Secret of the Slaves (11 page)

And results she got in trumps. Her heel struck the angry blond man midway between belt buckle and crotch. As Annja danced aside, his legs shot backward out from under him. Meanwhile the upper half of him was slammed against the floor as if a giant hand had grabbed him around the legs and swung him into it. His chin hit the concrete with a loud crack.

His head lolled to the side. He moaned. As Annja turned back to where she suspected the
capoeirista
was about to attack her again she felt pretty sure he was down for the fight. He had almost certainly broken his lower jaw. She might have cracked his pelvis, as well. That would mean no matter how determined or adrenalized he might be, he could not stand. It would be mechanically impossible.

That was good. The dreadlocked man, clad in an olive-drab T-shirt and baggy khaki pants belted with a length of rope, was indeed back on his feet and approaching her in a sort of forward-leaning crouch. He did what she recognized as the standard
capoeira
dance, stepping forward and back, with wide swings of arms and hips. It was clearly intended to distract or even hypnotize an opponent, while keeping the
capoeirista'
s body in motion.

Her counter was to stand with weight on her back foot and arms raised, hands relaxed, not clenched into fists. When it came to fighting, anyway, the
capoeirista
was clearly a better dancer than she. She'd already had success letting him attack first, however inadvertently, and counterattacking. Now she figured on letting him commit and using her catlike reflexes to parry or evade and then slam him again before he could recover.

Because of his constant, smiling motion, side-to-side, back and forth, she forced her eyes to stay in soft focus, rather than focusing directly on her foe. It saved her life.

High and to her left, motion caught the very corner of her peripheral vision.

The distinctive motion of an arm raising a weapon to fire.

Annja threw herself flat on her back, legs drawn up, ready to kick with powerful leverage if her opponent leaped for her.

A green spear of light cracked through the space Annja had occupied a heartbeat before. Planks of a crate splintered explosively as moisture in the wood flashed instantly into steam. A feather of greenish smoke wisped upward. Annja's nostrils filled with the smell of charred wood. She saw no flame.

Her opponent seemed more disoriented by the blast than she was. Guessing he was seeing nothing but great big magenta shards of afterimage, she launched herself into a forward roll, body tucked in a tight ball to keep low out of the laser's field of fire—she hoped. As she rolled over the top she whipped out her right leg into an ax kick that smashed her heel into the face of the dreadlocked man.

The impact snapped his head back and drove his body down. Before he could step back—or fall—and take the weight off his feet, Annja rolled on her right side and snapped a brutal shin kick against the inside of her opponent's right knee. The leg buckled with a loud snap. The man uttered a loud groan and collapsed, grabbing for the shattered knee in agony.

A shadow fell across Annja. Some instinct made her roll to her right, to slam against the crate on that side of the narrow aisle. As she did another green beam stabbed down with a crack. Concrete exploded away, stinging her calf through the jeans she wore.

Her own eyes dazzled with pink afterimage lines, ears temporarily deafened by the noise, head full of the stink of ozone. Annja knew her assailant was standing right over her. In another second he or she would lean forward, correct aim and blast her apart with the energy gun.

She formed her right hand as if grasping a hilt. Obedient to her will, the sword appeared to fill it.

She jumped to her feet. Her enemy stood on a single crate. Taking the sword in both hands, Annja swung blindly right to left at the level of her shoulders.

The sword's blade bit deep into the wood of a crate on her left. But not before passing, with the slightest of hesitations, through the lower legs of the laser wielder.

She heard a thump as he fell backward onto the crate. With a scream half of fear and half of fury she wrenched the sword free.

Her vision cleared. To her astonishment she saw the person whose legs she'd just slashed, a young man whose face was probably not usually this paper-pale beneath long brown hair and a backward baseball cap. He was levering himself up to a half-sitting position with one hand so he could point his matte-silver hand weapon at her with the other. Reversing her grip on the sword, she stabbed forward and down with frenzied speed. The blade punched through his sternum to split the heart beneath. He sagged. The laser fell from lifeless fingers to the top of the crate.

Rather than try to wrench her sword free from the embrace of his rib cage, she released it. It vanished. She grabbed the pistol.

Another beam ripped the top of the crate.

Two loud cracks echoed through the warehouse. These differed from the thunderclap sounds of ionized air rushing back into the temporary vacuum created by the beam's incredible heat. They were deeper, louder. Handgun shots.

Annja looked up to see the figure who had shot at her from the catwalk slump down to the perforated metal walkway.

Her first thought was amazement that Dan had risked packing a firearm. The second was that she was lucky he had. Even a magic sword was not the ideal weapon to bring to a gunfight. Especially when the guns were wonder weapons that apparently shot energy beams instead of bullets.

“Remember Mafalda!” she heard him call from somewhere away to her left. She nodded, as if he could see her. Maybe mercy was misplaced with these people, she thought.

Moving bent over down the line of crates toward the warehouse's side door, Annja reminded herself she had no way of knowing if any of these people were actually involved in the shopkeeper's death. But she could afford to hold back no longer.

Gunshots cracked, then two more of the differently pitched thunderclaps she had learned to associate with the beam weapons. She reached the aisle's end. The doorway waited invitingly, barely twenty feet away, although out of her direct field of vision.

It might as well have been a thousand feet away if an energy gunner covered it. She had no illusions of being able to move faster than light. Nor was she going to be able to read the intent of a shooter half a room away.

Still bent over, she chanced a three-second look right. She saw nothing. Lowering herself to a squat, in case she'd been spotted the first time and a shooter had sights lined up at the level her head had last appeared, she peered the other way.

Sixty feet away Dan stood by a wall. A slight woman with long black hair crouched on the catwalk above him, holding an energy pistol in both hands with the barrel pointed toward the ceiling. The woman kept leaning cautiously over the rail, evidently reluctant to expose herself to the unseen intruder's fire.

Peering intently upward as if he could see through the catwalk, Dan didn't notice Annja. Instead he leaned out and triggered his semiautomatic handgun blindly.

Annja guessed he hoped to make his unseen antagonist flinch back long enough for him to break for the cover of the crates, or even to the door. It backfired dangerously. Despite the muzzle-blasts going off almost under her feet, the Promessan woman never flinched. Instead, learning exactly where her opponent was, she vaulted lithely over the rail and dropped to the concrete floor with apparent unconcern for injury. Her hair waved above her head like a black banner. She twisted in air like a cat. With a recoil-free weapon she could shoot as soon as she saw Dan, before she even landed—

Annja leaned out with her left hand bracing her right and fired as soon as she got a sight alignment on the woman's khaki-clad back.

It was a strange experience. Other than a click of the trigger breaking—felt rather than heard and almost certainly engineered so a shooter would know when the weapon fired—there was no reaction. Then a green line of light, dazzling in the gloom, appeared between the muzzle and a point between the woman's shoulder blades.

Steam exploded from her back. She arched convulsively backward, fell hard on her back, thrashing. Dan snapped his weapon down and pumped three shots into her as she writhed. She went still.

“I'll cover you,” Annja called. “Go!'

He sprinted to the door, yanked it open. Stepping out into the spill of yellow light from the lamp above the door, he pivoted, dropped to a knee to aim back into the warehouse from the cover of the door frame.

There was no response, either shouts or shots. Annja waited a beat, then darted straight for the exit. Her cheeks went taut with anticipation of a lethal light blast between her shoulders.

But she also made the door without drawing any reaction from within the warehouse. The security response team was either all out of action or hunkered down.

She did not slow down. She turned right to run toward the waterfront. The upstream docks were dark. Seemingly derelict warehouses lay that way.

She glanced back over her shoulder. Dan was still crouched in the doorway, handgun leveled, looking at her oddly. “Come on,” she shouted to him, scarcely slowing down. “Follow me!”

After a moment, during which Annja resolved to let Dan make his own escape if he failed to follow, he did. She reached the corner of the next building and ducked into the enfolding shadow of a loading bay. Suddenly winded, by the fight more than the brief flight, brisk as it had been, she bent over, braced her palms on her thighs and tried to catch her breath.

Dan caught up. “Another dry run,” Annja panted. She knew trying to breathe hunched over and tensed up like this was self-defeating, but it took her a moment to tame her body's oxygen panic and force herself to stand erect. “Lives lost—for nothing.”

“Not so,” Dan said. He held up something small and dark. The lights of the docks downstream shone through it vaguely blue.

“Thumb drive,” he said with a grin.

“F
ASCINATING
,” Sir Iain Moran said. He turned the captured energy weapon over and over in his hands. They were big hands, as Annja would expect—he sometimes played guitar or keyboard with the band, although he primarily served as vocalist. But they were more square and powerful looking than she'd expect from a billionaire musician, scarred and callused in ways that wouldn't be accounted for by hours of practicing on hard steel strings. She wondered what he'd done to earn such hands.

The three were gathered in his top-floor suite in the Lord Manaus. It had the same somewhat raffishly gaudy color scheme as Annja's more modest room. His Croat bodyguards were nowhere in evidence. Dan sat on a sofa tapping industriously on the keyboard of a notebook computer opened on a coffee table in front of him. The thumb drive full of data from the warehouse computer was stuck in a USB port.

The weapon Annja had taken from the young man she had killed was utterly unprepossessing. She expected an energy weapon to be futuristic looking. Instead it looked like a handgun, very compact and solid in its lines. Its finish looked like the brushed-stainless-steel revolvers she had seen. But instead of having a slide that reciprocated to eject an empty casing and chamber a fresh round, it seemed made all of one piece. And instead of a hole in the end it had what appeared to be a glass lens, about half an inch wide.

Publico tossed it on the bed.

Annja raised an eyebrow. “That's it? I bring you back a genuine ray gun, and you toss it on the bed?” She had initially assumed it was a laser. On reflection she decided she had no grounds to assume even that. It was an energy gun that appeared to involve a beam of emerald-colored coherent light. But the laser might be a low-powered sighting mechanism for all she knew.

“It's a pretty toy, I grant,” he said. “And a lethal one, to be sure.”

“But—doesn't that prove everything? The existence of some wildly technologically advanced civilization—somewhere, anyway, and most likely up the Amazon where you thought it was all the time.”

“It hints. Not proves.”

“But—”

“It's not that big an advance over what exists now,” he said. “Indeed it may not be an advance at all. You'll have to trust me on this, Annja. I have certain contacts. Along with which goes access to certain information not precisely widely known.”

“But I thought lasers still needed these huge, unwieldy energy supplies.”

He just smiled a craggy, knowing smile. Annja frowned, genuinely puzzled.

“If somebody's got handheld energy weapons now,” she said, “why haven't we seen them in action on the news?”

Publico shrugged. “What kind of advantage did they give our putative Promessans? Dan brought a person armed with one down with a common handgun. You yourself won this one away from an enemy despite being unarmed.”

Annja brushed a hand back through her hair to distract the older man's attention from her face. Evidently the crates had hidden her use of the sword from her partner. Or perhaps he'd been distracted by staying alive. And what he had seen that night at the
toque
—well, he must have decided his memories of that night, if he even had any, were not to be trusted.

“Think about it,” Dan said from the computer. “What good would ray guns do against enemies who use ambush tactics, like rocket-propelled grenades?”

“I just have a hard time believing the government would cover something like that up,” Annja said. “It smacks of conspiracy theory.”

Dan snorted. More diplomatically, Publico smiled. “What d'you think it means when they classify something top secret, then, lass? What's that but a cover-up?”

She sighed and waved a hand. “All right.”

Dan slapped his thigh. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “Got it.”

Publico and Annja looked at him. “Broke the encryption.” He shrugged and smiled self-deprecatingly. “Don't give me too much credit—it's really all down to the software on this box.”

Frowning slightly, Annja looked from him to Publico. The older man shrugged.

His mouth twisted in an ironic smile. It struck Annja she had often seen the same expression on Dan's younger, less weathered face. She wondered if the young man had copied it from the older. She knew Dan idolized his boss.

Or maybe they're just two of a kind,
she thought.

“In the course of my humanitarian work,” Sir Iain said, “my aims have at times coincided with those of certain—let's say, powerful entities. To help me do this work, these allies—temporary, I need hardly add—have seen fit to share with me certain tools not available to the public at large.”

Her eyebrows rose. “No Such Agency is sharing its decryption tools with you?”

“Now, lass, I never said NSA,” he said.

“You wouldn't,” she said. “I thought you got to be a billionaire by being an antiauthoritarian rebel.”

“Annja my love,” he said, “nobody gets to be a billionaire by being a rebel. Never by its lonely self. Indeed, I didn't make most of my money through music at all. Rather it's the outcome of ethical, and judicious, investing.”