by Alex Archer
She rolled over and jumped to her feet. Xia was already up, clearing a curtain of heavy black hair from her face with a flip of her head. She grinned at Annja.
"Not bad," she said.
Annja advanced. Not headlong this time, but behind a flurry of kicks and punches.
Xia blocked or redirected them with apparent ease and a remarkable economy of motion. Even as Annja struck for her in dizzying combinations, she marveled at the other's skill.
Annja's breath came in great gulps. Strength ebbed from her like blood from an opened vein. Along with total physical exertion loading up the lactic acid in her muscles came unrivaled mental tension.
Xia, her oval face serene, looked as if she could keep this up for a week.
Gasping raggedly, trying not to reel, Annja decided to try power where technique had failed. She threw a quick quartet of punches at Xia's face – all blocked by scarcely visible movements – then shifted weight to her back foot to fire a side kick.
But she had barely lifted her right foot to chamber the kick when Xia flowed toward her and slammed a palm heel into her sternum.
Floorboards slammed her in the back. The air fled her body. A dark figure rose above her. It was Xia, hair flying around her again.
From down the hall a noise erupted. Even with Xia suspended above her, Annja's eyes were drawn away, back down the hall. A gang member stood in a crouch, firing a Kalashnikov from the hip. The brilliant yellow muzzle-flare illuminated a face screaming almost in ecstasy.
The dancing flame went out. The banana magazine was empty. Annja looked up, wondering why Xia hadn't heel stomped on her sternum.
The air was empty of all but roiling smoke and drifting motes of dust and spores. The hallway between Annja and the door to the outside world was a roaring hell of flame.
The Promessan woman had vanished.
It was time for Annja to do likewise. A hint of light showed beneath a blanket hung in a doorway to her right. She rolled through it into a tiny room as a fresh burst of automatic gunfire chewed up the planking where she had lain an instant before.
A tiny off-square window let sunlight filter vaguely into the room through yellowed newspaper taped across its crossed slats in lieu of glass. Annja coiled herself and jumped through it. She carried with her not just the window but a good patch of rotted-wood wall.
She put a shoulder down as she landed and rolled clear of the wreckage. She got herself to her feet by sheer willpower and desperation and bouncing off the walls to both sides of the narrow alley. Speed was her only slim chance at life.
Coughing from the smoke she had inhaled, Annja tried to force her mind clear, assimilate surroundings and circumstances. She was alone in a tiny space that initially seemed to have no outlet. Then ahead of her she noticed the outward-leaning wall of the shack to her right didn't quite meet that of the hovel beyond.
She also noticed all the buildings around her were in flame to a greater or lesser extent. If she lingered another minute she'd best pray the Kalashnikov gang-banger blasted her from the blown-out window. Only that would save her from burning to death.
Annja raced around the almost hidden corner. Running through coils of brown-and-dirty-white smoke, she saw ahead of her, thirty yards away beyond a cross alley, two men fighting.
Dan. Looming over him was Patrizinho.
She shouted. Smoke clawed at her throat. Dan, bare-handed, launched a savage one-two combination, left hook and right cross.
The punches came at their target from the sides, outflanking most attempts to block them. Patrizinho leaned back away from his opponent, slipping the blows. His bare brown upper torso gleamed in the sun as if oiled. His dreadlocks, held back from his handsome face with a golden band, flew like a Medusa tail of serpents about wide shoulders.
Dan's right hand went behind him, came up with the handgun.
"No!" Annja screamed. She reached the crossing alley. Firearms and energy weapons crackled to both left and right through the roar of flames.
Patrizinho flicked the 9-mm pistol with the back of his left hand. It fired. The muzzle-flame must have seared his left biceps; unburned propellant and primer fragments must have peppered his bronze skin. Paying no mind, he stepped into Dan, dropping his weight and driving a compact vertical punch straight into Dan's chest above his heart.
Dan did not go flying back the way Annja had from Xia's palm-heel strike between her breasts. Instead his body seemed almost to balloon away from the blow, up and outward. He staggered but stayed on his feet.
"No!" Annja shrieked again. This time Patrizinho looked straight at her. His beautiful long face seemed full of infinite sadness.
The black handgun dropped from Dan's fingers.
From her left, green beams flickered, crossing Annja's path. Automatic fire answered invisibly from her right. Disregarding both, she plunged on, across ten feet of open death ground.
No energy beam or bullet struck her. But flames suddenly roared from both sides and met in the middle, an orange wall. Just inside the cover of the far alley mouth Annja was forced to stop, safe from the firefight but unable to proceed to the aid of her friend.
The flame curtains parted. As through an opened gate, Dan walked unsteadily toward her. There was no sign of Patrizinho.
Annja ran to him. His face was horribly pale, his lean cheeks ashen beneath his fine two-day beard. He scarcely seemed to breathe.
"My... heart," he explained. "It's my heart."
He staggered, went to his knees in the foul alley muck. One hand spasmodically clutched the front of her shirt. His pale eyes were wide.
Then he smiled. It was the sweetest smile Annja had ever seen. It would haunt her dreams so long as she lived.
"I see it all so clearly now," he said as he died.
Chapter 24
The massive double doors, oaken, stained dark brown, polished as mirrors, swung open violently to Sir Iain Moran's shove. They would give me permission to enter, would they? he thought savagely.
Beneath a chandelier like a wedding cake of light and crystal, deep in the bowels of a little-known château perched high in the Bernese Alps, there stretched a long, massive table of oak, dark stained and polished like the door. Around it sat a dozen men.
They were old men. Sir Iain was junior in the room by a good two decades or more. Their hair was silver or white or absent, their clothes exquisite, with the unobtrusive perfection rendered by masters of the tailor's art.
These men brought unobtrusiveness to an art. Their names were unknown to the public, or only incidentally so. They sat on no thrones, in no cabinets, held no chairs in any corporate boardroom. No ties connected them to any government or corporation or recognized institution – visibly. They were as far above such things as eagles over ants.
But every single person who served a government or multinational, no matter how low or high his rank, served one or another of them indirectly.
Look at them, Publico thought with contempt, these self-anointed masters of the world. Withered old vultures is what they look like. But he knew them for what they really were. Jackals.
The ancient at the table's far end raised a head of hair like spun glass. On a face liver spotted and sagging with the weight of years, he adjusted his glasses. Like the presence he projected – even seated, even tethered by plastic tubes from his nostrils to an oxygen tank discreetly hidden behind his chair – the piercing blue eyes made no concession to age.
"Sir Iain Moran," the old man said in a high voice, upper-class English accent piping with outrage. "What is the meaning of this intrusion?"
"I meant to correct a most unfortunate oversight on your part, gentlemen," he said, his baritone Irish brogue at once rough and rolling. "You seemed to believe you could make me wait upon your pleasure like a lackey."
The chairman drew his head back on his skinny, wattled neck.
"What do you think to gain by storming in here like this, young man?" a stout man halfway down the table's right side demanded wit
h Teutonic heaviness. He had white eyebrows that stuck out ferociously.
"My rightful place," Publico said.
"That has to be earned, friend," said a man across from the bristle-browed German in an elaborate Texas drawl. It was fake, Publico knew. The man in the pale gray suit and bolo tie with an immense silver steer head for a clasp had been born in Massachusetts and educated at Princeton and Georgetown.
"Ah, but have I not earned my place and then some?" Sir Iain asked. "I've served you well, gentlemen. I've done your bidding and more."
"Do you imagine," the chairman asked, "that we hand out memberships to the most exclusive council in the world like crackers at a child's birthday party? You have served well, it's true, Sir Iain. But you have likewise been well recompensed."
"You think to hire me like a tradesman, then?" His tone was silky.
They said nothing. They simply sat and stared at him. They showed no discomfiture. Security in the château matched that of a thermonuclear-warhead assembly plant. No matter how robust and agile he was, he posed them no physical danger. At the least aggressive movement he would instantly die.
Even the volcanic force of his own presence, his reproach, made no impression on them. They were men of necessity long inured to shame. And likewise to injustice.
He leaned forward and dropped his big, scarred knuckles on the immaculate wood with a significant thunk. If he could make no overt threat he could still emphasize his very potent presence.
"Some of you have lived even longer than your visible decrepitude would indicate," he said, continuing to speak in the softest voice his scarred vocal cords could manage. "Your relative anonymity, thanks to your control of the world's media, ensures that no one notices anything unusual about you. I know there are others. Members emeritus. Who yet have a voice in affairs."
He straightened, allowed his volume to rise. "Those of you who sit here today, sinking into the decay of your advancing years, do so because you either have physiological resistance to the current generation of treatment, or because you fear to step away from the table of power for long enough to undergo the full extent of rejuvenation. I know that at your level there is no friendship, no loyalty, no brotherhood. Only fear and interest – and your fellowship is that of a pack of wolves, always looking to rend the weak."
"Do you think to force us to admit you to our ranks by insulting us?" the German demanded.
"I might," he said, sticking hands in pockets and grinning, "if I thought you capable of being insulted. Any more than you are of feeling shame."
"Pray you are correct in that, Sir Iain," said a Frenchman who sat closest to Publico's right. "We might not make the truest of friends. But as enemies, we are dauntless!"
Publico showed him a frown, then he glared about at the council members.
"If you will not make a place for me at your table, gentlemen," he said, "I shall be compelled to force one open."
"Others have tried that before, Sir Iain," the American said with heartiness as false as his accent.
"But never I."
Again, there was no reaction. A lesser man might have quailed at the utter certitude their blandness showed. But such a man would never have pushed his way in there in the first place.
"Do you deny," Publico said, "that you have discovered the means, not just of life extension, but life renewal?"
"Why should we bother?" said the Chinese member who sat at the chairman's left. He was a large stout man with a fringe of white hair around the rear of a globelike head. His build and manner and blunt peasant's face projected almost as much physical force as Publico's weight-chiseled frame. "Or affirm, for that matter? We have no need to answer to you, Sir Iain."
"Do you really think not?"
"You think your billions impress us?" the Frenchman sneered.
The American laughed. It was presumably meant to be a guffaw. It came out a raven's croak. "He doesn't even know where they are!" he exclaimed.
"Ah," Sir Iain said. "But I do. Don't forget – I'm a man of deeds. You know I put my body, my very life on the line when I was a lad. Since then I've done as much in half a hundred less publicized ways. Of course, you gentlemen are well aware. I've made my mark upon the world. I've taken actions. Some on behalf of this august if nameless council.
"And I've a following. When I speak, tens of millions listen. Hundreds of millions. From the scruffiest street activists to crowned heads and corporate gods."
"Do you honestly think," the German chortled, his jowls aflutter like slabs of gelatin dessert, "that we don't control as much and more?"
"They may dance to your tunes, Sir Iain," the Chinese member said, "these masses and ministers and monarchs. Even march to them. But will they kill and die to them, as they do ours?"
"Do you honestly want to find out?"
"Enough, Sir Iain!" The chairman's thin voice rapped like a schoolteacher's ruler on a blackboard. "You err grievously if you believe mere wealth – or vulgar repute – can gain you entrance into our councils. You are permitted to leave now, Sir Iain. I will stress this word, permitted."
Publico stood as erect as a soldier at attention on a parade ground. Then he turned and marched briskly from the gleaming chamber.
Out in the corridor he stalked, emanating rage. His hands were buried in his pockets. His great leonine head was thrust forward on his bull's neck.
Right, he thought. That's their last chance, then. The thought came with as much relief – satisfaction, even – as anger.
Chapter 25
The water of the Amazon was ocher.
Annja Creed stood in the riverboat's blunt bow. One walking shoe up on the gunwale, the other on deck, she gazed up the course of the river.
The far bank, the left, was visible only as a green thread along the yellow flow. On the right the forest loomed over them so close that the outer limbs almost overhung the tubby, run-down vessel.
The trees were full of monkeys, screeching and hooting at the invaders and their engine, its mechanically monotonous regularity as alien to the surroundings as spiders from Mars.
Other primates lined the starboard rail – mercenaries of the small platoon of twenty-five men and an officer Sir Iain Moran had arranged to accompany Annja on her journey to find the nine-boled tree and the long held trove of secrets of the descendants of escaped slaves.
Whether they had been brought to Feliz Lusitânia especially for the task or recruited from the ganglike internal-security forces, Annja neither knew nor cared. They were heavily armed and showed every sign of ruthlessness. That was all that mattered to her now.
She was bound on a mission of justice. She needed hard tools. These men were that, at least.
She would not have chosen many of them herself. Half a dozen of them were perched precariously on the rail, all shirtless, a couple wearing nothing but shorts, hooting and screaming back at the furious monkeys.
A flight of blue macaws erupted from a tree, flew off over the ship and headed upstream. The ship was about sixty feet long and twenty wide. It had a modest deckhouse extended forward by a corrugated tin canopy and by a tentlike awning astern. There were also cabins below, stinking, close and crowded.
Annja had chosen to pass the first night alone on deck, under the tin shelter of the elevated wheelhouse for protection from the rain that drummed down half the night. The cabins offered a modicum of privacy. The captain, a short Belgian with a silver fringe beard, had offered his own, probably by prearrangement rather than gallantry. But even the captain's Spartan deckhouse quarters reminded her too much of the hopeless hovels of the lower circle of Hell she had known at the colony.
A tall blond kid from upper New York State crouched atop the deckhouse, wearing only shorts and bulky combat boots and what seemed to be a T-shirt wrapped around his head. The skin stretched over his washboard ribs was fish-belly white. It was already changing to boiled-lobster red on his back from the sun. If Annja's extensive field experience was any guide he'd be writhing in agony by the ea
rly equatorial nightfall. But like the rest, he loudly claimed vast combat experience.
He cradled a long black M-16 rifle across his knees. He wanted to hunt monkeys, he said.
He was getting visibly more and more frustrated. The monkeys were shrewd. Watching the dense transition undergrowth and low-hanging trees along the banks, Annja could catch only flashes of their dark-brown-and-white-furred bodies.
She didn't much care. To the extent she paid attention to her surroundings she hoped her companions would exhaust their masculine energies in their dominance fight with their unseen rivals. Some had begun casting not-so-professional glances her way the moment they shoved off from the Feliz Lusitânia dock upstream of the river-dredging operation the day before. The looks kept getting hotter eyed and longer; she expected trouble by tonight.
She was ready for it. She was ready for anything. Perhaps things she never would have considered before.
****
Somehow she had made her way back to the citadel after Dan's murder. Maybe it was the sword she carried naked in her hand. Maybe it was the look in her eye.
She had somehow found the presence of mind to put the sword away before approaching the heavily fortified gate through which they had exited that fateful morning.
She was recognized and admitted quickly. She knew her pale skin counted little and her U.S. passport even less – if she crossed the powers-that-be in the camp she wouldn't be the first American citizen to end her days in the cage, nor the first American woman. But whatever his relationship with the mining camp and its warring directors, Publico's patronage was a powerful shield for her.
She had been forced to leave Dan's body behind. There was no way to carry it while she threaded her way through the maze of hazards back to the central compound.
Gomes had assured her his bosses would recover the body. He scoffed at the notion there was any part of the camp the security forces dared not go, although privately Annja was inclined to believe Lidia. But she suspected the main gangs of that part of the colony had temporarily exhausted themselves, fighting each other, as well as the intruding Promessans, and would hunker down licking their wounds rather than oppose a patrol of official enforcers.
