Latitude Zero (25 page)

Back in the nightclub entryway, I scanned faces in what little light there was. Where was Darwin? Would he be alone? With a gang? Couples were shimmying and sliding around the dance floor in exotic salsa moves. I couldn’t imagine Darwin dancing. Small round tables, filling up with spectators, surrounded them. Nobody looked like him.

Then Pizarro swooped in, seemingly out of nowhere, and took me firmly by the arm. “Right this way,
señorita
,” he said, maneuvering me through the crowds.

“Ouch. You’re hurting my arm,” I complained.

Pizarro only squeezed tighter. “You’re a flight risk. And we all have a job to do. Mine is to deliver you to my boss, and make sure you’re coming alone.” His face was carefully arranged in a pleasant expression, as he nodded or waved at people he knew—mostly bouncers, burly men posted around the club. But his voice was acid. He brought me to the farthest corner of the club, where five archways were cut into the brick walls, each one covered with red curtains. He made eye contact with one of the bouncers nearby. “Know that we have many friends here. Some of them work for the police. I suggest doing everything Darwin tells you to do.” He brought me to an archway, pulled back a curtain, and pushed me inside toward a table. The heavy fabric swished closed behind me, and I was with Darwin, alone.

45

IT TOOK
my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light. Votive candles in red glass cups were all that lit this alcove. Darwin, seated at a wooden table, motioned for me to sit opposite him on a bench.

In front of him was popcorn in a little dish, and a short ceramic mug with some kind of steaming hot beverage, which he sipped. The scent drifted my way. Hot red wine. But when it sloshed in the cup as he set it down, it made me think of blood.

There was also a bottle of Inca Kola on the table, which he slid toward me. I refused it. For all I knew, he’d laced it.

Other than sitting under a blood-red lamp, alone in a salsa club, Darwin looked not unlike a tourist himself. A young businessman passing through town, maybe looking to have a good time. In his black pants and striped polo shirt, he looked almost as straightlaced as Santiago, at first glance. But he still wore aviator sunglasses, as he had that day in the woods. In the lenses, the reflected light of the votive candles flickered.

“So.” A slow, crooked grin spread across Darwin’s face. “You’re quite the globe-trotting teen. So far from home.”

I thought I might faint or throw up. I did not want to be in here, where nobody could see us or hear us.

But I was so close to catching Juan Carlos’s possible killer! I positioned my tote bag in front of my chest and hoped the camera would pick up at least the sound. The drapes muted the music from the club a little, yet music still leaked in.

“What’s this meeting all about?” I asked, speaking loudly so the audio on my camera would pick up.

He tossed a handful of popcorn into his mouth, chewed it, and leaned forward. “Information,” he said, drawing out the word. “Missing information, that is.” He fell silent but kept on looking at me. Despite the candlelight dancing in his lenses, and the heat in the club, his gaze made ice run through my veins.

“For someone interested in information, you don’t give very much of it.”

Darwin chuckled, though I didn’t see what could possibly be funny. “I’ve got a problem on my hands, Tessa Taylor,” he said. “A certain individual stole classified information from someone in the organization that I represent.”

An organization! It hadn’t even crossed my mind that Darwin could be part of a larger chain of command, that he might be working for somebody else. “What organization?” I demanded. I was so excited to finally get information from Darwin that I actually forgot to be nervous. I angled my tote bag upward, praying I’d catch his words and maybe his face on film. This was it. The grand confession! I braced myself for the words to come.

“I’m giving information on a need-to-know basis,” he snapped. “You don’t need to know the specifics. But the stolen data got put on a flash drive, which we’ve been attempting to locate. If the data is leaked, it will cost the organization millions of dollars, irrevocable reputation damage, and a possible prison sentence for my client of up to twenty years if the feds were to come after him. This is something, I assure you, he does not deserve. It’s a situation that can too easily blow up over a simple misunderstanding.” He leaned forward again, and the reflected candle flames leaped in his shades. “I’m an information specialist, Tessa. Data is my business. But you might think of me more as a plumber. I am doing whatever I can to stop the leak.”

A prison sentence was at stake? Millions of dollars? This had to involve drugs, and serious drug money. But now it sounded like Juan Carlos was trying to expose someone for buying or selling drugs, not participate in that business himself. He was trying to be a whistle-blower. A hero. A warm feeling slowly replaced the ice that had filled my veins.

“So Juan Carlos took your client’s data?” I asked, shifting the tote bag with the camera even closer. I had to get all this recorded.

“Ding ding ding!”
Darwin pantomimed ringing a bell. “You win the sweepstakes! Yes. Juan Carlos should have stuck to the cycling path, but he rashly stole a flash drive belonging to my client, containing backup data from his personal computer. In doing so, he veered into my territory, and set off a whole chain of events with very serious consequences.”

I leaned forward to pick up Darwin’s every word, his breath, even the upward curl of his lip. “So is that why you killed him?”

Darwin looked startled. Then he laughed. “You think I killed him? You seriously crack me up. I can see why you were so popular on TV and why you already have four hundred followers on your new vlog. You’re very entertaining. Look. I told you, I deal in information. I kill reputations, not people. I don’t like blood on my hands. It’s not my thing. I didn’t knock your friend off his bike. If anything, his stupid accident made my work harder.”

“Was it someone else you work with, then?” I tried to hold my gaze steady. “You know, don’t you, who rigged his bike?”

He barked a laugh.

“It wasn’t Dylan Holcomb, was it?”

He gave me a long look and drummed his fingers on the table. “No,” he said slowly. “That moron of a mechanic was useful as a portal, though.”

“What do you mean, a portal?”

“He was willing to leave the trailer unattended long enough to let someone in. For a modest fee.”

“You paid him off to leave the trailer? Did he know why?”

Darwin smirked. “Dylan’s not exactly the brightest bulb. He didn’t have a clue. But money talks, so he didn’t ask. Just as I predicted.”

“Then call the police and tell them that!” I burst out. “Tell them who Dylan
did
let in!” I narrowed my eyes. “Who did Dylan let into the trailer when he left it unlocked?”

He waggled a finger at me, as if I were a misbehaving child. “You’re changing the meeting agenda. I don’t like that. I’m here to talk about that missing flash drive. I’m not a murderer. Not even from afar.”

“And I don’t have a flash drive,” I retorted. “Just like I didn’t have that bike you were looking for.”

“You led us directly to the bike. In the bike shop where Juan Carlos worked as a volunteer.”

“I didn’t even know it was there!” I spluttered. I wanted to explode. “Come on. You’ve cyberstalked me, you hacked my phone, and you had Balboa post crap about me online, and all for no reason! Why are you coming after me now?”

Darwin shifted in his seat and folded his arms across his broad chest. “It has come to my attention that you were perhaps not as aware of the bike and its whereabouts as we once thought,” he said. “I understand now that another party may have had a hand in the bike’s removal. In fact, we’re grateful that you unwittingly led us to the bike shop, where our field agents could comb the premises and eventually locate the bike. So I’m no longer interested in your connection, or lack thereof, to the bike.”

“So what’s this all about? Why follow me to the middle of the world to keep bothering me?”

“Information. Connections.”

“What?”

Darwin scrutinized me a moment longer before continuing. “My organization has received intelligence that Juan Carlos planned to leak my client’s stolen information to the media. He planned to expose the person in question at Chain Reaction, which was crawling with cameras and reporters. We figured out you, of all people, were his media contact. A kid. What are the odds?”

I gripped the edge of the table. So that must be what Juan Carlos had wanted to talk to me about so urgently after the award ceremony! The information he stole! It all made sense now. He’d wanted to confide in me, or use my connections to GBCN. Not to confess his secret love for me or whatever. That was why he asked me if I had a laptop. If he had a flash drive on him at Chain Reaction, he could have shown me these incriminating files right then and there, and I could have brought them to someone at GBCN.

Although why did he have to do this in person? Why not simply email information, as I’d mailed the bike inspection video to Bianca Slade?

“You look surprised,” said Darwin said with a smirk.

“How’d you know for sure I was the media contact?” I demanded.

“It’s a fascinating chain of events, actually,” said Darwin. “Juan Carlos had called a friend here in Ecuador, the day before the race. We intercepted the call and learned that he planned a leak at the event. Then two of our agents, embedded at Chain Reaction, saw Juan Carlos ride off toward the woods and then come out of the woods. With no bike. Those same agents saw you and Juan Carlos talking shortly after. They witnessed other suspicious behavior, like transferring a phone between you and ducking behind a tree with him. Then once I learned who you were and that you worked at GBCN,” Darwin continued, “we simply connected the dots.”

I was shaking, badly. I put my hands beneath the table so Darwin wouldn’t see. Now I could see how the trail led to me. If Juan Carlos hadn’t been killed, he would have told me everything. I didn’t know what made me madder: Darwin’s wild assumptions about me, or the missed opportunity to talk to Juan Carlos and prevent this whole mess in the first place.

“You connected the dots? No,” I said. “You jumped to conclusions. The only information Juan Carlos gave me was his phone number. And I went to tell him about a team photo shoot he was missing. Not to get ‘information.’”

“But you knew Juan Carlos,” Darwin insisted. “You’d seen the bike in the woods. You’d filmed it on your phone. And you worked in the media. You were a loose cannon. We had to get you off the air and away from your immediate media connections.”

I sucked in my breath. “Is that why Balboa posted that article? And is she the one who filmed me in the medical tent and posted that photo and audio file?”

“You are correct. That was also our insurance policy. You know what we can do if you don’t cooperate with us. Now, can you look me in the face and tell me you don’t have the flash drive?” Darwin lowered his shades, and I saw his eyes. Or eye.

One eye was missing. The skin around the sewn-up socket was mottled and scarred, as though he’d been burned. His other eye was blue and intense, piercing through me, unblinking.

I shuddered, but I held his gaze. “What happened to you?”

“Hockey injury. Long story. When you’re a mother someday, don’t let your kids play that sport. It’s dangerous. I’ve avoided sports ever since. It’s why I turned to computers. Safer that way. If you know your way around them.” His upper lip curled. “So you see, if I’m squeamish about contact sports, how could I be Juan Carlos’s killer? I operate at arm’s length, or farther, as much as I possibly can, in all my business dealings.”

I forced myself to stare at his face, including his hideous eye socket. “I do not have a flash drive,” I said slowly and clearly. “He didn’t give it to me.”

Darwin regarded me a moment longer, then slid his glasses back up his nose. “I believe you,” he said. “But I also believe you can help us find it.”

“But where was Juan Carlos after he talked to me? Why didn’t he make it to the starting point on time? Did your little spies happen to see where he went? There’s a lot of people who’d like to know.”

“Persistent interviewer, aren’t you? I can see how you’re in the school of Bianca Slade. That must be why you put her on the path to a criminal investigation.”

I shuddered. So he knew about that.

“You see, you’re entirely too interested in Juan Carlos to be completely innocent of involvement,” said Darwin. “Now I’ll tell you an amusing story. Right before the race, my field agents grabbed Juan Carlos.”

“Balboa and Pizarro,” I guessed, picturing them in their EcuaBar volunteer outfits.

“That’s right. We had a van stationed nearby. They held him there. They demanded he hand over the flash drive that he’d been planning to leak to the media at Chain Reaction. They also asked who else had this information. Had he made copies of the drive? Sent it to the cloud? We had to know, and determine the risk.”

I pictured Pizarro and that gleaming knife, held against Juan Carlos’s neck, in a van, while his junior teammates and Preston Lane and Chris Fitch looked for him in the staging area, not suspecting a thing.

“And?” I prompted, feeling sick.

“And finally, he buckled under pressure thanks to my skilled interrogators. He confessed that he’d already given the drive to a media contact. Though he wouldn’t name names, at least we had a lead. Then we asked him where his spare bike had gone, because it contained something else he’d swiped from our organization.”

“Money?”

“You’re an A+ student, Tessa Taylor.” Darwin clapped his hands together. “He took a pretty tidy sum of money that did not belong to him. One of my field agents had intelligence about his plan to turn that cash in to the authorities at Chain Reaction, where we were supposed to pick up a payment. Again, my young interrogators got him to confess he’d hidden the bike in the woods until he could safely bring it to a media contact and a police officer immediately after the race. He told them he’d placed his bike with our cash in the woods near a spray-painted rock. When my source gave me that lead, I immediately went off to find it. I found the rock but no bike. I looked all around. I smelled a rat. I figured he’d deliberately misled us. And then”—he smiled slowly—“I saw you. Little Red Riding Hood. Too conveniently traipsing through the woods, exactly where you didn’t belong.”

The puzzle pieces of the Chain Reaction morning finally snapped in place. So when Juan Carlos had talked to me on Great Marsh Road, Balboa—lurking across the street—must have shown up in time to see us talking. She must have alerted Pizarro. They accosted him on his way to the photo shoot, and that’s why he never got there. If Juan Carlos had been held up in a van, being interrogated at knifepoint about the missing flash drive and a cash-stuffed bike, he wouldn’t have been ready to start the race with his team, and his teammates wouldn’t have seen him. That’s why he started the race so late. And Darwin was probably talking to Balboa and Pizarro when I overheard him talking on a cell. But Juan Carlos must have misdirected them to buy himself some time. Because that bike was definitely not by some spray-painted rock when I’d found it.

“So Juan Carlos eventually got out of that van, right?” I guessed. “I know he picked up his main bike from Dylan at some point. Then he tried to catch up with his team.”