The Calm Before The Swarm (10 page)

They were all around him now and closing
fast.

If he could just reach the rock ledge, he
could leap down into the river and allow it to whisk him away.

Ten yards.

Through the trees, he could see only fog,
but he'd been down here enough times to know that the foaming
whitecaps flowed only fifteen feet below. He would then need to
navigate a series of waterfalls, and keep from drowning long enough
to reach the bottom of the valley and the start of the real
trek.

Five yards. Another four strides through the
snarl of brush and he could make his leap. Just three more strides
and---

Searing pain erupted in his back as he was
slammed from behind. Something sharp probed between his ribs to
either side of his spine. The mist-shrouded cliff disappeared and
he saw only mud rising toward his face. The backpack against his
chest broke the brunt of his fall, but his forehead still hammered
the ground. He saw only blackness and tasted blood. The weight
pounded down on his back, knocking the wind out of him. Something
clawed at his shoulders as he slid forward.

The pressure on top of him abated and
whatever had stabbed him was yanked out as he rolled over the ledge
and tumbled into the fog toward the frigid river, unable even to
scream.

Chapter One

Pomacochas, Peru

October 14
^th

8:38 a.m. PET

By the time Wes Merritt caught up with the
children, they were giggling and prodding the corpse with
sticks.

This certainly wasn't how he had envisioned
starting his day.

He had been down on the rickety floating
dock on Laguna Pomacochas, loading his 1953 DHC-2 #N68080 seaplane
with supplies for a quick jaunt down to the City of Chachapoyas,
capital of the Amazonas Province of Peru, when the three boys had
raced up the wooden planks and begun chattering at him in Quechua.
Far from fluent in the native tongue, he had captured just a
handful of words here and there, but the few he understood told him
he wouldn't be making the flight that morning. Two words had stood
out specifically. The first,
aya
, meant "dead body." And the
second, undoubtedly the reason they had come directly to him rather
than the policía, was a word that he had been called on more than
one occasion himself.

Mithmaq
. The Quechua word for
stranger.

As Merritt approached the bank of the river
and the partially concealed body, he wondered if the children had
been mistaken. What little skin he could see was mottled bluish
black, and the hair was so thick with mud and scum that it was
nearly impossible to determine the color. The Mayu Wañu, or,
roughly translated, Resurrection River, rose and fell with the
seasons, alternately climbing up the steep slope behind him in the
spring into the primary rainforest, where the massive trunks of the
kapok trees bore the gray discoloration of the water, and
diminishing to a gentle trickle mere inches deep during dry spells.
The body was tangled in vegetation, half-buried in the mud on the
shore, half-floating in the brown river. Swirling eddies attempted
to pry it loose to continue its journey along the rapids into the
lagoon, but the earth held it fast.

"
Sayana
," he said in Quechua.
Stop.

The boys looked up at him, then slowly
backed away, their fun spoiled. One, a shaggy-haired boy of about
twelve in a filthy polo shirt and corduroys that were far too
short, peeked at Merritt from the corner of his eye and gave the
corpse one final poke. All three whirled and sprinted back into the
jungle, laughing.

Merritt eased down the slippery bank. The
mud swallowed his feet to the ankles and he had to hold the limp
yellow ferns to maintain his balance. A quick glance at the ground
confirmed the only recent tracks belonged to the barefooted boys.
He breathed a sigh of relief. There was a long list of creatures he
didn't want to encounter in his current compromised position.

Merritt hauled himself up onto the snarl of
branches that shielded the body from the brunt of the current and
crouched to inspect the remains. Judging by the broad shoulders and
short hair, the corpse belonged to a male, roughly six feet tall,
which definitely marked him as a foreigner to this region of
northern Peru. The man's shirt and cargo pants had both absorbed so
much of the dirty river that it was impossible to tell what color
they might once have been. Twin black straps arched around his
shoulders. His left leg bobbed on the river, the laces from his
boot squirming beneath the surface. His right foot was snared in
the branches under Merritt, the bulk of the leg buried in mud. Both
arms were pinned somewhere under the body.

Back home in the States, this was when the
police would arrive and cordon off the scene so the forensics team
could begin the investigation. But he wasn't back home. He was in a
different world entirely. A world far less complicated than the one
he had left behind, one that had initially welcomed him with overt
suspicion, but had eventually introduced him to a culture that had
made him its own. And although his white skin would always brand
him a
mithmaq
in their midst, no place in the world had ever
felt so much like home.

He looked to the sky, a thin channel of
cobalt through the lush branches that nearly eclipsed it from
either bank. Blue-capped tanagers darted through the canopy in
flickers of turquoise and gold, and common woolly monkeys screeched
out of sight. The omnipresent cloud of mosquitoes whined around his
head, but showed little interest in the waterlogged corpse, which
already seethed with black flies.

Merritt had seen more than his share of
bodies during his years in the army, and approached this one with
almost clinical detachment. That was the whole reason he had run
halfway around the world to escape. There was only so much death
one could experience before becoming numb to it.

With a sigh, he climbed down from the mound
of sticks and rounded the body again.

"This is
so
not cool," he said,
leaning over the man and grabbing one of the shoulder straps.

He braced himself and pulled. The body made
a slurping sound as he pried it from the mire and dragged it higher
onto the bank. Silver shapes darted away through the water, their
meal interrupted.

The vile stench of decomposition made him
gag, but he choked down his gorge. It wasn't as though this was the
first corpse he had ever seen. A flash of his previous life
assailed him.
A dark, dry warren of caves. Smoke swirling all
around him. Shadowed forms sprawled on the ground and against the
rock walls. One of them, a young woman with piercing blue
eyes---

Merritt shook away the memory and willed his
heartbeat to slow.

He blew out a long, slow breath, then rolled
the corpse onto its back. The angry cloud of flies buzzed its
displeasure.

"For the love of God..." he sputtered, and
drew his shirt up over his mouth and nose.

The man's face was a mask of mud, alive with
wriggling larvae, the abdomen a gaping, macerated maw only
partially obscured by the tattered remnants of the shirt. Merritt
had obviously dislocated the man's right shoulder when he wrenched
it out of the mud. The entire arm hung awkwardly askew, while the
left remained wrapped around a rucksack worn backward against his
chest, the fingers curled tightly into the fabric as though afraid
to release it even in death.

Merritt groaned and knelt above the man's
head. He really wished he'd brought his gloves. Cupping his hands,
he scooped the mud from the forehead, out of the eye sockets, and
from around the nose and mouth. The skin beneath was so bloated it
felt like rubber.

Even with the brown smears and discolored
flesh, Merritt recognized the man immediately. He had flown him and
his entire group into Pomacochas from Chiclayo roughly three weeks
ago. So where were the rest of them?

His gaze fell upon the rucksack. If it was
still here when the policía arrived, nothing inside would ever be
seen again. Corruption was a way of life down here.

Merritt unhooked the man's claw from the
fabric, pulled it away from the bag, and set it on the ground. He
unlatched the clasp and drew back the flap. At first all he saw was
a clump of soggy plants. He moved them aside and blinked in
astonishment.

"Son of a bitch."

Hospital Nacional Docente Madre Niño San
Bartolomé

Lima, Peru

October 15
^th

9:03 a.m. PET

Eldon Monahan, Consul-general of the United
States Consulate in Peru, waited in the small gray chamber,
handkerchief over his mouth and nose in preparation for what was to
come. At least this time he'd had the foresight to dab it in Vicks
VapoRub before leaving the office. He wore a crisp charcoal
Turnbull & Asser suit with a navy blue silk tie, and had
slicked back his ebon hair with the sweat that beaded his forehead
and welled against his furry eyebrows. His piercing hazel eyes
absorbed his surroundings. It took all of his concentration to
suppress the expression of contempt. Slate gray walls lined with
ribbons of rust from the leaky pipes in the ceiling surrounded him
on three sides. The fourth was a sheet of dimpled aluminum that
featured a single door with a wide horizontal handle, the kind of
freezer unit they installed in restaurants. Twin overhead sodium
halide fixtures were mounted to the ceiling on retractable
armatures. The diffuse beams spotlighted the scuffed, vinyl-tiled
floor in front of him.

God, how he hated this part of his job.

A baccalaureate degree in Political Science
from Stanford and a doctorate in Politics and International
Relations from Oxford, and here he was in the basement of what
could only loosely be considered a hospital by American standards,
in a backward country half a world away from where he really wanted
to be. Paying his dues. Mastering the intricacies of foreign
diplomacy. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was still about as
far as a man could get from a seat on the Senate floor. Here he
was, thirty-six years old and not even an actual ambassador.

The screech of his grinding teeth reminded
him of his hypertension, and he tried to focus on something else.
Anything else.

The door in the aluminum wall opened outward
with a pop and a hiss. Eldon took an involuntary step in reverse.
The morgue attendant acknowledged him with a nod as he wheeled the
cart into the room and centered it under the lights. A sheet,
stained with a Rorschach pattern of mud and bodily dissolution,
covered the human form beneath.

"What can you tell me about the body?" Eldon
asked in Spanish through the handkerchief.

"The policía dropped it off last night," the
attendant said, visibly amused by the Consul-general's
squeamishness. He wore a yellow surgical gown and cap,
finger-painted with brown bloodstains. "Found him way up north in
the Amazonas. Textbook case of drowning, you ask me."

"How do we know he's an American
citizen?"

"The pilot who flew him into Pomacochas
recognized him."

"But he couldn't identify him?"

"That's all I know. You're supposed to be
the man with the answers. Shouldn't your embassy have told you all
of this?"

Eldon flushed with resentment.

"Where are his possessions?" Eldon
asked.

"What you see is what you get."

Par for the course
.

"Let's just get on with this then, shall
we?"

With a curt nod, the attendant pulled back
the sheet to expose the head and torso of the corpse.

Eldon had to turn away to compose himself,
but he couldn't chase the image from his mind. The man's face was
frosted from the freezer, his skin tinged blue. Chunks of flesh had
been stolen from his cheeks, earlobes, and the tip of his nose.
There were still crescents of mud in his ear canals and along his
gum-line. He was dramatically swollen from the uptake of water,
which caused his epidermis to crack as the deeper tissues
froze.

"You don't want to see the parts I left
covered," the attendant said. He smirked and clapped Eldon on the
shoulder, eliciting a flinch. "Do what you need to do quickly. We
don't want him to start to thaw."

Eldon removed the digital camera from the
inner pocket of his suit jacket and leaned over the body. Three
hurried flashes and he was out the door without another word. He
needed fresh air, humid and oppressive though it may be. He
ascended the stairs and crossed the lobby through a churning sea of
the sick and injured, oblivious to their curses as he shouldered
his way toward the front doors. As soon as he was outside, he
ducked to his left, cast aside the handkerchief, and vomited into
an acacia shrub.

Sometimes he absolutely hated his life.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand
and headed to where his car idled in the emergency bay. The driver
waited outside the open rear door of the black Mercedes-Benz
E-Class sedan, and ushered him inside. They drove in silence, save
the whoosh of the wind through the open driver's side window. The
chauffer repeatedly raised his hand to cover his nose as discreetly
as he could.

Wonderful, Eldon thought. He'd obviously
brought more than pictures of the corpse with him.

The Mercedes turned through the black,
wrought-iron gates of the Consulate. Armed Marines saluted as the
car passed and rounded the circular island of rainbow flowers, from
which twin poles bearing the American and Peruvian flags rose.

Eldon didn't wait for the driver to come
around to open the door. He just wanted to get this over with. As
he ascended the concrete stairs beneath the gray marble portico, he
focused on the task at hand: upload the digital images into the
program that would compare them to the passport photos of all
Americans still in Peru, starting with those who had registered
their travel plans with the Embassy. Once he had positive
identification, he could make his calls, get the body embalmed and
on a plane back to the States, and wash his hands of the whole
mess.