River of Eden Read online

  Unbeknown to them, she hadn’t returned to Brazil to stay inside anybody’s lines. In the week since she’d been back, she’d already broken half a dozen laws. The proof was lying in a pair of long, narrow crates stacked up between the door and her cot—the merchandise she’d purchased from Johnny Chang, the merchandise the slimeball didn’t want hanging around Manaus any more than she wanted to hang around herself. One stint in a Brazilian jail had been enough, thank you very much, and if she never saw the inside of another cockroach-ridden cell or Corisco Vargas, the damned megalomaniac army major who had put her there, so much the better.

  Truthfully, William Sanchez Travers was the least of her problems. She just wanted to keep it that way.

  With the last of the press frames secure, she double-checked her supplies of alcohol, glycerol, and stove fuel and hauled them all outside. She had a milk crate each of rice and beans, and a few tins of canned meat and fruit. Finding fresh fruits and edible vegetables in gardens abandoned by the Indians and in the surrounding secondary forest was part of her research, and she was good enough at it to feed herself and a family of four.

  Not that she was going to be spending enough time doing research to feed anybody. She hadn’t fought her way back to the Amazon in order to continue her data collection on peach palms and the reforestation of abandoned swiddens, despite what the proposal she’d submitted to RBC said. There was a prize of untold riches waiting for her up the Rio Cauaburi, and if it hadn’t been for the army major, the woolly monkey, and the damned garimpeiro she’d had to shoot, the prize would already be hers. Now she had another chance, and if she pulled it off, she would be famous with her reputation secure, instead of infamous with her reputation hanging in shreds.

  Her gaze strayed past Johnny Chang’s crates to the small black fanny pack tucked up under her pillow on the cot. Leaning over, she pulled the pack out and knew she held the future in her hands. Not just her future, but something for the future of all mankind. Johnny Chang’s crates were only for any trouble that might get in the way of that future.

  The running patter of feet approaching from outside brought her head around, and her hands tightened on the pack.

  “Annie. Annie,” a small voice called. “Grandmama says for you to come.”

  A smile curved Annie’s mouth as she rose to her feet and crossed to the open door. Lifting her hand high, she hid the pack by stuffing it into the thatched eaves above the jamb, before she leaned outside.

  “Oi, Maria. Tudo bem?” she said to Gabriela’s six-year-old granddaughter, a chubby little beauty with bouncy black pigtails and big, melting brown eyes. As the director of RBC, Dr. Oliveira had a house on the coalition’s thirty acres of lushly landscaped gardens and cultivated fields. Another twenty or so researchers were housed in the guest cabanas, some of them just passing through, like herself, others working in RBC’s labs. Annie was on her second stint with RBC.

  “Ô, terrível, Annie, terrível.” Maria scrunched her little face up and gave a disconsolate shake to her head. “Tomas’s puppy ate my frog, and now he won’t give it back.”

  Schooling her features into an appropriately grave expression, Annie knelt down.

  “Trust me, honey, you don’t want the frog back. What you want is a new frog, and I saw lots of them in your grandmother’s fountain next to the lab.”

  Maria’s face brightened. “Nice, big fat ones?”

  “The fattest,” Annie promised.

  Maria ran off down the path, shouting over her shoulder, “Don’t forget Grandmama!”

  Annie was unlikely to forget the formidable matriarch of RBC, the woman who had saved her twice, once from a Brazilian jail, and the second time from the obscurity of a lab assistant’s job at the University of Wyoming. Annie had cooled her heels for nearly a year at home on the great western plains of North America, trying to get back to the Amazon. She never would have made it without Gabriela Oliveira’s support.

  She looked down at herself and grimaced. She hadn’t changed clothes since she’d gotten drenched looking for Travers, and a summons from Gabriela required better than shorts that drooped to her knees and a green shirt that had seen better days.

  Looking around by the door, she spotted the duffel bag that held her bathroom kit and clean clothes. She reached for it—and froze.

  Her outstretched fingers slowly curled back into her palm. A trickle of fear ran down her spine.

  Snail snake, she told herself, looking at the small coiled colubrid nestled in the shadows between her duffel and a gallon of alcohol. The snake was nothing more than a harmless Dipsas indica—and it still made Annie’s skin crawl.

  “Damn,” she whispered as the snake slithered off and disappeared into the leaf litter. Her best friend, Mad Jack Reid, had assured her she would outgrow her aversion to snakes the same way someday he would outgrow wild women, but neither had happened yet. It was still one of the great ironies of her life that she hated snakes and yet loved the snake-infested jungle of the rain forest—all the lush, overgrown plants and towering canopy trees, and above all the rare jewels tucked in between, the Orchidaceae.

  She glanced over at the doorjamb where she’d hidden the small black pack in the palm thatch. Mad Jack would have her butt in a sling if he found out where she’d gone, and what she was doing.

  There had been a time before she’d been exiled, a few short days on the Rio Cauaburi, when she’d thought all the world could be hers. The illusion hadn’t lasted long. The Woolly Monkey Incident had changed everything, tumbling her from glory into the depths of doom so fast there had been days she’d wondered if she would survive.

  Well, she had survived. Not only survived, but gotten back to Brazil, and this time she would not be denied. Johnny Chang’s crates would see to that, friggin’ Corisco Vargas or no Corisco Vargas.

  With the snake gone, she grabbed the duffel bag and headed off for a quick cleanup at the bathhouse.

  ~ * ~

  “It’s time you came back into the fold, William,” Gabriela said from behind her big mahogany desk piled high with papers and various potted plants, most of them straggling toward death’s door. At sixty-eight, she had hair that was white as snow and was twisted into a tidy French roll at the back of her head. Her hands shook slightly with palsy, but her mind and her eyes were crystal clear, missing very little of what went on at RBC or anywhere else in the Amazon. “You’ve been running wild for too long.”

  Will could hardly disagree with her last statement, and he could hardly agree to the first, which left him in a bit of a bind.

  “You could water your plants,” he suggested, lifting one limp leaf where it lay comatose on a neatly bound research proposal.

  “I’m a botanist, not a gardener,” the old woman informed him with a haughty arch to her brow, “and you’re avoiding the question.”

  Will looked up. “I’m taking Annie Parrish to Santa Maria. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Partly. It would be nice if you could set aside a few days of whatever it is you do all day long and make sure she’s on terra firma once she gets there.”

  “ ‘Nice’ isn’t the word most people think of when they think of me,” he said nonchalantly, picking up a smooth stone from off her desk.

  “I know you better than most people,” the old scientist said, undaunted.

  He rubbed his thumb over the stone. Gabriela had known him. There had been a time when a lot of people had known him, but they didn’t know him now. Will set the stone down, not bothering to correct her.

  “Didn’t she work in Santa Maria before? Everything I’ve heard had her up there until she shot her lover in Yavareté.” He named a town far to the west of Santa Maria, a town on the Rio Vaupes where it crossed the border from Colombia into Brazil.

  “I found her in Yavareté, yes,” Gabriela said carefully, “but she wasn’t there by choice.”

  Will paused, his fingers resting on the edge of a cobalt-blue bowl filled with seed pods. “Found?”

>   “She’d been taken there for questioning.”

  “Taken by whom?” He picked up part of a broken seed pod containing four Brazil nuts, Bertholettia excelsa.

  “Corisco Vargas,” the old woman said after a short hesitation.

  Will looked up and caught her clear-eyed gaze with his own.

  “Where, exactly, did you find her?” he asked. He knew Corisco Vargas. Everybody on the Rio Negro knew the bastard.

  “In a jail cell.”

  “What kind of shape was she in?” It was a loaded question, loaded eight ways from Sunday, and Will doubted very much if he was going to like Gabriela’s answer.

  He didn’t.

  The old woman shrugged, her hand making a slight, dismissive gesture.

  “You know the way of these things. To save face, the government sent her home and—”

  “I heard she was deported,” he interrupted, dropping the broken seed vessel back into the bowl.

  “Not officially. There were no papers.”

  “And the lover?”

  “There was no lover.”

  No lover.

  “Then who the hell did she shoot?” He was beginning to doubt if anything he’d heard about Annie Parrish was true.

  Gabriela made another negligent gesture. “A garimpeiro working for Vargas.”

  It was an interesting quirk of Brazilian politics that allowed Vargas, an army major, to also be one of the country’s most notorious, illegal gold-mining entrepreneurs. Vargas had operations in the Serra Pelada and was opening more mines along Brazil’s northern border.

  Santa Maria was only about a hundred miles from that border.

  “If she’s planning on messing with Vargas, you shouldn’t have approved the research that got her back into the country,” he said, moving on and lightly skimming his fingers over a book. They came away dusty.

  “She’s brilliant,” Gabriela said, as if that both explained and excused everything.

  He wiped the dust off on his pants and looked over at the old woman, pinning her with his gaze. “She’s jaguar bait, and we both know it. Do everybody a favor and send her back to the States, and the next time you ask me to take somebody on my boat, don’t leave all the fun parts out.”

  He turned to leave, planning on getting on the Sucuri and getting as far away from RBC and Annie Parrish as possible.

  Dr. Gabriela Oliveira had other ideas.

  “You owe me, William, and I’m calling in my markers.” She paused for effect, then added, “All of them.”

  It was true. He did owe her, more than enough to cover the hassle of hauling Annie Parrish up the Rio Negro, but he’d taken on another debt that far exceeded any hold Gabriela had on him, a debt wrapped around him as tightly as his own skin. This close to payback, he wasn’t interested in dealing with somebody who could easily turn out to be more trouble than she was worth.

  He felt the weight of the old shaman’s crystal lying against his chest, his protection for now, and had no regrets for the bargain he’d made, or for the “lost” year that had changed the course of his life. For what he’d seen, and heard, and felt, and known three years ago, there had been no choice but to follow Tutanji into the forest. A year later he’d emerged, and for the last two years Tutanji had charged him with plying the rivers of the Amazon. The cord that held him to the medicine man had grown ever longer; his search had ever expanded, until he’d finally found the demon Tutanji sought—Corisco Vargas.

  And Vargas was a demon, more so than anyone knew. Annie Parrish couldn’t have picked a worse person to tangle with, not in all of Amazonia.

  “I could just shoot her now and save us all a lot of trouble.” It was the voice of experience speaking. Will knew enough about Vargas to imagine what the Yavareté jail had been like, and the thought was enough to churn his gut.

  “And I could just shoot you now and save us even more,” another voice said from behind him.

  Will didn’t know whether to laugh or swear out loud. He did neither, only turned toward the door leading from Gabriela’s office to the garden to see Annie Parrish standing there in the last rays of a dying sun.

  “When did you come in?” he asked out of curiosity.

  “Just before jaguar bait,” she said clearly, as if an apology might be in order.

  In good conscience, Will couldn’t retract a word. Dry and all scrubbed clean, with her hair fluffed out, her clothes too big for her small frame, and her eyes wide behind the glasses perched on her freckled nose, she looked like exactly what he’d called her—a cat snack. Contrarily, she also looked mad enough to chew nails.

  “For the record,” she went on, “I’m planning on staying as far away from Corisco Vargas as I can get, and the last ‘jaguar’ that tried to take a bite out of me ended up with a bullet in his leg.”

  “So I heard.” He was glad to hear her stance on Vargas, but the whole Amazon Annie thing was starting to look like a hoax to him—because the woman simply didn’t fit the description, any of the descriptions. And she sure as hell didn’t look as if she’d survived a Yavareté jail, with or without Vargas involved. An experience like that would have left its mark, and other than the scar near her temple, she had one of the most unmarred faces he’d ever seen, not a perfect face, but an interesting face with pretty skin and delicate, feminine features. She was physically fit and as sleekly muscled as anyone who had walked the Rio Vaupes and lived to tell the tale, but there wasn’t a hard edge on her. Not anywhere, he thought, letting his gaze sweep the length of her body before coming back up and getting waylaid by the flinty glint in her hazel eyes.

  It was all he could do to fight off another grin. The cat snack came complete with claws. Good, he thought. Given her chosen destination, she needed them, the sharper the better.

  “William and I were just finishing up discussing the terms of your passage,” Gabriela interjected diplomatically. “If I thought the RBC launch would actually be fixed in a week, I would recommend waiting. It would certainly give me much less to worry about, but I know you don’t want to miss the height of the peach palm harvest.”

  Peach palm harvest? Will couldn’t say for sure, but Annie Parrish didn’t look as if she were thinking about peach palms, not with her mouth that tight.

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about, Gabriela,” she assured the old doctor. Then her gaze slid in his direction, and her attention focused on him in a way he found interesting, if rather obvious. She was checking him out through her little gold-rimmed glasses, sizing him up, and trying to figure out just how much trouble he could possibly turn out to be.

  More than she needed, he could have told her—but he didn’t.

  “Are you still leaving at dawn?” she asked.

  He nodded, intrigued. By his own standards, there wasn’t a square inch left on him to inspire anyone’s confidence. He was damned surprised to find out that Annie Parrish’s standards were even lower than his own.

  She turned to Gabriela. “Is there anything else?”

  “No,” the old woman said. “I just wanted you to know William and his boat had arrived.”

  “Then if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get Carlos and start loading my gear,” she said, naming RBC’s old caretaker. She hardly glanced at Will on her way out the door. “I’ll be on the dock at dawn.”

  Will nodded, waiting until she was out of earshot before he turned back to Gabriela. There were a whole lot of bad ways for the situation to end, and only one good one.

  “Send her home, Gabriela. You can get another researcher to finish whatever work she had going on in Santa Maria, or you could just let it go. She’s been gone a year. There couldn’t be much left of whatever she started.”

  “Another researcher wouldn’t be Annie.”

  “Okay,” he conceded. “I’ll go up there and check it out myself. If there’s anything worth salvaging, I’ll let you know. Then you can decide whether to send her or not.” He was headed in that direction anyway, straight to hell, the Cauaburi, and
Vargas, and he could spare a couple of days to look over the Santa Maria station and file a report.

  “You’re not Annie Parrish, either,” the old woman said, and at that, Will did laugh out loud.

  “I lost my reputation, Gabriela, not my mind. I doubt if her work is beyond my comprehension. I can still manage an assessment.”

  “I know enough to only believe half of what I hear about you,” Gabriela countered, “and given my observations and your lack of explanations, I do believe half of what I’ve heard since your return.”

  “Obviously the bad half.”

  She narrowed her gaze at him. “Don’t fool yourself, William. It’s all bad and some of it worse.”

  He couldn’t argue the point. “Which part makes you think I can’t do what Annie Parrish can do?”

  “Not can’t do, but won’t do. You’re not interested in benefiting RBC. On the other hand, any work Annie does will come under the auspices of my institute.”

  “Looking for a legacy, Gabriela?” he asked dryly.

  In answer, she raised her hand. It shook like a leaf in the wind, but there was no wind coming in through the garden door. With a heavy sigh, she lowered her hand back to the desk.

  “It’s time, William. I’m getting older in a thousand ways every day, and the board knows it. They want Ricardo Solano in as the new director.”

  Will knew Ricardo Solano. The man was good, but worked strictly by the book. Solano sure as hell would have never let Annie Parrish back into RBC.

  “A legacy is built on years of work,” Will said, relenting from his hard line. “You’ve done the work. No matter what Annie Parrish finds or doesn’t find, it isn’t going to change how you’re remembered.”

  A tired smile spread across the old woman’s face. “You’re too cynical, William, just like me. Annie isn’t. She still believes there are wonders in the forest, and it’s the believers who find them.”