River of Ruin

On the Rio Tuira, Panama

The boat’s outboard engine emitted a throaty growl that made conversation all but impossible unless the speaker’s lips were to the listener’s ear. Hovering above the V of the boat’s wake was a noxious cloud of blue smoke as the old Johnson engine burned through quarts of oil. Mercer sat in the bow of the open craft. The wind generated by their movement dried the heavy sweat that stuck his hastily purchased bush shirt to his chest. At his feet was a cheap duffel filled with spare clothes and other essentials. Behind him were local guides he’d hired in El Real, the closest town with an airstrip to where Gary was working.

Maria Barber was also in the boat, sitting between Mercer and the natives, her vacant gaze fixed in space as the impenetrable jungle scrolled by. She was not what Mercer had expected. Maria no longer resembled the sad waif in the picture Gary had shown him. In the years since it had been taken, she’d replaced the suffering in her eyes with a sophisticated demeanor more befitting a native of Miami or New York than the barrios of Panama City. Her skin color and features showed heavy European influence, still considered an honor badge in Central America, and glowed with health. Despite the rough surroundings, makeup accented her full mouth and drew special attention to her dark eyes. She was dressed in bush clothes that cost twice what Mercer had spent on his. The khaki was only a shade darker than her face and still showed the creases of newness.

Mercer had met her in David, a town near the Costa Rican border. Circumstances demanded he sacrifice comfort for speed getting to Panama from France, so he’d reshuffled his route to shave off fifteen hours, flying on airlines he’d never heard of and replacing an overnight layover in Martinique with three hasty hours of sleep in Mexico City’s Benito Juarez Airport. She’d stepped off the private plane Mercer had chartered for her from Panama City as if born to such travel, wearing a simple silk dress, a string of pearls, and flashy earrings. His call from a pay phone in David had given her just an hour to get from her apartment to where the charter plane waited and it appeared he’d caught her getting ready for an elegant morning rendezvous. Mercer noticed the distinctive smell of Obsession perfume when they’d shaken hands. Her nails were beautifully manicured and painted a slick red.

Even after he told her about the attempt to steal the Lepinay diary, she hadn’t seemed concerned over her husband’s continued silence, now stretching past twenty-four hours. Normally, Mercer would have made allowances for Gary’s lack of sophisticated communications gear—he didn’t have the expense accounts Mercer enjoyed when he prospected for some multinational mining company—yet the connection to the journal was so clear that Maria should have shown some anxiety. Considering the changes he saw in her, it was obvious that she was no longer the young girl grateful to Gary for rescuing her from the slums. It was also possible that these changes had effectively nullified their marriage. For all his faults, Gary was an honest worker who enjoyed a simpler way of life. Mercer couldn’t imagine the woman before him spending more than a few hours away from the comforts of a big city.

Mercer recalled that Maria was Gary’s third wife and that the others had left because the women had wrongly assumed Gary would eventually give up his rough lifestyle. He imagined this marriage heading in the same direction.

Maria had wanted to wait in David and try to reach Gary again, but Mercer felt time pressing in on him and insisted they immediately take off for the Darien Province. He barely gave her enough time to freshen up in the airport before the charter plane was in the air and headed toward El Real.

In the riverside town of three thousand people, he’d asked her to hire the boat and guides since his Spanish was nonexistent. The locals knew of Gary and the owner of the boat had set a reasonable price as long as his three cousins—and their M-16s—came along. Most of the narco-guerrilla activity had been far to the north, near the Atlantic coast, but no one took chances with the Colombians.

El Real was an hour and a half behind them now as they continued to motor deeper into the jungle. The sun was high up in the sky, flashing off the river where it found breaks in the canopy. The water was as black as tea, stained dark by tannins leached from fallen leaves. Only occasionally could they get a look at the banks of the river, sandy shoals and spots where a gentle curve had eroded small ledges. Mostly, though, their view was obscured by the jungle, a riot of intertwined plants, trees, vines and creepers that cut off everything but a ribbon of sky directly above them. The entire color palate was blue sky, black water, and green, a million shades from deepest emerald to mildest mint. And then there would be jeweled flashes. The central Darien Province was one of the premier spots for bird watching on the planet and the jungle sparkled with feathers in a dazzling variety of colors. This deep into the hinterland, only an occasional bird would flutter away from the sound of their passing boat.

The boatman eased back on the throttle and the bow settled into the water. The wake slapped against the shores. A quick conversation fired between the dark-skinned mestizos.

“What’s going on?” Mercer asked Maria Barber. The low burbling of the engine was a relief after its choking roar.

“We are getting closer to what Gary called the River of Ruin. The waters here are unpredictable. They don’t want to run the boat into a shoal.”

Mercer studied the water. Brown stains wended their way down on the lazy current. This tributary was being fed by another, muddier stream. Conversation over, the boat again picked up its pace, though much slower than before.

It was amazing, Mercer thought. Less than two days before he was in a city of millions and now the six of them in the boat were the only people for miles. Because his job took him to the remotest corners of the globe, the isolation didn’t bother him. The same couldn’t be said for Maria. She looked miserable.

“You don’t seem too comfortable out here,” he said.

She gave him a slow glance. “No.” She went on after a pause. “When I first meet Gary, we would explore together. It was fun for a little while.”

“But not anymore?” Mercer prompted.

“Gary has money. He doesn’t need to live in the jungle like an animal. We have an apartment in Panama City, a nice one. A car. I am happier there.”

“You knew that this is what Gary did with his time, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I knew.” She reapplied a glossy coat of lipstick without use of a mirror. “I just didn’t think it would go on for so long. Why would a rich norteamericano want to live in conditions worse than I had when I was a child? I couldn’t take it.”

The next logical question was if she still loved Gary, but Mercer decided that not only wasn’t it his business, he honestly didn’t care. Maria had wanted out of the slums and got it and Gary had a pretty wife years younger than him for when he came out of the jungle. Love, he realized, had nothing to do with it. He guessed the lunch date he’d interrupted with his call from David hadn’t been with some girlfriends. Mercer was glad he’d be out of here in less than a week.

“Do you know what Gary wanted me to see?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. There is a dead volcano at the head of the River of Ruin. It has a lake in its center that feeds the river from over a tall waterfall. He had been looking up there recently. Maybe he found something. I don’t know.”

The river valley they’d been traversing had been shallow but soon began to grow steeper, with high hills of thick jungle that hemmed in on the water. The ribbon of sky hadn’t shrunk, yet somehow looked farther away. The river seemed more claustrophobic and the humidity level shot up brutally.

“We are close,” Maria called.

The river branched, the spill from the smaller fork completely brown, like the discharge from an industrial outlet. Mercer saw that a number of trees had lost their upstream foliage, as if a storm had raged here recently. The muddy tributary was partially blocked by a set of small rapids, nothing the boat couldn’t negotiate, but they struck Mercer as odd. The boulders in the stream were the first rock he’d seen since leaving El Real. Then he saw partial stone walls on each bank. The artificial breastworks ran from the valley’s flanks right to the water’s edge. They were ancient, worn and near collapse. Sections of the walls had been recently cleaned of vegetation and dirt, exposed to the daylight for the first time in centuries.

The boat swung into the right branch of the river, powering through the short stretch of cataracts. This part of the river was even narrower than before, darker and more ominous.

“Those rocks back there made a ten-foot-high waterfall,” Maria said. “They dammed off this whole river until Gary cleared them away. He thinks that the stones were quarried from someplace else and set there so no one could travel farther up this valley by boat. We’re on the River of Ruin now.”

“Who laid them?” Mercer noted that the valley floor didn’t appear to be as thickly covered with jungle. This area had been underwater until just a short time ago—back-flooded by the ancient dam.

“Gary believes it was the Incas who robbed the Spanish mule trains of gold and jewels and created what is called the Twice-Stolen Treasure. It was those stones that convinced him the treasure was close by. That is why he called it the River of Ruin, for the ruins of a dam he had discovered.”

Mercer recalled the fantastic story Gary Barber had pieced together over the past five years that led him to this isolated stretch of water.

Following the dazzling success of Hernan Cortes against the Aztecs in 1519, Spanish conquistadors turned their attention to South America in pursuit of the massive gold reserves held by the mighty Inca empire. After an earlier exploration that gained him the favor of King Charles I, Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1531 with 180 men and 27 horses just as a long Inca civil war was coming to an end. He immediately left his coastal garrison of San Miguel to meet with the new ruler, Atahualpa, in Cajamarca. Backed by a thirty-thousand-man army, Atahualpa felt he had nothing to fear from the small Spanish band. He continued to believe that right up to the moment he was taken prisoner. His people paid his ransom by twice filling a room eighteen feet by twenty-two feet with silver and once more with gold, an estimated twenty-four tons of precious metal. The bullion was shipped back to the coast for its journey to Spain and the Inca ruler was murdered anyway on August 29, 1533. Three months later Pizarro completed the conquest by occupying the Inca capital of Cuzco and made Atahualpa’s brother, Manco Capac, a puppet ruler.

In 1536, Manco Capac finally began a belated revolt against the Spanish, laying siege to Cuzco and eventually burning the city. But he could not maintain his revolt and eventually retreated to the mountain stronghold of Vitcos, where he engaged in a harassment campaign against Pizarro’s soldiers until his murder by the Spanish in 1544. By this time a steady supply of gold, silver and emeralds was being drained from the Inca empire, loaded on ships in the new city of Lima, where it was sent to warehouses in Panama City. From there the treasure was moved to the Caribbean coast trading centers of Nombres de Dios or Porto Bello by pack mule on El Camino Real, the King’s Highway. Once a year, galleons from Spain arrived to take the loot back to Europe.

As part of his guerrilla campaign against the conquistadors, Manco Capac dispatched a small expeditionary force to Panama in an effort to stem the flood of gold, silver, and gems. Although the Incas did not have Spain’s rapacious hunger for precious metals, they considered gold to be the Sweat of the Sun, the central deity in their religion, and silver to be the Tears of the Moon. Manco’s plan was that this force would attack the mule caravans in the densest part of the jungle as they traversed the isthmus, and recover as much of the treasure as they could. Once taken back from the Spanish, the treasure would then be hidden until such time as the conquistadors were thrown out of Peru and the Inca empire was reestablished.

With the help of Cimaroons, escaped slaves living as small tribes in the jungle, Manco’s troops established a number of hidden villages in Panama where they prepared to carry out their commando raids. Using information gathered by the Cimaroons, the warriors learned the routes and schedules and began their attacks. The early assaults were small-scale and cautious, netting little in the way of treasure, but teaching the rebels a great deal about Spanish arms and tactics. They would strike quickly and just as quickly flee with what they could carry to their forest redoubts, far from where the Spanish would pursue them. Soon, however, they were attacking the larger mule trains the Spanish sent across the isthmus, wending caravans of three hundred or more animals laden with bullion from the newly opened mines at Potosi and Huancavelica.

Back in Peru, Manco Capac’s rebellion against Pizarro ended with his assassination. His son Sayri Tupac became ruler, and the Inca warriors in Panama continued to raid the mule trains. Sayri was poisoned in 1561, and still the raids continued. Isolated in the Panamanian jungle, the band of warriors didn’t know that their once mighty empire was dying by degrees. They interbred with Cimaroon women, creating new generations of rebels to maintain their harassment of the caravans. In 1572, the last Inca revolt in Peru, led by another of Manco Capac’s sons, Tupac Amaru, ended with his beheading in Cuzco. What followed was two hundred uninterrupted years of colonial rule by the Spanish, and for much of that time they shipped the riches of the New World back to the Old through Panama. And all that time the descendents of Manco’s original band of soldiers continued to plunder the mule trains.

While the attacks by pirates such as Henry Morgan and Francis Drake against the Spanish strongholds of Nombres de Dios and Panama City were better known, the secret raids by Incas long cut off from their homeland amassed fortunes far beyond the dreams of even the most bloodthirsty privateers. An estimated billion dollars in silver from just one mine in Bolivia was transported on the King’s Highway, and nearly every shipment across the isthmus was attacked by the rebels. Untold tons of silver and gold and millions of carats of Colombian emeralds were hijacked from the caravans and cached someplace in the Panamanian jungle.

Gary Barber, like others who’d followed the legend, believed the hoard, stolen once from the Incas and once by them, to be worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in today’s market.

The problem, of course, was that there exists no actual proof that these raids ever took place. Journal entries written at the time were sketchy at best and much of what was known came second- and often thirdhand. Most scholars discounted the idea of a tribe of Incas living in the Panamanian jungle for two hundred years. They felt the tales were merely cover stories told by conquistadors who stole from their own mule trains to avoid turning over the loot to the Spanish crown. Because nothing of the Incas had ever been found, and certainly no trace of a fabulous treasure had ever turned up, they believed the legend likely grew from a single documented Cimaroon raid. This tale was then embellished to hide a systematic looting by the Spanish of their own royal caravans.

But looking back at the remnants of the ancient dam that once blocked this river from the main channel of the Rio Tuira, Mercer saw that maybe there was something to the story after all. As far as he knew, no pre-Colombian civilization in Panama had constructed such elaborate stonework. In fact the main indigenous tribe, the Kuna, had been left alone by the Spanish because they were a near-Stone Age people with nothing worth plundering. The stone slabs that Gary had excavated were square cut and would weigh between one and two tons. Not something the Kuna could have built, and the design lacked typical Castilian ornamentation, which meant it was unlikely to be the work of the Spanish. Having never seen Inca ruins like Machu Picchu firsthand, Mercer couldn’t say for certain if the dam had been fashioned by those master builders, but he wouldn’t be surprised.

Once past the rapids that were the remnants of the dam’s foundation, the boatman throttled back his outboard and guided the craft deeper into the jungle, farther up the River of Ruin. Sections of both banks had been dug into recently, showing raw scars of muddy dirt that could only be Gary’s work as he searched for the treasure. After ten minutes the engine was cut altogether.

Expecting to hear the raucous sounds of the jungle—the birds, and insects, and monkeys—the party was struck by a deafening silence. Mercer’s hearing recovered from the thrum of the outboard and still he could hear nothing except the gentle hiss of the boat through the water as it slowed. The guides shot each other apprehensive glances. This was clearly something they had never experienced before.

High above, a vulture slashed through the strip of sky.

The guides jabbered something at the boat’s owner, each reaching for his assault rifle.

“What are they saying?” Mercer asked.

Maria ignored him and joined the conversation, her voice rising to a shout that cut off the argument. She finally turned to Mercer. “He wants to head back and call the police. He thinks Gary and his party have been attacked by guerrillas.”

“Tell him we go on,” Mercer said.

“I did. We’re only about a half mile from Gary’s camp.”

The nervous energy was palpable as they threaded through the draped branches of overhanging trees. The three armed men restlessly scanned the jungle, eyes and hands tight, mouths fixed in grim lines. There was no movement except where the boat’s wake splashed against the river-banks.

The smell reached them before the camp came into sight. On an instinctive level, Mercer knew what it was, as if his olfactory senses had a genetic knowledge of what human death smelled like. Then again, he’d smelled death too many times to ever forget it. It was a scent like that of rotted meat, but somehow much, much worse.

Gary’s encampment stood on a flat plain on the water’s edge. There were a dozen personnel tents and one larger one Gary must have used for his headquarters. The bodies lay haphazardly throughout the camp. Some were at the riverbank as if they’d died fetching water, while others had fallen half in and half out of their tents. Still others must be still inside the tents, for carrion birds clustered around the open flaps, their plumage streaked with gore. Mercer could see maybe fifteen people, men and women, and several children. All were dead from apparent gunshot wounds.

The boatman began jabbering again. Mercer flicked his eyes from the carnage and stared at the frightened man. The Panamanian stopped speaking, swallowed once, and was unable to meet the hard gaze. “Tell him to beach the boat,” Mercer said without turning away.

Maria didn’t need to translate. The boat edged over to the camp and Mercer leapt out with a rope in his hand. He tied it to a stake jammed deep into the mud. He pointed at the leader of guards, motioning the man to follow him and to send out the other two as pickets at the upstream and downstream edges of the clearing. Maria and the boatman stayed in the small craft. As the men entered the camp, their motion startled the scavenger birds to a flight of indignant cries. Mercer tied a bandana around his mouth and nose.

There were times that he hated being right, absolutely hated it. As he trudged toward the main tent, the sense of urgency that had driven him halfway around the globe washed out of him with each step. The fears he’d harbored since the assault in Paris had been justified. This was no random narco-guerrilla attack. The timing was just too coincidental. Judging by the amount of damage done by the birds, he estimated this group had died at least a day before he bought the Lepinay journal, just after Gary’s final communication with his wife, when he’d said he had something he wanted Mercer to see. Gary had been closer to a major discovery than he’d known and the knowledge had cost him his life.

Mercer was doing a good job of keeping his emotions in check until he entered the main tent and found Gary’s body. Dressed in shorts, boots, and a filthy T-shirt, Gary lay sprawled on the canvas floor of the tent, a bullet wound like an obscene third eye in his forehead. Despite the savagery of the attack on the camp, his weathered features were composed, as if he’d puzzled about his death rather than fought it. Though not as bad as the others outside, Gary’s corpse had not been spared from the vultures. Mercer thought he’d prepared himself for finding this type of scene, and still his hands shook as he bent to close Gary’s eyes.

Mercer needed many minutes for the ache to subside enough for him to begin thinking again.

The large tent had been ransacked, the contents of chests and boxes dumped on the floor, a computer smashed, Gary’s bed stripped and flipped. Further proof that this wasn’t Colombian guerrillas was that a great deal of equipment valuable to struggling rebels had been either smashed or left behind: a transceiver, clothing, the portable generator just outside the tent and cases of canned food. Mercer didn’t know exactly what the killers were after so he couldn’t tell if they’d found it, but he suspected that eliminating Gary as a rival was their principal aim. The ransacking had been a ruse to throw off authorities.

Back into the brutal sunshine, he stepped carefully toward the boat, noting that they had gone so far as to shoot a couple of camp dogs, two goats, and a handful of chickens. Like the dead people, there was remarkably little blood from the gunshots. When he reached the boat, Maria’s back was to him, her gaze fixed on the slow-moving river.

“I’m sorry,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder. They remained frozen for several long seconds and then he could feel her body heaving gently as she began to sob. “If it’s any comfort, he didn’t suffer.”

She turned into him and his arms went around her, her face buried in his stomach as he stood over the boat. “It is no comfort,” she said softly.

They stayed like that until the leader of the guards, Ruben, approached. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand to encompass the camp then shook his head. He’d searched the area and found no one alive and no sign of the attackers. Just as Mercer had guessed.

“Guardia Nacional?” he asked, meaning should they alert the national police force.

“Sí.” Mercer nodded. He lifted Maria’s chin so he could look at her face. Her makeup had smeared a little, but her eyes remained clear and glassy. “I’m going to stay here while Ruben contacts the police. I think you should go back to Panama City. The charter plane is still in El Real. Just have the pilot fly you home. Is that okay?”

“All right. You will ... take care of Gary?”

“They’ll probably want to bury him tomorrow in El Real or I can have him flown to the capital.”

She looked across the camp. “No. He was interiorano, a person of the bush. He should be buried here.”

“Then tell the pilot to bring you back tomorrow morning for the ceremony.”

Maria hesitated. “You and I will go to church for Gary at home when you are finished here. I will say good-bye then.”

Surprised that she wouldn’t want to be there when her husband was buried, Mercer held his tongue. Her relationship wasn’t his business, he reminded himself.

Ruben stayed with Mercer and sent his two comrades to El Real with Maria. It cost Mercer another hundred dollars to retain their services. He didn’t think Gary’s killers would be back, but there were real narco-guerrillas operating in Darien, and he didn’t want to hang around without armed protection.

The language barrier aside, the Panamanian seemed to understand Mercer’s need to quietly mourn for Gary Barber and to investigate what had happened on his own. Ruben shadowed Mercer at a respectful distance as they spent the six hours it would take for an organized force to return exploring the area around the camp. This included taking a battered fiberglass canoe down to the dam. It was an amazing structure but told Mercer nothing about its builders or its true purpose.

Ignoring the ancient enigma, he concentrated on the one surrounding the massacre. Apart from the obvious—that treasure hunters, likely backed by an unknown Chinese businessman, had shot seventeen people to make their raid look like the work of Colombian rebels—there was a deeper mystery here that went beyond the evidence. There were too many irregularities that didn’t fit the elaborately staged scene. Gary’s calm expression and the lack of blood were the most obvious signs, and the more Mercer explored, the more anomalies he saw.

Although the killers had taken the time to shoot all the domestic animals, further inspection revealed that several of the wounds wouldn’t have been fatal, and five of the dozen chickens hadn’t been shot at all but were still as dead as those raked by automatic gunfire. Then there was the absence of any scavengers other than those that had flown here. He also found a number of dead animals in the bush bordering the camp, a few monkeys and birds. Even more puzzling was the fact that they were barely decomposed. There were no insects to eat them. The jungle was virtually dead. It wasn’t until he entered the kitchen tent and discovered lifeless cockroaches lying on their backs that he put it all together: the wind-ravaged trees, the silence, the calm acceptance of death on most victims’ faces.

That the whole scene had been contrived wasn’t in doubt. It was what the killers had covered up that was truly bizarre. “Jesus.” Mercer looked upstream to where a lake hidden inside a volcano fed the river. “These people weren’t murdered.”

He and Ruben were drinking warm bottles of Coke when they heard boats approaching, their rumble echoing across the tight valley. A minute later three boats appeared from downstream. One was the outboard that had first brought them here, but the craft’s owner had not returned. It was run by Ruben’s men. Another held a small group of officials in sweat-stained uniforms, and the third boat, the largest, was likely to be used to transport the dead back to El Real. It wasn’t until they were almost to the camp that Mercer saw one of the officials was wearing U.S. Army camouflage BDUs. He then realized it was a woman. Most of her brown hair was tucked under a black beret but there was no mistaking the feminine beauty of her features or the swell of her breasts.

Ruben helped secure the boats as everyone jumped to the shore. The local officials did nothing to hide their disgust at the smell of the camp, making exaggerated gestures and muttering a few sarcastic remarks. The head of the delegation, a paunchy man with a mustache that sagged past the corners of his mouth, spoke with Ruben for a few moments, paying no attention to his M-16. Mercer picked up a few words, muerto, guerillero, Colombia, and Gary’s name several times.

“Do you mind my asking who the hell you are and what you’re doing out here?” The question was asked in a melodious Southern accent. Though bluntly worded, it sounded more congenial than accusatory.

Mercer looked away from where Ruben was giving an account of what they’d found and studied the American soldier who’d accompanied the Panamanian military. She’d pulled her hat off. Her hair swept past her jaw and covered a portion of her small ears. He guessed she was somewhere in her early thirties because the lines at the corners of her eyes vanished when she stopped squinting into the setting sun. Mercer noticed immediately that her eyes were two different colors. One was a gray a few shades lighter than his own and the other was more blue. The asymmetry made her striking, even if he hadn’t already found her so attractive. Through her tan, a sprinkle of freckles glowed on her high cheeks and across her nose. The other thing that struck him was how long and graceful her throat was and that without makeup her lips were still red and full.

She stood with a casual confidence that told him this was-n’t the first time she’d witnessed such carnage. Mercer found himself flustered for a moment. He finally put out his hand.

“Mercer. My name is Philip Mercer.”

“Captain Lauren Vanik.” Her grip was firm and she never broke eye contact. As if nature needed to draw even more attention to her stunning eyes, her lashes were long.

“The head of this expedition was a friend of mine,” Mercer told her. “He’d invited me here a while ago. I arrived with his wife around noon and discovered ... well, this.”

“And you sent a couple of Ruben’s boys back to get the police?”

“Yes.” It was odd that an army officer would know such a mercenary. He asked, “Ah, how do you know Ruben?”

Her quick smile revealed a narrow gap between her front two teeth. “I coordinate with Panama’s antidrug efforts for U.S. Southern Command. Ruben’s network has been a good source of information to us. I was in La Palma, the provincial capital, when word got out about this massacre so I came to El Real to see for myself. I understand Mr. Barber was some kind of treasure hunter. Is that what you do?”

“No, I’m a mining engineer. Gary and I went to college together.”

Captain Vanik had stopped listening. She was watching as the Panamanians trooped around the encampment. “Excuse me,” she said to Mercer and strode across to the head official. A holstered Beretta 92 slapped against her slim hip with each pace.

As several of the other policemen unceremoniously stacked corpses into the larger boat, she began a shouting match with the group’s leader. Her Spanish sounded colloquial. Mercer moved closer, and a few minutes later Captain Vanik spun away from the cop. Her face had darkened.

“What is it?” Mercer asked.

“Damn fools. I was afraid this would happen.” She pronounced I as Ah. “I wish I had time to get a real forensic team from Panama City.”

“Why?”

“El colonel Sanchez,” she sneered, “has determined simply by walking by the bodies that this was a failed kidnapping attempt by Colombian rebels who have already slunk back across the border.”

It appeared Colonel Sanchez was more than satisfied that this was done by long-vanished narco-traffickers so he could just clear the site, fill out his report and go back to the sleepy office he kept somewhere. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” she parroted. “The lazy bastard’s convinced he’s solved another one. Five guerrilla attacks in Darien in four months and every time it’s the same story. Usually he doesn’t even come out to inspect the sites except this time a gringo got himself killed.”

Not prone to making snap judgments of people, Mercer had to go with his gut impression that Captain Vanik cared far beyond her official capacity. It was in her quick anger at the police ineptitude. Since Sanchez wasn’t likely to act on his suspicions, he had to trust that she would.

“He’s more wrong than you know. Want me to tell you what really happened here?”

Lauren Vanik looked at him sharply. “What do you know?”

Mercer led her a little away from the others. “These people weren’t murdered by Colombian guerrillas. In fact, they weren’t murdered at all.” Mercer took a breath, pulling together the small bits of evidence that had drawn him to a rather outlandish but inescapable conclusion. “They were killed by an invisible wall of carbon dioxide gas that swept down this valley from a volcanic lake farther up the river. The bullet wounds are all posthumous to make this look like an attack.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked in her scratchy alto voice.

“I noticed something was wrong when we first arrived on this river. There were no sounds from the jungle, no birds or monkeys. An area like this should sound like a zoo at feeding time. I also saw that a lot of the trees were stripped of foliage on their upstream side, as if a storm had passed through.”

“I noted that stuff too.” Captain Vanik nodded. “I didn’t think anything of it.”

“Neither did I until I did some exploring. Some of the dead chickens supposedly shot by the gunmen hadn’t been shot at all. They didn’t miss the goats or dogs but they just raked the chicken pen figuring no one would look too closely. And the animal corpses I saw in the jungle show no physical trauma, no reason to be dead. Also they weren’t decomposed yet. Few insects out there to eat them. That’s when I checked around the kitchen tent. The cockroaches were all dead and all of them were on their backs.”

“Meaning?”

“Cockroaches breath through a tube on their abdomens. When they’re poisoned, they roll over in an effort to get more air. An exterminator explained it to me when I first bought my town house and discovered a roach problem. The only thing that could have killed the roaches, the birds, monkeys and Gary’s people at the same time is some kind of poison gas. With me so far?”

“Yeah. I can see that.”

“Okay, if it was an attack by rebels using mortars or gas grenades, the people would have panicked and tried to run into the jungle. Yet everyone appears to have simply fallen dead where they were. No one ran anywhere. No one panicked. They all just fell dead when the carbon dioxide hit.”

“How do you know it was CO₂?”

“Because it’s colorless, odorless, heavier than air, and can come from a natural source. It would have swept this camp like a wind that no one would have thought anything of until they started to die.” He paused. “And because something like this has happened before.”

Lauren’s bicolored eyes told him to continue. “In August of 1986 a volcanic lake called Nyos in Cameroon, Africa, erupted one night, belching out thousands of tons of CO₂ that killed about seventeen hundred people. The gas had risen up from a magma chamber under the lake and became dissolved in the water until something released it, a small earthquake possibly. Like opening a can of soda after shaking it, the gas came out of solution in a fountain that scientists estimate was two hundred and fifty feet tall. The villagers lived in a valley below the lake. When the heavy gas poured into the town, it suffocated every living creature.”

She listened intently. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Few people have. There’s only one other lake like it in the world, well, maybe two if I’m right about what happened here.”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but volcanic gas can’t explain bullet holes. And you said this wasn’t Colombians. Why?”

“This is where the story gets really weird.” He told her about Gary’s belief in the Twice-Stolen Treasure and how he thought it might be here. Then he explained how he’d been drawn into the search by going to a Paris auction and how thieves almost made off with the Lepinay journal, saying that it was the only item not purchased by a nameless Chinese businessman with ties to Panama.

“So you’re saying some Chinese guy who’s looking for this treasure shot a bunch of corpses for the fun of it?”

“I think what happened was he came out here to hijack Gary’s effort, I assume by killing him and his people, but when he arrived he found everyone was already dead. He had to know that eventually Gary’s wife would become suspicious and the bodies would be found. He couldn’t afford to have such a mysterious death investigated. Scientists would fly in from all over the world to test the lake to see if it was a CO₂ eruption.”

“By shooting the bodies,” Lauren interrupted, “and making this look like a rebel attack, he knew the local police wouldn’t spend more than a day here and they could come back and pick up where Mr. Barber left off.”

Mercer was pleased that she made the same intuitive leap that he had. “That’s how I figure it.”

She looked over to where Sanchez was smoking little cigarillos with one of his men. “He wouldn’t believe us even if we showed him proof.”

“That’s why I told you and not him.”

“I know you have some sort of proposition for me, so what is it?”

“I want to take a look around that lake tomorrow, maybe collect some samples. If it is high in CO₂, I can have a team from the States here in twelve hours. I know a couple of the geologists who’ve studied Lake Nyos. Unfortunately I don’t speak Spanish and I’d like Ruben and his boys to stick around to help me. What I need is a translator. It would only be for a day or two.”

Suspicious, Vanik narrowed her eyes. “You’re hoping that a well-publicized science team will deter this Chinese guy from coming back until you can find the treasure.”

“I have no interest in the treasure,” Mercer countered. “Hell, I don’t even think there is one. I just want the son of a bitch who almost had me killed in Paris and came here to murder my friend.”