Without waiting for a response, he guided her into the first room he saw, a small sitting room with a low settee covered in lush aubergine velvet. Lowering her onto the surface, he knelt beside Kat, taking her hands in his. He chafed at the frigid skin. “Do you need some water?”
Kat shook her head. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” But she lied. Tio Felix had been working on something for nearly twenty years. And the Cinchona was at the center of it. A manuscript that he begged her to return to its people. People she didn’t know. For reasons she didn’t understand. She wasn’t fine, she was terrified. The men who killed him had been after him for years. Now they were after her.
“Kat?”
“I’m okay.” Willing the assurance to be true, she gulped at air that seemed to escape her lungs faster than she could take it in. When her breath quickened rather than slowing, she felt the return of the light-headness.
“God, Kat, you’re hyperventilating. Here.” Sebastian gripped her neck and gently forced her head to lower. “Breathe slowly, honey. In and out. Slow, deep breaths. Come on, you can do that for me, right?”
Kat heard nothing but the hum of nonsense words and the rush of blood through her head. Dead. Dead. Breathe. Dead. Breathe. Breathe. Dead.
On the carpeted floor, Sebastian heard a mantra mumbled through the hissing breaths that refused to catch. He’d seen this before, the shell shock that came and devoured a person whole.
Slowly, he stroked the damp tank top that clung to her skin. The dusky complexion paled, and her gasps became harsh stutters as her lungs ceased to draw in sufficient oxygen. Alarmed, he switched tactics. “Kat, listen to me. If you don’t start breathing, you’re going to faint. And then I’ll have to give you CPR, which means I might have to kiss you again. Do you want me to kiss you again?”
Kiss. Again. The absurd threat penetrated as his earlier admonitions hadn’t. She sucked in another draught of oxygen, then another. She wanted to be fully alert if that happened, not on the edge of a breakdown.
Be logical, Kat, she thought hazily. What did she know now that she hadn’t known an hour before? That Tio Felix had a secret so huge his life had been in danger? No, she’d known that for years, had figured it out when she realized that no one else in his life had the elaborate security system that surrounded him. Had known deep in her gut that fear for her was the reason she’d not been allowed to visit recently.
Breathing slowing, she continued. Herbology and botany had been the core of her studies with him on her visits. Where Cinchona calisaya grew. What the scrapings of bark and steeped white flowers could do for the human body. And other botantical marvels. Like Desmodium adscendens, with its light-purple flowers and green fruits. They’d grown them together. Reputed to be a natural antihistamine and muscle relaxant, with properties associated with pain relievers. Or Kalanchoe pinnata, a plant with unusual antibacterial and antiviral properties. Tio Felix taught her to boil the broad green leaves to produce a liquid that could be used for nausea.
The Cinchona manuscript, the years of lessons, they were all connected. To her, to Bahia and to a group of people who demanded an old man’s penance. Perhaps the men who killed Tio Felix acted out of revenge for his theft of their legacy. Or perhaps they were like Sebastian, hired guns who knew the secret of the Cinchona, a secret she hadn’t learned yet.
A secret she had to find. But she couldn’t do it alone. She thought of the night before and of the behemoth of a man who had ransacked her uncle’s home. In faith, she thought fatalistically, lies salvation. Sebastian.
“I have it.”
Sebastian stilled his hand, which had slipped beneath the dense fall of ebony hair to rub at her nape. “Have what, honey?”
“The Cinchona. I have it.” She tilted her head and gave him a long, probing look. “I found it like you thought and hid it in the forest. That’s what I went to get. You were right.”
Sebastian returned her examination with an impenetrable gaze that had her edging away from his touch. She leaned away, but he didn’t let go. Instead, he drew a thin line across the suddenly hot skin, feeling her pulse startle at the caress. He braced his free hand on the cushion, effectively boxing her in his embrace. “Why are you telling me now?”
“Because you risked your life. Because I need your help.” She took a deep breath. “You knew I had it. So why haven’t you conked me over the head and made a run for it? Why are you helping me?”
As the question had been nagging at him, he shot back, “I’m not helping you. I’m keeping you alive until we find the gold.”
Intrigued by the heat in his tone, Kat pressed, “The gold?”
“Yes, the Incan gold buried somewhere in Bahia. The gold you claimed the Cinchona would lead us to.”
“You know there’s no gold.”
Deliberately, Sebastian tightened his hand on her throat then released her. He came to his feet, towering over her on the settee. “That’s a dangerous admission to make, Kat. Unlike your namesake, you don’t come with nine lives.”
“I’m not afraid of you, Sebastian.”
“Then you’re an idiot.”
“You won’t try to kill me. I know that.”
“Murder isn’t my style, no. But I will double-cross you. First good chance I get, I will take the Cinchona and pass go and collect my reward.”
“Then why haven’t you done it yet? There have been plenty of chances.” She lifted her fingers to tick off her examples. “On the cliff. At the hotel or the marketplace. Even at Senora Martinez’s house. You’ve had the pack with you the whole time.”
“And you dogging my heels like a lost puppy.”
“Won’t play, Sebastian. You’re the expert. The master thief. Hired to recover the Cinchona. Coulda ditched me anywhere along the way. You speak Spanish as well as I do. So why are you still with me?”
He stared at her, his glib explanations vanished. Hadn’t he been wondering the same thing? Why not take the Cinchona, hop a flight to Miami, and cash in? Turning away, he wandered to the bookcase that lined the far wall of the sitting room. The tomes were lined precisely, their leather spines in a straight, unbroken line. Shelves of gleaming mahogany ran across the length of the wall in four parallel rows. From floor to ceiling, the mahogany broke the shelves into five equal columns. Sebastian swept a curious gaze over the bookcase, noting that the fourth column expanded nearly half a foot wider than the others. That kind of flaw would have frustrated him endlessly, he knew. The devil, and the satisfaction, lay in the details. Dismissing the imperfection, he turned to face Kat, who wore a smug expression that crinkled lines near her wide, glossy eyes.
“Stop smiling at me,” he snarled. “I don’t know what you think the answer is, but it shouldn’t make you grin like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like the canary who ate the cat.”
Kat released a delighted laugh at the imagery. “I thought I was the cat.”
He shrugged. “Metaphor isn’t my forte.”
“No, stealing is.” Kat stood and crossed to stand near him, but was careful not to get too close. She could still feel the soothing, tantalizing weight of his hand on her neck, the gentle strokes along her spine. His touch, as much as his patience, had calmed her panic attack, she admitted. But only to herself. After that stupid kiss and his clear warning, she’d keep her distance. “I haven’t had a chance to read it thoroughly yet, but I think the Cinchona is a manual.”
“For what?”
“Medicine.”
“By Borrero?”
Kat nodded and began to circle the room slowly. “I’d have to read it more closely, but yes, I think it has to be him. The writer was a newcomer to Bahia and Peru. Someone who spoke and wrote Spanish, Latin, and Quechua, plus some Greek. Fluently.”
Watching Kat pace, Sebastian noticed the irregular bookcase again. “Do you know how your uncle came into possession of the Cinchona?”
“No.” Kat halted near the bank of shuttered windows. “He didn’t have time
to tell me much last night. I arrived late and drove to meet him here. We’d only spoken for a few minutes when the men arrived. We were upstairs, at his safe. Tio Felix told me to grab the Cinchona but to wait until he called me. He came down to check the door, and he never returned.”
“So you came to find him.”
“After—” Kat wrapped her arms around her waist. “Later, when I found him, he told me that I had to return the manuscript. He begged me.”
“Where are you to take it?”
“I don’t know. You arrived before he could finish telling me. I hid again, waited until you went upstairs, then I ran.”
“Was there anything else in the safe?”
“Just his diary and cash.” She spun around to face Sebastian. “I promised him I would return the Cinchona. But I don’t know where I’m supposed to take it.”
“Well,” Sebastian reasoned, “it’s time to find out.”
Chapter 13
“Fifteen thirty-eight.” Sebastian ran light fingertips over the date, scratched onto the parchment in faded brown ink. Though he knew it impossible, he felt ghostly frissons beneath his hand as he carefully turned the translucent vellum with its sketch of a slender stem bracketed by a broad leaf on either side. Along the stem, two smaller leaves flanked the stem until the thin line curved up into nothing.
They set up camp in the drawing room, hunching over their work space. The Cinchona lay open on a low cedar coffee table. Leather cracked with age as the binding adjusted to its modern readers. Sebastian had taken a seat in front of the manuscript and Kat sat cross-legged beside him. He skimmed the opening lines, which had been centered below the date on the front plate. “From the pen of Father Juan-Carlos Borrero.”
Kat noted the border of the page, clusters of leaves and flowers embossing the edges. Centered just below the signature of Borrero, a sketch of a flower with five petals, bunched together but unconnected to a cluster of similar, unfurled flowers. She lifted the vellum and laid it over the page again. The stem and its leaves fit perfectly. She traced the image, and murmured, “This is the Cinchona officinalis.”
Her pronouncement drew his attention to the other sketches that framed the paper. “What about the other plants? Do you know their names?”
Excitement bubbled in her veins, tugged at an idea not fully formed. “This vine is the aya-huasca.”
“Ay-a-who-what?”
“Aya-huasca. As in aya for soul or for dead and wasca, which means rope or vine. At least, that’s what the plant is called here and in Peru. The Banisteriopsis caapi is a malpighiaceous jungle liana usually found in the Amazon, and along the Pacific Coast in Colombia, Ecuador, and here in Bahia.”
“You mean the vines in the jungle? I read about them in the travel book on Bahia. They typically start at the base of tree and wind around the trunk, using the tree as a ladder to reach sunlight, right?”
Impressed, Kat nodded quickly. What ever his faults, Sebastian possessed a rapacious mind for details. Normally, she would have done her research in silence, knowing her nonbotantist companions found her waxings about leaves and bark tedious. In him, though, she sensed an eagerness to learn, a zeal that owed nothing to their mission and everything to the kind of man he was. She reached for the pad and pen he’d secured for her. “In the rain forest, the sun typically can’t penetrate the upper canopy, so the vines come to it.”
Thinking about the plants she described, Sebastian wondered what kind of manual the Cinchona was. The quina plant he understood. Every overseas traveler had been dosed with the palliative for malaria. He’d needed quinine’s curative powers once before. “What about the dead soul vine? What does it cure?”
Her mind spinning, Kat explained, “Basically, the plant is a hallucinogen. But it has other medicinal properties.” She jotted notes on the other plants depicted, describing each species to Sebastian. “The artist had a fantastic talent for recreation. These renderings are of scientific quality. See how he captures the stem lines and the veins along each leaf. If he drew these, he had some education in art from the church.”
“So why is Father Borrero drawing native plants?” Sebastian inquired, shifting position to better view the pages. “Do you see a connection?”
Thinking aloud, Kat offered, “According to what I read yesterday, Borrero was a priest in the Jesuit order.” She reached over his hand and flipped through the aged, browned pages. “He traveled to South America with Pizzaro in 1532.”
“His diary talks about his time here. He was among a group of monks brought over to help enslave the native population and destroy the Incas.” Reaching behind him, Sebastian lifted a volume he’d taken from Felix’s stack of books in the great room. Several volumes were stacked near his knee, more spilled across the Fereghan Sarouk rug. The great room or even the dining room would have been more comfortable, but Kat had paled at the mention of going deeper into the house. He hadn’t pressed.
“I saw something in one of these books earlier,” he explained as he riffled through the tabbed pages. When he found the bold-typed name, he set the book on the surface and read aloud. “Our journal writer was mildly famous. Father Juan-Carlos Borrero. Says here the good priest has been compared to Bartholomé de Las Casas, the Dominican priest who convinced King Charles V to forbid the enslavement of the natives in the West Indies.”
Leaning closer, Kat tried to read over his shoulder. “Why the comparison?”
Sebastian tried to ignore the wafting scent of juniper that lingered after their visit to Senora Martinez. Just as he’d spent the previous hours not noticing how despite the heat and humidity and danger, rather than wilt, Kat glowed. And smelled like a fantasy he’d never dreamed.
Clearing his throat, he skimmed the story. “Pizzaro and his men weren’t having any luck finding the famed Incan gold in Peru, so Pizzaro thought Bahia might prove more cooperative. Borrero deserted his order after the massacre of a village of Bahia Incans. Pizzaro’s men raped and sacked the village, then set the town on fire when the Incas refused to tell them about a rumored cache of gold.”
“My God.”
“It gets worse. The men who committed the atrocities were part of Borrero’s order.”
“They were priests?”
“Of a sort.” Fast hands turned the pages, his eyes moving quickly as he absorbed the tale. “Borrero protested to the head of the order, the Brothers of Divinity.” Years in Catholic school had taught Sebastian a healthy respect for the discipline meted out by the holy orders. He wasn’t surprised that Father Borrero found their methods in the brutal days of conquistadors and conquest too much for his pious soul.
His account of children stripped from parents, of fathers pressed into servitude rang chords that echoed along Sebastian’s own ancestry. Africans. Native Americans. The New World had been hell brought to earth for them. The shiver of memory he’d experienced earlier sharpened into resentment. He’d never understood the type of deity that sanctioned evil. Or the people who thought those gods made any sense.
For his part, the relationship Sebastian had with the Big Guy was one of tolerance and bemused indulgence. In his own way, he figured, he balanced the scales for the higher powers. Taking from the obscenely rich to give to the disgustingly wealthy surely earned him a modicum of consideration.
When Sebastian’s silence lengthened, Kat shifted closer to see what had captured his attention. “What happened?”
“Hmm?”
“To Borrero? The priest. What happened when he protested?”
Sebastian rotated the text on the smooth cedar surface. He pointed to the final paragraph on the renegade priest. “Unlike de Las Casas, Borrero didn’t receive any good marks for his protests. Instead, he was branded a sympathizer to the pagan Incas and the African slaves Pizzaro sent into Bahia. The Brothers of Divinity decided to have Borrero defrocked. The last recorded sighting of him had the good father headed for the jungle. After that, he vanished.”
Kat read over his shoulder. “That was 1533,
after the Spanish executed Atahualpa.”
“Pizzaro had a brutal reign. He kills the Inca and ransacks the countries.” Sebastian leafed through a history text that had been stacked among the other books. “Borrero can’t take it. He’s a defrocked priest who heads into the jungles of Bahia, cut off from his order and the world he knows. He’s obviously Spanish. Bahians despised the Spanish and their holy men. They’d brought death with them. Smallpox had killed their leader, Huayna Capac, and a priest had trapped and murdered his successor.”
“How did he survive long enough to write the Cinchona?”
“I guess he found a friendly village that hadn’t heard about Pizzaro. One that had a strong relationship to nature.” He flipped through the pages of the diary. “The Mutambo. This is the section where he starts to write in a mix of Spanish and Quechua.”
“The Mutambo? I’ve heard Tio Felix and other anthropologists mention them, but I don’t know much about the tribe. They are one of the indigenous groups, and their descendants have mixed with the rest of Bahia, though they live together somewhere deeper in the country.”
“This is what you do every day, isn’t it? Think about tribes and villages and families, figure out their connection to nature.”
“In my way,” demurred Kat. “A tribe, a family, even small villages are the same thing. We all divide ourselves along sectarian lines defined by race or origin or commonalities. I tend to study cultures that have a spiritual connection to the earth. Like the people who sheltered Borrero. The Mutambo.”
He turned the page carefully, the delicate rustling slowing his hand even more. The image that stared back at him was of another plant. Again, the rendering was precise and beautiful. Sebastian lifted his eyes to Kat, who watched the page as though it were alive. “What is this one?”
Secrets and Lies Page 14
