“But?” Nancy prompted gently.
“But this friend, he is telling me Roberto—Roberto was not to be trusted! That he was—what did he say?—a double agent, working for the dictator and for the revolutionaries. He says he found, in Roberto’s papers back in San Carlos, some letters that show that he wanted to sell the list of names to the senator.”
“Sell the list?” Bess gasped.
“Yes,” said Teresa. “If she would not pay enough, Roberto would not care what happened to the people on the list!”
“So he really wasn’t working to overthrow the San Carlos dictatorship?” Nancy asked, appalled.
“There is no way to tell whose side Roberto was on.” Teresa bit her lip. “And maybe he would even betray me!”
Nancy was horrified, but there was no time to think over what Teresa had said. It was almost nine o’clock.
“Dawn’s at five-fifty-seven,” Bess said starkly. “The senator checked. Dan took Teresa straight to her as soon as he found out.”
That meant Senator Kilpatrick knew about the masquerade—and Carson Drew probably knew as well. “Where’s the senator now?” Nancy asked weakly.
“At the Department of Justice, pushing panic buttons and pulling strings. She took your dad with her,” Bess added. “I almost forgot. She said that out of desperation the government agents even took Teresa’s poetry book. They used microscopes and infrared light and tried all kinds of code tests, and it’s clean. So Teresa will get it and that postcard she was using as a bookmark back tomorrow.”
Nancy saw Teresa’s face change.
“What postcard?” Nancy asked instantly.
Teresa shook her head, turning away slightly. “It is nothing . . . I just realized that that card is the last thing Roberto ever gave me,” she confessed, wiping away tears.
“Roberto gave you a postcard?” Nancy jumped up. “Teresa, think hard. When did he give it to you? And why?”
Teresa looked at her, bewildered. “Why . . . when we were leaving the airport, Roberto said he wouldn’t have time to write postcards, that he was stupid to think he would. He threw the cards into a trash can. And I—I said I would like to have the picture of the Capitol to take home to my mother. So Roberto laughed and took it out of the can and gave it to me. I was keeping it in the poetry book.”
“Teresa, think! You’d just gotten into the U.S. You hadn’t even left the airport! When and where did Roberto get American postcards?”
Teresa frowned. “He must have bought them—”
“The novelty shop!” Nancy almost shouted. “I knew that must have something to do with this! It was the only place Roberto could have gone during those few minutes. He must have written a message on one of the cards.”
She faced the others urgently. “Come on! We have to get hold of the manager of that store! The hit list may still be there.”
“Hold on,” George said promptly. “One, the store’s been searched—several times. Two, he could have mailed the card. Three, and most important, the senator’s not about to let any of us loose till the hit men are arrested. She gave strict orders to those musclemen outside our doors.”
“That’s easy,” Nancy said. “George, phone the senator’s office, tell her assistant that we need to follow up a lead for the senator.”
Hiding a grin, George did so. “We’re in luck all the way,” she announced when she hung up. “We’ve got a bulletproof car and escorts, your father’s occupied looking up legal measures the senator can invoke to protect the people who could be on the hit list, and your chaperon,” she added, turning to Teresa, “has just been picked up by the FBI. It seems she has an interesting past they want to find out more about.”
“Chatty assistant,” Bess said, smiling at George. George simply bowed.
Could Señora Ramirez be a terrorist? If so, on which side—the rebels’ or the dictator’s? Nancy felt a sudden stab of pity for Teresa. She was so alone on her first trip to a foreign country. The man she loved had been brutally murdered, and suddenly she wasn’t sure who that man had been. Even her chaperon might betray her.