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 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.”