The cabbie handed it back. "Chang Feng. Very nice."

Maybe Rambo wasn't such a bad name for him, Annja thought.

"What are you waiting for?" Jadzia shouted. The black Mercedes swerved around another little boxy sedan to move in closer. Behind them the blue pursuer also gained ground. "Shoot them."

"I can't," Annja said. "Not until I get a better shot. I'm not going to spray traffic with bullets at random."

"They do!"

"Do you want to be like them?"

"I want to be alive!"

A street angled off at forty-five degrees to their left. The cabbie suddenly cranked the car across two lanes of onrushing traffic and shot up it.

"This isn't the right way," Jadzia complained. "The border with Hong Kong is east and south of here! We're going northeast."

"Well, we just lost the black Mercedes," Annja said, looking back. "We need to lose both before anything else happens. Anyway, the airport's on an island pretty much south of the university. We've been heading away all this time."

They had come into a zone of flats between steep hills. Beyond them rose factories, sculptures of tanks and pipework and chimneys, all l.u.s.tily belching black smoke and white steam.

"Black car back behind us," Jadzia said. Her voice rose an octave. "Here comes the blue one! Shoot! Shoot!"

Annja twisted in her seat. The traffic had thinned to next to nothing. The black car was making a move, overtaking rapidly on the left.

"No worries!" the driver chortled. The taxicab accelerated away from the Mercedes.

After a moment the bigger sedan accelerated. Annja thought she could actually hear its engine roar.

"We can't outrun them!" Jadzia wailed.

She and Annja rocked violently forward as the driver tapped the brakes. Annja's mouth bounced off the pa.s.senger's headrest.

"What are you doing?" Jadzia screamed at the driver as the cab jolted and slowed to another hit on the brakes.

The Mercedes shot past them. A man hung half out the window again. He grabbed the frame, trying to twist to shoot back without falling out of the vehicle.

The cab accelerated again. The gunner was actually facing away from it, with his rump all but sticking out the window. They scooted past.

This time she definitely heard the Mercedes' engine growl furiously as it sped up to run them down. "Now driver watch only us," the cabbie sang out. "Too bad for them."

Annja glanced toward him, then did a second take. A train bridge crossed the road ahead of them, complete with a bloodred and sunflower-yellow-painted locomotive creeping across it, pulling open-topped cars piled perilously high with what looked to Annja like rusting chunks of sc.r.a.p metal.

As they approached the bridge the Mercedes surged up alongside. Annja saw the gunman grinning over the sights of his bullpup a.s.sault rifle at her. She started to raise the Chang Feng, knowing she was too late.

The cabbie threw the wheel hard left. The cab sideswiped the Mercedes. The enemy driver probably flinched reflexively away from a car slamming into his. The black Mercedes rammed head-on into the concrete bridge support.

It telescoped with a terrible grinding screech, and a cloud of white steam rose from its ruptured radiator. Through the white puff Annja saw the gunner's body snapped suddenly sideways.

She gulped down sour bile. A human body wasn't meant to bend that way.

The cabbie uttered a triumphant rebel yell. Jadzia echoed him piercingly, pumping her fist.

"Not so fast," Annja said. "Here comes the other one."

They were driving between factory buildings, with almost no other cars on the road. The blue Mercedes was overtaking them quickly. This time Sulin himself leaned out the pa.s.senger window, white hair whipping in the wind, aiming an a.s.sault rifle one-handed.

"Your turn to do something," the cabbie shouted. "Better make snappy!"

"Roll down your window," Annja told Jadzia.

"What?"

"Do it!"

Jadzia cranked the window down, using both hands. Annja flung herself across the girl's lap and stuck her right arm and head out.

The blue Mercedes was swinging out to come alongside. Sulin wanted to make sure of his shot, it seemed.

The cab masked him from Annja. She lined up the red-dot sight on the shadowy figure of the driver and pumped out a 2-round burst, followed by another.

The windshield cracked as four holes appeared in front of the driver. The Mercedes continued to overtake them. Then it suddenly veered away left.

A meaty thump came from the rear of the cab. Annja felt the vehicle rock. The pursuing Mercedes went off the road into the ditch. It rolled over once, continuing to slide forward at a great rate of speed.

"He's on the car!" Jadzia screamed.

"What?"

"Sulin! He's on the roof!"

The cabbie hit the brakes hard. The white-haired a.s.sa.s.sin failed to fly off the front. The cabbie shifted his narrow b.u.t.t into the pa.s.senger seat, improbably, and continued to steer from there as the taxi slowed.

Bullet holes appeared in the middle of the roof. Bullets struck the inside of the driver's door. If the cabbie hadn't moved he would have been shot in the head and shoulders.

"I saw that in a movie!" the cabbie crowed.

"Annja! Do something!" Jadzia cried.

She aimed the Chang Feng at the roof, pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. With no idea how to clear a jam in the unfamiliar weapon, Annja let it drop.

Still lying across Jadzia's lap, Annja held her hand tipped forward at an angle between the front seats. "Stay put," she advised the cabbie. She focused.

The sword sprang into being, angled upward. To Annja's relief it cleared the arm the driver used to steer the slowing vehicle.

Another burst ripped down into the driver's seat. Bits of stuffing flew up to drift like gnats around the inside of the car. Annja dropped her hands so she could bring the tip of the sword to the holes in the roof. Then she thrust up with both hands on the hilt.

With a crunching sound the sword pierced the roof of the cab. The cabbie ducked under her arm back into his seat to take better control of the cab.

For a moment Annja wondered if her blow had gone true. Would another burst rip through the ceiling, kill the driver and leave them helpless? Or kill her or Jadzia, whose safety was in her hands?

A red drop ran down the side of the blade. Then another. Then a scarlet stream poured down to wet her hands.

It struck Annja as strange that a factory that must have been recently built could already be derelict. But as he pulled in out of sight from the road behind a huge blocky concrete structure, the cab bouncing across a parking lot already cracked and heaved by weeds sprouting through it, Rambo the cabbie explained that businesses died off as quickly as they sprang into being in boomtown Shenzhen.

The cab stopped. Annja let go of the sword. It vanished, allowing a brief rain of blood just beginning to congeal to fall to the floor of the cab. Some of it fell on Annja's hand and forearm. She grimaced.

But if you're willing to shed it, you'd better be willing to wear it, she told herself grimly.

They got out. Sulin was still breathing, shallowly and irregularly. Jadzia helped Annja ease him off the roof and gently to the ground. Blood was crusting around his nostrils and streamed down his chin.

"You think you've won," he wheezed. "You cannot win. You have made it personal."

"Don't talk," Annja said, kneeling beside him. "We'll call an ambulance for you."

"What's this? Mercy to a fallen foe?" The beautiful, too-fine features twisted in a sneer. "Fool yourselves if you will. Don't try to fool me. I'm dying. I have seen enough death to know."

"All right," Annja said. She stood. "What did you mean, it's personal, then?"

"The director," he said with a ghastly bubble running through his asthmatic wheezing. "He has commanded that you two be hunted down and killed at any cost. However long it takes."

"What about the scrolls?" Jadzia asked. She was calm. It bothered Annja slightly. Was there something wrong with her? Or was she merely on emotional overload?

Why don't I feel more? she wondered. And then she realized she did feel something empty. Utterly drained. Of fear, as well as hope.

Sulin shook his head weakly.

"Regardless of what befalls the scrolls," he said, "no one is permitted to defy the company as you have." He smiled as if in contemptuous amus.e.m.e.nt, whether at them or his own employer, Annja couldn't tell. Probably both, she guessed.

"Run if you will," he said. His voice was a whisper. "You cannot get away. You will only die tired. But I can help you escape them."

"Tell me," Annja said.

He raised his right hand with obvious effort. "Come close," he said in a voice like the ghost of the last wind of autumn.

She frowned but knelt again and leaned down. His breath was thready on her cheek.

"I have your escape," he said, "in my hand."

With blinding speed his left hand shot toward her neck. She caught him by the wrist. The needle point of a stiletto hovered half an inch from her carotid artery.

"d.a.m.n you!" he growled. The violet eyes were wide and staring. "Who are you?"

"Your worst enemy," she said.

He arched his back. She felt him die. All the tension and strength flowed out of him with the life force.

Gently she laid his hand, still clutching the stiletto, across the front of his immaculately tailored dove-gray suit coat. She gazed at the red mora.s.s from the wound the sword had made in his chest.

She stood. For a moment she looked down at the sculpted elfin features. Despite his final spasm he looked perfectly at ease, perhaps for the first time in his life.

"What demons drove you?" she asked under her breath. "What kind of thoughts ran through your head?"

She looked up to see Jadzia's cheek glistening with tears.

"I hate him," the girl said. "Why did it hurt to watch him die?"

"Be glad," Annja said. "It means we're both still human."

She looked to their driver, who stood with arms akimbo regarding his poor battered car. She expected him to demand a prodigious payment to make good the damage to his cab. But his eyes were bright and his cheeks flushed from the chase and running battle.

"It all right," he said. "Insured!"

Annja raised an eyebrow. "Against crash damage, spilled blood and bullet holes? That seems like a lot to ask of an insurance company. Even for a wide-open town like Shenzhen."

He laughed. "Oh, no," he said. "For theft! Car disappear, so sad. Shenzhen full of thieves!"

"What about him?" Jadzia asked, indicating Sulin. "We can't leave him here."

For practical more than sentimental reasons Annja agreed.

"No problem," the cabbie said. "You pay?"

Annja sighed. "I pay." He did save our lives, she reminded herself.

He opened the trunk and produced, to Annja's astonishment, a box of garbage bags. "We stuff him in trunk. I know all about it. I'm a big Sopranos Sopranos fan. I leave car somewhere hidden before I report stolen. Dump him just like New Jersey!" fan. I leave car somewhere hidden before I report stolen. Dump him just like New Jersey!"

Chapter 24.

"We have to change our strategy," Annja told Jadzia.

They sat in the departure area of Hong Kong's relatively new ChekLapKokAirport on LantauIsland, waiting to board the afternoon flight that would carry them to Kuala Lumpur. It was the first available flight out of Hong Kong and China. Annja had avoided rousing suspicion by paying with a credit card in a phony name that Roux had provided to her on a previous mission.

"What do you mean?" Jadzia asked, half defiant.

"We're out of resources," Annja said, "out of places to turn. There are only a few places with the ability to transcribe the scrolls, and they're all barred to us. We have no way of getting the secrets of the scrolls to the world at large."

Jadzia's shoulders slumped. "What can we do, then? Isn't that our only chance?"

Annja's own shoulders rose as she took a deep breath. "There may be a way to save ourselves," she said. "Maybe. And if it works it will definitely keep the scrolls out of the hands of our enemies." She shook her head. "But that's all. Beyond that we're stymied. Unless you can think of something we haven't tried."