Red Snow

by Michael Slade

  Joe shut the door and locked it.

  From her hiding place in the shadows, Scarlett raised her ice pick for the kill.

  Eyewitness

  The myth of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was inspired by cops who triumphed in winter weather. Sam Steele, the hard-assed lawman of the Klondike Gold Rush. The trackers who chased Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River, across 150 snowbound miles of the Northwest Territories in February 1932. The crew of the St. Roch, under Sergeant Henry Larsen, who cracked through the polar ice in 1942, becoming the first men since Roald Amundsen to conquer the Northwest Passage.

  There were still rugged cops like that in the Mounted Police, and the chief had two under his command. But Sergeant Ed “Mad Dog” Rabidowski had almost been stabbed to death, and he was still on leave with his wife, Brit, recovering. Inspector Bob “Ghost Keeper” George was a full-blooded Plains Cree from Duck Lake, Saskatchewan, who was more comfortable in the woods than in the city. Unfortunately, Ghost Keeper was stuck in Vancouver, having been left in charge in the absence of both DeClercq and Chandler.

  “Mephisto’s playing us, G.K. Of that, I have no doubt,” DeClercq said into his cellphone as he peered over the shoulders of Hawksworth and Jenny to see what they’d pulled up onscreen. He had commandeered the office of the El Dorado’s hospitality manager, much to the annoyance of the hotelier, who was still whining about his “Going for the Gold” event. The man seemed unable to grasp that something more important than the Olympic Games was happening.

  The chief wished he could slap him out of his economic hysteria.

  “I don’t know how he killed Nick—Gill’s at work on that—but he lured him to a room booked by a company called Ecuador Exploration,” Robert said into the phone. “The hotel has pulled up everything it has on the company, and I’m about to send it to you. I need whatever you can find on them ASAP.”

  The Mountie reached between Hawksworth and Jenny to hit the Send button.

  “What in hell’s going on up there?” Ghost Keeper asked. “Reports say the highways north and south—”

  “Hold on,” interrupted the chief. “Zinc’s been out of contact, but my call display says that’s him.” Switching from one inspector to another, he barked, “Where are you?”

  “I’m on my way from Alpha Lake to join you, Chief. A skater slit Jenna Bond’s throat with his blade, then he grabbed Becky.”

  “Is Jenna dead?”

  “Yes. But Becky’s safe.”

  “And the killer?”

  “He’s dead. He fell through the ice as we shot it out. His body’s still in the lake.”

  “Where’s Becky now?”

  “She’s with me in my Rover. So is her mother’s body. She won’t let go of it.”

  “I’ll meet you out front of the El Dorado Resort. If anyone tries to waylay you, shoot to kill.”

  Robert switched back to Ghost Keeper. “First Nick,” he said, “and now Jenna Bond has been killed. Zinc foiled an attempt on the life of her daughter, but Mephisto is obviously out for revenge. He’s the mind behind Ecuador Exploration. Hopefully, you can track that company’s cyberspace dealings back to an address in Whistler. Meanwhile, I need a guard detail, armed to the teeth, to protect the girl against another attack. Get on the radio and round up a team. Have them out front of the El Dorado as soon as possible.”

  “Will do,” confirmed the inspector.

  Robert hung up and made for the door.

  Behind him, Hawksworth asked, “Does that mean we can carry on with ‘Going for the Gold’?”

  Forget about a slap.

  The Mountie yearned to punch him.

  * * *

  The El Dorado Resort was trying to have it both ways. The Beautiful People demanded all the amenities of a five-star hotel, from beauty salons offering the latest styles and tints to ski shops selling gear so expensive that no one would dare use it on the slopes. The decor, however, harked back to the rustic days when this was London Mountain, known locally as Whistler because of the shrill sound made by the western hoary marmots living among its rocks. A century ago, when Myrtle and Alex Philip opened a fishing camp called the Rainbow Lodge, it was a three-day journey—by steamer, horse, and foot—up from Vancouver. From the pioneer photographs hung on the walls to the totem carvings decorating the lobby, the El Dorado was an imitation of the real thing. But if friends at home wanted proof that you were hardy enough to survive in this wilderness, a shop off the lobby would sell you a genuine Bullwinkle moose wearing Mountie garb.

  Superimposed on all this “authentic” Canadiana was the essence of the Olympic Games. Banners invited one and all to the “Going for the Gold” event, where any schlub could rub shoulders with the champions of tomorrow. The banners were festooned with logos lauding the official sponsors for the Winter Games, including Coca-Cola, Petro-Canada, Panasonic, McDonald’s, 3M, and—rather tellingly—the Royal Canadian Mint and the B.C. Lottery Corporation.

  Katt now knew every detail of the El Dorado’s lobby. After Napoleon’s walk, she’d waited just inside the entrance—ready to retreat if someone approached to complain about the dog—until Robert had returned with the gut-wrenching news that Nick was dead.

  Ever since, she’d been crying quiet tears for the man who had seen her through Luna Darke’s death. Although DeClercq had taken her in after the carnage on Deadman’s Island, it was Nick who—having lost his own mom shortly afterwards—had truly understood her misery.

  So now, while Robert was in the office of the hospitality manager, Katt mourned Nick as she and Napoleon paced the lobby, from the door to the Gilded Man pub to the Grand Ballroom at the far end. There, Katt could see a bartender constructing a pyramid out of what had to be hundreds of newly branded cans of Coke.

  As an official sponsor of the Whistler games, Coca-Cola was also going for the gold.

  Ka-ching!

  When Robert emerged from Hawksworth’s office with his cell to his ear, Katt and Napoleon were gazing into a huge glass case displaying the three Olympic mascots in their many commercial forms: stuffed toys, T-shirts, ball caps. Whatever would make a buck. There was Sumi, with what appeared to be a colander on his head, the wings of a thunderbird, and the legs of a bear. A sign said Sumi liked skiing and hot chocolate. There was Miga, a sea-going “spirit bear” with a dorsal fin as a cowlick. A sign said Miga liked snowboarding and eating salmon. And there was Quatchi, an ear-muffed, mukluk-sporting sasquatch with a goatee, an inukshuk tattoo, and Olympic rings on his chest. A sign said he liked playing hockey and dreamed of becoming a world-famous goalie.

  Weren’t they the cutest little profits you ever saw?

  Katt frowned.

  How spiritually depressing!

  To think that what had once been a celebration of the prowess of amateur athletes had degenerated into a billion-dollar cash grab.

  Get back to the basics and cut the crap, thought Katt.

  She turned on hearing Robert’s approaching voice. His brow was furrowed with concern, and the cell still hugged his ear.

  “I can’t reach Gill. That’s not like her, Joe. How long ago did she leave the morgue?” The chief listened, then said, “I’ll give her five more minutes.”

  “What’s up?” Katt asked.

  “Come with me.” Robert led the teenager and the dog through the revolving door to the hotel’s front entrance. The street was filled with frightened skiers straggling in from the avalanches, some so exhausted from their struggle down the mountain that they were using their equipment as crutches.

  “Jenna has been murdered,” Robert informed Katt. “Zinc saved Becky, but she’s traumatized. He’s on his way here with her now. A guard team will drive her to Gill’s chalet for safekeeping. Until I know what’s going on, I want Becky hidden away. Not in the middle of the crowd in Whistler Village.”

  A Range Rover came into view.

  “Here’s Zinc now.”

  Not long after, a four-wheel-drive bearing the insignia of the RCMP also
pulled into the loop.

  “The guard team,” Robert said. Then he saw who it was and rolled his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Katt asked.

  “Nothing,” he lied.

  The cop who climbed out of the driver’s seat was Sergeant Rachel Kidd. The cop riding shotgun was Corporal Rick Scarlett.

  As if that wasn’t bad enough, the chief’s entire plan was overheard. For one of the seemingly exhausted skiers, slumped nearby for a much-needed cigarette, was the mercenary who’d blown the bridges to cut Whistler off from outside help. His toque, caked white with snow, hid an earplug that picked up every word Robert said to Katt with a parabolic mike.

  Lost City of Z

  So what became of Percy Harrison Fawcett, rumored to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones? Did he fall prey to wildlife in the steaming jungle of Brazil’s Mato Grosso, that huge, swampy wilderness that holds secrets to this day? Was he murdered by headhunting cannibals in the unexplored area beyond Dead Horse Camp by the Upper Xingu, a tributary of the Amazon River? Or did he “go native” and leave his culture behind to populate the jungle with blue-eyed offspring?

  Mephisto’s father had told him Fawcett’s tale as they huddled around the fire in their isolated bush camp, listening to the sounds of the Amazon night closing in. Fireflies streaked through the blackness, and nighthawks snapped at insects over the river. The shrieks of a jaguar’s prey cut through the pulsing rhythm of croaking frogs. Blood-sucking vampire bats owned the night.

  “Do you know anything about Bolivia?” Fawcett had been asked by the president of the Royal Geographical Society in 1906.

  “Nothing,” he’d replied.

  “Look at this area,” the president said, showing him a sketchy excuse for a map. “It’s full of blank spaces because so little is known of it. The border between Bolivia and Brazil is poorly defined. That’s raising tension and could lead to war. As a neutral third party, we’ve been asked to mount an expedition to mark the borders. It’s a perilous task. The natives are known for their savagery, and could at any moment kill a surveyor and serve him up in one of their macabre feasts. The Royal Geographical Society wishes to know if you will take on the job.”

  “I’m your man,” Fawcett replied, seizing on this ticket to adventure.

  Before training as a surveyor, Fawcett had been an artillery officer in Ceylon and a spy in Morocco. Still, he was unprepared for what the New World jungle had in store. At night, poisonous spiders scuttled up his arm and across his throat. Though he slept under a mosquito net, it was poor protection against the fangs of the vampire bats, and he’d awake to find his hammock soaked with blood. Nature sought to kill him at every turn. Surging down rapids, Fawcett’s raft shot over a waterfall, plunging him into the roaring depths. On the trek, bushmaster snakes and anacondas lurked around him. Fording rivers gave piranha fish the opportunity to strip him to the bone, and one of his companions lost two fingers washing his bloodstained hands in a stream.

  Hostile natives were also a constant threat. Amazonians wanted revenge for years of enslavement by rubber traders who hacked ears, fingers, and hands off those who failed to deliver their quota. Once, while Fawcett and his group were canoeing down the wild Heath River, they rounded a bend and ran into Indians encamped on a sandbar. Dogs barked and women ran to gather up their children as men shot arrows and blew curare-poisoned darts at the explorers.

  “Can you guess how they survived?” Mephisto’s father had asked his son.

  “With guns?” the boy replied.

  The father shook his head. “Fawcett pulled his men back out of missile range, then had them sing ‘Swanee River,’ ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ and ‘A Bicycle Built for Two.’ So perplexed were the natives that they stopped shooting, and Fawcett quickly approached with gifts.”

  “Good trick,” said the boy.

  Fawcett had an interest in the occult that went back to his years in Ceylon, where he’d stumbled on a large boulder inscribed with a strange script. When he learned that it was a form of writing that only a small group of Buddhist monks could understand, he became obsessed with the idea of lost civilizations hiding just beyond the fringe of explored territory.

  “Fawcett befriended many famous occultists, including Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard,” said Mephisto’s father.

  The boy’s eyes shone. “The authors of Sherlock Holmes and King Solomon’s Mines?”

  “He told Conan Doyle about Brazil’s tabletop mountains, which are completely cut off from the jungle below by vertical cliffs. Imagining the unique plants and animals that lived there, the writer penned The Lost World, populating a similar mountaintop with dinosaurs.”

  The boy was thrilled. What a book that was!

  “Fawcett endured the trenches of the First World War, winning a Distinguished Service Order and rising to the rank of colonel. By 1920, he was back in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, he discovered an eighteenth-century Portuguese document describing a lost city that natives said was populated by a tribe of red-haired, blue-eyed Indians. Fawcett dubbed the outpost the Lost City of Z and began raising money for an expedition.

  “Funding came from a group of financiers called the Glove. With his son, Jack, and Jack’s buddy, Raleigh Rimell, the colonel—then fifty-eight years of age—set out for this black hole in 1925. His plan was to travel to Dead Horse Camp, then head northeast to the Xingu River and on through the jungle to the Serra do Roncador, where the Lost City of Z was rumored to be hidden.

  “Fawcett’s final words to his wife, sent from Dead Horse Camp on May 29, were ‘You need have no fear of failure.’ Then—like the city he sought—he vanished from history.”

  Mephisto’s father went on to explain that many expeditions had tried to pick up Fawcett’s trail, and more than a hundred men had perished along the way. In 1928, the first search party found a metal plate from one of the colonel’s trunks strung around the neck of a native chief’s son. In 1932, Indians from another tribe said Fawcett had passed through, producing his compass as proof. In 1951, Kalapalos Indians confessed to clubbing the colonel to death, but the bones recovered from them weren’t his.

  The story the boy liked best, however, was this: “In 1932,” Mephisto’s father said, “a German stopped at an Indian village near the Xingu River. With persistent questioning, the village chief finally produced a small bag made from tree bark. Loosening the tie with his teeth, the headhunter withdrew a shriveled trophy. The features of the shrunken head, the German later swore, matched those of Colonel Fawcett exactly.”

  * * *

  How lucky Mephisto was to have an adventuresome father, an archeologist obsessed with finding lost realms. His father had taught him many things, including how to make an Amazonian blowgun. “Split that palm stem with this.” He handed the boy a knife. “Hollow out the pith and rub the bore until the tube is smooth and free of snags.” He passed the boy a length of stripped liana vine, the kind of creeper Tarzan used to swing through the trees. “Bind the halves together with this, and you have a blowpipe.”

  Next, his father taught him how to make darts. “Cut the midrib of that palm leaf into two-inch lengths.” The boy did so. “Now sharpen the points.” He whittled the end of each missile. “Stick a wad of pith on the other end, so each dart fits snuggly into the blowpipe.”

  The boy made a slew of small arrows.

  “Good,” praised his father. “Now where’s your poison?”

  From his knapsack, the boy withdrew a glass jar full of the curare his father had made from ingredients purchased in a Mato Grosso village.

  The archeologist ruffled his son’s hair.

  “Tomorrow, we go hunting.”

  Dawn brought another day of insufferable heat. Mist rose from the river as father and son slipped downstream in their dugout canoe. The languid air was thick with the smell of rotting vegetation. The lower branches of overhanging trees sank into the festering water. Caymans crawled through the underbrush and a boa constrictor stretched along a lim
b, waiting to drop on floaters-by.

  Forsaking the river for the rainforest, they hid the canoe and crept toward an isolated hut on the edge of a glistening pool. Choked by vines as taut as garrotes, towering trunks reached for the burning sky. Up where howler monkeys screeched, the canopy was shot through with sunbeams. On the ground, as the hunters picked their way around backwater marshes, the citrine smell of ants swarming through hollow logs promised they’d be eaten alive if they stumbled against the bark.

  “Stop,” his father whispered.

  The boy crouched beside his dad.

  An Indian had just come out of his hut. Necklaces of jaguar teeth and boar tusks looped down his naked chest. Iguana skins ringed his wrists, and parrot feathers crowned his brow. His lips were dyed indigo, and a macaw feather pierced the septum of his nose. He was painted to look like the spirit people a shaman meets in visions, and it was clear the man was stoned on yagé.

  The visionary vine.

  The sounds of the jungle masked their approach. The Amazonian was lost in another reality. As the shaman saw serpents wrapped in fire and angry claws tearing at the sky, the boy unscrewed the lid on his jar of poison and dipped the tip of a dart. As the Amazonian sucked the breast of a jaguar woman, the boy carefully inserted the dart into his blowgun. As the visionary rode a viper to heaven, where he was introduced to the spirits of the dead, the boy aimed the blowpipe at his neck. Standing before a solitary tree, the shaman watched a door open into nothingness as the boy blew the dart from the blowgun.

  Phhhh!

  The poisoned missile hit the Amazonian’s jugular vein, and the curare went to work. The shaman’s legs buckled, and by the time the stalkers had reached their prey, he was gasping for breath.

  “Here,” said Mephisto’s father, unsheathing a machete. “Hack off his head and we’ll shrink it.”