Chapter 23

Annja dived in headfirst on top of the bag of scrolls. "Drive," she said.

The driver didn't move. Instead he turned around. "You no pay combat pay," he declared firmly.

Annja's hand slid into her pants pocket. She writhed on top of the gym bag and a startled Jadzia, cursing the vanity that made her wear her tight jeans instead of the baggier cargo pants she often wore. After a contortion or two she squeezed out her wallet. Lying fully across Jadzia's lap she fished in it, grabbing some bills. She came out with at least two hundred dollars and thrust it at the cabbie.

"The same if you get us safe to the Hong Kong airport!" she shouted.

His hand snatched the bills like a mongoose taking a striking cobra. "I your man!" he declared, turning and shifting into Drive. "You call me Rambo now!"

Annja sat up and looked out the back window. The bad news was a second big sedan full of hitmen had blasted out of the gates. The good news was both pursuers were at least momentarily locked up in traffic. Even Shenzhen drivers tended to lose their composure when random full-automatic gunfire sprayed over their heads.

The cab took off as if it had a jet assist. Annja, Jadzia and satchel got jumbled into a heap of synthetic fabric and long, lean feminine limbs. After a few confused, squirming moments they got themselves sorted out, though Annja's left eye socket now throbbed from having gotten Jadzia's elbow in it. At least they'll match, she thought.

Annja looked back again. Their pursuers had sorted themselves out and accelerated, weaving in and out of traffic. Annja had the satchel dumped on her again as their cabdriver did the same thing. She heard the blare of a horn and a big flat-nosed panel truck rushed by the other way, so close the cab actually rocked to its passage.

Traffic actually picked up as they exited the industrial area by the university. But the pursuing vehicles were gaining by dint of truly demented recklessness. For the moment they had quit shooting, anyway.

"What about the army?" Jadzia asked as the cab's darting for position tossed them from side to side. They had finally managed to get their seat belts fastened, which prevented them from crashing into each other at each wild swerve.

"Why aren't they chasing us?"

"They may not even know we got away," Annja said. "And having announced the security sweep through the building, I suspect they have to carry through with it."

A sudden crack made them both cringe. They looked back to see a hole in the rear windshield with a white spider of fractured glass around it. The bullet had apparently passed out the open front passenger window. Somehow it had missed all three occupants.

"Son of a bitch must pay!" the driver screamed in English. He leaned out his own window to throw a finger back at their pursuers, one of whom had pulled momentarily into the opposing traffic lane for a clear shot at them. He turned forward just in time to keep the cab from veering into the front bumper of a cement truck, which passed with the now almost obligatory blare of a horn.

They crossed a bridge over the river that formed the eastern border of the university. The slow water was bright green, with a sort of iridescent sheen to it, like radiator fluid. "It looks just like what Hollywood thinks toxic waste looks like," Annja said.

"Cool," Jadzia said. "Maybe there are mutants."

"Pollution just temporary problem of growth!" cried their cabbie over his shoulder. He glanced in his side mirror as they came off the bridge. "Uh-oh. Bad guys gaining."

They were. The second Mercedes was just a few cars back in the pack.

"Do something," Jadzia hissed urgently.

The cabbie fumbled around in the front seat and shocked Annja when he hauled out a submachine gun. Its cylindrical see-through magazine showed it was mostly full of cartridges.

The cabbie handed it back. "Chang Feng. Very nice."

Maybe Rambo wasn't such a bad name for him, Annja thought.

"What are you waiting for?" Jadzia shouted. The black Mercedes swerved around another little boxy sedan to move in closer. Behind them the blue pursuer also gained ground. "Shoot them."

"I can't," Annja said. "Not until I get a better shot. I'm not going to spray traffic with bullets at random."

"They do!"

"Do you want to be like them?"

"I want to be alive!"

A street

angled off at forty-five degrees to their left. The cabbie suddenly cranked the car across two lanes of onrushing traffic and shot up it.

"This isn't the right way," Jadzia complained. "The border with Hong Kong is east and south of here! We're going northeast."

"Well, we just lost the black Mercedes," Annja said, looking back. "We need to lose both before anything else happens. Anyway, the airport's on an island pretty much south of the university. We've been heading away all this time."

They had come into a zone of flats between steep hills. Beyond them rose factories, sculptures of tanks and pipework and chimneys, all lustily belching black smoke and white steam.

"Black car back behind us," Jadzia said. Her voice rose an octave. "Here comes the blue one! Shoot! Shoot!"

Annja twisted in her seat. The traffic had thinned to next to nothing. The black car was making a move, overtaking rapidly on the left.

"No worries!" the driver chortled. The taxicab accelerated away from the Mercedes.

After a moment the bigger sedan accelerated. Annja thought she could actually hear its engine roar.

"We can't outrun them!" Jadzia wailed.

She and Annja rocked violently forward as the driver tapped the brakes. Annja's mouth bounced off the passenger's headrest.

"What are you doing?" Jadzia screamed at the driver as the cab jolted and slowed to another hit on the brakes.

The Mercedes shot past them. A man hung half out the window again. He grabbed the frame, trying to twist to shoot back without falling out of the vehicle.

The cab accelerated again. The gunner was actually facing away from it, with his rump all but sticking out the window. They scooted past.

This time she definitely heard the Mercedes' engine growl furiously as it sped up to run them down. "Now driver watch only us," the cabbie sang out. "Too bad for them."

Annja glanced toward him, then did a second take. A train bridge crossed the road ahead of them, complete with a bloodred and sunflower-yellow-painted locomotive creeping across it, pulling open-topped cars piled perilously high with what looked to Annja like rusting chunks of scrap metal.

As they approached the bridge the Mercedes surged up alongside. Annja saw the gunman grinning over the sights of his bullpup assault rifle at her. She started to raise the Chang Feng, knowing she was too late.

The cabbie threw the wheel hard left. The cab sideswiped the Mercedes. The enemy driver probably flinched reflexively away from a car slamming into his. The black Mercedes rammed head-on into the concrete bridge support.

It telescoped with a terrible grinding screech, and a cloud of white steam rose from its ruptured radiator. Through the white puff Annja saw the gunner's body snapped suddenly sideways.

She gulped down sour bile. A human body wasn't meant to bend that way.

The cabbie uttered a triumphant rebel yell. Jadzia echoed him piercingly, pumping her fist.

"Not so fast," Annja said. "Here comes the other one."

They were driving between factory buildings, with almost no other cars on the road. The blue Mercedes was overtaking them quickly. This time Sulin himself leaned out the passenger window, white hair whipping in the wind, aiming an assault rifle one-handed.

"Your turn to do something," the cabbie shouted. "Better make snappy!"

"Roll down your window," Annja told Jadzia.

"What?"

"Do it!"

Jadzia cranked the window down, using both hands. Annja flung herself across the girl's lap and stuck her right arm and head out.

The blue Mercedes was swinging out to come alongside. Sulin wanted to make sure of his shot, it seemed.

The cab masked him from Annja. She lined up the red-dot sight on the shadowy figure of the driver and pumped out a 2-round burst, followed by another.

The windshield cracked as four holes appeared in front of the driver. The Mercedes continued to overtake them. Then it suddenly veered away left.

A meaty thump came from the rear of the cab. Annja felt the vehicle rock. The pursuing Mercedes went off the road into the ditch. It rolled over once, continuing to slide forward at a great rate of speed.

"He's on the car!" Jadzia screamed.

"What?"

"Sulin! He's on the roof!"

The cabbie hit the brakes hard. The white-haired assassin failed to fly off the front. The cabbie shifted his narrow butt into the passenger seat, improbably, and continued to steer from there as the taxi slowed.

Bullet holes appeared in the middle of the roof. Bullets struck the inside of the driver's door. If the cabbie hadn't moved he would have been shot in the head and shoulders.

"I saw that in a movie!" the cabbie crowed.

"Annja! Do something!" Jadzia cried.

She aimed the Chang Feng at the roof, pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. With no idea how to clear a jam in the unfamiliar weapon, Annja let it drop.

Still lying across Jadzia's lap, Annja held her hand tipped forward at an angle between the front seats. "Stay put," she advised the cabbie. She focused.

The sword sprang into being, angled upward. To Annja's relief it cleared the arm the driver used to steer the slowing vehicle.

Another burst ripped down into the driver's seat. Bits of stuffing flew up to drift like gnats around the inside of the car. Annja dropped her hands so she could bring the tip of the sword to the holes in the roof. Then she thrust up with both hands on the hilt.

With a crunching sound the sword pierced the roof of the cab. The cabbie ducked under her arm back into his seat to take better control of the cab.

For a moment Annja wondered if her blow had gone true. Would another burst rip through the ceiling, kill the driver and leave them helpless? Or kill her – or Jadzia, whose safety was in her hands?

A red drop ran down the side of the blade. Then another. Then a scarlet stream poured down to wet her hands.

****

It struck Annja as strange that a factory that must have been recently built could already be derelict. But as he pulled in out of sight from the road behind a huge blocky concrete structure, the cab bouncing across a parking lot already cracked and heaved by weeds sprouting through it, Rambo the cabbie explained that businesses died off as quickly as they sprang into being in boomtown Shenzhen.

The cab stopped. Annja let go of the sword. It vanished, allowing a brief rain of blood just beginning to congeal to fall to the floor of the cab. Some of it fell on Annja's hand and forearm. She grimaced.

But if you're willing to shed it, you'd better be willing to wear it, she told herself grimly.

They got out. Sulin was still breathing, shallowly and irregularly. Jadzia helped Annja ease him off the roof and gently to the ground. Blood was crusting around his nostrils and streamed down his chin.

"You think you've won," he wheezed. "You cannot win. You have made it personal."

"Don't talk," Annja said, kneeling beside him. "We'll call an ambulance for you."

"What's this? Mercy to a fallen foe?" The beautiful, too-fine features twisted in a sneer. "Fool yourselves if you will. Don't try to fool me. I'm dying. I have seen enough death to know."

"All right," Annja said. She stood. "What did you mean, it's personal, then?"

"The director," he said with a ghastly bubble running through his asthmatic wheezing. "He has commanded that you two be hunted down and killed at any cost. However long it takes."

"What about the scrolls?" Jadzia asked. She was calm. It bothered Annja slightly. Was there something wrong with her? Or was she merely on emotional overload?

Why don't I feel more? she wondered. And then she realized she did feel something – empty. Utterly drained. Of fear, as well as hope.

Sulin shook his head weakly.

"Regardless of what befalls the scrolls," he said, "no one is permitted to defy the company as you have." He smiled as if in contemptuous amusement, whether at them or his own employer, Annja couldn't tell. Probably both, she guessed.

"Run if you will," he said. His voice was a whisper. "You cannot get away. You will only die tired. But I can help you escape them."

"Tell me," Annja said.

He raised his right hand with obvious effort. "Come close," he said in a voice like the ghost of the last wind of autumn.

She frowned but knelt again and leaned down. His breath was thready on her cheek.

"I have your escape," he said, "in my hand."

With blinding speed his left hand shot toward her neck. She caught him by the wrist. The needle point of a stiletto hovered half an inch from her carotid artery.

"Damn you!" he growled. The violet eyes were wide and staring. "Who are you?"

"Your worst enemy," she said.

He arched his back. She felt him die. All the tension and strength flowed out of him with the life force.

Gently she laid his hand, still clutching the stiletto, across the front of his immaculately tailored dove-gray suit coat. She gazed at the red morass from the wound the sword had made in his chest.

She stood. For a moment she looked down at the sculpted elfin features. Despite his final spasm he looked perfectly at ease, perhaps for the first time in his life.

"What demons drove you?" she asked under her breath. "What kind of thoughts ran through your head?"

She looked up to see Jadzia's cheek glistening with tears.

"I hate him," the girl said. "Why did it hurt to watch him die?"

"Be glad," Annja said. "It means we're both still human."

She looked to their driver, who stood with arms akimbo regarding his poor battered car. She expected him to demand a prodigious payment to make good the damage to his cab. But his eyes were bright and his cheeks flushed from the chase and running battle.

"It all right," he said. "Insured!"

Annja raised an eyebrow. "Against crash damage, spilled blood and bullet holes? That seems like a lot to ask of an insurance company. Even for a wide-open town like Shenzhen."

He laughed. "Oh, no," he said. "For theft! Car disappear, so sad. Shenzhen full of thieves!"

"What about him?" Jadzia asked, indicating Sulin. "We can't leave him here."

For practical more than sentimental reasons Annja agreed.

"No problem," the cabbie said. "You pay?"

Annja sighed. "I pay." He did save our lives, she reminded herself.

He opened the trunk and produced, to Annja's astonishment, a box of garbage bags. "We stuff him in trunk. I know all about it. I'm a big Sopranos fan. I leave car somewhere hidden before I report stolen. Dump him – just like New Jersey!"