Provenance

by Alex Archer

  “If you just believed in yourself you could catch one,” Clarice told Annja. “Get him to take you for a nice cruise—What?”

  Annja shuddered.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Clarice said.

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  Clarice set her generous mouth. “All right. Be that way.”

  “She will,” Mindy said, spearing a bit of lettuce. “She always is.”

  BACK IN HER LOFT Annja stood gazing at her couch by the light of a lamp with a black metal shade. She had changed to russet sweats, a green T-shirt and running shoes. “Do I really spend too much time here with my papers and artifacts?” she wondered aloud.

  Of course not, she assured herself. She trotted the globe almost incessantly, both for Chasing History’s Monsters and on adventures of her own that were far less publicized.

  But the evenings she spent on her sofa reading papers and arcane journals—not to mention alt. archaeo and alt.archaeo.esoterica—struck her now as sadly symptomatic of a major hole in her life. She couldn’t escape it even by racing around the world.

  Get off this track in a hurry, she told herself sternly.

  Her eyes strayed to the end of the couch. The emerald pendant Garin had lent to her that night on the Ocean Venture was strung over the heavy wood frame like a cheap Mardi Gras trinket from New Orleans. He had insisted she keep it. When she tried to demur, saying it made her feel uncomfortable, he only laughed.

  “Our destinies are intertwined anyway,” he told her. “A bauble more or less makes no difference either way, don’t you see?”

  He had a point, she had to admit. She had hung it there, in plain sight, almost defiantly. She figured in the event anyone burgled her loft they’d leave it alone, figuring it had to be paste and gold paint.

  She sat down on the couch, clicked on the television. Tuning it to a station that was showing a documentary on sea turtles—innocuous enough—and turning the volume just low enough to provide a reassuring murmur of background noise, she opened her notebook computer and went to download her e-mail.

  She had just gotten engrossed in the current flame war regarding the true origins and purpose of the famous giant stone Olmec heads when her skylight exploded in a tinkling cascade of gleaming glass shards, and men dressed all in black came sliding on ropes into her living room.

  5

  Annja pushed the computer off onto the couch and leapt to her feet. Her rational mind was gridlocked. This is totally impossible, this can’t be happening, things like this don’t happen, it doesn’t make any sense—

  Fortunately her body had long since learned how to react to immediate danger without relying on her brain. The sword appeared in her hand almost as if by its own accord.

  The men descending from the shattered skylight in a downward roil of humid air were dressed in black, from boots to masks. Unlike the balaclavas worn by the Ocean Venture hijackers these lacked mouth holes. The intruders carried what looked like submachine guns of a design unfamiliar to Annja.

  Two landed in the middle of her hardwood floor. They turned to her. With her left hand Annja scooped up a heavy fossil of a large chambered nautilus that a paleontologist friend had given her. She threw it at the one on her left. He raised a black-clad arm to protect his face.

  The heavy stone crunched when it hit his arm. Whether it broke the bone or not he reeled back, off balance. His partner seemed nonplussed by the fury of her counterattack—and by the sight of her suddenly swinging a broadsword with a three-foot blade in her right hand.

  Belatedly he started to lift his weapon. She slashed him diagonally across the neck. He fell back clutching at his blood-spurting throat.

  Taking the sword’s hilt in both hands Annja screamed her fury at the violation of her sanctum and swung with all her might at the man who had deflected the fossil with his arm. That arm dangled. He tried to aim at her one-handed. Her blade caught him at the juncture of neck and shoulder and bit deep into his torso. He dropped to his knees.

  He was wearing body armor. It didn’t surprise her. It also gave little protection against her sword, which struck at the edge of his shell and found flesh. Hard-shell armor would bind her blade worse. She put her hips into yanking the weapon free.

  The man fell onto his masked face. His blood soaked into her throw rug.

  It occurred to her that if this was some SWAT team she was in big trouble. In her anger she didn’t care. She respected the police, but she also respected a document some people seemed to think irrelevant—the Bill of Rights. She couldn’t square masked paramilitaries kicking down people’s doors and invading their homes without presentation of warrant with the protections supposed to be guaranteed to Americans—which no act of Congress nor stroke of presidential pen was supposed to be able to contravene. No matter what kind of “official” sanction these men could have, to her mind their actions made them nothing but violent criminals.

  And if she had to flee the country, live on the run—well, Garin and her mentor Roux had been living outside the law for centuries. She would learn from them, or learn on her own.

  Two more men rushed at her. Beyond the light cast by her lamp she saw more figures descending from the skylight’s jagged blackness. Her heart sank. How many of them are there? she wondered desperately.

  She parried an overhand sword cut from the nearer man, on her left. The sound of steel on steel was ringing in her ears before the realization struck her—there was no SWAT team anywhere in the United States whose members carried short-swords slung in scabbards over their backs. Belatedly she realized she had seen the hilts protruding above the shoulders of the first two men she had cut down. Her mind had refused to assimilate them at first, so unexpected were they.

  Reflexively she had thrown her right hand up any which way in response to the stimulus of seeing the two-foot straight blade flashing toward her eyes, and stopped it with the flat of her own weapon. Shouting again in anger she spun right, dropping her weight as she did so. Her sword sang a rising, skirling song as it slid across the other’s edge and whipped free. The second man, trying to close on her right, danced back to avoid its downward-slashing tip.

  She went low, scything out with her right leg in a spinning sweep. The first attacker did not expect the move. It took him in the side of the right calf and knocked both legs right out from under him.

  She completed her spin, driving with her left leg, coming up from the floor, slashing up and right with her sword. The second man hacked at her. Metal rang like a bell, a high pure note. Then the intruder was staring in stunned amazement at the stump of his sword blade, cut off clean from his cross hilt.

  Another intruder vaulted over the man she’d swept. She spun back into him, slashing him across the torso. He uttered a hoarse shout, muffled by his mask, as his legs flew out from under him. He fell across his comrade on the floor even as that man tried to regain his feet.

  At the same time Annja fired her right leg in a back kick into the man whose sword she had broken. He staggered back.

  Swordsmen surged toward her. How many she couldn’t even tell. Motion yanked her eye upward, above them. A man was sliding down a rope and aiming his machine pistol at her. She turned, darted a few steps and dove over the back of the sofa.

  As she landed on her tucked-in shoulder and rolled over she heard a stuttering. It sounded more like an air gun than a suppressed firearm, even one firing subsonic rounds. It sounded almost like a paintball gun.

  To her surprise no bullets punched through the sofa after her. The wooden backing was pretty solid, but she didn’t think it would stop bullets.

  Her assailants left her little time to puzzle over that. She sensed someone looming over the couch. She turned, drew her legs in and kicked the heavy sofa over, back to front. The top of it slammed into the man’s thighs, knocked him down and pinned him.

  Annja got her legs under her and launched herself in a mad sprint the several steps to her kitchen. Spice jars on a metal r
ack hung from the wall shattered as a burst barely missed her. At the kitchen’s far end a window led out onto a fire escape. Expecting at any instant to feel bullet impacts hammering her back she yanked it open and swung herself legs-first onto the landing.

  She went down the first few metal steps on all fours, like a monkey. She was scarcely aware of having released the sword back into the otherwhere. There were just too many intruders to fight. Her only hope lay in flight.

  Though the rungs and rail were slick with an ever-renewed coat of pigeon droppings she sped down them, released the last stage to drop with a clang. If anyone shot at her as she pounded down the last few steps and dropped the several feet to the alley they missed her.

  She ran.

  FOR A DAZED INTERVAL she wandered the fever-humid nighttime streets, ducking in and out of alleys and trying to avoid the lights and other pedestrians as much as possible. She did not want to be seen. She wasn’t sure whether or not she was soaked with blood.

  That it all belonged to her attackers was certainly a comfort. It wouldn’t make it any easier to explain to the authorities, though.

  Despite the mugginess she hugged herself as if she were cold. Her teeth actually chattered.

  It took an unknown span of time before she began to wonder at the strength of her own reactions. Being attacked so suddenly and violently in her own home was an emotionally devastating experience. She felt at once violated and unmoored from reality.

  Her part of Brooklyn was largely given to settled but run-down residences and businesses just scraping by, interspersed with pockets of gentrification and gaping wounds of derelict buildings. That was one of the reasons she was able to afford the space she had.

  The streets were never truly deserted there, any more than anywhere else in the five boroughs. But most businesses closed at night, and concentrations of foot or vehicular traffic were relatively rare. It simplified her task of staying out from in front of anybody’s eyeballs.

  The few people she did encounter tended to take one look at her and walk quickly in another direction.

  Eventually she found a recessed doorway in a dark alley and simply slumped in it. Should anyone see her, with any luck they would take her for another of the homeless who haunted Brooklyn. And if anyone took her for prey, for a mugging or worse—well, that would be the worst mistake of their life. Not to mention the last.

  She started to cry. The intensity of the emotion pouring out of her amazed her and scared her all over again. But she knew better than to try to fight it. She just let it out in ragged sobs, trying no more than to keep herself from making too much noise and attracting attention.

  At last she vented enough terror and anger and despair to get control of herself. She sucked in great breaths of garbage-flavored alley air. It contained just enough oxygen to begin to clear her head.

  What happened? she asked herself. She shook her head as tears stung her eyes again. There simply weren’t any answers. Not rational ones. Certainly not good ones.

  Misdirected no-knock raids, based on lies from paid informants eager to pass information on to their handlers so they would get paid, or get their next fix, or on something as banal as a mistyped address, were becoming a disgraceful commonplace event across the country. A SWAT raid targeting Annja might not even be a mistake. She had skirted a hundred laws in a score of countries, had poked her nose into places and matters where it most definitely had no business, in official eyes. In her own exacting estimation she had done nothing wrong. But not everything she had done was strictly legal.

  But this was no police raid. Not with swords. While the apparent fact her attackers weren’t any kind of law enforcement officers was good news, from the standpoint of her not going away to jail, it made things much worse by way of explanation.

  Who used those kinds of weapons? Along with her brushes with authority, in the course of her knocking around the world doing battle with those who would oppress the innocent, she had run afoul of any number of scary people. If they—or their survivors—had identified her and tracked her back to Brooklyn, an all-out attack on her residence would certainly not be beyond their moral scope. But in this day and age, who attacked like that?

  She put her face in her hands for a moment. Then she smoothed her hair back and took another deep, malodorous breath.

  It doesn’t make any sense, she thought. If they wanted to kill me, why not just open fire through the skylight? Or shoot me as they rappelled down from the ceiling.

  Whoever attacked her had wanted to capture her alive. The thought gave her a fresh set of the shivers. What were they going to do with me once they caught me?

  She shook her head. “All right,” she said out loud. “I have lots of questions I don’t have any answers to right now. So the question I need to ask is, what do I do now?”

  She stood and took quick stock of herself. She was bruised in various places, mostly, she guessed, from diving over the sofa. She couldn’t find any punctures, though, and nothing seemed broken. She had blood spatters on her arms and suggestive sticky spots on her face. She wiped those away as best she could with her hands. Or at least smeared them enough so that they wouldn’t be readily identifiable. She hoped. As for the spots on her clothes she could do little except be glad she wore blue jeans. Her tan short-sleeve shirt was less fortunate.

  She started walking again, with no particular destination in mind. She had no cell phone, no money, no credit cards—and no apartment keys. She could probably rouse Wally, the building superintendent, out of bed to let her in. He was a decent old guy.

  Of course, he might have some uncomfortable questions if she turned up knocking on his door at weird o’clock in the morning looking as if she had just engaged in a swordfight with a bunch of guys dressed like ninjas. She knew she could be quite persuasive, but she had limits. And she did not want him becoming suspicious of her.

  More by accident, or subconscious design, than intention, she found herself within a couple of blocks of a little neighborhood tavern she had been in a couple of times. She wasn’t well-known there. That was a start.

  The place was loudly crowded and had big motorcycles parked outside. That was bonus. She tended to get along with all kinds of people, even fairly rough ones. She had learned that polite friendliness, offering neither submission nor challenge, went a long way. More to the point, the patrons would probably not be too nosy.

  She was wrong about that. About the male ones, anyway; too many heads for comfort turned to track her as she squeezed through the laughing, shouting throng. And far too many women gave her the evil eye. She was surprised by that, as she usually was by male attention.

  But it was blessedly dark inside the tavern, and the butt-to-belly crowding, if more intimate than she usually cared for, served her as well. The combination made it impossible for anyone to get a good look at her condition. And the fact that any blood left on her had long since dried, combined with her ministrations in the alley, meant she didn’t leave blood trail on the people she brushed against.

  The bathroom was lit by a single yellowish bulb. Apparently the owners were concerned about energy consumption—it seemed to draw about five watts. She caught another break in that no one was using the sinks when she slipped in, although a pair of women in the stalls were having a loud conversation about how nobody worthwhile was hitting on them.

  In the grimy mirror she smeared the blood spots on her shirt beyond recognition as anything out of the ordinary with the aid of water quickly dashed on from a cupped hand. Suspicious matting in her hair got more or less rinsed out. Most overtly alarming was the condition of her face—her eyes were puffy from her intense bout of crying. She looked as if she’d gone five rounds in the ring. Some more water thrown on her face and a brisk rub helped some.

  She managed to escape before the loud women emerged from the stalls.

  OKAY, SHE SAID to herself, walking the lonely streets again. Now what?

  The responsible, conventional, good-citizen thing t
o do would be to find a pay phone and call 911. And say what? Hi, I’m out on the street without any money or credit cards because my home was invaded by ninjas. Yes, you know. Ninjas. Like those Japanese assassin guys. Except I’m fairly sure they weren’t Japanese. No, this happened several hours ago….

  And how am I going to explain all the dead bodies and bloodstains in my apartment? she wondered.

  The strong desire to return home came over her. She doubted her attackers had hung around long once she fled. Even in New York the sounds of pitched battle might be expected to draw attention. Although it occurred to her the whole affair had been pretty quiet, all things considered, and the soundproofing was actually quite good in her building, testament to its industrial-grade construction. But in any event her attackers would not want to risk getting caught.

  She hiked back to her apartment. It wasn’t that far. Her wanderings had been more winding than linear.

  The fire escape still hung low, unsurprisingly. A faint light shone from her window. She jumped up, caught the bottom step, hauled herself up. Then she climbed the metal stairs, moving carefully to make no noise.

  The window had been closed. She put her back to the wall and risked a three-second look inside. A lamp burned in the living room. She saw no sign of anyone.

  She summoned the sword and tried the window. It was unlocked. She caught her breath when it creaked as she raised it. Then she bent over and stepped inside.

  She straightened. Something was wrong. Alarms yammered in her skull. Yet she did not turn and bolt back out the window and down the fire escape.

  Because she realized that what was wrong was that—nothing was wrong.

  The kitchen was clean. Intact spice jars lined the racks. They looked vaguely out of order, and she thought there had been more. But the floor was not a crunchy carpet of broken glass and cinnamon and thyme.

  Cautiously she moved to the living room entrance. She smelled the sharp tang of disinfectant.