The Hunt

13

Peter took off immediately, disappearing around the other side of the waterfall. He returned a few minutes later, just as disappointed as he’d been earlier that day. “Nobody’s out there,” he said. “The people who were on the Esplanade before have gone.”

Ben, meanwhile, had been looking for cameras. Checking for surveillance tape must have been a standard part of FBI training, or perhaps it was the part Ben remembered best. But even if there were cameras, I doubted they’d be helpful. Hundreds of people must have come through here today, maybe even thousands-it was tourist season, after all. Assuming we’d be able to talk whatever security personnel there were into letting us view any footage, what were the odds that there was a camera pointed at just the right angle to provide a clear view of whoever had tucked the package into its hiding place? Ben must have been thinking along the same lines, because he gave up his search with a shrug when Peter returned. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

Which left us with the package itself. The five of us stood in a circle on the walkway, looking at the padded envelope resting in my hands.

“This had better not be another keychain,” I said, testing its weight. The envelope and the handwriting on it were identical to the envelope from Union Square, but this one had a bit more heft to it.

“Maybe it’s a bomb,” suggested Luisa, but she was mocking me. I was beginning to wonder whether our friendship would be able to withstand another thirty-six hours of withdrawal.

“Do you want me to open it?” asked Peter.

“No, I can do it.” I pulled on the little tab that peeled back to slice open the top of the envelope and peered inside. Light glinted off something metallic.

“What is it?” asked Ben.

“Strange,” I said. “That’s what it is. Very, very strange.”

I reached into the envelope and withdrew a shiny new iPod, complete with headphones.

“Nice,” said Peter appreciatively. “I was thinking of getting you one just like that to take to the gym.”

I didn’t know when, exactly, he thought I’d be going to the gym, but I could disabuse him of that particular fantasy later. “I guess Christmas came early this year. But why would somebody give me an iPod?”

“Perhaps to help you expand your cultural horizons beyond national monuments and television shows meant for teenagers,” said Luisa. “You could download operas and symphonies. Or subscribe to podcasts from the BBC and NPR.”

“I don’t think whoever left this intended for me to bore myself to death.”

“Maybe there’s something already on the iPod that’s a clue of some sort,” offered Abigail. “A song or photograph. Something like that.”

This, in contrast to Luisa’s suggestion, was a good idea. I wondered if it was possible to trade in Luisa for Abigail, at least until Tuesday morning at ten. “How do I turn it on?” I asked. It’s possible I was the last American under the age of eighty who had never used an iPod.

“Here,” said Peter. He took the device from my hand and pressed the track wheel. A second later, the small screen lit up. We huddled around him, watching as the Apple icon gave way to a menu of options.

“Try Photos first,” I said, thinking about the picture we’d found in the safe, but clicking on Photos led only to an empty screen. He clicked on Music next, but this also produced nothing. Then he clicked on the Videos option in the menu.

“Jackpot,” he said, tilting the screen up so we could all get a better look. There was only one item listed, but it was clearly meant for me: it was titled “Play Me, Rachel.”

It was a simple enough request, and it had worked for Lewis Carroll. “Okay,” I said, “Let’s play it.” Peter handed me the headphones, and I inserted the buds into my ears.

“Ready?” he asked.

I nodded, and he pressed Play. The screen went dark for a moment, and I belatedly started worrying that I was about to see something I wouldn’t want to see. But before I could even think of any examples of things I wouldn’t want to see, images began appearing on the screen and a staticky audio track filled my ears.

The video was a montage of sorts, a series of black-and-white clips of the same man in a variety of settings: behind a speaker’s podium, striding through a crowd, shaking hands with other men, bending to pick up a child. Each clip morphed into the next as someone spoke passionately in a foreign language over the footage. I thought it sounded like Spanish, but, as I mentioned before, I’d taken French, and I remembered precious little of that. The man himself didn’t look unfamiliar, but I couldn’t place him. He had the same shaggy bulk Leo had in the picture in my purse, but these clips were clearly much older, and this guy’s favorite outfit seemed to consist of a beret and fatigues, whereas Leo had been wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

Luisa had pressed her head in close to my own to see the screen, and she said something beside me, but I couldn’t hear her. I removed one of the earbuds. “What?” I asked. “I’m trying to listen.”

“Give me that,” she demanded.

“Why?”

“Just give it to me.” She grabbed the earbud from my hand and stuck it into her own ear. I’d never seen her quite this testy before, and we watched the rest of the clip together in silence.

“Do you know who that was?” she said when the montage had drawn to a close a half-minute later. “Could you understand the Spanish?”

“Well, no.”

“I didn’t think so,” she said with satisfaction. “You may know everything there is to know about TV and American tourist attractions, but I spent my youth studying important subjects, like political history and foreign languages.”

I didn’t see what political history had to do with understanding Spanish. It also wasn’t a fair comparison given that Spanish was hardly a foreign language to Luisa, but we could debate that when she wasn’t nicotine-deprived. “Are you going to share with us your knowledge of political history and foreign languages? Or are we supposed to guess?” I asked.

“It’s Che Guevara.”

“Who?”

“Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. El Che. Born in Argentina in 1928 and executed as a revolutionary in Bolivia in 1967.”

“Oh,” I said. I’d heard of him. In fact, I’d seen the movie, feeling virtuous since it had subtitles. “You mean, the guy from The Motorcycle Diaries?”

“The movie was based on the actual diaries Che Guevara kept during a trip he made by motorcycle to a leper colony in Peru. The experience played a critical role in shaping his radical philosophy.”

“The guy in the movie was better looking,” I said.

“Che Guevara was a Marxist, right?” said Ben.

“Right,” said Luisa. “And the audio’s from a speech he gave in the sixties, talking about the importance of using technology to further socialism.”

“Well, whoever’s leading us on this scavenger hunt either knows a lot about leftists or he is one. Or maybe both,” said Peter. “But where does he want us to go next? I’m pretty sure there isn’t a Che Guevara monument in San Francisco.”

My earlier frustration was turning to annoyance. “And we’re not any closer to knowing why he’s leading us on a scavenger hunt in the first place, or if any of this will help us find Hilary.”

We were all silent for a moment, thinking. The ambient noises of the city-traffic, a dog’s bark, the clang of a cable car’s bell-competed with the rush of the waterfall to fill the quiet. I wondered if I was ever going to be able to get the Rice-a-Roni theme song out of my head. Every cable car I heard only exacerbated the problem.

Abigail was the first to speak. “You know,” she began, almost hesitantly, “Luisa had started to tell me about everything that’s happened over dinner. About Hilary’s disappearance, and the article she was working on and the picture in the safe. And then the keychain, and now this video. It’s all been reminding me of someone I used to know. Especially when you called it a scavenger hunt, Peter. The person I knew loved scavenger hunts-he loved any sort of puzzle. But it can’t be him.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“The person I’m thinking of-well, he’s dead.”

“Leo?” asked Luisa.

Abigail looked at her in surprise. “Who told you about Leo?”

“He was the other man in the picture Hilary stored in the safe. Peter’s mother identified him-she remembered him from when she used to teach at Berkeley. Then I called the university’s technical-support hotline, right before we met up for dinner, and I asked if a graduate student named Leo had ever worked there. The woman who answered had overlapped with him, and she told me about the fire. I was getting to that part of the story when Rachel called and we had to rush over here.” This last was delivered with yet another pointed look at me. If this kept up, I might have to release Luisa from the dare purely out of self-defense.

“How did you know Leo?” Peter asked Abigail.

“And you still haven’t explained why you think you can get in touch with Iggie,” said Luisa.

I’d been watching Abigail’s face, and maybe it was a trick of the light, but she was starting to look familiar in a whole new way, a way that had nothing to do with her resemblance to Christie Turlington.

“You’re Biggie, aren’t you?” I said.

She turned to me, her brown eyes wide. “How did you know?”