by Alex Archer
Slowly she lowered the unconscious man to the bed.
The machine gun was fed by a belt from a box attached to its receiver. Annja stood up straight behind the weapon, grabbed the pistol grip, swung the butt around to her shoulder and boldly announced her presence.
“Here I am!”
“WHAT HAVE we here?” the leader of the intruders asked sarcastically, putting his hands on his hips. “You here to do the right thing and give yourself up, save these good people a lot of suffering and dying?”
Annja swiveled the barrel so it aimed straight at the freckled bridge of his nose. “Not a chance,” she said. “Throw down your weapons and walk out of here, and it’s you who’ll be saving yourselves.”
“I think not,” he said. “I think I’ll just start executing one of these little people every count of ten, say, until you decide to surrender.” He raised his Beretta and aimed it at the head of a man who stood nearby.
Annja pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Safety, she thought, with a gut slam of shock. She knew pistols and rifles fairly well. But next to nothing about machine guns.
She spun away as a trooper behind the leader whipped his AKM to his camo-clad shoulder and triggered a burst. The bullets cracked over her head. She dived over the tailgate as a grenade thumped in the bed.
The explosion drove the big Ram down hard on its suspension. As it flexed back up, the fuel tank went up with a loud whomp, sending an orange ball rolling into the sky, trailing a pillar of black smoke.
A figure reared up from the truck bed, all orange, waving wings of flame. Demonic screams issued from it.
“Billy!” shouted the trooper who’d thrown the grenade.
Frowning slightly, the leader raised a straight right arm, sighted down his handgun and squeezed off a single shot. The flame-shrouded head snapped back. The shrieking ceased. The figure settled back into its pyre.
“Spread out. Find the bitch,” the redhead said coldly.
“What about these people?” asked the tall black trooper.
“The hell with them. I want her dead!”
THROUGH GATHERING EVENING, Annja ran.
Not so much for fear of her own life. To her own surprise she felt little concern for that. Rather, for her mission. The thought that her mentor might have labored half a millennium to find the sword, and to find a new champion, only to have his labors made futile by such men as these made her blood boil.
Her footfalls thudded in her ears, above the buzz of swarming insects and the swishing and piping cries of the birds that swooped between the trees in pursuit of them. She had no idea how many men hunted her through the hills. They seemed to operate in teams. Three times they had spotted her and opened fire with their false-flag Russian weapons. Fortunately her reflexes—or distance—had prevented her being tagged.
That and her knowledge of the terrain. She had spent the better part of a month tramping these hills, looking for buried treasure: the cache where Brother João had hidden his voluminous journal from the planters and the troops who hunted him to steal his secrets. She had found it not two days before beneath a cairn of stones half-buried in a hillside, using clues left by the friar after he made his escape to Goa, India.
She knew Chiriqui’s intimate environs far better than her pursuers were likely to. And they didn’t seem inclined to slow themselves down by dragging along a local to serve as a guide. Besides, she could see they were manifestly arrogant to the point of blindness, accustomed to believing themselves so superior to anyone else that they’d never think of dragooning help.
She paused in the shelter of an erosion-cut bank, trying to control her breathing with a yoga exercise. The sun had gone from sight, although the sky remained light, stained with peach toward the west. The hollows and low places were filled with a sort of lavender gloom that was almost tangible.
A deep ravine gashed the land just over the next ridge. Using such cover as scrub and rock outcrops offered, she climbed the slope, senses stretched tight as a guyline. She paused in the deep shade of the broad-leaved trees at the crest. A hill across from her still hid the sun. Below her the ravine was a slash in gloom crossed by a pale blur—a rope-and-plank footbridge common in the erstwhile Incan empire.
She drew a deep breath. Almost out of here, she thought. She walked down the slope.
A nasty crack sounded beside her left ear. She felt something sting her cheek. By uncomprehending reflex she turned to look back up the hill.
A yellow star appeared in the brush at the foot of the trees, not far from the point where she’d left them. It flickered. She heard more cracking sounds.
She turned and raced for the bridge. The short, steep slope gave no cover. The bridge gave less. But the only chance she saw was to make it across and lose herself in the night and far hills. Her pursuers might have night-vision equipment but she’d just have to chance it.
She zigged right and zagged left, running flat out. The grayed, splintery-dry planks were bouncing beneath her feet with a peculiar muted timbre as she darted out onto the bridge.
It had not occurred to her to wonder why these hardmen, who seemed to know their business had gotten a clear, close shot at her back—and missed.
But then a pair of men rose up from the bushes clustered on the far side and walked onto the bridge to meet her. Men in mottled brown-and-khaki camouflage. Each carried a rifle with an unmistakable Kalashnikov banana magazine slanted in patrol position before his waist.
Feeling sick, she grabbed the wooly guide rope with one hand and turned. Another pair of men strolled almost casually down the hill behind her, likewise holding their weapons muzzle down. Their crumpled boonie hats were pulled low, making their faces shadows.
“Might as well give it up here, miss,” a man called from the bridge’s far end in a New England accent. “Only way out is down. And it’s a long step.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” a nervous voice asked from behind her.
“What do you think?” the New Englander called out with a nasty sneer. “The first white woman we see in weeks, and she’s a babe with legs up to here. You want to let that go to waste?”
“Plenty of time to waste her later,” the big merc added. “Sorry, lady. Nothing personal. Life’s just a bitch sometimes, ain’t she?”
Annja let her head hang forward with a loose strand of hair hanging before it like a banner from a defeated army. Her shoulders slumped. She sat back against the guide rope heedless of the way it swayed over emptiness.
“That’s more like it, honey,” the trooper said. “You’ve got a good sense of the inevitable.”
He was close now. Holding his weapon warily in a gloved right hand, he reached for her with his left.
Her face hidden, she frowned in sudden concentration. She reached with her will into a pocket in space, into a different place, always near her but always infinitely far away.
Suddenly a sword was in her hand, a huge broadsword with an unadorned cross hilt. She swept it whistling before her.
The hand reaching for her pulled back. Blood shot out from the arm, more black than red in the twilight. It sprayed hot across her face.
The mercenary staggered back, shouting more in astonishment than pain. That would come later.
But he had no later.
Annja dropped to the planks, catching herself with her hands, her right still wrapped around the sword’s hilt, ignoring the agonizing pressure on her knuckles. She could see the stream meandering more than three hundred feet below, visible between wide-spaced planks as a pale ribbon through shadow.
Gunfire rapped from the bridge’s far end. The flash and vertical flare-spike from the muzzle brake lit the canyon like a spastic bonfire. The bridge bounced and boomed as men raced toward Annja.
She jumped to her feet. She looked at them for a heartbeat. The man in front faltered, allowing the one behind to blunder into him.
“A sword?” he asked, momentarily stunned.
The sword went up and down. Left and right. The guide ropes parted with ax-blow sounds, turning into muted twangs. Turning her upper torso sideways, Annja seized the hilt with both hands and slashed through both foot ropes with a single stroke.
The bridge parted. Its sundered halves fell into the ravine. So did all the men on it.
The merc in back on the west side might have managed to get a grip and conceivably climb to safety. But his partner panicked, turned and ran right into him as the boards fell away beneath his boots. The two fell in a screaming tangle of arms and legs and weapons.
Annja let the sword slip back into its space as she fell. She felt no fear, only thrill-ride exaltation. She had escaped. That was victory. Her right hand shot out and caught a plank. Splinters gouged her palm. She gripped with all her strength regardless.
The slam into the sheer bank broke her nose. But it did not break her grip. She hung on while bells and firecrackers went off behind her eyes.
Then, blood streaming over her lips and dripping from her chin, she began straining her eyes to pick out the best climb down to the safety of the streambed.
2
“Say, lady,” a voice called through the rain. “Hey, pretty lady. Hey, there.”
Annja paused. She was walking home from the little Puerto Rican bodega around the corner from her loft with a small bag of groceries. She wore a light jacket, a calf-length skirt in dark maroon and soft fawn-colored boots that came up almost to meet it, leaving just two fingers of skin bare. A long baguette of French bread stuck up from the brown paper sack, shielded from the patchy downpour by a black umbrella. She liked to get small amounts of groceries during the brief intervals she spent at home, to force herself to get out at least once a day. Otherwise she’d spend all her time cooped up with her artifacts and monographs, turning into a mushroom. Or so she feared.
She looked into the doorway framed by grimy gray stones from which the words had issued. The speaker looked anything but threatening.
Don’t make too many assumptions, she warned herself.
A small man lay sprawled in the arched doorway with his legs before him like a rag doll’s. He looked emaciated within a shabby overcoat, knit cap and a pair of ragged pants, smeared with patches of grime, that came up well above grubby, sockless ankles and well-holed deck shoes. All might have possessed color at one point. Now all, including his grime-coated skin and stubble beard, had gone to shades of gray
The closest thing to color he displayed was the yellowish brown of his teeth and the slightly lighter but similar shade of the whites of his mouse-colored eyes.
In a quick assessment, she reckoned she could take him. It was part of the calculus of life as a New Yorker. And even more of the life she had taken on.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“Need some change,” the man muttered in a voice as colorless as his skin. “Got some change for me?”
“You’re right,” she said. “You do need change. But I can’t give it to you.”
The man cawed bitter laughter. “Shit, lady. I need a drink not a sermon.” Spittle sprayed from his gray lips, fortunately falling well short of her.
“At least you’re honest,” she said. “I do want to help you.”
The impatient traffic hissed through the rain behind her. “But if I give you money, am I helping to keep you here? Is that really kindness or compassion?”
He had cocked his head and was staring at her fixedly. She realized he was contemplating trying to threaten her or outright rush her: a nice middle-class twentysomething white girl with more education than sense.
I’ve got victim written all over me, she realized.
She had already stopped talking. Instead she turned and lowered her head to bear squarely on his face and hardened her eyes. She would not summon the sword unless he displayed a weapon. And maybe not then; even before her transformation she had known how to take care of herself and been surprisingly good at it.
But if he actually tried to coerce her she would react with force as ungentle as it was unarmed. She had always hated victimizers. Now as her life’s destiny had begun to unfold she found herself growing almost pathological in her hatred for them.
Something in her manner melted his resolve, which had never so much as gelled. The readying tension flowed out of him. His head dropped and he muttered into a filthy scrap of muffler wrapped around his neck.
Annja realized he wasn’t a victimizer, not really. Just another opportunist who had realized on the teetering brink of too late that the opportunity he thought he saw was the eager smile of the abyss. He was weak rather than committed to anything. Even evil.
In a way she found that sadder.
She struggled with her groceries, her hand fumbling in her pocket, then handed him the first bill she found. “In the end, I find myself fresh out of answers,” she said. “So I guess I’ll take the easiest course.” And wonder who’s really the weak opportunist, she thought.
He snatched it away with crack-nailed fingers swathed in what might have been the shredded gray remnants of woolen gloves, or bandages. The movement sent a wave of his smell rushing over her like a blast of tear gas. Eyes watering, trying not to choke audibly, she turned and walked away.
“Hey, what’s this?” he screamed after her. “A lousy buck? Tight-ass bitch! Don’t care about anybody except yourself.”
HER LOFT HAD a window seat. She liked to half recline on it as she studied or read her e-mails. It gave her a cozy feeling, surrounded by her shelves of books and the artifacts, the potsherds, bone fragments and chipped flint blades, that seemed to accrue on every horizontal surface. Today the clouds masked the time of day and veils of rain periodically hid and revealed the distant harbor. Rain ran long quavering fingers down the sooted, fly-spotted glass.
She sipped coffee well dosed with cream and sugar. The way she’d loved it as a child at the Café du Monde. Which, of course, wasn’t there anymore.
As active as she had always been, she had never had much need to watch her diet. And now that her activity levels had increased, her main problem was keeping up weight.
She frowned slightly as she finished downloading headers from her favorite newsgroups, alt. archaeology and its companion, alt.archaeology.esoterica. There enthusiasts, nuts, grad students and professional archaeologists, mostly anonymous, would splash happily together in the marshy outskirts of her chosen discipline.
She quickly surveyed the headers in alt.archaeology. To her annoyance a number were obvious spam. While she was in South America she hadn’t been able to keep the filters up to date. She resented having to spend the time and effort to do so, but it was like weeding a garden: either you did it regularly or gave in altogether to the forces of entropy.
Part of living in the modern world, she told herself, as she added a few new exclusions. It helps to keep me appreciative of the Middle Ages. Not that she was naive or romantic enough to wish away little things such as air-conditioning and antibiotics, she thought with a laugh.
The spam du jour was real estate. Before that it had been small-cap stocks, and before that, the heyday of male enhancements. She had filtered all of them out. She manually deleted all the new spam she could identify as such, and also the vast majority of legitimate headers that failed to spark her interest.
The usual controversies were being trotted out, she saw: the coastal-migration theory of the human settlement of South America. The authenticity of the Vinland map. Nothing of terrific appeal to her. As usual the flames raged hot and furious.
She switched to alt.archaeology.esoterica. Though it dealt with the far fringes and beyond of archaeology—or what was accepted—the discourse was actually less vitriolic than the regular archaeology group. If only just.
There was the usual debate about pre-Columbian visits to the Americas from Europe and Asia, and a thread about the building of the Great Pyramid that people k
ept poking at sporadically like a hollow tooth. She opened a message at random:
I give you your Caral pyramids, built even before the Egyptian pyramids. But if there was contact between Peru and Egypt, why didn’t the Caral people learn about ceramics, as well as megalithic civil engineering?
The next header down was something new and different. It caught her eye. “Solomon’s Jar?”
She downloaded the thread and read.
I have come into possession of an antique brass jar, which I believe may be the jar in which King Solomon is said to have bound the demons after he used them to build his temple in Jerusalem. Can you tell me, please, how to authenticate? Also how much it might be worth?
The poster was shown as [email protected]. Annja knew the suffix .nl meant the address was in the Netherlands.
The last question could have been asking what the worth of such a discovery would be to science. Somehow she doubted that was how it was meant. The responses—many—were the usual flames and derision such naive questions from obvious nonprofessionals engendered. About half of them were from the reflex skeptics who derided the idiocy of believing in demons, in a jar in which they were bound, and for that matter that any such person as King Solomon ever existed. The others were from believers of one degree or another abusing the debunkers.
“Hmm,” she said aloud. Annja closed the cover of her notebook computer.
THE SWORD IN HER HAND, she flowed through the ritual motions.
Though it was a gray day outside, she left the overhead light off. She enjoyed a companionable semidarkness; unless she was reading or examining an artifact, she didn’t care much for intense light.
Annja had changed into a gray sports bra and a matching pair of terry trunks that clung to her long, lithe form. Her feet were bare on the hardwood floor of her exercise space, which was separated from her living area by a fifteenth-century north German carved altar screen representing the Annunciation. Her steps echoed. Though it cost her dearly, she lived in that most enduring of Hollywood clichés, a New York loft apartment.