Charlie Thorne and the Lost City Page 6

  Many of those people might have been suspicious of two women carrying large coils of climbing ropes into the Basilica. So Charlie and Esmerelda had come in disguise.

  An unusual aspect of the Good Friday procession in Quito were the cucuruchos, penitents who walked the route in bright-purple robes. The robes looked disturbingly like those worn by members of the Ku Klux Klan in America, with the same pointed conical cowls, but in Quito, they had a very different significance. The cones symbolized humility, hiding the faces of the wearers except for the eyes, while the purple color represented repentance. Until recently, women had not been allowed to wear them. But times had changed. Esmerelda had purchased two the night before, at Charlie’s suggestion, while Charlie had been buying climbing ropes, harnesses, and other sporting goods.

  Charlie had paid for everything once again. She had explained to Esmerelda that she could easily afford it because her parents were rich and that she had a huge trust fund.

  This was a lie.

  Charlie had earned the money herself—in a way. Technically, she had stolen it from the Lightning Corporation, one of the biggest tech firms in the world. Although, in Charlie’s defense, the Lightning Corporation had stolen something from her first: a security program she had created that was worth millions. Charlie felt she was simply taking back what was rightfully hers; however, the Lightning Corporation—and the CIA—considered it theft. Which was how the CIA had blackmailed Charlie into helping them look for Einstein’s equation in the first place.

  Charlie didn’t feel like explaining all that to Esmerelda, though. And besides, being a trust fund kid sounded much more believable than the truth.

  Charlie hadn’t gone to an ATM to get the money, because ATM visits could easily be traced. She’d already had the cash; inside her backpack from Puerto Villamil was a money belt containing $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills. (The money was in American dollars because no matter where they were, black markets always accepted US currency.) The pack also held clean clothes, a first aid kit, snacks, a lighter, and a fake passport that Charlie had paid a forger $15,000 for. It was expensive, but necessary, as she needed it to be top-quality.

  Charlie was wearing the money belt now, concealed beneath her shirt. She had winnowed down her few belongings even further. Along with her remaining cash, she had crammed in the passport, a spare set of underwear, and the lighter, which had been a gift from her grandfather.

  The cucurucho robe wasn’t made for comfort. The fabric was coarse and itchy and it was stifling inside, even at that early hour. Charlie pitied the people who would be walking miles in such robes in the equatorial heat—even though she knew some of the point of the procession was suffering. Of course, it didn’t help that she was lugging twenty-five pounds of climbing rope under her robe, along with an assortment of carabiners, nylon slings, and belay devices. She had acclimatized to the high altitude over the night, but climbing the steep hill to the cathedral with all the gear and the heavy robe still wasn’t easy. Her thighs were screaming by the time she reached her destination.

  The robe served its purpose well, however. No one gave Charlie or Esmerelda a second glance as they entered the Basilica. The cathedral was built in a Gothic style, designed to look like one of the great churches of Europe. It was enormous, as long as one and a half football fields, with a sanctuary tall enough to fit a ten-story building inside. The interior walls were lined with statues of religious figures and stained-glass windows.

  But Charlie and Esmerelda didn’t enter the sanctuary. There was a large foyer at the entrance of the Basilica, flanked by the two great bell towers, much like those at Notre Dame in Paris. Charlie and Esmerelda slipped through the crowd of celebrants and headed up the stairs of the closest bell tower.

  The stairs led upward several stories to a landing that was even with the roof of the sanctuary. No one else was there, so Charlie and Esmerelda quickly peeled off their cucurucho robes. In the middle of the landing was a doorway marked CERRADO. NO HAY ENTRADA. CLOSED. NO ADMITTANCE.

  Charlie brushed it aside and picked the lock on the door.

  This led to a walkway that crossed over the very peak of the sanctuary. For structural reasons, the roof of the cathedral was much higher than the roof of the sanctuary, creating a large attic space that was almost completely empty. Charlie had done some research on the Basilica the night before and learned that on most days, this route was open to tourists who wanted to visit the spire, but since today was one of the holiest days of the year, it was closed to the public. Which made it the perfect time to access the spire; no one else was there.

  And yet the building was alive with the sound of people. The music of the organ in the sanctuary and the chorus of voices singing was so loud, it made the roof vibrate as Charlie and Esmerelda walked across it.

  At the far end of the attic space, another stairway rose. This one was far more narrow and rickety than the one in the bell tower, and Charlie and Esmerelda struggled to lug their ropes and gear up it.

  At the top, there was another door, although this one wasn’t locked. Charlie and Esmerelda passed through it and found themselves out on the cathedral roof at the base of the spire.

  The spire didn’t have walls; it was merely a framework of ornately designed steel, completely open to the elements. It rose high into the sky from the dead center of the roof, which sloped away precipitously on both sides. A dozen iron flights of stairs circled upward around the spire, with only a thin railing to keep climbers from tumbling to their deaths. Charlie imagined that the spire would be a nightmare for anyone with a healthy fear of heights. There was no other way to get to the Devil’s Stone, however, so she and Esmerelda kept on climbing.

  It was a cloudless, sunny day and the spire was the highest point for miles; as Charlie climbed it, she could see all of Quito spread out around her. At the base of the hill below the Basilica was the Iglesia de San Francisco, where the Good Friday procession would end; the plaza in front of it was already thronged with spectators. Beyond that, Charlie could see the glassy skyscrapers where rich people lived and the tumbledown homes of the poor. And beyond those, green mountains circled one side of the city, while steep ravines spilled down from the other.

  Eventually, Charlie and Esmerelda arrived at a small octagonal platform. This was as high as tourists were allowed to go, although the spire itself continued even higher. An ornate conical cap rose another three stories into the sky. It reminded Charlie of the conical top of the cucurucho costumes, having almost the exact same proportions.

  There was no sign of the Devil’s Stone anywhere around the platform. Which Charlie had assumed would be the case. Nothing was ever that easy. Which was why they’d brought the climbing gear.

  “Guess I’m going up,” Charlie said.

  Esmerelda had balked at the idea of this when Charlie had first suggested it the day before. “It’s too dangerous,” she had said. “I can’t ask you to do it.”

  But Charlie had insisted she could, pointing out that she was an adept rock climber. Back when she had been in college at the University of Colorado, she had spent more time scaling the pinnacles around Boulder than she had in class. (Although, in truth, Charlie had spent almost no time in class at all.)

  Meanwhile, Esmerelda didn’t know the first thing about rock climbing. Once they had acquired the proper gear, Charlie had to give her a primer. Charlie might have been a daredevil, but she wasn’t stupid. She never climbed without a partner who could safely belay her. The idea was, both of them would be harnessed to a climbing rope. While Charlie climbed, she would occasionally attach a metal ring called a carabiner to the spire and pass the rope through it, while Esmerelda anchored the other end down below. If Charlie fell, Esmerelda would keep the rope from playing out—and thus prevent Charlie from falling to her death. So Charlie had to literally show Esmerelda the ropes.

  Working the belay wasn’t complicated, but a single mistake could have grave consequences, so Charlie had made Esmerelda practice for wel
l over an hour the night before, until they were confident in her abilities. Now, on the platform, they strapped on their climbing harnesses, linked themselves to the rope, and did several safety checks to make sure that everything had been set up properly.

  Then Charlie began to climb.

  The moment she left the small platform behind and found herself clinging to the spire, Charlie was struck by a sense of vertigo, the feeling that she was way too high above the ground for comfort. But while most people would have felt fear, Charlie felt exhilarated. Partly, this was because she had run the numbers in her mind; she knew that with the combination of her skills and a proper belay, she was in less danger than she would have been in a car in rush-hour traffic. And partly because she was caught up in the thrill of discovery, hoping that her instincts were correct and that she would find what Darwin had left behind.

  Like the great churches of Europe, the entire Basilica—including the spire—was decorated with grotesques, ornate carvings of human and animal figures. (People commonly referred to these as gargoyles, but in fact a gargoyle was a grotesque that was specifically designed to be used as a water spout; the word “gargoyle” came from the French word for “throat,” as they were often designed so that the rainwater spewed from their mouths.) However, the grotesques on the Basilica differed from the European ones in that they only represented animals native to Ecuador, like monkeys, armadillos, marine iguanas, and Galápagos tortoises. Fortunately for Charlie, all the statues provided plenty of good hand- and footholds as she climbed. In addition, a metal cable ran down the spire to direct lightning strikes to the ground. It was easy to slip the carabiners around, allowing Charlie to readily secure the rope time and again. Thus her climb was far easier than many others she had done, as simple as climbing a jungle gym, the only concern being the height.

  After just a few minutes, Charlie reached the narrow peak of the spire’s conical cap. A perfect orb of stone perched there, with an iron cross rising above it.

  Charlie affixed a final carabiner around the cross, and then clipped her rope into it, securing herself so that she could use both her hands to examine the orb. She had originally assumed the Devil’s Stone would be square, as one might find in the walls of a church, but now it occurred to her that an orb made sense. Throughout history, orbs had been ascribed mystical powers and were often made part of important Christian art.

  The orb she faced now was much larger than it had appeared from down at street level, nearly as big as a basketball. It was completely smooth, a sphere perfectly sculpted from stone.

  And then she touched it.

  The orb spun on its axis, revealing its other side. A jumble of numbers had been etched there, carved deep into the stone:

  213431313452442315331135344224511542

  15114344214234321334131121344244153314115443

  453344243144231552114415424445423343

  44341231343414

  442315332124331444231544421515

  124524314431242515

  252433224313343131152215132311351531

  They didn’t make any sense at all.

  But then, this was exactly what Charlie had expected. It appeared to be a kind of code. She had been hoping to find some sort of indication that she was on the right track to find Darwin’s treasure, and this certainly looked like one.

  Charlie fished her phone out of her pocket and took some pictures, as a long stream of random numbers like this was incredibly hard to memorize. Still, she did her best to commit it to memory as well, just in case something went wrong.

  In Charlie’s experience, things went wrong far more than they went right.

  Charlie scrutinized her photos, making sure that they were in focus and she could see all the numbers clearly, then carefully pocketed her phone again and started climbing back down. Even though she trusted herself to be safe, the less time she stayed up there, the better. With all the people in the streets below, sooner or later, someone would notice her.

  The spire’s conical cap flared out beneath her, blocking Esmerelda—and the entire platform she had started climbing from—from her view. When she looked down, she could only see the long drop to the steeply slanted roof of the Basilica. If she were to fall, she would tumble off the roof and splatter on the pavement far below.

  So she climbed down quickly, using the animal grotesques as hand- and footholds again. The trickiest part was getting past the base of the cone. Since it was wider than the platform below, Charlie couldn’t see where she was going. She grabbed a pair of stone marine iguanas and lowered herself over the edge, so that she was dangling in thin air.

  At that point, she had intended to swing herself forward and drop onto the safety of the small platform where she had left Esmerelda. It was a relatively easy move, even at a height like this.

  Only, once Charlie was hanging by her fingertips, she discovered there was a complication to her plan.

  Esmerelda was aiming a gun at her.

  NINE

  I want whatever you found up there,” Esmerelda said. “Now.” Any trace of friendliness she had shown Charlie over the past day was gone. Instead, there was only a cold, determined gaze in her eyes.

  Despite her precarious position, dangling high above the ground, Charlie still kept her wits about her. “I didn’t find anything,” she said earnestly. “The stone isn’t up there.”

  “Don’t lie to me!” Esmerelda yelled, loud enough to startle some pigeons that had been roosting in the spire into flight. “Tell me what you found… or else!”

  “Or else what?” Charlie asked. “You’ll shoot me? If you kill me, I won’t be able to tell you anything.”

  “I don’t have to shoot to kill,” Esmerelda said. “I can just wound you. If I shoot you in the knee right now, it will hurt so badly, you’ll wish I’d killed you.”

  “Oh,” Charlie said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  This was a lie. In truth, Charlie wasn’t surprised that Esmerelda had double-crossed her. The woman had done several things to arouse Charlie’s suspicions over the past day. For example, she hadn’t been concerned about taking the Darwin Institute’s plane to the airport until Charlie had asked her about it, which indicated that she was far more interested in Darwin’s treasure than she was in the Institute. And she hadn’t been forthcoming about her background—which, as Charlie knew from personal experience, was often the behavior of someone who had something to hide. Therefore, Charlie had prepared for betrayal. Now that it had actually happened, her response wasn’t shock; it was disappointment that her suspicions were correct and that yet another person had turned out to be a jerk.

  Even so, Charlie hadn’t expected Esmerelda to ambush her here. She had expected it might happen later, when they were safely down on the street. But she had to admit, this was an excellent place for it. Esmerelda definitely had her in a bad spot. So while she was doing her best to act as though Esmerelda had caught her by surprise, in truth, her mind was racing, analyzing everything around her, working on an escape plan. She noticed that Esmerelda had already unclipped the climbing rope from her own harness, so if Charlie fell, they wouldn’t be tied together. That had been a clever move on Esmerelda’s part—although Charlie realized it gave her an option that Esmerelda would never have considered.

  The rope ran from Charlie’s harness up to the top of the spire fifty feet above, then snaked back through the carabiners Charlie had linked to the lightning rod. The remaining hundred feet of rope was coiled on the floor of the platform in front of Esmerelda.

  “So,” Charlie said. “I guess you’re not a tortoise researcher after all. You’re some kind of treasure hunter instead?”

  Esmerelda wasn’t interested in small talk. “What did you find up there?”

  “Another code. But it was too complicated for me to memorize. So I had to take a picture of it on my phone.”

  “Then give it to me.”

  “Oh sure,” Charlie said sarcastically. “I’ll just let go of this ledge here, then magic
ally hover in midair while I hand it over. If you want it, you either have to let me drop down onto the platform—or you’ll have to get it out of my pocket yourself.”

  Esmerelda took a moment to consider her options.

  “I don’t have a whole lot of time for you to make a decision here,” Charlie said. “My fingers are starting to slip.”

  This was the truth. Hanging from the spire wasn’t easy. Charlie’s fingers were sweating and losing strength.

  “I’ll get it myself,” Esmerelda announced. She took a step forward, over the coil of rope, keeping her gun trained squarely on Charlie’s chest. “Don’t try anything stupid,” she warned, reaching for Charlie’s pocket.

  “I’m a genius,” Charlie said. “Nothing I do is ever stupid.”

  And then she let go of the roof.

  In most circumstances, this would have been a terrible idea. But Charlie had worked out the math.

  Since the climbing rope was still tied to her harness, she didn’t plummet, which was good—as plummeting from that height would have been deadly. Instead, the friction on the rope as it passed up through the carabiners and ran back down through the grotesques slowed her slightly. Instead of free-falling, she merely descended very fast, as though she were on a high-speed elevator.

  At the same time, due to her weight, the other end of the rope snapped taut, cracking Esmerelda in the face. It scorched her cheek with a rope burn and knocked her backward. She stumbled over her own feet and dropped her gun. By the time she recovered her balance, Charlie had dropped out of view and the rope was quickly unspooling.

  Esmerelda cursed and ran to the railing of the platform.

  Eighty feet below her, Charlie alighted on the peak of the cathedral roof. The friction on the rope had slowed her just enough to make her landing bearable—although it wasn’t pretty. The moment her feet touched down, her knees buckled and she fell backward onto her rear end. She nearly tumbled down the steeply slanted roof, but she managed to grab the railing for the stairs at the last second.