but then Ivan noticed the words carved into the flat piece, which seemed unusual.

  He headed closer to the shell, shoving Luis in front of him, keeping the man’s arm twisted behind his back.

  Once he was close enough, Ivan read the inscription. His English wasn’t nearly as good as his Spanish, but he could understand it well enough to know that the part about the treasure made sense, but the three lines in the center of the shell were gibberish. It seemed to him like some sort of code, and it appeared that the scientists at the research station thought so too, because a nearby whiteboard was covered with efforts to parse some meaning from the words. Attempts had been made to anagram the letters, to assign numeric values to them, and a few other things that Ivan couldn’t understand.

  Ivan knew a much faster way to decipher codes. There was an entire division of the SVR devoted to doing it. So he roughly shoved Luis aside, warned him not to try anything stupid, then snapped a photo of the shell with his phone and sent it as an encrypted message to the coding team marked PRIORITY.

  Then he turned back to Luis and Dr. Salinas and calmly withdrew the gun from his holster. He didn’t aim it at either of them. He simply let them know that he had it. Then he said, “Tell me about this treasure.”

  Luis and Dr. Salinas immediately told him everything. The decades-old rumors about Darwin and the treasure. The discovery of the code on the dead tortoise. How they had tried to crack it and failed and how it had been decided that Esmerelda Castle should go seek out the help of the unusual girl in Puerto Villamil.

  They were frightened and spoke quickly, volunteering all they could. It took only a few minutes before Dr. Salinas was insisting, “That’s all we know. I swear.”

  “Do you have a photo of Esmerelda Castle?” Ivan asked.

  Luis pointed to the wall, where there was a framed photograph of the research station staff. “She’s in the front row, at the far left.”

  Ivan smashed the glass with the butt of his gun, then removed the photograph and studied it. Esmerelda Castle was a beautiful woman with striking features. Ivan probably would have easily recognized her if he saw her again, but he pocketed the photograph anyhow, just to be safe.

  His phone buzzed with an email. The cryptography team had already cracked the code.

  Find the devil’s stone in Quito.

  Ivan put the phone away, then stuck the gun back in his holster. “Thanks for your time,” he told Luis and Dr. Salinas, nice and friendly, like he had just borrowed a cup of sugar, rather than threatened their lives. Then he walked out of the lab and quickly left the research station, thinking about the words that were etched in the tortoise shell:

  The Greatest Treasure in Human History.

  He could bring in the girl for the SVR and get rich in the process. This assignment might have started off badly, but it was beginning to sound a whole lot better.

  SEVEN

  Iglesia de San Francisco

  Quito, Ecuador

  Quito was the second-highest capital city on earth, nestled on a high plateau in the Andes Mountains, nearly two miles above sea level. It had been founded by Spanish conquistadores in the 1500s and was surrounded by snow-capped volcanoes and steep, treacherous ravines.

  Since Charlie had spent the last two months at sea level, the change in altitude hit her hard. When she had first climbed out of the cab from the airport, she had nearly passed out from the lack of oxygen. She had managed to stay conscious, but she still had a nagging headache and her stomach was queasy from altitude sickness. However, she was soldiering on, driven by the excitement of tracking down the Devil’s Stone.

  Esmerelda was having even more trouble, struggling to get a breath in the thin air. “Charlie, please,” she gasped as they cut through the Plaza Grande in the heart of the city. “I need to go slower.”

  Charlie stopped in front of the Carondelet Palace, where the president of Ecuador lived, and looked back at Esmerelda with obvious frustration. “The church is closing soon.”

  “I’m doing the best that I can.” Ever since meeting Charlie Thorne, Esmerelda had been struggling to keep up with the girl, physically and mentally. Charlie had surprised her so many times, it already seemed routine. There had been their abrupt departure from the house in Puerto Villamil, her equally abrupt decision to head directly to the airport, the revelation that she had solved Darwin’s code almost instantly. Then, despite the meager life she had been living in Puerto Villamil, Charlie had turned out to be rich. At the airport in the Galápagos, she had been able to purchase two tickets on the next flight to Quito on the spur of the moment, at a hefty cost. And upon arriving in the city, she had insisted on paying for rooms for both of them at a pricey hotel. Esmerelda had told Charlie she would be happy to get a room with twin beds to save money—or even sleep on a couch—but Charlie had replied, “It isn’t an issue,” and handed over enough cash to cover the night.

  But perhaps most surprising of all was Charlie’s encyclopedic range of knowledge. She appeared to know about almost everything.

  The legend of the Devil’s Stone, for instance. Charlie had come across it in a history of Quito, which she had decided to read upon visiting the city en route to the Galápagos. She was recounting it now for Esmerelda as they wound their way through the city, using a tourist map from their hotel as a guide.

  “The church of San Francisco was built shortly after the founding of Quito,” Charlie said. “And as you can see, it was a major construction job for a remote Spanish outpost in the 1500s.” She pointed down the narrow street they had just turned on. At the end of it, Esmerelda saw the church, a great stone and white stucco edifice at the edge of another large plaza.

  Charlie continued. “The legend is that the head priest asked a man named Cantuña to help build it. Cantuña agreed, but realized he would need help. So he called upon God. Only, God didn’t answer. So Cantuña asked for the help of the devil instead.

 
; “The devil answered instantly, but being the devil, he was kind of a jerk. He made a deal with Cantuña: He would build the church in only a day, but he wanted Cantuña’s soul in return. Cantuña accepted the deal—with one condition. If the church wasn’t one hundred percent completed by sunrise, down to the very last stone, the deal would be canceled.”

  They emerged into the plaza, and Esmerelda stopped again, not because she was out of breath, but because she was amazed by the spectacle before her. The plaza had been gaily decorated with lanterns and strings of lights, and everywhere around her, people were in costumes. Some wore the traditional native dress of the Incas, some wore biblical robes and tunics, some were dressed as colonial Spaniards, and quite a few were elaborately costumed as angels and devils.

  “It’s Holy Week,” Charlie told Esmerelda. “Today is Jueves Santo—Maundy Thursday.”

  “Of course,” Esmerelda said, feeling a bit foolish. The next day would be Good Friday and Sunday would be Easter. “I’d forgotten. In the Galápagos, every day feels almost the same, so sometimes you lose track of where you are on the calendar.”

  “There’s a huge parade here for Good Friday,” Charlie said. “But I guess they’re already celebrating.” She noticed Esmerelda staring at a group of devils in the plaza and explained, “They’re dressed as the diabolitos who helped the devil build the church. Kind of like the devil’s subcontractors, I guess.”

  Hundreds of people were gathered around the church doors, working their way inside. Charlie and Esmerelda fell in with the crowd. “So what happened to Cantuña?” Esmerelda asked.

  “He found a way to get out of the contract,” Charlie said. “While the devil and the diabolitos were slaving away to build the church, Cantuña secretly removed a stone from a place where the mortar wasn’t dry and hid it under his robes. The devil finished the church by sunrise—or so he thought. He came to Cantuña, all proud of himself, and said, ‘You owe me your soul’—and then Cantuña said, ‘Not so fast, pal. You missed a spot.’ He pointed to the gap where the stone was supposed to be. The devil flipped out and threw a huge fit, but he knew he was beaten. So in the end, he just slinked away, vowing revenge—and Cantuña became a hero.”

  “But that’s only a folktale,” Esmerelda said. “So the Devil’s Stone isn’t real.”

  “Maybe not,” Charlie agreed. “But there’s still a gap in the masonry somewhere in this church—and there’s a stone that fits into it. The legend says that someday the devil will return through that gap to exact his revenge, and when he does, they can plug the hole with the stone and trap him inside.”

  They finally managed to work their way into the church, and once again Esmerelda froze in amazement. While the exterior of the church had been quite plain, the interior was lavishly decorated. No matter where she looked, there was art. Every last inch of the walls was bedecked with beautiful paintings, intricate mosaics, or delicate carvings. A great dome soared above the altar, painted iridescent blue and studded with golden stars to look like a twilight sky.

  The church also extended farther than Esmerelda had expected. The central chapel was quite large, while an open archway to their right led to an atrium the size of a city block. That, in turn, was ringed by what appeared to be a monastery.

  “This place is enormous,” Esmerelda said, sounding daunted. “Do you have any idea where the Devil’s Stone is supposed to be in here?”

  “No,” Charlie admitted. “So let’s find someone who might.”

  Most of the other church visitors were filing into the atrium, where monks were ladling out bowls of fanesca, a traditional soup served during Holy Week, for the masses. Charlie went that way.

  With hundreds of people filing out to the atrium or back into the church, there was a tight squeeze to pass through the doorway. One of the other pilgrims jostled Esmerelda roughly as she entered the atrium, knocking her down. She landed hard on the stone pathway and winced in pain.

  Charlie rushed to her side to help her. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Esmerelda said, getting back to her feet.

  Charlie noticed there was a great deal of blood on Esmerelda’s hand—although Esmerelda herself seemed completely unaware of this.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” Charlie asked.

  “Yes,” Esmerelda said, like she really meant it—and then she noticed the blood herself. She turned her hand over, and both of them saw there was a shard of glass sticking out of her palm. It appeared that a drinking glass had been broken earlier but this fragment had failed to have been cleaned up—and now Esmerelda had put her hand right on it. The shard was small and it hadn’t gone in deep, but it had cut a good-size slash across her palm. “Oh,” Esmerelda said, like she was as surprised to see this as Charlie. “I better get this cleaned up.” She made a beeline for one of the soup tables and grabbed some napkins to stanch the flow of blood.

  “I didn’t realize you were Italian,” Charlie said.

  Esmerelda looked to her, surprised once again. “How did you…?” she began, and then understanding dawned on her. “You know about that, too?”

  “I know there’s an unusual family from Italy whose members feel pain differently from other people.” Charlie carefully plucked the shard of glass from Esmerelda’s palm. “They feel it when it happens, but then it instantly fades instead of lingering, like it does in other people. So they’re sort of impervious to it. I’ve also heard there’s a family in Pakistan with the same genetic trait, but you look much more Italian than Pakistani.”

  Esmerelda shook her head in amazement. “My last name is really Castello. How do you know so much at such a young age?”

  “I read a lot.”

  “And apparently never forget anything.”

  That was true, although Charlie wasn’t going to admit to it. She didn’t exactly have a photographic memory, but hers was as close to that as memories got.

  One of the monks on duty in the atrium rushed over, having noticed Esmerelda’s bleeding. He was a young man, not much beyond his teens, with a tonsured haircut and wearing a dark-brown robe. “Are you all right?” he asked in Spanish.

  “I could use some disinfectant,” Esmerelda replied. “And perhaps a bandage.”

  “We have a first aid kit,” the young monk replied. “Follow me.” He led them away from the crowds and across the atrium.

  Charlie was now able to get a better look at her surroundings. A large ornate fountain dominated the center of the atrium, while several cages full of Amazonian parrots and macaws were arrayed around the gardens. Many monks were showing the birds to excited young visitors.

  “Do you know where the Devil’s Stone is in this church?” Charlie asked.

  The young monk’s features clouded, and for a moment Charlie thought she had offended him, but when he spoke she realized it wasn’t her that he was upset with. “It is no longer here,” he said sourly. “It was taken from us.”

  “When?” Charlie asked, upset to hear this herself. “And by who?”

  “Decades ago.” The monk led them up a flight of stairs in the dormitory building, which ringed the atrium. “By our own country. To build the Basilica of the National Vow.”

  “What’s that?” Esmerelda asked.

  “Another church. One that the government seemed to feel was more important than this one,” the monk said, entering a small infirmary on the second floor. In contrast to the ancient building around them, it was extremely modern. “The country helped fund the construction of it, and then they demanded that every other church donate something precious to signify that the Basilica would be the most precious of all. The church elders at the time didn’t want to give up any precious artworks, so they gave them the stone.” The monk opened a medicine cabinet and took out gauze and rubbing alcohol.

  “Is this church far away?” Esmerelda asked.

  “Not at all. It’s right there.” The monk pointed out the window.

  A few blocks from where they stood, an enormous Go
thic church perched atop a steep hill. There were two great bell towers at one end and a massive spire at the other. It appeared to have been designed to be imposing, to loom over every other church in Quito.

  “And the Devil’s Stone is somewhere inside there?” Charlie asked.

  “In the spire,” the monk said, uncapping the rubbing alcohol. “At the very top.”

  He splashed some alcohol on the gash in Esmerelda’s hand. Esmerelda winced the moment it touched her, but then the pain seemed to pass almost instantaneously.

  Charlie noticed this, but her attention was drawn to the spire in the distance. It emerged from the top of the cathedral roof, stabbing high into the sky. It was ornately decorated and looked to be at least three hundred and fifty feet tall.

  Esmerelda looked to her and spoke in English, presuming that the monk wouldn’t understand them. “Maybe we should check the place in this church where the stone used to be first.”

  “Darwin’s message said to find the stone itself,” Charlie reminded her.

  Esmerelda considered the spire of the cathedral with trepidation. “That’s awfully tall and exposed. Do you really think we can find the stone up there?”

  “Of course,” Charlie replied confidently. “But we need to get some sporting goods first.”

  EIGHT

  Basilica of the National Vow

  Quito, Ecuador

  Good Friday

  The sun had barely poked above the horizon when Charlie and Esmerelda approached the Basilica the next morning.

  To be on the safe side, the night before, they had visited the spot at the Iglesia de San Francisco where the Devil’s Stone had once been kept but found nothing of interest. So now they were on their way to climb the Basilica’s spire and locate the stone itself.

  Throughout Quito, Good Friday celebrations had already begun. The highlight of the day was the great processional that ran through the city. Thousands of penitents would participate, while an even greater number of people would watch. The procession began early, and so celebrants were already lining up along the route. They were gathered so thickly on the sidewalks that Charlie and Esmerelda could hardly squeeze through. Furthermore, services were already underway at the Basilica, and churchgoers in their finest clothes were crowded around the doors.