Rogue Angel 46: Treasure of Lima (11 page)

18

Being watched was a familiar sensation for Annja, not only due to her penchant for dangerous confrontations that tended to breed enemies of a certain type but also because she happened to be the host of an internationally broadcast television show. People liked celebrities and little by little, like it or not, that was what Annja was becoming.

She did not, however, expect to run into any rabid fans out here in the midst of the jungle, so the fact that the watcher was remaining unseen put a little different spin on the situation.

Her first thought was that it might be an animal. Cocos Island had several species large enough to cause such a reaction, but there seemed to be a sense of intent to the feeling that was all too human in nature. She was being watched and it wasn’t just idle curiosity from one species to another.

That meant there was a specific purpose behind it.

Annja did nothing to reveal the fact that she was aware of the scrutiny, just continued with what she was doing, but now she was watching the nearest tree line from beneath half-lidded eyes, searching for something that didn’t belong. If she could pinpoint where the watcher was hiding...

Annja made a big show out of banging her boots off against a nearby tree and then sat down to pull them on and lace them up. As she did, she caught a glimpse of something moving among the shadows cast by the trees about half a dozen yards ahead of her.

Gotcha!

The figure was definitely bipedal, but it was staying back far enough that it was hard to get a good look at how big it might be.

Had one of the men decided to take an illicit sneak peek or two while she changed? She dismissed the idea. Neither of them seemed the type, never mind the fact that because they would have had to come from the other direction they wouldn’t have had time to loop around.

Someone else, then,
she thought.
A member of Dr. Knowles’s expedition, maybe? One of the missing crew members—if they’re even missing, that is—off the Sea Dancer? The individual who left the Supay mask in the Dancer’s galley?

She didn’t know.

But she planned to find out.

Annja kept the figure in her peripheral vision as she pretended to dig through her backpack for something she needed. She squatted on the balls of her feet, prepared to push off at a moment’s notice, and she could feel the adrenaline flood her system as she readied herself for action. Timing was going to make the difference between success and failure, and she was waiting for that certain feeling when being watched changed slightly as the watcher momentarily looked away, and when it came she intended...

Now!

Annja leaped to her feet and raced directly toward where she thought her mystery watcher was hiding. She kept her gaze focused on that same spot as she ran, not wanting to miss whoever it was if they decided they’d rather get away than face her directly.

It was a good thing she did, too, for the figure bolted the instant he or she realized they’d been seen.

Annja didn’t waste any time talking. She just called her sword to hand and gave chase.

Her sudden approach had allowed her to close some of the distance between them and she caught a glimpse of a dark-haired man with deeply tanned skin wearing something colorful around his head as he turned and took to his heels.

Annja had always prided herself on staying in shape, and her daily exercises both with and without the sword had honed her body into a finely tuned piece of machinery, but this guy made her look as if she hadn’t run a day in her life. He took off through the trees like a gazelle on speed, slipping beneath branches, leaping over fallen logs and undergrowth, until he disappeared from view before she could get a better look at him.

Knowing there was no way to catch up or even keep pace with him given her current condition, Annja slowed and then turned back the way she had come. She spent a few minutes searching about, trying to find the spot from which the stranger had been watching her, but she couldn’t find any evidence that he’d been there at all, not even a footprint or a broken branch.

It was as though he’d been nothing more than a ghost.

At least that would explain how he’d been able to move so quickly, Annja thought wryly.

She released her sword, sending it back into the ether, and glanced in the direction of where she’d left the others, wondering if they had seen anything themselves.

* * *

“I
T
WAS
A
SETUP
.”

Those were the words that Marcos greeted her with as she emerged from the trees. In his hands was a backpack, presumably the one Hugo had been running to investigate when he’d been caught in the quicksand.

“Why a setup?” she asked.

In response, he opened the top flap on the backpack and let her look inside.

It was full of nothing but stones.

Someone had filled the pack in order to weigh it down and had then set it where it would be seen.

“I’m telling you it was a setup,” Marcos said again. “No question about it. The hat was the lure to catch our attention, and the bag was the bait to make us go after it!”

Annja really couldn’t fault his logic. If the backpack had still been full of whatever gear it had originally contained she might have disagreed, but the presence of the stones made the placement of the bag deliberate.

Someone had wanted them to see it. Someone had wanted them to investigate it.

Someone had wanted them to run afoul of the quicksand pit.

Annja had a hunch she’d just seen one of those responsible; she suspected that there were more.

She told the others about the man she’d seen watching her while she’d been tending to her muddy clothes and of how she’d tried to chase him down. Though they hadn’t been more than a hundred feet away from one another at any point, the thickness of the jungle foliage had kept the others from getting a glimpse of Annja’s mysterious watcher or even knowing that something was happening with her. It was a sobering reminder that they were generally safer if they stayed together in a group.

Marcos was far from pleased. “I knew it!” he said, smashing one big fist into his other hand to emphasize his statement. “Which way did he go? We’ve got to hunt this guy down.”

“No, we don’t,” Claire said, and the sharp, command-oriented nature of her tone surprised Annja. She wouldn’t have thought Claire was capable of it and she was even more surprised when the other woman went on.

“Our priority is to find Knowles,” Claire said. “Anything beyond that is secondary.”

Find
Knowles?

That seemed an odd way for Claire to refer to her husband, but Annja put it off as stress and didn’t dwell on it. Besides, Claire was right; finding Dr. Knowles and his missing team was their most important goal right now.

“I agree with Claire,” Annja said to Marcos. “It makes no sense to go charging off into the jungle searching for a guy we barely caught a glimpse of. Better to continue with our plan, but keep your eyes open as we go.”

“This guy tried to kill us and you just want to let him go?”

Annja shook her head. “We don’t know that,” she insisted. “Hugo wasn’t in any danger of dying, not with the rest of us here. He may have simply been lured into the quicksand in an effort to scare us off, get us to leave. And we’re not
letting
whoever it was go. We don’t have any idea where he is or how to find him, so what’s the point of wasting time trying to do so when we have other priorities?”

“Because they’re dangerous,” Marcos insisted. “Think about it. First, contact with Knowles and his group is lost. Then the crew of the
Sea Dancer
goes missing without a trace. It seems pretty obvious to me that we’re next.”

But Annja disagreed; she didn’t think it was obvious at all. “We don’t know what happened to Knowles or to the crew of the
Dancer.
More likely than not they’re two separate, isolated events that just seem connected to each other because of their proximity. We can’t really be certain until we find the doctor and his team.”

“I still don’t like it,” Marcos said, but he left it at that and didn’t argue any further.

“So now what?” Hugo asked.

Claire said, “According to what Richard told me on the phone, he and his team made camp their first night about a half hour north of our present position, close to a small waterfall. No reason we shouldn’t, as well.”

Doing so had a couple of key advantages, Annja knew. First and foremost, it would allow her and Hugo to wash the rest of the quicksand from their bodies and clothes, which they would both be thankful for. Second, it would give everyone some much-needed rest before pushing on the next morning to the former expedition’s last known position.

And it would give me time to check our tail, see if there was anyone hanging about who shouldn’t be.

Annja could live with that.

They gathered their gear and resumed their march, heading inland, deeper into the jungle. This time Marcos took point and Annja didn’t bother to question his doing so. If it made him feel better being out in front, so be it. She settled into position at the rear of their little formation, happy enough to keep an eye on the trail behind them.

Roughly forty minutes later they emerged from the tree line to find themselves standing on the rocky edge of a large pool of water. On the other side was a sheer cliff face rising up a hundred feet or more, and it was from the center of this edifice that the waterfall Claire had mentioned earlier spouted. Its waters poured over the drop in a thrumming roar and filled the pool in front of them, before racing away down the length of a fast-running river to the east. Two dozen yards away, on a bend in the river, was a stony beach that would serve as their camp for the night.

It had been a long day and all of them were tired from their exertions, so they quickly hiked around the pool and crossed to the other side of the stream to set up camp along the beach. A broken tent spike and a discarded length of rope told them that they weren’t the first to camp here, validating Claire’s report that her husband’s team had done the same before them.

They built a fire pit by bringing some large rocks together in a circle and then set up the tents around the pit, one at each cardinal point of the compass so that all of their doors were facing inward toward the fire.

By the time they finished, the sun had dropped below the tree line, leaving them in heavy shadow. It wouldn’t be too long before it was fully dark. Before that happened, Annja wanted to take advantage of the nearby pool and waterfall to wash off the rest of the detritus left over from the quicksand.

Hugo joined her and the two of them took turns standing guard for each other as they washed the grit and grime from their bodies as well as their clothing and boots. When they were done they carried their wet gear back to the fire and laid it out near the flames to get them to dry.

Dinner was a rehydrated stew that Marcos whipped up and Annja had to admit it was pretty decent fare. For camp food, that is. Knowing she needed to replenish the energy she’d burned fighting the pirates and rescuing Hugo, Annja even helped herself to seconds.

The bath had given Annja some time to think about the events thus far. She had originally been under the impression that Dr. Knowles’s team had suffered some kind of accident—perhaps a tunnel collapse had buried most of the team members alive or a freak storm had knocked out their communications gear, cutting them off from the mainland—but as her own team encountered increasingly targeted acts of disruption, she was beginning to rethink that hypothesis. When viewed in a different light, all of the strange encounters they’d endured to date had been attempts to keep them from investigating the island or, once there, to keep Annja and her companions from pushing onward.

The pirate attack might have been chance, but then again it might have been deliberately planned to keep them from ever reaching Cocos Island.

The crew of the
Sea Dancer
might have gone off of their own accord or they may have been abducted and their boat deliberately seeded in the
Pride
’s path to serve as a warning to Annja and her team.

Even the stunt with the baseball cap and backpack had seemed more of a warning to Annja than any serious attempt to cause them harm.

That led her to believe that whoever was on the island with them was more interested in getting them to turn away and go back to Costa Rica than in hurting them or worse.

After all, why resort to violence, and the mess it brought with it, if you could scare your rivals into turning away of their own accord?

Rivals. That’s it!

They were facing a rival group of treasure hunters; she was suddenly convinced of it. And not just any group of rivals but one that was not afraid to push the envelope a little in trying to get first Knowles’s, and now Annja’s, team from heading deeper into the jungle after the treasure.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise her to discover that one or more of Knowles’s own crew had gone rogue and tried to claim the treasure as their own. They would have known that Richard’s wife would come looking for him and would have only needed to plant a watcher in Puntarenas to keep an eye out for her arrival. Once Claire had come up on their radar, so to speak, they could have easily staged any of the incidents to date.

The only thing that seemed out of place was the recurring use of the Incan death-god motif. Unlike the Greek or Egyptian pantheons, in which gods like Zeus, Aphrodite, Set and Anubis were household names, very few people were familiar with the deities and demigods of the Incans. Even fewer people would know that the grinning, horn-headed god named Supay, the same one they’d encountered twice today, was the Incan version of the devil and was therefore an excellent choice to symbolize the potential danger they were getting into if they continued pushing onward with the expedition.

She pondered that for a few minutes longer and that was all it took for her to come up with a solution. It was a given in archaeological circles that one cannot truly come to know a native culture without studying that culture’s religious beliefs. Since Knowles was an expert on South American cultures, it stood to reason that he would have people working for him that were not only familiar with the Incan civilization but also with its pantheon of gods.