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.
“Oh, hey,” Lauren exclaimed after wiping sleep from her eyes. “Did you find anything in the journal?”
“Not one damned thing,” Mercer said. Lauren’s expectant look dimmed. “It was interesting from a certain point of view, but I couldn’t find anything that would compel Liu to send gunmen to steal it. Maybe he really is interested in canal history.”
Lauren shot him a doubtful look. Mercer shrugged as if to say anything’s possible.
Juan switched on the fuel pump and keyed the ignition. The motor came to life. For the remainder of the trip down the canal, Tomanovic and Lauren had to remain out of sight. The idea was that Mercer was to act like a photographer who’d hired a local’s boat to take pictures of the ships using the lock. To enhance the deception he still had the camera and lens he’d brought to the River of Ruin.
Lauren and Vic ducked into the cabin to don half-millimeter Henderson microprene body suits, more as camouflage than thermal protection, as Juan pulled them away from their secluded anchorage and headed back for the main channel. They passed a couple of excursion boats lined with camera-wielding tourists in addition to the normal parade of oceangoing transporters. The sun continued its dive for the horizon. Its reddish glow mirror- flashed off the water whenever a wave turned to the proper angle.
Exiting Lake Gatun, they started down the narrower reach toward the Gaillard Cut and the Pedro Miguel Lock. Because the exclusionary marker buoys for the big ships left only tight lanes along the banks, Juan kept his craft tucked to the right shore, on the opposite side of the canal from Gamboa. Beyond the wide twists in the waterway, Mercer could see the looming massif of the continental divide. The closer they got, the narrower the canal became and the more the landscape revealed its artificial nature. The hills that once fell in lazy slopes to the water had been partially leveled and stepped back so they resembled the terrace farms Mercer recalled from trips to Asia and Africa. Jungle vegetation was just now reclaiming the land. This was the latest in a century-long effort to stem the landslides that had plagued the canal since the moment the first steam shovels began tearing open the passage.
One hundred and five
Towering to their right, they passed what remained of a particular hill that had been blasted to the exact shape of the step pyramid at Saqqara. Then they reached the actual continental divide. Mercer was astounded to think that he was in the middle of a mountain range that stretched from the tip of South America all the way to northern Canada. Walls of andesitic basalt rose in stepped-back cliffs five hundred feet above the placid water. These were the remains of Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill, the highest mountains near the canal and yet the lowest the early engineers could find when they surveyed the route. Holes had been drilled into the rock and reinforced concrete plugs inserted to add stability, and still there was evidence that rockslides continued to occur. The canal was a little more than six hundred feet wide and it seemed the tops of these stone massifs weren’t much wider, looming like the sides of the artificial canyon this was.
