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
“Why?”
“
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.”
Not prone to making snap judgments of people, Mercer had to go with his gut impression that Captain Vanik cared far beyond her official capacity. It was in her quick anger at the police ineptitude. Since Sanchez wasn’t likely to act on his suspicions, he had to trust that she would.
“He’s more wrong than you know. Want me to tell you what really happened here?”
Lauren Vanik looked at him sharply. “What do you know?”
Mercer led her a little away from the others. “These people weren’t murdered by Colombian guerrillas. In fact, they weren’t murdered at all.” Mercer took a breath, pulling together the small bits of evidence that had drawn him to a rather outlandish but inescapable conclusion. “They were killed by an invisible wall of carbon dioxide gas that swept down this valley from a volcanic lake farther up the river. The bullet wounds are all posthumous to make this look like an attack.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked in her scratchy alto voice.
“I noticed something was wrong when we first arrived on this river. There were no sounds from the jungle, no birds or monkeys. An area like this should sound like a zoo at feeding time. I also saw that a lot of the trees were stripped of foliage on their upstream side, as if a storm had passed through.”
“I noted that stuff too.” Captain Vanik nodded. “I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Neither did I until I did some exploring. Some of the dead chickens supposedly shot by the gunmen hadn’t been shot at all. They didn’t miss the goats or dogs but they just raked the chicken pen figuring no one would look too closely. And the animal corpses I saw in the jungle show no physical trauma, no reason to be dead. Also they weren’t decomposed yet. Few insects out there to eat them. That’s when I checked around the kitchen tent. The cockroaches were all dead and all of them were on their backs.”
“Meaning?”
“Cockroaches breath through a tube on their abdomens. When they’re poisoned, they roll over in an effort to get more air. An exterminator explained it to me when I first bought my town house and discovered a roach problem. The only thing that could have killed the roaches, the birds, monkeys and Gary’s people at the same time is some kind of poison gas. With me so far?”
“Yeah. I can see that.”
“Okay, if it was an attack by rebels using mortars or gas grenades, the people would have panicked and tried to run into the jungle. Yet everyone appears to have simply fallen dead where they were. No one ran anywhere. No one panicked. They all just fell dead when the carbon dioxide hit.”
“How do you know it was CO2?”
“Because it’s colorless, odorless, heavier than air, and can come from a natural source. It would have swept this camp like a wind that no one would have thought anything of until they started to die.” He paused. “And because something like this has happened before.”
Lauren’s bicolored eyes told him to continue. “In August of 1986 a volcanic lake called Nyos in Cameroon, Africa, erupted one night, belching out thousands of tons of CO2 that killed about seventeen hundred people. The gas had risen up from a magma chamber under the lake and became dissolved in the water until something released it, a small earthquake possibly. Like opening a can of soda after shaking it, the gas came out of solution in a fountain that scientists estimate was two hundred and fifty feet tall. The villagers lived in a valley below the lake. When the heavy gas poured into the town, it suffocated every living creature.”
She listened intently. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Few people have. There’s only one other lake like it in the world, well, maybe two if I’m right about what happened here.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but volcanic gas can’t explain bullet holes. And you said this wasn’t Colombians. Why?”
“This is where the story gets really weird.” He told her about Gary’s belief in the Twice-Stolen Treasure and how he thought it might be here. Then he explained how he’d been drawn into the search by going to a Paris auction and how thieves almost made off with the Lepinay journal, saying that it was the only item not purchased by a nameless Chinese businessman with ties to Panama.
“So you’re saying some Chinese guy who’s looking for this treasure shot a bunch of corpses for the fun of it?”
“I think what happened was he came out here to hijack Gary’s effort, I assume by killing him and his people, but when he arrived he found everyone was already dead. He had to know that eventually Gary’s wife would become suspicious and the bodies would be found. He couldn’t afford to have such a mysterious death investigated. Scientists would fly in from all over the world to test the lake to see if it was a CO2 eruption.”
“By shooting the bodies,” Lauren interrupted, “and making this look like a rebel attack, he knew the local police wouldn’t spend more than a day here and they could come back and pick up where Mr. Barber left off.”
Mercer was pleased that she made the same intuitive leap that he had. “That’s how I figure it.”
She looked over to where Sanchez was smoking little cigarillos with one of his men. “He wouldn’t believe us even if we showed him proof.”
“That’s why I told you and not him.”
“I know you have some sort of proposition for me, so what is it?”
“I want to take a look around that lake tomorrow, maybe collect some samples. If it is high in CO2, I can have a team from the States here in twelve hours. I know a couple of the geologists who’ve studied Lake Nyos. Unfortunately I don’t speak Spanish and I’d like Ruben and his boys to stick around to help me. What I need is a translator. It would only be for a day or two.”
