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.