Their heads started to come into view over the lip of the little depression. Their attitude was almost relaxed. They were still twisted near the snapping point, she knew – but entirely confident now of the kill. They were ready for fun.

"Remember your buddies back there," she called to them in Spanish. "You can join them if you want."

They laughed at that. "Give it up, girly," called their apparent leader, a small, wiry, swaggering man with tattoo-covered shoulders and arms bared by an undershirt despite the chill and hair shaved within a millimeter of his scalp. He carried a Beretta autopistol in his hand. "We won't hurt you."

"Much," added a tall, lanky man with snag teeth and a head of wild black hair who walked beside the leader. He carried another AK-47. Like his buddies he held it at a careless angle, barrel down.

One of the men cursed in Spanish. "She's got a sword!"

"Who's afraid of her little knife?" the bandy-legged little leader said. "Miguelito, why don't you shoot her in the leg for me?"

The tall guy started to bring up his rifle. Annja coiled herself for a final futile spring. The gunman was twenty feet from her. She could cut him with her sword, but she would also take a burst of jacketed Russian 7.62 mm bullets, pulping muscle, smashing bone.

The left side of Miguelito's head suddenly erupted red.

Chapter 13

Annja was already in motion, cocking the sword back to her right side, racing with all her speed at the leader. From her left she saw a man raise a shotgun. Then the leader lurched forward as if punched hard between the shoulder blades. His shirtfront blossomed blood. His head snapped back with blood starting from his mouth.

Eyes wild as a trapped animal's, the blood-soaked gang leader tried to shoot. He had no chance. Screaming in a release of terror and fury, Annja swung her blade savagely right to left.

Shots flashed and cracked all around her. She spun to her right, found herself confronting a gang member hammering futilely on the charging lever on top of an evidently jammed MAC-10 with the heel of his fist. He looked up and screamed as her blade flashed.

Ten feet beyond him another man pointed a shotgun at Annja's face. Before he could fire, a bellowing burst from an assault rifle took him and sent him spinning to the gravel.

The remaining gang members were fleeing, with the spraddling, loose-jointed panic of those who know death's gaping jaws are slavering an inch from the seats of their baggy pants. Attacks from at least two directions had finally shattered their morale.

Annja looked around to the south, from where the interloping shots had come. She had a feeling who her rescuer must be, improbable as it was.

"They will run until they literally drop now," Father Godin said as he tossed away a Kalashnikov and drew a bulky, short-barreled revolver with a black-gloved hand. "It will be weeks before they sleep through a night without waking screaming from the nightmares. If ever.

"No thanks are necessary," he added.

"Thank you," Annja panted. Her knees felt like overboiled pasta, and her stomach churned with exhaustion and after-action nausea. She staggered a few paces to brace herself against the swing set. "I can't believe they were that determined," she said.

"Evidently they were strongly motivated," Godin said. "One suspects both a large carrot and an equally large and heavy stick. You have made someone very powerful most unhappy, Annja Creed."

She lifted her head and looked at him through strands of loose chestnut hair. "Like the Pope?" she asked.

He laughed. "His Holiness doesn't find it necessary to operate through the agency of street gangs."

She watched him closely as he approached. He had opened the cylinder of his brushed-nickel gun, dropped six empties connected by a black spring-steel full-moon clip to his palm. He transferred them to a pocket, and came up with a fresh clip.

Despite the fact that he had come to her aid she felt uncomfortable at his proximity. Or even his presence.

"How is it," she said, still sucking in deep breaths, "that you happened by at such an opportune moment?"

"I was following you, of course," he said.

"Why?" she asked angrily.

He aligned the six cartridges gripped in the moon clip, slid them into the cylinder and snapped the revolver shut. Then he stretched out his arm, cocking it as he aimed it straight at Annja's head.

"Because I fear you have something that does not belong to you."

Deliberately she straightened. She forced her focus past weapon to meet his eyes with angry intent. "The sword?"

"Indeed."

Anger flashed inside her. "Why should you have the sword? Look what happened to the last sword bearer!" she shouted.

"Mistakes were made," Godin said. His voice was level, his eyes calm. They held hers. She realized he was trying to lull her. "Surely, they will be made again. Still, the church can be the only proper caretaker of such a holy artifact."

She held her hands out open to her sides. "Where is it?"

He shrugged. Somehow he managed to do so without the muzzle of his handgun wavering in the slightest. "An excellent question. Suppose you answer, and save us both a great deal of unpleasantness?"

She laughed. It had a frost-brittle sound in her ears. "If you kill me, how do you plan to find the sword? Using a Ouija board?"

"You frame a most astute objection," he said, and shot her in the leg.

Or tried to. As he dropped his arm, time seemed to slow for her. She'd anticipated his move and noticed the black-gloved finger as it tightened on the curving trigger with its longitudinal grooves.

She was moving, diving sideways to put a six-inch post of splintery gray-green pressure-treated wood between herself and her opponent. The handgun flashed. The bullet kicked up bits of porous white gravel behind the heel of her boot.

She put down a shoulder, rolled, came up crouching behind another upright. Godin stood placidly, regarding her with an odd smile on his face.

"Very good," he said, and snapped a shot for her face.

Again she read the intention in the ripple of the fine calfskin of the glove echoing the movement of muscle and bone in the finger beneath. Before he had completed triggering the shot, she had ducked back. The bullet sailed past her head and struck the grassy slope behind her with an audible thud even as the aftereffects of the painfully loud report rang in her ears.

As the ringing subsided she heard the crunch of his crepe-soled shoes on the pumice. He was walking clockwise, trying to flank her.

She sprinted right, straight out in front of him. She kept her eyes at soft focus so as to perceive the widest possible vision field. She saw his arm once again tense to fire.

She stiffened her left leg as she swung it out for the next step, dug her heel deep through the gravel to the soil below. She pivoted around her heel, away from him, as another shot cracked out – horribly loud, the noise like knitting needles driven into her eardrums. Wheeling through 270 degrees, she ran straight at him, trailing her right arm.

The sword appeared in her hand.

He was trying to shift aim to shoot her in the face. She ran fast. The sword sang through the air in a rising backhand cut.

Somehow the Jesuit managed to twitch his heavy revolver far enough that the mystic blade did not shear it in half. Instead it knocked the dull silver weapon from his grasp. It spun end over end, glittering in the light of the single streetlamp that illuminated the little depression beneath the hill with its curious gleaming statue.