“This place is unbelievable,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Take this.” He handed her the rifle and the extra rounds of ammunition he'd taken off the dead soldier. “It's about a thousand times bigger than I expected. We'll try to keep out of sight, until we can see where they're taking the Dakú. Hopefully, it'll be near the cages. Our first priority is to get as many people out as possible. Secondly, if we can”—he pulled a duffel bag out from under the wheel—“we'll try to use this stuff to blow the place.” He unzipped the bag, revealing a cache of dynamite.
“Vargas's guys like to travel prepared for anything, don't they,” she said, stuffing a stick in each pocket.
“Yes.” He smiled. “Come on. Let's go.”
CHAPTER 25
Fat eddie slowly motored up the river, nearing Reino Novo, his swivel spotlight swinging from side to side in smooth, battery-powered arcs. It had been a long night with little to eat, and he wasn't in the best mood. He'd been on the rivers of the northwest for a solid week. Unbelievable for a man who prided himself on never having to leave the Praça de Matriz in his beloved city of Manaus.
The woman, she was a demon to have done this to him. He'd been trapped for hours, days, in his speedboat, sneered at by the likes of Corisco Vargas, lost his plane, ten pounds if he'd lost an ounce, and the woman, by the blood of Christ, for about the hundredth time.
What was it with her? he wondered. What made the little cat so hard to hold on to? So hard to catch?
He'd like to know how Vargas had held her for three days in the Yavareté jail. Or maybe that's what it took, a jail, to keep her in her place. He'd completely changed his mind about her head, and was damn close to changing it about turning her in to Vargas. She was a smart woman, a damned smart woman, like Guillermo was a smart man. The two of them together, working on his side, maybe could make him the richest man in Brazil.
Vargas still had to be dealt with, possibly killed.
Eddie mused the idea over for a minute, his hand easy on the wheel.
Yes, he decided in the end. There was no doubt. Corisco Vargas had to be killed. The man was a menace.
He'd never gotten another radio transmission from Marcos and Eddie had a sneaking suspicion it wasn't because his captain had suddenly dropped dead in the forest.
No, he figured it had to do with the size of Marcos's balls, which must have shrunk up into his brain by now. The man had been taking the diabo do noite far too seriously.
“Night of the Devil. Night of the Devil,” all the river people were whispering.
Night of the Devil, his ass, Eddie thought. Like everything else this last year that had been going to hell, the Night of the Devil was really the Night of Corisco Vargas.
Cristo, but he was really starting to hate that man.
Vargas had those Indians and those caboclos. Eddie would bet every ounce of fat on his body on the fact. What the hell Vargas was going to do with them, Eddie didn't have a clue, except to figure it would probably be pretty sick, and the Indians and caboclos would probably end up dead. Everything Vargas touched ended up dead, like this whole huge stretch of forest.
Eddie had seen plenty of mines in the north, and worked deals with the donos, the mine bosses, when he could. But he'd never seen anything like Reino Novo. It was no New Kingdom, but it was damn big.
His spotlight hit the top of its arc to the right and slowly swung back to the left, going from one riverbank to the next, and finally finding something of interest on the far shore. He grabbed the light, shining it full on the boat tied up to a branch.
Damned odd, he thought. There were five fully functional docks at Reino Novo not a hundred yards farther up the river. There was no reason on earth to tie a boat up to a tree.
He smelled a rat.
Or rather, he smelled a cat, a little cat. He smelled her like a feral dog.
“Jorge!” he called out, signaling the man piloting the next boat. When the man looked over, Fat Eddie lifted his arm and gestured toward the shore.
Possibly, just possibly, it wasn't too damn late to turn a profit on this whole damn mess.
WILL AND ANNIE scrambled over the slag heaps rising like small mountains around the belching smelter. Once they were off the river, its fires could be seen glowing like the fires of hell on the south side of the camp. Between the smelter and the mines was a stretch of no-man's-land, where hoses snaked, and water ran, and every makeshift walkway that had ever been tried was sinking into the mud. For all its riches, Reino Novo had not overcome the bane of rain-forest industry: once the thin layer of topsoil was gone, nothing would hold the rest of it together. The battle was always one of deterioration, with the rain always winning.
It was over the walkways that Fernando and his men were herding the Indians, past rows of shacks and burning piles of refuse.
Annie's heart was in her throat. There were men everywhere, but most of them were too haggard and tired to do more than jeer at the captives, or to look dumbly as they went by. The miners were captives themselves, captured by a false promise of riches and held by a debt servitude they could never repay. The company store would always be charging just a little bit more than the garimpeiros made, and too much of their hard-earned share of the gold went right back into the donos's pockets, spent on whores and cachaça, fleeting pleasures that few men could do without, but none could actually afford. To call their existence grim was almost naïve. The word “grim” didn't begin to sum up the misery of the mines.
Once past the smelter, the rain forest reasserted its dominance, sending viney tendrils burrowing under the slag heaps to reemerge as a spot of green in the middle of a gray wasteland. Trees grew closer to the trail, adding the cover Will needed to get closer to the Indians, but he was behind them, and he needed to move ahead.
“Keep following them, Annie,” he said, dropping back to check on her. “Stay on this side, and you'll run right into me in about five minutes. If you don't, make your way back to the boat and get the hell out of here. Promise me.”
“Promise,” she said without hesitation, but he wasn't fooled. She was a terrible liar.
He kissed her hard, once, and slipped away, moving swiftly and silently through the perimeter of trees. He had five darts left.
Annie watched him disappear, an act that took him about two seconds flat. When the last soldier in line collapsed, she knew exactly where Will was—so did the Indians. The change in them was immediate. An alertness came over them, their faces turning to the forest. They knew they weren't alone.
Will's was a war of stealth, of hit and run with the darkness as cover. When the next soldier in line fell, his companions still oblivious to the carnage stalking them through the night, Annie thought they might have a chance at winning. The mines were behind them, the forest smelling greener, full of promise. If they could get the Indians released, they could melt into the trees as easily as Will.
Then she heard it, men's voices behind her, coming not from the walkways and the trails, but from the forest. She speeded up her steps, breaking into a loping run, wondering who in the hell besides her and Will was out in the jungle on a near moonless night—and so help her God, she could only come up with one name.
Fat Eddie Mano.
CORISCO SAT IN THE DARK in his office, the only light coming from the jungle-filled glass cage and the cylinder holding the orchid in his hand. He'd lost. Word had just come up from the docks. Fernando had arrived with the last cordeiros, and Annie Parrish was not among them. She would not be his to interrogate and torture one last time. Nor would she be his to sacrifice on El Mestre.
Perhaps he'd been wrong all these months. Perhaps she'd found the orchids elsewhere and was bypassing Reino Novo altogether.
Still recovering from his night of visions, brooding the loss was the limit of his energies at the moment. Later, he would take retribution.
He glanced over to a box lying open on the corner of his desk. A week ago, infinitely sure of success, he'd bought her a pres
ent, a little something his São Paulo tailor had sent up the river, a dress for her to die in.
He leaned over and lifted a handful of the silk. Gold and glittering, it would have been the perfect foil for her blond beauty.
His gaze came back to the cylinder in his hand. The orchids' location would remain a mystery now, and that was the true loss. He'd searched for the meaning of the flower's light in his uyump visions, and been denied an explanation. So be it. Many of the riches shown to him through the visions had come to him, and if at moments he remembered fleeting traces of a time before he'd partaken of the tiny frog devils, when his mind had been different, he didn't dwell on them for long. He'd chosen his path, and even a cursory look around would prove that he had chosen well.
And yet the orchid, he thought, watching it float inside its glass container. The orchid was more than it seemed, much more. He'd spent hours mesmerized by its vacillating light, many nights to the point where he'd been certain the plant had relayed something to him. But then he would come to himself, out of the trance, and realize he'd been drifting in dreams, not really paying attention, and the moment and the sensation would be gone.
For now, his chance to find more of the flowers was lost, as was his chance to have Annie Parrish, but he still had his cordeiros, his lambs, and he would not shirk his duty to them. Their sacrifice would make him infamous and bring him glory; the least he could do was go down and sort the new arrivals. The strong ones would go to the mines, the weak and the lame and the old would all go to El Mestre.
A loud bang against the glass cage drew his attention to the far wall of his office. The giant snake threw his body against the glass again, and something in the wall creaked, as if it might give way. With the anaconda's next attack, the wall actually bowed out.
Corisco smiled. Poor thing. He knew exactly what the beast's problem was—hunger, a hunger that would only be assuaged in the jungle glade on the Night of the Devil.
CHAPTER 26
Will caught annie as she raced by, dragging her close with a hand over her mouth in case she screamed.
She didn't, recognizing him instantly. Her eyes were wide, though, wide with fear.
“There are men coming up behind us, out of the forest,” she said, when he removed his hand. “Not Indians. They're making too much noise.”
He met her eyes. “Fat Eddie.” He couldn't believe it. Tenacious didn't begin to describe the fat man.
“The cages are just ahead, but let me warn you, Annie, the glint of gold you saw through the forest the last time you were here has gotten a lot bigger and taken shape.”
“What kind of shape?”
“Snake.” He was blunt. “Big snake.”
Bigger than he would have dreamed possible. It was an unbelievable amount of gold to have all in one place, and Will could only wonder at the power Vargas wielded to keep his soldiers and the garimpeiros from stealing it by the handful. Fear would do it, an ungodly amount of fear, the kind of fear that made Will wonder what in the hell they were actually going to come up against, if they couldn't get out of Reino Novo as easily as they'd gotten in.
She swore, and swore again. He'd expected it. The woman did not like snakes.
“There's only two guards at the cages, both well armed, and one of them has a ring of keys. I don't want you to shoot, unless it's in self-defense. Bringing a bunch of soldiers and garimpeiros down on us is the last thing we want to do.”
“Right.”
They moved out, and Will couldn't begin to describe how awful he felt having her with him. Sometime, somewhere, over the last seven days, he should have been able to find a place to keep her safe. Her own damned insistence on coming had been part of the problem, but the rest of it was feeling like pure bad luck.
What in the hell, he wondered, had happened to his neat plan of gliding into Reino Novo on the Sucuri, an invited smuggler for God's sake, and taking a look around, seeing what had to be done, formulating a plan for doing it, doing it, and getting out.
Amazon Annie had happened, came his answer, and he knew in his heart that he wouldn't have missed her for the world, but he wished like hell that she was anyplace else but with him.
Annie wished she was someplace else, too, anyplace other than heading toward a giant gold snake in the middle of a hellhole, with a gun strapped over her shoulder, and her heart beating so fast she was afraid Corisco Vargas could hear it above the sound of the pumps and the hoses and the hundreds of men he had working around the clock to mine more gold. Fernando for sure could hear it. He wasn't that far away, coming out ahead of them on the path into a circle of bright light.
As she and Will caught up to the group, she realized it wasn't a circle of bright light at all, but the reflection of a few torches on an unbelievable amount of gold. Vargas had literally paved a plaza with gold, and in the middle of the plaza he had erected the most stunningly unbelievable representation of her giant anaconda that she had ever seen.
“Will. Will,” she whispered, pulling him to a stop. “Don't you recognize her?”
“Who?”
“The snake, the gold snake.”
A trace of bafflement narrowed his gaze. “It's a snake.”
“My snake, Will. The one that strangles me in my dreams, and it's your snake, too, the one on your boat.”
That was the absolute last thing Will had wanted to hear.
“Don't tell me this, Annie. Please.” He'd never seen her vision snake. Hell, he'd never even seen his vision snake. The only anaconda he'd ever seen up close and personal was the one that had sunk its teeth into his shoulder and bled all over him, and that snake had not been a vision.
“My God,” she said, her voice full of awe as she looked up at the damned thing. “It's incredible.”
Neither was that the reaction he was looking for.
“I've got three darts left, and four soldiers, including Fernando. Let's do this, Annie, and get the hell out of here. Get the bow ready.”
“Take Fernando first,” she suggested, tearing her gaze away from the golden, snake-shaped tower. “He's got a Galil.”
Excellent advice.
As they came up on the cages, a murmur of hope swept through the captives. Will said only one word, “freedom,” and he said it in two languages, and three Indian dialects.
The stir put the soldiers on their guard, including Fernando and his last soldier, who had just reached the others and were quickly realizing that they'd lost a couple of men on the trail.
Fernando's realization was cut pretty damn short, though, when a curare-tipped blowgun dart caught him in the neck. Will downed the next man before he had a chance to shoot his gun. The third man was momentarily dumbstruck by his comrades all falling helpless to the ground for no apparent reason, and by the time he figured out that he was under attack, he had a dart sticking out of his chest.
He clawed at his shirt, trying to rip the dart out of his skin, but to no avail. As the curare took hold, his knees buckled and he fell to the plaza.
For Annie it was like watching a nightmare unfold in slow motion, the men crumbling, their cries of surprise as they were hit, and the grunts of terror when they realized what had hit them and that they were going to die. She felt her own breath slow in her throat, until a shot rang out, the last guard firing at them.
She reacted in an instant, swinging her rifle up and pulling the trigger, her own shot echoing around the plaza followed by the guard's scream of pain.
“Will.” She turned and found him holding his arm. Blood leaked through his fingers. He'd fallen to his knees.
“Will,” she gasped.
“Get the keys, Annie! Now!” He ground the words out between his teeth, forcing himself to his feet.
Annie ran across the plaza. The man she'd hit was writhing on the ground. The others weren't even twitching. Their muscles were paralyzed by the curare, their eyes locked open in terror as they slowly asphyxiated to death, their lungs no longer capable of moving air in and out.
&n
bsp; Murmurs of excitement ran through the cages. The Indians and caboclos had been saved. All Annie needed was the key to release the locks bolting the iron doors, before more guards came running, alerted by the gunfire. All she needed was to wrestle the keys off the belt of the man she'd shot, while he twisted and jerked in agony at her feet, blood gushing from his stomach.
Oh, God. She was going to be sick, but she kneeled anyway and unclipped the ring of keys from his belt.
“Annie!” Will's warning cry rang out, but not before a meaty fist got a hold of her ankle and jerked her to the ground. She landed with a heavy thud, the wind knocked out of her as a half-paralyzed Fernando tried to roll her beneath him.
She kicked and swore, the arm she'd landed on throbbing in pain, the beast all over her, grappling her around.
The keys! She'd lost the keys.
Then Will was there with a knife, jerking Fernando's head back and slitting his throat.
Annie scrambled backward, revulsion turning into panic in her veins. Blood was everywhere, pumping out of Fernando's throat, running off Will's arm, pouring out of the gut-shot soldier. She dropped her rifle, trying to get away, her eyes riveted to the blood flowing onto the gold brick plaza. It slipped into the gold-mortared grooves, forming a tracery of blood, red veins running their course across the expanse of gold to the shallow indention in the middle of the plaza, a bowl, four feet across, with all the blood collecting in its golden pan.
Corisco drank blood. She remembered now. He cooked it into a hallucinogenic elixir with uyump frog skins. Devil frogs, the Indians called them, and a straighter road to hell had never been devised.
Will had drunk blood, too. Jaguar blood. She had blood smeared on her clothes and her skin, staining her shoes and getting all over everything. She'd lost the keys. Lost her rifle.
Merda. The keys. They were probably covered in blood from all the dying men.
“Will.” She stopped her retreat, stopped sliding and pushing herself away from the dead guards. She lifted her gaze to where he was rising to his feet, one of the soldiers' knives still in his hand. “Help me, Will. We have to—”
River of Eden Page 24
