Taking full advantage of her skill and speed, Annja targeted two of the goons, plucking a handgun and a shotgun from surprise-slack hands before their owners could react. She pitched the weapons out into daylight through the opening yawning nearby. She kicked a second pistol from the grasp of a pasty-faced White Tree member who was pointing it at her sideways, American gangsta style. Then she spun and grabbed the flash suppressor of an FN-FAL 7.62 mm military rifle, twitched the long weapon out of its owner's hands and hit him in the jaw with it. He went down moaning and clutching his face.

  That left two with guns in their hands. One man wearing a silver medallion fired a handgun. The noise and recoil so startled him that he immediately punched off a second shot on the light trigger, unintentionally to judge by the astonished look on his face. Both shots missed Annja, but one of the fat bullets hit a fellow Lodge member, one of the first pair Annja had disarmed on landing. He dropped to his knees and toppled on his face. His comrade dropped the big handgun as if it had turned red-hot.

  The stout Malkuth follower Annja had used to cushion her landing had gotten his feet under him. As he raised his pistol, still hunched over and clutching his gut with his other hand, Annja did a sideways stutter-step toward him and side kicked him in the groin once more. This time she put a hip thrust into it and sent him flying right out into the sunlight.

  With a wild scream a White Tree devotee cut loose from the hip with a 9 mm Franchi machine pistol, sweeping it left to right. A Malkuth enforcer and one of the gunner's lodge mates spun down in a welter of blood. Annja turned and sprinted toward the front entrance with bullets letting in daylight in a sort of irregular sine wave behind her. She dived behind a large machine and heard bullets ring off its far side like trip-hammer blows.

  Baying like a pack of hounds, zealots of both stripes converged on her. She lay on her stomach trying to listen for footsteps. With all the noise and the echoing properties of the vast enclosed space, it wasn't easy to sort them out.

  She saw a pair of oxblood shoes on the floor on the other side of a wheeled device that might have been a generator or portable power supply by her head. She prepared herself.

  The White Tree fanatic spun around holding a beefy SPAS riot shotgun. Annja rolled hard, flung out a leg, caught him right on his jade tie-tack with the back of her heel. Choking and flailing, he fell, losing his grip on the weapon as it blasted noisily toward the ceiling.

  Annja bounced to her feet, darted around the squat mechanism and onto the main floor as somebody else hopped out behind, spraying the oil-spotted place she'd been an instant before with bullets. Men with guns were running toward her. She summoned the sword again and charged.

  She slashed left, right, left. Two men fell, screaming and spurting blood. A third stood staring in mute horror at the blood flowing freely from his numerous wounds.

  Bullets snapped past her ears and cracked against the concrete by her flashing feet. She dived over a table laden with rusty parts, tucked her shoulder, rolled. She still hit hard enough to hurt and make her fear for a moment she had dislocated her left shoulder when she landed on it.

  She pressed against the pedestal of a grinder. Reversing at once, she rolled back against the table she had cleared. She tried to squirm beneath the bottom shelf. A hand appeared over the table's edge, holding a Heckler & Koch MP-5K, a little stubby machine pistol with a sort of piano-leg foregrip. The gun yammered, spraying bullets at a downward angle.

  The stream was directed away from her – but right against the gray-painted cast-iron pedestal of the grinder. Annja cringed and cried out as ricochets buzzed about her like angry hornets, stinging her arms and face with concrete particles as they spanged off the floor and punched holes through cans above and to either side of her.

  The bullet storm stopped. Almost reluctantly she lowered her hands from her head, which she had covered in a futile attempt to protect herself from the ricochets. The compact but heavy German machine pistol bounced once on the floor next to her with a ringing sound.

  She looked up. The hand lay draped over the table edge like an abandoned sock puppet. Its skin looked almost bluish white in the half light; she could see blue veins through it. She raised the sword.

  Rising slightly, she found herself staring into a pair of surprised gray eyes. They showed no sign of seeing her. Nor were they likely to – they stared out from beneath an irregular hole right in the center of a high forehead, where one of the shooter's own bullets had came tumbling back and struck him.

  Annja sprang to a hunched-over posture. Guns blared at her. Bent low she darted this way and that like a fox pursued by hounds, trying to throw off the aim of her multiple enemies by speed and sheer unpredictability. She knew that since few if any of them bothered to actually aim, whether or not she took a hit would pretty much be a matter of luck anyway. But moving made her feel better, somehow.

  A pair of Malkuth goons appeared before her as she darted toward the rear of the smelter, where the furnace roared, oblivious to the doings of mere flesh. She darted right, bowling over two more men closing in from that direction, sprinted across seven yards of open floor, threw herself into a forward roll.

  Another Malkuth man jumped out from behind a machine and into her path, firing a Glock. But he anticipated a target running at him upright. Annja skidded forward on her butt with bullets cracking right over her head. She thrust upward at an angle and skewered him right beneath the rib cage as she slid past to his left. He fell, sword still transfixing him, momentarily pinning her right hand to the floor.

  As her feet hit the wall something made her look up and left. Sir Martin Highsmith stood at the top of the stairs with the yellow glow of the still liquid metal in the hanging crucible illuminating the right side of his body and underlighting his craggy face and mane of white hair with deceptive sunset gold. He held a 9 mm Beretta out before him like his own sword of vengeance.

  "You are dead, interloper!" he declared. "You cannot reach me with that sword of yours."

  He was right. As he began to trigger shots and bullets cracked around her, Annja willed the sword away. Then she yanked the Glock from the dead Malkuthian's nerveless fingers, rolled onto her back, pushing the blocky handgun out before her in a two-handed isosceles grip.

  The white dot of the front sight lined up on the center of Highsmith's chest, its black post contrasting nicely with his old-ivory waistcoat. She squeezed the trigger, hoping the Glock's characteristic long pull wouldn't throw her aim off too badly. The weapon roared and bucked in her hand.

  Sir Martin Camdessus Highsmith felt a piledriver impact to the center of his chest. Instantly his gun hand ceased obeying instructions and began to drift downward. His weapon no longer fired.

  He couldn't breathe. His vision blurred. He teetered.

  Spirit of wild nature, who have guided me so long, he prayed, help me now so that I might yet bring our shared vision to pass.

  But the voice in his head, which had always been so warm and honeyed, now dripped with scorn.

  Useless fool, it sneered. I have no use for failure. Die.

  Sir Martin reeled and fell backward over the rail.

  He screamed as he felt the heat growing on his back like a rising sun. Screamed louder as his hair and the backs of his coat and trouser legs took fire with a huff.

  And then the molten metal caught him, enfolded him and drew him into infinite agony. His shriek achieved a steam-whistle pitch and volume as intolerable agony was augmented by the moisture in his lungs boiling in an instant, searing throat, palate and tongue.

  The scream died.

  "Wait," Annja heard Mark Peter Stern command. "Take the woman alive. She may know where the jar is."

  Transferring the Glock to her left hand and summoning the sword back into her right, Annja leaped to her feet. With their leader gone the White Tree survivors seemed as inclined to obey the Malkuth guru as his own followers were. Annja was surrounded, a dozen men closing in on her, faces grim or gleeful over leveled weapons.

  "Ah, yes," Stern said, tipping his head to one side. "That's a nifty sword you have there, Ms. Creed. If you hand it over, we might be persuaded to let you live."

  Her eyes darted left and right. To surrender the sword was unthinkable. She wondered fleetingly if she willed it gone before they killed her, whether it would remain eternally sealed in its pocket universe. Probably not, she decided.

  There was no possible escape for her. Even using gun and sword simultaneously she could never get through before someone put a bullet in her, or she was dragged down by sheer weight of male muscle and bone. If I go down, she thought, I go down fighting. But winded, exhausted, disoriented by the relentless attacks of the swarming demons, she hesitated for the space of half a breath.

  That was all it took. Strong hands gripped her arms from right and left as two men closed with her. In despair she felt her strength and will drain from her. She was trapped.

  The man to her right said, "Be a love and give us the sword, then." He was a tall, young Englishman in a dark green pin-striped suit, no tie, with curly chestnut hair. He smiled and reached for the hilt of her sword.

  Then his eyes went wide and his head snapped to the side.

  Chapter 27

  Annja's eyes widened as a cloud of pink mist and dark shreds puffed out above the left ear of the handsome young Englishman. He dropped as if he were a suit of clothes slipped from the rack.

  The burly Malkuth man who had her left arm grunted. His meaty hand went slack on her arm. Turning toward him, she saw his eyes standing unnaturally out from their sockets, the skin of his face sagging.

  The right side of his head was bloody ruin.

  From the front of the foundry a sound erupted as if a decade's worth of hailstones were being unloaded on the corrugated metal roof at once. Out on the floor men closing in on Annja began to spin and fall with little red sprays jetting from bodies and limbs and heads.

  Her head snapped toward the entrance. She gasped.

  A line of men marched shoulder to shoulder into the smelter, dark forms silhouetted against the tropical morning sun. Most were firing machine-pistol-sized Kalashnikovs from the hip. They stepped aside only to walk around machines in their path. Interspersed with them was a quartet of what Annja recognized with a shock as Orthodox priests, in flowing vestments with basket-shaped hats on their heads and magnificent beards. They intoned prayers and swung smoking censers on chains before them.

  In the middle of the line a smaller man was dwarfed by the burly gunners. He walked with a bandy-legged swagger of total self-assurance. He looked oddly familiar.

  The man raised his hand. Flame bloomed from it – right toward Annja's face. She set her jaw and waited for the fatal impact.

  Instead the bullet cracked past her head. She heard a sound similar to a bat hitting a ball. She turned back to see a Malkuth cultist toppling backward with a yard-long fixed wrench falling from his hands to ring on the concrete.

  The invaders mowed down Malkuth and White Tree men with a fine lack of discrimination. Several of the well-dressed Englishmen threw down their weapons and raised their hands.

  Then died.

  "The Babylonians come again!" Annja heard Mark Peter Stern shout from the back of the foundry. "But I will not be taken into captivity."

  All the rest of the cultists lay on the floor, dead or dying. The diminutive man with the Glock held up a hand. The shooting stopped. He halted near Annja. His men stopped at the same time, lowering their weapons but staying alert.

  He was a very trim man, with receding hair cropped close to a narrow skull and piercing eyes. He wore a dark suit over a dark pullover of some sort, very well tailored to his athletic form.

  It took Annja a moment to regain some composure. She looked at the man with surprise. He was the leader of the group of mafiya goons who had surprised her and Aidan in Amsterdam.

  Mark Peter Stern's tall form suddenly appeared silhouetted against the furnace's blinding yellow maw. Blue flames jetted in like fangs from the periphery.

  "I am protected by the power of the Lord of Hosts," Stern said, "'Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil – '" he turned and walked into the furnace "' – for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.'"

  His outline blurred as his suit took flame. He stopped. Then he turned and staggered back toward the entrance, a figure of darker flame against the furnace's brilliant fire, waving wings of fire. His hands burned like white torches.

  His screaming cut through the furnace roar like a razor.

  He made it three steps, then fell to his knees. A moment later and he slumped into a shapeless mound, like a wax figurine melting.

  An especially tall mafiya man with a head like a shaved bear's and hair in his ears said something to his small and dapper leader. The smaller man shrugged.

  "What's going on?" Annja asked, devastated by the carnage around her.

  "We are restoring peace," the small man said. "Did you never hear 'Blessed are the peacemakers'?"

  It seemed to Annja a useful distinction might be drawn between peacemaking and mass murder. However, it did not seem that it would be useful to bandy words just now.

  "Why haven't you killed me yet?" she demanded.

  He looked at her. No one seemed to be paying particular attention to her despite the fact she stood there with an archaic broadsword in one hand and a thoroughly modern semiautomatic pistol in the other.

  "I forget my manners," the small man said. "Please forgive me. I am Valeriy Korolin, formerly captain of special-designation soldiers in armed forces of USSR. Now I work in private sector. You are Ms. Annja Creed."

  She lowered her sword, which Korolin had started to examine. The big man at his shoulder crossed himself in the Orthodox manner. The constant murmur of the priests' prayer spiked briefly.

  "You haven't answered my question," she said.

  "You are a very courageous young woman," Korolin said, "if maybe not so prudent. But we knew that." He suddenly grinned. "We haven't killed you because you have not gotten in our way, if you will forgive my speaking candidly."

  "You tried hard enough before," she said.

  "Those were mistakes. In Amsterdam my men misconstrued my orders under misapprehension you might be the killers of that poor old lady shopkeeper. In Jaffa our attempt was to incinerate Dr. Stern – who seems to have escaped our efforts only to carry out our intentions by himself." He shook his head, still marveling at Stern's walking voluntarily into the blazing furnace.

  "And now," Korolin said, "since it is obvious you do not have the jar, if you will excuse us – "

  "She doesn't have it," a voice called from above. "But I do."

  Everyone looked up. Aidan Pascoe stood on the catwalk perilously close to the crucible of still molten metal into which Highsmith had fallen. Above his head he brandished a gleaming metal jar, in the shape of a globe with a funnel thrust into it, and two oddly slender, scrolled handles.

  Annja drew in a sharp breath. She could feel it. It was Solomon's Jar.

  With a guilty start she realized Korolin was looking at her closely. He nodded sharply. Then he turned to look up at Pascoe.

  "Mr. Pascoe," he said, "please throw down to us the jar."

  "I won't," he said. "And if you shoot me, or try to take it from me by force, I'll throw it in the melt. Then no one will get it."

  "What do you want it for, Mr. Pascoe?" the Russian asked.

  "Tell him, Annja," Pascoe said, his voice strained.

  Anna was concerned. He seemed to be standing in the midst of a dark whirlwind. She wasn't sure if she was literally seeing it with her eyes, or some other sense. But she knew what she was seeing. Aidan Pascoe was struggling with temptation.

  "Why don't you tell them, Aidan," she said, trying to keep her voice neutral.

  "The power to make the world a better place," he said. "That's what I've dreamed of since I was a child. What do you want it for?"

  "Very simple," Korolin said. "A wealthy and well-connected collector in St. Petersburg offers a substantial sum of money for authenticated jar of King Solomon. He desires this object solely for its value as artifact of the ancient world. He is an atheist. He is merely obsessed with history."

  "He wants to display it?" Annja asked.

  "He wants to be able to admire it, and to show it off to favored guests, or so I presume. He is prepared to preserve it using the best modern techniques."

  "What about you?" Annja asked Korolin. "What do you think about the jar?"

  "I think I will receive a munificent reward for success," he said, "rather than getting shot in the back of the neck for failure, maybe."

  "But the demons – "

  "I myself am also atheist. I do not believe in demons," he stated with a shrug.

  "Why did you bring the priests?" Annja asked.

  "I do not believe in demons, but I do believe in hedging my bets, Ms. Creed. After all, if there are no demons, I have only subjected myself to smelling some incense and listening to some mumbo jumbo. And if there are demons..."

  Aidan shook his head. "Selfishness. Pure selfishness. The root of all evil."

  "How do you plan to make the world better, Aidan?" Annja asked.

  He frowned at her. "Whose side are you on?"

  "You know which side, Aidan. Ask yourself that question. Please," she said trying to quell her fear.

  He looked at her, suspicion narrowing his blue eyes.

  "Very well. I will put an end to human suffering – to evil, if you will – by confining the demons that were released through the selfish greed of the treasure hunters who breached the seal."

  "Aidan," Annja said, as gently as she could with any hope of being heard above the furnace roar, "are you sure that would even work?"