Public Enemy Read online

  He knew the reason: it seemed there existed no difference between this jungle and the one through which he’d fled-the one in which he’d been held, and into which he’d stupidly, arrogantly jumped.

  His jumpy need to bolt came in waves, between which he paid close attention to what he saw-and what he saw, besides a reasonably primitive Central American Indian village, were more bones. Skeletons-lots of them.

  Or, as the tomb raider in the chop shop had put it, all of them.

  It was becoming rapidly clear-particularly given the positioning of the skeletal remains in their many different, seemingly casual angles of repose-that every single inhabitant of this village had died, or been killed, at almost the same time. Some had been attended, some not, but it seemed pretty obvious everyone had died fairly quickly.

  Curse, indeed. Christ.

  A wave of fear and nausea overtook him briefly and he set his hand against a tree to steady himself. As he did, he heard her. It was faint at first, just another part of the jungle sounds, but then her screeching, singsong tone ramped up in volume and he knew who it was. It was that goddamn golden idol of a priestess, calling out to him across the Caribbean. Her voice was deeper now, distorted, throat dry and scratchy-

  Oh, yeah, Cooper, you come to find us, and now we been found.

  You come to free us at last. So take us away, you dumb old paramilitary goon. Let us escape our damnation. An escape arranged by a soul as damned as we…

  Cooper bent down and squatted beside one of the skeletons and had a closer look. This one was reclined partially against the wall of the structure it occupied and partially on the floor, as though the person, in life, had been sitting against the wall when he or she died, the bones collapsing somewhat over the course of the body’s decay.

  “Why don’t we set up camp,” Borrego said. “There’s a clearing back a hundred yards or so, seems like a decent place to do it. We can use a fire as a home base and take a look around in spokes-out and back, out and back, so we know where we’ve been and where we haven’t, with the fire as our compass.”

  Madrid cleared his throat.

  “Might just be better,” he said, “to wait for morning. Then have a look around.”

  Borrego chuckled.

  “What,” he said, “and wait around all night? If you can stand to wait another ten hours to peer around every nook and cranny of this little city-hell, if you can get any sleep in this racket-you’re a better man than I.”

  “All right,” the velociraptor said, lacking Borrego’s enthusiasm for matters. “I’ll get going on setting things up.”

  Borrego tossed Madrid an enthusiastic thumbs-up and turned to lead the way.

  Working in tag teams, with one of them manning the camp-usually Madrid-they had a look at the entire village, or at least what appeared to be the entire village, examining everything within range of the flashlight beams while they headed six or seven hundred yards out and back on each “spoke.” It was about three-quarters of the way around the wheel where Cooper and Borrego, about a hundred yards east of the fire, found the stairs going down.

  There were two stone columns that had recently been knocked to pieces, but had obviously once marked the entrance to wherever the stairs went. Stone slabs composed the stairwell, which, upon illumination, revealed itself to lead down beneath the rain forest floor. Cooper counted thirty stairs and estimated the level of the passageway visible at the base to be twenty feet below ground level. Dirt, leaves, sticks, fallen stones, and broken slabs of rock were strewn across the stairwell and the passageway beneath. There were also footprints, straight-line depressions, and, on the surface, near where they stood, the tire tracks again.

  “I’m guessing this’d be where they found the goodies,” Borrego said.

  “And maybe the curse.” Cooper felt queasy at the prospect of heading underground.

  “Oh, hell, no,” Borrego said with a chuckle. “You get the curse over where we set up camp.”

  “Very funny.”

  “After you.”

  “Even funnier.”

  “I could get Madrid,” Borrego said. “Send him in ahead of us. Maybe he can set off the booby traps.”

  “Thought you were an experienced spelunker?” Cooper said.

  Their dual flashlight beams remained trained on the base of the stairwell.

  “I am.”

  “So?”

  “You’re the canary,” Borrego said, “aren’t you?”

  Aw, what the hell, Cooper thought, and started down. He turned so he could keep an eye on Borrego as he went. He didn’t do it for any reason other than instinct-you just never knew. Borrego started down behind him cautiously, some of that spring he’d shown along the way missing from his step.

  In the passageway, some of the stones and beams that held the walls together had broken apart and fallen. There were mounds of dirt where the earth had caved in, but most of the cave-ins appeared to have happened prior to the raid-tire tracks, footprints, and scrape marks evident on the mounds of dirt too.

  Protrusions from the wall were visible at shoulder height every ten steps or so, on alternating sides; looking more closely at them, Cooper realized they were there to hold torches or lanterns. As with the rest of the architecture, they didn’t seem particularly old.

  The hall turned to the right, and Cooper first saw darkness, and then, as he rotated the flashlight beam into the blackness-vastness. Borrego came up alongside him, and between their two flashlights they were able to partially illuminate the room.

  It was a massive, stone-walled chamber, with a number of benches built in rows along the floor. The benches were made of the same dark hardwood as the structures on the rain forest floor. Along the two longest walls, rectangular cavities had been carved out at regular intervals, the flashlight beams revealing the cavities to be empty. Because of the way the spiderwebs, dust, and dirt were patterned within the cavities, Cooper caught the distinct impression of something recently taken.

  A similar emptiness of grime and dust showed itself under their beams in a rectangular shape along the shorter back wall of the room; Cooper thought immediately of the gold tapestry he’d seen on display in Cap’n Roy’s Marine Base Barn.

  “Looks to me,” Borrego rumbled from Cooper’s left, “like a church.”

  There were a pair of doorways, one on each side of the place where the tapestry had hung. Cooper took one of the openings at the back of the room and Borrego the other. They wound up in the same room-this one much wider, with a shallower ceiling. As he watched his flashlight beam illuminate the features of this particular chamber, Cooper felt an icy tingle inch up his spine.

  “Or a funeral home,” he said.

  Stretching away from them, in multiple rows, stood a sea of caskets. These too were made of the same hardwood. They looked more weathered than the timbers used to build the shacks-older, Cooper thought.

  “This is their cemetery,” he thought out loud.

  “So it seems,” Borrego said.

  Most of the caskets appeared to have been opened and re-closed; their lids were mostly a little bit askew but remained on the coffins despite the disturbance they’d endured. There were cavities built into the walls of this room just as in the other, and these-along with the boxes beside the coffins, Cooper and Borrego examining a few of them-were also empty.

  “Your boys did a pretty thorough job of cleaning house,” Cooper said.

  “Told you they were good.”

  “Not that this comes as any great surprise,” Cooper said, “but I’m not exactly feeling like Sherlock Holmes here. Everybody’s dead-okay-that makes the place no different from every other Mayan ruin, except it’s pretty obvious whatever killed these people killed them quickly. Then we’ve got the thorough cleaning job by your tomb raiders-other than these evident facts, we ain’t exactly stumbling across an explanation behind the multi-continental snuff-out currently being conducted by persons unknown.”

  Borrego’s flashlight beam moved b
umpily around the walls of the room; Cooper took a look at him and saw that the Polar Bear had entered into a massive, slow, ecstatic kind of stretch. As though to emphasize the satisfaction the full-body stretch gave him, he opened his mouth and undertook a wide, trembling yawn.

  When he’d finished, Borrego said, “Guess you could see it this way: either it’s got something to do with the whole village being dead, or this trip was one big waste of time. Other than good exercise and great lobster, of course. Let’s head up top-see if Jesus has the tents up.”

  Cooper shrugged, said he didn’t see why not, and followed the Polar Bear up and out.

  35

  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 i
n 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.