River of Eden

by Glenna Mcreynolds

  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 confi- dence. He was damned surprised to find out that Annie Parrish's standards were even low
er 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.”

  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 Pharmacueticals, 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 hellbent 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 go
ing 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. “Vent 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?”