Secret of the Slaves (9 page)

Sir Iain Moran nodded gravely. “The notion has its merits,” he said in his rumbling baritone.

Standing by the rail before the entryway to the Manaus Opera House, Dan smirked. Annja frowned. “We're talking about breaking and entering here.”

“You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs,” Dan said.

“Dan has a pretty rough-and-ready approach,” the billionaire singer and philanthropist said. Goran and Mladko stood discreetly apart from their boss and his conversation, but close. “It's what you might expect from a hardened activist. I do have to point out that the stakes are pretty high in this game, Annja.”

“You don't have to tell me,” she said. “People have been killed.”

I've killed one,
she thought. She hadn't mentioned it in her own reports to Publico, by voice or e-mail—among other things, the last thing she wanted to do was leave an evidence trail for something like that. But she suspected Dan had informed his boss. She hoped he'd used strong encryption.

“Ah, and isn't that an indication that we're on the right track, then?”

Annja frowned and said nothing.

“You know,” Publico said, “there's even a district of the city named Zumbi dos Palmares.”

“After the legendary last leader of the Quilombo dos Palmares, I'm guessing,” Annja said. “You think that's a clue?”

Publico shrugged his broad shoulders. “Why not?”

He was dressed in immaculate white-tie evening dress. His graying blond hair swept down to his shoulders. The hair, the black tailcoat and stiff white shirt combined with Publico's own physical presence to produce an almost overwhelming effect.

To reduce the risk of falling under his spell, Annja turned away to lean on the railing.

“He's a popular historic figure in Brazil,” she said. “There are places and things named for Almirante Cochrane all over South America, too. That doesn't seem to indicate there's a secret conclave of unfairly pilloried Napoleonic-era British admirals dwelling away up in the wilds of the Amazon Basin.”

Publico laughed loudly, attracting glances from the rest of the glittering crowd drifting toward the high, white-columned entrance with its arched top. Large banners announced an international film festival for the evening.

“A hit! A palpable hit, dear lady. Maybe I feel so strongly about this quest of ours that I tend to see things that aren't there. Still, there's the little fact that my poor friend Reinhard dealt with River of Dreams.”

“I still don't know why you didn't see fit to share that little nugget of information with us,” Annja said. She and Dan still wore the clothes they'd worn to the frustrating interview with Toby a couple of hours earlier. She was feeling increasingly dowdy as the night's audience filed into the extravagant, domed belle epoque theater. The attendees possessed not just beauty but the ease and grace of being raised to wealth, which would forever be denied an orphan girl such as her. Or maybe that was just her insecurities speaking.

“I didn't want to prejudice you,” Publico said. “I thought it important for you to develop leads on your own.”

“What are you holding back now so you won't prejudice us?” she asked.

“She's got a good point,” Dan said.

Publico nodded. “To be sure. Believe me, I hold back nothing vital, either to our quest or to your own survival. I will tell you that you're on the right track—and that we need to know what can be learned from River of Dreams.”

Annja clouded up. It was a totally unsatisfactory answer.

“Ahh,” Publico said, his craggy face lighting. “My lovely companions arrive. Annja, Dan—if you'll forgive me, it would be uncivilized of me to keep these ladies waiting.”

He left embraced by two beautiful women, one blond and Nordic looking, one exotically African. Their own evening gowns put Annja in mind of the old phrase, “a lick and a promise.” It was about what they seemed to consist of.

She turned a ferocious scowl on Dan. He shrugged. Then he waggled his eyebrows at her.

She laughed. “Come on,” she said. “Let's go get something to eat. I'm starving.”

“L
OOK
,” D
AN SAID
on the walk back to the hotel. “I know you're reluctant about breaking into the River of Dreams warehouse. I won't lecture you about bourgeois sensibilities—”

“Good.”

The traffic flowed around them like a river full of luminous fish. Annja walked along hugging herself as if chilled, although she could barely stand the heat. The smell of exhaust, ubiquitous at the center of any modern city, couldn't overpower the omnipresent scent of the rain forest, stronger here than in Belém. Maybe that was why Manaus felt off somehow to Annja. She had a sense that this was temporary, an aberration, like a vacuum fluctuation in physics. The city, and all those within it, seemed to exist in a bubble that could simply collapse at any minute.

Dan showed her a wolf grin as he continued. “I will point out that Publico has reason to believe these people—the people of this lost city—are hoarding secrets that could ease much misery and suffering on earth. Secrets that should be shared with all humankind.
Need
to be shared with all humankind. Are you with me on this?”

She frowned. Then she nodded. Face it, she said told herself, this will not be the first time you've stretched the letter of the law out of all recognizable shape. It won't be the last. I've killed people, for God's sake. Why balk at a little B&E?

“I guess so.” She brushed a stray lock of hair from her forehead and offered up a faint smile.

“Good woman,” Dan said. “We'll make an activist out of you yet.”

“Maybe.”

He crooked an arm. After another moment of hesitation, she wound her own through his.

D
ESPITE ENJOYING
the arm-in-arm walk, she said a firm goodbye once they reached their floor. She was a big girl. She could take care of herself.

The truth was she had no clue what had really happened last night in Belém. Neither, she was sure, did Dan. She liked him, even respected him, though she acknowledged he had thorns and hitches in his step.

She knew they, like the powerful currents of anger that ran not too far beneath his flip, hip surface, grew out of caring. He cared deeply about the world's poor, about the planet itself. She also knew he had not just seen but experienced horrible things in the Third World.

So maybe he was tied to Ogum, she thought as she went into the bathroom to get ready to shower. Even an easy walk through Manaus's busy nighttime streets had left her soaked in sweat. Maybe he has reason to be.

She'd like to get to know him better, she thought, not for the first time, as she stripped off her clothes. He was attractive in many ways beyond the purely physical. No. This was not a good time to think about that.

She turned on the water in the shower and adjusted it. We'll work it out, she thought, or we won't. The most important thing is the job. She stepped naked into the spray.

W
EARING A FLUFFY TERRY ROBE
, a towel wrapped around her hair, Annja came around the stepped glass-brick wall that separated the bathroom from the rest of the room. She picked up her notebook computer from the table by the window and carried it to the bed. She intended to review her e-mail, answer anything that demanded it. Then to relax she'd browse the newsgroups, then hoped to sleep soundly and not dream too much.

The fairly hideous tropical-flower-pattern bedspread was turned down. A green-foil-wrapped mint waited on the pillow. Perhaps most importantly, the air-conditioning was strong and steady.

As she approached the bed, the spread at the foot of it seemed to be moving. Ever so slightly.

She froze. The motion ceased. Did I imagine that? She hadn't exactly been sleeping much of late.

She saw it again. The smallest hint of motion.

Deliberately she stooped and set the computer on the bedside table. Then she whipped back the spread with a flourish.

Fangs extended like spears as a big black-and-grey snake struck at her face.

By reflex she turned her body counterclockwise. Her right hand moved with her compact and rapid turn, a result of hours practicing martial arts.

To her surprise, she caught the snake about eight inches behind the head. It thrashed in her hand, trying again to strike at her face. She jerked her head away, overbalanced, fell sideways on the bed.

She knew if she let go, she would die.

The snake fought furiously to get free. She recognized it as an
urutu,
a South American pit viper, like a rattlesnake minus the rattles. Its venom was a hell brew that would surge through her bloodstream causing her red blood cells to explode like tiny bombs, while secondary toxins destroyed her nervous system, causing irreparable damage and unendurable pain.

The creature's body was surprisingly solid and alarmingly strong. It must have been a good six feet in length. It felt as if she were trying to hang on to an out-of-control fire hose.

Somehow she kept her grip. She managed to get her other hand around the snake's body below her first. It turned and struck for her forearm. Her cheeks pulled her lips back from her teeth in a grimace of horrified expectation.

But the snake struck only air. It could not double back upon its own sinuous body far enough to sink fangs in her flesh.

She sighed. The snake waved its head angrily, but she knew that, unless she got careless, she had won.

“Okay,” she said aloud, “now what do I do with you?”

She didn't want to kill the creature. For all she knew they were endangered. In any event, this one was no longer a threat, and her spirit rebelled against taking the life of anything that didn't threaten her.

She remembered seeing snake collectors dump their captives in bags. That seemed her best bet. Holding the snake gingerly away from her at the extent of her right arm, she groped behind her for a pillow with her left hand. Grabbing it by the closed end, she shook out the pillow.

Annja sat up. The snake had quit struggling and now moved its fat wedge of a head hypnotically from side to side. The poison sacs to either side of its head were swollen, immense. Had it buried those big fangs in her arm, the snake would have pumped enough venom into her to kill a bull.

With the little finger and ring finger of her right hand and her whole left hand she managed to get the pillowcase open. Holding it well away from her body, she took a deep breath and poured the snake inside.

She expected it to explode into wild action on finding itself trapped. Instead it subsided into fat, fleshy coils and, as far as she could tell, went promptly to sleep.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” she said, holding up the improvised bag. She reminded herself to stay aware. The animal couldn't bite its way out of the pillowcase, but if it happened to brush against her, it might still manage to bite her.

After a brief contemplation she gingerly and gently twisted the top, swaying the pillowcase from her upheld arm so that the snake's weight would rotate the pillowcase. The snake weighed more than she expected.

When she had the pillowcase wound well shut she stood, walked to the bathroom door and very cautiously knotted a loop and hung it over the knob. When she let go she held herself poised to dive away, in case being allowed to hang against the door woke the viper and gave it leverage somehow to strike at her. But the captive did nothing.

Annja went to the bedside telephone, picked up the receiver, punched a single button.

“Hello, front desk?” she said in Portuguese when the line was picked up. “I have a little problem.”

Outside the rain poured down as if it had always been raining and never intended to stop. Evidently they didn't call this part of the world the rain forest for nothing.

Annja sat contentedly in the lobby of the Lord Manaus, tapping away at the notebook computer. The rushing sound of the morning downpour provided a backdrop more soothing to her than the generic Brazilian jazz oozing softly from the hotel speakers.

She was still amused by the follow-up to last night's encounter with the snake. The concierge's supercilious disbelief when she claimed to have found a poisonous snake in her room had almost been funny. He had come around when she described the distinctive patterns of one of Brazil's most feared snakes. Obviously he recognized the design.

She suspected close encounters with poisonous serpents wasn't rare in this city in the jungle. But she didn't think snakes, poisonous or not, were common visitors inside the Lord Manaus.

The first hotel maintenance man to show up at her door in his green coveralls had been cheerfully nonchalant, clearly not taking the white North American woman's babble about vipers all that seriously. Even the fact that Annja did her babbling in Portuguese did little to dent his obvious skepticism. Then Annja pulled open the pillow-case to show him what she'd found—in a closet, she said. He turned ashen and spoke into his walkie-talkie so rapidly Annja couldn't follow him. Then he had to sit down.

Eventually a pair of maintenance types showed up carrying a metal-looped snake-catching pole and a more substantial bag. The transfer was accomplished efficiently and with minimal fuss. Annja tipped the two snake handlers and when they had gone, tipped the first responder double. He was so badly shaken she felt sorry for him. Even if it was his own fault for not believing her.

The hotel night manager had turned up ten minutes later, all unctuous concern, to reassure himself that Annja was intact, especially unbitten, and uninclined to bring any unfortunate lawsuits. She also knew the manager
really
dreaded an account of her terrifying adventure turning up and catching a million hits on the Web.

She had ducked out of the hotel early for breakfast solo at a nearby café, then got back without getting rained on. Well, except for a little on the last sprint to the door, but that hadn't done her any harm.

She was glad to have had time to herself without either Dan or their eccentric boss on hand. She'd needed it. Especially with events moving so quickly. Even if she still felt, frustratingly, as if she and Dan were stumbling around in the dark looking for clues to the hidden city.

I guess that's why they call it hidden, she thought ruefully.

She had decided that morning to say nothing about the snake incident to either Dan or Sir Iain. It added nothing they hadn't already known. Sharing it could only add complications.

As for warning Dan a similar attempt might be made on his life…he already acted like an old scarred alley cat, with his head on a swivel whenever he walked out on the street. He struck Annja as being as functionally alert as he could be. Winding him tighter would only feed his paranoia—and propensity for anger.

“May we join you, Ms. Creed?”

It was a familiar, mellifluous male baritone, speaking beautifully accented English. Annja looked up into the pale amber eyes of Patrizinho. At his side, compact and radiantly lovely despite her conservative gray skirt, stood Xia. They both smiled as if Annja were a long-lost cousin.

“Sure,” Annja said. She had to force her own smile. Inside she felt tight and very, very cold. “Feel free.”

She closed her notebook computer with a certain relief as they seated themselves side by side on the sofa facing Annja's chair across a low coffee table. After the initial shock of the encounter, the chill within her turned quickly into quivery anticipation, like a hunting dog straining at the leash. Or what she imagined one would be like.

“What a pleasant surprise to see you both,” she said.

“Likewise,” Xia said. “What brings you to Manaus? And where's your very handsome friend?”

“To answer the second question first, either still in his room or getting breakfast.”

“Ah,” Xia said. Her eyes sparkled. “Too bad.”

Annja felt her mouth tighten. Patrizinho laughed. He was dressed in sort of retro style, a faintly pink beige jacket over similarly colored slacks and a dark green collarless shirt. “Please forgive us. We Brazilians are terrible romantics,” he said.

“I notice you say ‘we,'” Annja replied.

“I'm one of the worst.”

“As for your first question,” Annja said, crossing her legs and feeling annoyed with herself for how much she wanted to like these two people, “our research continues.”

“Here in Manaus?” Patrizinho asked. “A long way to go afield to look for
quilombos.
Am I mistaken, or were they not mainly a coastal phenomenon?”

“I thought so, too. But our employer asked us to look into documents available here, at the library and university.” That was what she had determined she would do today. With luck it might even obviate the need to engage in any nocturnal burglary. “We have come across hints there might actually have been
quilombos
established even farther upriver after the fall of Palmares. And there is a neighborhood here named for Zumbi of the Palm Nation.”

“There are lots of neighborhoods named for him,” Xia said, “even down in the Pampas, where surely no
quilombos
ever were.”

“Still,” Patrizinho said, “how fascinating would it be if there were something in it all? A lost civilization!”

“Patrizinho likes to let his imagination roam free,” Xia said. “Anyway, if a city really has been lost all this time, might that not be strictly accidental? Perhaps the citizens don't want to be found.”

Has she taken my hook? Annja wondered, uncrossing her legs and trying to act casual. Or have I taken hers? Whatever the truth about this amiable and cover-model-gorgeous pair, she suspected it would be a mistake to underestimate them.

“What are you doing here?”

It was a rough challenge delivered by Dan's voice. Annja looked around to see him standing there frowning.

Xia smiled dazzlingly at him. “Conversing with your delightful associate, Annja, of course,” she said.

“Sit down,” Annja said sharply to her partner. Dan looked at her. He raised an eyebrow in momentary rebellion. Then he grinned and sat in the chair beside hers.

“If you mean what are we doing here in this rather charmless and remote city of Manaus,” Patrizinho said, “we simply have business here.”

“Do you deal with the River of Dreams Trading Company at all?” Annja asked as casually as she could.

Patrizinho glanced at Xia. “Sometimes,” she said. “Our business naturally brings us to Amazonas State on a regular basis. You know, of course, there are no roads from here to the coast.”

“I know most of what moves through the interior goes by air. Or by river, obviously, here in the Amazon Basin,” Annja said.

Patrizinho nodded, smiling as if she'd just spoken a rare insight. “Manaus is the natural hub for the deep-Amazon trade. Especially since it's the farthest deep-draught oceangoing ships can travel up the river. That naturally draws us. River of Dreams is what we might term a middle-scale company. So yes, we deal with them on occasion.”

“So what do you make of our Brasilia, Dan?” Xia asked.

His pale eyes narrowed. His brow furrowed. “Mostly I see oppression and environmental rape. Despite your socialist president, wild capitalism is destroying the rain forest for profit. No offense, of course.”

“Of course not,” Patrizinho murmured.

“You might wish to be cautious assigning blame,” Xia said. “Yes, the rain forest is being destroyed at a tragic clip. But were you to look deeply into our politics, you might see that—while it brings increased profits to certain sectors, such as the soya growers, who grow rich selling their produce to your health-conscious fellow North Americans—the motive for the destruction is not primarily economic. The government subsidizes it out of a desire to exterminate the Indians by devastating their habitat. Like most Latin American governments, ours regards the indigenous people as little better than animals, who disgrace our great and advanced civilization by their stubborn backwardness. It is the great unacknowledged shame of South and Central America, this ongoing genocide against the natives.”

For the first time Annja heard something other than cheerfulness in Xia's voice. She spoke with unconcealed bitterness.

Dan shrugged. “Isn't it fashionable for capitalists to blame the government for their crimes these days?”

“But don't you find,” Patrizinho said lightly, “that the capitalists who commit the greatest crimes do so with the active cooperation of government?”

Dan scowled. Then he shrugged. He was clearly uncomfortable continuing this conversation, Annja saw. Otherwise she guessed a potentially vitriolic debate would have ensued.

“I admit I wouldn't mind seeing this whole city plowed under and returned to the rain forest,” Dan said.

“And the people of the city?” Xia asked. “Would not many innocents suffer?”

“I've been all around the world. I've seen a lot of suffering. I've seen a lot of damage to the planet. And one thing I've learned—there are no innocents.”

“You don't mean that,” Annja said. But his only response was a hard smile.

“It may be easier to see such things from your vantage point than mine, my friend,” said Patrizinho.

Xia stood up. Annja envied her grace.

“But we do not wish to intrude any longer,” she said as Patrizinho rose, with scarcely less fluidity. “You have important matters to attend to. For that matter, so do we.”

Annja rose, making polite farewell noises. Dan sat with arms tightly crossed over his chest, glaring at the Brazilian pair as if they were capitalist fat cats with dollar signs all over their suits.

When they left, Annja sat and pinned her partner with a look. “Why go all Mr. Surly with the ingenue Brazilian couple?”

He sneered. “I don't suppose it occurred to you there might be something a little bit
suspicious
about them turning up right here in Manaus at the same time we're here—not to mention how they chanced to be passing through our very hotel?”

“Of course it did. It also occurred to me my best chance of getting anything useful out of them was to play along, instead of growl at them and chase them off. Did it ever occur to
you
to give me credit for having any brains?”

He glared at her a moment. Slowly a smile struggled across his face. He uttered a bark of a laugh. “Eventually it'll sink in,” he said, “I hope. I've found that every time I underestimate you I wind up nursing bruises in places I never knew I could get bruised.”

It was the first time he had referred, however obliquely, to the events of their last night in Belém.

“So you suspect they know something?” he asked.

“Coincidences just seem to keep piling up, don't they? Wasn't it Sun Tzu who said, ‘Once is chance, twice is happenstance, three times is enemy action'?” Annja asked.

“Actually,” a deep voice said from over her shoulder in a Northern Irish accent, “it was Goldfinger, in the Ian Fleming novel. I love those books. I read them every year.”

“Isn't that like the ultimate celebration of imperialism?” asked Dan, who was clearly still grumpy.

Publico laughed. “You'd be happier if you learned to separate politics from entertainment, Dan my boy.”

“Do you?”

The rock star laughed even louder. Heads turned to stare. Such was the magnetism of the man that stares turned to smiles when they saw him. Annja thought it happened whether the people recognized him as a superstar performer or not. “Well, sometimes I do. That's what I recommend. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.”

Dan eyed him dubiously. “Did you spend the night at the hotel?” he asked.

“No. A private residence. Allow an old man his fleeting pleasures, son.”

“We just had an interesting encounter,” Annja said. Publico tipped his head curiously to the side. Quickly she filled him in on the peculiar appearance of Xia and Patrizinho, seemingly out of nowhere. She didn't see any need to mention Dan's hostility toward them.

The more she thought about it the more she understood it. If they actually had guilty knowledge of Mafalda's death—and the attempts on Dan's and Annja's lives—they were nothing but smiling murderers. Or accomplices to murder.

It's looking more and more as if Sir Iain's right in his assessment of the Promessans, Annja thought. If what we suspect is true, they might be a whole culture of narcissistic sociopaths.

Publico stood by, nodding and looking thoughtful. “Doesn't it seem to you we might be stirring things up, then? It seems to me that might just indicate we're getting closer to our goal.”