A blur of motion in her eye's corner brought her a quarter turn right in time to parry another ax-style stroke of the pipe with the flat of her long blade. For a moment she stared past the crossed weapons at the fat, astonished, sweat-streamed face of her opponent.
She pushed off to deflect a wild machete slash over her head. She was a whirlwind, parrying rapid hacks and slashes from both increasingly desperate men.
She was breathing hard, almost gagging on the diesel fumes and stench of blood and dust and viscera. The air was thin – but at 7,240 feet it was almost the same altitude as the San Esequiel dig, where she'd spent ample time to be acclimated.
But nothing drains like combat. It was why prizefighters did roadwork so obsessively. Intense exertion took it out of you. But the mental stress was what really sucked you dry.
The revolver began to go off like spastic firecrackers again. All three combatants ducked as a bullet moaned low over their heads, then jumped as another kicked up dirt right beside Annja.
The machete guy turned to curse out his buddy with the gun.
Annja was not feeling chivalrous. She side-kicked the pipe man in his capacious belly once more and turned right, unleashing a wheel-like stroke, looping high and down to the right.
Her sword took the machete wielder transversely across the back. It opened him right up. His head snapped back, his knees gave way and he fell into the alley grit.
Screaming with surprising shrillness for one so huge, the fat man rushed her with pipe held high. She pirouetted, lunged, thrust.
The tip of the sword took him in the sternum, punched through ribs, heart and ribs again to stand a foot out from his back.
He fell over backward.
The tight embrace of bone and flab pulled the sword right out of Annja's hands.
She looked back over her shoulder. Her final attacker stood thirty feet away. He had the revolver open and a new scatter of silvery empties at his feet. He was frantically trying to fumble a fresh cartridge into the cylinder.
Their eyes met. She experienced a strange sense of darkness, felt an inexplicable internal impact.
The cartridge at last slid into the chamber.
Annja spun and flowed forward as he shut the cylinder with a snap. As he raised the pistol with both hands, feet braced, she reached the fallen body of the second machete man. His weapon lay in the dust by his side.
She grabbed its hilt. The revolver came on line. The click as it was cocked seemed like the loudest sound in the world.
Annja was still twenty feet from the muzzle. She would never reach him before he dropped the hammer. And this time, it seemed, he aimed true.
She cocked her arm back, threw. The unwieldy two-foot machete turned over twice in the thick, humid air and punched its wide tip vertically through the gunman's forehead.
For a moment he stood there staring at her. His eyes had gone very wide.
A single trickle of blood ran down between them.
He collapsed. The old revolver did not fire.
Annja dropped to her knees. Her lungs burned as she gasped in huge breaths. Her eyes stung with tears, whether from pollution or emotion she could not tell.
Police sirens rose and fell like a chorus of electronic locusts from all around her. There was little chance of a tall, leggy gringaon foot escaping unnoticed from some wretched warren of a Mexican slum. Especially since only God knows how much blood I've got on me,she thought frantically.
She hauled herself up enough to stagger over to sit sideways in the rear driver's-side seat of the cab, with her legs out the now-missing door. It was time to play soft and sheltered American tourist lady much too totally freaked out by an eruption of sudden violence and her own near brush with death to give a coherent account of the proceedings.
It would not be much of a stretch.
Chapter 10
As the Airbus A319 circled to altitude Annja finally felt her muscles unclench. It's really over, she told herself.
The police, as she anticipated, had spun their own story of what happened. It did notinclude an active role for a delicate middle-class American tourist in the back-alley bloodletting, extreme even by the standards of Mexico City street violence, that had left half a dozen hardmen dead. They assumed she could have been nothing but a helpless victim in whatever it was that transpired. Therefore she was no suspect.
As a tomboy who'd occasionally managed to cut loose from the orphanage and wander the seamy, steamy byways of predeluge New Orleans, Annja had picked up a bit more than a modicum of street wisdom. Among other things she had perfected a technique she'd used on the sisters themselves. The best alibi was to give the authorities a tale to tell themselves that didn't include you. She'd seen it succeed time and again.
This time the prevailing hypothesis was that one or more gang members had gone amok, resulting in internecine slaughter. The fact that one would-be kidnapper had a bullet hole from his buddy's revolver in his head, while the man with the revolver had another comrade's machete embedded in his,lent great credibility to that scenario.
Of course, drugs were also involved. Annja would not be surprised if toxicology tests on the decedents supported that, too. She'd be surprised if it didn't.
The fact that someone recognized her as a television personality had helped. Considerably. She already knew that the various Knowledge Channel networks were popular in Latin America. Thank goodness for satellite, she thought.
She took a deep breath, forced residual tension to flow out of her with the air. She was bound for Albuquerque. The police had kept her overnight so she could answer further questions, under guard in her hotel room. By morning their theory had evolved enough tha they had lost interest in her. They suggested she leave the country as quickly as possible. She was up for that,even though it meant forgoing her intended trip to the silver town Plateros, near Fresnillos. She reckoned she had learned what she needed to in Mexico.
A male attendant, slim with receding hairline and hands crossed behind his back, passed by and nodded, smiling. She reciprocated. She sat by the window over the right wing of the modest two-engineAirbus. Right behind the starboard emergency exit, it was one of the best seats on the plane, with extra room to stretch her long legs. It was such a good seat she wondered if the police had bumped someone to get it for her.
The captain spoke up over the PA system. "If you look out the starboard windows, folks, you'll see one of Mexico's most spectacular sights – Mount Popocatepetl. MEX traffic control has routed us to pass near it as we climb to altitude. It's only seventy kilometers, or about forty-four miles, from downtown Mexico City. Rising 5,452 meters, or almost 18,000 feet, Popo is, like its legendary companion Ixtaccihuatl, that flat-topped mountain visible a bit to the left and past it, an active volcano. Fortunately, at present neither is acting up much."
Annja turned and pressed her nose to the glass. The sight was breathtaking. Popocatepetl was so dramatic it looked more like a matte painting than anything real. A perfect cone, bare silvery gray rock thrusting into the sky from a base of green whose top indicated the treeline. The Smoking Mountain lived up to its name: a thin gray strand trailed away to the right from its summit. A thrill of delighted apprehension passed through her. Here was a genuine monster. Not like black phantoms flitting through New Mexico dusk...
She sighed again and got out her iPod. She stuffed the earbuds in her ears. She hated them. The right one would never stay put, but they gave good sound and most of all were highly portable. She dialed up a New Age playlist. New Age music drove her crazy in short order if she actually listenedto it. But it soothed her wonderfully as a background, especially when it blotted out the incidental environmental sounds of airplane travel.