They had a fire going, not to keep warm-no need in the tropical heat-but to brew some coffee. The changing sounds of the forest had awakened Cooper just before dawn.
On one of the “spokes” they’d traversed the night before, he’d encountered a narrow river. It was on the outskirts of the village, to the north. This morning, once he’d arisen, he found the aluminum pot Madrid had used to cook some condensed hiker’s food, and made his way to the river to fill it. He got the fire going by kicking its embers around, boiled the water in the pot, took a coffee filter and pouch of grounds from his backpack and custom-filtered some brew into the cups Madrid had packed into each of their backpacks.
Borrego and Madrid came awake the minute the smell of coffee hit the jungle air.
Food, Cooper thought-it’s all about food with these guys.
Once they’d found three suitably distant bushes in which to relieve themselves, the trio of explorers sat around the fire and worked on putting away the coffee.
“You notice the shreds of fabric on some of the bones?” Cooper said.
“Yep,” Borrego grumbled.
“Your tomb raider was right. Everybody here died. But he said it could have been a thousand years ago when they caught the curse, if that’s what it was. I’m fairly certain that’s not possible.”
“The artifacts certainly aren’t that old.”
Cooper nodded, electing to ignore the fact that Borrego already knew this and hadn’t said anything about it along the way.
“Correct,” he said, “a hundred and fifty years old at most, according to an archaeologist I asked. But the presence of the fabric in the homes would indicate the citizens here died a lot more recently than that.”
“You’re saying the clothes on the skeletons,” Borrego said, sipping from his cup, “would have rotted faster than that.”
“I’m not exactly up to speed on the latest forensics theories, but no way do fabrics like those stick around a rain forest more than twenty-five years.”
Borrego nodded.
“Definitely not a hundred,” he said, “or even fifty.”
“So everybody died here. They died quickly, and more or less all at once-less than fifty years ago.”
Borrego nodded again and took another sip of coffee. Madrid too sipped.
“Maybe that’s what the snuffer-outers don’t want anybody finding out,” Cooper said.
“Could have been something else,” Borrego said. “Like tribal warfare, say.”
“Could have.”
“Or civil war within the tribe-two factions battling to the death. Hell,” Borrego said, “could be they all listened to their crazy leader and downed some arsenic-laced indigenous version of Kool-Aid. But given the other factors that brought you into my office on that switching train, I’d say your theory is in the lead.”
Cooper dumped the gritty remainder of his coffee on the fire and stood.
“Gonna look around some more,” he said.
Borrego looked up at him from his seat beside the fire. He didn’t have to look very high despite Cooper’s relatively tall frame-six-nine goes a long way, Cooper thought, even when you’re sitting down.
“Longer spokes?” Borrego said.
“Longer spokes.”
“Let me lace up my boots,” Borrego said. “I’ll join you.”
Madrid looked over at Cooper, and then at his boss, who was already busy securing the double knot on the first of his hiking boots.
“How about I stick around and make some more coffee,” the weary velociraptor said.
Neither Borrego nor Cooper said a word while they worked around the hundred-plus square miles of the crater in silent synch. They encountered other signs of the civilization that had been-pots, tools, the occasional small, rotting structure-but little else. Around three-thirty Cooper encountered the creek again. It ran a little faster here, kind of a scale model of rapids, maybe four feet across at most. Following the creek’s upstream course, he saw that the creek was rushing along at this pace because it had just completed its tumble down the edge of the crater. He hadn’t realized he was so close to the edge of the forest.
Cooper caught Borrego’s eye with a wave and the Polar Bear started over. Cooper headed uphill, enjoying, even in his first few steps, a fresh supply of newly forming blisters. He thought of the figure-eight shape they’d observed upon cresting the crater’s edge the day before-that was where he was headed now, the higher, smaller plateau in the figure-eight. He followed the creek as it leveled out and slowed and the stroll became less arduous. He could hear Borrego behind him from time to time, the occasional broken twig, the brush of the big man’s bulk against a tropical leaf.
The light had begun to fade when he found it.
There wasn’t much to find. The toe of his hiking boot bumped against it, and he felt whatever he’d bumped shift. A quick look down revealed a distinctly unindigenous scrap of particle board. Charred, wet, and mostly rotted through, the flat chunk of wood still managed to look as out of place as a man like he did in the West Indies: yellowish-white and soft in a forest of hard, dark trees. Cooper picked it up and discovered nothing else out of the ordinary about it: unpainted, it held no bolts, displayed no telltale shape, and otherwise simply seemed to be what it was-a scrap of compressed sawdust being slowly uncompressed by the wet woods around it.
It was about a hundred yards onward when the smell got to him.
It wasn’t exactly an unnatural fragrance, but neither was it familiar to him in the three days he’d spent here. He placed it as the smell of an old, doused fire-of burned, water-soaked wood.
Borrego caught up to him. Cooper showed him the particle board.
“Smell that?” he said once Borrego handed him back the wood.
Borrego said that he did.
Working wordlessly again, they started covering this section of the woods in opposing crescents, Cooper examining the foliage and earth beneath it as he went. Besides the chunk of particle board, all that remained of whatever had burned was charcoal, long since blended into the soil.
It occurred to Cooper that whatever had burned to the ground here had been exceedingly large-the charred footprint, while mostly hidden beneath the foliage now grown over in its place, stretched at least sixty yards in one direction and a hundred in the other. There were fewer trees growing in the footprint than elsewhere, and those that were growing here had a long way to go to catch the other, taller trees in the crater.
He looked up from his reverie and saw that Borrego, up ahead, was staring off into the woods. When he saw that Cooper was clocking him, the Polar Bear said, “You see those?”
Cooper looked where he was pointing and saw stones in the river.
Stones, but not stones. Broken concrete-the water eddying lazily around chunks of it, some with straight or sharp edges but most busted into rounded, rocklike pieces. They converged on the rubble and saw depressions in the soil, presumably indicating some of the places from which the concrete had been excavated. The exposed portions of the foundation had been broken off, knocked to pieces, and tossed into the water.
“Looks to me,” Borrego’s deep voice said from behind him, “like somebody worked very hard at hiding whatever this place was.”
“Didn’t do too good a job of it, either,” Cooper said.
“At least not if you’re standing in the woods under the rim of a volcanic crater that sees city slickers like us maybe once a century.”
“Yeah,” Cooper said. “Fly by or something, you’ve got no idea.”
“Bad winds in here too. There’s something about the humidity and the winds together that makes it impossible to fly through most of this mountain range. Even with a helicopter.”
“Suppose a smart person would have asked you the question back in the Land Rover,” Cooper said, “as to why we weren’t flying in aboard a helicopter to start with. There’s my answer.”
Borrego shook his head.
“Tough to get hold of one without arousing too much rebel attention anyway,” he said.
Cooper said, “Crap.”
Borrego nodded, then shook his head. Cooper understood the combination of gestures with a kind of precision: What a shame-lot of people killed here.
“Somebody spilled something,” Cooper said. “Killed off a whole village full of people in the process, then headed for the hills.”
“Looks that way to me.”
“Then whoever it was decides-”
Cooper stopped.
“Fuck me,” he said.
It was getting dark. He flipped on his flashlight. It created a million sparkles of light on the surface of the river as it swirled through the chunks of concrete.
“What is it,” Borrego said. “You hear something?”
“No,” Cooper said. He hadn’t shared with Borrego the part of his theory he’d started out with-the theory on who the snuffer-outers worked for, or were associated with, the very association that caused them to decide not to snuff him out too. Wouldn’t be too much of a stretch that somebody in the federal government of the good old U.S. of A.-his chief snuffer-outer suspects-might have had something to do with this fucking chemical spill, or whatever the hell it was about this place that had killed an entire Indian village. The treatment of the locals here being fairly consistent, he thought, with the treatment of other localities around the globe by the Evil Empire.
He still didn’t see much reason to share his theory with Borrego. What would he do with it anyway? Get mad at Uncle Sam? Or, more likely-get killed by someone sent by Uncle Sam.
Cooper started out along the river, heading upstream again. Borrego clicked on his own flashlight and fell in behind, following the rhythm they’d maintained throughout the day. Cooper liked that Borrego didn’t press him further. Working with the flashlights in the increasing darkness, they made their way out from the rectangular burn site in the same spoked paths they’d used back in the village. Cooper found himself growing angrier with every spoke. With every passing minute, in fact.
Almost a dozen spokes had come and gone when Borrego finally said, “You want to tell me what it is we’re looking for?”
“Any goddamn thing at all,” Cooper said, “that’ll show me who was here.”
Or confirm it-since I already know who it was.
Cooper crossed the stream and found the woods didn’t last long in this direction-the rocky crest of the crater stood like a steeply angled wall a hundred yards from the creek. They approached the crater wall and Cooper saw it almost immediately.
A cave.
“Should have looked here first,” Borrego said-almost, but not quite, causing Cooper to break the scowl distorting his face.
Ignoring his knee-jerk fear of lurking predators, Cooper barreled into the cave, descending into a cavity the size of a squash court. It occurred to Cooper that the Indians from the village must have known or found these underground caverns to exist in the crater, and used them to their advantage. The way Indians and other smart people did, he thought-use what nature gave you to its fullest-unlike the way whoever ran this facility worked. Theirs being-literally-the scorched-earth philosophy.
All the more corroborating evidence on the identity of the snuffer-outers.
As with the aboveground portion of the former riverfront factory-or prison camp, or movie theater, or whatever the fuck it had been, he thought-there wasn’t much to see in the cave. They’d burned whatever had been left in here too, the blackened, moist, smelly soil that coated the floor of the chamber consistent with the ash and coals he’d been kicking around up top. Neither Cooper nor Borrego could stand up straight except near the middle of the cavity; they shone their flashlights around the room in search of anything besides the evident rock, moss, dirt, and puddles.
“Maybe they stole from the Indians too,” the Polar Bear said from somewhere behind Cooper. “Kept the loot in here.”
“Maybe,” Cooper said idly.
“Whatever it was, though, seems to me it wouldn’t keep.”
“What do you mean,” Cooper said, peering around.
“Right now’s dry season. My guess’d be half the year, maybe more, this room’s a pond. Underwater.”
Cooper, brain dulled from too many days with too little food and too much humidity and exercise, took upward of thirty seconds to hear the coupler engage within the confines of his head. Trying to fend off some of the fatigue and flex his brain, he made the connection his mind was trying to tell him it had already made:
Underwater.
Along the back wall of the cavern, the floor was two or three feet deeper than the spot where he stood now. It was there, at the back of the cave, where the puddles stood. He walked to the back wall, moving slowly so as not to stir up too much mud, and shone his flashlight into the water as he worked his way along the wall.
The puddles reminded him of blackened tide pools. He poked around with his foot, feeling from behind the protective sheath of his steel-toed boot. Some of the puddles were deeper than others-two inches here, six there.
You’re burning something, and part of that something happens to be underwater, it could be you didn’t burn all of-
He heard the muted scraping noise first. Cooper and Borrego met each other’s gaze for an instant, and then Cooper pulled his boot out of the puddle, crouched down, and slipped his hand into the muck to find what it was he’d nudged. He came out with a short length of rotting wood.
Holding it up in the light, he could see it was close to eight or nine inches long, two or three inches wide in one direction, and thinner than his pinkie in the other. Its edges were jagged, blackened, rotten-a piece of it fell off and slopped into the puddle as Cooper rotated it in the beam of his flashlight-but when he got it turned around, Cooper, and Borrego beside him, saw that there was actually something to see.
The wood on the back side of the board, which had been submerged in the mud-or algae, or whatever else it is you find in a mud puddle in a rain forest cave-was pale. The color on the back side of the board was probably close to the original, natural color of the wood before the fire and rot had got to its other side.
Along this pale side of the board, stenciled in black, were two complete and legible letters, and half of a third. The three letters, at least by Cooper’s guess, were ICR. Below the letters were the rounded tops of an incomplete sequence of numbers, Cooper thinking it might be a serial number or ID labeling of some kind, but this portion of the markings on the wood seemed impossible to read.
Cooper looked at Borrego and pointed the wood in his direction.
“Mean anything to you?” he said. “Appears to be part of a crate, and you’re the biggest shipping magnate in the cave.”
“‘ICR,’ you mean? Not offhand.”
Cooper put the rotting piece of wood in his pocket, kicked and felt his way through the remainder of the puddles, found some other boards, splinters, and chunks of wood-all similar to the one in his pocket, but none with any markings.
Then he stood and took in the sight of the massive, hunched form of Ernesto Borrego.
“Might mean something to somebody somewhere, though,” he said.
Borrego nodded. “Otherwise we came all this way for a stick.”
Cooper almost smiled again.
Borrego’s bass rumble of a voice came next.
“Had enough?” he said.
“Of this place? For a lifetime.”
Borrego turned, pointed his flashlight beam toward the exit of the cave, and led the way out.
“Good,” the Polar Bear said. “’Cause I may be dead, but I’ve still got a business to run.”