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Seeker's Curse
Alex Archer


Enlisted by the Japan Buddhist Federation to catalog a number of ancient shrines dotted across Nepal, archaeologist Annja Creed is honored to help. Political violence has prompted the Federation to protect holy sites from desecration and vandalism, and Annja is their last hope to properly conserve these sites.Where there's vandalism, there's plundering, and local police soon become suspicious of Annja's presence. But she is more concerned about the antiques smugglers and Maoist guerrillas trying to kill her. When she must trek high up in the Himalayas to protect a sacred golden Buddha statue from falling into the hands of her pursuers, she's told that the place is cursed–and guarded by demons. And Annja has no choice but to face her demons….









“You were fated to come here.”


Annja thought she showed no reaction but the monk chuckled.

“Oh, I know that you do not believe in fate, Annja Creed. Any more than you believe in demons. Despite the secret burden you carry. You are simply too polite to tell a fat old man to his face that you believe he is, as you might say, full of it.

“You believe that only you, and those who think as you do, see the true face of reality. I can only shake my head sadly and hope that someday you might see that this universe of shining gears and ratchets you have constructed to believe in is itself merely a glittering toy, an illusion by which you hide the truth from your eyes.”

She started to say something. Whether to dispute him or make some polite evasion, she didn’t know. But he held up a chubby finger.

“No need exists for us to debate. My universe, like your unseeing, unfeeling, uncaring machine, shall carry on regardless of whether either of us believes or disbelieves. I only caution you for your sake—do not be too hasty to disbelieve in the help that comes to you in your direst need. You can explain it away later. What is vital to your quest, and possibly your survival, is that you not fight it.”

She nodded. “I’ll do my best.”




Titles in this series:


Destiny

Solomon’s Jar

The Spider Stone

The Chosen

Forbidden City

The Lost Scrolls

God of Thunder

Secret of the Slaves

Warrior Spirit

Serpent’s Kiss

Provenance

The Soul Stealer

Gabriel’s Horn

The Golden Elephant

Swordsman’s Legacy

Polar Quest

Eternal Journey

Sacrifice

Seeker’s Curse



Rogue Angel







Seeker’s Curse

Alex Archer





www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)




THE LEGEND


…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.

The broadsword, plain and unadorned,

gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against

the ground and his foot at the center of the blade.

The broadsword shattered, fragments falling

into the mud. The crowd surged forward,

peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards

from the trampled mud. The commander tossed

the hilt deep into the crowd.

Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued

praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed

her body and she sagged against the restraints.

Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France,

but her legend and sword are reborn….




Contents


Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30




1


The building fronts were whitewashed in name only. They had long since taken on a dingy cast.

Or maybe that was just Annja Creed’s frame of mind.

She wore a gray business suit over a pale lavender blouse and high-heeled shoes that were impractical and uncomfortable on the cobbled streets. With her head held high and shoulders thrown back she looked, she hoped, every inch the typical successful American businesswoman.

But the angles of Kastoria, strewed all up and down picturesque hills on a peninsula that undulated into a lake, conspired against her. The unfamiliar balancing act of walking in heels, which made her back ache and sent pain stabbing up her lower legs at every step, threatened to twist an ankle or send her tumbling down the lane.

As picturesque a little Greek Macedonian town as Kastoria was, Annja felt as if she could smell tension like a tang of wood smoke in the air. Panel trucks blared horns at men trundling crates across the crowded street on handcarts. The way people shouted and gestured at each other made Annja hunch her shoulders in unhappy anticipation that knives would come out at any minute.

And all that was before she reached her scheduled rendezvous with a gang of ethnic-Albanian artifact smugglers out of Kosovo.

Along with the diesel fumes and harsh tobacco smoke a chemical smell loaded down what should have been crisp air filtered through the pines on the surrounding hills. Annja passed a stack of cages where long slender animals paced nervously or stood with slightly arched backs and stared at her with beady black eyes. They were minks, destined to play a role in the fur trade, which was still the town’s main commerce and Annja reckoned also must account for the unidentified stink, since presumably the furs were subjected to some kind of chemical treatment.

She kept her head turning right to left, hoping she looked arrogant rather than furtive or paranoid. Furtive and paranoid would have been accurate. She was looking for a weathered dark blue sign with yellow lettering. Which of course she wouldn’t be able to read because it was in Greek. But supposedly that wouldn’t matter; it was only a landmark.

How the Japan Buddhist Federation had turned up the contact she didn’t know and hadn’t asked. She doubted they’d tell her. They’d hired her, for a very nice sum, to investigate why artifacts from Nepalese Buddhist shrines had begun to appear on the black market in Europe, particularly the Balkans. If she had to guess, she suspected certain of their members posed as collectors none too concerned about the provenance of the items in their collections, so long as they were convinced of their genuine antiquity—and value. They were certainly heeled well enough to pull off the pose.

Fearless pigeons bobbed, pecked and burbled everywhere, as disdainful of her uncertain progress as they were of the prospects of destruction beneath the wheels of the trucks and humpbacked little cars and overloaded handcarts. They went about their single-minded business until the last possible moment and a heartbeat or two beyond. Then they scurried or fluttered up from the path of onrushing doom and settled down again a few feet away as if nothing important had happened.

As promised, she spotted the sign on her right, near the base of the hill. A block farther down, the narrow lane opened onto a road that ran around the lake’s shore. Shacks and kiosks stood along the water. A few boats bobbed at rickety wharfs. The lake water was very blue but the waves were getting pointy and even flashing a little white in the sun as the breeze strengthened. Some heavy clouds were starting to crowd the sky overhead. It looked as if a storm front was moving down from the Balkans.

Appropriate, she thought.

The sign was a surprisingly deep blue; the weathering showed not in fading so much as severe cracking. In yellow above the Greek writing was an outline of a young woman who appeared to be pouring something from an amphora. Given the location it could be the waters of the lake as easily as the local wine.

At the bottom of the sign the word Taverna was written. Not that she had much doubt as to the nature of the business going on behind the gray stone facade. Stocky old men with sailor’s caps, gray beards and heavy sweaters stood around the stone stoop smoking. They glared at her as she marched past, whether in suspicion or religious disapproval of assertive foreign womanhood she couldn’t tell.

Play the part, she told herself. What’ve you got to be afraid of? Other than walking alone into the middle of a gang of Muslim Kosovar bandits who are doubtless armed to the teeth.

Thinking those reassuring thoughts, she turned right onto the narrow street just past the tavern’s raw stone corner.

The rooftops leaned together as if eventually they’d just meet in the middle in a sort of happenstance arch. They cut off the sunlight like peaks in a high mountain valley, plunging the cobbles below into gloom. Air that had been cool turned chill.

The street didn’t meet the other at ninety degrees, but rather took off at an angle up the same hill she’d just walked so precariously down. Great, she thought. Now I get to climb in these stupid heels.

But it wasn’t far. Half a block up a pack of men loitered in front of a building where the whitewash had started coming off in sheets, revealing lumpy gray stucco beneath. A blue fog of harsh Turkish cigarette smoke hung over them.

In their sweaters and long black coats and dark beard stubble they were just the sort of group of loitering males Annja would normally give a wide berth to. Unattached males in a clump tended to spell trouble in every time and clime. These toughs looked older than your usual street gang, mostly thirties and up. That didn’t much reassure her, though. It likely meant they had a much more advanced thug skill set than adolescent hoods.

The tall nervous-looking man who stepped out to meet her wore a black leather greatcoat over a dark turtleneck sweater. He had a handlebar mustache backed by a three-day beard sprouting from his round face. The roundness was deceptive; he was lanky beneath the coat. Disconcertingly his left eye was milky, dead, beside his beak nose.

“You are Amanda Carter?” he asked in thickly accented English.

Annja followed the old WWII spy rule of using aliases with her own initials. It made them easier to remember and reduced the risk of some overlooked personal item tripping her up. She didn’t exactly have a lot of monogrammed possessions, but you could never be too sure at the stakes she was playing for. Besides, she felt the name was easy for non-native English speakers to pronounce—and more important, remember—as well as having the Waspy ring appropriate to her current cover story.

“Yes,” she said, remembering to be clipped and haughty. As wound up inside as she was it wasn’t hard to do. The pack had split and men began to drift up and down the street toward her. The members tended to keep their hands inside their voluminous coats. She was well aware they were positioning themselves to provide security against intrusion, accidental or otherwise. She also recognized a classic predatory move. Hemming in the prey and cutting off escape.

Remember, she told herself, you have something they want—access to abundant American cash.

“You are Enver Bajraktari?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. He indicated over his shoulder. “And this my associate, Duka.”

Bajraktari cast a large shadow. Duka loomed like a mountain of bone and gristle over his boss’s right shoulder. He had thick black hair greased back from a face and mouth like a jack-o’-lantern carved from scar tissue. His eyes were dark crescents and his smile wide, revealing a jagged jumble of brown teeth. Annja made herself not stare at this disastrous failure of modern dentistry.

Because it suited her persona, and absurdly made her feel slightly better, she held up the black briefcase she had been carrying before her chest like a shield.

“Do you have the items we discussed?” she asked.

Bajraktari held out a hand. It was a surprisingly large hand, with long slender fingers. It was the sort of hand old-time pulp-mystery writers usually described as belonging to pianists and stranglers. Annja doubted the man played much Mozart.

In the big palm lay a figure cast in the shape of an elephant with trunk raised to forehead. It was either gold or gold washed. Although Annja was no authority on South Asian artifacts, it certainly looked authentic.

“You like.” His tone suggested a command, not a question or come-on.

“Maybe,” she said. “I trust you have more?”

Bajraktari looked at her with his one dark eye. “Come,” he said.

He turned and stalked into an oblong of blackness in the ratty building behind him. To Annja’s relief Duka followed him straightaway, bending his knees considerably to get through the door. His shoulders squeezed against the frame.

The other goons in view now stood seven or eight yards away toward both ends of the block. She had the option to follow or not.

She followed.

Inside was dim. It was cool to the edge of chill. A musty smell hit her in the face. Dust, mold, general antiquity and—

Pigeon droppings streaked down the sides of water-warped crates and decaying cardboard boxes and big vases Annja hoped weren’t ancient amphorae. They were caked in lumpy pale sedimentary layers on every horizontal surface and at the edges of walkways across the hardwood-plank floor of the warehouse. As her vision adjusted she saw it was a warehouse filled with unsteady-looking shelves laden with boxes and objects of uncertain nature.

Following her sketchy hosts, Annja advanced into the crowded interior. It wasn’t cave-black; a grayish illumination came from somewhere, like fog. Everything that wasn’t horizontal and caked in droppings, it seemed, was draped with cobwebs.

The narrow aisle ahead of Annja was blocked almost entirely by the mountainous mass of Duka, who progressed by leaning side to side, endangering the groaning, sagging shelves at every step, and teetering forward, as if he lacked knees or his legs were very short. Bajraktari was completely hidden by his massive underling.

Annja wondered how the huge henchman did it. She had to focus on walking down the very center of the wooden floor, with her shoulders unaccustomedly hunched forward to keep them from brushing anything, which might cover her in dust, inspire something awful to leap out at her or simply bring a whole overburdened rack of shelving down upon her head. Her shoulders, although broad for a woman even of her height, were nothing to Duka’s. Yet he managed to avoid mishap.

At the end of ten yards or so a space opened, seven or eight yards on either side. In the middle stood a large crate covered with some kind of dark cloth. A single lightbulb in a not very reflective reflector cone hung from a cord that led up into blackness so complete it might have gone on forever into the heart of infinite night. It spilled a yellow illumination upon the objects arranged on the cloth-covered surface.

Annja’s breath stuck in her throat. They were artifacts: statues, plates, bowls, coins. All gleaming bright gold. A mound of the stuff. A foot-high seated Buddha presided jovially over the lot.

“Samples,” Bajraktari said.

If it was all real—meaning both authentically ancient and actual solid gold, not just gold-washed lead, a trick the ancients were perfectly hip to—Annja was looking at upward of one hundred thousand dollars in plunder in the value of the metal alone. If you took into account the historic value, its price became incalculable.

Annja strode forward. As it happened that fit the role she was playing, but that had been driven right out of her mind by the sight. All she could think of now was confirming that she confronted evidence of a truly massive crime against archaeology. And circumstances suggested this was only the tip of the iceberg.

Reaching the makeshift display table, she snatched up the nearest item. Any evidence as to context was long lost already, especially if the loot had been polished, as appeared likely. Her finger oils weren’t going to damage the gleaming artifact if it was gold.

Annja stared down at the thing she held. It was a slightly irregular disk—a coin, imprint eroded by its passage through many previous hands. And time. She could almost feel the years adding to its not in-substantial weight. It showed the blurred image of the head of a youthful-looking, somewhat plump man.

To her amazement the letters stamped in it, faded though they were, were unmistakably Greek.

She turned to Bajraktari, who stood to her left with his shadow, Duka, looming as always behind him. “What’s a Greek coin doing here?” she demanded. “I thought these artifacts were Nepali.”

Instead of responding directly to her question, Bajraktari raised his head and said something sharp in Albanian. Annja sensed movement behind her.

Hard hands clamped like vises on her upper arms.




2


“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Bajraktari?” Annja demanded. She became aware of a grayed-out oblong glow farther back in the warehouse heights—a time-and-pigeon-grimed skylight. “Don’t you know who you’re dealing with?”

She knew even as the words left her mouth that she wasn’t going to like the answer.

Bajraktari smiled. “There has been a change of plan,” he said.

“Says who?” she demanded.

His coal-smudge brows twitched toward one another. “Do not try my patience, woman,” he said. “For in the end you are only a woman.”

It occurred to her this was not a good time to debate feminism. She settled for an angry toss of her head and a glare. “We had a deal,” she said.

He nodded. “So we did. But all things are subject to negotiation in this world, are they not?”

“I represent a very important figure in American business.”

“Just so. All Americans are rich. If your boss is rich by American standards, he must be really rolling in it, no?”

Annja’s lips compressed to a line. She could see where this was going.

“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 she 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 Greece, 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.

What bothered her was the brush with authority. Aside from the chance of harming an innocent person, which she couldn’t stand, tangling with law enforcement carried the risk of bringing her to official attention. That could prove disastrous. Even deadly.

She sighed. The books weren’t yielding any helpful hints of connections between ancient Greece and Nepal. None of the ones she’d pored through so far so much as mentioned Nepal. It just wasn’t a place you thought of in conjunction with Greece. Rome, Persia, Turkey, Egypt—but Nepal? Sure, they occupied the same continental landmass, and not even its extremities. But it was a big landmass.

A hand suddenly reached past Annja into the yellow spill of light. Strong-looking fingers plucked up the coin, turned it obverse and reverse in the light of the reading lamp. The hand engulfed it and withdrew.

“It is ancient Macedonian,” a baritone voice said in Greek-accented English. “It bears the likeness of Alexander the Great, Ms. Creed.”

Heart in throat, she turned. And found herself looking into a pair of piercing dark eyes.

She seemed to just sort of swirl right into them. Her stomach did a slow roll. She heard a buzzing in her ears.

It was the special operator she had seen in the Kastoria warehouse.

Though her body felt frozen she took in details. Up close he was even more breathtakingly handsome than he had been in the smoky, dusty, ill-lit warehouse. Curly black hair framed a face at once rugged and youthful, with a strong aquiline nose. His rangy athletic form was clad in a light gray houndstooth jacket over what seemed to be a dark gray shirt with an open collar.

“I am Sergeant Pantheras Katramados,” he said. “I am with EKAM, special forces of the Hellenic police. And you are under arrest for trafficking in illicit antiquities.”

“I haven’t done any such thing,” Annja said, fighting to keep her composure.

“You were seen in the company of the notorious antiquities smuggler Enver Bajraktari and his gang during a warehouse raid in Kastoria, in northern Greece,” he said. He smiled grimly. “Not to put too fine an edge on it, I was the one who saw you. And then there’s this.”

She turned in her chair as he held up the coin. It glinted in the lamplight. “You are in possession of a stolen artifact. That may prove the least of your difficulties from a legal standpoint.”

Questions crowded in her mind, jostling each other along with protestations of outraged innocence. Well, she felt outraged, and knew that in any meaningful sense she was innocent. Whether she could convince the handsome sergeant of the fact was a different issue.

What popped out first was, “How did you identify me?”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “You will not attempt to convince me it is a case of mistaken identity?”

She shook her head. “On the contrary. I want to impress you with my good faith so you’ll listen to what I have to say.”

“You looked familiar,” he said. “Later it struck me I had come face to face with the famous Annja Creed, of the American television program Chasing History’s Monsters .”

He grinned. “I’ve always been something of a fan,” he said. “I am an archaeologist, too, as it happens.”

She sighed. Under other circumstances her heart would be fluttering at the announcement by this gorgeous young man that he was a fan of hers.

Instead she felt as if she teetered on a tightrope, with flames to one side and spikes on the other. On the one hand she feared disclosure—discovery. Getting arrested and publicly tried, even if acquitted, would attract attention that might make doing her work—her real work, both as an archaeologist and as the not-altogether-willing successor to Joan of Arc—impossible. A conviction would certainly sink her, both with the television show and as an academically respected archaeologist.

On the other hand was the dread that the Greek national cops might just disappear her. They hadn’t always had the best reputation where torture was concerned. There was always a chance that this smiling man’s employers might simply stash her away somewhere until she told them what they wanted to hear.

She figured her only chance of making it across that chasm was to convince handsome Sergeant Katramados that she was more use to him and his bosses at large than in a cell somewhere.

All this flashed through her mind in a desperate instant. “All right,” she said. “Don’t take me in yet. I’ll tell you what I know. Then you can decide what action to take.”

He looked doubtful. “You’re not going to bluster?” he asked, his tone gently humorous. “Not threaten me with lawyers and the U.S. Embassy?”

She shook her head. “To be candid with you, Sergeant, I think the goodwill I’d give up by playing it that way is more important than any of those other things.”

“You are probably wise,” he said, “to trust neither our judicial system nor your ambassador. But let me advise you not to try to bolt on me. You seem to be very fleet. I could not afford to take it easy on you if you did so.”

“I won’t,” she promised.

“Very well. Let us go somewhere private and you can tell me everything.”



“N OW ,” HE SAID , settling in on a backward-turned chair. “What is it you wish to say to me, Ms. Creed?”

Annja would’ve thought the largely deserted reading room of the library was as private as it got. But with a word to a passing assistant, backed up by a flash of his credentials, Sergeant Katramados had gotten exclusive use of a small room with chairs, a table and lockable doors that was probably used for meetings and classes.

Now the doors were locked. It was just the two of them.

“You must understand you hold no strong position here,” the officer said gravely. “We have no record of Annja Creed entering Greece legally at the time of the Kastoria raid. And with my own eyes I saw you meeting with former Kosovo Liberation Army members affiliated with al-Qaeda.”

He crossed his arms on the chair back and regarded her for a moment. “Along with being familiar with your TV work, I hear rumors that you are known to quietly take on certain commissions outside the orbit of conventional academic archaeological fieldwork.”

Outrage overcame Annja’s fears. “I would never do anything unethical from an archaeological standpoint.”

“Your name has been connected to certain suspect parties. Before Bajraktari.”

“To preserve archaeological treasures—or human lives—I’d deal with the Devil himself,” she said.

That got a brief laugh.

“Sometimes one must indeed do so,” he said.

Annja drew a deep breath. “I was hired by the Japan Buddhist Federation,” she said, “to survey and preserve Buddhist shrines in Nepal.”

The truth, she had decided, was her best weapon under the circumstances. Or her best chance.

While Sergeant Pantheras Katramados had started out stern, if scrupulously polite, what struck Annja as a natural affability began to shine through. She also felt a definite chemistry between them. She doubted he would let it affect his judgment. Nor would she. But she couldn’t deny it.

So she told him the truth, with just a few select omissions. Such as anything to do with her mentor Roux. And most especially the sword.

“Is that the best story you can come up with?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “It’s the truth. Truth doesn’t always make the best story. Or even the most plausible sounding one.”

“You might claim to be working undercover as a reporter investigating the international trade in plundered antiquities for your program,” he pointed out.

Look, you’re confusing me, she wanted to say. Whose side are you on, anyway?

“I could. But my best chance of walking out of here as anything but a prisoner is to stay on your good side. If you catch me in a lie, I don’t think you’ll feel like cutting me any slack.”

He grinned. “You’re right.”

She knew the Japan Buddhist Federation hadn’t passed on the Bajraktari lead to police yet because they wanted to follow up on it first. Annja was fine with that. She had nothing against the police, although she lacked the reflex trust of anything in a uniform so many people displayed.

In general Annja felt more concerned about what was good and right than what was legal. Or not.

Sergeant Katramados knit his fingers together and rubbed his chin and lower lip absentmindedly with a thumb.

“You were either very brave or very foolish, Ms. Creed,” he said, “to put yourself in such a situation.”

She scowled and shook her head. “I guess on evidence it turned out to be foolish. Much as I hate to admit it, it never occurred to me they might decide to grab me for ransom.”

“Kidnapping is a growth industry in the Balkans these days.”

“Evidently I should have done a bit more research on the modern era.”

“You were lucky to escape with your life.”

She frowned slightly. “I’m resourceful,” she said, “and I’m totally determined to be nobody’s victim.”

He cocked a brow again. She shrugged.

“And sure, I was lucky. Especially when you and your friends came busting through the skylight,” she admitted.

“Speaking of the warehouse battle,” he said, “some mysteries exist which I hope you might be able to clarify for me.”

The subtext that it could help her case remained unspoken, though unmistakable. She gave him points for not saying it aloud, though.

“Which ones?” she asked.

“One of the bodies bore severe stabbing or slashing wounds. Have you any idea how that came about in the midst of a gun battle?”

“Some of the gang members wore knives, I noticed,” Annja said. “They might’ve fallen out, blaming each other for betrayal. Or perhaps the attack provided the pretext to work out internal gang politics, personal rivalries, even take revenge. Who knows, with violent criminal types?”

“Kosovar and Albanian gangs tend to be both violent and unpredictable, it’s true,” he said, looking and sounding as if he didn’t like the taste in his mouth. “But these wounds were inflicted by a weapon with a very long blade. Not pocket knives or even belt knives.”

She smiled and shrugged. “Surely you don’t suspect me of packing a concealed sword? I wasn’t even wearing a coat.”

He looked at her, his long handsome face unreadable in the questionable dim light. Long strong fingers drummed the tabletop briefly.

“No,” he said. “I suppose not. It would seem impractical at best.”

He showed his teeth in a grin. It was an infectious smile. Annja was too savvy to let it put her off her guard.

She felt a certain smugness over the sword ploy. When you said it flat out like that, it sounded so completely absurd that it would weaken any suspicions he harbored about the dead men’s wounds. She hoped, anyway.

“So, what are you researching here?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Classical Greece isn’t really my area. I’m trying to refresh my knowledge. Particularly I’m looking for anything that can help me figure out why Greek coins are turning up in plunder from a Buddhist shrine in Nepal.”

“Macedonian,” he corrected.

“Macedonian. Right. You mentioned that. Might that have something to do with it?”

He stood up and smiled at her. “I’ll let you pursue that on your own,” he said.

“This means I’m not arrested, yes?”

“For the moment.” He frowned pensively. “It might be better to take you in,” he said, “strictly for your own good. Our informant inside the gang tells us that Bajraktari blames you for setting them up. He intends to take vengeance. It is a major reason I’m inclined to believe you.”

Annja swallowed. “Might the gangs have spies of their own in the Hellenic police?”

He shrugged. “Such infiltration is a problem,” he said. “Our particular task force consists only of handpicked and proven men and women—it’s part of the reason we exist. But we lack the resources to provide you a safehouse. You would have to go to jail.”

There’s a happy prospect, she thought. “Meaning you’d have to get cooperation from other Hellenic police. And you can’t take for granted they haven’t been compromised.”

He spread his big, strong hands. She recognized the typical stand-up cop’s dilemma. On the one hand he hated to criticize a fellow law-enforcement officer, especially within his own department. On the other, he was too perceptive and honest not to know there were dirty cops in his house.

“I have not said it,” he said, confirming her suspicion.

It cut against her grain to roll over completely. “So, what’s a door-busting commando type doing in a library in Athens?” she asked.

Katramados laughed. “The same thing as you—studying. I did serve in EKAM for a time as a commando, as I did in the Hellenic army’s special forces. Now I work primarily as an investigator with an organized-crime unit of the national police, dedicated to suppressing the trade in illegal antiquities. Though, as you know, I still take active part in certain raids.”

“I noticed.”

“As it happens, along with a knack for detective work I have a lifelong love of Hellenic archaeology. Especially as pertains to my native Macedonia. The force finds it useful to pay for me to get my degree.”

His smile turned a bit shy. “One day I hope to lead the fight against antiquities thieves. I admit, that’s quite a leap from my current lowly status.”

I’ll bet you’re a fast-tracker, Annja thought, despite the humble act. Although to be fair she had to admit it didn’t really seem to be an act.

“What now?” she asked.

“It would appear you owe me a debt for saving you from terrorist thugs, Ms. Creed.”

She frowned. “I had things under control.”

“Perhaps,” he said.

She shrugged. She didn’t want to go too far down that road, either. “Okay. I admit I got in over my head in Kastoria. But that’s a reason I try to fly under the radar. It’s just not possible for an archaeologist affiliated with a university or other big institution to do those things. But they have to be done.”

“So much is true,” the young police commando said. “But again, please keep in mind the kind of risks you run.”

“They’re seldom far from my mind. I promise.”

“Then I shall leave you to your research. I accept your story. For now. But I shall keep an eye on you, Annja Creed.”




4


“So,” Annja said through the steam rising from her cup of intense Turkish-style coffee, “I remember from my history that Alexander the Great made it all the way into India. But somehow I never quite associated that with Nepal.”

Pan Katramados nodded gravely. “He conquered much of northern India. I doubt he specifically set out to take Nepal. It mostly came as part of the package.”

He grinned. He did that readily enough, Annja was finding out. She grinned back.

Traffic beeped and jingled on the street running around the flank of Strefi Hill in north Athens’s Exarcheia district, not far from the archaeological museum. The air was cool and smelled as much of the evergreens that thickly forested the crown and far side of the hill as much as it did of traffic and roasting coffee beans. The morning spring sun, though, warmed any surface it reached fairly quickly. Annja found herself alternately moving into the sun when it got too cool under the table’s umbrella, then back into the shade when she grew uncomfortably warm.

Her companion looked around.

“Why the head-on-a-swivel bit?” she asked. “Concerned about Bajraktari?”

“Always,” Pan said. “But it’s mostly habit. This district is a notorious haven for drug dealers and anarchists.”

“Really?” Annja asked.

“It’s possible that police intelligence exaggerates the amount of drug dealing,” he said, “to allow for more actions against dissidents.”

Annja sipped her coffee and considered what Pan was saying. The whole point of EKAM—the special antiquities unit of the Hellenic police antiterrorist unit—was that the Hellenic Police in general had been penetrated by criminal spies, particularly for the brutal, well-armed and organized Balkan gangs. And here he was admitting behavior among his fellows that was ethically questionable at best.

It clearly caused pain to a good man who believed, as police were generally taught, that all law-breaking was wrong and that criminals were irremediably bad.

“So,” Pan said, visibly dragging his thoughts back to more pleasant pathways, “how go your researches into our Macedonian history?”

“I’m definitely getting up to speed on Alexander. And his father,” Annja said.

“Ah. King Philippos the One-Eyed. His son did enough to earn his name of Megas Alexandros. But the son gets credit for much his father did.”

“So I gather. I did know Alexander beat the army of King Poros. It turns out that part of Nepal was included in the conquered kingdom. Which would seem to explain how coins bearing Alexander’s likeness turned up in treasure stolen from Nepal.”

“But not necessarily why,” Pan said.

“That’s the sticking point. I’m going to have to go to Nepal to find the whole of that reason, I know. Then again, that’s what I was hired to do in the first place.”

“How long will you remain in Greece?”

“That implies I’ll be allowed to leave.”

“At this point the government knows nothing prejudicial to allowing you to do so,” he said, deadpan. As mobile as his long, olive features were, that in itself was significant. “For my part, as a professional matter I shall be glad to have you take your investigation to Nepal and out of the danger the gangsters pose to you. Provided that you send back any pertinent information you turn up. Sadly, our budget is too limited to allow any of our investigators to make the trip on the basis of the evidence we’ve gathered so far.”

“I promised I would,” she said simply. She had no intention of telling him everything she found in the troubled mountain republic—most wouldn’t be any business of his or his task force. But anything pertaining to the still-mysterious link between Albanian gangs and the land tucked up high in the planet’s mightiest mountain range, she’d be happy to pass on to him.

Over the past few days they had bumped into each other more than coincidence could likely account for. Their dealings had rapidly become casual and even friendly. She knew she wasn’t totally out from under suspicion, but she had the impression the sergeant was giving her more attention than his job required.

“So, Pan,” she said, holding her cup with both hands. “You seem to have more than an academic interest in Macedonian history.”

“I do,” he said, grinning and bobbing his head like an embarrassed schoolboy. “I come from Macedonia. I grew up in a poor mountain village in northern Thessaloníki province, in central Macedonia. I herded goats as a boy.”

“It must have been hard.”

He shrugged his right shoulder in what she already recognized as a characteristic gesture. “My refuge from hardship and boredom was recalling the tales the old country folk still tell, of the ancient glories of Macedonia under Philip and Alexander. I used to daydream about them while herding goats.”

He laughed. “In my mind I built for myself a whole biography as a Macedonian soldier,” he said, growing more animated. “I—he—fought first under Philip and then his son as a shield-bearing infantryman. He rose to officer rank. Over many battles he so distinguished himself he was elevated to Alexander’s personal bodyguard, the Argyraspids, or Silver Shields. Eventually he rose to the rank of general of the Agema, the Royal Foot Guards.”

He broke off. Annja was leaning forward, entranced.

“So how does the story end?” she asked.

Pan sighed and shook his head. “That I never saw,” he said.

“I hope he lived happily ever after.”

Pan chuckled softly. “I do, too.”

“So what happened next?” she said. “To you, I mean. Modern Pan.”

“I grew up strong and agile,” he said. “Constantly climbing rocks in pursuit of straying goats may have had something to do with that. Also I loved to wrestle with the other boys, even though I was smaller.”

Annja blinked at him. While he wasn’t abnormally large, no one would ever describe him as small. “They must have raised them big in your village,” she said, laughing.

He shrugged. “It’s a Balkan thing. Some of us grow to be quite large indeed. I am still considered somewhat undersized by my family and old neighbors.” He grinned. “But I did have a growth spurt in adolescence.”

“So let me guess what came next,” she said. “You joined the army to get out from among the goats.”

“It is a common story, is it not? I did well on their tests. On all their tests—as a boy I also loved to read. Especially tales of far places and adventure. History, of course, mythology, fiction. And mostly anything other than staring at goats and scrub oak all day. I used to get in trouble with my father and uncles for reading on the job. Although goat herding does not exactly demand constant attention.

“So I joined our army when I was sixteen to escape the goats and my uncles with their too-quick fists. I lied about my age. What can I say? I enjoyed it. The training I found easy. The regimentation—well, it beat the goats. I was quickly promoted. And being a strong lad with much more lust for adventure than good sense, after the necessary five years I volunteered for the special forces, and was sent to Afghanistan. I was there for a couple of years until I was shot by a sniper on the Pakistani border. I came home to recover.”

He shrugged. “I left the army. Tried going to school. But I quickly found that unsatisfying. I am afraid I’d become a kind of adrenaline junkie. Since I could not afford to become a mountain climber or amateur parachutist I joined the police force. And there is my story.”

He sat back, lost in thought for a moment.

“I sometimes wonder,” he said, “how well the wise men who rule, the heads of state, really know history. Even Alexander never really tamed that land. Megas Alexandros, history’s greatest conqueror.”

Annja would’ve argued for Ghengis Khan, herself. But somehow getting embroiled in a debate with a Macedonian hillman, a warrior-scholar raised on daydreams of his ancestors’ martial glory, about whether his hero was top of the world-conquest food chain, did not seem like a good idea. Especially a man who could still cause her to vanish into some clammy, reeking cell and never come out.

“Sometimes at night, listening to the winds howl between the terribly high cliffs of the Khyber, it seems you hear the voices of all the soldiers who fell there. Thousands upon thousands of them. But too many of our enlightened modern types cannot hear them.”

He drew in a deep breath and drummed his fingertips decisively on the table. “But I talk out of turn. The soldier should keep from politics. We Greeks know that too well. It is not only the leftists who say it, although perhaps they say it too smugly. And besides, nothing is more boring than an old soldier’s tales.”

Annja smiled. “Boring is one thing you aren’t, Pantheras Katramados,” she said.

She sipped her coffee. He was an intriguing man, no question. He could be a fascinating one. But he was still a potential adversary, and in any event his orbit was one Annja the wandering star would not stay in for long. Fascination was a luxury she couldn’t afford at this stage in her life.

She set her cup down decisively and checked her watch. “Not that it hasn’t been pleasant, but I’ve hung out here long enough. I need to get back to the museum—those moldering old books are calling to me.”

He raised a brow. “Are you still staying in Exarcheia?” he asked.

She guessed that was a rhetorical question. European Union law required hostelries to examine foreign guests’ passports, and to report all foreign guests to police agencies. And EKAM probably had ways to keep track of her anyway. She hadn’t found any GPS tracker-bugs stuck in her clothing or possessions. She was pretty well-seasoned when it came to that sort of thing. But she still suspected that the Hellenic police special forces could lay hands on her if and when they cared to.

“I’m staying at a little pension. It’s convenient to the museum. Cheap, too. But only relative to everything else in Athens. I figured with the National Technical University right nearby there’d be kind of a student-ghetto discount going on.”

They both stood. “Watch yourself,” he said.

“Because of the drug dealers?” she asked. “Or the anarchists?”

“Both pose real problems,” he said. “Most of the anarchists are harmless, really, despite what some of my fellow officers believe. But beware; some of them are violent thrill seekers. But they are not what really concerns me. As you know.”

“Bajraktari,” Annja said.

“Of course. He is relentless and resourceful—a lot of these former guerrilla fighters are. As well as utterly ruthless. And he has…certain resources.”

“I’ll be careful, Pan,” she said. “And I really should be done here in a day or two. I’m just trying to get as much information as I can.”



P OISED LIKE A GAZELLE on the edge of a clearing looking out for cheetahs, Annja waited for a break in the noisy metal jostle of midday traffic. She was returning across the Exarcheia plaza to the museum from the café where she’d had lunch. Pale green leaf buds sprouted from the branches of scrawny trees. Pigeons bobbed and bubbled on the pavement, oblivious to scurrying pedestrian feet. The Aegean sun flashing off glass and chrome was hot on her face and dazzling even through her sunglasses.

Her break came when a white panel truck cut off a faded blue-and-white CitroГ«n. She trotted briskly forward. As she neared the opposite side of the street she heard brakes squeal and horns blaring. It startled her enough that she turned her head to glance over her shoulder.

A boxy little ancient Audi compact, its paint faded to leprous gray and rusting through in big patches like scabs, had cut in to the curb close behind her. The fat round shape of an RPG warhead pointed at her from the rear passenger window. White smoke rushed out around it. Garish yellow flame lit the car’s interior.

The high-explosives-stuffed metal onion sprang toward Annja’s face.




5


Annja hurled herself to the right. Thirty feet to her left the rocket grenade cracked off against the corner of a building. The floor-level window, almost totally obscured with hand bills, exploded in big shards of glass and scraps of colorful flaming paper.

She hit the pavement, skinned the palms of her hands, got a shoulder down, and rolled over and over.

Demonic shrieking rose over the plaza, which had abruptly gone so quiet Annja momentarily thought the blast’s vicious crack had deafened her. She rolled on her side into the gutter and looked back.

Yellow flames completely filled the little car and rolled out the windows in big gushes. The front passenger’s door was open. A blazing figure had staggered out into the street, waving wings of flame. A man threw a jacket over his head and bodychecked him to the ground.

Picking herself up to a crouch Annja looked quickly around. People were standing and gaping. Some were screaming, while others ran in various directions. People thronged around the unfortunate victims of the blast’s overkill, trying to tend to them.

The Audi’s gas tank exploded and a gout of orange flame shot out from beneath it in all directions, driving back would-be rescuers. At least two people were still inside the car, the driver and the shooter. Annja wasn’t sure it would be any favor to extract them—if they were even still alive in that crematory.

The crew in the Audi must be newbies, Annja thought, looking to make their bones with Bajraktari’s gang. She figured they’d decided to show initiative and really impress their bosses by making a splashy hit on her. No doubt the survivors would find they had succeeded. Their bosses would have the unbreakable impression they were idiots.

Even aside from the little problem of the flaming rocket’s backblast—which never caused a bit of problem in the movies—the RPG was a pretty goofy weapon for a targeted hit on an individual anyway. Scanning her surroundings for signs of attack from a different direction, Annja felt a flash of bemusement. Where along the way did I become an expert in the specs and subtleties of deployment of the rocket-propelled grenade launcher?

Nobody was paying Annja any attention as she got upright, a little creakily. She was going to have a nasty bruise on her hip, and her skin almost crawled with the need to pick out the grit and wash the foul gutter goo off her skinned hands. There was no way for anyone to see she had been the rocket’s target. She was just another unfortunate passerby who was lucky enough to possess good reflexes.

But the comforting anonymity didn’t last. Through the shouting, milling throng she spotted two men in long black greatcoats, open and flapping about their trouser legs, hard faces scruffily unshaved even by the standards of Greek anarchists. The none-too-subtle way they held their hands in their coats and swiveled their heads before their burning crow-dark eyes fixed on Annja showed that, as she feared, the hapless crew in the car had backup. And more seasoned backup, by the looks of it.

She headed down the street that led away from the plaza, toward the Acropolis hill and downtown Athens. She made herself walk, though at a good pace with her long legs. She wasn’t concerned about attracting the gangsters’ attention—they had spotted their prey already. She just didn’t want anyone else to associate her with them, nor to have any reason to remember her at all.

Fortunately the crowd had plenty of distractions. Pedestrians wounded by the rocket blast were being tended. The Audi was wholly engulfed in flames and burning with a noise like a gale blowing down a narrow street, attracting a lot of gawkers. A knot of men surrounded the would-be assassin who had escaped the inferno. They had completely covered him in coats, smothering the flames. Now they jostled each other to kick the unmoving figure, leaving open the question of whether they had saved him from burning to death out of Samaritanism or simply the desire to kill him themselves.

The only people paying attention to Annja, it seemed, were her personal hunters.

The few other people Annja saw were hurrying toward the plaza to see what the excitement was about. She broke into a run. An alley opened to her left. She turned into it.

Once off the street she accelerated into a full-on sprint.

The alley reeked of fish, vegetables and coffee grounds decomposing into the black greasy muck that slimed its floor and made footing tricky.

She reached the end of the short block and dodged left again. This street was narrow and deserted.

She waited. In a moment she heard the footsteps pounding along the alley.

She knew the very last thing on their minds was that their quarry, a mere woman, a soft, weak, Western infidel at that, would do anything but flee like a frightened rabbit until she collapsed of exhaustion.

As the footfalls grew louder she closed her eyes and summoned her sword from the other where. A tall dark figure flashed into view. She swung for the fences.

The edge of the sword was extremely sharp. Annja twisted with her hips and put everything she had into the cut. Subtle technique was not an issue here.

The blade caught the running man at the Adam’s apple. In a flash he was tumbling into a loose-limbed sprawl.

His partner came a few steps behind. He tried to brake himself. Annja pivoted around the rough stone corner of the wall and, still grasping the hilt with both hands, plunged the sword into his belly to the cross-shaped hilt.

Her pursuer’s mouth and eyes flew wide.

Annja stepped to her left. She released the sword. It vanished. Blood spurted from the assassin’s wounds as he fell.

Annja walked away with hands in her jacket pockets as if nothing had happened.

She hoped no one had witnessed the events. But experience had taught her that didn’t necessarily matter. Telling skeptical and generally short-fused police they had seen a female American tourist pull a broadsword out of nowhere and kill two gun-armed terrorists, then made the lengthy weapon utterly vanish wasn’t a good move.

Cops the world around had ways of dealing with people who told stories like that. None of them was pleasant. And Greek cops weren’t renowned for their restraint or regard for human rights.

Annja’s heart raced. So did her mind. She was trying to sort out what had just happened—or what lay behind what just happened, and what that meant for her future survival.

Clearly, Enver Bajraktari was highly vexed with Annja.

It was possible, she thought, the carload of newbies had been sacrifices. Pawns chosen to noisily and splashily die, attracting the attention of everyone, most especially their intended victim, to give the real kill team a clear shot at her.

It was a good plan, too, she had to admit. It would’ve worked if Annja’s recent life experiences hadn’t given her the awareness and paranoid suspicion of an alley cat.

She came to a wider street, filled with tourists and locals far enough from the Exarcheia plaza not to have noticed the commotion yet, although sirens had started to go off and a pillar of black smoked undulated up into the sky. Those events were remote enough that most of them shrugged and went about their business.

Gratefully, Annja joined them.




6


“There was some excitement down in Exarcheia today,” Pan Katramados said across a spoonful of soup he was raising to his lips. The candle in its bronze bowl in the middle of the table underlit his face in such a way as to make him look quite ferocious. It contrasted crazily with his mild conversational tone. But it served to remind Annja he was a highly trained and seasoned special-forces warrior, and that nobody sane wanted to see him angry.

“Yes,” Annja said. “I saw reports on CNN in my room this afternoon. It looked awful.”

They were in a small uncrowded restaurant in Piraeus. The food was superb and the view, of lights twinkling on the water and white boats bobbing at anchor in the harbor, was lovely.

Pan grimaced and shook his head. “Well, perhaps. And perhaps not so awful. Some bystanders were hurt, and property destroyed, which is to be regretted. Yet the passersby were not badly injured, and are recovering nicely in hospital.”

“The news said four people were killed,” Annja said.

“Indeed,” Pan said, nodding. “Four terrorists.”

“Terrorists?”

Again he nodded. “Albanians. Or, rather, ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. Two were burned beyond recognition, and the other two fatalities carried papers falsely identifying them as Krasnovar Serbs from Croatia. But we have an injured survivor under guard in hospital, with third-degree burns over fifty percent of his body and badly broken ribs. He is expected to survive to face trial. He has confessed. It appears he was the racketeer and was unwise enough to fire his launcher inside a small imported sedan, apparently in ignorance that the rocket exhaust produced a substantial fiery backblast.”

“That’s a terrible thing to go through,” she said. “Not that they didn’t have it coming, I guess. And from the way you’re looking at me—”

He laughed softly. “Can’t I just enjoy looking at you?”

“Do you?” she asked, surprised.

“What man would not?”

“Well—a man who was mainly interested in looking at me wouldn’t look at me in that particular way. At least I hope not,” she said.

“I suppose not.”

“So they were Bajraktari’s men?”

He nodded.

“I don’t suppose any of them happened to be Bajraktari? Or Duka?” she asked.

“Don’t you know?”

“Don’t I know? How on earth should I?”

“Well, to start with, you know full well Enver Bajraktari is a cagey fox. Would he let anybody on an operation he commanded in person do anything so foolish as to fire an RPG inside a car? Unless he meant to produce a diversion to allow the real killers to strike.”

Annja struggled to keep her face impassive. Fortunately she had had lots of practice. “The real killers?” she asked.

“We suspect the other two dead men were the real hit team. We found them several blocks away.”

“I thought you had a confession,” Annja said with a sinking sensation.

Pan shrugged. “The burn victim has confessed to taking part in a terrorist attack. He claims it was merely to strike a blow for independence of all ethnic Albanians from the former Yugoslavia. That seems unlikely. Bajraktari isn’t the sort to indulge in violence for mere political posturing. He takes his violence far too seriously for that.”

“And the others?” Annja asked.

“Our suspect disclaims all knowledge of them.” Pan sipped his ouzo. “He may be telling the truth. In fact, he may be telling the whole truth. As he knows it.”

Annja knew otherwise, but she wasn’t going to tell him how.

“But it smells like an assassination. The two dead men had Skorpion machine pistols in their hands. Nasty pieces of work. You know them?”

She realized she was nodding. “I’ve read about them. I have to admit I’m mildly interested in firearms.”

Comfortable as she was coming to feel in his presence, she knew she had to tread carefully. She didn’t dare play dumb with him—he knew her background too well for that. She’d already shown Pan ample evidence she knew how to react in combat simply by getting out of that Kastoria warehouse alive. So she reckoned being up-front about a familiarity with guns would make him least suspicious.

“The two on foot would seem to have been closing in on a target,” Pan said.

“What happened to them?”

“They were killed by someone wielding a weapon with a long, double-edged, sharp blade. Exceedingly sharp. One of them was almost decapitated at a single blow. Although the position in which his body was found indicated he was running, which would add his own momentum to the force of his blow, that is…unusual, to say the least.”

“Didn’t you find similar wounds in the warehouse?” It’s coming out anyway, she thought.

He sat back from her, turning slightly sideways in his chair and crossing one long lean leg over the other. “Exactly.”

She took a bite of her stuffed grape leaves. “I guess they went after the wrong person.”

Pan’s chuckle had an edge like broken glass. “It would certainly appear so. The other man was stabbed clean through the torso. Our medical examiner says both entrance and exit wounds had the cleanest edges of any stab wounds he had ever encountered.”

“Seriously,” Annja said faintly, laying down her fork. She hoped he’d think such a detailed postmortem made her feel appropriately squeamish.

His eyes were intense as a falcon’s as they gazed at her. “The most obvious person for Bajraktari to expend such effort to target,” he said, “is you, Annja. And you were at the warehouse.”

She laughed weakly. “Somebody else must’ve been, too,” she said. “Or do I look like Conan the Barbarian to you?”

He laughed. “You are an exceedingly strong and fit woman,” he said after a moment. “And you clearly know how to handle yourself in dangerous situations. But no—” he shook his head “—I can’t see a woman delivering a decapitating blow. Call me a male chauvinist if you will. And there is of course the astonishing fact that the weapon, which the medical examiner judged must have been nothing less than a broadsword, is unwieldy and most inconvenient to carry. Much less conceal. Especially on a frame as spare as yours.”

“Are you saying I’m skinny?”

He held up his hands defensively and laughed. “I didn’t say that. I just mean you’d have to be built like an ox and dressed in a tent to have a hope to hide such a weapon.”

“That’s not my style,” she said.

“Of course not.” He shook his head. “It’s a mystery. It preys on my mind. Yet rationally it cannot concern you. So let’s put it aside and enjoy our meal, yes?”

“Yes,” she said. “I have news, anyway. I found something fantastic today.”

He turned forward and leaned closer. “And what is that?”

“At the museum I found a remarkable story in a Medieval Latin translation of a Byzantine manuscript. It told of how Alexander faced increasing discontent from his Macedonian soldiers, worn out by marching so far and fighting so much. His treasury was getting low. Then from an informant he learned of a cave shrine high up in the mountains of Nepal that contained a vast treasure. He sent a general from his bodyguards with a small handpicked force to seize it. And guess what?”

“I’m all ears.”

“The general’s name was Pantheras. Isn’t that strange?”

Pan went still. Then he leaned back slowly until his face was shadowed in the darkness of the restaurant. Outside a patrol boat putted across the harbor, probing left and right with a blue-white spotlight.

“So how did the mission turn out?” he asked after a moment of silence.

“I don’t know. The fragment ended there.”

She could see a smile play over his lips. “That’s too bad,” he said.



A S THEY WALKED along the base of the brightly lit hill their arms had become interlinked. Annja felt disinclined to disengage, somehow.

“I’ve started to have the dreams again,” Pan said. “You know, the ones from my childhood. About actually being an ancient Macedonian general.”

“I can see why it might come out again now, with the ancient Macedonia-Nepal connection coming to the fore. Although it’s still an interesting coincidence, given what I found out about that earlier Pantheras today,” Annja said.

“Interesting. Yes.”

They walked a while along an old stone retaining wall. The traffic was sparse. Flute music played from somewhere.

“I have to leave soon,” Annja said. “I hope you and your superiors are all right with that.”

“Well, much as I might regret the fact of your going, our investigations have turned up no evidence your involvement in the case is other than you have described. Which is perhaps unwise enough in its nature that I should be rather relieved to see you go.”

“Really? You’ll regret my going away?”

“Well…you make life interesting, let us say.” He laughed softly.

She laughed, too. But she felt an unexpected pang that she would soon have to say goodbye to the handsome police officer.

Pantheras Katramados was clearly as strong in character as in body, but without the blustering machismo so common in Mediterranean cultures. Rather he had the confidence that comes from being truly competent and knowing it, overlaid with wry good humor. His interests were as broad and deep as Annja’s own, and his wit as quick. They found much to talk about. Much to laugh about. He reminded her, in many ways, of her dear friend Bart McGilley.

“Where will you go now?” he asked.

“Nepal. It’s where my real job begins.” She had been getting polite e-mails from the Japan Buddhist Federation hoping she would soon be able to go to Nepal. Apparently the political situation there was rapidly deteriorating. Whether full-scale civil war was in the offing Annja couldn’t tell from the news online, but lawlessness was clearly rising in the countryside.

He stopped and turned to face her. “Don’t let your guard down.”

“Bajraktari won’t have any reason to suspect where I’ve gone,” she said.

“He has contacts in Nepal, quite obviously,” Pan said. “Don’t get complacent.”

Annja grinned. “Thanks. But I think I can promise you, that’s one thing I’m not. ”

He took her in his arms and kissed her. Almost despite herself she responded.

Too soon he broke away. His face looked troubled.

“Was it that bad?” she asked shakily.

“As an experience? Certainly not,” he said. “As a thing for a policeman on a case to do—perhaps.”

He turned and walked quickly away. She made no move to follow. She felt a combination of sadness and relief.

And she couldn’t help wondering how much of his interest in her was really romantic—and how much was special-forces cop?




7


“Lumbini is a foremost shrine of Buddhism,” said the smiling man in the saffron robe. He walked beside Annja along a paved path next to a square pool sunk into worn gray stone. “Here Siddhartha Gautama was born to Queen Mayadeva. The fig tree you see before us closely resembles the one under which he later received enlightenment, thus becoming the Buddha.”

His smile widened. “Or rather, the most famous Buddha. Others have come before and since.”

“Really?” Annja said.

“Oh, yes.”

The morning sky was bright blue, with a wash of thin white clouds away off to the west over northern India. In south Nepal the sun shone unimpeded from the east. It was surprisingly warm. The long sleeves and pants she wore out of respect for her host weren’t optimally comfortable.

Away to the north, blue with distance, the low wall of the Himalayas rose from the horizon. Annja felt a minor thrill at knowing she’d soon be among those legendary stratosphere-scraping peaks.

The lama Omprakash was a stout man whose round body seemed to taper directly to the shaved crown of his head. Though his broad face was un-lined he claimed to be in his eighties.

“I thought the Buddha was born in India,” Annja said. The sacred site lay just across the Indian border, although Annja had reached it by flying into Kathmandu in the east of the country, then taking a feeder flight on an alarming Russian-built two-prop plane to Sunauli, the town nearest Lumbini. A taxi had brought her the rest of the way. Though high up near the foothills of the Himalayas, the surroundings were a wide, well-forested river valley just greening into spring. The valley of the Upper Ganges, in fact.

“The distinctions were not so clearly drawn in those days,” Omprakash said. His name, he told her, meant “Sacred Light.” “Certainly this land was claimed by the great Maurya king, Ashoka. Some believe it was he who brought the doctrine of Buddhism to Nepal. Great proselytizer that he was, that is not so. He did make a pilgrimage here in 249 B.C ., after he had reclaimed north India from the successors of Alexander of Macedonia.”

Ah, she thought, that name. She didn’t press. She was here to listen. It was easy enough. Omprakash was a pleasant old gentleman who spoke beautiful English, with a liquid Hindi accent and a perpetual twinkle in his anthracite eyes. The Japan Buddhist Federation had sent her specifically to speak to the rotund monk. She badly needed background. This was way off the map of her previous studies and experience. She had decided to let the old man tell her whatever he wanted, and try to soak it up as best she could.

“King Ashoka did erect here a sandstone pillar to signify the great spiritual significance of the spot,” Omprakash said.

“I take it it’s that one there?” Annja said, pointing across the pool past the temple.

“The very one!” the monk exclaimed, beaming as if he had built it.

“But my good friends in Tokyo desired that I should tell you a particular tale,” Omprakash said. “It is said that shortly after Gautama’s death one of his disciples decided to exalt the Enlightened One in the heights of the world. Obviously, we find these most conveniently nearby. Traveling alone, north from Lumbini, he climbed the Himalayas in what is now the Dhawalgiri Zone, until a dream revealed the location of a cave.

“In accordance with his vision the lama consecrated there a shrine. He even contrived to get a gold Buddha statue weighing hundreds of kilos up to it. Some say this was by magic. I myself prefer to believe he employed the power of devotion, in himself and his disciples. And who is not to say that is not real magic?”

He laughed again.

“For centuries truly dedicated Buddhists made the difficult pilgrimage to the high, remote shrine to leave tributes of gold or silver or jewelry to signify their rejection of Maya, the world of illusion. Gradually a treasure trove accumulated. It was already immense when the Macedonian invaders came two centuries later.”

Annja caught her breath. Could this be the treasure the Byzantine fragment recorded, in search of which Alexander sent one of his most trusted generals? Unless immense ancient treasure troves lay thick in the Himalayas, it seemed a pretty good bet.

“But precisely because the unenlightened might be tempted to plunder it, binding themselves more tightly to the wheel of karma by their greed, the mountain shrine’s location was kept most secret. The shrine could only be found by a quest—something more arduous than simply a climb to a great height. The pilgrim was required to pass through a sequence of shrines and lamaseries, proving sincerity and spiritual worth at every stage to the lamas. And possibly to less earthly guardians, as well.”

He stopped beneath a tree and turned to face her.

“This is your path, Annja Creed,” he said, still smiling. “It is the road you must follow to find that which you seek. You, and one who is to come later. As has been foretold.”

Annja kept her face set in a mild smile. Although she didn’t believe in destiny or prophecy, she didn’t want to antagonize a man she hoped would give her more information.

He radiates serenity, she thought. There’s no questioning that his beliefs give him that.

“I see you are skeptical,” Omprakash said. His smile didn’t falter. He couldn’t, in fact, have sounded more pleased if she’d explicitly accepted his every word as gospel, or converted to Buddhism on the spot.

“I’m…sorry,” she said.

He laughed. “Please, don’t be. All traditions are equally sublime. Even agnosticism and atheism. Your path to enlightenment can only be your own.”

“All right.” She smiled back. “Then I’ll go ahead and confess I am skeptical of the existence of a single fantastic treasure.”

“Yet the Japan Buddhist Federation has hired you to find it.”

“They never actually said anything about it. I did read a Byzantine fragment that mentioned such a treasure,” she said.

“Perhaps they had their reasons for wishing you to find out on your own. If you wish you may correspond with them. You need not take my word. I won’t be offended—I don’t claim to be immune from error.”

“That’s okay,” she said. She was annoyed at the JBF for holding out on her. “They may not even know about it. But you’re absolutely right—if it exists, it’s part of my job to find it and see that it’s properly preserved like any other shrine. And I’ll do my level best to find it.”

Omprakash nodded. “I believe in your integrity, Ms. Creed. You will not accept if I speak of auras, although your own best researchers years ago discovered means of tracking individuals by their unique personal electromagnetic fields. A phenomenon which I surely find difficult to tell from auras. Out of respect for your beliefs, I will point to a lifetime spent learning to read people.”

“Thanks.” She unbuttoned one of the cargo pockets of her khaki trousers and took out a plastic bag containing the coin she had taken from the warehouse in Kastoria. To her surprise Pan had given it back to her and allowed her to keep it. She might find it useful in shutting down the artifact-smuggling operation at the source, which would serve both their ends.

She presented the bagged coin to the lama. “This was found in Thessaloníki, in Greek Macedonia.”

“Hardly surprising, inasmuch as it appears to bear the likeness of Alexander,” he said.

“It was being sold by a notorious and highly dangerous antiquities-smuggling gang as part of a trove looted from here in Nepal. I saw other artifacts of clearly Buddhist origin, although I admit I don’t know enough to determine whether they were Nepalese. Archaeologists with the Hellenic police antismuggling task force authenticated them, however.”

“You are wondering,” Omprakash said, handing the coin back, “if it came from the Highest Shrine, as tradition calls it. Or legend, if that gives you greater comfort. As to that, I cannot say. But far more likely is that it came from a lesser shrine.”

His smile widened. “You see, no impious hands can ever defile the Highest Shrine, Ms. Creed. Some guardian will always arise to defend it.”

More mysticism, she thought. Since he no doubt sensed her disbelief again, she didn’t have to worry she might show lack of courage in her own convictions if she didn’t say it out loud.

“Well, just in case,” she said, “I’ll do my best to locate this Highest Shrine and ensure its proper preservation. If, ah, my hands turn out to be pure enough.”

“That will be determined in the course of your quest.”

She had nothing to say to that.

“A final bit of advice, Annja Creed, before I impart the information necessary for you to proceed,” her host said. “Your progress will depend upon your actions and the state of your soul, regardless of whether or not you believe. Please be aware that your skepticism can put barriers in your path.”

“It’s part of me, Lama. And I choose to walk the rational path,” she said.

He nodded. “Does that require you to form preconceptions and prejudices?”

“Well…no. The opposite, I like to think.”

“Just so. All I ask, and urge, is that you keep an open mind.”

“I can do that,” she said. Can’t I?




8


The monk’s advice sent her north to Baglung, chief town of Baglung District in the Dhawalgiri Zone. A garishly painted bus took her from Lumbini into almost the center of the long, striplike country. It also took her up, along precipitous narrow switchbacks.

Baglung sprawled along a wide ledge at the base of a big hill. Its blocky white multi-storied structures, roofs pitched high to shed the massive yearly snowfall, spilled out onto a couple of naturally terraced sandstone buttes thrusting out over the river valley below. The land around was scrub and stands of small trees, pitching quickly up into more hills, dusted with snow, with the stark blue-and-white mass of the real mountains looming beyond.

To the north a gigantic white mountain, shaped vaguely like a tooth, dominated the skyline.

When Annja got off the bus her legs were a bit unsteady with remnant adrenaline. Some of those last hairpin turns had been hair-raising. Shouldering her pack, she hiked to the police headquarters to check in.

It wasn’t hard to find—an old British colony, heavily influenced by India and increasingly by the U.S., Nepal depended almost entirely on tourism to keep its economy rolling. So even in this remote place English-language signs abounded alongside the curvy local writing.

The cop shop was a three-story building with a roof of dove-gray slate. The Baglung contingent of the armed police force were glum and wary little men in brown berets, light gray shirts, darker gray trousers with white-and-orange stripes down the legs, black belts and boots. Their holsters held modern Glock autopistols, Model 19s with high-capacity 9 mm magazines.

To Annja’s surprise each Glock was counter-balanced by what looked like a forward-curved short sword on the other hip. These had to be the Nepalese kukris, made famous by their Gurkha mercenary troops. They still carried them in modern-day assignments in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Annja hadn’t expected to see police officers toting huge fighting knives, though.

She filled out the usual reams of paperwork. She was all aboveboard, prepared to brandish her documents from the JBF, as well as the letter of recommendation the well-respected Lama Omprakash had provided her in Lumbini.




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