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.”