Talbot shook Bell’s hand. “Here’s some irony for you. Rinaldo is missing his left pinkie, as punishment inflicted by his father—it’s a long story, about a disturbed, abusive parent—and now his brother loses the same finger in death.”
Bell looked at Talbot critically. He didn’t like irony or, in this case, coincidence. “Are you absolutely certain this isn’t Rinaldo?”
“The wound to the face makes it a little more difficult, but yes. Besides, you can see for yourself that the hand wound is recent.”
“True,” Bell said slowly.
Talbot flipped open one of the pouch pockets on his bush jacket and handed an object to Bell. It was a small metal cylinder with a glass end. “Single D cell electric light. Turn it on by twisting the base.”
He hefted the ladder lying by the drain opening and slid one end into the tunnel below.
“It’s got to be down there.”
Bell knew what he meant and turned on the light before descending into the shaft. There was plenty of light below the opening, and while the rainwater had diluted the blood, it still looked pink where it puddled on the bottom of the huge pipe. The severed finger lay about three feet from the opening, roughly the distance Bell expected it would be. He picked it up with a handkerchief from his pocket and examined the stump. The bone showed the expected fracturing from being struck by a bullet.
He climbed back to the surface and once back on top opened the blood-smeared handkerchief to reveal his grisly find. “This is all the proof I need,” he announced. “By the way, Court, this is one handy little device. Gives off more light than I expected.”
“Sears, Roebuck catalog. Please keep it, I ordered a dozen of them.”
Bell thanked him and pocketed the electric torch.
“What does all this mean?” young Sam Westbrook asked. “Was he working for the Colombians or what?”
“This should be a matter for the Canal Authority,” Bell said, looking at Goethals, “but with your permission . . .”
He gestured to the body, and the Administrator nodded his approval.
Bell searched the corpse with professional adroitness, not a hiding place overlooked or a motion wasted. The man had nothing on him but some matches in a plain paperboard box and a knife fashioned into a shiv from some unidentifiable piece of metal. The knife had been used to cut an appropriate length of fuse, the matches had been to light it. There were no labels in his clothes and nothing hidden in his boots. Bell took a second to tuck the handkerchief into the dead man’s breast pocket.
He got to his feet and said, “It was too much to hope for that he had letters in his pocket from the President of Colombia detailing the plot. Sam asks a good question, Colonel. What will happen if Raul Morales was working with Colombian agents?”
“That’s for Washington to decide. They will need something more definitive than our speculation to even inquire diplomatically at this point, but I can see this escalating very quickly.” He lit another in his unending chain of cigarettes. “You gentlemen must surely be aware that there is a great deal of sentiment around the world that the United States was in the wrong when it came to the Panamanian revolution. It’s said we acted as bullies, and that on the heels of taking Cuba and the Philippines from Spain our colonial aspirations are growing too dangerous.”
Bell said, “Ironic, coming from European powers that have spread their tentacles into every corner of the globe and exploited lands and peoples for generations and enriched themselves endlessly from it, but apparently hypocrisy doesn’t reflect in the mirror.”
“True,” Goethals said. “What I am saying is, we’ve spent half a billion dollars, with a capital B, down here and lost better than four thousand men’s lives. I don’t think we’re going to meekly turn over our marvelous accomplishment. I also know there will be a diplomatic firestorm and quite possibly military repercussions if we have to fight the Colombians if it turns out they are behind the Red Vipers.”
“We’d risk war,” Westbrook said.
“For this?” Goethals spread his arms to encompass the enormous structure in which they stood. “With any and all comers. Mr. Bell, I am very much interested in your continued presence here in the zone, if you are willing to lend a hand. We need answers, and I believe you are the man best qualified to find them.”
“Of course, Colonel, I am at your disposal. I already have a first question that demands an answer. Where are the rest of the dynamite crates? That explosion was big, to be sure, and effective, but it wasn’t a full ton of explosives.” Bell then addressed Westbrook and Talbot. “I believe there was a third option I didn’t consider back in the bunker and that’s they cached some of the dynamite here and took some of it with them.”
“What do we do?”
“We need to search this site from top to bottom, in the unlikely event they left it behind.”
“Why do you say ‘unlikely’?” Goethals asked.
“No point in splitting your loot if you’re going to leave it all on-site. It doubles the chances of it being discovered.”
“Yet halves the chance of losing it all if it were,” Talbot pointed out.
Bell shook his head and said to Westbrook, “A ton of dynamite goes missing. What would happen if you found a thousand pounds of unauthorized dynamite in the back of a truck?”
“We’d run an audit of our supply, discover the theft, and then search every nook and cranny until we found the other thousand pounds. If it was here, we’d find it.”
Court Talbot could find no fault in the logic. “You are rather good at this, Bell. Go on.”
“Point two is that they have already struck here. If I were trying to sow unrest, I would spread my swath
