by Alex Archer
But if you're willing to shed it, you'd better be willing to wear it, she told herself grimly.
They got out. Sulin was still breathing, shallowly and irregularly. Jadzia helped Annja ease him off the roof and gently to the ground. Blood was crusting around his nostrils and streamed down his chin.
"You think you've won," he wheezed. "You cannot win. You have made it personal."
"Don't talk," Annja said, kneeling beside him. "We'll call an ambulance for you."
"What's this? Mercy to a fallen foe?" The beautiful, too-fine features twisted in a sneer. "Fool yourselves if you will. Don't try to fool me. I'm dying. I have seen enough death to know."
"All right," Annja said. She stood. "What did you mean, it's personal, then?"
"The director," he said with a ghastly bubble running through his asthmatic wheezing. "He has commanded that you two be hunted down and killed at any cost. However long it takes."
"What about the scrolls?" Jadzia asked. She was calm. It bothered Annja slightly. Was there something wrong with her? Or was she merely on emotional overload?
Why don't I feel more? she wondered. And then she realized she did feel something – empty. Utterly drained. Of fear, as well as hope.
Sulin shook his head weakly.
"Regardless of what befalls the scrolls," he said, "no one is permitted to defy the company as you have." He smiled as if in contemptuous amusement, whether at them or his own employer, Annja couldn't tell. Probably both, she guessed.
"Run if you will," he said. His voice was a whisper. "You cannot get away. You will only die tired. But I can help you escape them."
"Tell me," Annja said.
He raised his right hand with obvious effort. "Come close," he said in a voice like the ghost of the last wind of autumn.
She frowned but knelt again and leaned down. His breath was thready on her cheek.
"I have your escape," he said, "in my hand."
With blinding speed his left hand shot toward her neck. She caught him by the wrist. The needle point of a stiletto hovered half an inch from her carotid artery.
"Damn you!" he growled. The violet eyes were wide and staring. "Who are you?"
"Your worst enemy," she said.
He arched his back. She felt him die. All the tension and strength flowed out of him with the life force.
Gently she laid his hand, still clutching the stiletto, across the front of his immaculately tailored dove-gray suit coat. She gazed at the red morass from the wound the sword had made in his chest.
She stood. For a moment she looked down at the sculpted elfin features. Despite his final spasm he looked perfectly at ease, perhaps for the first time in his life.
"What demons drove you?" she asked under her breath. "What kind of thoughts ran through your head?"
She looked up to see Jadzia's cheek glistening with tears.
"I hate him," the girl said. "Why did it hurt to watch him die?"
"Be glad," Annja said. "It means we're both still human."
She looked to their driver, who stood with arms akimbo regarding his poor battered car. She expected him to demand a prodigious payment to make good the damage to his cab. But his eyes were bright and his cheeks flushed from the chase and running battle.
"It all right," he said. "Insured!"
Annja raised an eyebrow. "Against crash damage, spilled blood and bullet holes? That seems like a lot to ask of an insurance company. Even for a wide-open town like Shenzhen."
He laughed. "Oh, no," he said. "For theft! Car disappear, so sad. Shenzhen full of thieves!"
"What about him?" Jadzia asked, indicating Sulin. "We can't leave him here."
For practical more than sentimental reasons Annja agreed.
"No problem," the cabbie said. "You pay?"
Annja sighed. "I pay." He did save our lives, she reminded herself.
He opened the trunk and produced, to Annja's astonishment, a box of garbage bags. "We stuff him in trunk. I know all about it. I'm a big Sopranos fan. I leave car somewhere hidden before I report stolen. Dump him – just like New Jersey!"
Chapter 24
"We have to change our strategy," Annja told Jadzia.
They sat in the departure area of Hong Kong's relatively new Chek Lap Kok Airport on Lantau Island, waiting to board the afternoon flight that would carry them to Kuala Lumpur. It was the first available flight out of Hong Kong and China. Annja had avoided rousing suspicion by paying with a credit card in a phony name that Roux had provided to her on a previous mission.
"What do you mean?" Jadzia asked, half defiant.
"We're out of resources," Annja said, "out of places to turn. There are only a few places with the ability to transcribe the scrolls, and they're all barred to us. We have no way of getting the secrets of the scrolls to the world at large."
Jadzia's shoulders slumped. "What can we do, then? Isn't that our only chance?"
Annja's own shoulders rose as she took a deep breath. "There may be a way to save ourselves," she said. "Maybe. And if it works it will definitely keep the scrolls out of the hands of our enemies." She shook her head. "But that's all. Beyond that we're stymied. Unless you can think of something we haven't tried."
Jadzia looked at her bleakly. Her mouth worked as if trying to shape words she didn't want to say. Her eyes brimmed and overflowed with tears.
Annja put her arms around her as Jadzia sobbed into her shoulder, soaking her blouse.
She was suddenly struck by the heaviest, most devastatingly complete sense of loneliness she had ever known.
She was isolated. She had a unique role, which she had no more chosen than her parents had chosen to go away from her. It set her apart from the rest of humanity – with a few exceptions, perhaps no more than two, and they were as alien to her as to everybody else on the planet. She saw with sudden clarity how her new role might preclude her from forming any kind of lasting relationships.
It came to her lips to tell Jadzia that, to seek the solace of at least sharing her burden.
But she knew she could not share and remain true to herself. She was a uniquely powerful being. Roux had certainly intimated as much, and while she knew full well he would twist the truth or outright lie as suited his own agenda, she also sensed he was right.
And that power, as the cliché ran, imposed upon her a crushing weight of responsibility. She couldn't tell Jadzia of her own loneliness and isolation. Not just because the girl was a mere child, although she was, emotionally. Annja simply wouldn't slough off her burdens on anyone else.
And so Annja sat there as the airport throngs surged heedlessly past, doing her best to soothe this child who needed her.
At last Jadzia's sobbing ebbed. She eased away from Annja, smoothed tears from her face and said almost matter-of-factly, "What do you have in mind?"
Annja took out a cell phone. She had bought it from a friend of Rambo the adventure-loving cabdriver. It was a pay-as-you-go phone, the contact said – legal, he said. She was in no position either to know or care. The one thing that mattered was the one thing that was sure – when she used it no board would light up anywhere in the vast web of Euro Petro's spider empire pinpointing the whereabouts of Annja, Jadzia and the lost Atlantis scrolls.
She punched a sequence of numbers she remembered better than she cared to.
****
"Master Garin," a voice said over the intercom.
Garin Braden scowled. "Hoskins," he said sharply, "I gave orders I was not to be disturbed."
"If I may be so bold as to say so, sir," the butler said over the intercom, unperturbed, "you also directed in no uncertain terms that you should be notified at once of the receipt of any communication from one Ms. Annja Creed."
His coal-black eyebrows rose. "So I did. And I take it we are in receipt of such a communication?" He made his tone arch, to show he was mocking his butler's overly elaborate elocution.
"We are indeed, sir. A telephone call."
"Come ahead, then," he said.
A moment later his man's man entered bearing an opened flip phone on a silver platter.
"Thank you, Hoskins," Garin said, accepting it as the servant stooped. Hoskins straightened and walked from the room. Garin settled back in his chair.
"Annja? Are you there?"
"Garin?"
"Unless you hit the wrong speed-dial button when you were calling out for pizza, whom did you expect, my girl?"
"Look, I don't have much time. I'm in trouble."
"Then why waste my time belaboring the obvious? You're always in trouble. Although I grant it must be deeper than normal, for you to call me."
"It is. I – I have a deal for you."
"I'm all about the making of deals. Does this involve your surrendering the sword to me?"
"No."
"Pity. But I find myself in a receptive mood. Bored, to put not too fine an edge to it. What do you have in mind?"
A pause. That surprised him. Annja Creed was not given to hesitancy, in his experience.
"I can offer you extraordinarily valuable resources," she said, "if you will do me a favor."
"You can't tell me precisely what resources?"
"No."
"How valuable?"
"Beyond your wildest dreams of avarice."
"My dreams are quite expansive, my dear. But I respect your judgment, at least in such matters. What favor?"
"Get somebody off our backs."
"Our?"
"Mine. And a friend."
"Consider it done. For considerations offered. Whom can I do for you?"
"Euro Petro."
After a rather lengthy silence he vented a half-voiced whistle. "You don't do things by half measures, do you, Annja? That's the European Union you're talking about. Even for me that's a heavy hitter."
"Then you can't help me?"
"Don't try to manipulate my ego. That was last done with any success shortly before the close of the eighteenth century, under circumstances I prefer not to discuss. If there's something I know I can't do, rest assured I feel no compulsion to try."
"Cut the crap, Garin. Will you or won't you?" Annja said.
His laughter was long and loud and rich. "You delight me, Annja. Of all the men and women who think they know the extent of my power, only the merest handful would dare talk to me like that. And only you and Roux know the real nature of my capabilities. How is our old mentor, by the anyway?"
"The same annoying, self-righteous old fart as always. Please, Garin."
"Very well. Since you said the magic word, it's a deal." He grinned at the phone. "To tell you the truth, you have tweaked my ego, girl. There are so few worthy challenges left to me. How could I pass this one by?"
Chapter 25
"Will your friend really help us?" Jadzia asked.
Annja scowled. "He's not really a friend."
They walked by night among the quaint and mostly authentic colonial buildings of central Kuala Lumpur. They seemed to exist in a hidden valley walled in on all sides by canyons of steel and concrete. In one direction the colossal Petronas dominated the immediate skyline. They looked to Annja's eye like a pair of huge rocket ships linked together. In another rose the Kuala Lumpur Tower, nearly as tall as the Petronas twins. It resembled the world's largest stalk of asparagus. Cars and buses hissed along narrow old-town streets that meandered like streams as if in contrast to the geometric exactitude of the skyscrapers.
Jadzia looked at Annja with a spark of interest. It was good to see, after the listlessness the girl had displayed since they'd left Shenzhen.
"A lover?" Jadzia teased.
Annja adjusted the strap of the satchel of scrolls on her shoulder and let out a reflexive chuff of laughter. "I'd say 'he wishes,' but I'm not even sure that's true."
"What about you? Do you wish? Is he a sexy man? A beautiful man?"
"Yes. I guess he is. He's a very powerful man. He's unique."
"So why don't you sleep with him?"
She just shook her head, tight-lipped. Garin Braden was attractive, no question, with his commanding eyes, superb physique and charisma to make the curtains sway when he entered a room. The truth was Annja found it hard to get really intimate with someone who, at any given moment, might decide to try to kill her. It didn't seem politic to mention that to Jadzia in connection with someone on whom both women currently relied to save their lives.
Leaving a compulsively neat little square with palm trees and flowers in planters in the middle and copper-domed buildings around the fringes, they entered a more modern section of the city. And shortly, down a street blocked by concrete traffic barriers, they came to a wire perimeter surrounding a half-finished building.
A crash sounded from behind them. They both turned. A heavy truck had just bulled its way between two waist-high barriers and was roaring down the street at them.
"Oh, no," Jadzia said.
Annja grabbed the satchel with one hand and Jadzia's wrist with the other. "Come on," she said, and raced inside the wire. The truck grumbled to a halt behind them with a sound like the tail end of an avalanche.
A pair of uniformed guards with billed caps and showy white Sam Browne belts came running out of a security shack near the entrance to the half-built building. "Stop! You cannot come in here."
Rippling cracks sounded to either side of Annja. The two guards folded like collapsing cardboard cutouts.
Annja looked back over her shoulder and almost stumbled. A burly figure swaggered in the gate with a bow-legged roll. Dark-clad men flanked him, holding suppressed submachine guns to their shoulders.
Jadzia looked too. "Marshall!" she exclaimed. She yelped in terror as she stumbled on a piece of rubble.
Annja would not let her fall. Jadzia cried out as Annja pulled ruthlessly on her arm, barely slowing her stride. She got her sneakers under her and followed with ungainly flapping steps, into the darkness of the building's heart.
****
"I hear them!" Jadzia said. "They are below us!"
Her panted words echoed between the raw concrete slabs of roof and floor and the metal sheathing on the outside of the building. The two women had run up a dozen stories of temporary steel stairs with only the most perfunctory kind of safety rail. Fortunately, small amber lights clamped at irregular intervals gave enough illumination that neither woman had put a foot wrong enough to plummet back down.
The drumbeats of feet, the shouts of men's voices, even the panting of their breath came echoing up the deep well.
"We better keep going," Annja said.
"But where? There's nowhere to go but up."
"You're right," Annja said. "But it's not as if we've had much choice."
"Then where are we going? Are we just climbing to prolong the inevitable?"
"To look for somewhere to make a stand," Annja said.
"What kind of stand?" Jadzia demanded. "I thought you left the gun back with the cabdriver."
"I did," she said.
"So what happens when you find someplace you like?"
"Ambush," Annja said. "Classic recourse of the weak and hunted."
She glanced over to see Jadzia screwing up her face to say something cutting. But she simply nodded. "You're right," she said.
They had a way to go before they ran out of building. But they were running out of options. Jadzia was right – ultimately all that lay up this way was roof. Or actually the topmost floor slab, sixty or seventy stories farther up, with a giant crane clamped to it.
The floors they had just passed had been bare, to judge from what Annja could see. While they did offer plenty of deep darkness, she had to assume their pursuers had some kind of night-vision gear. Under the circumstances, flashlights would be all they'd need to ferret out their quarry.
"We need terrain," Annja said.
"Meaning what? We're in a building."
"Stuff to hide behind."
"Oh."
They reached a new landing.
"How about here?" Jadzia said,
looking around. By the amber gleam of a utility light Annja saw a promising plenitude of boxy shapes – portable generators, tool chests on wheels, worktables. Either more internal work was being done on this floor than those immediately below for some reason, or it was a designated shop. "Perfect," she said, starting away from the stairs.
"Wait," Jadzia said. "Give me the scrolls."
"Really, they're easy for me to carry. Although I have to admit my hips've gotten pretty sore from the bag bouncing off them at every step."
"No," Jadzia said. "Give me the bag so you're free to hit people."
With more relief than she cared to admit, she peeled the strap off her shoulder and handed the satchel to the girl. Then, summoning the sword, just in case, she led the way among the meaty chunks of equipment, turned by the darkness to solid black.
Too late she became aware of a shadow-blur of motion from her left. An impact against the back of her skull filled it with a red explosion, and then a white radiance as blinding as the sun.
Chapter 26
Annja came back to herself blubbering incoherent words as she lay on her back on a stretcher. She looked over quickly to see Jadzia lying beside her. The girl was in the same shape she was. From the sound penetrating her aching head, Annja realized they were in a helicopter.
"Hello, miss," a British fellow was saying.
A woman knelt beside Annja and shone a light in both her eyes. "Pupils both the same size, you'll be pleased to know," she said in English with a singsong Malay accent. "Sit up for me, please, if you can." She was small and brown and spare, with a red crescent in a white circle patch sewn to the breast of her green jumpsuit.
Annja obeyed. As the Malaysian woman began to probe the blood-matted hair at the back of her head with gloved fingers, something struck Annja. "Wait – are you a Malaysian search-and-rescue team?"
"Oh, no," the medic said from outside of Annja's field of view. "The rest of the team are not even Malaysian."
"Annja!" Jadzia began to struggle frantically. A woman tried to restrain her. The blond girl batted at her weakly. "Annja, do something. They're Euro Petro!"
