Seeker’s Curse Read online

  “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.

  The echoes of angry shouts and random shots flew around the rafters. The horde of pigeons that had been rousted by the enormous uproar now fluttered around in the shadowed eaves like smoke trying to escape a burning building. Annja started to run. If I follow the walls, she reasoned, eventually I’ll find a way out of here.

  Shapes appeared ahead of her. She pushed off the wall with her right hand as she spun, adding momentum as she tried to dart into another aisle. A burst of full-auto gunfire ripped the air behind her.

  Becoming aware that the rack of shelves to her right ran only about ten feet before another one began, Annja stopped and grabbed the uprights farther from the outer wall. She prayed that whatever was stored on them, too dust caked and cobwebbed for her to identify in the light and urgency, weren’t priceless relics. Or if they were, that they weren’t fragile.

  Adrenaline gave her extra strength. With a couple of quick shakes the whole thing came toppling down across the aisle just as a couple of pursuers appeared. One of them threw up an arm before disappearing with a wail of despair beneath several hundred pounds of plundered antiquities and massive shelves. The other vanished behind a solid wall of dust, his path blocked by the shelves now propped at an angle across the narrow passage.

  Annja ran on. A man dashed into the aisle ahead of her. Without time to think she swept her arm along the shelf beside her at a foot or so below her shoulder level. Another big dust cloud swirled out; at least one large pot flew through the clouded air right at the smuggler’s head even as he raised a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

  He fired a burst straight up into the rafters, causing a brief shower of bloody feathers to fall on him as he warded off the pot with an upflung left elbow. Annja’s peripheral vision caught another pot lying on its side right in front of her just before s
he stepped on it, twisted her ankle and went down. Instead she rushed it with a swift soccer kick. It shot up at an angle and caught the gunman by evil chance, square in the crotch.

  He started to jackknife. The sword appeared in Annja’s hand. She slashed down right to left, met brief resistance and raised a quick spray, black in the gloom. The man dropped onto his face to rise no more.

  She vaulted the body and found herself back in the middle of the cleared space. Golden debris littered the floor. And facing her across twenty-five feet of fallen antiquity stood Bajraktari, his good eye and his bad wide.

  He smiled and raised his gun two-handed. “Prisoner!” he exclaimed.

  Above her Annja heard a crash, the tinkle of falling glass. Something sailed over the terrorist leader’s head to bounce with several dwindling thuds on the floorboards between them.

  It looked like a short length of pipe with holes drilled in the sides and big hex nuts screwed onto either end. As it happened Annja knew at once what it was, having seen them demonstrated by some of her friends in Special Forces once upon a time. It was a U.S.-made M-84 stun grenade, commonly known as a flash-bang.

  By reflex Annja had turned away, covering her face in her arms and just dropping. Bajraktari, she noted in the instant before she shielded her eyes, just stood there gaping at the grenade. He didn’t seem to recognize it. Then again, relatively few people who saw them in use close up and personal like that lived to recall the experience.

  The blinding flash neither blinded nor stunned Annja, although she was temporarily deafened by the blast, which was beyond loud and hit her body like a big bat.

  Survival urged her to pop right up again and run. Already feeling the effects of stimulus overload, her body was slow to respond. She got up to one knee with a high-pitched tone singing through her skull, aural aftermath of the shattering noise, and looked around. Maybe I’m a little stunned after all, she thought.

  The tableau took her breath away. Sunlight of a sort, grayish and feeble by the standards of the outside world but almost dazzling in this dim hell, poured through a busted skylight. Men in black masks and bulky black suits slid down ropes from the gaping hole. One of them fired a machine pistol one-handed. The walls and rafters danced with muzzle-flames in all directions.

  With the attackers, almost certainly Greek police or army special forces, and the Kosovars blazing enthusiastically away at each other, and dust and smoke everywhere, and pigeons flapping through the mayhem in frantic attempts to find their way out, the disoriented Annja felt for a dizzy instant as if she was starring in her own personal movie.

  She glimpsed a big black-clad arm reach around Bajraktari’s neck from the rear, dragging the thoroughly dazzled gang leader back into shadow. Duka was doing his bodyguardly duty. Then two things kick-started her body and her brain back into lightning action. First, the sheer animal desire to survive, the same thing that had the pigeons so agitated. Her scattered wits had coalesced enough to grasp that lingering in the midst of a firefight in a darkened warehouse was no way to stay breathing.

  The second was her intellect re-evolving toward human intelligence from about the level of moss. She realized that getting caught either by the smugglers, who would now believe beyond a doubt she had set them up even though it wasn’t true, and the authorities, who would know beyond a doubt she was trafficking stolen antiquities with well-armed criminals, which would be little better and possibly worse than catching a stray round.

  She knew neither side was going to feel like listening to her explanations.

  She darted into the nearest welcoming dark aisle as a random burst took out the lone light bulb hanging over the cleared space, adding to the darkness and confusion. Bad guys abounded, and if the cops had anything on the ball, there were going to be plenty of them, too.

  Annja reckoned that increased her chances of escape. Everybody was so busy killing each other and trying not to get killed they likely had little attention to spare for a lone, apparently unarmed woman.

  Hold that thought, she told herself, racing for the outer wall. She burst out into the corridor between it and the shelves.

  A smuggler stood not twenty feet from her, holding an assault rifle. His eyes went wide when he saw her. He raised the rifle as she started to turn for a desperation dive back into the doubtful sanctuary of the aisle she’d just left.

  A black-clad knee came up right between the gunman’s wide-braced legs from behind. The impact raised him onto his toes. His rifle came down and to his right and went off, a short burst kicking up long splinters from the floor and blasting another cloud of dust from the shelves.

  The leg straightened, then slammed back diagonally across the gunman’s right shin, sweeping it out from under him. Pivoting from the hips, the man behind slammed him face first into the floor. Annja felt the impact through the soles of her feet. The smuggler made a quick grab behind him with his left hand. As he went down he clawed the black balaclava off his assailant’s head.

  For a moment Annja and the counterterror operator, or whatever he was, stared at each other. He had a long, dark olive face and his curly hair was sweat plastered to his skull. His eyes were dark and piercing and very wide at the unexpected sight of a Western woman in tattered business clothes in the middle of a warehouse takedown in the back of beyond.

  Annja’s gaze slipped past him and her eyes went wide. From the corner of her vision she saw a look of skepticism cross the operator’s face: You think I’m gonna fall for that old trick, lady?

  As she opened her mouth to shout a warning, she knew she would be too late.

  Either instinct or her genuine fear saved the operator. Twisting his upper torso, he threw himself down. As he did he yanked a handgun from his thigh-tied quick-draw. Two shots flamed out before he landed on the prone, motionless body of his first opponent.

  Behind him a shadow form fell to the floor. Annja wheeled and ran straight away from them. Coming up fast on her left she saw a rude oblong of boards nailed to the wall, as if covering a window. When she was outside she’d hadn’t seen any bars on the windows, and the wood looked rotten.

  If it’s good wood I am going to break myself, she thought. Taking a running jump, she threw her shoulder into it.

  Rotten was right. The planks disintegrated into dust and whirling lightweight flotsam. Annja toppled through the window. For a moment she lay there in cold rain that had begun to fall sometime during the fiasco in the warehouse.

  From her right gunfire blasted. Somehow she got her feet beneath her and came up to a crouch.

  A man in a long black coat was turning toward her with an assault rifle in his hands. A similarly clad man lay facedown in a puddle beside him. Annja glimpsed two other fallen figures, both wearing black outfits, masks and no coats, on the cobbles beyond him. Apparently a pair of bolting smugglers had run into a pair of operators trying to prevent escapes. One of the smugglers had gotten lucky.

  But only briefly. Annja formed her hand into an open fist. The sword filled it. She slashed him across the shins.

  He fell over backward shrieking in agony.

  She turned and took off up the hill toward some trees that stood flanking the block’s upper end.

  3

  Squinting in the dim light of a green-visored reading lamp, Annja looked from the huge book spread open on the table before her to the tiny golden disk she had propped against a stack of other volumes for comparison. The world-renowned National Archaeological Museum in Athens made brightly lit, modern reading rooms available to the public. But Annja felt more in the mood for the confines of the special-collections stacks. Especially since she was a little leery of getting too much exposure to the public after her recent adventure.

  She couldn’t think of a better place to bone up on ancient Greek history than the museum’s Alexander S. Onassis Library, named for the shipping tycoon’s son who had died in a plane crash. The subject fell far afield of her specialty, the European Renaissance. She knew the basics about Classical Gree
ce, but nothing that seemed useful in explaining how Classical-era Greek coins could conceivably turn up amid plunder from a looted Buddhist shrine in Nepal.

  Actually she could research ancient Greece at any library anywhere, more or less, and turn up plenty of material. But libraries or museum collections always gave Annja a certain sense of serenity. She loved the feel and look and smell of books. Especially old books—much of her more orthodox work involved original manuscripts in sixteenth-century French or Portuguese. And here in the Onassis Library she found abundant material in English, French and Italian, as well as a discreetly helpful staff, most of whom spoke English.

  After the warehouse dust-up she had left Greece in a hurry. She then re-entered under her own name, bearing her own academic credentials. Besides which, everyone was happy to oblige the famous American TV star. Even if the show was on a cable network and her role was to play token skeptic, basically the academic foil to the comely Kristie Chatham on Chasing History’s Monsters.

  While Greece was not a large country by North American standards, Athens felt comfortingly distant from Macedonia. Events in Kastoria had rattled her pretty severely. Not the Kosovars’ treachery—two days later she was still chastising herself for not having anticipated it in the first place.

  Nor did the fact she had killed several of them bother her too much. She realized that with her possession of Joan’s sword came a whole different reality. She wasn’t happy about it but she was becoming quite accustomed to killing people in self-defense. She supposed her mentality was like that of a cop or soldier. Someone had to fight the bad guys even if that meant lethal encounters.

  Nor was Annja overwrought about her narrow escape from what had turned into a pitched battle in the old warehouse. Narrow escapes had become commonplace in her life since she had gotten tangled up with Roux and Garin and the sword. They weren’t the sort of thing you got used to, exactly. But if she went to pieces every time one happened she’d just be a total wreck and never get anything done.