Goethals looked at him for a long moment, lit another cigarette, and said, “I’ve heard enough. Get out. Both of you.”
“No, Colonel. You have to listen to me. Talbot and his men are the Red Vipers. I know this because of the identity of the bomber at Pedro Miguel.”
“Raul Morales,” Sam interjected, in case Colonel Goethals had forgotten. “Talbot’s driver’s brother.”
“No. It wasn’t Raul,” Bell countered. “It really was the driver. Rinaldo.”
Goethals asked, “How can you be so sure?”
“That was the biggest thing I forgot when I had amnesia. Rinaldo is Talbot’s most trusted man, right? They are always together. For the sake of argument, let’s say Talbot was behind the Red Vipers. He would want his best and most trusted operative, Rinaldo, to carry out their most destructive act yet, one so heinous you would have to let him pursue the Viboras onto the lake.”
Goethals remained silent, doubtful.
Bell plowed on. “What he didn’t expect is me tracking and killing the bomber after the explosion. Right away, he had to distance himself from his driver, and so he told us it wasn’t Rinaldo but a brother named Raul. Do you recall in the lock chamber how Talbot pointed out that the corpse was missing the same finger as his driver?”
“I do,” Sam said. “You found it down in the tunnels under the lock.”
“Talbot had more than enough time to get to the body and shoot off the pinkie and toss it in the tunnel.”
“Why?”
“Because Rinaldo isn’t missing a finger, his brother Raul is. Rinaldo always wore these nice kidskin driving gloves, so I never saw whether it was one way or the other. We all just took Talbot’s word for it that Rinaldo was a finger short, and finding the body with the severed finger felt like proof the bomber was Raul and not Rinaldo. Talbot thought through and executed his plan while we were working on rescuing any survivors. He acted fast, lied cleverly, and fooled everyone.”
“But now you claim you weren’t fooled at all?” Goethals asked, one bushy eyebrow cocked.
“I was, at the time,” Bell conceded. “It was later, when I interviewed Morales on the boat in Gamboa, that I figured everything out. Even though I’d seen Rinaldo Morales on only two brief occasions, I have made my living on my powers of observation. The man Court Talbot presented as his driver was an impostor. Talbot claimed they were a year apart. He lied. Rinaldo and Raul were fraternal twins and closely matched to be sure, but I could tell right away that it wasn’t Rinaldo. The fact Talbot was peddling this charade was proof he was the mastermind behind the Viboras and all their attacks. I was going to come straight here after my meeting with him to tell you, Colonel, when they ambushed me on the road and almost killed me.”
“Any physical evidence of all this?”
“None, but I know what I saw.”
Goethals looked far from convinced but he hadn’t sent Bell packing. “You said earlier that Talbot wanted access to Lake Gatun. Why?”
“I don’t know that yet. I do know he has the only workboat on the lake, and that you hadn’t allowed him to leave Gamboa since the Chagres River was dammed up. And this isn’t really about Courtney Talbot either, Colonel. There’s another angle—well, two really—that I haven’t mentioned. I believe Talbot is just hired muscle working for a German industrialist named Otto Dreissen. The company he owns is called Essenwerks, and they have their finger in a lot of different pies.”
“I’ve met him at a couple receptions in the city,” Goethals said. “Typical cold fish Teutonic type.”
“He’s the one bankrolling this.”
When Goethals was about to ask the obvious question, Bell stopped him with a raised hand.
“I don’t know what he’s after, but it comes down to getting Talbot’s boat away from Gamboa and out on the broad lake. I do know that Dreissen is involved because I followed someone who tried to kill me out to his house on the coast road.”
George Washington Goethals was Army through and through, a West Point graduate and a man who governed by rules and regulations. Bell’s instincts told him that if he revealed he’d broken into Dreissen’s house, this interview would be over, so he lied.
“Armed with the address, I learned Dreissen’s name from a British expat here named Macalister. While I knew nothing of the man or his company, I was looking at that time into a possible European agent being behind the Viboras, and this man fit the bill. I cabled my office in New York for a biographical and business dossier.
“I believe the scheme played out like this. Dreissen wants access to Lake Gatun, for some unknown reason. Court Talbot has the only workboat on the lake, Dreissen hires him. You won’t just give him permission, so Dreissen and Talbot invent a fake insurgency that only Talbot can destroy. They create a backstory, a narrative, that is elaborate enough to begin taking on a life of its own. Remember, Talbot is well versed in guerrilla tactics because of his time in the Philippines fighting the Moro uprising. When the low-level stuff like robbing depots and derailing trains doesn’t get your attention in the way Talbot wants, he ups the stakes.”
“The business in California?”
“Yes, sir. Talbot went after your old West Point roommate, Senator Densmore. The plan was to have it look like the Viboras assassinated him, goading you on to the point where you would let Talbot out on the lake to hunt them down. The whole thing was a setup from the beginning, and had I known Spanish, I would have picked up on it sooner. Did you know Talbot has a nickname with some of the locals?”
“I didn’t.”
Sam Westbrook provided the name as he was familiar with Talbot’s legend. “He’s called Ojo Muerto, ‘Dead
