Rogue Angel - The Golden Elephant Part 21

He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her to her feet. "Ow," she complained. "That hurts."

He laughed. "See? You're just a woman after all. And my men are right outside."

He brought his hand up. With a snick he opened a lock-back folder. It was a good knife, she saw, a Spyderco. Or at least a pretty convincing knockoff.

"Really," he said, reaching behind her, "what choice have you got, other than to do your best to make me happy?"

She gasped as the keen blade sliced her skin. The plastic restraint parted. Blood rushed back into her hands. It felt as if she had plunged them into red-hot sand.

She had been wondering if she could do this thing. It seemed so cold-blooded. But knowing his plans, it had to be done.

He was armed-he held a knife with a four-inch blade. She knew it would certainly serve to slit her helpless female throat when he was done with her.

She put her face to his ear. "What choice have I got?" she asked throatily.

He grabbed her hair with his left hand. And stiffened.

She stepped back. To give him a good look at the sword that had appeared from thin air an eye blink before she rammed it through his belly.

He opened his mouth. All that came out was a voiceless squeal. And blood.

She tore the sword free with both hands. Marshal Qiangsha fell to the stone floor.

The quick flurry of motion had apparently caught eyes outside. She heard voices coming closer. A shadow fell across the doorway.

Annja turned and bolted through the back door. She prayed it indeed led out into the night.

UNSEEN, THE ROOT ARCHED up out of the red clay earth and caught Annja's right instep as if it had deliberately reached to trip her. Winded from her desperate broken-field run, still dizzy from aftereffects of the blow to the head hours before, she couldn't prevent herself pitching into a bush. Another tree root sticking up from the ground gave her a savage crack on the forehead as she hit, causing a white flash behind her eyes.

If she had gotten a concussion earlier, it might have a friend to keep it company now, she thought.

She lay still. She had used up all her energy fleeing the tumult of the GSSA camp-and the angry pursuit hounding after her. Her last molecules of strength had been knocked out of her by the fall. For endless, horrific moments it was all she could do to lie there and breathe.

In the distance she heard the sporadic clatter of gunfire from the direction of the late Marshal Qiangsha's camp. As she fought to stifle trapped-animal moans of pain and desperation, she heard the distance-dulled thump of a grenade. The issue of who should succeed as marshal of the Grand Shan State Army was still being vigorously debated.

For all his apparent executive ability, Qiangsha had in the end just been the leader of a bandit gang. Like most such groups, the GSSA ultimately operated by the ethics of a wolf pack-the most dangerous male ruled. Like many leaders of such human packs, Qiangsha apparently had secured his own position in part by keeping his chief lieutenants in constant rivalry with one another. The theory was they'd be so occupied trying to pull one another down, and to prevent themselves being torn apart by ever-hungry rivals, they would leave the alpha in relative safety. Among others Adolf Hitler had practiced the technique, successfully enough, so far as it went.

But it meant that when the alpha was removed from the scene, no subordinate held a strong enough position to a.s.sert dominance and make it stick.

But dominance wars hadn't stopped a smaller wolf pack from baying after Annja.

She knew she could not have run far. It was less than two miles from the middle of Qiangsha's camp to the middle of the Protector village. But Annja had dodged and backtracked as she ran through the jungle, trying to lose her pursuers in the humid night.

She had failed. She had, however, succeeded in losing herself.

She had managed to bushwhack three of her pursuers and kill them with her sword. But always their comrades had been on her like rabid dogs, driving her away before she could scavenge a firearm. The calculus was inescapable-sooner or later they'd hem her in and finish her with gunfire. Or she'd simply catch a stray bullet from one of the random bursts the pursuers loosed periodically, in hope of just such a lucky hit on their prey.

"Move, d.a.m.n you," she gasped to herself. She got her hands beneath her, pushed herself upward from the warm, moist, fragrant earth.

Vegetation rustled behind her. She turned her head to look back over her shoulder.

A Shan stood eight feet away. He grinned as he raised his big rifle to aim at her.

His head suddenly jerked to the right. Dark fluid jetted from his right temple. He slumped straight down to the ground like an imploded building collapsing.

Annja heard the high sharp crack of the handgun shot that had killed him. Another man burst into the moonlight several paces behind, thrusting his Kalashnikov before him. Before he could spray the p.r.o.ne and still-helpless Annja he dropped the heavy weapon, clapped a hand to his left eye and uttered a shrill scream. A wood sliver, doubtless tipped with poison, that had just been blown into his eye from a bamboo pipe.

Gunfire crashed out to either side of her. She had already heard someone walking toward her from the direction she had been running. She looked around.

A small, emphatically female form strode toward her. Gunfire flashed from its right hand, then its left.

Easy Ngwenya knelt by Annja's side. "Lord, girl, you look a fright. Are you all right?"

"Never...better," Annja croaked. She sensed Protectors slipping past like shadows. Shadows that occasionally paused to reveal themselves in shattering blasts and jumping flares of full-auto gunfire. Few shots came back in reply. The surviving pursuers had already turned and fled back the way they had come.

"What...took you?" Annja said. "Couldn't find me?"

"My dear girl, neither the Shans nor the Wa answer nature's call without the Protectors knowing within moments what they had for breakfast, to be perfectly crude. And anyway, you and your fan club were about as subtle as water buffalo stampeding."

"I thought speed was more important than stealth," Annja said, sitting up. The African woman had holstered her left-hand piece and offered her a canteen. She accepted and drank desperately.

"Wise choice," Easy said. "But therein lay our problem-we had the devil's own time intercepting you. When you were keeping away from the Shans, you also kept away from us."

Annja spit. Her mouth felt like an old gym shoe. "Qiangsha said Jerry Cromwell's dead."

"Oh, yes." Easy smiled and nodded. "Curiously enough, the wound proved instantly fatal. I rather feared he'd live on for days without his head, like a roach."

Annja shook her head. "And the Wa?"

"Gone with the proverbial wind. Apparently they took their prophet being struck down in their midst as a sign the Lord had withdrawn his favor from them. The GSSA did their brutal best to reinforce the impression. The last living Wa was off the mesa by sunset."

"Last living?"

"A few were unwise enough to straggle. The Protectors can be remarkably vindictive. They aren't given to torture. Inflicting sudden death-that's another thing."

She stooped to wind Annja's arm over her shoulder. "And now we'd best be getting back. While our Shan friends are occupied killing each other, the Protectors are going to encourage them to move their dispute elsewhere."

"But they still outnumber the Protectors!" Annja said.

"To be sure," Easy said. With surprising strength she pushed off, hoisting Annja to her feet with little help from the larger woman. "But with them split into multiple factions, demoralized by recent events, and with the Protectors fighting the sort of battle they know best-sniping from the trees and the like-I doubt they'll have much stomach for staying where they're so obviously unwanted."

31.

"Seriously, Easy," Annja said. "We need to work this out."

"Well," Easy said. Was the lightness in her voice real or feigned? "The villagers did give us free rein to do as we will up here."

It had been a brisk climb through stinging morning sun up the sheer face of the red pinnacle to the Temple of the Elephant. Despite their bruises and residual exhaustion from their recent adventures, the two young women had climbed with vigor. We're nothing if not resilient, Annja reflected.

"I doubt that means they'll let us steal their price less idol," Annja said. It gave her a jolt to recall that she had come here at great personal cost-and as she could never forget, far greater cost to her companions-to do exactly that. But I didn't know about the Protectors then, she thought.

It sounded lame even inside her head.

"We agreed, did we not," Easy said, "that we'd get up here and then see what we might see? After all-"

She started to say more. But then they mounted high enough on the steps inside the temple's s.p.a.cious foyer to behold the Golden Elephant itself, its golden glory brilliantly lit by a ray of morning sun through the arched entryway.

Annja stopped. She couldn't seem to breathe.

"Oh, my G.o.d," Easy said.

"This changes things," Annja managed to say.

"Quite."

"Ladies," a male voice said in musically accented English from behind them, "there's no need to fight. As entertaining as that would be to watch, I'm afraid I cannot take the risk."

The two young women spun in place.

"Giancarlo?" Easy said in a breathless schoolgirl gasp.

"Giancarlo?" Annja said in shock. Annja said in shock.

The archaeologist smiled a smile as radiant as the idol itself-still out of his view beyond the high temple steps.

He stood limned against electric morning dazzle. He was flanked by pairs of burly men in expensive expedition wear. They pointed handguns at Easy and Annja.

"You son of a b.i.t.c.h," both women said at once.

He spread his hands innocently. "Ah. Harsh language does nothing to help us here."

Annja's throat was suddenly so dry she had to work her mouth to summon saliva and swallow before she could force words out. "So you're behind this," she said angrily.

"Not exactly," he said, still smiling benignly. He wore no pack, but his normally svelte figure looked oddly bulky beneath the lightweight tan jacket he wore. Despite a bit of a breeze it was hot as h.e.l.l out there in the morning; Annja and Easy alike were sheened with sweat from their own exertion scaling the seventy-foot sheer precipice. Giancarlo looked as cool as if he lounged in an air-conditioned private club in Buenos Aires. "Let's say I accepted a commission similar to the one that propelled you both here."

"So you set us up," Annja said as mental tumblers fell into place with clicks she thought Easy ought to be able to hear beside her. "You...got the red ants and the black to fight."

"Compet.i.tion, the current wisdom avers, works wonders. And in any event, by the time I was offered the commission you both had attained a substantial lead. So I thought-" he shrugged "-why wastefully duplicate effort myself, when not just one but two brilliant and ingenious young women were already on the trail? Simpler to let you do what you did so well, and follow in your tracks."

"But I slept with you!" Easy wailed.

Annja shifted her weight uncomfortably. "You, too?" Easy asked her.

"No," Annja stated emphatically, relieved it was the truth.

Giancarlo cleared his throat. "Ladies," he said, raising his voice only slightly. It echoed within the high arched foyer of the Temple.

The professional-archaeologist part of her mind, still working below surging tidal layers of despair, outrage and fury, told Annja that must be a mark of sophisticated acoustic design.

"I fear we've no time for recriminations. Or rather, you've no time for recriminations."

"Not so fast, pal," Annja said. "You killed Sir Sidney. And poor Isabelle!"

"And set those dogs on me in Montmartre," Easy added.

"Whom you dispatched with admirable ruthlessness, my dear," Scarlatti said. "As for Professor Hazelton, do these look like hands that could beat a gentle old man to death? No, it was Luigi, here, who did in the ridiculous old blatherer." His head flip indicated a goon on his right, who had a slab jaw and a black-browed scowl.

"And a fearful mess he made, although I scarcely blame him. An unavoidable by-product of such work. As for Professor Gendron, though, I admit I pulled the trigger on her. An occupation at least marginally more suited for a gentleman."

He shrugged. "You must admit, it proved an admirable goad. You in particular acted like one obsessed, Annja Creed. You drove your expedition furiously enough to shed all three of your companions without requiring my a.s.sistance at all."

Her eyes narrowed with fury. Not content with using her-and Easy, too, a vulnerable child still in so many ways for all her erudition and lethality-he was now sticking his finger in her rawest emotional wound and twisting. Clearly he was a master psychologist. And a sociopath.

"You're a dead man, Giancarlo," Easy growled. Her tone suggested an angry cat. Her eyes had grown red.

He laughed. "So we've progressed to the threats stage. Obviously, the fact that my quartet of multinational stalwarts have the drop on you fails to make the slightest impression.

"And well it might, seeing the deft way in which you saw off heavily armed and bloodthirsty foes in just a few days. Did you know both the Lord's Wa Army and the remnants of the GSSA have dragged their pathetic tails entirely out of the district? They must have thought the temple was guarded by demons in all fact."

Annja glanced at Easy. She had taken for granted the woman was no more inclined than her to go down without a fight. Unfortunately it was looking as if Giancarlo had, too. Cagey b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

"Of course, with the indigenous defenders scattered to shadow their defeated foes, and weary from their battle, it proved relatively easy for my men and I to make our way here undetected. However, as you'll appreciate, our time here is limited. So I've resorted to a traditionally invaluable adjunct of what we might call the more informal brand of archaeology-dynamite."

Annja gasped.

"You wouldn't!" Easy exclaimed. Annja's eyes flickered toward her in surprise. She would've expected a pot hunter to embrace the use of dynamite to get at the goods.

Then again she realized she had never seen any evidence that Easy used destructive means in her activities, pot hunting though they were.

"Spoken like a true academic, my dear," Giancarlo said, allowing his tone to taunt. "I've murdered two innocents, that you know of, contrived the murder of heaven knows how many more. And you think I'm going to shrink from blowing up some half-rotted ancient public works project to get what I want?"

He held open his jacket. He wore a nylon vest with dynamite sticks tucked neatly into special loops, like cartridges on an old-fashioned bandolier.

"Where'd you get that?" Annja asked, "Safari Outfitters' special suicide-bomber shop?"

"Whistling past the graveyard, Annja," he said. "Admirable spirit-execrable judgment."

"You wouldn't actually kill yourself," Easy said. Her tone belied her words.