“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.”