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are dauntless!"
Publico showed him a frown, then he glared about at the council members.
"If you will not make a place for me at your table, gentlemen," he said, "I
shall be compelled to force one open."
"Others have tried that before, Sir Iain," the American said with heartiness
as false as his accent.
"But never I."
Again, there was no reaction. A lesser man might have quailed at the utter
certitude their blandness showed. But such a man would never have pushed his
way in there in the first place.
"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.
Chapter 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.
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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
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