River of Eden Read online

  Or fools not quick enough to get out of their way, Will thought, exasperated with her reasoning, even with the shaman’s crystal weighing heavily around his neck.

  “I still say you should send her home?”

  “No. She goes to Santa Maria.” The old woman was adamant. “You just get her settled. I’ll be up as soon as the launch is fixed. I’m sure Father Aldo at the mission can keep her out of trouble in the meantime.”

  “He didn’t manage to keep her out of trouble last time.” It was a point too important not to mention.

  “Father Aldo wasn’t at fault,” the old woman said, absently sorting through a sheaf of papers on her desk. “Annie wasn’t anywhere near Santa Maria when she came in contact with Vargas.”

  “Then where the hell was she?”

  Gabriela lifted one of the papers. It shook ever so slightly in her hand, but her gaze, when she leveled it at him, was steady. “I wish I knew. Nobody dared to question Vargas, and Annie wasn’t talking. She still isn’t. If you really want to know, you’ll have to ask her yourself.”

  It was a challenge, the gauntlet thrown, and Will wasn’t naïve enough to think Gabriela had done it lightly. To the contrary, he’d just figured out why the director of RBC was being so insistent on having Annie Parrish travel with him.

  “You want me to find out what she’s up to, and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with peach palms, does it?”

  “I don’t think so,” was the old woman’s unacceptable reply.

  “I don’t have time for this, Gabriela,” he said, his anger starting to break toward the surface.

  Gabriela was completely unfazed by his unraveling control, meeting his glare without so much as batting an eyelash, her look cool, calm, and presumptuously appraising.

  “I don’t know what you’ve been up to the last two years, either, William, but I know it’s a damn sight more than drinking your way down the length of the river, no matter what I’ve heard. I don’t know where you were for those twelve months when you were supposed to be doing botanical research for Howard Pharmaceuticals, and I don’t know what happened to you while you were there, but I do know Elena Maria Barbosa Sanchez’s son, and I think I know when he’s in over his head.”

  That she was close to being right didn’t make Will any less angry. He wasn’t in over his head yet, but he sure saw himself heading in that direction.

  “You want to know why I let Annie Parrish come back to Brazil?” she continued. “Because I couldn’t keep her out. They beat her in Yavareté, William. I was there to pick up the pieces, and I’m the one who put that girl back on the plane to Wyoming. It wasn’t four months later that she was begging me to let her back in. She must have still had the bruises.”

  Will felt his jaw tighten. He didn’t want to hear this, none of it.

  “So you tell me what’s driving her,” Gabriela said. “You’re both in the same field. You’re both among the very best. You’re both a couple of loose cannons hell-bent on something—and this old woman can’t help but wonder what.” She cocked her head to one side, as if she expected an answer.

  An answer she wasn’t going to get from him.

  “I’m just living my life, Gabriela. What I’m doing has nothing to do with Annie Parrish, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “You’re not living your life,” she said, all but calling him a liar. “You’re biding your time. I’ve watched you do it for two years, but I’ve got a bad feeling in my bones that your time is running out. Maybe I’m just an old woman feeling her own end drawing near—or maybe I’m right.”

  That was the last damn thing Will wanted to hear. “I’ve never known you to be quite so philosophical,” he said, more than ready to leave.

  “Then you weren’t paying attention. Take her to Santa Maria, William, make sure she’s okay. That’s all I’m asking.”

  It was enough, and as close to a dismissal as Will needed to make a break for it. Without another word, he turned and walked out of her office.

  On the front porch, he glanced back toward the garden where Annie had disappeared down an overgrown path. Take a woman up the river, Gabriela had said, but she sure as hell hadn’t said, “Take Annie Parrish up the river.”

  Jesus. Vargas had beat her.

  He wished Gabriela hadn’t told him—not that he hadn’t figured it out for himself. He also knew a beating might have been the least of her ordeal, but he’d be damned if he wanted to think about it.

  Jaguar bait he’d called her, and despite the garimpeiro she’d shot, at least one predator had gotten his teeth into her. So why the hell hadn’t she stayed home? If she wasn’t back for vengeance, what was she back for?

  “Merda,” he swore under his breath. Sometimes, botanists in the tropics went a little crazy, the sheer tonnage of plant material and variety of species cross-wiring their circuits and skewing their perspective. From the looks of things, Annie Parrish was one of those who’d been out in the sun too long.

  Damn. It was going to be a long three days to Santa Maria, but first he had his final meeting with Fat Eddie. More than contraband needed to exchange hands if he was going to find his way through the vast expanse of the Cauaburi drainage. He needed the fat man’s map to the gold fields, those jungle hellholes carved out of the riverbanks by the garimpeiros and ruled by a devil named Corisco Vargas.

  CHAPTER ~ 3

  Reino Novo, Brazil

  She’d come back, the Norte-americana. Corisco had known she would. She’d come back to Manaus and would soon be heading straight for him, compliments of Gabriela Oliveira, the River Basin Coalition, and the trap he’d so carefully baited a year ago. Santa Maria wouldn’t hold her this time any better than it had the last. She would come up the Rio Negro to the Cauaburi and through the emerald door to the heart of the rain forest, to Reino Novo.

  He set the message from his man in Manaus aside and leaned across the top of his desk, reaching for a smooth glass cylinder next to the lamp. Light shone down through the glass, illuminating the delicate, glowing prize inside.

  Poor little cientista, he thought, pulling the cylinder closer. Annie Parrish had come back, and now the Rio Cauaburi would be her grave. He should have killed her when he’d had the chance, instead of indulging himself in trying to break her.

  “Fernando,” he called out. “Vem aqui.”

  A hulking giant of a man dressed in an army uniform moved out of the shadows in the corner of the richly paneled office. His face was scarred, his head bald, his gaze deceptively blank. Behind him, something moved inside a huge glass tank.

  “Bring the box,” Corisco added.

  Fernando turned to a shelf on the wall and picked up a small gold box. At the desk he set it down with a deferential murmur.

  “Do you remember the woman from Yavareté?” Corisco asked, knowing full well that Fernando had not forgotten her. The great hulk had formed a bit of an attachment to Dr. Parrish, especially on the third day, when Corisco had hung her naked in chains from the jail cell wall and let Fernando look his fill.

  The giant nodded, his gaze growing quite discerning.

  “She is back in Brazil, in Manaus. Send a message to our man to have her picked up and brought to us here. She’ll be impressed by the changes in Reino Novo, don’t you think?”

  Again, Fernando nodded, and Corisco graced him with a smile before dismissing him with a wave of his hand. For all his intelligence, Fernando was ridiculously easy to please.

  Not so himself. The night air was stifling, despite the ceiling fans droning overhead. Rain at dusk had laid a pall of humidity over the Cauaburi, making the fountain in the courtyard outside his office absurdly redundant. He was awash in a water world. Piping in more seemed almost ludicrous.

  He picked up the box, appreciating the solid heaviness of the gold. Gabriela Oliveira had played her hand out saving Annie Parrish in Yavareté. The governor of Amazonas, the man who had issued the order to release the RBC botanist at Gabriela’s insistence, had mysteriousl
y died within months of Dr. Parrish’s release, and the new governor was deep in Corisco’s pocket. There would be no more interference in any of his plans. The government of Brazil could twist and turn and natter all it wanted about tapping the potential of the rain forest, but he was the man who would do it, and in a manner no government official could ever have imagined, let alone brought to fruition.

  He turned the gold box over in his hand, admiring the exquisite craftsmanship almost as much as he admired the deadly contents. There were a thousand ways to die in the Amazon, but few as exquisitely painful as the kingmaker beetle. The iridescent carapace of the five-inch-long insect contained enough toxic material to dispatch two governors. Once ingested, the hemorrhagic toxins created an internal bloodbath inside the victim and then disappeared without a trace.

  Annie Parrish was lucky. She would have a far more glorious death. She’d been so stubborn, so unyielding, a willful prize to be tamed—and he would have tamed her, if she hadn’t been taken from him. She didn’t know a woman’s place, but he would teach her, and this time she would tell him everything. She’d been so soft to the touch, when he’d had her before, so very, very soft.

  He set the box aside and shifted his attention to the cylinder, letting his fingers drift down the smooth curve of glass. He didn’t understand scientists and all these damned environmentalists. They didn’t seem to have any concept of reality, of his reality. They had no idea of the power waiting to be unleashed in the forest.

  He did.

  His gaze drifted to the large glass tank in the corner of the room, then came back to the cylinder and the exquisite piece of rain forest jungle floating inside.

  Scientists came to the Amazon with their degrees and their books, wanting to understand, but only on their terms. They never took the jungle on its terms. Interpreting through the eyes of the rational gaze, they understood nothing, because the jungles of Amazonia did not fit their rational minds. Left to her own devices, Annie Parrish and those like her would have his world crawling with researchers trying to unlock secrets best left alone. Secrets like the one he was building in Reino Novo, like the one residing in the glass cage, and the one inside the glass cylinder.

  The delicate orchid was so very lush, its elongate, midnight-blue petals limned with a cream-colored frill, the whole of it dusted with gold flecks like stars in the night sky. He’d confiscated it from her in Yavareté, one of a pair, and known she’d found a rare prize.

  In the dark of night, the flower glowed. Even after twelve months of floating in preservative solution, the petals had not browned or withered, and it still emitted light, a mesmerizing, creamy golden light draped with a hint of green along its edge, like a miniature aurora borealis.

  Irresistible, he’d thought, and known then that she would return. That she’d collected the flower near the mines was a foregone conclusion, though she’d refused to tell him where. He’d tried beating the information out of her and gotten nowhere, and before he’d had the chance to escalate to more refined torture, she’d been freed by Gabriela and the doomed governor.

  The little fool, to have come back. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. It was so inauspicious as to seem fated, that she would die with all the others, a lovely, exotic centerpiece to the sacrifice that would put Reino Novo on the map and seal his name in infamy. None would dare defy him then. Anyone who wanted to enter the rain forest, whether to rape it or save it, would have to deal with him. He would be king of the last great wilderness left on earth, King of the Great Green Hell, King of the Amazon.

  CHAPTER ~ 4

  Darkness fell quickly along the Rio Negro, and Annie, Carlos, and his son, Paco, finished loading her supplies by the light of the lanterns strung along the path leading down to the river.

  Travers’s boat rocked on the water at the end of the dock, its white form barely illuminated by a low-wattage bulb hanging from a pole on the docking shed. The riverboat was a thirty-footer with two cabins, a helm forward and a smaller cabin aft with an open walkway in between. A short rail around the upper deck made it a good place to store cargo. Up close, she could see the boat needed paint, but the deck felt solid beneath her feet, and she couldn’t help but feel a surge of excitement at being on the river and knowing in the morning she would be heading upstream, back to the Rio Cauaburi, the land of all her dreams.

  After storing the last of her cartons, she and the men exchanged good-nights, and Carlos and his son headed back up the riverbank to the hacienda’s compound. Annie stayed a moment longer to double-check the lashings holding down her supplies. She also wanted to make sure Johnny Chang’s crates were well hidden by the rest of her cargo and the tarps she’d bought to keep the rain off her equipment. Waterfront lowlife or not, she doubted if Travers would appreciate her dragging ill-gotten goods on board his boat. In fact, she was damn sure that was just the sort of thing that would get her kicked off his boat. It was certainly why booking fare on one of the public “birdcage” riverboats had been out of the question.

  Even so, in Gabriela’s office she’d come damn close to changing her mind about going with him. Damn close. Only the risk of staying in Manaus another day had kept her from telling Will Travers he’d talked himself out of a passenger.

  Jaguar bait.

  She jerked one of the tie-down ropes, her mouth tightening in irritation. What gall. She’d never heard it put in quite those words, but she knew exactly what he meant—and he was dead wrong. She wasn’t anybody’s entrée. If anything, he’d be surprised to know just how much alike they were, or had been before he’d lost himself in the rain forest.

  Her mouth curved into a brief, knowing smile. Having met him twice now, she’d put a dollar to anyone’s dime that Travers had never been lost a day in his life, and certainly not for a whole year.

  No, she mused. He’d known exactly where he was and probably knew exactly how to get back. Not that he was telling.

  Something more than intelligence was burning in the depths of his dark eyes, and against her better judgment, part of her was damned curious to see how much she could find out about him in three days, beginning with where in the hell he’d been, and moving on to what in the hell had happened to change him from a scientific legend to a waterfront has-been.

  Holding on to the last tie-down, she stood on the boat’s aft deck and looked down the length of the Rio Negro. Jungle rose up on the near bank, dense and impenetrable, a hothouse of plants and mysteries. The river’s black waters reflected a white stream of moonlight all the way to the lights of the city farther to the southeast. She had a year on her visa. By the time she returned to Manaus, there would probably be rumors running all over town about her. Like Travers, she planned on being “lost” for a while herself. Unlike Travers, she planned on coming back a hero, not an outcast. If the Amazon and its creatures had devoured anybody’s life, it was Dr. Will Travers’s, not hers.

  A soft noise coming from the other side of the boat brought her head around. In the next second, she heard a soft thud and the sound of running feet racing up the dock toward shore. Moving quickly to the walkway between the two cabins, she barely caught sight of a man before he veered off the lantern-lit path and disappeared into the palm trees on the riverbank. The palms’ fronds gleamed silver in the moonlight, great swaths of curves silhouetted against the sky. Below the trees, all was darkness.

  It could have been Paco, she thought, though she doubted it. Paco wouldn’t have left the path. It certainly hadn’t been Carlos. The old man was incapable of moving faster than a shuffle. That only left the about forty or so people who lived and worked at RBC to choose from for the nighttime runner, any of whom could have had a legitimate reason to board Travers’s boat. Given where she’d been standing, they probably hadn’t even realized she was on board.

  Curious, but not overly disturbed, Annie turned back into the walkway and came to sudden halt, her gaze riveted to the blowgun dart sticking out of the aft cabin’s door. The small wad of white kapok fluff on the end
shone brightly in the moonlight.

  Alarmed, she looked back to the shore to make sure the man was gone, before she moved in closer to the dart and saw the scrap of paper pinned to the door. With a quick tug, she pulled the dart out of the wood and held the paper up to the light.

  The message was short and ominously direct: LEAVE MANAUS.

  CHAPTER ~ 5

  Sunlight streamed through the windows fronting the Sucuri’s helm, making a hot band across Will’s face where he lay in his hammock between the wheel and the door, slowly rousing to the day. The thought of opening his eyes to such a blast of brightness was too painful to contemplate, so he gingerly rolled himself over into a spot of shade. A soft groan escaped him.

  The mere fact of the sunlight’s existence told him he’d overslept and missed the dawn departure time. He wondered, briefly, if Annie Parrish had found another boat and left without him. Or better yet, if Gabriela had come to her senses in the night and canceled the woman’s project.

  “A-hem.” A purely feminine voice sounded from the doorway.

  No such luck.

  By pure force of will, he lifted his head a bare fraction of an inch and pried one eyelid open. It was her, all right, looking incredibly fresh and lovely, and incredibly annoyed. With a pained sigh, he sank back into his hammock.

  He didn’t blame her. He was pretty annoyed himself. It had taken half the night and two bottles of cachaça, before Fat Eddie Mano had relinquished the map. Bitching and moaning had been the first two items on the fat one’s agenda. The old thief had been robbed, a load of merchandise taken out of one of his warehouses right out from under his nose and undoubtedly by one of his own jagunços, henchmen, the only people with access to Eddie’s various hidey-holes. Eddie hadn’t said what had been stolen, but Will had a pretty good idea of the kind of goods Fat Eddie traded in and out of Manaus, and none of it was legal. The man couldn’t go to the police, especially since whatever had been stolen from Fat Eddie, Fat Eddie had originally stolen from them—a fact the man had let slip sometime after they’d cracked open the second bottle, then repeatedly forgotten as he’d bemoaned the fate of “honest” businessmen at the mercy of corrupt police officials and perfidious employees. Vengeance had been sworn, with various tortures amply described—hour after hour and shot after shot of brain-numbing cachaça.