River of Ruin (8 page)

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 CO
₂
?”

“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 CO
₂
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 CO
₂
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 CO
₂
, 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.”

Police Colonel Sanchez and his troopers spent a total of thirty-eight minutes at the camp before the last of the bodies was stowed on the largest boat and they were ready to leave. The officials wanted to be in El Real as soon after sunset as possible. He tried to order Captain Vanik back with him, but Mercer got the impression that no one but a direct superior officer could order her anywhere. She’d made her decision to remain behind and that was it. Sanchez boarded his launch, warning her about guerrillas and saying that he had no desire to return in the morning to pick up more gringo corpses. She threw his retreating party a mocking salute, cursing them in a frustrated breath. Ruben tossed in a few choice phrases of his own and then they were alone—Mercer, U.S. Army Captain Lauren Vanik, and three Panamanian mercenaries.

Sundown was an hour away and already the light was diffused, ruddy and deeply shadowed. They quickly established a smaller camp upstream from the ruins of Gary’s bivouac. The prevailing wind swept away the coppery smell of blood, but none wanted to remain near the site of so much death. They tolerated the hordes of insects that swarmed their campfire because its cheery glow dispelled the superstitious chills that struck them all.