Chapter 25

"Will your friend really help us?" Jadzia asked.

Annja scowled. "He's not really a friend."

They walked by night among the quaint and mostly authentic colonial buildings of central Kuala Lumpur. They seemed to exist in a hidden valley walled in on all sides by canyons of steel and concrete. In one direction the colossal Petronas dominated the immediate skyline. They looked to Annja's eye like a pair of huge rocket ships linked together. In another rose the Kuala Lumpur Tower, nearly as tall as the Petronas twins. It resembled the world's largest stalk of asparagus. Cars and buses hissed along narrow old-town streets that meandered like streams as if in contrast to the geometric exactitude of the skyscrapers.

Jadzia looked at Annja with a spark of interest. It was good to see, after the listlessness the girl had displayed since they'd left Shenzhen.

"A lover?" Jadzia teased.

Annja adjusted the strap of the satchel of scrolls on her shoulder and let out a reflexive chuff of laughter. "I'd say 'he wishes,' but I'm not even sure that's true."

"What about you? Do you wish? Is he a sexy man? A beautiful man?"

"Yes. I guess he is. He's a very powerful man. He's unique."

"So why don't you sleep with him?"

She just shook her head, tight-lipped. Garin Braden was attractive, no question, with his commanding eyes, superb physique and charisma to make the curtains sway when he entered a room. The truth was Annja found it hard to get really intimate with someone who, at any given moment, might decide to try to kill her. It didn't seem politic to mention that to Jadzia in connection with someone on whom both women currently relied to save their lives.

Leaving a compulsively neat little square with palm trees and flowers in planters in the middle and copper-domed buildings around the fringes, they entered a more modern section of the city. And shortly, down a street blocked by concrete traffic barriers, they came to a wire perimeter surrounding a half-finished building.

A crash sounded from behind them. They both turned. A heavy truck had just bulled its way between two waist-high barriers and was roaring down the street at them.

"Oh, no," Jadzia said.

Annja grabbed the satchel with one hand and Jadzia's wrist with the other. "Come on," she said, and raced inside the wire. The truck grumbled to a halt behind them with a sound like the tail end of an avalanche.

A pair of uniformed guards with billed caps and showy white Sam Browne belts came running out of a security shack near the entrance to the half-built building. "Stop! You cannot come in here."

Rippling cracks sounded to either side of Annja. The two guards folded like collapsing cardboard cutouts.

Annja looked back over her shoulder and almost stumbled. A burly figure swaggered in the gate with a bow-legged roll. Dark-clad men flanked him, holding suppressed submachine guns to their shoulders.

Jadzia looked too. "Marshall!" she exclaimed. She yelped in terror as she stumbled on a piece of rubble.

Annja would not let her fall. Jadzia cried out as Annja pulled ruthlessly on her arm, barely slowing her stride. She got her sneakers under her and followed with ungainly flapping steps, into the darkness of the building's heart.

****

"I hear them!" Jadzia said. "They are below us!"

Her panted words echoed between the raw concrete slabs of roof and floor and the metal sheathing on the outside of the building. The two women had run up a dozen stories of temporary steel stairs with only the most perfunctory kind of safety rail. Fortunately, small amber lights clamped at irregular intervals gave enough illumination that neither woman had put a foot wrong enough to plummet back down.

The drumbeats of feet, the shouts of men's voices, even the panting of their breath came echoing up the deep well.

"We better keep going," Annja said.

"But where? There's nowhere to go but up."

"You're right," Annja said. "But it's not as if we've had much choice."

"Then where are we going? Are we just climbing to prolong the inevitable?"

"To look for somewhere to make a stand," Annja said.

"What kind of stand?" Jadzia demanded. "I thought you left the gun back with the cabdriver."

"I did," she said.

"So what happens when you find someplace you like?"

"Ambush," Annja said. "Classic recourse of the weak and hunted."

She glanced over to see Jadzia screwing up her face to say something cutting. But she simply nodded. "You're right," she said.

They had a way to go before they ran out of building. But they were running out of options. Jadzia was right – ultimately all that lay up this way was roof. Or actually the topmost floor slab, sixty or seventy stories farther up, with a giant crane clamped to it.

The floors they had just passed had been bare, to judge from what Annja could see. While they did offer plenty of deep darkness, she had to assume their pursuers had some kind of night-vision gear. Under the circumstances, flashlights would be all they'd need to ferret out their quarry.

"We need terrain," Annja said.

"Meaning what? We're in a building."

"Stuff to hide behind."

"Oh."

They reached a new landing.

"How about here?" Jadzia said, looking around. By the amber gleam of a utility light Annja saw a promising plenitude of boxy shapes – portable generators, tool chests on wheels, worktables. Either more internal work was being done on this floor than those immediately below for some reason, or it was a designated shop. "Perfect," she said, starting away from the stairs.

"Wait," Jadzia said. "Give me the scrolls."

"Really, they're easy for me to carry. Although I have to admit my hips've gotten pretty sore from the bag bouncing off them at every step."

"No," Jadzia said. "Give me the bag so you're free to hit people."

With more relief than she cared to admit, she peeled the strap off her shoulder and handed the satchel to the girl. Then, summoning the sword, just in case, she led the way among the meaty chunks of equipment, turned by the darkness to solid black.

Too late she became aware of a shadow-blur of motion from her left. An impact against the back of her skull filled it with a red explosion, and then a white radiance as blinding as the sun.