River of Ruin

man. The Panamanian stopped speaking, swallowed once, and was unable to meet the hard gaze. “Tell him to beach the boat,” Mercer said without turning away.

Maria didn’t need to translate. The boat edged over to the camp and Mercer leapt out with a rope in his hand. He tied it to a stake jammed deep into the mud. He pointed at the leader of guards, motioning the man to follow him and to send out the other two as pickets at the upstream and downstream edges of the clearing. Maria and the boatman stayed in the small craft. As the men entered the camp, their motion startled the scavenger birds to a flight of indignant cries. Mercer tied a bandana around his mouth and nose.

There were times that he hated being right, absolutely hated it. As he trudged toward the main tent, the sense of urgency that had driven him halfway around the globe washed out of him with each step. The fears he’d harbored since the assault in Paris had been justified. This was no random narco-guerrilla attack. The timing was just too coincidental. Judging by the amount of damage done by the birds, he estimated this group had died at least a day before he bought the Lepinay journal, just after Gary’s final communication with his wife, when he’d said he had something he wanted Mercer to see. Gary had been closer to a major discovery than he’d known and the knowledge had cost him his life.

Mercer was doing a good job of keeping his emotions in check until he entered the main tent and found Gary’s body. Dressed in shorts, boots, and a filthy T-shirt, Gary lay sprawled on the canvas floor of the tent, a bullet wound like an obscene third eye in his forehead. Despite the savagery of the attack on the camp, his weathered features were composed, as if he’d puzzled about his death rather than fought it. Though not as bad as the others outside, Gary’s corpse had not been spared from the vultures. Mercer thought he’d prepared himself for finding this type of scene, and still his hands shook as he bent to close Gary’s eyes.

Mercer needed many minutes for the ache to subside enough for him to begin thinking again.

The large tent had been ransacked, the contents of chests and boxes dumped on the floor, a computer smashed, Gary’s bed stripped and flipped. Further proof that this wasn’t Colombian guerrillas was that a great deal of equipment valuable to struggling rebels had been either smashed or left behind: a transceiver, clothing, the portable generator just outside the tent and cases of canned food. Mercer didn’t know exactly what the killers were after so he couldn’t tell if they’d found it, but he suspected that eliminating Gary as a rival was their principal aim. The ransacking had been a ruse to throw off authorities.

Back into the brutal sunshine, he stepped carefully toward the boat, noting that they had gone so far as to shoot a couple of camp dogs, two goats, and a handful of chickens. Like the dead people, there was remarkably little blood from the gunshots. When he reached the boat, Maria’s back was to him, her gaze fixed on the slow- moving river.

“I’m sorry,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder. They remained frozen for several long seconds and then he could feel her body heaving gently as she began to sob. “If it’s any comfort, he didn’t suffer.”

She turned into him and his arms went around her, her face buried in his stomach as he stood over the boat. “It is no comfort,” she said softly.

They stayed like that until the leader of the guards, Ruben, approached. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand to encompass the camp then shook his head. He’d searched the area and found no one alive and no sign of the attackers. Just as Mercer had guessed.

“Guardia Nacional?” he asked, meaning should they alert the national police force.

“Si.” Mercer nodded. He lifted Maria’s chin so he could look at her face. Her makeup had smeared a little, but her eyes remained clear and glassy. “I’m going to stay here while Ruben contacts the police. I think you should go back to Panama City. The charter plane is still in El Real. Just have the pilot fly you home. Is that okay?”

“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