Restless Soul - Alex Archer [104]
She heard a siren, but it was distant and receding, attending to another matter and leaving this private war to her and the remaining thugs. Both of them fired, missing because she was moving so fast and the shadows from the van helped cloak her, darting and weaving and never staying still for even a heartbeat. The slugs hit the side of the van, one of them breaking a headlight and making everything murkier.
Annja preferred that, not wanting to see too closely the faces of the men she was going to have to kill. She was haloed by the sole headlight, backlit like a movie monster as her feet churned to eat up the distance, feeling another bullet graze her left arm, and changing her grip so she held the sword only in her right hand.
Blood flowed down her left arm, that hand practically useless now, and mingled with the sweat as she hollered, “Madness!” once more and swung her weapon with all of her waning strength. She’d aimed high, and with one blow killed one of the men. Spinning from the energy of the swing, she followed through and struck the second, felling him, too.
She slouched forward, panting, holding her left arm in close to her body, the fire of it fading and turning to numbness. She needed a hospital. But more than that she needed to end this war and finish the puzzle. Gulping in the humid, bug-filled air she turned and staggered toward the SUV. A man climbed out, taller than the others, thinner, and with hair so pale it looked like mist. In the light from the SUV’s dome she saw that he wasn’t Vietnamese, and that his deeply lined face was so pale it branded him a Caucasian.
“Sandman,” she guessed.
“And you are a madwoman.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “Hands out to your sides.” She raised the sword for emphasis, and he complied. She listened for any movement, either from the few men she’d knocked out rather than killed or from the vehicles, hinting that there were still more inside.
“You are impressive,” he said after a few moments had passed. “An army unto yourself. I should have not dismissed Nang’s ramblings so easily. He called you a pretty demon. I should have brought twice this many men.”
“Who are you?”
“Sandman, as you know,” he said. His face was an emotionless mask, cold and empty. “It is the only name I’ve used in, well, quite a long while.”
Annja put him in his sixties.
“Tell me about this, about all of this.” She pointed the sword behind her to the back of the antiques store. She had plenty of other questions, but she’d start there.
He gave a great shrug of his shoulders, and she realized that beneath the long coat he wore, he was frail and rail-thin. “What about it?” he said after another few minutes had passed.
In the silence she’d heard nothing but her own labored breathing and the buzzing of the damnable insects. Then somewhere out on the street a car horn honked.
“The smuggling,” she started. “The cave in Northern Thailand.” She paused. “All the guns. Vietnam and all of this!”
He leaned against the side of the SUV and dropped his hands to his sides. “Did you kill Lanh?”
Annja pointed the sword at his chest. “No. But he is dead. I don’t think anyone killed him.”
“He hadn’t been well,” he said. “It was only a matter of time. It’s only a matter of time for all of us, actually.”
She narrowed her eyes and her voice dripped with ire. “Tell…me…about…all…of…this.”
“That could take a bit.”
“I’m not going anywhere. And neither are you.”
“Apparently not.” He let out a long sigh. “I suppose ‘all of this’ started shortly after the Vietnam War. A police action, they called it. I’m sure the war was long over before you were born.”
Annja listened, concentrating to stay on her feet and refusing to give in to the pain and blood loss.
“I survived the war, and I didn’t go home. The gold was too tempting, you see. And I found things in Vietnam to my liking.”
He explained that he’d been a soldier with a rifle company that had come across a stash of relics on a tour during 1966. A collection of golden Buddhas had been hidden by monks