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?”
His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “What do you mean? Of course it would do.”
“Do you think all the evil went out of the world when Solomon sealed the demons in that jar, Aidan? The demons may personify human evil, abet it, but they don’t cause it. Humans do that themselves. Don’t they?”
Aidan was frowning. But he was also listening. Annja sensed his struggle. He had experienced so much horror. He had heard her story. He simply didn’t know what to believe.
“Treasure hunters sought out the jar and released the demons back into the world because of greed. Wasn’t that evil? But obviously they did it when the demons were trapped in the jar. Right?” She hoped she could reach him.
“And after you’ve trapped all the demons, and you find out evil hasn’t left the world—what then, Aidan? When you start to feel frustrated in your very praiseworthy desire to do ultimate good—and the demons start to whisper from their captivity that they can give you the power to do the good you so want to do—what will you do then?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But—” He raised his head. “I hear them now. Whispering to me. They’re telling me not to listen to you, Annja.”
She caught a breath in her throat.
He smiled. “We know what their advice is worth, now, don’t we, Annja love? What about you? Do you want it, then?”
“No.” She hoped she wasn’t answering too quickly, perhaps making him think she was trying to cover uncertainty with emphasis. She wasn’t. She had no interest in the relic other than to keep it from causing more harm. “It isn’t for me, Aidan,” she said plainly.
He glared around him as if at a flock of gnats buzzing about his head. “Should I destroy it, then?”
He held it out over the crucible. Orange light glowed on its rounded belly. The Russians raised their guns again. Korolin shouted them down.
“Do you really want to destroy such an artifact, such a part of history?” Annja called out.
He sighed and looked at Korolin. “Your principal will hire professional archaeologists to see to the jar’s preservation?”
“He has already done so, Mr. Pascoe.”
“And if we give you the jar, what then? What becomes of us?”
Korolin shrugged. “We walk out of here. You get on with your young lives.”
“Do you trust him, Annja?”
She shrugged. “They could have shot me,” she said. “I don’t see we have any choice but to trust them.”
He drew in a deep breath. When he sighed it out he seemed to lose an inch or two of height. “Very well,” he said.
He tossed the jar to Korolin. The Russian fielded it deftly.
He gestured briskly. A man with his AKS hanging from a waist-length sling by his side brought a bulky satchel. When he opened it Annja noticed the sides were unusually thick, as if insulated. She was reminded incongruously of the packs pizza delivery stores used to keep their pies warm on their way to customers.
A man even shorter and skinnier than Korolin whom Annja had not noticed previously, in a rumpled brown suit, came forward and frowned at it through thick-rimmed and thick-lensed glasses. He nodded abruptly.
At a nod from Korolin the priest with the most grandly decorated hat and the grandest beard came up and blessed jar, satchel or both with sweeping gestures. Then Korolin carefully placed the jar in the satchel, closed it up and handed it to the bearlike man.
Korolin turned to look at Annja. “My patron, Mr. Garin Braden, thanks you,” he said with a smile. Annja’s blood ran cold.
He nodded and smiled. “Good day, Ms. Creed, Mr. Pascoe.” And he walked with his bantam-rooster walk out the side door into the sunlight.
His men followed without a backward glance.