Paradox

by Alex Archer

  Before she could take a step a heavy hand clamped her right bicep. Another got her left one. They felt like iron bands.

  Despite the length of her legs and her lean muscle weight, she felt herself picked up bodily off the ground. She smelled stale male sweat and harsh tobacco. Not a good sign. Not one little bit.

  Looking hurriedly around, as she was dragged back down the street and around the corner, she saw she'd been seized by a pair of burly, swarthy goons in ill-fitting suits. One had a shaved head; the other took the opposite tack with a shaggy head of hair. Both had thick moustaches. Both also wore impenetrably dark mirror shades.

  "I don't suppose the fact I've got an American passport will make much of an impression on you gentlemen, huh?" she said. "Huh. No. Thought not."

  It had been purely quixotic to ask—mostly to reassure herself with the sound of her own voice, and assert her personal power with a smart-ass remark.

  They bundled her into a four-door Mercedes sedan, black and shiny and imposing. Keeping a low profile didn't seem to be high on the agenda for this team.

  One of Annja's captors slid in beside her, staying firmly latched to her arm while the other went around to the other side and got in, pinning her between their bulky bodies. The car slid away from the curb.

  "Just to be fair," she said, "I'm giving you gentleman one last chance to let me go. Fair warning."

  Dark sunglasses still on, they exchanged looks past her. Then as one they started laughing.

  Annja formed her right hand into half a fist. The sword's hilt filled it with cool reassuring metal hardness. She leaned back against the luxuriant leather-upholstered seat, and jabbed before either man could comprehend what they had just witnessed.

  The man to her right screamed shrilly as the blade's edge bit into his face. The man to her left was struggling to shift his bulk. She felt him bunching to deliver some kind of retaliatory attack. She couldn't get much hip into her own blows but she did the best she could, swinging her body hard to ram the sword's pommel into his face. She felt teeth splinter.

  The other guy was thrashing and bellowing. Glancing back she saw his face fountaining blood from a long gash. Seizing the hilt with both hands Annja did quick nasty work in the tight confines. Periodically she gave his partner a quick slam with the hilt. The man on her right shrieked and convulsed. The inside of the driver's-side window and the rear window were sprayed with blood.

  As he slumped into a bubbling mass of torn cloth and violated flesh his compatriot recovered from his facial battering enough to grab Annja's arm again. He was still strong; she couldn't break free, especially with too little room to really get her hips into it.

  She opened her hand. The sword vanished. The astonishing sight made the assailant relax his grip slightly. Then she turned and jabbed him in the eye. He squealed.

  His shades were broken and askew on his face. Half-blind he tried to grab her again. He still hadn't given up the notion that he was big strong man and she was mere weak woman; he was relying on muscles and now adrenaline rather than going for the gun whose butt she could see tucked beneath his left armpit.

  As she fended off his blows Annja flicked a glance at the driver. He looked smaller than the two bruisers who'd picked her up—literally—but that was a relative thing. He was veering around some narrow street, dividing his attention between steering the big black SUV, looking in the rearview mirror to try to see what was going on in the backseat and bellowing what she thought were alternate curses and advice at the top of his voice.

  The guy on her right cocked a fist to smash her in the side of her head. She couldn't afford to lose consciousness now or even focus.

  Her problem was the car wasn't quite six feet side to side, internally. The sword was four feet long and there was no room to maneuver. She leaned way over the now quiescent, sodden body of her other assailant, held her right hand up and back at a wonky angle and formed it into a half fist again.

  Again the sword came to her call. The way her wrist was bent her grip was very weak. She wrapped her left hand over the pommel again and, turning hard, drove the sword with all her strength into her enemy's thick throat.

  She overdid it. She barely felt the blade's passage through the cartilage muscle and sinews of his neck, nor the seat padding. Only when the sword began to bite deeply into the metal of the car's body itself did she feel a shock of resistance.

  And then the blade was well and truly stuck. The driver had finally turned his head to see firsthand what was happening behind him.

  His eyes were wide with shock. The olive facial skin around his dark eyebrows and moustache was suffused with a dark hue that she figured was red; his blood pressure was headed toward detonation. Spittle flew from his mouth along with sounds Annja suspected weren't intelligible in Turkish or any other known human language. It was the primal speech of rage and terror.

  But he hadn't lost enough touch to forget his own handgun. He was obviously grabbing for it, while trying to bring the car to a stop.

  Annja released the sword. It vanished instantly back to the otherwhere. In the milliseconds she had to estimate, she didn't see any way to wield it effectively against the driver. Not before he got his own piece and started blasting her.

  But she wasn't tied to the Renaissance and its tools. The butt of the handgun belonging to the man she'd just killed was prodding her in the right bicep. She needed no more hint than that.

  Her left hand snaked over and dived inside his jacket. It was a wet mess, damp with a wider variety of fluids than she wanted to think about. Fortunately he didn't have one of those trick holsters that only work for a certain angle, or that you have to perform some kind of complicated ritual to get to disgorge its contents. For a while those had been all the vogue in law enforcement, to keep cops from having their guns taken away from them by suspects. Annja wasn't sure how that worked out; she personally thought that the point to carrying a firearm, which was at best heavy and inconvenient, was to have it instantly available at need.

  The dead man's piece was a Glock. It was boxy, reassuring and reliable and best of all had no external safety to try to fumble to flick off. Annja was ready in an instant.

  The driver came out with his own piece, a shiny chrome Beretta. Then he realized it was the wrong hand and the wrong angle to shoot into the backseat. His elbow was in the way, his shoulder not hinged to rotate far enough to bring the gun to bear.

  In his moment of dithering Annja rammed the Glock's blunt muzzle up into the notch of the man's jaw, right behind the ear. He continued to try to get his weapon aimed at her. Knowing she had no other choice, she pulled the long, heavy trigger.

  The gun's roar was astonishingly loud in the closed car. The brief, almost white muzzle flash illuminated a look of terrible terminal surprise on the man's face.

  The driver slumped forward over the steering wheel. The car continued to roll down the street. Fortunately it wasn't going very fast.

  It didn't matter. For any number of reasons, all of them good, all of them pressing, Annja was not going to stay in the charnel-house backseat a heartbeat longer than necessary. She threw herself over the slumped inert mass of the man on her right and yanked at the door handle.

  The door opened. An icy blast of air hit her in the face. The diesel fumes of downtown Ankara smelled as sweet as the finest garden in the height of summer next to what she'd been breathing the last desperate minute or two. Which was all the time the fight had lasted.

  She scrambled over the dead man and threw herself out the door. She tucked a shoulder and rolled. She still hit pretty hard, slamming her shoulder and then a hip. But she'd had gymnastic training and martial arts training in falling safely, plus way more experience at diving for safety on unsympathetic surfaces than she cared to think about. She wound up on her back staring up between dark, blank three-and four-story building faces at a dense, low cloud ceiling underlit to a sullen amber by the city lights. She was bruised, contused, but alive, conscious and with noth
ing she could detect broken or even dislocated.

  The car rolled another twenty feet, hopped the curb and slammed into a darkened light standard. The car's horn began to blare.

  Annja felt like just staying there a spell, enjoying the comforting cold hardness of asphalt on her back, the icy air on her face and in her lungs, the lovely, lovely clouds. Few beds had ever felt more welcome.

  But she knew better than that. Anyway, her body did. Survival instincts kicked in. She got to her feet quickly and stumbled away into the nearest pool of welcoming dark she could find.

  Chapter 8

  "Pick up. Pick up." Annja hated when people told her answering machine that. Now she was repeating it as fervently as a prayer, listening to the ring through her cell phone.

  She'd found herself a nice, dark, narrow alley. The smell of garbage was appalling enough, she imagined hopefully, to discourage even street bums.

  She was covered head to toe in blood drying to a sticky second skin. Although she was beginning to come down from the adrenaline rush, feeling shaky and clammy and not so happy in the stomach, her nerves still just stood out all over her like porcupine quills.

  She had fumbled and almost dropped the phone as she punched in the number. She cursed herself for not having put it on speed-dial.

  "Hello?"

  Her knees buckled. Never in any moment of her existence had she ever expected to hear sweet music in the voice of a man like Leif Baron.

  "It's me," she said.

  She wasn't sure if hostile ears might be listening to her conversation—which was, after all, being broadcast over the airwaves like any other radio transmission. She had to presume that any hitters heavy enough to plant a bomb on a man as high-ranking as a general, and send three goons in a top-of-the-line Mercedes to sweep the street of any witnesses, could well swing the resources to listen in on cell phone calls.

  There was a pause. Then, "Hello, me. What's gone wrong?"

  A breath she didn't even realize she was holding gusted out of her in a sigh. Her hands were shaky with relief. Hang on, girl, she commanded herself sternly. You're not out of the woods yet. Baron was an unknown quantity. He gave good tough talk. She'd yet to see him in action when the hammer started coming down.

  "Listen fast," she said, "our local chum just went up in flames."

  "Shit," Baron said. "I copy. Wait one."

  She did. She kept her head on a swivel, scanning up and down the blind alley, even up to rooftops black against the amber overcast. Whoever her assailants really were, they were powerful and there could be more of them.

  She was good. She knew that. She'd seen plenty of danger, actual combat, in the last couple of years. She could handle herself.

  She also knew when she was in over her head. At the very least she needed to warn her companions. Hopefully they could then all help one another get clear of the crosshairs and safely out of the country.

  In a moment Baron said, "Are you clear?"

  "Affirmative. I had a…little trouble. I got loose."

  "Roger that. Can you handle it?"

  "Yes."

  "I'll be in touch. We'll rendezvous later. Good luck."

  The connection broke. She tucked the phone back in its carrier. She was surprised Baron actually seemed to think she might possibly be competent to look out for herself. It seemed not quite consistent with the fundamentalist view of womanhood. As she understood it, anyway. Then again, evidently they hadn't hired her just because they liked the way she looked on TV. Even if that had probably figured into the equation.

  I sure hope Baron can come up with a way to get everybody out of the country safely, she thought. And fast.

  Annja started off down the alley. Despite her circumstances she felt reassured. I may get a slightly creepy vibe from Baron, she thought, but maybe he is very good at what he does.

  She headed toward the bright lights and the traffic sounds. Despite the fact it seemed a lifetime had passed—and for at least six men, it just had—it wasn't late.

  Where she was going she had no good idea. Just away.

  * * *

  SIGHING, ANNJA STRETCHED OUT on her back on the bed in the little hotel in the middle-class bedroom suburb called Batikent, west of the city center. She'd wanted to go on to Sincan, farther out the recently added Metro line, mainly because it was farther, but a friendly middle-aged English-speaking woman in a conservative but Western skirt suit had advised urgently against it. Apparently both the district and the city were notorious hotbeds of Islamists. It wasn't a good place for a Westerner to be. Especially, all but needless to say, an unescorted woman.

  After calling Baron she'd found a fountain in a deserted cul-de-sac and taken a quick field-expedient bath, clothes on. She'd been able to get her face, hands and hair reasonably clean, at least as far as appearance was concerned. And she had smeared the bloodstains enough that she hoped they'd look like some kind of fashion emergency, not the medical kind. Evidently it worked; nobody had screamed and pointed at her and fainted. In fact people looked pointedly away from the crazy Western woman. Which suited her fine.

  The hotel she'd found near the Metro station wasn't bad. The staff spoke English. The rooms were clean, the water in the shower was hot and plentiful and her room had satellite television.

  She'd spent an anxious half hour channel-surfing to make sure there hadn't been some kind of huge political upheaval in Turkey that had almost caught her in its overkill. But the absence of tanks or screaming mobs on the streets had not been a deception, at least as far as world or local news knew.

  She was bone tired. She used the somewhat harsh soap offered by the hotel to cleanse herself all over, including her hair. It was good enough to get the crusted-salt feel and more important the smell of blood out. Yet her mind was spinning like a helicopter rotor. She knew how to compose it by meditation. But right now she let it freewheel.

  She wanted to know what the hell was going on. She had clues—way too many, far too frightening. But how they fit together was a different question. It was still altogether possible that she'd been a happenstance observer of the results of some unfortunate lifestyle choice by General Orga that had absolutely nothing to do with her or Charlie Bostitch or Ararat coming home to roost. The fact that he was involved in negotiations to allow a thoroughly illegal undertaking meant he'd strayed from the narrow path by definition. Annja doubted it was the first time.

  But even if Orga's negotiations with the Americans hadn't got him killed, his assassination was altogether too likely to entangle them anyway.

  She didn't know much about Turkish politics. Wilfork had told her how the powerful Turkish army—NATO's second largest—stoutly defended the country's official secularism, even against a civilian government increasingly influenced by Islamism. He also told her that, despite a long military alliance, resentment against the U.S. had grown both in the army and among the populace at large over the Iraq invasion and subsequent U.S. support of the Kurds in that country.

  Because the general had been assassinated, instead of being arrested and bundled off to stand trial, she dared hope that Turkey's ruling faction wasn't actively hostile to the expedition, or maybe they were unaware of it. That enhanced their odds of escape.

  It wasn't as if she were uninterested in her own hide. But she had gotten herself out of plenty of tight situations. What really worried her was the rest of the party, cooped up in that oh-so conspicuous Sheraton Tower. Especially the innocent and otherworldly Levi—not to mention her television crew, for whom she felt personally responsible.

  I hate this, she thought. She could wait: that wasn't the problem. What bothered her was the sense of utter powerlessness.

  Yet for the moment she was powerless. She could not do anything more than make herself get the best night's sleep possible, to be fit and ready for whatever tomorrow would bring. Which she had a feeling was going to be…stressful.

  Drawing a breath deep to the center of her being behind and below her navel, she tense
d every muscle in her body. One by one she relaxed them, starting with her feet.

  She was asleep by the time she got to her upper arms.

  Chapter 9

  Annja's cell phone rang as she was getting dressed after another quick shower, mostly to refresh her and get her fully awake and alert.

  "Hello?" she said, flipping open the phone. She continued to dress in the clothes she had washed in the bathroom sink and hung up to dry on the shower-curtain rod.

  "It's Baron," the familiar voice said. "We're clear of the hotel."

  Relief hit her so hard she had to sit down on the bed. She got that weak. "I take it we can talk in the clear."

  "That's a big affirmative. No worries. I had to pull plenty of strings with both the Turkish government and our own. I won us a little operational space. Now the bad news—we have to get out of town quickly. We've got powerful interests on our trail."