Текст книги "The Chosen"

Автор книги: Алекс Арчер

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Chapter 9

Annja put her hands to the heavily tinted glass of the taxicab window. "Wait," she said in English. "Where are we going?"

" No intiendo," the driver said, a stout, sweating, droopily mustached man who had both understood and for that matter spoken English perfectly well when he had picked her up outside the hotel.

She repeated her question in Spanish, which was the first foreign language she'd learned in the orphanage in New Orleans – a city where the Spanish influence was almost as strong as French, though much less publicized. It attracted both the affluent and the penniless from all across the old Spanish Main and much of Latin America. Not to mention from right across the Gulf of Mexico.

The cabbie only shook his balding head and waved a handful of rings that had turned the fingers blue-green around them.

She was on her way, or so she thought, to the airport. Yet somehow the taxi had turned decisively off any kind of main drag. Initially the driver had muttered something – again in heavily accented but quite clear English – about avoiding traffic jams. And traffic jams there were aplenty, with upward of twelve million people poured together in the big, high bowl of the Valley of Mexico. At first Annja accepted he was dodging apparent gridlock because she could see he did so. The street ahead had been solid with cars immobile as some modernistic ribbon statue of sun-gleaming metal.

But they had wandered way too far from the beaten path. Annja's instincts were screaming.

The street was narrow, unlike the wide, tree-lined boulevards that veined the vast metropolis. That wasn't entirely unexpected of a back route. But the buildings all looked old, without either the affected quaintness or authentic grandeur of, say, the buildings around the Zócalo. They ran to cracked white or pink stucco and bulging, tilting walls that looked to consist of no more than random piles of ill-chosen rocks. Where much of Mexico City resonated with the energy one encountered in midtown Manhattan or Buenos Aires or Río, this place had a stealthy, half-deserted vibe.

Nor did it seem the lack of activity on the claustrophobic street resulted from early-onset siesta. Annja had the acute sense of being watched, from every dark hole of a doorway or gap between badly fitting stones. By eyes that were anything but friendly.

Too late she remembered reading about taxis being a popular medium for armed robbery and kidnapping in the violence-plagued Federal District. But this taxi had an official emblem, she thought wildly. It was identical to the others lined up in front of the hotel.

"Turn around," she shouted.

Instead the taxi turned into an alley that been invisible to her a moment before and stopped. Instantly she yanked the door handle.

It came off in her hand.

The driver jumped out so ferociously his door scraped pink stucco dust off the wall of the building to the cab's left. He ran away down the alley.

Annja slapped her palms twice experimentally against the window. She couldn't remember if side windows were made from sugar glass the way windshields were, to minimize the risk of their turning into sprays of shrapnel sharper than any razor when broken. She wasn't too sanguine a Mexican taxicab would have such amenities anyway. Especially an outlaw cab – even an outlaw with official sanction.

Instead she lay back at her full length, which put the back of her head and shoulders against the far door. She placed the corrugated rubber soles of her hiking boots against the door and pushed with all her strength.

The flimsy door banged off a cracked concrete patch of wall and fell into the hard-packed alley dirt with a clatter and crash of glass breaking. With the strap of her overnight bag already looped across her shoulder, Annja flew out of the cab almost as fast.

She saw both ends of the alley were blocked.

There were six of them, spread out across the alley. The trio facing her, approaching the rear of the stalled cab, had two machetes and a rusty-looking revolver. The three coming from the front carried two semiautomatic pistols and a length of white-painted metal pipe.

Knowing her only hope was to act quickly, she darted straight at the bunch with the two big knives. The guy with the revolver promptly cranked off his entire cylinder.

Even before he cut loose, Annja had dropped flat on the ground, just catching herself, palms and toes. The bullets passed harmlessly over her. Two starred the taxi's rear windshield and made the red-and green-and-white fringe inside bounce. One knocked a maggot-colored divot in the pink wall on the driver's side. Two went who knew where.

The last smacked, audibly, into the forehead of the tall man coming up right behind Annja, a big 45 autopistol in his hand. The shot killed him so quickly his finger didn't even twitch enough to set off the sensitive single-action trigger.

When she heard the sixth shot crack Annja jumped. She snapped herself upright as if spring-loaded, then vaulted over the top of the car.

The guy on the far wing from the deceased pistolero,coming up on the cab's front passenger side, blazed away at her with some kind of 9 mm pistol. He held the piece on its side, rendering it utterly impossible to aim.

The impact of seeing his intended victim hurtling through space, apparently right at him, startled him. He sprayed the ground, the car, the walls, the sky even more comprehensively than the first guy had, and with a good deal more bullets.

Shooting the way he was, he would only hit Annja by sheer luck, even at close range and closing fast. Annja felt the left side of her blouse, which had come out of her cargo pants during the proceedings, tugged as if by invisible fingers. Another shot brushed her right forearm.

She cleared the entire taxi, hitting the far side on her feet. She went instantly into a forward roll as her target finished emptying his high-cap magazine through the approximate space she would have occupied had she stayed up. As she came over she drove both heels into his chest in a sort of combination ax-and-thrust kick. Impact shivered down her legs. She heard ribs crunch. Her target was thrown into a wild backward somersault. His head hit the pavement at a deadly angle and the pistol dropped from his lifeless hand.

Annja brought her feet down and snapped herself standing again. Then she threw herself into another roll. As she did the pipe came whistling down in a two-handed overhead stroke meant to turn her skull to mush. Instead it glanced off her left buttock.

Pained but not injured she came up yet again onto her feet. She turned left. The pipe man was cocking his steel club over his head for another crack. She skipped sideways and pistoned a side kick into the pit of his stomach. She didn't have time to roll her hip over and get the full weight of her body behind it; it was just a leg kick. And his stomach was well padded. But Annja had powerful legs. He doubled as if he'd sucked a slug to the belly and sat down hard.

Loud noises from just up the alley indicated the man with the revolver had managed to fumble at least a couple of cartridges into his weapon. Annja darted past the pipe wielder, who was struggling to breathe. She crouched by the front bumper as glass, blasted from the windshield by a back-to-front shot, rained down on her head and shoulders.

"I got the bitch," a voice shouted in Spanish from her near left.

"Kill her!" someone shouted.

Things were getting tight for Annja. She had a machete coming up fast on her left. There was almost certainly another coming down the other side of the car to catch her. And all too soon the pipe man was going to suck enough air back into his lungs to kickstart his central nervous system and get back to the party.

It was time.

She willed the sword into her hand. And sprang like a panther.

The man who'd claimed he had her howled and swung his big, wide blade at her from beside the front tire. Striking across her body, Annja caught it with the sword, guided it past her and down. As momentum carried her attacker by she rotated her wrist and swung her weapon backhand. Right up the line of his extended arm.

The sword caught him right between clavicle and Adam's apple. It cut through skin and cartilage with only the slightest hesitation. When the edge hit his neckbone she felt a jar. His head drooped. She pulled back the blade.

The man's body hit the ground hard and slid, limbs sprawling, neck pumping great gushes of blood into the dust.

Annja was already looking the other way, brandishing the sword in a glittering horizontal arc over the cab's dented hood.

The machete man coming around from her right yelped. He jumped back. The sword's tip swished harmlessly before his scrawny chest.

A shot cracked. The taxicab roof sounded like a Caribbean steel drum as the soft-nosed .38 slug skipped off it like a stone off a millpond. At the same time a shadow loomed in Annja's peripheral vision and her nose filled with the stench of stale sweat.

She threw herself into a forward roll as more ineffectual shots echoed down the alley. The steel pipe buckled the taxi's hood with a bang. She rolled to her feet in time to parry a downward machete stroke with a ring and a shower of sparks.

A blur of motion in her eye's corner brought her a quarter turn right in time to parry another ax-style stroke of the pipe with the flat of her long blade. For a moment she stared past the crossed weapons at the fat, astonished, sweat-streamed face of her opponent.

She pushed off to deflect a wild machete slash over her head. She was a whirlwind, parrying rapid hacks and slashes from both increasingly desperate men.

She was breathing hard, almost gagging on the diesel fumes and stench of blood and dust and viscera. The air was thin – but at 7,240 feet it was almost the same altitude as the San Esequiel dig, where she'd spent ample time to be acclimated.

But nothing drains like combat. It was why prizefighters did roadwork so obsessively. Intense exertion took it out of you. But the mental stress was what really sucked you dry.

The revolver began to go off like spastic firecrackers again. All three combatants ducked as a bullet moaned low over their heads, then jumped as another kicked up dirt right beside Annja.

The machete guy turned to curse out his buddy with the gun.

Annja was not feeling chivalrous. She side-kicked the pipe man in his capacious belly once more and turned right, unleashing a wheel-like stroke, looping high and down to the right.

Her sword took the machete wielder transversely across the back. It opened him right up. His head snapped back, his knees gave way and he fell into the alley grit.

Screaming with surprising shrillness for one so huge, the fat man rushed her with pipe held high. She pirouetted, lunged, thrust.

The tip of the sword took him in the sternum, punched through ribs, heart and ribs again to stand a foot out from his back.

He fell over backward.

The tight embrace of bone and flab pulled the sword right out of Annja's hands.

She looked back over her shoulder. Her final attacker stood thirty feet away. He had the revolver open and a new scatter of silvery empties at his feet. He was frantically trying to fumble a fresh cartridge into the cylinder.

Their eyes met. She experienced a strange sense of darkness, felt an inexplicable internal impact.

The cartridge at last slid into the chamber.

Annja spun and flowed forward as he shut the cylinder with a snap. As he raised the pistol with both hands, feet braced, she reached the fallen body of the second machete man. His weapon lay in the dust by his side.

She grabbed its hilt. The revolver came on line. The click as it was cocked seemed like the loudest sound in the world.

Annja was still twenty feet from the muzzle. She would never reach him before he dropped the hammer. And this time, it seemed, he aimed true.

She cocked her arm back, threw. The unwieldy two-foot machete turned over twice in the thick, humid air and punched its wide tip vertically through the gunman's forehead.

For a moment he stood there staring at her. His eyes had gone very wide.

A single trickle of blood ran down between them.

He collapsed. The old revolver did not fire.

Annja dropped to her knees. Her lungs burned as she gasped in huge breaths. Her eyes stung with tears, whether from pollution or emotion she could not tell.

Police sirens rose and fell like a chorus of electronic locusts from all around her. There was little chance of a tall, leggy gringaon foot escaping unnoticed from some wretched warren of a Mexican slum. Especially since only God knows how much blood I've got on me,she thought frantically.

She hauled herself up enough to stagger over to sit sideways in the rear driver's-side seat of the cab, with her legs out the now-missing door. It was time to play soft and sheltered American tourist lady much too totally freaked out by an eruption of sudden violence and her own near brush with death to give a coherent account of the proceedings.

It would not be much of a stretch.

Chapter 10

As the Airbus A319 circled to altitude Annja finally felt her muscles unclench. It's really over, she told herself.

The police, as she anticipated, had spun their own story of what happened. It did notinclude an active role for a delicate middle-class American tourist in the back-alley bloodletting, extreme even by the standards of Mexico City street violence, that had left half a dozen hardmen dead. They assumed she could have been nothing but a helpless victim in whatever it was that transpired. Therefore she was no suspect.

As a tomboy who'd occasionally managed to cut loose from the orphanage and wander the seamy, steamy byways of predeluge New Orleans, Annja had picked up a bit more than a modicum of street wisdom. Among other things she had perfected a technique she'd used on the sisters themselves. The best alibi was to give the authorities a tale to tell themselves that didn't include you. She'd seen it succeed time and again.

This time the prevailing hypothesis was that one or more gang members had gone amok, resulting in internecine slaughter. The fact that one would-be kidnapper had a bullet hole from his buddy's revolver in his head, while the man with the revolver had another comrade's machete embedded in his,lent great credibility to that scenario.

Of course, drugs were also involved. Annja would not be surprised if toxicology tests on the decedents supported that, too. She'd be surprised if it didn't.

The fact that someone recognized her as a television personality had helped. Considerably. She already knew that the various Knowledge Channel networks were popular in Latin America. Thank goodness for satellite, she thought.

She took a deep breath, forced residual tension to flow out of her with the air. She was bound for Albuquerque. The police had kept her overnight so she could answer further questions, under guard in her hotel room. By morning their theory had evolved enough tha they had lost interest in her. They suggested she leave the country as quickly as possible. She was up for that,even though it meant forgoing her intended trip to the silver town Plateros, near Fresnillos. She reckoned she had learned what she needed to in Mexico.

A male attendant, slim with receding hairline and hands crossed behind his back, passed by and nodded, smiling. She reciprocated. She sat by the window over the right wing of the modest two-engineAirbus. Right behind the starboard emergency exit, it was one of the best seats on the plane, with extra room to stretch her long legs. It was such a good seat she wondered if the police had bumped someone to get it for her.

The captain spoke up over the PA system. "If you look out the starboard windows, folks, you'll see one of Mexico's most spectacular sights – Mount Popocatepetl. MEX traffic control has routed us to pass near it as we climb to altitude. It's only seventy kilometers, or about forty-four miles, from downtown Mexico City. Rising 5,452 meters, or almost 18,000 feet, Popo is, like its legendary companion Ixtaccihuatl, that flat-topped mountain visible a bit to the left and past it, an active volcano. Fortunately, at present neither is acting up much."

Annja turned and pressed her nose to the glass. The sight was breathtaking. Popocatepetl was so dramatic it looked more like a matte painting than anything real. A perfect cone, bare silvery gray rock thrusting into the sky from a base of green whose top indicated the treeline. The Smoking Mountain lived up to its name: a thin gray strand trailed away to the right from its summit. A thrill of delighted apprehension passed through her. Here was a genuine monster. Not like black phantoms flitting through New Mexico dusk...

She sighed again and got out her iPod. She stuffed the earbuds in her ears. She hated them. The right one would never stay put, but they gave good sound and most of all were highly portable. She dialed up a New Age playlist. New Age music drove her crazy in short order if she actually listenedto it. But it soothed her wonderfully as a background, especially when it blotted out the incidental environmental sounds of airplane travel.

Laying her head back against the headrest, she slipped quickly into sleep.

Driving her rented Honda back to the motel room she'd relocated to on Albuquerque's west side, Annja realized with a start she was skating around the big thing, the elephant in the room – an image that momentarily gave her the giggles.

But that was sheer venting. There was nothing humorous about two attempts to murder her in the space of three days.

She had wondered, sitting in the sterile fluorescent police offices shivering in the air-conditioning and after-action adrenaline crash, why she'd never even tried to talk her way out of the ambush in the alley.

She knew she'd sensed a purpose even darker than kidnapping the instant the cab had turned into an inexplicable alley and stopped.

Perhaps it was because of the attack in the parking lot. Although that may also have been nothing more than a kidnap attempt. But she felt certain, irrationally perhaps, a darker force was behind it than that.

Perhaps it was the presence in those grubby hands of a very clean hypodermic – and equally clean firearms. Obviously, little about that incident had been as it seemed.

You're going into conspiracy-theory mode,the debunking part of her mind sneered. But the thought rang hollow. For two attempts on her life to be made in two different countries, a thousand miles apart, by sheer coincidencewas a theory as far-fetched as anything she could imagine. In a purely abstract, hypothetical sense, it could happen. But had it?

Stopped at a red light waiting to turn north up the entrance to I-25, she rolled down the window. She hoped the night wind blowing in her face would sharpen her thoughts.

Why would anybody want to kill me? Who?

One answer came to mind. Garin Braden. She knew he unabashedly enjoyed the immortality that Roux claimed to regard as a curse. He feared that the reunification of Joan's sword might jeopardize his apparently infinite life as a young, robust, healthy man. He had taken drastic steps to eliminate the sword before.

Garin had professed a liking for her. Frankly Annja found him charming and even likable, as well. But she knew he was willing to do absolutely anything necessary to get his way. He'd tried to claim her sword before.

He certainly had the reach. He was tremendously wealthy and influential, both acknowledgedly and, like an iceberg, she was sure, enormously more so beneath anyone's range of vision. But why now? Why here?

Freeway speed blasted cool air into her face. It helped keep her awake but forced no insights. She shook her head. Maybe Garin wasn't involved. Or maybe his involvement was very indirect. That's certainly his style, she reflected.

Whatever the truth was, she had to assume the attempts against her had some connection to her investigation. And that in itself meant she was on the right track.

Sitting cross-legged on the bed in her Motel 6 room Annja almost deleted the e-mail. The subject – Urgent Meeting Requested – tripped her mental spam filter. As did the sender's name, Dr. Raywood Cogswell. A lot of scammers styled themselves "Doctor."

Her virus-protection hadn't detected anything unusual so she clicked on the header to read the message.

Cogswell claimed to be a retired biologist turned cryptozoologist. He wished to meet with her to discuss anomalous sightings – including the one she was rumored to have shared. She grimaced but kept reading.

He was familiar, naturally, with her work on Chasing History's Monsters.He believed he might have information that could be of use to her.

She sighed and unwound the towel from her hair. It was mostly dry. That was one thing you could say for the high desert, she thought. Things dried quickly. She shook still-cool locks tickling down her T-shirted shoulders and tossed the towel at a chair.

Shut out of her hotel room in Pojoaque, she had shifted operations here. It was just as well. Even on the off chance the Pueblo could be talked out of pulling the plug on their dig, a heavy early snowfall had blanketed the area during her Mexico City jaunt. The dig season was over anyway. And the interesting action, for the moment, seemed to be developing in Albuquerque. Unfortunately, more centrally located rooms were unavailable with the balloon fiesta in progress.

Annja leaned over to the bedside table and picked up a hair brush. As she began to brush out her tresses she thought about where she was and what she was doing.

Someone or something had drawn her to this place. Maybe it was the sword itself. She couldn't be sure. She didn't like to think about what the sword's existence implied.

Her mentor, Roux, was half-cynical, half-devout, half-mad and a few halves beyond that. He had found her when she found the last remnant of the sword – the last piece for which he himself had been searching ever since Joan herself had been taken and executed, her sword destroyed. If he understood what forces were in play, he refused to tell her.

The sword belonged to her now. Whatever, exactly, that entailed. Neither the sword nor her new life came with an owner's manual.

She had always felt an impulse to protect the weak and defy the bully. If there really was a difference. If anything she felt more strongly now. She felt an overriding, almost obsessive desire to preserve innocence – where she could find it, and of course, where it could be preserved.

Maybe that was her mission. It would do until something better came along.

Meanwhile something strange was going on in central New Mexico. Several somethings.

Maybe.That was what had hooked her, she thought. The strange creature sightings and the sudden spate of well-attested encounters with the Holy Child. More coincidence?

No way to know yet, she reflected, grimacing as she broke through some split ends. Nor was she sure if innocence was involved, or if so, who the innocent was. The Holy Child himself? Whatever he was, it was difficult to envision what could threaten a being who apparently could disappear at will.

Ah, well, she thought. If no one going to give me any hints, I guess I'll have to go on relying on my intuition. It had always served her well – even before she encountered Roux, the sword and this madness.

Her instincts told her that whatever was going on here, she was meant to take part in it.

She sighed and put her notebook computer back on her crossed bare legs. A little practiced Google searching turned up some background on her mystery correspondent, Dr. Cogswell with the curious first name. He had a respectable if not extraordinary curriculum vitae. He had worked for Monsanto, apparently researching ways to make agricultural insecticides safe for creatures that weren't insects. From there he had gone to a professorship at an agricultural college in Nebraska, from where he had recently retired to the warmer climes of Albuquerque. Along the way he had contributed numerous articles on cryptozoology – the study of creatures whose existence was not acknowledged by science – to various publications. More recently he had been an active participant in Usenet newsgroups and on the Web.

He struck her as one of those scientists who, despite genuine intelligence and knowledge, tended to go a bit bizarre as soon as they set foot outside their own specialties. Nonetheless, he was as close to a lead as anything she had. Unless she wanted to hang around and try to interview the next tourist to encounter the Santo Niño before he, she or they fled home – as almost all the previous claimants had.

She reread Cogswell's message then hit Reply. He had suggested they meet for lunch.

So be it.

The morning air held an edge as Annja pushed the glass door of the motel lobby. Not enough to cut – just enough to make itself known. It was the sort of cool you tasted as much as felt – along with the inevitable exhaust fumes from the vehicles streaming past a parking lot dotted with cars whose windshields were white blazes of reflected sun. And a hint of that ubiquitous piñon smoke. Annja already knew she would associate that scent with New Mexico for the rest of her life. Adjusting the strap of her shoulder bag, she strode forth into the full light of the sun in search of breakfast.

From directly above her head a hissing, roaring sound cut loose.

She ducked. She almost summoned the sword.

She looked up to see a gigantic bloated shape, blotting the painfully blue high-desert sky mere feet overhead.

And then a chubby arm waved at her from a wicker-looking basket hanging from beneath the vast, globular shape, and a smiling little face appeared framed by blond pigtails.

"Hi, lady!" the little girl called from the gondola of the hot-air balloon. The man standing beside her, wearing a bright yellow jacket, did something that caused another jet of blue-edged yellow flame to shoot up into the open mouth of the envelope. Rising slowly, the balloon, painted in jagged horizontal stripes of blue and red, swept across busy Coors Road and off over a shopping mall.

Beyond it the sky was full of balloons. The weather was different down in the Lower Sonoran life zone than up North, where a glance showed her dark banks of cloud piled high above the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains flanking the central river valley. That was a boon to participants in the vaunted Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, it seemed.

What struck Annja was that the sky really was full of balloons. Some took bizarre form. She saw cartoon character heads, a taco, a fire hydrant and at least one totally implausible cow. Mostly they were standard fat-teardrop shapes like the one that had overflown her, painted in a dizzying range of colors and patterns.

She had paid little attention to the balloon fiesta. It didn't really impinge on the dig, eighty miles or so north. It struck her as just another gimmick to draw in tourists, and as such, of small interest to her. She was concerned with ancient things, things that lasted. Not tacky ephemera.

But nothing she had ever seen in her life had quite prepared her for the sight of several hundred hot-air balloons in the air at once.

Her shoulders rose and fell in an exaggerated sigh. "Okay," she said aloud. "I'm impressed."

She had turned to face toward the uneven wall of the Sandia Mountains, a blue backdrop to the lower balloons. She was facing right back toward the motel lobby entrance.

Her eye happened to fall on the newspapers displayed in dispensers in front of some juniper bushes beside the door. There she saw, beaming at her, the beatific countenance of Santo Niño himself.

She rushed to the rack. The likeness was plastered all over the front of a local alternative-looking paper calling itself by the unlikely moniker Alibi.It was free. Bonus, she thought.

She plucked one right out. The painting was almost breathtaking in its sheer kitsch. The Holy Child was portrayed as a huge-eyed waif in cloak and robe and weird hat.

Splashed across the image were the words Holy Kid Sightings At Chiaroscuro Fest! Below it the legend continued:

"Holy publicity stunt! Albuquerque art prodigy Byron Mondragón attracts nationwide attention to local gallery opening, just as his current favorite subject puts in personal appearances all over the state.

"Whoa," Annja said. A rumble from her stomach reminded her of her prime mission of the moment.

Folding the paper, she tucked it under her arm and strode off to her rental car. She was assured of interesting breakfast reading material, at any rate.