by Jack Du Brul
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.
One hundred and five million cubic yards of dirt had been excavated from the Gaillard Cut alone, fully half of all material unearthed for the canal project. An early description of the sheer volume of rubble removed to build the Panama Canal stated that if it were compacted into a column with the base the size of an average city block, it would climb to 100,000 feet. Or put another way, the overburden would fill a string of railcars long enough to circle the globe-three and a half times. As Juan Aranjo’s boat motored farther into the cut, Mercer felt that no guidebook comparison could possibly depict the awesome scale of the project. He’d seen many of the world’s engineering marvels, the Great Pyramids, the Coliseum in Rome, the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam, the Channel Tunnel. All of them paled next to this.
Towering to their right, they passed what remained of a particular hill that had been blasted to the exact shape of the step pyramid at Saqqara. Then they reached the actual continental divide. Mercer was astounded to think that he was in the middle of a mountain range that stretched from the tip of South America all the way to northern Canada. Walls of andesitic basalt rose in stepped-back cliffs five hundred feet above the placid water. These were the remains of Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill, the highest mountains near the canal and yet the lowest the early engineers could find when they surveyed the route. Holes had been drilled into the rock and reinforced concrete plugs inserted to add stability, and still there was evidence that rockslides continued to occur. The canal was a little more than six hundred feet wide and it seemed the tops of these stone massifs weren’t much wider, looming like the sides of the artificial canyon this was.
From the deck of the small boat, he had to tilt his head all the way back as they motored between the shadows of these man-made cliffs. The recent rain had saturated the veneer of soil on top of the hills, so water cascaded down the faces of the hills in white horse-tail streaks.
“Pretty amazing, huh?” Lauren asked from the entrance to the cabin. The black microprene suit clung to her body like a second skin.
Mercer had to force himself not to stare. “I was just thinking that when they were digging the cut, the temperature must have been about a hundred and twenty degrees.”
“The heat was about that bad, yes, but what bothered them most were the landslides. Months of digging could be refilled in just one avalanche, burying steam shovels and train tracks and men. I read it was so unstable that not only would mud slide into the dig, but at times, the bottom of the cut actually bulged upward because of the weight of the mountains next to it.”
Mercer visualized the titanic weight of the two hills pressing into the soft substrata and causing an upthrust between them, like pinching two ends of a balloon to expand its center. It was rock mechanics on the largest scale.
They watched in silence for a few minutes. Lauren finally spoke. “On the drive over, you were kind of vague about what Vic and I are looking for down there.” Behind her, the Serb used a whetstone on the blade of his dive knife. “Care to give me something specific?”
“I’m not sure,” Mercer said. “Roddy told us that all the ships that suddenly went off course had been delayed coming out of the west lane at Pedro Miguel. He and the other pilots didn’t report anything wrong with the ships’ steering. No one had tampered with the auxiliary controls or anything like that. Roddy and I think that maybe something was attached to the hulls of these ships to cause the course changes.”
“A submersible?” she asked doubtfully.
“I know it sounds farfetched, but how would you go about changing the direction of a twenty-thousand-ton ship? Remember, none of the vessels that went off course were PANAMAX ships. They were smaller freighters passing through the canal at night. This would give a submersible the room to maneuver and, depending on how it was designed, the power to alter the course of such a vessel. The sub could be moved into position as soon as the lock doors open. The ship is then held up for a few minutes while the sub is attached. And when the time is right, it uses its engine to nudge the freighter off course.”
“Why go through all that when it would be cheaper, and easier, just to pay off a couple of canal pilots to cause these accidents?”
“If Liu does close the Panama Canal the subsequent investigation is going to be massive. He can’t risk those pilots being questioned and can’t kill them either because that would be more suspicious. Also, by staging a string of such strange incidents he’s created a pattern that would explain away an explosives-laden ship he intentionally rams into the canal’s bank.”
Lauren’s brow creased as she considered Mercer’s explanation. He could tell she was reluctant to believe his idea. Her nod was more to say that he should go on than that she bought the scenario. He saw that their relationship had suffered in some fundamental way because of his reaction to the torture. He didn’t know what he could do or say to reassure her that he was still thinking clearly. Nothing, probably, until he did finally come to grips with what Sun had done to him.
“I’ve got to hand it to Liu,” Mercer continued, putting aside her uncertainty. “He’s damned thorough. He’s planned dozens of moves ahead, and remains flexible enough to react to our presence. Every contingency I can think of, he’s already considered. Any investigation into a catastrophic explosion will show that American-trained canal pilots have a history of screwing up. Following the trail of gold he’ll pay to Panama only leads to a mine that looks legit. If the canal is closed for a couple of years, the fact that Hatcherly Consolidated has container ports and bought a rail line and has almost finished an oil pipeline will seem like a case of right place right time, not something deliberate.”
“It all seems so convoluted.”
“It is, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s too complex to be plausible and yet there’s no other explanation.” He paused. “Anyone with enough motivation and explosives could blow up anything in the world. The trick is getting away with it. That’s what separates a lunatic from a calculated terrorist. We’re not dealing with suicidal fundamentalists. These are rational people who want to survive the attack and enjoy their rewards. That’s why it has to be so complex. Liu’s got this operation planned to the final detail and is weeks, maybe only days from pulling it off.” His eyes bored into hers. “Laur
en, do you realize that if I hadn’t been suspicious about how Gary Barber died the investigation would have ended in the jungle with that police officer you don’t like. No one would have any idea that a Chinese company, ostensibly owned by their government, was about to shut down the Panama Canal in such a way that the United States would be unable to react.”
“Senor,” Juan Aranjo interrupted.
Mercer looked up. Like an oasis of technology in the middle of a primeval jungle, the Pedro Miguel Lock lay just ahead. Their little boat was now on the Pacific side of the continental divide so the terrain had flattened into gentle slopes covered in golden grass and palms. On the east bank a shantytown of corrugated buildings abutted the chain-link fence that stretched along this section of the waterway. Laundry swayed from lines stretched across the squatters’ village, and behind it was the railroad and the trans-Panama highway. Closer to the side-by-side locks sat a mooring site for the small boats pilots used to reach the ships they were to guide, several parking lots, and two long warehouses. These structures were maintenance sheds for the electric trains that towed vessels through the locks. The trains ran on tracks laid on the edges of each thousand-foot-long lock chamber and on the sixty-foot-wide wall that divided the two concrete basins. Up to six of these engines, called mules, were needed to guide their unwieldy charges into and then out of the locks so that neither was damaged. It was up to the canal pilots to coordinate a ship’s own motive power with that of the mules, and to maintain proper tension on the heavy towlines to see the vessel transit the lock safely.
A tanker had just passed out of the right lock, giving Mercer a view down the length of the chamber to the tops of the mitre doors that held back Lake Gatun. They closed inward in the shape of a flattened V so the angle helped spread the tremendous load they held at bay. From Roddy he’d learned that the doors were sixty-five feet wide, seven feet thick, and were hollow so that they floated to make opening them easier. Each individual gate weighed upwards of seven hundred tons. And here at Pedro Miguel, both lock chambers had two sets of doors on the downstream end so that if one were somehow broached, there wouldn’t be a catastrophic failure that could conceivably drain the lake.