Alex Archer - Seeker's Curse

To her amazement the letters stamped in it, faded though they were, were unmistakably Greek.

She turned to Bajraktari, who stood to her left with his shadow, Duka, looming as always behind him. “What’s a Greek coin doing here?” she demanded. “I thought these artifacts were Nepali.”

Instead of responding directly to her question, Bajraktari raised his head and said something sharp in Albanian. Annja sensed movement behind her.

Hard hands clamped like vises on her upper arms.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Bajraktari?” Annja demanded. She became aware of a grayed-out oblong glow farther back in the warehouse heights—a time-and-pigeon-grimed skylight. “Don’t you know who you’re dealing with?”

She knew even as the words left her mouth that she wasn’t going to like the answer.

Bajraktari smiled. “There has been a change of plan,” he said.

“Says who?” she demanded.

His coal-smudge brows twitched toward one another. “Do not try my patience, woman,” he said. “For in the end you are only a woman.”

It occurred to her this was not a good time to debate feminism. She settled for an angry toss of her head and a glare. “We had a deal,” she said.

He nodded. “So we did. But all things are subject to negotiation in this world, are they not?”

“I represent a very important figure in American business.”

“Just so. All Americans are rich. If your boss is rich by American standards, he must be really rolling in it, no?”

Annja’s lips compressed to a line. She could see where this was going.

“It occurred to us, therefore, that Allah had delivered into our hands a most wonderful opportunity. If your employer would pay handsomely once for our artifacts, then would he not pay handsomely twice for the treasure, as well as for the return of his very lovely assistant?”

“You’re making a mistake,” Annja said.

Bajraktari said something in Albanian. Around him, unseeable in shadow, his men laughed.

“It shall be as Allah wills,” the pack leader said. “If you are a religious woman, you should pray that it is not your employer who makes the worse mistake.”

Annja glared at him. She felt the men holding her shift their weight to drag her away. She drew in a deep breath. And prayed forgiveness for the grave sin she was about to commit against archaeology.

Then she kicked the relic-topped crate for all she was worth.

Annja had extensive training in martial arts, Asian and Western. She had hundreds of hours of practice and no little practical experience at using those techniques. And she was far stronger than most women her size.

The crate, though loaded down with tens of pounds of golden wonders, was empty. It rolled right over. Glittering priceless objects flew everywhere.

Shrill voices yipped. Men flew from the shadows like bats, clutching at the lovely tumbling golden things. The hard hands on Annja’s arms relaxed their grip.

Driving with her long strong legs and turning her hips, Annja wrenched her right arm free. She continued her pivot to slam a shovel hook with the heel of her right palm into the ribs of the man who held her left arm. The strike delivered force straight along the bones of the forearm; it was little less powerful than a closed-fist punch and presented a fraction of the danger of breaking your own hand.

A squeaking grunt blew out the man’s lips and he doubled over. He released her.

Annja was already spinning back. Her elbow smash caught the man on her right on the point of his bristle-bearded chin. She’d been aiming for his nose. The miss was fortuitous. His teeth clashed loudly together. As she followed through, his eyes rolled up in his head and he toppled straight over backward like a chainsawed tree. He wouldn’t be unconscious, she knew, and from personal experience she knew knocked out almost always meant stunned, not out cold.

She sensed movement rushing on her from the left. Again she spun counterclockwise to meet the man whose ribs she’d cracked. Roaring with pain-induced fury, he bore down on her with arms outflung to catch her and crush her in a bear hug.

She drove her right hand into his solar plexus and heard a crunching sound.

Bajraktari reached into his coat and came out holding a handgun. His stiffened arm rose straight up over his head.

Annja was already diving away as Bajraktari fired. She briefly considered summoning the mystical sword she’d inherited from Joan of Arc but, useful and lethal as it was, it wouldn’t stop bullets. She tucked a shoulder and rolled neatly into an aisle.

A whole row of heavy clay pots on a shelf to her left exploded as Bajraktari hauled the weapon down and triggered another shot. Pale pink dust enveloped her as flying potsherds raked her calves. Annja kicked off her shoes straightaway. She hated it in movies when women tried to flee or fight in heels. It was as absurd as it was unnecessary. And anyway, it was a relief to lose the accursed things.

She got her stocking feet beneath her, pushed up with her hands and launched herself down the aisle like a sprinter off the blocks. Bajraktari didn’t have a clear shot at her back but she wanted to get out of the narrow passage before somebody did.

She was still coughing and blinking dust from her eyes. It caked in her unfamiliar mascara, blurring everything beyond. The figure that abruptly blocked the lane ten feet ahead of her was no more than a shadow.

There weren’t a lot of things the shadow could be. Except for a gangster. Almost certainly aiming a gun at her. She launched herself into a forward running dive, throwing her arms out to keep from doing a skidding face plant and hoping she wouldn’t break anything.

Gunfire erupted like thunder behind her. At the same time she felt the pulsing concussion of a nearby muzzle-blast, powerful and full-auto. A dragon’s-breaths of muzzle-flame swept over her as she hit the ground.

She skinned both palms and did a sort of belly flop on the wood floor. In front of her she saw motion. The smuggler who had popped up in front of her was collapsing like a suit of clothes falling from a hanger. She knew in an instant what had happened—he and his fellow gang member behind her had neatly cross-fired each other when she dropped unexpectedly out of their line of fire.

Ignoring the pain from raw splinter-snagged palms, she swarmed over the man in a sort of sprawling crawl and flung herself toward the exposed stone of the wall dimly visible ahead of her. A corridor maybe six feet wide ran between the wall and the shelves. She slid across it.

She heard a startled exclamation. A man stood almost on top of her. Had she come out of the aisle facedown he would’ve been to her left. Instead she had tucked her head and rolled onto her right side to avoid slamming headfirst into the wall. She still caught enough of a rap at the base of her cranium, slightly cushioned by the twist she’d wound her hair into, to shoot a pulse of yellow light through her brain.

Annja had always prided herself on her ability to keep her presence of mind even in blood crisis. With her eyes dazzled from within, her ears ringing from nearby gunshots and her stomach roiling with terror and nausea induced by the crack on the head, she brought her knees up to her belly and shot both long legs out in a kick that struck the smuggler’s shins and shot the pins right out from under him.

He fell across her with a guttural exclamation that had to be a curse. She gave him a hard elbow to the left ear, writhed out from under him and found herself on her feet without any clear idea as to the process that had gotten her there.

It didn’t matter. As the man reached for her she knew she had no options. She closed her eyes and saw her sword clearly. When she opened them, the weapon was in her hand. The sword gleamed dully in the smoky light. She reversed it and plunged it down between the man’s shoulder blades. It bound, not wanting to withdraw. She let it go and it vanished back to the other where.