Provenance

Rogue Angel™

Alex Archer

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Victor Milán for his contribution to this work.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

1

A burst of automatic rifle fire in the grand ballroom shattered the band’s bright dance music like a crowbar smashing glass figurines from a shelf.

People screamed. Men in tails and white ties and women in elegant evening gowns threw themselves to the floor or clung to each other and trembled. Heads turned to stare at the half-dozen black-hooded men in loose green-and-black camouflage-pattern clothing who had burst in like wolves among pheasants.

And here I am practically naked in this ridiculous dress, Annja Creed thought, arched over backward with her hair almost brushing the elegant blue-and-gold carpet and only Garin Braden’s strong right arm keeping her from falling.

SHE HAD THOUGHT the evening had started inauspiciously.

“How good of you to join me,” Garin murmured when she presented herself at his table. Actually, she was presented by a bowing and scraping steward who acted as if he were giving a supermodel as a gift to a maharajah. Except a maharajah would probably not have received quite such deferential treatment.

Annja felt eyes sticking to her like clammy clumps of seaweed. She felt exposed in the clinging sheath of flame-colored silk he had picked out for her. Her long chestnut hair had been swirled atop her head by the cruise ship’s expert staff of hairdressers. She suspected it made her look as if she had a soft-swirl ice-cream cone for a head. Around her slender neck she wore a delicate gold chain with an emerald pendant that Garin assured her would bring out the green highlights in her amber-green eyes. She knew it was exquisitely tasteful, just too small to be gaudy. But she could practically feel the weight of the money it had cost. It felt like an anchor.

“As if I had a choice,” she said snidely as she allowed herself to be seated.

Garin laughed a rich baritone laugh. He was a charismatic devil, she had to give him that. And devilishly handsome. The catch was the consistent way devil kept creeping into her thoughts about him.

“There’s always a choice, my dear,” he said. “That is one thing life has taught me in no uncertain terms.”

As always Annja felt conflicted about Garin, as she smiled and accepted the menu from the headwaiter. In his immaculate tuxedo with the star-sapphire stickpin, his black hair and goatee and dancing black-diamond eyes, Garin was admired by every woman in the room. He was charming, breathtakingly well-read and witty. He was vigorous, and as CEO and majority shareholder of the monster oil company EuroPetro he was, officially, richer than God. He was what most women in her position would consider one hell of a catch.

But hell was the operative word. That was the catch.

First of all, Annja had sworn off having affairs with men significantly older than she was. Not that he looked over the limit. Annja was in her mid-twenties. Garin appeared to be in his early thirties. But his real age belied that appearance—by centuries.

And then, of course, there was the fact that, while he sometimes helped her—indeed, she was paying off one of those debts at that moment—he also had the unfortunate habit of trying, at entirely unpredictable intervals, to kill her.

Around them people chatted and drank wine from immaculate crystal and ate five-star food. The cruise ship Ocean Venture was the most modern and luxurious ocean liner yet built.

“I can’t believe I let you blackmail me to serve as arm candy for some business negotiation,” she said.

“Blackmail is an ugly word,” Garin murmured over the top of his menu. “Besides, I believe extortion is more correct under the circumstances.”

She glared at him through slitted eyes.

“You really must try the Pinot Noir. A splendid vintage. In any event, if you wish to keep your scruples inviolate, you can always choose to believe that you are here of your own free will. It’s true, of course.”

He held the crystal goblet up, where the light from the chandelier struck bloody highlights through the wine. “See? As I’ve told you, my dear. There’s always a choice.”

She winced.

He ordered for them. She didn’t mind. It was the role he was playing. She was secure enough in her own independence not to feel threatened—least of all by him.

She did have something he wanted. And she did keep it coyly and carefully hidden from public view. But it wasn’t what most people would think.

It was a complicated dance they danced.

The food was excellent but Annja ate mechanically. Distracted by circumstances, she scarcely noticed what she consumed. Growing up in an orphanage in New Orleans’ French Quarter, she had learned not to be picky about what she ate. As she spent more time on the Crescent City streets she had learned to appreciate good food. Subsequently, as a graduate student and then archaeologist on innumerable digs, and in the last few years trotting the globe as staff talking head and resident voice of reason on Chasing History’s Monsters, she had learned to be quite adventurous about what she ate.

She was preoccupied, on the evening of the first full day at sea in the Caribbean.

“So why do you have me here?” she asked.

Garin smiled. “Reasons of my own.”

The reason she was there was that he had called in a favor. A big one. A save-your-life favor—not to mention the life of an innocent girl who’d depended on her.

Of course in the process of doing her that favor he had increased his wealth and influence almost exponentially. To his mind that failed to diminish the moral obligation one iota. What was worse was, he knew full well it didn’t in her mind, either.

At some point in the future, when she wasn’t still miffed about having her arm twisted, she would have to admit to herself there were worse fates than getting a free ocean cruise with a movie-star-handsome man who happened to be one of the world’s richest. If she was a captive bird her cage was very well gilded by any standards. And her captivity, to call it that, would last no more than the four days of the cruise. But her fiercely independent nature bridled at it anyway.

“Come on,” she said, spearing a piece of asparagus. “You owe me a better explanation than that.”

He shrugged a broad, tuxedoed shoulder. “Perhaps you’re right, Annja dear. I have no wish to torment you, after all. I am not a cruel man, you know—I worked that out of my system long ago.”

She tried not to shudder, and tried harder not to envision just what he meant.

“Although I’m maintaining a low profile on this voyage,” he said, “and the world at large still does not know my face—an expensive status to maintain, but well worth the investment—I have a certain image to project to those with whom I’m carrying out a certain, most delicate negotiation.”

His accent was vaguely and indeterminately European. She suspected it was an affectation. He no doubt could speak English better than she could. He’d had long enough to practice.

Nonetheless it did contribute to making him devastatingly sexy. Curse him anyway, she thought. This could turn out to be a very long voyage.

“Aren’t you concerned about doing that under the noses of the Venezuelans?” she asked. The Ocean Venture had just steamed past Aruba in the Netherlands Antilles, and was scheduled to make landfall at Willemstad on the island of Curaçao the next morning to allow sightseeing and, of course, a spree of shopping. Venezuela’s north coast lay less than a hundred miles to the south.

“How do you know those aren’t the ones I’m negotiating with? Their oil holdings might prove of interest to EuroPetro. They certainly do to the Chinese.”

She looked at him hard. “Am I just arm candy?” she asked. She shook her head in almost reflex negation. “You could have your pick of supermodels or Hollywood stars. If you crooked one finger, Nicole Kidman would kick Keith Urban back into rehab and fly at you like somebody’s wristwatch to the inside of an MRI machine.”

He laughed with a gusto that made heads turn. He paid no mind. He did few things by halves. “You’ve a gift for unexpected expression,” he said. “Indeed, you’ve a positive gift for the unexpected. Is it not enough to know that I savor that? Because I do. Not to mention your beauty, which to my sorrow you constantly denigrate, and which possesses, to these jaded old eyes, a freshness few celebrities—especially the flavors of the week—can match.”

Annja snorted in a most unladylike way. “Flattery,” she sputtered.

He scowled and she recoiled slightly. She feared a lot of things and a lot of people—she had seen and experienced far too much not to—but she was intimidated by no one. He came close, though.

“Please, my dear,” he said, softening a degree or so, “never say such a thing again. I never flatter.” Then that grin, youthful and ageless, returned. “It implies I need to.”

“Point taken.” Finding her plate empty, she set down her fork, propped her elbows to either side, laced her fingers in their flame-colored long gloves and rested her chin on them. “Now, give. Why is it so important to have me along?”

“Perhaps I feel the need of additional security,” he said, with a roguish twinkle in his eye. Well, even more than usual. “You make a most exemplary bodyguard, as well as a—shall we say—disarmingly lovely one?”

She snorted again. “I don’t want to set off that touchy Renaissance pride again,” she said—she was something of an authority on the Renaissance, it being her period of professional specialization as an archaeologist and historian. “But that seems rather hard to believe. You can afford to travel with a phalanx of top security men. And you do—I’ve spotted a few of them on the boat. Immaculately dressed bald guys with wires in their ears.”

“Ship,” Garin corrected automatically. “Without meaning to denigrate your own falcon keenness of perception, don’t you think potential evil-wishers can do at least as well spotting such men? Whereas you are an extraordinarily gifted amateur, some of them are lifelong professionals at the craft.”

“Hel-lo,” she said quietly, “you’re immortal.”

He chuckled. “Being immortal doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t die,” he said. “It just means I haven’t.”

He made an easy gesture with one hand. “I am extraordinarily tough to kill, I grant. But there are certain fates that might make me wish I could die. What if I was trapped at the bottom of the sea? So that I was perpetually drowning, but couldn’t quite die? That would be like hell, would it not? So you see, I’ve plenty to fear. And of course, there is always my concern, now that you’ve claimed the sword, that my gift—the one that old rake Roux perversely prefers to consider a curse—of immortality might evaporate.”

Annja’s blood ran cold. She could never forget that Garin would—if he could—wrest the mystic sword of Joan of Arc away from her and break it to pieces again, as had the English soldiers who had captured St. Joan so many centuries before.

“Fear not, fair lady,” Garin said, eyes dancing as he finished his wine. “So long as I continue to wake up each morning feeling hale and whole—you can continue to wake up in the mornings. Shall we dance?”

“You’re a bastard,” she told him as he held her chair and helped her to her feet.

“Born that way,” he acknowledged, “although I like to think I’ve earned the title on my own merits, over the years.”

When the band, perched on its podium to one side of the great ballroom, struck up a tango, Annja thought for sure the evening couldn’t possibly get any worse.

“I don’t know how to tango,” she snarled in Garin’s ear.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “You’re a natural athlete. And a trained martial artist. Remember your taijiquan balance training.”

“I don’t do taijiquan in heels,” she said. She knew now why they called them stilettos—they were like daggers stabbing her feet at every step. As much experience as she had wearing heels—very little—she walked in them with all the grace of a drunken baby duck. Whereas she danced in the high spike heels, she thought, like a water buffalo on skates. But a tango—“I’ll break an ankle!”

He laughed softly. “Follow my lead,” he said. “It’s worked splendidly for you so far.”

She struggled to keep her irritation from showing on her face. Her gown was backless, and its bodice consisted of what she tried not to think of as bunny ears from just south of her navel upward, diminishing to bitty strings tied behind her neck. It was held in place either by some kind of surface tension, like a bubble, or through magic. And she didn’t believe in magic.

She’d seen the tango sequences in True Lies. She secretly identified with Jamie Lee Curtis, a sort of standard-bearer for gawky women who could still be darned sexy. But once Garin started flinging her around she feared it would be mere seconds before her boobs came flying out of the dress like startled pigeons.

“Trust me,” Garin said with a wicked grin.

“Yeah,” she whispered furiously. “It’s not like you’ve tried to kill me.”

“Not recently,” he said. “And most assuredly not here.”

The preliminary violin strains died away. She felt his hand burning at the small of her bare back as if heated in a forge.

The tango began in earnest. He leaned forward. In response she leaned back, bent over his strong grasp. She felt her breasts ride up her rib cage and thought, This is not good.

That was when the terrorists barged in and fired a burst into the ceiling.

2

“Nobody move!” a black-hooded man shouted in Spanish-accented English. “We have commandeered this vessel in the name of the People’s Revolution!”

“How tedious,” Garin murmured, his face inches from hers. “It seems we’re being hijacked.”

“I’m almost relieved,” Annja murmured. Her heartbeat, already accelerated, spiked. But she wasn’t in any danger of losing her presence of mind over a little full-auto gunfire, even though it hurt her ears in these close confines.

At least it wasn’t aimed at her.

With deliberation Garin straightened his back. He brought Annja upright as if she weighed nothing.

“You think they’re trying to kidnap you?” she asked softly.

He frowned slightly. “I think not. Trust me, I’d sense their intention.”

“How?”

He smiled. “Long experience. This is something else.”

He let go of her hand. The other stayed at the small of her back. She found it strangely reassuring. “Now let’s play along like good little lambs,” he said.

She knew how he thought. “Until…?”

His smile widened. It made her think of a lean black wolf contemplating a staked lamb. “Until it’s time not to, of course.”

More armed men crowded into the room. They carried what Annja recognized as Kalashnikov AKMs, some with folding stocks, some with fixed wooden stocks. She had learned they were generic weapons for terrorists—or people who wanted to pose as terrorists. Something about the men struck her false. Maybe they’re just pirates, she thought.

She looked to Garin. He was looking elsewhere. She saw him give his head a barely visible shake and realized he was telling one of his security men to stand down. For the moment.

At least a score of men in black ski masks had bustled in to the ballroom. They broke up in to several groups. One rousted the musicians off the platform. In different circumstances it might have been funny to see the men and women in their penguin suits scurry off clutching their instruments to their breasts. As the gunmen on the platform covered the crowd, other knots of two, three and four began to move among the dancers, cutting them into groups of a dozen or so like cattle-herding dogs.

One of the men on the dais grabbed a microphone from its stand. “You are now the People’s prisoners of war,” he declared. “If you follow instructions you will be treated properly. Do not try to be heroes. If you resist you will be considered an unlawful combatant, and will be killed.”

Garin’s expression hardened. “Another unfortunate legal precedent we have to thank your government for,” he murmured.

“Why are they separating us?” Annja asked under her breath. “Wouldn’t it be easier for them to keep control if they kept us together?”

“Dividing the hostages into groups and dispersing them throughout the ship makes it harder for counterterror teams to effect a rescue,” he said.

“Oh.” Annja glanced down at her feet. She really wanted to ditch the heels. She always hated it in the movies when a heroine tried to run—or do anything more demanding than a runway turn—in heels. She’d hate trying to do anything herself if the crunch came down, encumbered with what she thought of as torture devices.

But the lightweight gold pumps had straps that crisscrossed past her slim ankles halfway to her knees. She knew they looked sexy. But they also meant she had no chance of kicking off the shoes quickly. She would have to bend over—which might cause misunderstanding among their captors. And Annja made it a principle never to court misunderstanding with people toting automatic weapons.

Two men thrust themselves between Annja and Garin, jabbing at them as if their heavy Russian-made assault rifles were pitchforks. They might as well have been, for the alacrity they elicited from people shying away from their menacing black muzzles.

Annja found herself amongst a dozen—ten passengers and two stewards, the latter a man and a woman, both with painfully young faces sheened with nervous sweat. Of the group, six were elderly and four Annja’s age or a little older, which seemed a representative sampling of the passengers.

The captives were being split up without regard to who was with whom. One thirtyish man with a blond crewcut tried to stay with a female partner who was being prodded from his side. A terrorist clipped him in the face with the butt of his rifle.

Annja winced. She knew the AKM was nearly nine pounds of hardwood and stamped steel, with a steel plate capping the butt. The man went down as if shot, although a moment later he was being helped to his feet by a fellow passenger and a steward whose crisp white jacket was never going to be the same with all the blood pouring on it from the man’s smashed nose.

A pair of terrorists herded Annja’s group to the galleys. One guard preceded them, kicking open the double doors. She caught a glimpse of Garin in a different group going out a side entrance. Then she was in the humid gangway, all white and stainless steel, redolent of cooking food and dishwashing steam. Stewards and chefs in their puffy white hats emerged from side doors, to vanish like rabbits down holes when the terrorists barked at them and pointed their rifles.

As their captors, shouting, herded them down the gangway, figures from the cruise line’s brochures played through Annja’s mind as she tried to encompass the tactical situation. Ocean liners always reminded Annja of skyscrapers toppled onto their sides into the ocean. The Ocean Venture’s vital statistics did little to belie that image. Over one thousand feet long and one hundred feet wide, more than two hundred feet from keel to funnel, grossing over 125,000 tons. With fifteen decks she accommodated two thousand passengers and over one thousand crew. She contained gyms, two swimming pools and even a water park.

It really was a horizontal, ocean-going skyscraper, plain and simple.

How many men do they have? Annja wondered. It would take a huge force of highly trained special-warfare operators to really secure something this huge with so many people aboard. She was no professional herself but she was still sure it would tax the resources of a full U.S. Navy SEAL team to do so.

No way did the terrorists—or pirates—have that many men aboard. No way did they have that kind of training and discipline. That was just practical reality, she knew.

So they would try to secure important locations, such as the bridge and engine rooms—and they would grab some hostages. They probably preferred the richest of the passengers—who happened to be attending the fancy-dress ball. She presumed they’d ordered everybody else to go to their rooms and stay there. They’d enforce the order by sending random patrols of men with guns to threaten anybody who poked their heads out.

As Annja’s group proceeded, the doors that weren’t opened by curious staff were yanked or kicked open by the terrorist in the lead. He seemed to be looking for something. Suddenly he dived into a room. A pair of white-clad staff erupted out like flushed pigeons and raced away down the hall. Apparently the men had all the hostages they felt they needed.

The lead terrorist emerged again. He had long kinky black hair flowing out the bottom of his ski mask. His eyes, visible through the holes, were dark. They showed a lot of white, like a frightened horse’s. Annja didn’t think that was a hopeful sign. A hyper-adrenalized state, a finger in the trigger guard, an automatic weapon with the safety off and crowded quarters was a potentially explosive combo.

“In here!” he shouted, gesturing with his rifle into what Annja could see was a storeroom lined with shelves of fat, institutional-sized cans.

Annja strode forward, wobbling only slightly. Sharp pains shot up her calves. She held her head high and her face impassive.

From somewhere distant came the thud of a single gunshot.

GARIN BRADEN smiled and nodded encouragingly to the dowager with the blue-white hair and the gaudy string of pearls. His group had three gunmen herding nine prisoners, including a little girl of perhaps nine. From their stature and quick motions Garin surmised, not surprisingly, all three were young. Two carried AKMs. The third, who seemed to be a sort of officer, carried a handgun, a Beretta or the nearly identical Brazilian Taurus. They were highly excited. Perhaps more than even the circumstances called for. That concerned him.

Something about these self-proclaimed terrorists—or People’s Revolutionaries—struck him as phony.

He took no more interest in the conflicts of human ideologies for their own sake than a normal adult in the battles between the red ants and the black. As with cruelty, it had taken him what he now frankly regarded as an unseemly amount of time to outgrow an adolescent interest in that sort of thing. But outgrow it he had, now centuries past.

He took the same sort of interest in politics and its attendant shooting conflicts that a canny sailor or pilot took in the weather—with a wary regard for potentially lethal storms. Unlike airmen or seamen, though, he also sometimes kept a weather eye peeled for potential profits from those situations.

He was particularly suspicious about Spanish-accented revolutionaries cropping up right off the coast of loudly socialistic Venezuela. Indeed, for self-proclaimed revolutionaries to pull so drastic a stunt within air-strike range of Venezuela smacked of an attempt to discredit or embarrass the government—or even a false-flag attempt to justify violent U.S. retaliation.

While Garin knew of the existence of various parties who might have the means and inclination to do such a thing, he doubted that was the case, either. His gut response told him this was really about ransom. Or extortion might be a better term, as he was amused to recall having told Annja in what now seemed a hopelessly trivial context, not an hour previously. The hijackers would systematically rummage the ship for valuables—the obvious, such as cash, jewels and credit cards, and the far less obvious, such as high resale-value prescription drugs both from ship’s stores and private staterooms. Then they would negotiate a stiff cash settlement from the cruise line to get their ship back, as well as their passengers.

Part of the settlement would entail an agreement by the shipping line not to pursue the matter through the courts, nor to cooperate in any ensuing investigation. It was not legally enforceable, nor would it ever be admitted—but it would be most scrupulously kept. It would be neither the first such deal struck nor the last. Garin knew the cruise lines were obsessed with keeping a positive public image above almost all else.

As far as he was concerned that was fine. The cruise company’s craven but entirely understandable capitulation would make it difficult if not impossible to recover the cost of his own valuables through insurance. On the other hand the sum of it, including the little bauble with which he had chosen to grace Annja’s charming swanlike neck, amounted to scarcely more than pocket change.

Should the terrorists actually annoy him, they’d find out that as a true son of the Renaissance, Garin had forgotten more about exacting vengeance than these modern upstarts would ever know. His reach, should he really wish to extend it, was as long as his memory.

And the fact he had forsworn cruelty for its own sake hundreds of years ago by no means implied he was averse to making examples of those who crossed him.

“Move it! Move it!” the leader of the gunmen screamed as they pushed the group of captives out the doors of the grand ballroom and into the corridor. Spittle flew out the mouth hole of his mask.

He struck at one older man with his pistol. Garin grimaced. It’s not a club, you half-wit, he thought. He hated to see anything done badly, and anyway, his action was inviting accidental discharge. The man was barely in control of himself, and that was the worst thing.

The little girl, wearing a prim but visibly expensive blue silk dress, her blond hair pulled into painfully tight pigtails, suddenly broke away between the other two masked gunmen and raced back toward the doors of the grand salon screaming, “Mommy, Mommy!”

The leader of the gunman shrieked at her to stop. When she didn’t he raised the handgun.

Garin frowned. “Wait,” he said, and stepped in front of the masked man, holding up his hands.

The man shot him in the chest.

3

The men deep in the immense ship’s brightly lit cargo hold paused in their work as gunfire clattered through the ship. It had a faraway sound, like hail on a neighbor’s roof.

“Idiots,” remarked one. Like the self-proclaimed revolutionaries above, his head was encased in a ski mask.

The resemblance ended there. The dozen men working in the hold wore casual street clothes appropriate to the Tropics. All of them were much calmer than the raging, rampaging, camouflage-clad hijackers—even the several who stood guard holding MP-5 submachine guns with their barrels thickened by built-in sound suppressers.

Their leader was a short man with a powder-blue shirt open to reveal a thick thatch of dark chest hair, silver-dusted and growing down toward a hard, aggressive paunch. He took a lit cigar from the mouth of his own ski mask.

“Hey,” he said in a New Jersey accent. “Give ’em some credit. It’s supposed to be a diversion. What’s more diverting than a damn firefight?”

“Or a massacre,” a third man said from behind the controls of the front-end loader. The others laughed.

The first man, who had fair skin, seemed sour. The ponytail sticking from the mask down the back of his neck was dark blond. “It’s all good fun until the chopper-loads of SEALs start falling on the boat from the sky.”

“Ship,” one of the guards corrected.

“Shut up,” the guy with the chest hair on display said. It came out emphatically but without heat. “That’s just all the more reason to hurry up and get that bad boy loaded on the forklift.” He waved the cigar at a large yellow-pine crate lashed to hold-downs.

“Boss,” the driver said, leaning out of the little roll cage, “it’s a front-end loader.”

“Who asked you?” the leader said. “What is this, remedial English? Now move it, you assholes. We got us a boat to catch. Boat, not ship, Mr. Teach and Learn Network. And watch your fingers—that crate weighs a ton.”

THE PISTOL SHOT echoed in the gangway. As Garin fell passengers screamed in horror.

Slowly, Garin picked himself up off the carpeted deck. He reached to the ruffled white front of his tuxedo shirt to the protective shield over his heart. His fingertips came away bloody. He scowled thunderously.

“You stupid bastard,” he said to the gunman. “You’ve got no idea how badly that stings.”

The hijacker’s eyes almost bugged right out through the holes of his balaclava-style mask.

Garin moved. He had no extraordinary physical abilities other than his longevity. What he had was practice.

The gunman simply stood stunned, as if he’d taken a bat to the side of the head. He had no chance. Garin skipped forward. He batted the handgun offline with a quick swipe of his right hand. Then, closing fast, he clenched the hand to deliver a back-fist to the side of the mask-covered head with a snap of his hips and all the power of his big, well-muscled body.

The gunman’s head whipped around from the blow. A string of saliva trailed from his bearded lips. A pair of his neck vertebrae snipped one of the arteries threaded through them like scissors.

With an arterial break that close to the brain, incapacitation was instantaneous, death almost so. The man simply fell straight down as if the tendons holding his joints together had dissolved.

Garin’s left hand had grabbed the wrist of the man’s gun hand. He caught the pistol as it slipped from lifeless fingers. Then he twisted counterclockwise and snapped his arm straight out.

The other two hijackers were still staring in slack-jawed amazement.

Garin shot one between the eyes. His head whipped back. His eyes rolled up. He sank to the deck. Though his finger was still on the trigger of his big Kalashnikov, he didn’t fire. A hit in what counterterrorists call the “ninja mask” region of the head had punched through his medulla oblongata and instantly switched off his nervous system.

His partner was a little quicker on the uptake. He grabbed an elderly lady around the waist and tried to shove the muzzle brake of his AKM under her ear. It was a stretch, but he was well-motivated.

“Drop the gun,” he screamed, “or I’ll blow this old bat’s head off.”

From somewhere off through the bulkheads Garin heard a rattle of automatic fire. That will be dear Annja swinging into action, he thought. I hope.

Garin swung his arm around until the terrorist’s staring right eye, visible inside a curl of his hostage’s white hair, was perched like a plum atop his foresight post. He squeezed the trigger.

The eye vanished in a red splash. The terrorist dropped out of sight behind the woman.

She turned and looked down at her captor. Then she looked back at Garin. She seemed more startled than afraid.

“That was a remarkable shot, young man,” she said shakily.

“I learned from the best,” Garin said. I wonder what she’d say if I told her that meant Wild Bill Hickok? he thought, amused.

Then he winced. It felt as if he’d been kicked by a mule. His body armor, worn from habit because his business dealings had a tendency to turn nasty, couldn’t prevent bruising from the impact of such a close shot.

“You folks should find someplace to hide,” he said. He quickly subvocalized commands to his security force, whom he had earlier ordered to stand easy and await events, via a high-tech and very well-concealed phone. Events having begun, he ordered them to move quickly to neutralize the other hijackers. He had faith they would do so with discretion and brutal effectiveness. He knew how to hire skill.

ANNJA’S HEART JUMPED into her throat. Garin! she thought. The guard with the long kinky hair was starting to bring up his rifle. His body language suggested he was about to start shooting.

Who are these people? she wondered. Terrorists were vicious by definition and usually crazy, but most of them knew not to massacre their hostages except as a final dying gesture. It not only burned all their bargaining chips, it ensured the authorities, when they inevitably landed on them, would be in a vengeful frame of mind. They’d shoot first—and probably not ask any questions. Ever.

Annja was already moving. Her total lack of coordination on those ridiculous spiked heels acted to her advantage. She tottered a couple of quick steps toward the gunman, then stumbled against him.

He caught her reflexively with his left arm. It left him still clutching the Kalashnikov’s pistol grip with his right hand, and his finger still on the trigger. But in grabbing her he automatically dropped the weapon offline. It no longer threatened the innocent hostages.

His eyes went wide and his pupils dilated inside his mask as his left hand closed around Annja’s right butt-cheek. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “It’d be a waste to shoot a hot chica like you.”

“I think so, too,” she said.

Annja snapped a right backhand into the hijacker’s Adam’s apple.

He fell back against the bulkhead, clutching his throat and emitting a rattling gasp. If she’d succeeded in collapsing his windpipe, he’d be dead in minutes unless he got an emergency tracheotomy—unlikely under the circumstances, however the events of the next few seconds played out. If not, he was still going to be way too preoccupied with a trivial little matter like trying to breathe to shoot anybody.

As Annja turned away from him she formed her right hand in a fist and exerted her will. Obedient to it, the hilt of her sword filled her hand, summoned from the otherwhere where it rode, invisible but always available.

The other gunman had turned to gape back down the gangway at the sound of the far-off gunshot. Turning back, he goggled at Annja, struggling to swing his heavy rifle up to shoot her.

Somehow Annja managed to execute a flawless high-line lunge in her heels. She drove the sword through the man’s sternum to the hilt.

He bent over as he took the blade. Or it took him. His eyes stood out of his head. He was literally dead on his feet, his heart virtually cut in two.

Annja let go of the sword. It vanished back to its private dimension. She grabbed the Kalashnikov as it fell.

Letting the man slump, she spun. Blessing the universal thug propensity to carry a weapon with the safety off at all times, she snapped the rifle up.

Still clutching his ruined throat with his left hand, the young man Annja had stunned was raising his own assault rifle to shoot her. She fired a burst from the hip. He fell backward as three metal-jacketed 7.62 mm slugs lanced through his chest and belly.

Glancing around the shocked faces of her fellow hostages, she quickly settled on the young steward with the prominent forehead as the calmest-looking of the lot. “You,” she said in a voice that acknowledged no conceivable possibility that he’d do anything but what she told him. “Take the gun. Get the people in the storeroom and guard them.”

He nodded and quickly knelt to recover the second Kalashnikov. Its owner was clearly dead, huddled against the base of the bulkhead. Annja wasted no pity on him—he was a victimizer of the innocent. He had gotten what he deserved.

“And watch where you’re pointing that!” Annja snapped at the steward.

“Oh! Right. Sorry.” Hastily he lifted the muzzle away from Annja’s navel, where he was pointing the weapon because he happened to be looking at her. She smiled to take the sting from the tone she’d used.

“No problem. You might want to shake him down for more weapons and extra magazines.”

“Sure.” He seemed excited, eyes wide and bright, and dark cheeks flushed, as anybody would be. He seemed in no danger of losing it.

“What about you, young lady?” asked an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a substantial belly pushing out his white vest beneath his tailcoat.

She thought like mad as she finished searching the man she had run through for other weapons, finding none, and spare magazines, coming up with two.

“You never saw me,” she said. Then she frowned. Where am I going to carry the magazines? she wondered.

“But that sword you used,” said a blond woman about her own age in a floor-length blue gown. “Where’d that come from?”

Annja looked at her and forced a conspiratorial grin. “What sword?” she asked, and winked broadly.

She settled on unfastening the dead man’s web belt. It was bloody. She grimaced but pulled it out from under him. She’d learned not to be squeamish since the sword had entered her life. Darn, she thought. And I became an archaeologist so I wouldn’t have to deal with bodies that were still juicy.

She stood up. Everyone was staring at her with a combination of fear and awe. She felt hurried relief that, in apparent violation of the laws of motion, her breasts had not escaped custody in all the commotion.

“Listen, people,” she said, “this is secret stuff, okay?”

Everybody nodded.

“I know,” the young steward said. “You’re some kind of special operator.”

She gave him a smile. “I was never here,” she said. “Okay?”

“Anything you say, ma’am,” he breathed. He seemed to be working on not hyperventilating. She reckoned she had probably tripped the switches for all his adolescent male fantasies at once.

She turned to look at the others again. They seemed mostly to have huge saucer eyes, like alley cats who have been awakened to find themselves nose-to-nose with a grizzly bear.

“What you saw,” she said, “is a big bald guy in a tux take these two down.” That was a fair description of pretty much any random member of Garin’s squad of bodyguards. “You didn’t see any details because you were busy ducking like the smart people you are. You really don’t remember it clearly anyway—you’re so traumatized and all. Do you understand? This is extremely important.”

They stared.

“Nod,” she said.

They nodded.

“Breathe,” she said.

They breathed.

“Great. Now—you, what’s your name?” She turned to the steward.

“Tommy.”

“Great,” she said. “You nice folks all go in here and do what Tommy tells you. And Tommy will keep watch, and take care of you, and remember his responsibility is to stay with you and not, under any circumstances, to play hero. Right, Tommy?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“And you.” She turned to the female staffer. “What’s your name?”

“Tina, ma’am,” she replied confidently.

“You help Tommy take care of these people and keep them calm and safe. Are we good?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” she said, eyes shining. “Very good.”

Annja nodded decisively. “Okay. I’m going to go deal with some more of these bad guys. And once more, you never saw me, because I was never here!”

“Oh, yes,” they chorused. “Didn’t see a thing.”

It’d be nicer, she thought as she buckled the gory web belt around her narrow waist, if this getup didn’t make me look like a direct-to-video prom queen from hell. But we do what we have to do.

4

Steam wisped from Annja’s mug of hot chocolate as she emerged from the small but well-organized kitchen of her Brooklyn loft. She wore a dark purple sports bra and white terry shorts. Despite the air-conditioning holding the flat summer day’s heat at bay, her skin was sheened with sweat from her morning workout.

Finding a spot at one end of her sofa that was clear of books and manuscripts, she plopped down. She picked up the remote from the coffee table, its glass top also loaded down with artifacts, magazines and stacks of printouts. She clicked on the television.

One of the cable news channels came up. There weren’t many kinds of daytime television she could bear to watch. Actually, most of her viewing consisted of watching DVDs, either of movies or occasionally whole seasons of TV series. She hated only being able to watch part of a story, and she hated commercial interruptions, although she did find some ads entertaining.

Not like I have much time to watch, she thought.

The modest wide-screen set showed a long, gleaming white ship shot from above. Helicopters swarmed around it, including the shark shapes of gunships. Boats of various sizes surrounded the huge luxury vessel.

Annja grimaced. She didn’t have to read the white letters at the bottom of the screen. It was the Ocean Venture, where criminal investigators and counterterrorism experts from the Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S. were still trying to sort out what had happened.

She muted the sound. It wasn’t as if they were going to tell her anything she didn’t already know. She just felt sorry for the passengers and crew, still stuck on board while authorities grilled them.

“WE’RE CLEAR TO GO,” Garin had said, when he walked into her stateroom without knocking.

“What?” she replied, shocked.

He smiled that devil’s smile of his. “I pulled some strings,” he said. “Amazing what’s available to be pulled when one is CEO of one of the world’s largest oil companies. I could get used to it.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You talked our way out of interrogation? What, did you bribe the SEALs? The Royal Navy? All of the Netherlands?”

“None of the above,” he said. “It’s always easier and cheaper to bribe the media. Listen and learn, young Annja.”

The terrorists had never known what hit them. By the time the first SEALs swarmed over the stern from their fast STAB craft in the wee hours of the morning—they’d beat the Royal Dutch commandos by half an hour—the hijackers were all being guarded by Garin’s highly professional security team in the cruise liner’s ballroom. Garin had communicated with the rescuers in advance, using the ship’s radiotelephone. Captain Nygard, who had started the rescue rolling by surreptitiously pressing a concealed panic-transmission button when the masked men burst onto the bridge, was very cooperative. One of Garin’s bodyguards, himself a former Royal Marine commando, had dropped the hijacker aiming at the captain’s austere silver-haired head with a head shot of his own. Garin’s call had prevented any unpleasant incidents. Under normal conditions a counterterror team hitting a hostage situation would automatically kill anyone they saw holding a weapon.

Annja had captured several hijackers. She hadn’t had to kill any more. Having a beautiful woman wearing a bloody and not very substantial evening gown burst in and aim an assault rifle at them got their attention. Especially since the rattle of gunfire hinted how very far wrong things had gone for them.

The presence of almost a score of far more professional armed thugs in the midst of their intended victims had taken the hijackers utterly by surprise. They’d obviously expected the cruise liner to be a soft, undefended target. Civilian vessels usually were.

The total butcher’s bill had been nine hijackers killed, three wounded. Almost twenty more had been taken prisoner. One of Garin’s men had been wounded slightly when a mettlesome but overwrought female passenger, believing him to be a hijacker despite his evening dress and lack of a ski mask, nailed him above the right eye with the spike heel of her shoe. I knew those things were dangerous, Annja thought when she heard that.

Once the ship was secured, and the antiterror units converging on the liner had been alerted to the fact, Annja and Garin had returned to their cabins to change out of their incriminatingly bloody clothes. En route Annja wiped down her AKM and magazines for fingerprints and hid them in a broom closet. She showered and then had a fit of the shakes.

A pair of SEALs paid a visit to her cabin half an hour before Garin showed up. She was sitting in a chair wearing jeans and a short-sleeved blouse and the most innocent expression she could muster. They had been briskly professional as they searched her cabin for lurking terrorists, told her to stay put and await further instructions, and left.

She fully expected to spend hours being grilled by spooks and operators from half the nations of the earth. When they had rendezvoused briefly after the ship’s recapture, Garin explained that the Americans were coming because they had the closest operational team available. The Dutch were sending men because the ship was in their territorial waters and the UK was getting an oar in because a lot of its nationals were on board the Ocean Venture, and anyway it still liked to imagine the Caribbean belonged to the Royal Navy.

And then Garin came waltzing in to tell her they were free to go. A EuroPetro helicopter was descending toward the afterdeck helipad to lift them off.

SITTING SAFE AT HOME in the air-conditioning of her loft, Annja blew at the hot cocoa, as if that would actually do any good, then tentatively sipped. As always it was hotter than she suspected and scorched her lips and tongue.

She winced and set the cup down. It was all part of the ritual.

She still remembered the surreal feeling as the blue-and-white Dauphine leapt gracefully off the Ocean Venture’s deck while Dutch commandos on guard stood by as unresponsive as statues, as if their camouflage battle dress wasn’t being whipped and their very eyeballs blasted by helicopter rotor-wash.

“Why are they letting us go?” she asked Garin.

He smiled. “I told them something far more compelling to their minds than mere truth,” he had told her. “I told them what they wanted to hear.”

The media, courtesy of Garin’s bribes or not—Annja took what he told her with a grain of salt, although experience had shown her that the more outrageous what he said sounded, the more likely it was to be gospel truth—were asserting that the would-be hijackers had fallen for a multinational sting operation designed to trap modern-day pirates of the Caribbean. It wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded—on the flight to Curaçao Garin explained what a huge and growing problem piracy was worldwide, although largely unreported even by the sensation-hungry news media.

She could also see how the nations of the multinational antipiracy task force would be more than happy to take credit for what they believed had been accomplished purely by Garin’s security team. They couldn’t be happier than Annja. She’d spent way too many uncomfortable hours answering pointed questions from sweaty men in uniforms.

For their part, the “People’s Revolutionary” terrorists had reportedly confessed to being pure pirates, interested only in looting the wealthy passengers and gouging a vast hush-payment out of the cruise lines to get their ship back. She knew not to take anything in the news at face value—she’d seen what really happened far too often. But she suspected that much was straight. She hadn’t bought the “revolutionary” line from the outset, and gathered Garin hadn’t, either.

Garin. At least he seemed to be done with her semi-coerced services as escort. That was a relief, too. She hadn’t really been able to enjoy the cruise anyway….

To what extent Garin would consider she had returned his favor was an open question. But then, so was Garin. He had off-handedly explained that he had felt compelled to act when a little girl broke away to try to rejoin her mother, from whom she’d been separated. “Don’t think it was a good deed on my part,” he’d assured her. “I was simply worried that, once the hijackers started shooting, they wouldn’t stop.”

It was entirely plausible but she didn’t believe it for a minute. Sitting in her own living room she still wasn’t sure what to believe. Sometimes Garin seemed an embodiment of evil. Sometimes he seemed merely to be totally selfish—and she had seen enough authentic evil not to buy into the currently dominant wisdom that the two were one and the same. Many of the worst monsters she’d met believed what they thought was right so selflessly that they didn’t care how many people they had to kill for their own good.

Sometimes Garin seemed almost chivalrous. She suspected that was illusion, too.

But she didn’t know. I don’t know anything where Garin’s concerned, she thought. Except that our destinies are entwined, and going to stay that way so long as I carry the sword.

The TV switched to show a man with one of those boyish-gone-middle-aged hardcase faces under a crewcut the color of a steam iron. The screen identified him as spokesman for the Cruise Line International Association. She guessed he was about to very earnestly, and with great sincerity, lie across his bow tie about how the cruise lines would never, ever pay hush-money to terrorists.

She’d had enough. She turned off the television and picked up a recent copy of The Journal of Forbidden Archaeology. Thumbing to an article on crystal skulls, she began to read.

MEETINGS WITH the Chasing History’s Monsters staff ate up Annja’s afternoon. Her producer, Doug Morrell, had been in fine form, flitting around the meeting room like a butterfly.

“I don’t really think,” Annja found herself saying at one point, “that we need to address the issue of whether the Loch Ness Monster is actually a shipwrecked alien from a water world.” Although he gets credit for unusual imagination for that one, she thought.

“GIRLFRIEND,” Clarice Hartung said, leaning forward over the table, “I don’t see how you manage to eat that much and stay that slim.”

Annja chewed the mouthful she had bitten out of the specialty of the house—a prime rib sandwich, blood-rare, on toasted sourdough, with just a touch of horseradish—and shrugged. “I mostly seem to have trouble keeping weight on,” she said.

Clarice shook her head in mock despair. She was a production assistant on Chasing History’s Monsters. She had milk-chocolate skin, a cloud of reddish-brown hair that was more curly than frizzy, big dark brown eyes and a wide smile. “I’d kill for a problem like that.”

“You look great,” Annja said, taking a bite of pickle.

“For a full-figured woman, you mean?” Clarice said.

“No. Seriously.” To Annja’s eyes her friend was no more than pleasingly padded. Certainly not fat. And even Kristie Chatham might envy the décolletage threatening Clarice’s Caesar salad from her golden-tan blouse. Had Kristie ever deigned to notice lowly production assistants.

Annja thought of saying as much. It just wasn’t her. She could think catty. But she seldom voiced it.

“It’s the starch,” Mindy Llewellyn said.

“Say what?” Clarice asked, in the middle of taking a bite from her roll.

“Your problem is the amount of starch you eat,” Mindy said. She was a somewhat hyper young woman, with ash-blond hair hanging straight to frame a gamine face with big blue eyes. She did makeup for several shows, including Chasing History’s Monsters.

The closest thing Annja had to real friends on the show, the pair had prevailed on her to accompany them to Corrigan’s, an Irish pub near the studios and consequently favored by the crew—although not, for the most part, the on-air talent—for a bite to eat after the production meeting. “To decompress from Doug,” as Clarice put it.

Annja found it a pleasant enough place, with its dark-stained wood paneling, muted Celtic music and the prints on the walls, most of which seemed to celebrate not just leprechauns but worldwide specimens of what alt. archaeo, Annja’s favorite newsgroup, liked to call “the fairy faith.”

“Girl, I don’t even want to be as thin as you,” Clarice said. Mindy was toothpick-thin. Annja worried a little about her health.

Mindy shrugged. “I never seem to have much appetite,” she said. She had ordered a salad, too, and a mineral water. She picked at one and sipped at the other. “But if you’re really concerned about your weight, you want to stop obsessing on fat and start looking at the amount of starch you eat. Take those fat-free yogurts you’re always snacking on. Have you looked at their contents?”

“Hey, they’re healthy,” Clarice said.

“Are they? They have the same amount of calories as the normal, full-fat yogurt. What they replace the fat with is starch.”

“But carbohydrates are brain food.”

“If you sit on your brains. Some are okay, but starches go straight to your blood sugar. And your hips. Like that roll. And the croutons.”

Clarice looked at the roll, frowned and replaced it on the bread plate. “Are you trying to rob me of my simple pleasures in life?”

“I’m just saying,” Mindy said. She shifted restlessly on the booth seat where she sat next to Annja.

Clarice sighed. “Well, the truth is, I worry about our Annja spending too many nights alone on her couch with museum samples and moldy manuscripts,” she said. “You’re going to turn into a mummy, girl. And not the kind that goes with a daddy.”

“Too bad the only bones you’re handling are long dead,” Mindy said. She snickered. “I can’t believe I said that.”

Annja favored them with an exasperated half scowl. “Thanks so much for your votes of confidence. You sure know how to give a woman confidence in her own sexuality.”

“Oh, you’ve got loads of sexuality, Annja,” Mindy said. “Men throw themselves at you like moths at a flame. And you swat them like moths.”

“I think it’s more like they smash their little antennaed moth heads in against the glass wall of her apparent indifference,” Clarice said.

“I am not indifferent!”

Clarice smiled an extra wide “trapped ya” smile. “You’re right,” she said. “The word is oblivious.”

Mindy’s skinny butt bounced on the bench. “Good one!”

Annja sat back and crossed her arms. “I’m so glad we had this time together,” she said.

“Oh, don’t take it so hard, Annja,” Mindy said. “We tease you because we love you.”

“And we wish you’d give some nice man a chance to.”

Annja sighed. She’d given some a chance. But they had a tendency to not stick around.

Or to die.

But she couldn’t tell her friends that. Even though their well-intentioned teasing was like sticking a knife in an open wound.

“What you need,” Mindy said, swirling a plastic sword with a piece of lime impaled on it in her tumbler of mineral water, “is a nice, rich oil sultan. But not one of the religious fanatic ones. Or a fat one with oily skin and too many rings. A handsome, dashing young sultan!”

“Right,” Annja said. “And they exist where?”

Clarice cocked an eyebrow at Mindy. “You been playing Prince of Persia on your PlayStation Two again?”

“All right, how about just a billionaire? I mean, a nice young billionaire. I’m not talking Donald Trump orange comb-over here.”

“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 rack 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 to 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.

There were no bodies, no bloodstains, no shattered glass on the floor. The couch sat upright. The skylight overhead was intact.

It was as if nothing had happened.

6

Morning sunlight streamed through the window, bringing its peculiar vivid-edged glow. The sky was clear except for a few white clouds. Down in the street the traffic rumbled and honked.

Annja sat on the window seat and tried to concentrate on notes she was trying to type up for the show. It was all so normal she wanted to scream.

Normal it may have been. But all was not as it had been before.

There were little things out of whack. The papers and periodicals were stacked on two-thirds of the couch as haphazardly as usual. But the cushions on the couch were new, the colors and patterns different from what they had been before. Similar—but distinctly not the same. Likewise the throw rug. The one that had been comprehensively bled upon was just an inexpensive throw she’d bought at Wal-Mart. This one, again, resembled the old one. But it wasn’t the same. Aside from lacking bloodstains.

The semblance of normalcy did nothing to diminish her creepy feelings of violation. They only added an edge of eeriness, as if the old Twilight Zone theme played constantly in the background.

Aside from the mind-fry elements, Annja had to admit a certain elegance to it all. It made reporting the incident to the police even more problematic. Hello? Remember me? Ninja girl? Well, it turns out the ninjas took all the dead bodies with them and cleaned up the bloodstains. They even replaced my throw rug and the contents of my spice rack!

Mentally replaying the hypothetical conversation for about the tenth time she shook her head. That conversation would not end well.

Why? she thought, for far more than the tenth time. Who? She sighed. She didn’t even know where to start investigating.

She tapped at the keys a bit more.

Investigate recent reports from the Republic of the Congo of sightings of a large animal which allegedly resembles a dinosaur. If there’s anything to it, it may be the model for the mysterious creature, the dragonlike sirrush, represented on Babylon’s ancient Ishtar gate….

She stopped. “I can’t concentrate,” she said aloud. “I may just have to go out to get anything done.”

She picked up the remote to click on the TV. It felt like an admission of defeat.

The 24/7 news channel had finally gotten over the abortive Ocean Venture hijacking. It was back to showing the usual processions of disaster and despair, interspersed with the standard assurances that all would be well, if only the viewers trusted the government. She sighed and turned it off.

Her phone rang and she answered it. “Hello.”

“Hello.” The man’s voice had a mannered, almost English accent. “My name is Cedric Millstone. Am I speaking to Ms. Annja Creed?”

“Yes, you are, Mr. Millstone,” she said, secretly glad of the interruption. “What can I do for you?”

“I’d very much like to meet you and talk to you, Ms. Creed.”

Uh-oh, she thought. He sounded a little older than her usual obsessed fan. “I’m sorry, Mr. Millstone,” she said. “I’m pretty tied up right now. I have a number of very pressing commitments.”

It was true. Annja couldn’t—honestly—claim she never lied. But she tried to tell the truth.

“I’m sorry,” the mellifluous voice said. “I know how this must sound. I could tell you I am a man of some standing in the community, a man of considerable means, but I fear that might only tend to confirm your altogether natural suspicion that I harbor improper intentions. I can provide you references, but doubtless you are aware the voice that answers at any number I give you might not be whom he portrays himself to be.”

“You’re right, Mr. Millstone. I have to tell you, that’s almost exactly what I’m thinking,” Annja said.

“Then let me tell you I wish to offer an apology, and an explanation, for your recent inconvenience.”

She drew in a sharp breath. She felt a complicated mixture of fear and anger.

“Inconvenience,” she said. It was almost a hiss.

“An inadequate word, I grant. As I say, I shall endeavor to explain, and insofar as possible, make amends. May I call upon you?”

Don’t do it! the ever-cautious voice at the back of her head cried. Nothing good can come of this.

She felt her mouth stretching in a tight-lipped expression that someone near-sighted might mistake for a smile in bad light. I can rationalize about how it’s a matter of personal security to find out all I can about whoever attacked me last night, she thought, but the truth is I’ll go crazy if I don’t find out.

“We’ll meet,” she said.

ARJUNA’S COFFEE SHOP was a favored hangout of Annja’s, in easy walking distance of her loft and convenient to the subway station where she caught the train to Manhattan to work. It managed to be at once spotless and cozy, not an effect all that easy to achieve and not too common in this part of Brooklyn. The owner, Mr. Brahmaputra, was a stout, friendly, voluble man who always wore an apron over his capacious belly, and had slightly protuberant, heavy-lidded eyes behind thick round lenses.

Annja associated India with chai, not coffee. She’d once asked Mr. Brahmaputra why he opened specifically a coffee shop, instead of a chai emporium. “Because I like coffee better,” he replied. Both the coffee and chai he sold were excellent, as was everything else. That and the friendly ambience of the place had helped him build a loyal clientele over the years, enabling him to withstand repeated efforts of a well-known chain to displace him.

Despite the café’s name, Arjuna wasn’t Mr. Brahmaputra’s first name. It referred to the Hindu hero-god, whose charioteer in battle was no less than the god Krishna, who was always lecturing him about karma in Bhagavad-Gita. Reproductions of some fairly alarming traditional portrayals of Arjuna adorned the walls, many with Blue Boy crouched at his side, nagging away.

“So, Mr. Millstone,” Annja told her companion through the steam rising from her freshly filled cup in the artificially cooled air, “I believe you had in mind to apologize and explain. Given the enormity of what you have to apologize for and explain, I’d say you have your work cut out for you.”

Cedric Millstone, or at least a man who bore a decent resemblance to the pictures she’d seen in a quick Google search, nodded his head. He had a large face, more sideways-oval than round, red as a brick beneath a wavelike coiffure of hair as white and perfect as a marble sculpture. His dark blue suit was expensive-looking, his nails recently manicured, his watch a Rolex. His cuff links resembled the exposed works of a small watch, gilded. Annja was disappointed the little gears didn’t turn.

“There has been a terrible misunderstanding,” he said. He had the kind of plummy voice that always suggested its owner was chronically constipated to Annja.

“I’ll agree with the terrible part,” she said.

He nodded as if accepting a passed sentence. “Truly, I know, there can be no restitution for what was done to you.”

“You could make a start,” she said, sipping her coffee and savoring its strong taste, “by cutting out the evasions and getting to the point.”

He showed her a pained smile. “Quite. I’m sorry. This is rather difficult, you see—although not, of course, nearly as difficult as what you have been put through. I represent a certain private international society devoted to humanitarian works.”

“Humanitarian? Is that what you call breaking through people’s skylights in the middle of the night and trying to kill them?”

“Not kill, Ms. Creed. I assure you. The men who…attacked you…had been given strict instructions not to harm you.”

“They shot at me.” It was perhaps a testament to the sort of life she’d been living of late that it didn’t take any particular effort to keep her voice down. If anything, she was way more upset about the violation of her personal space. People shot at her all the time. It no longer particularly bothered her. So long as they missed.

“Tranquilizer projectiles only,” he said quickly. “A…proprietary design. Quite painless and free of distressing side effects.”

“Aside from being captured like—what? A black bear who’s wandered into the suburbs? And if all they wanted was to capture me, why did they come at me with swords?”

“I surmise, in an attempt to intimidate you into surrendering. Obviously, an ill-advised course of action. Terribly so, in light of what happened. Nor in honesty can I blame you for the actions you took. You defended yourself and your home against a violent invasion. You acted within your rights. Laudably, even,” Millstone said.

“What did they intend to do with me, once they intimidated me, or knocked me out?”

“Question you concerning a certain artifact that vanished during a very recent attack on a luxury cruise liner off the Netherlands Antilles,” he said. “Despite the play the incident received in the global media, certain details have been altogether glossed over. As you’re no doubt well aware, Ms. Creed.”

“Oh,” she said, almost under her breath.

“I am, as I believe I have indicated, well-connected. My society possesses resources far in excess of my own. We were able to ascertain that you were aboard the vessel, despite the fact your name appeared nowhere on the passenger lists. Indeed, the cruise line had no record of you in their computers at all.”

She had blessed Garin for his efforts in making them disappear from all the attention, both official and media, focused on the hijacked ship. Now the law of unintended consequences had apparently swung around to whack her in the back of the head.

“That disparity, combined with your mild international notoriety in connection with a rather sensationalist television series which concerns itself with arcane matters, led us to suspect you might be involved in the disappearance of our holy relic.”

“I might be offended at that characterization of me,” Annja said, “except nobody’s ever referred to me as notorious before. I kind of like it but, did you say holy relic?”

He nodded. “What disappeared from the Ocean Venture—was stolen, to be quite candid—was an artifact of great antiquity. It has been in the possession of my society for centuries. It is a casket, containing the bones of a certain very holy man. Legend says they possess miraculous abilities.”

He made a dismissive gesture with a well-scrubbed pink hand. “But that, of course, is legend. Whatever the case, it does hold a great religious significance. For us,” he hastened to add.

Pieces fell into place in Annja’s head so hard she could almost hear them click. “So the hijacking was just a cover all along,” she said. “I thought there was something wrong with the whole setup. I mean, aside from the screamingly obvious.”

“Indeed. As closely as we can piece the story together, the people who attacked the ship legitimately, if I might use the word in such a context, intended robbery and extortion. It appears unlikely they realized they were being employed as a noisy and, in the event, highly lethal diversion. The men who stole our relic appear to have been most helpful in alerting the would-be pirates to the prospect of hijacking the Ocean Venture, as well as in planning the operation.”

He tipped his splendid head to one side. “They might have been wise to question their benefactors’ motives a little more closely. Then again, pirates are not historically noted for their wisdom.”

“So you thought I was one of these benefactors, who helped set up the raid—the real raid?”

“Not I, personally. Certain more volatile members of our confraternity, however, did jump to such an ill-advised conclusion.”

She sighed. “And I thought getting flamed in the network chat rooms by Kristie Chatham fans was the biggest downside of my gig for Chasing History’s Monsters. So I take it you’ve decided I wasn’t involved?”

“Yes. I speak for all our brothers in this. Leaving aside certain persistent rumors flying among the passengers and crew—which I will say, I now find less incredible than I might, in light of your actions last night—no one with the ability or the connections to disappear off that vessel like a will-o’-the-wisp could possibly be involved in the attack or the theft. A party with access to such resources would have no need of employing such crude means to rob us, frankly. Or having chosen to set in motion such a scheme, taken the ridiculous risk of actually being on board when the operation occurred.”

“That makes sense,” Annja said. “In hopes of stemming speculation, I’ll just say that I’m fortunate in my friends. And that’s all I’ll say.”

She hoisted her cup to her lips with both hands, sipped, then frowned down at the dark liquid as if she saw tadpoles swimming in it. Unaccustomedly she was drinking it black today. It fit her mood.

She returned the cup to the tabletop with exaggerated care. “So what do you want of me now, Mr. Millstone?”

“First, to express how truly sorry I and all my brothers are that these things were done to you. That you were put in the horrible position in which you found yourself. We are willing to pay substantial sums by way of reparation.”

She held up a hand. “I wouldn’t feel right.”

He nodded briskly. “I suspected as much. Very well. You are an archaeologist of some repute and achievement despite your tender years. You also have investigative talent, as manifest in your work for Chasing History’s Monsters. And, clearly, you have certain highly advantageous connections. We should like to hire you to recover our stolen artifact, Annja Creed.”

“No,” she said without hesitation.

He smiled. The expression was almost bittersweet. He actually seemed like a nice man. She knew well just how little that could mean.

“If you would be so kind as to give the matter some thought—”

“My home was invaded, Mr. Millstone. Men died. All as a result of this little mix-up of yours. I killed them. I won’t pretend or evade. Nor for that matter do I feel the trauma we’re all assured will overwhelm our lives and swamp our fragile psyches should we ever take the life of another human being. I may be horribly hard-hearted or maladjusted, but what I honestly feel about that is, if somebody attacks me, what they get is what they have coming.”

“My brethren and I,” he said, “would be the last to disparage such a sentiment.”

“But I don’t take it lightly.” I never do, she thought but did not say. “Your little elves were very efficient about scrubbing out the bloodstains on my hardwood floor. No doubt you’ve got proprietary technology for that, too. The moral stains do not wash out so easily.”

“The men who died considered themselves sacrifices for a holy cause,” Millstone said.

“I don’t believe in human sacrifice.”

“I see. So that is your final answer.”

“It is.”

He rose. “I regret your choice. I have to say, however, that I greatly respect it. I hope you will reconsider. I wish you good day, Ms. Creed.”

7

Annja couldn’t let it go. That simply wasn’t in her nature.

She went straight home—or straight after taking a few fairly routine detours to ensure Mr. Millstone, or his any of his more hotheaded “brothers” less convinced of Annja’s innocence than he, weren’t tailing her. She fired up her computer and jumped online.

Blast him, the painfully well-groomed and unctuous Cedric Millstone, with his white wavy hair, had snagged her interest like a rose thorn in white silk stockings. But it was straight down her line—an ancient artifact with strong mythical associations, stolen by men ruthless enough to stage the hijacking of a ship full of three thousand innocents. A bloodbath waiting to happen—just to cover their real crime. That was heavyweight, she thought.

Anyway, she told herself, I feel as if I’m already caught up in this. She was rationalizing again, she knew—up to a point. When men bust in through your skylight at midnight, it’s fair to say you’re caught up.

She went first to Google Earth, a delightful resource. She knew its publicly available satellite imaging frequently captured pictures not just of boats but even aircraft in flight. Rumors persisted online and in the coffee shops that some showed less conventional objects moving over the earth, and were quickly suppressed by secret government order. Ridiculous conspiracy theory, so far as Annja was concerned. Her passionate attachment to civil liberties wouldn’t let her echo certain fellow skeptics, who demanded such rumor-mongering be outlawed. But she understood where they were coming from.

Having come up with the longitude and latitude of where the hijacking had taken place, she quickly found an image time-stamped not two hours earlier of the Ocean Venture, still anchored in place while authorities from at least three nations swarmed over it looking for evidence and endlessly interviewing witnesses. She felt a stab of sympathy for the passengers and crew. Still, there were worse places to be trapped for several days. The liner was stocked with not just necessities but luxuries for a week or more out of contact with land.

The images showed nothing of the hijacking itself. She quickly found an online forum, however, that had sprung up in response to the attack. Through it she was able to locate several archived pictures from different satellite services showing the attack itself. Three big powerboats were moored to the liner’s square stern. From them the attackers had apparently fired grapnels over the taffrail and climbed aboard undetected.

The pictures had been snapped at fifteen-minute intervals. Apparently that part of the Caribbean was much photographed. In the third image in the sequence a fourth ship was visible floating alongside the others. It was a bigger vessel, eighty feet long or so, and looked like a power yacht.

By the fourth image it was gone.

Annja sat back and smoothed her hair from her face. Her sound system played Evanescence, just too low to make out Amy Lee’s haunting vocals. She considered the situation. After a few moments she got up and went to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of cold water from a bottle in the fridge. Then she returned and sent copies of the pictures of the interloping vessel to several friends, with a carefully worded request.

Two hours later she was roused from reading a geology textbook by the chime announcing she’d received e-mail.

The return address belonged to a Romanian acquaintance of hers in Berlin, although the domain was not a German one. When she saw that she made sure her antivirus library was up-to-date. Just on general principles.

The e-mail had several attachments. Annja ran an antivirus scan on them. When they checked out clean she clicked on the most intriguing, by reason of its extension.

It was a music file, cryptically named “001.mp3.” When her media player came up it started playing a song she recognized as being not that much younger than she was. It was an old Van Halen hit.

The song was “Panama.”

Frowning, she looked at the other attachments. Then she put the notebook computer aside and sat back to digest what she had learned. By habit she clicked her television on to a news channel.

It showed an oblique helicopter shot of a white-and-blue aircraft broken and burning with billowing orange flames in a marshy-looking area. “Near Kearny, New Jersey,” the newsreader was intoning, “where it crashed on takeoff from Newark Liberty International Airport late this afternoon after both engines failed simultaneously. The airplane, a private Gulfstream V jet, was registered to millionaire financier Cedric Millstone of Boston, Massachusetts. The Federal Aviation Administration has just confirmed that Millstone himself was on board the aircraft, as well as an assistant and three flight crew. There were no survivors….”

“HEY, CYRUS! My man,” sang out the deep-tanned man with the aloha shirt open to reveal a chestful of grizzled hair with a gaudy gold medallion in the midst of it. He had a New Jersey accent, a shiny brown bald front to his head and a big, hard paunch. His voice echoed over the slight sloshing of water inside the boathouse. “Do I deliver the goods, or do I deliver the goods?”

The man he had addressed as Cyrus allowed himself a thin smile. “I guess that remains to be seen, doesn’t it, Marty?”

Marty Mehlman had his whole team, a dozen men, gathered together in the boathouse. Windows set high in the wooden walls spilled an olive-oil colored afternoon light across the water, the plank gangway and the big oceangoing yacht moored to the dock with its mast unstepped and made fast to the deck. The water threw back the light in shifts and surges, playing across the features of the men. Cyrus knew them to be a selection of experienced North American and Central American, mostly Panamanian, hoodlums. They were all pros, all intrinsically small-time—competent, but not the hotshots they thought they were. They had been hired to pull a job. They had done so in workmanlike fashion.

Maybe. Cyrus had not gotten where he was by taking things for granted. He happened to be in Panama City, on the Pacific end of the canal.

Marty liked to play up. He made a show of lighting a cigar before answering. Then, puffing a wreath of bluish smoke around his sunburned bean of a face, he said, “What, Cyrus. Don’tcha trust me?”

“You know what they say,” Cyrus said in a cold voice. “Trust, but verify.”

Marty shrugged. Cyrus had him down as a man who didn’t care what you said to him as long as he got paid.

Mehlman circled an upraised finger over his head and whistled to his crew. They used a block-and-tackle arrangement trolleyed from rails along the ceiling of the boathouse to pull a crate from the yacht’s hold. It was a big crate, four feet by four feet by eight. Its proportions were suggestive in a morbid sort of way.

Cyrus stood watching as the crate swayed onto the wharf. He wore a white tropical-weight suit and a white straw Panama hat with a garish fuchsia and neon-green tropical-flower band. It was the only hint of color about him, except for the amber of his aviator-style sunglasses. His hair, cut close to his skull, was light blond. His skin was so pale as to make him seem an albino, which he was not.

He was remarkably thin. He was so thin he looked fragile and looked shorter than his actual height, which was only a couple of inches under six feet without the hat. He was so desiccated that his skin had a parchmentlike texture. The combination of gauntness, pallor and dryness gave him the appearance of being both sickly and elderly—even his thin-lipped mouth was wrinkled like an old man’s.

Although not young, Cyrus wasn’t elderly. As for his skinniness, he had been born with a sense of taste. He simply didn’t care for food, so he ate little. He believed that excessive intake of fluids was bad for one’s health, so he drank little as well.

He did very little, though, to dispel any impression he might be infirm. He frequently found it useful.

When the long yellow pinewood box thumped on the dock Marty turned and squared himself toward Cyrus. “There,” he said, fists on hips. “The goods.”

“Give me a break, Marty,” Cyrus said. “It’s a box.”

“Okay. Okay. Louie, bust the crate open.”

A big rough-looking American with a broken nose and a blond crew cut came up with a four-foot wrecking bar. “Tell him to be careful,” Cyrus said.

“Be careful,” Marty said, as if translating.

Louie pried the crate with splitting, squeaking sounds. He pulled the lid off and let it slam down onto the dock.

Cyrus winced. He walked up and peered down. Inside was a lot of strawlike plastic packing material. He brushed at it until he saw a hint of dull gray metal. He touched it. It was cool and smooth to his fingertips.

“Clear it away,” he said.

Marty scowled and waved at his men. A couple of dark, spare Panamanians stepped up and scooped handfuls of the packing material out and dropped it on the planks.

“Whoa,” Marty said. “It’s a coffin.”

One of the Panamanians made the sign of the cross.

“Okay,” Marty said, puffing like a steamship on his cigar. “Are these the goods, or are they the goods.”

“They’re the goods,” Cyrus said.

“All right.” Marty slammed his hands together and rubbed his palms.

His lieutenant, Pujols, had light-colored skin and dark blond hair tied in a ponytail. He wore a lightweight white jacket over a black and scarlet shirt. His expression was pinched, his manner nervous. He had been shifting his weight from foot to foot the whole time.

“Just pay us and let us get outta here, okay?” he said in a staccato Puerto Rican accent. His jacket hung open, revealing a big angular hog leg of a government-model Colt autopistol in a holster beneath his left armpit.

Cyrus smiled. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? But don’t you want a look inside?”

Pujols made an unhappy, impatient sound low in his throat. Marty frowned, looking puzzled more than annoyed. “What?”

“Sure,” Cyrus said. “Look inside. You’ve worked hard for your money. Now why not get a look at what all the fuss is about?”

Marty chuckled. “Sure. Since you put it that way, why not?”

His men tried the lid. It wasn’t secured in any way. Though extremely heavy it swung open on hinges that might have been lubricated yesterday, so smooth and soundless were they. A waft of cool air freighted with exotic spices rolled out. Marty and his crew crowded around to peer inside.

Their faces open like flowers of amazement unfolding. “Oh, my God,” Marty breathed.

“Say hi to him for me,” the man he had called Cyrus said.

At both ends of the boathouse, along the landward wall, doors burst open. Men in street clothes stepped inside. They held MP-5 machine pistols with built-in sound-suppressers to their shoulders. The guns fired with little popping barks, like seals who had lost their voices.

Most of the men fell right down, dead in an instant, killed by surgically precise two-shot bursts to the head. Pujols was fast. Marty was faster than he looked. Both men ducked around on the water side of the opened casket. Pujols drew his big .45.

With barely a ripple and no sound beyond the wavelets slogging endlessly against the yacht’s sleek flanks, two heads wearing black wet suits and rebreather masks broke water right behind them. Suppressed MP-5s rose with them. They coughed explosively.

Marty and his nervous lieutenant fell backward into the water.

Cyrus gazed impassively at the bodies slumped on the dock in spreading maroon pools, the corpses bobbing slowly in the water.

“Thanks, boys,” he said as the two frogmen clambered up onto the decks and peeled their masks off their heads. The men reloaded their weapons and closed the doors. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind giving me a hand getting this sucker closed and picked up on the loader? We’ve got a boat to get it aboard before it sails,” Cyrus said.

“Who’s taking delivery?” one of the men who had come in from outside asked, strolling up. He had slung his machine pistol muzzle down behind his right shoulder.

Cyrus laughed like a crow cawing. “You should know better than to ask that, Rushton,” he said. “Need to know, amigo. Need to know.”

8

The taxi rolling down the wide toll road called the Corredor Sur from Tocumen International Airport on the city’s eastern edge was white and red faded near pink by the scorching Panamanian sun. It was a Buick, about as old as Annja herself. Its air conditioner wheezed asthmatically and thumped alarmingly without appreciably thinning the humid heat. The cabbie ran it full-on anyway, despite having all the windows rolled down. Its noise and the early-afternoon traffic sounds of downtown Panama City did have the beneficial effect of mostly drowning out the cab’s CD player, which was chugging out terrible mid-nineties studio-gangsta rap at a volume that would’ve rattled the windows had they been up. Annja could feel the beats in her teeth.

They turned off the highway at a downtown exit. As with a lot of Latin American cities everything except the skyscraper-central middle of the business district interspersed shiny looming modern buildings with smaller, more inhabitable-looking older ones. In this case older meant mostly a particularly baroque variant of Spanish Colonial that Annja found especially charming.

Looking out the window at the awning-shaded shops and the crowds Annja was struck by a resemblance to New Orleans’ Latin Quarter. For all its well-publicized French heritage her hometown owed as much cultural debt to its long period of Spanish occupation as to France.

She did find herself wondering, Does archaeology ever happen anywhere it isn’t hot or humid? Although to be fair, she had to admit that she wasn’t exactly there to do archaeology. She had archaeological aims, though—to try to make sure an unknown artifact was properly conserved. So maybe that counted.

Her Romanian contact had used what Annja suspected was pirated NSA image-comparison software to sift through terabytes of raw overhead imaging. She had a feeling not all of it was supposed to be publicly available.

Her hotel, the Executive, stood in the midst of Panama City’s booming financial district. Annja had picked it because it got good reviews online, its rates were reasonable and also because, to her thoroughly irrational delight, it looked like nothing so much as a tower of giant white Lego. She tipped the driver, a dark taciturn man who had spoken English with a Punjabi accent, and wore a maroon turban.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.