1 APRIL 2003

2:20 P.M.

9780849943454_INT_0037_001.jpg

Aheadache had begun to hammer on Alex’s optic nerves by the time the sun stood directly overhead. Not wanting to be the first to suggest it was time they descended, she sipped from her water bottle, ate the oily peanut butter sandwich in her backpack, and sweated away her sunblock. The wide-brimmed straw hat she wore provided some shade, but already she could feel her shoulders and arms burning.

Two more hours passed before Kenneth Carlton announced that it might be time to descend. Olsson, who had been hanging by a rope from the platform edge, climbed back onto the raft and seemed surprised to discover that his teammates had wilted in the blistering heat.

“We are ready to call it a day?” he asked, looking around.

“More than ready,” Baklanov called, winking at Alex. “You have been in the shade for the last hour. We have been sizzling like—how do you say it?—eggs, sunnyside up.”

“The lodge is supposed to send someone to pick us up,” Carlton added. “I expect the man is down there waiting.”

“All right, then.” The Swede pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his neck. “Shall we let the ladies go first?”

Alex had assumed Lauren Hayworth would want to be the first to leave the platform, but that whimpering beauty developed a sudden interest in some odd berries her employer had collected. Deborah Simons probably wouldn’t have minded leading the way, but she was trying to coax a recalcitrant grasshopper into a specimen jar.

Drawing a deep breath, Alex crawled toward the porthole. “I’m ready.” She unsnapped the carabiner that held her to the safety rope. “Hook me up and send me down.”

The descent from the canopy raft was less taxing than the climb, but easily twice as frightening. “Abseiling,” Olsson had told them, “is as easy as falling out of a tree.”

Battling the heat and her headache, Alex scooted to the porthole’s edge and peered into the thicket below. This was not a tree from which she wanted to fall.

Olsson handed Alex a metal piece resembling a figure eight. “Remember how it’s done?”

“Barely.”

The corner of his mouth quirked in a grin. Apparently she wasn’t the first researcher to experience blank-brain on the edge of a leafy precipice.

“Hook this whale’s tail to the carabiner on your safety harness.”

When Alex hesitated, he reached out and attached it for her.

“Hold on to this rope with both hands.” He snapped a rope against her gloved palm. “Ease yourself into the opening, and release the rope slowly. If you let go, you will fall. Do not release the rope too quickly. But do not worry; you will get a feel for the proper pace. Let the rope slide between your fingers, and your body weight will carry you down.” He paused to mop his neck, then gave her a lopsided smile. “You can do this, yes?”

“Of course I can.” Moving with more confidence than she felt, Alex swung her legs into the porthole and gratefully eyed the thick green screen blocking her view of the forest floor. She could almost convince herself she was preparing to travel only a few feet. . .

Olsson wriggled his fingers in a farewell. “Away with you, then. The rest of us are ready for food and drink!”

Alex pushed off from the canvas, then caught her breath as the rope bobbed with her weight. Dangling in the center of the porthole, she moved her right hand below her left, releasing about six inches of rope, and felt her stomach lurch as she slid a corresponding number of inches downward. Yesterday she had glided out of the practice tree, content to know solid ground lay only a few feet away.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.”

She would not panic. She had no reason to fear. She would calm her pounding heart with slow, steady breaths and clear thinking.

Besides, what difference did the distance make? She had only to move a few inches at a time. Gathering her confidence, she lowered herself through the canopy, moving through vines, branches, and leaves she had scarcely noticed on the ascent. A group of chattering marmosets scattered at her approach while a toucan watched with interest from only a few feet away. Holding her breath, Alex glided slowly past them.

She traveled by less attractive animal forms as well. A muddy wasp’s nest stretched along one side of the tree’s wide trunk, a monstrous formation over six feet tall and four feet wide. Alex’s pulse quickened as she glided past the mound—one wrong sound or scent could agitate the insects.

“Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky. . .”

She heard herself gasping and paused to focus her thoughts. She would not panic. She could not panic, not here. She would think about the tree, about the strangler fig, which, according to Olsson, was a miracle of nature.

She removed her right hand from the rope, placed it below her left, and felt the rope slide beneath her gloves. Again, this time left hand under right.

Good. She was making progress. And her muscles were perfectly obedient.

She kept moving as Olsson’s voice replayed in her brain. Just this morning he had told them they were about to climb one of the most amazing trees in the jungle. Stranglers did not grow from the ground up, but from seeds dropped by birds onto the branches of other trees. A seed that managed to sprout on the branches of a stronger tree would send out tendrils and roots that eventually surrounded the host tree’s trunk and tapped into its water supply. As the host tree struggled to survive the invasion, the strangler kept growing, sending roots down to the earth while new branches and leaves shot toward the canopy and the life-giving sun. Eventually the old tree died, entombed by a parasite that had proven itself more adaptable to the climate.

“Nasty old tree,” Deborah muttered.

“Do not think of the strangler fig as evil,” Olsson had said, laughter in his voice. “It is only doing what it has evolved to do. And it benefits so many other life forms—its tangled roots and trunk offer shelter for an astounding variety of plant and animal life.”

Alex could see several of those life forms now. With the wasp’s nest safely overhead, her gaze fell upon a group of orchids and bromeliads scattered along a branch. Epiphytes flourished in the treetops, absorbing nutrients and water through fingerlike roots that stretched over limbs and sought out resting places in natural crevices. Brilliant blossoms of orange, white, and purple spangled the emerald canopy, and for an instant Alex felt the vague stirring of jealousy. If urgent personal concerns had not propelled her into neurology, she would have enjoyed botany.

Chalk it up as another of life’s cosmic pranks.

Trying to think about anything but the fact that her life depended upon a rope and a safety harness, her mind flittered over other jokes the universe had deigned to play on her. Her genetic heritage, for one. Her fatherless childhood, for another. The orthodontia she’d been forced to wear for four years while all her girlfriends were out of braces within twenty-four months, and her penchant for books, which in high school had repelled every teenage American male within ten miles.

She tightened her grip as her memory drifted toward her college years. Oh, the men had come around then—but they’d only wanted sex and/or information. Could she type a paper . . . and spruce it up a little? Could she do a little extra research while she was at the library? Gee, baby, if you love me, you’ll look up this one little thing . . .

One young man, however, had been quite capable of doing his own work . . . and little else. In medical school she had married teaching assistant Collin Wilt within days of finding out she carried his child and divorced him within weeks of discovering he cared more for his career than for her and the coming baby. She signed the no-fault divorce papers on Caitlyn’s one-month birthday, then kissed her daughter’s downy head and swore they would be okay. She’d reclaimed her maiden name, her room in her mother’s house, and her lifelong dream of going into research, only to find her dream shadowed by a pressing urgency—the doctors had diagnosed her mother with fatal familial insomnia, a genetic and fatal brain disease.

During the eighteen months of her mother’s illness, Alex read and researched and wrote countless letters to scores of other scientists working in the field, but whatever cosmic joker ruled the universe won the race against time. After her mother’s death Alex mourned her loss, tried to care for Caitlyn, and went back to her work, this time for her daughter’s sake.

Now she was convinced the infective agent that caused her mother’s disease was like a strangler fig—it had entered her mother’s tissues and begun to grow, slowly and steadily. It had entered Alex’s tissues, too, and probably Caitlyn’s.

With every passing day she became more convinced that FFI was not inherited—at least, not in a genetic sense. Studies of several types of prion-induced diseases had demonstrated that the infective agent could be transmitted orally, surgically, or through other means of ingestion. Surgeons had unknowingly passed it from one patient to another by the use of metal probes in neurosurgery; the agent had also been transmitted by the injection of human growth hormone derived from biological sources. Kuru, a prion disease found in New Guinea, spread through cannibalism, and every scientist in Europe now understood that cattle afflicted with mad cow disease had spread prions to dogs, cats, pigs, sheep, and humans. Prions had probably infected chickens, too, but the birds didn’t live long enough to show signs of the disease.

Prion diseases required time to develop . . . and the length of the incubation period depended upon the strain of disease being transmitted. For years researchers had assumed that fatal familial insomnia was the result of a genetic mutation among family members, but Alex believed the situation was far simpler—the prion that caused FFI passed from mother to child through the placenta in utero. Children did not become symptomatic for thirty, forty, or fifty years because each person’s metabolism functioned differently. Researchers had noted that stress seemed to hasten the onset of FFI, but perhaps the disease gained the upper hand because an individual’s immune system weakened during trying times, allowing the prions greater freedom to multiply. And if stress was an accelerant, she shouldn’t have been surprised a few weeks ago to find herself experiencing tingling limbs, panic attacks, and sleeplessness . . .

No. If Alex could help it, the cosmic joker would not have the last laugh this time.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star . . .”

She had descended to within twenty feet of the forest floor when a strident scream broke the stillness. Deborah Simons hung on the rope about fifty feet above her, but above Deborah, Lauren was flailing about in a full-fledged panic. Alex felt an icy finger touch the base of her spine as the line vibrated in her hand. More worrisome than the fear of falling, though, was the thought of the wasps—what if Lauren’s shrieking brought the pests out of their nest?

“How I wonder what you are.”

Not particularly eager to linger in such a precarious position, Alex loosened her grip and let the rope slide over her palms. She hit the ground more forcefully than she had intended, then fell backward into a patch of soft dirt Olsson had thoughtfully arranged for a landing zone.

Lazaro Mendez, a native guide who worked for the lodge, stepped up and gallantly offered her a hand. Accepting it, Alex scrambled to her feet, then moved out of the way. Deborah Simons landed a moment later.

Deborah chuckled as she unhitched her safety harness. “I see you had the same thought I did. Carlton’s going to have a time getting Lauren down.”

“I’m sure he’ll sweet-talk her through it.” Alex winced at the sound of sarcasm in her voice, but not even Deborah, who seemed oblivious to everything but bugs, could have missed the undercurrents between Carlton and his girlfriend.

Deborah smiled a grim little grin as she peeled off her gloves. “How long do you think they’ve been together?”

“Not long—or he’d have known she wasn’t up to a trip like this. I’m thinking Miss Hayworth is going to stay in her room tomorrow while Carlton hangs back and plays nursemaid.”

Stepping out of her harness, Deborah shook her head. “I don’t think Carlton is the nursemaid type. He’s probably not above hiring one, though.”

Alex glanced up, but she couldn’t see anyone but Lauren on the rope. The young woman had stopped flailing, though, and that was progress.

She forced a laugh. “What do you think, Deb? Should we ask Lazaro to take us back to the lodge? It might be an hour before the others get down.”

“It’ll go fast once the princess arrives.” Deborah bent her knees and sat in a squat, careful to keep the seat of her jeans off the muddy ground.

Imitating the entomologist, Alex stripped off her gear, then sat in the same fashion. “I’ll bet Mr. CEO is thinking he should have brought his sons to the jungle instead of his mistress.”

“All I’m thinking—” an impish grin lit Deborah’s face—“is that I owe the good Lord a big thank-you. I almost asked Lauren to tuck a couple of my specimen bottles in her backpack, but something told me I should reconsider. I’m so glad I did—with all that screeching, she would have rattled my poor bugs to death.” She took a deep, contented breath. “Yes sir, Jesus was really watching out for me.”

Alex stared up at the climbing rope as a wave of disappointment engulfed her. Until that moment, she had thought she and Deborah Simons might actually become friends.

Too bad.

Alex wanted nothing more than a speedy boat trip back to the lodge and a cold shower, but transportation in the Amazon was neither simple nor speedy. After regrouping on the ground, she and her teammates hiked twenty minutes to the place where Lazaro had left the boat. To her surprise, a jungle-style buffet waited in the clearing.

“I thought we’d be hungry for something more than sandwiches,” Carlton said, slipping his backpack from his shoulders. “We’ll have a snack here, rest a bit, then go on back to the lodge for a more substantial dinner.”

Alex dropped her pack into the safety of the boat, then looked around with delight. Two young men from the lodge had built a table of sticks and logs, upon which rested palm leaves spread with cooked fish and a neat stack of fresh plantains. She eagerly accepted a plantain from one of the boys, then walked back to the boat where she could sit and eat.

Her companions quieted as they concentrated on food, and the chirping sounds of the jungle rushed in to fill the gaps between their conversations. Alex peeled her plantain and ate slowly, staring mindlessly at a rotting tree trunk jutting out from the riverbank. Terraces of toadstools lined the wood while a line of ants traipsed in single file from one end to the other.

She shuddered slightly. Nothing went to waste in the jungle. The moment something fell, be it animal or plant, scavengers moved in.

When they had finished and cleaned up the area, Lazaro offered to teach them how to fish for piranha. Alex groaned inwardly as Carlton and Olsson leaped at the opportunity. She wanted to get back to the lodge to check on Caitlyn, but she couldn’t ask the entire team to accommodate her maternal impulses.

While the men accepted twigs, fishing line, and hooks from Lazaro, she stepped onto shore. Baklanov caught her eye as she moved toward a stand of trees. “Are you looking, excuse me, for a place to relieve yourself ?”

She laughed. “If I am, do you think I’d announce it?”

His mouth tipped in a faint smile. “I am sorry, I forget about the modesty of some American women. I will leave you alone. But be careful, my friend, of the insects. They sting.” He walked away, rubbing his backside. “Trust me, I know this from experience.”

Though Alex would have given twenty bucks for the chance to use a porcelain toilet in a modern bathroom, her bladder could wait. She sought solitude.

Taking care to keep the others in sight, she stepped carefully over the ground layer of the forest. Away from the river, the trees had reclaimed the sky, allowing only the faintest particles of sunlight to penetrate. The shade-loving plants, ferns, seedlings, and fungi grew here, and she recognized many of them—caladium and coleus, elephant’s ear, and a spectacular Heliconia, dripping with red and yellow flowers that looked more like crab claws than blossoms.

She waded through a tangle of vines, then bent to study a moving train of leaf-cutting ants. The biology films she had watched in school came to life before her eyes as the ants moved in an unbroken line from some tree at her left to a mounded nest a few feet to her right. Each ant carried a scrap of leaf larger than his own body, yet they seemed to have no problem hoisting them like tiny sails and carrying them home.

Squatting down, she rested her chin in her hand and studied the amazing creatures. Science had yet to plumb the mechanics of the ants’ collective consciousness. Though small and insignificant, they worked toward a common goal and cooperated not only with each other, but with nature itself. Leaf–cutting ants, she knew, did not actually eat the leaves they harvested, but offered them as food for a fungus in their nest. As the fungus consumed the leaves, it broke the plant material down into food for the ants.

She smiled against her palm. Such symbiotic relationships existed everywhere in the jungle, but they were rare in the civilized world. How many people would confidently help a stranger believing that the act would one day benefit them? She knew too many researchers who jealously guarded their research until they could publish the results, not thinking of the people they could help if they would only provide a clue to someone else in search of a cure for the same disease. . .

Sighing, she pressed her hands to her knees and stood. She would have to bring Caitlyn into the jungle and point out the leaf cutters. The lesson in cooperation would be good for her.

Her smile broadened at the thought of her daughter. Caitlyn had proved to be a precocious survivor, an uncomplaining traveler, and a brilliant student with a particular facility for language. Alex had worried that growing up in a single-parent family might cause Caitlyn to feel she was missing something, but over the years Collin’s desertion proved to be more silver lining than cloud. When Alex walked away from the marriage with an infant and twenty thousand dollars in outstanding student loans, she’d thought they’d need a miracle to survive. But now, ten years later, the loans had been repaid, she had risen to the top of her profession, and her team had made remarkable strides in the field of prion research. Without a husband, she had been free to travel, and her daughter had been happy to journey with her.

Instead of a father’s limited attention, Caitlyn had been schooled and spoiled by some of the world’s most brilliant scientists, including some of the people on this expedition. Since their arrival in Peru, she’d had the opportunity to hear Russian folk tales from Dr. Baklanov, stories of mountaineering from Dr. Olsson, and the hottest gossip from the French fashion industry, courtesy of Louis Fortier.

Alex knew Caitlyn might one day want to settle into a more traditional educational experience, but until then . . .

After glancing over her shoulder to be sure no one watched, she thrust out her arm, splayed her fingers, and watched for any sign of tremor. None—not yet, anyway. Perhaps she would still be around by the time Caitlyn graduated high school.

She dropped her arm and turned toward the sound of her companions’ voices. Before applying for this expedition, she had made certain her daughter could be safely entertained at the lodge while Alex worked in the field. Herman Myers, the American manager of Yarupapa Lodge, had assured her that Caitlyn could join the other lodge guests for the regular daily itinerary. Fortunately, this week the only other guests were two middle-aged sisters from Florida with extra time and money on their hands. Though they snapped photos of each other every ten minutes and squealed like tourists with a capital T, Caitlyn had warmed to them like a kid to a candy store.

Swatting at mosquitoes, Alex moved out of the forest and back into the clearing at the river’s edge. Their guide, Lazaro, stood on the bank to demonstrate the fine art of piranha fishing to Lauren. Deborah, Carlton, and Baklanov dangled lines in the water while Lauren suppressed a yawn. Louis Fortier paid the fishermen no attention; he had buried his face in a crimson flower the size of a dinner plate.

“First you thrash your pole in the water,” Lazaro said, whipping the brown water with a thin branch. “This tells the piranha that something has fallen into the river. Then you drop in the bait.”

Crossing her arms, Alex grinned at Milos Olsson, who held a fishfilled bucket with one hand and swatted at mosquitoes with the other. Apparently he had caught his fill of the voracious fish and was happy to give the lovely turista a chance to snag her supper.

After throwing Carlton a frown, Lauren accepted the stick from Lazaro, then let the baited hook fall into the water. For a moment she stood stiffly, her arms locked and extended, while Carlton laughed softly.

“Don’t think of them as man-eating fish,” he said, one corner of his mouth dipping in a wry smile. “Think of them as members of the board of directors. You’ve already proven you can handle the most bloodthirsty of them.”

As Alex felt a smirk lift her lips, Lauren squealed and jerked her pole away from the water. A razor-toothed fish with a decided underbite swung on the end of the line.

Lazaro laughed softly as he caught the flopping piranha by the tail. “Good job.” With two fingers he grabbed the fish behind the gills, then extracted the hook and tossed the creature into Olsson’s bucket.

Catching Alex’s eye, the guide smiled. “Want to see something?” Bending down, he picked up another piranha. “One of the gentlemen caught this half an hour ago. But watch.”

Carefully holding the piranha in his right hand, he scooped up a sardine and placed it near the piranha’s mouth. Without hesitation, the carnivore worked its jaws, chomping away at the smaller fish until nothing of the tail remained but a bloody nub.

Olsson stared down into his bucket. “Good grief, how long does it take them to die?”

“Long time.” Lazaro slipped the sardine’s remains onto the hook, then picked up the rustic fishing pole and arched a brow at Alex. “Señora, you want to fish?”

She stared at the simple apparatus—a pole, a line, a hook—then threw a longing glance at the boat.

“Actually,” she glanced at Carlton, “I was hoping we could head back to the lodge. I’m going to need a blood transfusion if these mosquitoes keep draining me.”

“A good idea.” Carlton placed his hand in Lauren’s back and prodded his mistress toward the boat. “Thank you, Lazaro, for the demonstration, but I think we’ll leave the other piranha alone. Perhaps tomorrow we’ll fish some more.”

“Thank you, Lord!” Deborah winked at Alex as she strode toward the boat. “God bless you, Dr. Pace.”

Breathing out an exasperated sigh, Alex followed the others.