And Then I Found Out the Truth (17 page)

Meanwhile, if Natalie was 99 percent confident, then I was 100 percent confident, because I had a couple of other data points to throw in, not that Natalie would ever call them data points since they came from Carolina. Regardless, they should push us over the top, even if I didn’t have the statistical analysis to prove it.

For starters, Samantha Stephens was the name of the lead character on
Bewitched
— that I knew for sure.

And
arcuarius
was the Latin word for archer, and from there it was just a short skip through various romance languages to get to Arquero as a surname.

So Samantha Arquero was, in fact,
Bewitched
meets the Sagittarius. And as the head of Special Operations for her father’s company, she was perfectly situated to play the role of EAROFO’s evildoer in chief.

Twenty-four

The plane had arrived at the gate by now, and I could see distant movement as people in the rows closer to the front began to make their way down the aisles. I was literally tapping my foot with impatience, eager to get to work, but I figured I still had at least a few minutes more of being trapped in my seat. It was a seriously enormous plane.

So I hastily sent off another grateful text to Natalie, followed by another apologetic text to Charley to let her know I’d landed without any problems. That I hadn’t heard anything further from her was completely ominous — I didn’t even want to consider the possibility she was so angry she wasn’t speaking to me. But I just told myself there must be a time lag in the phone system somehow, and all of her furious texts would come flooding in at any moment.

The next message I sent was to Rafe, to update him on my whereabouts and coordinate a way to meet up. I was hoping I might actually get to see my mother before the day was out, and maybe before the morning was over. It was even possible I’d get to introduce her to Quinn, and that thought put the uncontrollable smile on my face. Of course, it also assumed I’d ever be able to get off the plane.

“Your first time in Buenos Aires?” the squabbling children’s mother asked. Between her needing to mediate their various arguments and my having slept for most of the flight, we hadn’t really said anything but “hello” up until then.

“Yes,” I told her. And because I thought I should say more if I didn’t want to seem unfriendly or like I’d skipped town in a manner that was wholly unauthorized by a parent or legal guardian, I added, “I’m visiting friends.” Which was true, sort of, though I was visiting enemies, too, if by visiting you meant hunting them down and exposing their crimes against the environment and my mother.

She smiled. “I am a native, a
porteña.
You will like Buenos Aires. It is a wonderful city, like Paris or Madrid, but with its own flavor.” Her English was fluent, with only the faintest trace of an accent, and she began enthusiastically telling me about her favorite sights. I was almost glad I couldn’t tell her what I’d really be doing while I was there, because she might be disappointed to hear I’d be too busy to play tourist.

Finally, the rows directly ahead of ours began to empty out. The woman’s husband helped me retrieve my roller bag from the overhead compartment, and I followed the whole family down the aisle, along the length of coach, and through first class, where the seats turned into beds and the attendants were still clearing away the remains of a gourmet breakfast. It seemed like the airline wouldn’t want the passengers who’d just been crammed into tiny spaces and fed microwaved eggs to see how the more fortunate traveled, but I guess whoever designed the plane didn’t worry about class warfare.

Out in the terminal, I was relieved to see the signs were in English as well as Spanish, though I probably could’ve guessed what
Damas
meant from the skirted stick figure symbol next to the sign. I was sort of a mess, and while I didn’t want to waste time, I desperately needed to brush my teeth and wash my face, so I ducked into the ladies’ room. The cold water from the tap felt fabulous after having been cooped up for so long in the stale air of the plane, and it was as close as I was going to get to a shower anytime soon.

That done, I followed the signs to immigration, where several hundred other passengers from my flight were already waiting in a long line. Now that I was actually here in Argentina, it seemed unfair that all of my decisive action-taking was resulting in a lot of hanging out and waiting, but I tried to be patient as the line inched forward, checking my phone every so often to see if any new messages had come in yet.

The time crawled by, but eventually I was in front of the bored-looking immigration officer, handing him my passport.
“Buenos días,”
I said, since that was what the flight attendant had said when we’d touched down.

He mumbled something back, not even glancing up as he leafed through my passport until he found the main page with my information and photograph. Then he paused, and his expression shifted abruptly from bored to alert.

I suddenly worried I wasn’t old enough to enter the country by myself — I’d been concerned about age restrictions in New York, but it turned out that sixteen was the minimum for purchasing a ticket on one’s own, so I’d just passed.

“Cordelia Navare Truesdale,” he said slowly, as his eyes moved from the passport page to my face and back again. “That is your name?”

There was something weird about the way he said this — not his English, which was as smooth and accent-free as the woman’s on the plane, but his tone and the question itself — and it put me instantly on edge.

“Yes?” I said gingerly.

“Cordelia Navare Truesdale,” he said again, turning to the computer next to him and typing on its keyboard. I saw him hit E
NTER
, and he leaned back, studying whatever popped up on the screen.

After a long moment, he turned away from the computer and gave me another searching look. But then he shook his head, stamped my passport, and handed it over the counter. “Next,” he called.

I moved forward with relief, feeling the panic dissipate as I tried to make up for lost time. I zoomed through the baggage claim since I hadn’t checked anything and then on through customs and into the arrival hall. Immediately, a dozen different guys approached, all offering transportation into the city, but I figured these were the equivalents of the gypsy cabs in New York and it would be wiser to find an official taxi stand. Besides, I needed to get cash first.

I located an ATM machine along one wall and inserted my card, hoping Charley, enraged as she was, had at least kept Patience in the dark and my account was still active. And it worked fine, though here it offered me Argentinean pesos rather than dollars. I withdrew what I thought was a couple of hundred dollars’ worth — pretty much everything I had — and tucked the multicolored bills into my purse.

And as I went to find a taxi, I couldn’t help but congratulate myself. After all, I’d gotten myself to a foreign country completely on my own and with relative ease. Even the snag with the guy at immigration hadn’t really been a snag. This had to be another sign that I was doing the right thing.

And that’s when I saw her.

Samantha Arquero, in the flesh and only fifty feet away.

She was heading for the exit doors, accompanied by a uniformed driver piloting a cart stacked high with Louis Vuitton luggage. She wore a crisply cut pantsuit and her shiny brown hair looked like she’d just had a blowout — she clearly hadn’t spent the last eleven hours smushed into the very last row of coach. But it seemed reasonable to assume she had been luxuriating in first class, drinking champagne and nibbling on warm nuts as she plotted further evil.

I stopped short, and at that same moment she did, too, which had me jumping for the protection of a nearby pillar. My heart was beating hard, but I counted to ten and then peeked cautiously around the pillar’s side.

But she didn’t seem to have noticed me. She’d only paused to look at a flyer taped to a wall, right next to the exit. As I watched, she reached up and peeled the flyer off the wall, studying it closely before folding it and slipping it into her handbag. Then she walked briskly through the doors, accompanied by the driver with her luggage.

I rushed to follow, trying to keep a safe distance between us without losing them altogether. But it turned out these things work better in the movies than they do in real life. I reached the exit just in time to see the driver ushering Samantha Arquero into the backseat of a long, black limousine double-parked at the curb. She disappeared behind its tinted windows and the driver hurried to load her luggage into the trunk. They were pulling away before I’d located the taxi stand, not that I even knew how to say “follow that car” in Spanish. But I was still disappointed that this incredible opportunity had slipped through my hands.

As I waited in what felt like the millionth insanely long line of the day for a taxi, I tried to console myself with the fact that I’d managed to memorize the license plate of the limousine. Fortunately, it was easy to remember:
AE-I
. I assumed the AE stood for Arquero Energy, which seemed to prove the woman had definitely been Samantha Arquero. And even without the license plate, we should be able to find her again — I mean, how hard could it be to find the Arquero Energy office in Buenos Aires?

Another silver lining was that I wouldn’t have to face a lecture from anyone on how it wasn’t safe to go chasing after suspects on my own, regardless of how conveniently they’d presented themselves. And I was pretty sure it was nothing more than a coincidence that La Morena and I had been on the same flight. It wasn’t like she could’ve known where I was going when I hadn’t even known myself until I was actually on my way.

Anyhow, that thought only reminded me of all the various other people who hadn’t known where I was going, along with how I needed to find out where I was heading next, so I took out my phone again, expecting that by now both Rafe and Charley had to have texted me back.

But there were no new messages at all. Only the list of old messages, ending with the final text I’d received from Natalie at 6:49 P.M. the previous evening.

I felt an uncomfortable prickling, the first genuine inkling that something wasn’t right. So I clicked over to the outgoing messages screen. The texts I’d written after we’d landed were still there, but each had a little red X next to it, indicating that none had been successfully sent. And that’s when I finally figured out what was going on.

With a sinking feeling, I realized Charley hadn’t been restrained at all — it was entirely possible she’d texted me thousands of times. In fact, knowing her, she probably had. Her messages just hadn’t reached me, for the same reason no other messages had reached me and my own messages hadn’t been sent: My phone didn’t have international reception.

Twenty-five

I hadn’t realized the extent to which my phone served as an electronic security blanket until it was yanked out from under me, but I tried not to freak out. It wasn’t like I was in the wilds of Patagonia — in a city of this size there must be a pay phone somewhere. I’d figure out how to work it, get in touch with Charley and Rafe, and everything would be okay.

Regardless, it took until I’d reached the front of the taxi line to calm myself down. Meanwhile, the dispatcher was asking for my
destino,
and I wasn’t sure what to tell him. I’d assumed Rafe would text or call with a location for me to meet him, but now I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Nor did I know where he was staying or anything useful like that.

But I also couldn’t face waiting in line all over again if I gave up my place and went back inside to locate a pay phone — I was wasting too much valuable time, and the point of being here was taking action, not standing around. And I did know where I was likely to find Quinn. At least, I sort of did. I’d head there first, try to connect with him, and then I’d worry about how to get in touch with everyone else.

“He is going to the castle to encounter his papa,” Carolina had told me as I zipped my suitcase.

“There’s a castle in Buenos Aires?” I’d asked. An image of Sleeping Beauty’s castle at Disneyland popped up, unbidden, before my eyes.

“No, not like
La Bella Durmiente,”
said Carolina. “It is the name of the hotel where his papa stays.”

“The Castle?” That sounded odd, but maybe it was an Argentinean thing and didn’t translate well.

“That is what I am seeing,” she’d answered in her why-do-you-insist-on-doubting-me-when-I-am-always-right tone.

So I said to the dispatcher, “The Castle Hotel?”

“Cómo?”
he said, like he’d never heard of such a place.

The guy behind me in line, who’d been demonstrating his impatience by sighing a lot and smoking, leaned in. “
La americana quiere decir palacio, no castillo
.” And then, to me, “You mean the Alvear Palace,
sí
?”

Palace made a lot more sense as the name of a hotel than castle — there was even one in New York — and it was close enough to what Carolina had said that it had to be right. “Is it very expensive?” I asked, just to be sure. I’d seen how Hunter Riley lived in both Southampton and Manhattan, and he wasn’t about to stay in a Motel 6.

“Muy caro,”
answered the dispatcher, rubbing his thumb and fingers together in the universal sign of “it will cost you plenty.” “The celebrities and the
políticos,
they go there.”

“Then, yes, I mean,
sí. Gracias.”

The taxi didn’t look like a New York taxi — it was black with a yellow roof — but otherwise the experience was similar, as if the driver were auditioning for an off-track version of NASCAR that included horn-honking, cursing, and obscene gestures. And if I’d hoped that I might be able to convince him to let me borrow his phone, I was out of luck, because he didn’t stop talking on it himself the entire ride except to swear at the other rush-hour drivers. I didn’t even get a chance to ask.

Instead I tried to relax and enjoy the scenery as best I could, though the initial part of the drive was along an ordinary-looking highway. But the weather was mild, sunny if a little humid, and when I cracked the window, the breeze felt good on my skin.