by Jack Du Brul
Operationally, it was a sound plan. It also made Mercer think about putting Roddy and his family into a hotel for a while. The few hundred dollars for a suite was a small price for peace of mind. He couldn’t bring himself to imagine anything happening to this generous family. Mr. Sun couldn’t create a torture even half as painful.
“Okay,” Mercer said with deepening apprehension. “I’ll be in touch before we reach Pedro Miguel.” He clicked off the phone.
Mercer settled back into the couch, wrestling with his doubts. There could be dozens of reasons why Bruneseau had dismissed the Legion soldiers. He really could be closing out his case or he might have been embarrassed to admit he was with a prostitute when Foch called. There was no reason to believe that Liu Yousheng had turned him, yet with so much at stake, Mercer couldn’t dismiss that idea.
When he finally drifted back to sleep, the nightmares returned. Only this time it was Rene Bruneseau who manipulated the acupuncture needles.
Lake Gatun, Panama
The boat was a twenty-four-foot Wellcraft, old but well maintained. The elements had yellowed her fiberglass shell, contrasting with the recently repainted red strip along her waterline. Her stern was molded into bench seats that hid the engine and partially insulated its throaty growl. Accessible between the two front seats was a forward cabin outfitted with two beds, a tiny kitchen, and a small cubicle for a chemical toilet. She was perfect for a romantic weekend cruise on the lake, where thousands of secluded bays and uninhabited islands beckoned.
Behind the powerboat a wake of white foam spread like an elongated arrow on the glassy green water. The overnight rains had ended and the morning haze had burned off. The sun beat mercilessly. The breeze of their twenty-knot speed kept the four people on the boat from wilting in the heat.
Had Mercer been able to forget what lay at the end of this journey, he would have cracked a beer and enjoyed himself.
He stripped off his shirt, leaving him in just shorts and sneakers. He watched with fascination as the unusual coast-line rolled by. It was tough to imagine that the immense body of water wasn’t a natural formation. Lake Gatun, in fact all of the Panama Canal, represented an unprecedented triumph of human engineering over a nearly insurmountable obstacle. Geology had separated the Atlantic from the Pacific three million years ago and now they were connected across a lake floating eighty-four feet above sea level. That the canal was nearly a century old made it that much more impressive.
From the boat’s speeding deck, Mercer found himself hard pressed to find evidence of the lake’s unnatural birth. Farther on, past Gamboa where the canal narrowed toward the Gaillard Cut, its man-made nature revealed itself, but here it looked like any other lake in the world. It wasn’t until he looked closely at the islands that he could tell they had once been hilltops and the lake’s meandering shore the flanks of mountains. There was little evidence of erosion and only a few small sections of beach. Also, the vegetation covering the islands contained few aquatic plants. There were no marshes or wetlands, as he’d expect to see. The jungle simply stopped at the water’s edge where it ran out of soil. Outside the shipping lanes, he occasionally saw the tips of old telegraph poles sticking from the water’s surface, birds perched on the rotting wood. They were remnants of the old rail line that had been submerged when the lake formed.
He imagined that this is what the world would look like if the polar ice ever melted. The endless parade of ponderous freighters and tankers only enhanced that impression. It was easy to think that the last remnants of humanity were borne on their great hulls like a flotilla of modern-day Noah’s Arks out of some post-apocalyptic science-fiction scenario.
Juan Aranjo, Carmen Herrara’s brother, kept them well outside the buoys that marked the shipping lanes as they sped away from Limon toward the Pedro Miguel Lock. He spoke no English and seemed content in silence rather than engaging Lauren in conversation.
Lauren’s cell phone chimed.
She waved for Mercer to answer it. She and Tomanovic were checking over the equipment she had rented at Scubapanama, the country’s premier dive shop, where she was known.
He dug it out of her knapsack. “Hello.”
“Mercer, it’s Roddy.”
“Are you guys out of the house?”
“We just got to our new hotel. The kids are getting spoiled by your generosity. Even Miguel wasn’t so disappointed about you leaving him behind when he found there is a pool here. And Harry’s already working his way through the mini-bar.”
Mercer smiled at that image. “Have you heard anything from Foch? There was no answer when I tried calling him from Limon.”
“No, I haven’t,” Roddy said. “A couple of his men made sure we got to the hotel safely but I haven’t spoken with him. However, I did get a call this morning from a friend of yours. Maria Barber.”
That was the last person Mercer had ever expected to hear from again. “Really? What did she say?” A thought occurred to him and concern crept into his voice. “Hold on, how did she know to call you? She thinks I’m in D.C.”
“Don’t worry. I asked her the same thing. She tried your home in Washington and then took a chance calling me. She said you’d told her about me when you two had dinner.”
Mercer had worked to purge the whole ugly night from his memory so he didn’t specifically remember that part of their conversation. “What did she want?”
“Besides you?” Roddy teased, then turned serious. “She claims she has some information about her husband’s death.”
“Did she say what it was?”
“No, she wanted to talk to you in person. I told her you were going out on Gatun with my brother-in-law and couldn’t be reached. I have her number if you want to call her.”
“How did she sound?”
“Like she’d started her morning with a couple of Bloody Marys.”
Mercer’s mouth turned downward. “Keep the number. I’ll call her when we’re finished.” Or maybe he wouldn’t call her at all. It was unlikely she had any pertinent information. She was probably just drunk and lonely, and looking for affection. His pity for her went only so far.
“Where are you guys?” Roddy asked.
“According to the chart Juan showed me, I think we just passed Barro Colorado Island. We’re going to hold up near here until late afternoon. I don’t want us hanging out near the Pedro Miguel Lock longer than necessary.”
“Good idea. The Canal Authority hasn’t banned pleasure boats from approaching the locks, but with the heightened security they could ask you to leave if they get suspicious. Call me when you’re done.”
“Will do,” Mercer said and killed the connection.
Ten minutes later, Juan Aranjo cut away from the shipping buoys and motored toward the shore, tucking his boat into an isolated bay far from where they could be seen. He took them under an overhang of thick palms to hide them from aerial observation and the noontime sun. After killing the engine, he tossed a small anchor over the side. The jungle was a riot of bird calls.
Lauren declined his offer to use the cabin so Juan went below to sleep through the afternoon. Like soldiers anywhere in the world, Tomanovic found a corner to curl up in. The gentle sway of the boat and the shaded warmth lulled him immediately to sleep.
“All your equipment check out?” Mercer asked Lauren quietly.
“We’re good to go.” If she was nervous about diving near the lock it didn’t show in her voice. Lauren gave him a level gaze. “Can I ask what really happened to you at the mine?”
Mercer’s stomach clamped. All morning he’d convinced himself that he could put the incident out of his mind. The frantic preparations—getting the dive gear, picking up Tomanovic and meeting up with Juan—had kept him occupied. Now that they had a couple of hours with nothing to do but wait, he’d hoped the memories would remain suppressed. Lauren’s question brought the whole thing back in brutal clarity.
“Why do you ask?” he hedged.
“Something tells me
that the description you gave us in Roddy’s kitchen wasn’t the whole story.” She paused. “From the bedroom Carmen let me use I could hear you moaning and thrashing in your sleep.”
Mercer wasn’t comfortable giving voice to what bothered him. He’d witnessed so much ugliness and death that it would take a lifetime to talk it out. Instead, he steadily purged it himself, banishing it to the darkest corners of his memory where only nightmares dwelled. He knew that it was an ill-advised attempt at denial, but somehow it seemed to work.
She’d asked the question without guile, not understanding how much he didn’t want to recall the torture. As he took a minute to gather his thoughts, Mercer slowly realized he was grateful. Somehow she’d sensed that this incident wasn’t going to go away without help.
“This is going to sound weird, but he took something from me.” He chuckled. “And not just my watch.” Their eyes met. “He killed me, Lauren. I was dead. He did something with his needles that stopped my heart from beating. I could feel it lying in my chest, the rhythmic thumping I’d always taken for granted was gone. I could feel that I was dead.”
Lauren went pale. She didn’t know what to do with that information. It was far beyond anything she’d ever heard before.
Mercer continued, “I went someplace that no one is supposed to return from. And you know what? It wasn’t anything like what you’ve heard. I didn’t hover over the room looking down at my body. I was still there on a slab with a madman standing over me. There was no heavenly glow, no friends to guide me to the afterlife. There was nothing except the inevitability of oblivion. I don’t know what to think about that.”
After a moment, Lauren said, “You weren’t dead.”
Although she spoke with absolute conviction, Mercer recognized the empty assurance. Her words rang of a childhood spent at Sunday school and of regular church attendance. “Please, Lauren. You weren’t there.”
“There is no way he could stop and then start your heart with a couple of acupuncture needles. It’s impossible.”
“Are you stating scientific fact or defending your faith?” It sounded harsher than he intended. He regretted it and was relieved when she let it pass.
“How do you know your heart stopped? Did you really feel it in your chest or were you aware because there was no pulse in your ears?”
Mercer had to think about that. The torture had been so vivid in his mind, but that detail eluded him.
Lauren’s next question added to his confusion. “Do you remember hearing anything when you say your heart was stopped?”
“I don’t think so,” he replied after a moment. “Sun wasn’t talking or anything.”
“There’s your answer. Sun didn’t speak because the acupuncture needles paralyzed your inner ears, more specifically the tiny hairs in your cochlea that turn sound vibrations into a signal your brain can recognize. When he blocked those nerve impulses, he prevented your brain from feeling the rush of blood near your cochlea. Your heart was pumping just fine—you just couldn’t tell.”
“But . . .” Mercer began to protest then stopped himself. Her explanation was simple and logical. It made more sense than Sun having the ability to arrest his heartbeat. And yet he knew deep down that something fundamental had happened to him, something that he couldn’t name. So what if Sun had tricked him into believing he’d died? The feelings his torture created in Mercer were no less crippling.
He felt like he stood on a precipice, wanting to take the leap that might help him find what Sun had taken, while part of him desperately wanted to pull back. He knew the void was too great. It was full of too many monsters. Too much pain. He wasn’t strong enough to push past his own doubts.
He couldn’t look Lauren in the eye when he lied. “Maybe you’re right. Sun didn’t take anything from me. His little hoax, making me think he’d stopped my heart, fooled me into giving it to him.”
Lauren reached across the deck to take his hand. “Whether he took something or only made you think he did, you have to believe that you are whole now.”
“You’re not going to let me get away from this, are you?”
“No. For two reasons. I’m about to put myself in danger and I need to know you’ll be there to back me up.”
“If I couldn’t support you, I wouldn’t let you dive today. You have to know that.” Mercer had never meant anything more in his life. He would not let her down.
“All right.” She nodded. “Good.”
“And the second reason?”
“I’ll tell you that one after the dive.” While her voice sounded like she’d let this matter drop, her eyes did not. She smiled to dissolve the severity of the moment. The slight gap between her teeth acted like a counterpoint to the flawlessness of her beauty. To Mercer it only made her more attractive.
She rolled her arm to look at the matte-finished dive watch she wore instead of her regular Rolex. “Since we’ve got some time before we go into the water, I’m going to follow Vic’s lead and catch some sleep. Last night wasn’t one of the more restful I’ve had. Are you going to be okay?”
Mercer rummaged through a satchel he’d brought and extracted the leather-bound Lepinay journal. He held it up. “I still haven’t read this damned thing. I think now’s a perfect opportunity. But do me a favor. If you ever meet Jean Derosier, the guy who sold it to me, don’t tell him I took it out on a boat. He’d kill me for exposing it to the elements.”
“Deal.” She stretched out on the bench seat with a bundled dive bag as a pillow and seemed to slip away after a few seconds.
Mercer watched her sleep. He both marveled at and was frightened by her instincts about what Mr. Sun had done to him. He wondered if it was female intuition or if it physically showed on him. He hoped the former but suspected the latter.
He cracked open the journal. The smell of the old pages was strong, a scent that Mercer always associated with knowledge. Without an English-French dictionary, he could only get a vague sense of some of what Godin de Lepinay wrote more than a century earlier about his travels in Panama. Yet he was confident that he would understand more than Bruneseau when he had looked through it in Paris. Rene read it with the eyes of a spy.
Mercer’s saw it the way the author intended—as an engineer.
Three hours later, with the sun sinking toward the west, Mercer closed the book. Reading the faded script had started a dull ache in his temples. Before he woke the others he washed down a couple of aspirin with water from a bottle. Baron Lepinay wrote in a rather flowery style, odd for a man of science, and Mercer was sure he’d missed a lot of the subtlety in the text. Also, Lepinay compared geologic and geographic features in Panama to others he was familiar with in France. He’d written things like a particular hilltop reminded him of Mont Mouton. Mercer couldn’t know if there was even a place called Sheep Mountain in France or what it would look like.
Still, the journal didn’t contain a single reference to missing treasure, Incas, or anything else Liu Yousheng had shown interest in. It was little more than a travelogue, with details on how Lepinay would build a lake-and-lock canal. For Mercer it was a remarkable historic artifact, but it offered nothing about their present situation. The only thing even remotely close was a passage about visiting an extinct volcano in the north of Panama that sounded a bit like the one above the River of Ruin, including a lake and island. Lepinay didn’t have a geologic background and didn’t know that similar volcanic lakes dotted the globe. He was especially impressed with the smoothness of the lava tubes that had once belched molten rock from deep in the planet’s interior.
Mercer returned the journal to his bag, feeling a nostalgic twinge for the first time he’d explored such a feature at a volcano in Hawaii. He was sure that if Liu knew its contents, he wouldn’t have bothered trying to steal it in Paris. He had a perverse desire just to mail it to Hatcherly’s president with his compliments.
Putting aside his dismay, he called out to Lauren and Vic. It was time to get going. Juan lumbered up from the
cabin, his shirt unbuttoned down to his navel so that his sweaty belly spilled over his belt line. He went forward to haul up the boat’s anchor.
“Oh, hey,” Lauren exclaimed after wiping sleep from her eyes. “Did you find anything in the journal?”
“Not one damned thing,” Mercer said. Lauren’s expectant look dimmed. “It was interesting from a certain point of view, but I couldn’t find anything that would compel Liu to send gunmen to steal it. Maybe he really is interested in canal history.”
Lauren shot him a doubtful look. Mercer shrugged as if to say anything’s possible.
Juan switched on the fuel pump and keyed the ignition. The motor came to life. For the remainder of the trip down the canal, Tomanovic and Lauren had to remain out of sight. The idea was that Mercer was to act like a photographer who’d hired a local’s boat to take pictures of the ships using the lock. To enhance the deception he still had the camera and lens he’d brought to the River of Ruin.
Lauren and Vic ducked into the cabin to don half-millimeter Henderson microprene body suits, more as camouflage than thermal protection, as Juan pulled them away from their secluded anchorage and headed back for the main channel. They passed a couple of excursion boats lined with camera-wielding tourists in addition to the normal parade of oceangoing transporters. The sun continued its dive for the horizon. Its reddish glow mirror-flashed off the water whenever a wave turned to the proper angle.
Exiting Lake Gatun, they started down the narrower reach toward the Gaillard Cut and the Pedro Miguel Lock. Because the exclusionary marker buoys for the big ships left only tight lanes along the banks, Juan kept his craft tucked to the right shore, on the opposite side of the canal from Gamboa. Beyond the wide twists in the waterway, Mercer could see the looming massif of the continental divide. The closer they got, the narrower the canal became and the more the landscape revealed its artificial nature. The hills that once fell in lazy slopes to the water had been partially leveled and stepped back so they resembled the terrace farms Mercer recalled from trips to Asia and Africa. Jungle vegetation was just now reclaiming the land. This was the latest in a century-long effort to stem the landslides that had plagued the canal since the moment the first steam shovels began tearing open the passage.