The Chosen

A blur of motion in her eye's corner brought her a quarter turn right in time to parry another ax-style stroke of the pipe with the flat of her long blade. For a moment she stared past the crossed weapons at the fat, astonished, sweat-streamed face of her opponent.

She pushed off to deflect a wild machete slash over her head. She was a whirlwind, parrying rapid hacks and slashes from both increasingly desperate men.

She was breathing hard, almost gagging on the diesel fumes and stench of blood and dust and viscera. The air was thin – but at 7,240 feet it was almost the same altitude as the San Esequiel dig, where she'd spent ample time to be acclimated.

But nothing drains like combat. It was why prizefighters did roadwork so obsessively. Intense exertion took it out of you. But the mental stress was what really sucked you dry.

The revolver began to go off like spastic firecrackers again. All three combatants ducked as a bullet moaned low over their heads, then jumped as another kicked up dirt right beside A

The machete guy turned to curse out his buddy with the gun.

A

Her sword took the machete wielder transversely across the back. It opened him right up. His head snapped back, his knees gave way and he fell into the alley grit.

Screaming with surprising shrillness for one so huge, the fat man rushed her with pipe held high. She pirouetted, lunged, thrust.

The tip of the sword took him in the sternum, punched through ribs, heart and ribs again to stand a foot out from his back.

He fell over backward.

The tight embrace of bone and flab pulled the sword right out of A

She looked back over her shoulder. Her final attacker stood thirty feet away. He had the revolver open and a new scatter of silvery empties at his feet. He was frantically trying to fumble a fresh cartridge into the cylinder.

Their eyes met. She experienced a strange sense of darkness, felt an inexplicable internal impact.

The cartridge at last slid into the chamber.

A

She grabbed its hilt. The revolver came on line. The click as it was cocked seemed like the loudest sound in the world.

A

She cocked her arm back, threw. The unwieldy two-foot machete turned over twice in the thick, humid air and punched its wide tip vertically through the gunman's forehead.

For a moment he stood there staring at her. His eyes had gone very wide.

A single trickle of blood ran down between them.

He collapsed. The old revolver did not fire.

A

Police sirens rose and fell like a chorus of electronic locusts from all around her. There was little chance of a tall, leggy gringaon foot escaping u

She hauled herself up enough to stagger over to sit sideways in the rear driver's-side seat of the cab, with her legs out the now-missing door. It was time to play soft and sheltered American tourist lady much too totally freaked out by an eruption of sudden violence and her own near brush with death to give a coherent account of the proceedings.

It would not be much of a stretch.

Chapter 10

As the Airbus A319 circled to altitude A

The police, as she anticipated, had spun their own story of what happened. It did notinclude an active role for a delicate middle-class American tourist in the back-alley bloodletting, extreme even by the standards of Mexico City street violence, that had left half a dozen hardmen dead. They assumed she could have been nothing but a helpless victim in whatever it was that transpired. Therefore she was no suspect.

As a tomboy who'd occasionally managed to cut loose from the orphanage and wander the seamy, steamy byways of predeluge New Orleans, A

This time the prevailing hypothesis was that one or more gang members had gone amok, resulting in internecine slaughter. The fact that one would-be kidnapper had a bullet hole from his buddy's revolver in his head, while the man with the revolver had another comrade's machete embedded in his,lent great credibility to that scenario.

Of course, drugs were also involved. A

The fact that someone recognized her as a television personality had helped. Considerably. She already knew that the various Knowledge Cha

She took a deep breath, forced residual tension to flow out of her with the air. She was bound for Albuquerque. The police had kept her overnight so she could answer further questions, under guard in her hotel room. By morning their theory had evolved enough tha they had lost interest in her. They suggested she leave the country as quickly as possible. She was up for that,even though it meant forgoing her intended trip to the silver town Plateros, near Fresnillos. She reckoned she had learned what she needed to in Mexico.

A male attendant, slim with receding hairline and hands crossed behind his back, passed by and nodded, smiling. She reciprocated. She sat by the window over the right wing of the modest two-engineAirbus. Right behind the starboard emergency exit, it was one of the best seats on the plane, with extra room to stretch her long legs. It was such a good seat she wondered if the police had bumped someone to get it for her.

The captain spoke up over the PA system. "If you look out the starboard windows, folks, you'll see one of Mexico's most spectacular sights – Mount Popocatepetl. MEX traffic control has routed us to pass near it as we climb to altitude. It's only seventy kilometers, or about forty-four miles, from downtown Mexico City. Rising 5,452 meters, or almost 18,000 feet, Popo is, like its legendary companion Ixtaccihuatl, that flat-topped mountain visible a bit to the left and past it, an active volcano. Fortunately, at present neither is acting up much."

A

She sighed again and got out her iPod. She stuffed the earbuds in her ears. She hated them. The right one would never stay put, but they gave good sound and most of all were highly portable. She dialed up a New Age playlist. New Age music drove her crazy in short order if she actually listenedto it. But it soothed her wonderfully as a background, especially when it blotted out the incidental environmental sounds of airplane travel.