Secret of the Slaves

by Alex Archer

“Do you deny,” Publico said, “that you have discovered the means, not just of life extension, but life renewal?”

  “Why should we bother?” said the Chinese member who sat at the chairman’s left. He was a large stout man with a fringe of white hair around the rear of a globelike head. His build and manner and blunt peasant’s face projected almost as much physical force as Publico’s weight-chiseled frame. “Or affirm, for that matter? We have no need to answer to you, Sir Iain.”

  “Do you really think not?”

  “You think your billions impress us?” the Frenchman sneered.

  The American laughed. It was presumably meant to be a guffaw. It came out a raven’s croak. “He doesn’t even know where they are!” he exclaimed.

  “Ah,” Sir Iain said. “But I do. Don’t forget—I’m a man of deeds. You know I put my body, my very life on the line when I was a lad. Since then I’ve done as much in half a hundred less publicized ways. Of course, you gentlemen are well aware. I’ve made my mark upon the world. I’ve taken actions. Some on behalf of this august if nameless council.

  “And I’ve a following. When I speak, tens of millions listen. Hundreds of millions. From the scruffiest street activists to crowned heads and corporate gods.”

  “Do you honestly think,” the German chortled, his jowls aflutter like slabs of gelatin dessert, “that we don’t control as much and more?”

  “They may dance to your tunes, Sir Iain,” the Chinese member said, “these masses and ministers and monarchs. Even march to them. But will they kill and die to them, as they do ours?”

  “Do you honestly want to find out?”

  “Enough, Sir Iain!” The chairman’s thin voice rapped like a schoolteacher’s ruler on a blackboard. “You err grievously if you believe mere wealth—or vulgar repute—can gain you entrance into our councils. You are permitted to leave now, Sir Iain. I will stress this word, permitted.”

  Publico stood as erect as a soldier at attention on a parade ground. Then he turned and marched briskly from the gleaming chamber.

  Out in the corridor he stalked, emanating rage. His hands were buried in his pockets. His great leonine head was thrust forward on his bull’s neck.

  Right, he thought. That’s their last chance, then. The thought came with as much relief—satisfaction, even—as anger.

  25

  The water of the Amazon was ocher.

  Annja Creed stood in the riverboat’s blunt bow. One walking shoe up on the gunwale, the other on deck, she gazed up the course of the river.

  The far bank, the left, was visible only as a green thread along the yellow flow. On the right the forest loomed over them so close that the outer limbs almost overhung the tubby, run-down vessel.

  The trees were full of monkeys, screeching and hooting at the invaders and their engine, its mechanically monotonous regularity as alien to the surroundings as spiders from Mars.

  Other primates lined the starboard rail—mercenaries of the small platoon of twenty-five men and an officer Sir Iain Moran had arranged to accompany Annja on her journey to find the nine-boled tree and the long held trove of secrets of the descendants of escaped slaves.

  Whether they had been brought to Feliz Lusitânia especially for the task or recruited from the ganglike internal-security forces, Annja neither knew nor cared. They were heavily armed and showed every sign of ruthlessness. That was all that mattered to her now.

  She was bound on a mission of justice. She needed hard tools. These men were that, at least.

  She would not have chosen many of them herself. Half a dozen of them were perched precariously on the rail, all shirtless, a couple wearing nothing but shorts, hooting and screaming back at the furious monkeys.

  A flight of blue macaws erupted from a tree, flew off over the ship and headed upstream. The ship was about sixty feet long and twenty wide. It had a modest deckhouse extended forward by a corrugated tin canopy and by a tentlike awning astern. There were also cabins below, stinking, close and crowded.

  Annja had chosen to pass the first night alone on deck, under the tin shelter of the elevated wheelhouse for protection from the rain that drummed down half the night. The cabins offered a modicum of privacy. The captain, a short Belgian with a silver fringe beard, had offered his own, probably by prearrangement rather than gallantry. But even the captain’s Spartan deckhouse quarters reminded her too much of the hopeless hovels of the lower circle of Hell she had known at the colony.

  A tall blond kid from upper New York State crouched atop the deckhouse, wearing only shorts and bulky combat boots and what seemed to be a T-shirt wrapped around his head. The skin stretched over his washboard ribs was fish-belly white. It was already changing to boiled-lobster red on his back from the sun. If Annja’s extensive field experience was any guide he’d be writhing in agony by the early equatorial nightfall. But like the rest, he loudly claimed vast combat experience.

  He cradled a long black M-16 rifle across his knees. He wanted to hunt monkeys, he said.

  He was getting visibly more and more frustrated. The monkeys were shrewd. Watching the dense transition undergrowth and low-hanging trees along the banks, Annja could catch only flashes of their dark-brown-and-white-furred bodies.

  She didn’t much care. To the extent she paid attention to her surroundings she hoped her companions would exhaust their masculine energies in their dominance fight with their unseen rivals. Some had begun casting not-so-professional glances her way the moment they shoved off from the Feliz Lusitânia dock upstream of the river-dredging operation the day before. The looks kept getting hotter eyed and longer; she expected trouble by tonight.

  She was ready for it. She was ready for anything. Perhaps things she never would have considered before.

  SOMEHOW SHE HAD MADE her way back to the citadel after Dan’s murder. Maybe it was the sword she carried naked in her hand. Maybe it was the look in her eye.

  She had somehow found the presence of mind to put the sword away before approaching the heavily fortified gate through which they had exited that fateful morning.

  She was recognized and admitted quickly. She knew her pale skin counted little and her U.S. passport even less—if she crossed the powers-that-be in the camp she wouldn’t be the first American citizen to end her days in the cage, nor the first American woman. But whatever his relationship with the mining camp and its warring directors, Publico’s patronage was a powerful shield for her.

  She had been forced to leave Dan’s body behind. There was no way to carry it while she threaded her way through the maze of hazards back to the central compound.

  Gomes had assured her his bosses would recover the body. He scoffed at the notion there was any part of the camp the security forces dared not go, although privately Annja was inclined to believe Lidia. But she suspected the main gangs of that part of the colony had temporarily exhausted themselves, fighting each other, as well as the intruding Promessans, and would hunker down licking their wounds rather than oppose a patrol of official enforcers.

  It all meant little to her.

  Dr. Lidia do Carvalho had paid her a visit in her chambers as she packed for the trip’s final leg. Each expressed pleasure the other had made it out alive. The doctor asked if Annja might please help her young daughter. Although she obviously felt constrained in what she said, supporting Annja’s suspicion the rooms were bugged, Annja got the strong impression the little girl was being held hostage for her mother’s compliance.

  Annja felt genuine sympathy. Yet she had to tell the doctor there was nothing she could do for the child until she had finished what she was doing now. Lidia, though obviously disappointed, thanked her for her kindness and left.

  Annja wished she could help. But Dan’s death had sealed her, it seemed, to his viewpoint. She felt Lidia’s pain. But Lidia and her daughter were only individuals. How could a the welfare of single individual or even two be weighed against the common good?

  The Promessans had committed grievous crimes, against all humank
ind, as well as Annja and Dan. By withholding their knowledge they caused enormous suffering.

  Now Annja would wrest the secrets forcibly from the Promessans’ grasp or die trying.

  And in return she would give them retribution.

  THE MERCS ALONG THE RAIL grew impatient with the would-be hunter. They stopped screeching at the still-unseen monkeys and began to chant, “Billy, Billy,” as Lieutenant McKelvey, a nervous American probably in his early thirties but with the receding hairline, lined face and stress-sunk eyes of a middle-aged man, ran around trying to bring them back to some kind of order.

  Billy shouldered his rifle. Still no targets presented themselves. He held his fire. As if to assert his own dominance, he brandished his rifle above his head, miming triumph. Annja stopped straining her eyes at walls of green—always seeking the tree with nine trunks—to watch the proceedings. She felt a mild stirring of professional anthropological interest.

  The chanting subsided. Annja was unsure why. Billy shook the rifle and grinned at his comrades below him. Annja raised a brow. That teeth-baring display was certain to be interpreted by the monkeys as a threat, and Annja wondered how they would react.

  Nothing prepared her, or any of the hard men on the riverboat, for what streaked out of the dense green brush like a line of shadow.

  Annja heard it hit, a distinct thump, with a slight crunching sound like gravel beneath a boot. Billy’s grin froze on his sun-reddened face. He glanced down at his chest. The butt of an arrow stood a handsbreadth from his sternum. The fletching was black as crows’ wings.

  “An arrow?” he said in a puzzled voice.

  He pitched forward. His body cleared the rail by a couple of inches to plunge into the reeking, tannin-stained water, raising a greasy splash to wet the chests and legs of his comrades, who stood gaping with an utter lack of comprehension at what had just happened.

  Billy bobbed back to the surface. He floated on his back with his arms outflung, eyes staring sightlessly at the hard blue sky. Red stained the yellow water around him. The arrow jutted up from his chest like some defiant banner.

  With a furious scream a mercenary raised a machine gun and emptied the big box of .223-caliber ammunition clamped to its side into the undergrowth. Instantly the others joined in, blasting the greenery on full-auto with assault rifles and light machine guns and the shotguns.

  Lieutenant McKelvey shouted himself hoarse trying to get them to cease fire. The boat groaned low in the water from the weight of ammunition as much as other supplies for the small expeditionary force. But in a serious fight those crates could be used up quickly.

  In the end he drew his own side arm, a Springfield Government Model .45, and fired it in the air in an attempt to stop the mindless explosion of firepower. What stopped them, though, Annja thought, was simply that they’d exhausted their magazines.

  The fury ebbed from the men as they broke out empty magazines and replaced them with full boxes. In part it was because of the utter lack of response to their bullet storm. Some wood splinters flew, some branches fell, a green flurry of leaves flew up in the air to settle on the slow flow of the river. A flight of small scarlet birds rose twittering hysterically from a nearby tree and flew inland in a colorful cloud.

  Otherwise, nothing. No screams. No bodies. Not even more arrows. When the hammering racket of the gunfire ceased, the silence was complete.

  The boat chugged on. Bellowing orders, the captain got the helmsman to turn the wheel over hard to port and swing the stubby bow back toward the middle of the broad river.

  Billy’s body was left bobbing in the wake. No one seemed inclined to get the captain to halt the boat or make any effort to reel in the body.

  Annja had avoided interaction with the hired guns as much as possible, aside from their none-too-effectual lieutenant. She didn’t want them to notice her, even though she knew they had been instructed to follow her orders instantly and without question. But now she turned to one who stood near her holding a big shotgun tipped over a camo-clad shoulder.

  “What happened to never leaving a man behind?” she asked.

  “He lost. Let the gators have him,” the man said.

  NO MATTER HOW IT FELT the heat was probably not greater at night, Annja thought. She tried to sleep. Only the crush of fatigue had driven her at last, long after sunset, from her self-appointed lookout at the Marlow’s bow. She had exacted promises from Captain Lambert and Lieutenant McKelvey that they would detail men to keep watch throughout the night for the nine-trunked tree.

  The heat where she lay on her thin pallet before the wheelhouse, unallayed by the rain that had fallen earlier, made sleep hard to find. The mosquito netting she had formed into a sort of pup tent above her restricted such airflow as there was from the boat’s slow, steady passage upriver. And when sleep came, the images she saw were anything but soothing.

  She came awake to great weight pressing down on her body and stinking breath filling her nose and sinuses. Her eyes snapped open.

  A beard-stubbled face loomed inches above hers. The mosquito netting had been stripped away. Starlight gleamed in pale slitted eyes. The mercenary smiled.

  “We’re gonna have us some fun, honey.” She felt the hot kiss of steel against her throat. “Scream and I’ll cut you.”

  26

  For a moment Annja stared into the man’s narrow and hard face. Then she sighed and went limp.

  “That’s right, honey,” the man said in his Midwestern accent. “Just take it easy. You’ll like it. You’ll like it so good you’ll think you never got it before.”

  He laid the flat back of his combat knife between her breasts, slid its tip into her thin blouse beneath the top buttoned button. “Once you do Ranger,” he said, “you won’t never be a stranger.”

  Annja moved like a viper striking. Her left hand shot out to seize his knife wrist, shoving it and the big blade, gleaming in starlight, to the side. It cut loose her blouse button as she whipped it away.

  His eyes widened. His smile turned nasty.

  “So you want to make it interesting—”

  He sat astride her belly. He was too far up to control her long, powerful legs. With her foot flexed she snapped a kick against the back of his head, hard.

  His head whipped forward. He reared back upright in reaction, waving the knife wildly. He had come up onto his knees, taking most of his weight off her. She whipped up her legs. Her feet went around his neck. She locked ankle over ankle.

  Tucking her arms like a boxer’s, clenching her fists, clenching her whole body to aid her effort, she rolled to the right with all her strength and weight.

  The man’s neck broke with a nasty sound.

  The motion threw his body off her. It flopped like a fish in the scuppers in a final spasm.

  She jumped up. Her nostrils were flared, her eyes wide and furious.

  She had an audience. At least a dozen men were gathered around, standing or squatting to watch the show.

  She swept them with a glance like lasers.

  “Anybody else want to play?” she challenged them.

  If they rushed her she was ready to summon the sword. But in a way she already had. The mystic steel had entered her spine, her soul. The fires of its forging blazed through her eyes.

  One by one the men slunk away.

  AT ABOUT TEN the next morning a French man the others called Taffy stood leaning over the starboard rail trailing his fingertips in the swelling yellow wake of the boat. Annja was in the bow doing some stretching in the limited space. The former paratrooper was perhaps twelve or fifteen feet from her. Sudden movement drew her eyes. An object like a blunt arrow broke the yellow swell. It was a huge black caiman.

  The alligator-like reptile’s mouth was open wide, showing pale yellow-pink lining and lots of teeth. It slammed shut like a bear trap on the Frenchman’s arm. The broad, tapering head enveloped the limb to within six inches of his shoulder.

  The Frenchman screamed in a clear falsetto. With a wrenc
h of its huge body the caiman pulled him over the rail and into the water with a foam-edged splash.

  Another shoot-out instantly followed. The mercs seldom strayed far from their weapons by choice, and doubly so since the arrow had come out of the green blankness of the woods. They emptied their magazines again into the roiling water. Annja wondered if they remembered their comrade was in there with the caiman, or whether they wanted to save him from a horrible death. Maybe they just didn’t give a damn.

  MORE ARROWS FLEW from the shadowed bank when the boat wandered near in late afternoon. All fell short, disappearing into the river. With none coming near and McKelvey glaring at his men with a hand on the butt of his side arm, the mercenaries did not respond with a storm of fire. Instead they gripped their weapons hard and watched the jungle edge with hot, straining eyes. The boat scuttled back out toward the middle of the river.

  Lieutenant McKelvey tried to strike up a conversation with Annja. He seemed diffident, more than half-ashamed. Perhaps he felt embarrassed by how little control he had over his men, who squabbled often and violently now, and seemed to refrain from falling on and killing each other solely because of the imminent prospects of easier prey.

  She wondered how such an ineffectual man could find himself in charge of such predators in human form. She saw no better reason than that the mercenaries’ masters, back at the gold camp or beyond, had decreed him so. The mercs with regular military experience, she knew, were massively conditioned to obey anyone their superiors told them to.

  Mostly Annja tuned the lieutenant out, as she tuned out the bugs that swarmed and buzzed and bit incessantly. He was a tool to the great purpose she felt called on to serve. Not a good tool, particularly—and he and his men were likely too many or too few for what lay ahead. But they would serve well enough if the dangers of their quest wore them away instead of her, so long as she was left to face the final and greatest challenge.