Alex Archer - The Lost Scrolls

He heardAnnja land behind him, and spun. His hand lashed out horizontally with the combat knife.

He was way short. Annja didn’t even have to dodge. Before he could recover with a back stroke she sprang like an angry leopard and closed with him. She grabbed him by the biceps of his knife arm and his left shoulder.

Something came skittering down the aisle into the middle of the lab.

Grenade . Annja was out of time, with nowhere to go.

In fear and frustrated anger, Annja stepped past the black-clad assassin like a dancer leading her partner, and threw him toward the back of the room with all her strength. He hit the sealed-off window with a crunch. The bricks exploded outward into the humid Alexandrian night.

Grabbing the motionless Jadzia around her narrow waist, Annja dragged the young woman to the window and leaped out through the hole in the wall.

The grenade exploded behind her, filling the lab with smoke and tear gas.

Annja landed hard in the alley behind the building. Her right ankle buckled, not quite far enough to sprain. Her knee slammed against something hard—a bottle or stone.

“What are you doing?” Jadzia screamed from under arm. “Put me down!”

Annja dropped her, eliciting a fresh squall of fury. They were in a space ten feet wide between the warehouse and the next building. Lights shone from a crane out by the docks a long block away. A fast glance over her shoulder showed only dark the other way.

The hunters had night-vision equipment. Light gave her at least equal vision and the possibility, however slight, of witnesses.

A slim edge was an edge.

“Come on,” she said to Jadzia, who was sitting up rubbing grit out of her hair and cursing in several languages Annja didn’t recognize.

Jadzia opened her mouth to say something, probably a snotty protest. Annja grabbed her arm and started running. With a squawk the young woman found herself dragged to her feet and scrambling, still clutching the satchel.

As Annja reached the alley’s end a figure loomed before her. The bizarre shape of the head silhouetted against the silvery glare told her all she needed to know.

Letting go of Jadzia’s wrist, she sprinted the last few yards at full speed and leaped in the air as the inevitable machine pistol came up. Her right leg pistoned out in a flying side kick. It telescoped the single objective tube of the night-vision goggles and snapped the gunman’s neck as if he’d been hit in the face with a pile driver. In a sense he had.

Annja landed beyond the body, out on the rubble field. The inflatable tent over the excavation was ahead and to her right. She did a quick scan of the area. She seemed to be alone. The intruders, knowing there were no exits from the converted warehouse but the front way in, apparently and logically hadn’t bothered leaving more than one man on guard outside. Annja stood drawing in huge breaths of thick Mediterranean air flavored with cooking spices and motor oil.

A crunch of shoes on the loose, gritty earth behind brought her around. Jadzia was teetering toward her with blue eyes wide.

“What the hell?” she said.

“I’m scared, pissed off and alive,” Annja said. “And damned determined to stay that way. If you want to do the same, come with me. And don’t ask questions till later!”

Jadzia swiveled her pigtailed head from side to side as the two women walked down a street full of hulking trucks. The narrow lane ran between big dark warehouse walls near the Western Harbor wharves. It smelled strongly of seawater and sea-life uncomfortably past its sell-by date. Water sloshed along the rough surface underfoot. Not even her college geology courses enabled Annja Creed to know whether the street was actual cobblestone or just really decrepit pavement.

They passed through a spill of light from the rectangular opening into an amber-lit cavern of a warehouse. Rough-looking men in badly stained coveralls stood around the entrance smoking and talking in guttural Arabic while a skinny young man, probably just a boy, dressed in a black T-shirt and baggy cotton shorts reeled in a big hose. The smell of fish was very strong.

The conversation stream trickled to a stop as the men saw the pair of Western women, one dressed skimpily enough to be considered more than a little risqué even in cosmopolitan Alexandria.

Annja smiled widely and nodded at the startled male faces as they passed through the island of light. Nothing to see here, she thought, trying hard to broadcast it despite her devoted disbelief in psychic powers. Mess with us and you’ll be trying to digest your teeth. Have a nice night!

She had to tug extra hard at Jadzia’s wrist to tow her the rest of the way out of the light.

Jadzia followed her none-too-gentle insistence. The young language prodigy continued to maintain the shocked silence that had settled over her after Annja had killed the final attacker standing between them and escape. Fortunately, Jadzia showed little difficulty with the hike. Either she wasn’t one of those nerds who was totally opposed to any physical activity greater than teetering to the bathroom or the fridge to get another can of Red Bull, or adrenaline was working its magic. As aggravatingly lean as she was, Annja suspected the former.

Annja led them west for about a mile, following the waterfront, through the Greek quarter and into the city’s west side. She stayed alert but saw no sign they were being tailed. At length she circled back toward her own hotel.

“Why are we here?” Jadzia asked, looking up at the front of the hotel.

It was a modest three-star kind of place in the Greek quarter, big enough to have an elevator, a bar and even pretty decent bathrooms in all the rooms, but without being part of a big chain.

“I thought I’d grab my gear,” Annja said.

Jadzia hung back. Somewhere among the nighttime streets Annja had quit having to pull her along by the wrist. She had followed on her own, and now reminded Annja uncomfortably of a lost puppy.

“But won’t they know to look for us here?”

“Watch a lot of spy movies, do you?” Annja said. She instantly regretted the snide tone.

But Jadzia, while she had a flash-fire temper for perceived slights, proved to be dense as one of the city’s ancient stone Sphinxes when a real one hit her. She smiled happily.

“Of course!” Her pigtails bobbed as she nodded enthusiastically. “I know all about these things.”

What have I gotten myself into now? Annja wondered. “I’m betting they either aren’t aware of my existence or haven’t identified me yet,” she said. “Your team roster is available on the Web for all to see. My name’s not on it.”

She knew it was thin, as she watched a cab pull under the portico. The uniformed doorman bowed as a silk-suited Sikh with silver in his beard, and his shorter companion, voluptuous in an emerald-green dress, exited the vehicle and entered the hotel. She wondered briefly what the story was. The couple dressed nicely enough to afford a much pricier place.

Annja wanted to get in and out before much could go wrong even if the night’s assassins were watching for her. They might have spotted her while surveilling the dig—probably had, she had to admit to herself as she formed her plan. She would gather her things, then duck out of the hotel, shake anybody trying to tail them and head for a new place to hole up for the night.

She wasn’t that attached to the belongings she had brought. She traveled light, and nowadays always packed with the expectation she might have to leave anything behind and walk away for survival’s sake. Even her laptop was relatively cheap and contained no information that could easily be used against her.

But it would be convenient to have her stuff. And she reckoned that if she threw some of her own clothes on Jadzia, no matter how bad they fit her coltish form, they would be a lot less conspicuous than having the girl wandering around dressed in such a look-at-me manner.