Annja crouched lower, drawing Aidan down with her. She expected an instant eruption of answering gunfire. Instead the White Tree cultists seemed thunder-struck by the arrival of their rivals and the sudden death of one of their comrades.

  "Sir Martin," Stern called out as he strode past Annja and Aidan's hiding place with his burly henchmen spreading out to either side of him. "What a pleasure to find you here. I wish I could say it's unexpected."

  Highsmith stared at him with his dramatic white eye-brows flared in fury. "What are you doing here, you mountebank?"

  "You mean your divinations didn't tell you that? Any more than it warned you to expect my visitation? Gee, it's too bad. Obviously you're too inept to possess an artifact of the power and majesty of King Solomon's Jar. Jumping naked over fires and hugging trees is more your speed, eh, wot." The last appeared to be a cartoonish attempt at parodying an English accent, and Stern had said it with a nasty sneer on his face.

  "How typically American," Highsmith said. "Your feeble attempts at humor are of a kind with your so-called mystic teachings – base humbuggery fit to pull the wool over the eyes of self-besotted simpletons."

  "Are they going to try to talk each other to death?" Aidan demanded. The color had dropped from his face at the murder of his countryman. His cheeks were regaining their usual hue, and his insouciance seemed to be springing back.

  Annja was relieved. "I'm afraid not," she said. "I don't know if that's good or bad."

  "I see your point. I deplore bloodshed. But it couldn't happen to a nicer – "

  She gripped his arm and put a finger to her lips. She had begun to sense a change in the atmosphere – over the hot-metal stink and booming noise of the foundry.

  Another crucible came to a stop and poured its contents in an arc of liquid fire into a mold, where it ran in rivulets into the depressions awaiting it. Now looking somewhat nervously at the invaders, with sparks cascading unnoticed around them and dancing by their feet, the workmen plied the flow with their long tools, seemingly more to make sure it behaved as expected than because they needed actively to push the process along.

  By reflex Stern and his men glanced toward the fire fountain. "Take them!" Highsmith shouted.

  The White Tree cultists opened fire. Two of Stern's men fell. Another backed away, firing an Uzi machine pistol from the hip. He screamed as bullets hit him but kept firing until he tripped backward over the edge of the molds and fell into the stream of molten metal cascading from the crucible. His scream rose in a crescendo, impossibly shrill. Steam gouted from his body as his flesh became fluid and sluiced from his bones. His body, half-skeletonized, sprawled across the glowing molds.

  Annja ducked as random bullets cracked overhead and whined in ricochets off the machinery around them. She wished she had ducked when the shooting first began, and not seen what she had just seen. Aidan hunkered beside her, looking sick.

  "What now?" he mouthed over the crackle of gunfire and shouts and screams.

  "We can't just hide," she shouted back to him. "They'll find us if we do."

  He nodded, swallowing spasmodically as if trying to control his emotions. Her stomach was churning. She turned away. She knew she could not afford to be incapacitated by a fit of nausea, however briefly.

  Without any dignified course coming to mind, Annja crawled on all fours toward the office where it protruded onto the shop floor. Coming within ten feet of it, with what she thought might be a lathe shielding her from the interior of the building where most of the action was, and a big red toolbox on wheels between her and the office, she cautiously reared up and peered over.

  Throughout the smelter, men fought furiously. Some fired at each other from behind cover. No one was having much success. Much of the equipment and even general clutter inside the vast building was steel or iron, massive enough to stop bullets. Other men whaled at each other with wrenches, metal rods, bits of scrap as far as Annja could tell. Some simply pummeled each other, wrestled, shrieked, gouged eyes and tore at throats with their teeth.

  "My God," Aidan gasped from her side. "I've never seen anything like this."

  They both ducked as a burst of gunfire raked across the top of the lathe table, bullets howling like lost souls as they tumbled to rip irregular holes in the thin sheet-metal wall above their heads.

  "The rage and passion – they're increasing it, trying to use it to manipulate them. But at the same time all that emotion is working on them, too. They're getting themselves into a frenzy, losing control," Annja said.

  A figure loomed up at the other end of the lathe. It was one of Stern's men in a torn tan shirt with epaulettes. His forehead had been cut open, turning his face to a mask of blood, making the green-dyed braid around his neck a brown-and-purplish mess. He aimed an Uzi at them, pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. He had fired his magazine dry. Screaming with frustration, he raised the Uzi above his head as if to smash them with it. His eyes rolled in pits of blood.

  From his crouch Aidan lashed out with his boot and caught the man squarely in the groin. The kick lifted the soles of the Malkuth devotee's heavy work shoes an inch off the greasy concrete floor.

  Annja's close-combat instructors had warned her the famous crotch-kick did not always work. Whether he was too adrenalized for the neural overload associated with a blow to the testicles to have much effect, or just wasn't susceptible, the kick did no more than stagger the man. He came on again growling incoherently.

  "Bloody stay down, will you?" Aidan said. He jumped up and smashed an overhand right into the man's face. Annja heard the buckling crunch as the cartilage in the man's nose broke. He went over backward with blood pulsing from his nostrils, slammed the back of his head hard on the pavement and lay moaning and moving feebly.

  "Good shot," Annja said. Aidan waved his hand in the air, grimacing. "You didn't break it?" she asked.

  He flexed his fingers. "No. No thanks to myself. Stupid bloody stunt to pull."

  "It worked," Annja pointed out.

  A violent heave of shadow caught Annja's eye in the gloom. Another figure appeared twenty feet behind them, back toward the entrance. It leveled a long-barreled weapon at them. Annja threw her arms around Aidan and half vaulted, half rolled with him over the top of the lathe. A shotgun boomed, yellow muzzle-flare blooming. Lead pellets skittered across the floor and against the lathe's metal pedestal where the two had crouched an eyeblink before.

  Annja landed hard and Aidan's weight came down on top of her and squashed the breath from her body.

  By force of will alone she sucked air back into her lungs with a great convulsive inhalation. She shoved Aidan aside, rolled to her feet, gathered herself and sprang.

  She heard the shotgun slide being racked as she jumped over some kind of waist-high mechanism covered in black plastic and curling duct tape. She steeled herself to receive the next charge of shot at contact range. Instead she cleared the plastic-wrapped machine unopposed and the sole of her boot caught the gunman in the chest in a flying kick. He windmilled backward, the shotgun flying from his hand.

  Annja did a graceless three-point landing. Pain shot from her knee where it struck the concrete floor. The impact was so savage that white lightning seemed to thread through her brain. Across the main floor someone shouted and opened up on her with an automatic weapon of some sort. To her intense relief her knee did not lock or give way when she came up on hands and feet and scrambled like a four-legged spider back to cover.

  Aidan awaited her, crouched down in a narrow aisle, hair and eyes wild. With a white-knuckled hand he brandished a crescent wrench he'd found somewhere. Unfortunately the tool was no more than ten inches long and did not make a threatening weapon.

  "Listen," she told him, breathing hard and massaging her right knee, which throbbed. "You just stay here until everybody's distracted. Then try to find the jar."

  "What are you going to do?" Pascoe asked.

  "Something showy and stupid enough to make sure everybody's looking at me," she said.

  "Wait – "

  She didn't. She couldn't. Bent low she scrambled several feet deeper into the foundry, back toward the office, and peered over a steel table with a shelf beneath it piled thick with rusty junk.

  The fight raged unabated. She guessed both the White Tree and the Malkuth contingents had called in reinforcements. At least eight bodies were lying in her field of vision, on the floor, draped over equipment, sprawled at the base of a metal stair up to the catwalk. Meanwhile pairs and groups still shot and screamed and fought. She wasn't even sure they were paying attention to whether the person they raged and raved and struggled to destroy was on their own side or not.

  Men brandishing firearms had made little impression on the foundry workers. Men firing firearms made quite the impression indeed. Wisely the wiry-muscled men in the hard hats had vanished. The white-collar types had retreated within the office and locked the door, leaving two of their number lying unmoving outside. One was the skinny youngster who had been shot in the knee. He had apparently bled out or been finished off somehow. Possibly he'd just stopped a stray round; it was clearly not his day, Annja thought.

  Wreathed in pink ghostly flames a new crucible swung out of the furnace, white-hot metal slopping over the sides. It was an alarming sight. It would have dumped its load across the already filled mold pallet, which had not been removed out the side door along the steel track laid into the concrete floor when the last crucible had emptied itself into it. But instead of flooding the shop floor with liquid metal the vessel stopped to swing perilously midway between furnace and mold. Someone out of Annja's sight must have thrown a cutoff switch.

  A man, one of Highsmith's devotees by his clothing, which looked as if it had been expensively tailored before it had been torn and yanked every which way, began hacking at the office door with a fire ax. It was a bizarre gesture. To either side the walls were mostly window and many of them had been shot out. He could have simply scrambled through with little effort. Evidently the violent frenzy had so gripped him he never even considered the possibility.

  Is he possessed? Annja wondered. Maybe he's done it all himself, indulging himself in an ecstasy of pure destruction. It came to her to wonder, with a shock, whether the demons everyone spoke of were actual entities, possessed of any separate existence of their own, or were merely projections of human anger and fear and hatred.

  Something possessed that poor dog in Haifa, she thought. But couldn't it have been worked into a frenzy by human rage and cruelty?

  She shook herself. There was no time for metaphysical speculation – especially since the office door gave way after no more than three good whacks. The White Tree cultist charged inside, making for half a dozen office workers cowering from him. His ax was raised and an expression of mad joy twisted what otherwise might have been a handsome young face.

  Annja raced forward. She jumped, easily clearing the office structure's low side wall, ducking her head so as to fit through the vacant window. Her boots skidded with a crunch on the broken glass littering the floor. She had to flex her legs deeply to keep from falling over in it.

  The crazed man swung the ax at her. She jumped aside. The axhead rang on concrete, throwing up chips. With wild speed he raised it again and chopped at her.

  She ducked. The axe struck a heavy wooden table littered with drawings by the wall. The blade bit deep. It stuck.

  Annja shifted her balance, intending to disarm the man and then put him down, maybe dislocate his shoulder and take him out of the fight – or the fight out of him, in any case. But with mad strength he yanked the ax free in a shower of splinters, throwing it up and back over his head with such violence he almost overbalanced.

  It was too much. Annja concentrated. The sword was in her hand. The man screamed and started to swing at her.

  Blood gouted from his chest as she slashed horizontally through his torso, right below where his nipples must have been. He went to his knees. Blood welled up and slopped over his chin as it sprayed out to the sides from the wound. The ax fell from his hands with a clatter. His eyes rolled up and he fell forward at her feet.

  From the corner of her eye she saw someone point a weapon at her. She ducked as a shot crashed. Where the bullet went she didn't know.

  "Keep low," she said in Portuguese to the terrified office workers, who stared at her as if she were covered with green scales. She saw there were doors at the back of the office, apparently leading outside. "Get out of the building if you can. Lock yourselves in someplace out of sight if you can't."

  It was the woman who warned her. She hadn't noticed before that there was a slender middle-aged woman in the group huddled in the office. She looked past Annja and her dark eyes went wide.

  Annja spun toward the door and uncoiled from the floor like a striking rattlesnake, thrusting the sword in a long lunge.

  Chapter 26

  The sword's tip caught a man wearing a Malkuth necklace in the center of his broad chest.

  He lowered the Jericho 941 Baby Eagle handgun he had been pointing at her as if his arm was suddenly too tired to support its two-plus pounds. For a moment Annja stood face-to-face with him. He looked no older than thirty. His eyes were blue and wide. They seemed to stare through Annja without seeing her. His mouth opened but only blood came out.

  His legs sagged. His jaw worked. Annja pushed him out into the cacophony of the smelter.

  His body jerked as a bullet struck it. The man winced and his eyes rolled up in his head. She pushed him farther away. With the last capability of his own legs he staggered back three steps. From all around the foundry's cavernous interior the firefly lights of muzzle-flashes winked as at least twenty firearms opened up on him. The hammering noise of gunshots was like the devil's own forge, echoing within the metal walls.

  As the already dying man performed his jerking dance of death Annja willed the sword back to the otherwhere. Taking a step out from the doorway, she jumped up. With hands reversed she caught the edge of the office space's low roof and pulled herself up.

  The shooting suddenly stopped. As Annja had hoped, many of the gunmen had exhausted their magazines and needed to reload. She hoped to make use of the lull in the gunfight.

  "Listen to me," she shouted in English. "You've got to stop this! Can't you see you're being used?"

  "My, my," called an American-accented voice. Mark Peter Stern stepped into view from a side niche near the open maw of the furnace. It must have been wiltingly hot but he looked fresh, and his tropical-weight suit didn't seem to have lost a bit from the sharpness of its creases. "You're a woman of unusual talents for a TV archaeologist," he said.

  "I'm a real archaeologist," Annja declared with a defiant toss of her head.

  "You are the inconvenient young woman who came to my manor in the guise of a researcher," a voice boomed from up high. Annja raised her head. Up on the catwalk Sir Martin Highsmith stood, his own shades-of-white suit gleaming as if spotlit in the glare of the halted crucible, whose contents had only cooled to yellow from near white. Its sides glowed red. "Enlighten us, then. Used by whom?"

  "Demons," she said.

  The devotees of the warring sects had given off their wrestling and sniping to stare at her openmouthed. Her heart was pounding. She could see a good thirty of them still standing.

  Stern laughed. "That's a good one. Demons." His followers looked at each other, then voiced an uncertain laugh of their own.

  "Don't be ridiculous," Stern called out.

  "You think when you get the jar you'll control them," she called. She fought to keep desperation out of her voice. She was losing them, she knew. I hope this is providing enough of a diversion for Aidan, she thought. "But you're already in mortal peril of your souls."

  "Foolish young woman!" Highsmith declared in tones that rang like a great bronze bell. "Do you really think we have no means of protecting ourselves?"

  She looked up at him. For a moment he seemed surrounded by a nimbus of blackness.

  Suddenly she understood what was happening.

  Stern and Highsmith were willing participants in creating the frenzy. Their followers truly believed they were following a righteous path. And in the quest for power everyone had been possessed by evil.

  Up on the catwalk, surrounded by heat shimmer and flitting darkness, Sir Martin Highsmith began to laugh. It was a deep, rich, melodious laugh.

  Mark Peter Stern joined in. His laugh was harsh and rang throughout the metal sepulcher, clearly audible above the still hungry roaring of the furnace.

  One by one the men of the rival sects joined in.

  Maybe I should consider switching to a career in stand-up comedy, Annja thought.

  "Listen to me, please," she cried, shouting to make herself heard above the foundry sounds and the roar of laughter, now showing clear manic overtones. "We can work together. We can work things out like reasonable people."

  Sir Martin's laugh cut off as if he'd been chopped across the throat. Instantly his face was suffused with blood. "You're just like all of us," he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth. "You just want the jar for yourself. Kill the meddling bitch!" he screamed.

  Annja launched herself up and out as guns spoke. A great iron hook hung from the metal ceiling girders by a chain, ten feet from the lip of the office roof and about three feet above Annja's head. She grabbed the hook and swung on it.

  A half-dozen rival cultists stood clumped together by the foot of the stairway up to the catwalk along the far wall. They had been brutalizing one another with fists and makeshift clubs when Annja put in her appearance. They seemed to have all been able to put their hands on firearms, though. Their aim was thrown off by Annja's unexpected – and unexpectedly swift – movement. In fact when she let go the hook and came swooping down on them they were all too startled to track and shoot at her.

  It was the very response she'd been hoping for.

  She came down with both feet in the well-padded midsection of a blue-collar Malkuth hardman. The man staggered and sat down hard. Suitably braked, Annja landed with both feet on the concrete in the midst of the five still standing. She had hopes of preventing more bloodshed. She strongly suspected that the high-frequency emotion of combat and the actual spilling of life force were both feeding the demons in everyone.

 

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