“Uh-oh,” Annja said.
Gary glanced over in her direction. “Something wrong?” he asked.
Annja nodded. “You might want to hold on,” she said as she braced herself against the dashboard with both arms.
A look of confusion crossed his face. “What’s wrong?” he asked, easing up on the gas as the realization that there was a problem filtered into his consciousness.
Annja risked a quick look back and saw that the Mercedes was just a few feet off their bumper and closing quickly. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that whoever they were, they were probably with the same group that had attacked the dig site. She didn’t know how they’d known to look for her on the road—if, in fact, that was what they were doing—but at the moment the how really didn’t matter all that much; they had and now she had to deal with it.
“Don’t slow down!” she shouted at Gary. “Go faster!”
But her sudden exclamation had the opposite effect, startling him, and as a result his foot slipped even farther off the gas.
The driver of the Mercedes chose that moment to nurse his own engine and the big black automobile leaped forward and slammed into the back of the Renault, sending it skidding across the road as Gary fought to control the wheel.
“What the hell?” The young pastor cried out, glancing backward at the behemoth closing in again from behind. From the fear that was now plain on his face, Annja guessed that he’d never been involved in a car accident in his life, never mind a high-speed chase where the other guy’s only interest was in driving you off the road.
Welcome to my life, she thought.
She reached over and shoved her hand down on his knee, forcing his foot down on the accelerator.
“I said faster!” she shouted.
This time he seemed to understand the urgency in her request and when she took her hand away his foot stayed right where it was, pinning the gas pedal to the floor.
The Renault bucked and jerked beneath them, not used to having so much demand put on its aging engine.
“What do they want?” he asked, glancing back and forth between her and the rearview mirror. His voice still had a slight tremor to it but Annja was pleased to see him getting his wits back about him.
Maybe there was hope for him yet.
“At a guess, I’d say they want to run us off the road,” Annja said calmly, her gaze flitting around the inside of the car, looking for something she could use as a weapon. Mystical swords were all well and good, but they just weren’t all that useful when you were tearing down a country road at sixty miles an hour trying to get away from the killer Mercedes behind you. It wasn’t like she could stop and challenge them to a sword fight.
“Why would they want to do that?” Gary asked, and then before she had time to answer, followed that with a quick, “Hold on!” as he jerked the wheel to the right, avoiding the sudden rush by the vehicle behind them as it tried again to ram the back of their car.
Rather than attempting to explain the past twenty-four hours to him, Annja simply answered, “I have no idea.”
He didn’t believe her; that much was obvious. But he was too busy steering the car back and forth across the road to bother arguing about it, and for that Annja was grateful. It let her concentrate on how they were going to get out of this mess.
She opened the glove box in front of her and began digging around in it.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for a gun,” she answered.
“I’m a priest, for heaven’s sake!” Gary said. “Do I look like the kind of guy who carries a gun?”
He had a point there.
Giving up on the glove box, she turned and glanced into the backseat. Her gaze fell on the two large cardboard boxes on the floor behind them.
“What’s in the boxes?” she asked, hoping for something useful. A rocket launcher would be really nice right about now, she thought, knowing it was unrealistic but hopeful nonetheless.
“Hymnals!” he said.
Oh, for heaven’s…
She suddenly had an idea.
Hymnals might just do the trick, after all, she realized.
She scrambled between the seats and fell into the back, being sure to keep below the level of the rear window as she did so. She didn’t want to give their pursuers any idea of what was coming.
Annja looked inside the nearest of the boxes and found it filled with dozens of thick, leather-bound volumes.
These will do nicely, she thought.
She pulled a few of them into her lap and then turned around, positioning herself behind the driver’s seat but still staying out of sight of the men in the other car.
“What are you doing?” Gary shouted.
“Giving them something else to think about,” she answered.
She moved closer to the open window and watched as the Mercedes roared up behind them again, making another run at them. Their rear bumper was hanging off the vehicle now, the result of the past few times the two cars had collided. It dragged behind them, sending up a mass of sparks each time it bounced off the pavement, and from where she sat Annja could see that their trunk was half the size it used to be, crushed inward from the impact with the other car.
“Hold it steady and let them get close,” she shouted above the window.
“Are you nuts?” he shouted back, but did as he was told, trusting her obvious command of the situation.
She waited, letting the Mercedes get closer.
Fifteen feet.
Ten.
Five feet.
As the other car surged forward, closing the gap between them, Annja suddenly sat up and whipped her arm out the window in a classic sidearm throw, sending the heavy leather hymnal in her hand flying directly at the windshield of the Mercedes.
The driver reacted just the way you’d expect anyone to react when something came flying at them at speeds in excess of fifty miles an hour; he ducked and jerked the wheel to the side. The book struck the center of the windshield, starring the glass there rather than directly in front of the driver, but it still had the desired effect. The Mercedes went careering across the road as the driver fought to regain control, the outer wheels actually leaving the pavement and bouncing through the scrub brush at the side of the road.
“Go, Amy!” Gary cried, pumping his fist in the air, but his joy was short-lived as the other car pulled back onto the road and raced up behind them again.
This time Annja didn’t wait for them to get close but began flinging hymnals out the window as fast as she could. The big car swerved to avoid the first few and then hung back far enough that Annja couldn’t reach them with the next.
The whole time Gary kept the pedal to the metal and raced down the center of the road without saying a word. Annja figured he was either praying that they didn’t encounter another car coming the other way or cursing his luck for stopping for her in the first place.
Maybe even a little of both.
They drove another mile down the road before the men in the Mercedes decided to change the game. Annja was sitting up in the back, a hymnal in hand, ready to throw it, and so she had a clear view when the man in the passenger seat stuck his arm out of the window and pointed a gun at them.
“Oh, hell,” Annja said softly. She’d known it was coming and was frankly surprised they hadn’t forced the issue before now. After all, they’d killed more than twenty people so far to get their hands on the torc she carried. What were two more?
Two too many, Annja thought to herself, that’s what.
“They’re about to start shooting at us!” she shouted to Gary, ducking as she did so. As if in punctuation, her words were immediately followed by the crack of a shot and the crash of breaking glass. When she looked up again, the rear window had a hole in it.
Gary started swerving the car back and forth across the road, praying all the while. “Protect us Lord! Send Your angels to surround us! Lend us Your mercy and love….”
The gunman fired again, missing this time, but not by much. Annja knew it was just a matter of time before one of those bullets struck either her or Gary, and if that happened, it was all over for both of them.
Gary kept swerving.
Think, Annja! Think!
The gunman’s third shot struck the rear of the car and the trunk suddenly flew open, hiding them from the driver’s view for a moment.
There was no way they could outrun them; the Renault wasn’t in the same class as the Mercedes and frankly never had been, even on the day it rolled off the assembly line. Nor could they keep doing what they’d been doing. Either the Mercedes would eventually force them off the road or one of the gunman’s shots would finally hit something valuable.
Like Gary and me.
It seemed to Annja that their only choice was to bring the attack to the enemy. “Always mystify, mislead or surprise the enemy,” the great tactician Sun Tzu had said in
The Art of War,
and Annja always tried to listen to her betters.
The trick was going to be convincing Gary of the necessity.
The trunk slammed closed, startling them both, and no sooner had it done so that a gunman opened up again, peppering the rear of the vehicle with several well-placed shots. Two of them struck the rear window, which finally proved to be too much for the old safety glass and it fell away behind them in one big cascading sheet.
The Mercedes crushed it beneath its tires as it continued after them.
“We’ve got to do something!” Gary shouted to her, and Annja took that as her cue.
She laid out her plan as quickly she could.
“Can’t we just pull over and give them whatever it is they want?” he asked, not liking the sound of her idea at all. But when she explained that what they wanted was most likely their lives at this point, he saw the logic of her proposition.
They’d gone another half mile down the road and been narrowly missed by another flurry of shots before they were ready. Annja watched the other vehicle closely, knowing that the success of their plan depended heavily on the timing.
At her suggestion Gary eased up on the gas slightly, not enough to be obvious but just enough to let the Mercedes close the gap between them a little bit.
She watched.
And waited.
When the time was right…
“Now!” she shouted.
Gary stood heavily on the brakes.
Realizing at the last second what was going on, the driver of the Mercedes tried to do the same, but by then it was too late. The two cars slammed into each other, the big front grille of the Mercedes burying itself in the rear of the Renault so deeply that it was if the two vehicles had been fused together.
Having known it was coming, Annja and Gary had braced for the impact, but the two men in the front seat of the Mercedes had not. No sooner had they been thrown forward by the impact of the collision than they were bouncing back in the other direction as the dual air bags exploded in their faces.
For a moment they were both dazed by the impact and Annja took full advantage of the opportunity. The second the cars had stopped moving she was in motion, climbing through the open space of the rear window of the Renault and charging across the crumpled steel that had once been the trunk.
The air bags were already deflating by the time her foot hit the hood of the Mercedes and she saw the eyes of the man in the passenger seat go wide as he watched her coming toward them.
His right arm started to come up from where it was hidden below the dash.
That’s the hand with the gun in it, a voice in the back of her mind told her, but it needn’t have bothered; she was already prepared to deal with that very threat.
As she’d rushed across the hood of the Mercedes, she’d called her sword from the otherwhere. It blinked into existence inside of a heartbeat, and she thrust her arm forward just as the gunman attempted to bring his weapon to bear.
The sword passed through the shattered glass of the Mercedes’s windshield like it wasn’t even there, impaling the man on the other side through the center of his chest.
Life faded from his eyes almost immediately and Annja felt no remorse as she watched him go. He’d been trying to kill her, after all, and she was a big believer in doing unto others as they would do unto you.
As she pulled her sword free and turned to face the driver, she discovered that the crash had already done her work for her. The other man’s head hung on his chest at an odd angle—the impact, or possibly the air bag, having snapped his neck.
“Where on earth did you get a sword?” Gary asked from behind her.
Annja turned, wondering how she was going to explain this. Something must have shown on her face, though, some vestige of the hardness that came over her during combat, for Gary took one look at her and backed away quickly, his hands raised in front of him as if to ward off a danger of some kind.
“You know what, I don’t even want to know,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re really doing here, and right now I think that’s for the best. I’m going to chalk it up to the Lord working in mysterious ways and leave it at that.”
Annja could only stand there, mouth open in shock, as the young priest climbed back behind the wheel of his battered old Renault, threw it into drive and, with a wrenching shriek of torn and twisted steel, broke free of the other vehicle and drive off down the street as fast as the remains of his car would allow.
It was only after he was out of sight that it occurred to her that she could have claimed to be an angel of vengeance, complete with a holy sword, and he probably would have believed her.
She’d have to file that excuse away for next time.
Annja released the sword, letting it disappear back into the otherwhere. They hadn’t seen another car in more than an hour but that didn’t mean that one wasn’t on its way. It would be just her luck to have the local constabulary come driving along at this point, catching her in the act, so to speak, so she didn’t waste any time.
She dragged the bodies out of the car and laid them on the side of the road, hidden from immediate view by the bulk of the Mercedes itself. A quick check of their pockets didn’t turn up any identification—not that she’d expected there to be any. The clothes were off-the-rack items with all the labels removed, which wouldn’t prevent the forensics techs from identifying them but it would slow them down a bit. Clearly the two men were professionals. She found the same tattoo on each man, a red hand. The tattoo obviously meant something, but she had know idea what that could be. She assumed the driver must have been on his way to the dig site to rendezvous with the others and it was just her luck that he happened to see her as she got into the priest’s car.
Both men were carrying pistols, 9 mm automatics, but Annja left them where they were. She was going to have to talk to the police at some point and she didn’t want to have guns tying her to a roadside assault, never mind the deaths of two men, when she did.
A quick search of the car turned up nothing of interest. The car was registered to a Mr. Steve Jones, which Annja knew was a fake without even having to check on it. These guys had taken the time to wipe out the obvious clues to their identities; they sure as heck weren’t going to be driving around in a car registered in their own names. It was a fair guess that the license plates had been stolen from another vehicle, too. Still, she memorized the numbers, just in case.
Having found everything she thought she was going to find, Annja considered her options.
It probably wasn’t going to be long before the priest decided calling the cops might be the best thing, after all—if he hadn’t done so already. Given the investigation that was already under way at the dig site, she suspected they’d respond pretty quickly when he reported armed gunmen trying to run him off the road. He’d no doubt report the vehicle they’d been driving, as well.
All of which meant taking the Mercedes, if it even still ran at this point, was a pretty big risk. Still, it was a risk she was willing to take for it gave her access to transportation that could potentially put some serious distance between her and her pursuers. And right now that’s what she needed most—room to figure out her next move.
She called forth her sword once more and used it to slash the air bags free of the dash, using one of them to cover the bloodstains on the passenger seat and tossing the other onto the floor of the backseat. Releasing her sword, she smeared some mud from the side of the road onto the rear license plate, stood back to give it a look and then nodded in satisfaction. It partially hid the number without looking too intentional, which was the entire idea. Sliding behind the wheel, she said a quick prayer and turned the key. The engine hissed and spat for a moment before turning over with a growl of power.
It looked like she was in business.
Before she left she rolled the bodies off the side of the road and into the ditch beside it. Eventually they’d be found, but that should buy her a little time at least.
Getting back in the car, she drove away from the scene of the attack without a backward glance.
The car sputtered and whined far more than she wanted, and it had a strong tendency to pull to the left if she wasn’t paying attention, but it moved and that’s all she really cared about. She pointed the car south, set the cruise control for two miles an hour over the speed limit and sat back to let the car do the rest of the work.
She almost made it, too. She was just entering the outskirts of London when the Mercedes began to buck and shake like a bull at the rodeo and she had to fight the wheel to get the vehicle over to the side of the road before it died completely.
Once it had, she was unable to get it started again. A grinding noise came from somewhere under the hood when she turned the key and it got progressively worse. Finally it let out a big screech and stopped making any sound whatsoever.
“Great,” she said sourly. “Just great.”
It looked like she was going to have to hitch another ride or go the rest of the way on foot.
Before getting out of the car, she used the edge of her T-shirt to wipe down the steering wheel and any of the other places she thought she might have touched since getting inside. She didn’t want the police connecting her to the car or the two dead men who’d been driving it before her. She made sure to cover the door handle the same way when she opened it and got out once she was done.
Night had fallen an hour or so earlier, so Annja found herself standing on the side of the road in a run-down section of town. Traffic was minimal and after watching several cars drive past it was obvious that no one was going to be inclined to stop in this area. Maybe they would have in the bright light of day, but after dark was a different story apparently.
Still, that might work to her advantage. She’d been worried about the police finding the car, but in an area like this, the car might not be there long enough for the police to find it.
Especially if she left it unlocked with the keys in it.
She tossed the keys on the front seat, grabbed her pack out of the back and walked down the street, leaving the door open behind her, the interior light gleaming like a beacon in the night.
A few miles down the road she came to a run-down motel, the kind of place that would let her pay cash without leaving a name at the front and wouldn’t say a word about the bloodstains on her shirt. Noting that the elevator was out of order, Annja deliberately took a room on the fifth floor. Without the easy access the elevator would provide, the fifth floor was high enough to discourage all but the most determined of human predators; the casual thief didn’t want to deal with climbing five flights of stairs when there were easier pickings elsewhere.
She used the cash she’d taken from the driver of the Mercedes and paid for two nights in advance. When asked to sign for the room, a fit of mischievousness overcame her and she used the name of her well-endowed and wardrobe-malfunction-plagued cohost from
Chasing History’s Monsters,
Kristie Chatham. Imagining the look on Kristie’s face when some paparazzo asked her what she’d been doing staying in a slum hotel in the north end of London nearly made her burst into laughter right there in front of the clerk and she vowed to herself that she’d leak the information the first chance she got.
Annja climbed the narrow flights of steps to her room. Once inside, she locked the door behind her and then dropped her pack on the bed. There really wasn’t much to the place; a bed, a beat-up old dresser and a small nightstand were the only pieces of furniture in the room. There was a small safe set into one wall, but the scratches around the lock plate let her know just how safe it wasn’t. Rather than risk putting the torc in it, she began looking for a place she could hide it for a little while. Her first thought was to tape it inside the toilet tank, but one look at it told her that opening it might require a hazmat suit and a week of detox, so that was out. She dismissed the air-conditioning vent for the simple reason that too many Hollywood movies had used it as part of their plots—it would be the first place someone looked, whether they were conscious of the association or not. Inside the ceiling tiles was out for the same reason.
Then her gaze fell on the thin piece of baseboard that ran around the perimeter of the room. A few pieces here and there were coming free from the wall and she could see a narrow space behind them.
That will have to do, she thought.
With the help of a hanger from the closet, Annja managed to pry one of the sections of baseboard free from the wall without damaging it or the nails that held it in place. Whoever had hung the baseboard on the walls had cut corners and hadn’t taken them all the way to the floor but stopped instead, leaving a two inch gap between the wall and the floor, a gap just large enough to hide the torc. Once she had it in place, she replaced the baseboard and carefully pushed the nails back into place. Standing, she backed off a few steps and gave it a once-over, decided after she’d done so that the casual observer wouldn’t know it was there.
Satisfied for the time being that the torc was in a safe place—or, at least, as safe as she could make it—she stripped off her clothes and took a quick shower. Under the spray of the water she took time to clean out the wound on her head, discovering as she did so that it wasn’t all that bad. It had just bled a lot, as scalp wounds are wont to do. Padding naked out of the bathroom on bare feet, she picked up her clothes and returned with them to the sink, scrubbing them in cold water. A few minutes of effort got most of the bloodstains out. There were a couple of small spots here and there, but she’d didn’t think they’d be noticeable. She’d buy something new the first chance she got, anyway.
Her chores done, she collapsed onto the bed, pulling the sheet up over her. Within moments sleep had claimed her for the night.