Solomon's Jar (14 page)

He checked his Rolex. “If you will forgive me, I have
an important phone call incoming in a few minutes. I must ask you to excuse me. You'll find it pleasant waiting on the afterdeck for the launch to take you back to shore, I trust.”

She stood up. “The program—”

“Have your producer call Charles. He'll help set something up. And now, good day to you, Annja Creed.”

 

T
HE GLEAMING UPPER DECK
of the big white boat was deserted when Annja emerged, blinking at more than the dazzling Mediterranean sunlight. Not even a seagull perched on the rail.

She wandered aft from the hatchway. What went wrong? she wondered. I totally struck out. Was it my hair? I know I'm not a raving beauty, but I usually get more response than that. Maybe I was playing out of my league. How could I think I could compete with all those international sex symbols? What was I thinking?

Maybe it had been the blunt query about Trees's death. Not too tactful, she had to admit. Yet even before she asked the question she had sensed the conversation slipping out of control. The bold stroke, to give it a better name than it deserved, had been an all but desperate attempt to get more out of the famed religious figure than the same sort of cotton-candy-and-maple-syrup platitudes he exuded for his celebrity patrons.

She walked toward the stern alongside a boom with
a sail bound to it by nylon cords. What had her totally flustered was that everything had started so well. She had expected to have to spend days if not weeks trying to contrive a meeting with Stern. Instead she'd succeeded before she'd even properly tried.

Then she'd done a face plant into a brick wall. If that wasn't mixing metaphors. She had never gotten quite clear on that concept.

Before she could fully comprehend what had happened a hand seized her hair from behind and snapped her head around.

Annja gasped from surprise. The stinging at the back of her scalp brought unwelcome tears to the corners of her eyes. The morning sun shone on the white deck and housing like liquid incandescence, beating furnace heat against her cheeks.

Her jaw dropped. Through the dazzle she stared into a pair of angry green eyes glaring at her from a perfect face. Glaring
down
at her.

To her utter amazement she recognized the face. It belonged to up-and-coming Brazilian supermodel Eliete von Hauptstark. Her name was pronounced “Ellieetchy,” as Annja had discovered during her research about Mark Peter Stern. She was six feet tall with skin and hair like different shades of honey.

Under normal circumstances Annja would have known no more about those details than she did about the workings of a printed-circuit fabrication plant. But she'd seen much of Hauptstark online recently, as the latest addition to Stern's celebrity retinue.

Hauptstark's arm lay across Annja's shoulder. A strong hand was still wrapped in Annja's hair at the back of her head. The Brazilian woman wore a white man's shirt open over a red bikini top, pale turquoise Capri pants and white deck shoes. She looked angry.

“I beg your pardon,” Annja said as politely as she could. “Please let me go. I was leaving anyway—this isn't necessary.”

The supermodel let go with her right hand. Her left struck in a jab. Annja blinked furiously at the tears that sprang up in her eyes as her head snapped back. It hurt, especially since her nose had scarcely healed from her South American escapade.

She stepped back. She felt more astonishment than anger or even outrage. “What on earth do you think you're doing?” she asked.

The taller woman spun and fired a back kick into her midsection. Annja flew backward. She landed on her hip, then shoulders and slid across the smooth white deck. She stopped against something solid but slightly yielding.

Thoughts jostled for preeminence in her mind. Why is she attacking me? What the hell does she think she's
doing? She got her bearings and realized she had struck a truncated cone of wrist-thick nylon rope with a grapnel-style anchor with a nasty-looking blade sticking out stacked on top of it.

Annja kicked off her shoes. Shaking her head free of the whirl of confusion, she jumped to her feet, willing her mind to clear. She drew in a deep breath to calm and center herself.

The other woman was advancing on her. Her face had now twisted with rage. Yet her eyes looked strangely blank.

“What exactly do you think you're doing?” Annja said in Portuguese, grateful for her knowledge of many languages.

If the supermodel felt surprise at being addressed in Portuguese, she showed no sign. She showed no sign of comprehension at all. Or even of being aware that Annja had spoken. She only came on, not fast, but implacably.

Annja waited with legs slightly flexed. She realized she had slid all the way to the edge of the yacht's deck. Her head was full of the smell of paint, of sun-heated synthetic and steel, even the soap with which her dark blond nemesis had bathed recently, and the slight sweat of exertion she had worked up.

She remembered that Eliete von Hauptstark was a third-degree black belt in tae kwon do. Annja herself had studied martial arts and she knew full well that formal
martial arts had little to do with real fighting, but if advanced practitioners had real-world fighting experience, they could be extraordinarily formidable foes.

When she was less than ten feet away from Annja, Hauptstark did a sort of stutter step, skipping forward to launch a front kick to Annja's sternum with a force that might have shoved the front of her rib cage right through her heart.

Annja met it with a left forearm held out at a forty-five-degree angle. It was a simple technique, powered by a turn of the hips. Had she tried to block the kick directly, her forearm would have been broken. But the beauty of the counter, along with simplicity, was that it simply added a side vector and guided the fearsome thrust past her.
A force of four ounces deflects a thousand pounds
, Annja recalled learning.

Annja felt her opponent overbalance. Using the same hip twist that powered the deflection, she drove a Phoenix-eye fist, first knuckle extended, in under the supermodel's short ribs on the left-hand side.

The tall blonde exhaled violently. It didn't slow her down, although it did take the force out of the follow-through blow, another spinning back kick, this time off the foot that had delivered the deflected front kick. The second wouldn't have landed true because she hadn't knocked Annja back with the first kick, and her opponent had closed instead. The combination attack was
aborted. Hauptstark had to bend her knee to land the strike at all. She could do no more than push Annja in the small of her back with the rope sole of her deck shoe.

But it was a powerful push. Annja went flying past her in a graceless windmill of arms and legs. She felt like the coltish adolescent she had once been—not all that long ago—running out of control down a steep slope.

She regained control of her hurtling body when she accidentally ran into the side of the cabin. It knocked the breath from her. She turned, fearing a rib had cracked, as her first labored inhalation felt like a nail being driven into her side.

The taller woman was all over her like a tigress. A high kick flashing for Annja's face was a feint for a flurry of punches and elbow-strikes. Had Annja reacted by trying to block this time, instead of simply leaning her upper body back and to the side, slipping the first feigned attack like a boxer, at least one sledgehammer impact would have landed and quite possibly incapacitated her.

She stayed close to her opponent to keep her enemy's blows from having pace to gain momentum, using her forearms against the insides of the model's forearms to foul the jackhammer blows. At the same time she attempted to land short, hooking, hip-turning strikes of her own. She was still deficient in jabs, and would have to spend more time training with a Western-style boxer to master them.

If she survived.

The exchange was delivered in silence except for little cries as Hauptstark explosively expelled her breath by clenching the astonishingly well-defined muscles of her stomach at each strike. Annja slipped aside from a vicious cross and the supermodel's right fist blasted through the planking of the cabin's outer bulkhead like a harpoon. The woman seemed impervious to pain.

The hole's jagged jaws momentarily seized the supermodel's forearm like a bear trap. Annja used the opening to slam a brutal palm-heel uppercut up under Hauptstark's somewhat broad chin. The blow made her teeth clack together and lifted her slightly into the air.

Eyes literally reddened with rage, Eliete von Hauptstark uttered the first actual vocalization Annja had heard from her since the unexplained attack had begun. A furious roar, rising to a predator's unbridled scream, it was so piercing that something inside of Annja quailed. As the voice soared in pitch through better than two octaves, the Brazilian ripped her arm loose by yanking it out roundhouse, ripping a yard-long gash in the wood.

Annja gaped, stunned by violence of the move. Blood flew in scarlet strings from great furrows clawed by wood splinters in the tan satin skin of Hauptstark's forearm. An eight-inch sliver penetrated the arm like a spear. Ignoring what must have been blinding pain, Hauptstark continued the motion that had ripped her
arm free into an ox-mouth blow, delivered with the back of her right wrist. It was another one of those showy traditional martial-arts moves, superpowerful but way too unwieldy to use in a real fight.

Except it came at an already off-guard opponent at bullet speed. Annja barely got both forearms up in time to save her jaw from being shattered, and likely her neck from being snapped like kindling.

The impact stunned her arms. It knocked her bodily through the air again, toward the stern. She bounced off the starboard quarter rail in lieu of tumbling over into the sea and landed in a heap on her side on the deck.

She looked up. Her opponent moved toward her with fierce deliberation. Her face, once inhumanly beautiful, was now merely inhuman, her exotic features a demon mask.

Annja leaped to her feet. Her body felt like one big bruise. She'd had enough. She concentrated her will.

 

S
INCE SHE HAD BEEN
made aware of her connection to Joan of Arc's sword, Annja had spent many odd moments trying to puzzle out under what circumstances it might rightfully be employed. Roux had so far proved of little help. His relationship to the cause of good was as puzzling as everything else about him. He tended to blend ruthlessness with an eye for the main chance that she guessed was all his own. His advice ran along the
lines of quoting the words Abbot Arnaud-Amaury uttered during the Albigensian Crusade: “Slay them all! God will know his own.” Or, as Roux gleefully translated it into more modern terms, “Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out.”

Killing women, children, noncombatants, the odd household pet or anything else that happened to wander into the circle of her swinging blade had little appeal to Annja's modern sensibilities. She did wonder if Roux's bloody-mindedness—which she knew from voracious childhood reading was actually British slang for extreme willfulness, nothing to do with bloodshed per se, but still doubly appropriate applied to her ancient mentor—was in part a harsh if veiled reminder that as a force for good she had to make her own moral choices and live with the consequences. Just like everyone who
didn't
have a magic sword.

She had vowed to summon the sword only in defense of herself or innocents—and only in extremis.

Eliete von Hauptstark plainly meant to kill her. It seemed likely she could, that she was about to, unless Annja did something radical.

The time had come.

 

A
NNJA COMPOSED
herself. She gave her head a slight shake. The sword gleamed in her hands.

Surprised, Hauptstark checked and recoiled slightly.

“Stay back,” Annja said. “This has gone far enough. If you attack me again, I will kill you to defend myself. If you turn and walk away, we can forget this ever ha—”

With a hawk scream of fury Hauptstark launched herself.

The bull rush caught Annja unprepared. Before her reflexes could respond, Hauptstark had planted a powerful shoulder in her midriff and wrapped arms like iron bands around her upper thighs.

The air exploded out of Annja's lungs. She felt herself lifted off the deck. Then she was falling backward, seemingly in slow motion.

She collapsed herself, slightly rounding her back in hopes of taking the fall across her shoulders and not on the back of her skull.

Annja hit the deck with considerable force. Her teeth crashed together with a squeal. Had she not had the presence of mind to tuck her tongue well back against the roof of her mouth she would have bitten it in two. Her right elbow came down hard on the deck. The nerve center was struck. The arm went limp.

As she watched, the sword somersaulted out of her nerveless hand.

For an instant terror seized Annja. This isn't supposed to happen! she thought desperately. I've failed!

A sense of betrayal flooded her like fire. No one is supposed to be able to take it from me!

The sword had vanished.

With a flash of near manic relief Annja realized her sword had gone back to the pocket universe where it customarily awaited her summons. Then momentum slammed the back of her skull against the deck. Purple-and-scarlet lightning shot through her brain. A black fog swirled behind her eyes.

She snapped back to herself at once.

A concussion might yet be on the agenda, even a potentially lethal subdural hematoma, but she was able to
focus enough to perceive that Eliete von Hauptstark sat straddling her hips, hands on her shoulders, pinning her to the deck.

The animal fury that had propelled the supermodel seemed to have subsided into systematically murderous intent. She cocked a fist.

Annja jerked her head to the right. She felt a wind of passage, then heard a terrifying crunch and felt a sting at the back of her scalp as some of her hair was driven through the deck along with Hauptstark's fist.

The power she had packed into the blow—and possibly the surprise that she had missed—made the tall woman loosen her grip on Annja's right arm. Annja moved quickly. She twisted free and drove a punch against the side of the Brazilian's jaw. Pinned as she was, she could get none of her body mass behind it; it was a pure arm punch.

Annja had very strong arms. But the model's head merely jerked to the side. Her expression didn't change as she ripped her hand free of the deck in a shower of dust and splinters.

With a convulsion of back and belly muscles Annja lifted her upper body off the deck, trying to writhe free. With her hips immobilized she had little force. Hauptstark slammed her head down into Annja's. It struck too high; they clashed forehead to forehead, instead of Annja's nose being smashed. More sparks shot through Annja's brain.

The Brazilian supermodel shook her shaggy blond mane. Annja got her feet planted and thrust upward with all the strength in her legs.

Hauptstark folded herself against Annja, wrapping her arms around her neck and shoulders. Annja heard the bestial panting behind her head, felt the woman's breath on her neck. It was like the wind from a blast furnace, hot and damp.

Momentarily freed, Annja's arms flailed. Her right hand encountered something of smooth texture but rumpled feel. She realized it was the anchor rope.

Her left arm struck her foe's forearm. She felt blood, sticky on the model's skin. Her fingers brushed sharp hardness. It was the wood splinter that had been driven through Hauptstark's forearm when she punched through the cabin wall.

Annja grabbed it and twisted as hard as she could.

Hauptstark threw back her head and howled in agony.

With the force of desperation Annja heaved her shoulders off the deck. Her right hand scrabbled like a terrified animal at the coiled rope. As the supermodel raised her free hand to chamber a hammer-fist blow that would smash Annja's skull a strand of rope came loose in Annja's hand. She hauled on it for all she was worth.

She didn't know exactly what the anchor lying atop the rope coil was for. Despite having been raised within spitting distance of Lake Pontchartrain, in a town that spent
a certain amount of time underwater even before Katrina brought much of the Gulf of Mexico to town for a protracted visit, Annja knew almost nothing about boats. The anchor seemed too light to make a vessel this size stay put. She figured other anchors must have been deployed.

It was still a good-sized hunk of iron. It felt as if it must have weighed eighty pounds. Under most circumstances Annja knew she would have strained to lift it one-handed.

But these weren't most circumstances. The rope snapped taut as she yanked. The anchor flew through the air, the point of its wedge blade descending like a pickax between Eliete von Hauptstark's shoulder blades.

Annja was already moving. Her right hand whipped a coil of the rope, still rippling the air, around her opponent's neck. The weight of the anchor had pushed back Hauptstark's center of mass. With a heave of the muscles of her lower back and abdomen that sent pain shooting through her belly, Annja thrust her pelvis into the air.

The supermodel was thrown bodily off her. Bleeding and weakened, Hauptstark was momentarily stunned.

Annja jackknifed. She came forward onto her own feet facing her foe. With a scream of pent-up frustration and rage of her own she skipped forward and fired a side-thrust kick into the front of Hauptstark's pelvis with all her strength.

The supermodel was long and lean, but no one could
have accused her of being gaunt. Annja knew the woman was incredibly strong and still very dangerous. She also knew something more than simple jealousy was fueling her killer rage.

A voice deep inside her head was telling her what had driven the insane, and insanely powerful, attack. But she wasn't ready to listen to the voice. For all the miracles she had witnessed—had taken part in, had performed herself—there were some vestiges of her rational world-view she wasn't willing to surrender just yet.

And there were some things she didn't want to believe.

Annja turned to lean on the rail and look off across the water while she recovered her breath. She knew she had to take some decisive actions immediately. But her mind and spirit had taken as brutal a battering as her body.

The water was a lovely deep blue between the sailing vessel and the shore, with its buildings marching up Jaffa Hill. Gulls and terns wheeled and called out to each other overhead. Below them, a variety of watercraft, mostly smallish vessels, rocked gently at anchor or swooped to the impetus of sails or small engines. She gave herself over to a deliberately thought-free contemplation of the postcard prettiness of the scene.

Then, before Hauptstark could attack again, Annja climbed over the rail and jumped into the sea. She swam as hard as her tired muscles would allow. Her instincts told her to get as far from Mark Peter Stern as possible.

A sudden flash caught the corner of her eye. She turned her head to see a puff like a cotton ball, pure white, roll away from one of those pretty little watercraft, perhaps a quarter mile away across the crowded water. In the midst of it blazed a spark like a miniature blue sun. It moved. It seemed to be circling slightly, and drew behind it a corkscrew trail.

Annja dived deep.