The Chosen

But they had wandered way too far from the beaten path. A

The street was narrow, unlike the wide, tree-lined boulevards that veined the vast metropolis. That wasn't entirely unexpected of a back route. But the buildings all looked old, without either the affected quaintness or authentic grandeur of, say, the buildings around the Zócalo. They ran to cracked white or pink stucco and bulging, tilting walls that looked to consist of no more than random piles of ill-chosen rocks. Where much of Mexico City resonated with the energy one encountered in midtown Manhattan or Buenos Aires or Río, this place had a stealthy, half-deserted vibe.

Nor did it seem the lack of activity on the claustrophobic street resulted from early-onset siesta. A

Too late she remembered reading about taxis being a popular medium for armed robbery and kidnapping in the violence-plagued Federal District. But this taxi had an official emblem, she thought wildly. It was identical to the others lined up in front of the hotel.

"Turn around," she shouted.

Instead the taxi turned into an alley that been invisible to her a moment before and stopped. Instantly she yanked the door handle.

It came off in her hand.

The driver jumped out so ferociously his door scraped pink stucco dust off the wall of the building to the cab's left. He ran away down the alley.

A

Instead she lay back at her full length, which put the back of her head and shoulders against the far door. She placed the corrugated rubber soles of her hiking boots against the door and pushed with all her strength.

The flimsy door banged off a cracked concrete patch of wall and fell into the hard-packed alley dirt with a clatter and crash of glass breaking. With the strap of her overnight bag already looped across her shoulder, A

She saw both ends of the alley were blocked.

There were six of them, spread out across the alley. The trio facing her, approaching the rear of the stalled cab, had two machetes and a rusty-looking revolver. The three coming from the front carried two semiautomatic pistols and a length of white-painted metal pipe.

Knowing her only hope was to act quickly, she darted straight at the bunch with the two big knives. The guy with the revolver promptly cranked off his entire cylinder.

Even before he cut loose, A

The last smacked, audibly, into the forehead of the tall man coming up right behind A

When she heard the sixth shot crack A

The guy on the far wing from the deceased pistolero,coming up on the cab's front passenger side, blazed away at her with some kind of 9 mm pistol. He held the piece on its side, rendering it utterly impossible to aim.

The impact of seeing his intended victim hurtling through space, apparently right at him, startled him. He sprayed the ground, the car, the walls, the sky even more comprehensively than the first guy had, and with a good deal more bullets.

Shooting the way he was, he would only hit A

She cleared the entire taxi, hitting the far side on her feet. She went instantly into a forward roll as her target finished emptying his high-cap magazine through the approximate space she would have occupied had she stayed up. As she came over she drove both heels into his chest in a sort of combination ax-and-thrust kick. Impact shivered down her legs. She heard ribs crunch. Her target was thrown into a wild backward somersault. His head hit the pavement at a deadly angle and the pistol dropped from his lifeless hand.

A

Pained but not injured she came up yet again onto her feet. She turned left. The pipe man was cocking his steel club over his head for another crack. She skipped sideways and pistoned a side kick into the pit of his stomach. She didn't have time to roll her hip over and get the full weight of her body behind it; it was just a leg kick. And his stomach was well padded. But A

Loud noises from just up the alley indicated the man with the revolver had managed to fumble at least a couple of cartridges into his weapon. A

"I got the bitch," a voice shouted in Spanish from her near left.

"Kill her!" someone shouted.

Things were getting tight for A

It was time.

She willed the sword into her hand. And sprang like a panther.

The man who'd claimed he had her howled and swung his big, wide blade at her from beside the front tire. Striking across her body, A

The sword caught him right between clavicle and Adam's apple. It cut through skin and cartilage with only the slightest hesitation. When the edge hit his neckbone she felt a jar. His head drooped. She pulled back the blade.

The man's body hit the ground hard and slid, limbs sprawling, neck pumping great gushes of blood into the dust.

A

The machete man coming around from her right yelped. He jumped back. The sword's tip swished harmlessly before his scrawny chest.

A shot cracked. The taxicab roof sounded like a Caribbean steel drum as the soft-nosed .38 slug skipped off it like a stone off a millpond. At the same time a shadow loomed in A

She threw herself into a forward roll as more ineffectual shots echoed down the alley. The steel pipe buckled the taxi's hood with a bang. She rolled to her feet in time to parry a downward machete stroke with a ring and a shower of sparks.