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"Annja? Are you there?"
"Garin?"
"Unless you hit the wrong speed-dial button when you were calling out for
pizza, whom did you expect, my girl?"
"Look, I don't have much time. I'm in trouble."
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"Then why waste my time belaboring the obvious? You're always in trouble.
Although I grant it must be deeper than normal, for you to call me."
"It is. I  I have a deal for you."
"I'm all about the making of deals. Does this involve your surrendering the
sword to me?"
"No."
"Pity. But I find myself in a receptive mood. Bored, to put not too fine an
edge to it. What do you have in mind?"
A pause. That surprised him. Annja Creed was not given to hesitancy, in his
experience.
"I can offer you extraordinarily valuable resources," she said, "if you will
do me a favor."
"You can't tell me precisely what resources?"
"No."
"How valuable?"
"Beyond your wildest dreams of avarice."
"My dreams are quite expansive, my dear. But I respect your judgment, at least
in such matters. What favor?"
"Get somebody off our backs."
"Our?"
"Mine. And a friend."
"Consider it done. For considerations offered. Whom can I do for you?"
"Euro Petro."
After a rather lengthy silence he vented a half-voiced whistle. "You don't do
things by half measures, do you, Annja? That's the European Union you're
talking about. Even for me that's a heavy hitter."
"Then you can't help me?"
"Don't try to manipulate my ego. That was last done with any success shortly
before the close of the eighteenth century, under circumstances I prefer not
to discuss. If there's something I know I can't do, rest assured I feel no
compulsion to try."
"Cut the crap, Garin. Will you or won't you?" Annja said.
His laughter was long and loud and rich. "You delight me, Annja. Of all the
men and women who think they know the extent of my power, only the merest
handful would dare talk to me like that. And only you and Roux know the real
nature of my capabilities. How is our old mentor, by the anyway?"
"The same annoying, self-righteous old fart as always. Please, Garin."
"Very well. Since you said the magic word, it's a deal." He grinned at the
phone. "To tell you the truth, you have tweaked my ego, girl. There are so few
worthy challenges left to me. How could I pass this one by?"
Chapter 25
"Will your friend really help us?" Jadzia asked.
Annja scowled. "He's not really a friend."
They walked by night among the quaint and mostly authentic colonial buildings
of central Kuala Lumpur. They seemed to exist in a hidden valley walled in on
all sides by canyons of steel and concrete. In one direction the colossal
Petronas dominated the immediate skyline. They looked to Annja's eye like a
pair of huge rocket ships linked together. In another rose the Kuala Lumpur
Tower, nearly as tall as the Petronas twins. It resembled the world's largest
stalk of asparagus. Cars and buses hissed along narrow old-town streets that
meandered like streams as if in contrast to the geometric exactitude of the
skyscrapers.
Jadzia looked at Annja with a spark of interest. It was good to see, after the
listlessness the girl had displayed since they'd left Shenzhen.
"A lover?" Jadzia teased.
Annja adjusted the strap of the satchel of scrolls on her shoulder and let out
a reflexive chuff of laughter. "I'd say 'he wishes,' but I'm not even sure
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that's true."
"What about you? Do you wish? Is he a sexy man? A beautiful man?"
"Yes. I guess he is. He's a very powerful man. He's unique."
"So why don't you sleep with him?"
She just shook her head, tight-lipped. Garin Braden was attractive, no
question, with his commanding eyes, superb physique and charisma to make the
curtains sway when he entered a room. The truth was Annja found it hard to get
really intimate with someone who, at any given moment, might decide to try to
kill her. It didn't seem politic to mention that to Jadzia in connection with
someone on whom both women currently relied to save their lives.
Leaving a compulsively neat little square with palm trees and flowers in
planters in the middle and copper-domed buildings around the fringes, they
entered a more modern section of the city. And shortly, down a street blocked
by concrete traffic barriers, they came to a wire perimeter surrounding a
half-finished building.
A crash sounded from behind them. They both turned. A heavy truck had just
bulled its way between two waist-high barriers and was roaring down the street
at them.
"Oh, no," Jadzia said.
Annja grabbed the satchel with one hand and Jadzia's wrist with the other.
"Come on," she said, and raced inside the wire. The truck grumbled to a halt
behind them with a sound like the tail end of an avalanche.
A pair of uniformed guards with billed caps and showy white Sam Browne belts
came running out of a security shack near the entrance to the half-built
building. "Stop! You cannot come in here."
Rippling cracks sounded to either side of Annja. The two guards folded like
collapsing cardboard cutouts.
Annja looked back over her shoulder and almost stumbled. A burly figure
swaggered in the gate with a bow-legged roll. Dark-clad men flanked him,
holding suppressed submachine guns to their shoulders.
Jadzia looked too. "Marshall!" she exclaimed. She yelped in terror as she
stumbled on a piece of rubble.
Annja would not let her fall. Jadzia cried out as Annja pulled ruthlessly on
her arm, barely slowing her stride. She got her sneakers under her and
followed with ungainly flapping steps, into the darkness of the building's
heart.
"I hear them!" Jadzia said. "They are below us!"
Her panted words echoed between the raw concrete slabs of roof and floor and
the metal sheathing on the outside of the building. The two women had run up a
dozen stories of temporary steel stairs with only the most perfunctory kind of
safety rail. Fortunately, small amber lights clamped at irregular intervals
gave enough illumination that neither woman had put a foot wrong enough to
plummet back down.
The drumbeats of feet, the shouts of men's voices, even the panting of their
breath came echoing up the deep well.
"We better keep going," Annja said.
"But where? There's nowhere to go but up."
"You're right," Annja said. "But it's not as if we've had much choice." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]