Free Paradox by Alex Archer Page B

with his own piece, a shiny chrome Beretta. Then he
realized it was the wrong hand and the wrong angle to shoot into the backseat.
His elbow was in the way, his shoulder not hinged to rotate far enough to bring
the gun to bear.

In his moment of dithering Annja rammed the Glock's blunt muzzle up into the
notch of the man's jaw, right behind the ear. He continued to try to get his
weapon aimed at her. Knowing she had no other choice, she pulled the long,
heavy trigger.

The gun's roar was astonishingly loud in the closed car. The brief, almost
white muzzle flash illuminated a look of terrible terminal surprise on the
man's face.

The driver slumped forward over the steering wheel. The car continued to roll
down the street. Fortunately it wasn't going very fast.

It didn't matter. For any number of reasons, all of them good, all of them
pressing, Annja was not going to stay in the charnel-house backseat a heartbeat
longer than necessary. She threw herself over the slumped inert mass of the man
on her right and yanked at the door handle.

The door opened. An icy blast of air hit her in the face. The diesel fumes of
downtown Ankara smelled as sweet as the finest garden in the height of summer
next to what she'd been breathing the last desperate minute or two. Which was
all the time the fight had lasted.

She scrambled over the dead man and threw herself out the door. She tucked a
shoulder and rolled. She still hit pretty hard, slamming her shoulder and then
a hip. But she'd had gymnastic training and martial arts training in falling
safely, plus way more experience at diving for safety on unsympathetic surfaces
than she cared to think about. She wound up on her back staring up between
dark, blank three-and four-story building faces at a dense, low cloud ceiling underlit
to a sullen amber by the city lights. She was bruised, contused, but alive,
conscious and with nothing she could detect broken or even dislocated.

The car rolled another twenty feet, hopped the curb and slammed into a darkened
light standard. The car's horn began to blare.

Annja felt like just staying there a spell, enjoying the comforting cold
hardness of asphalt on her back, the icy air on her face and in her lungs, the
lovely, lovely clouds. Few beds had ever felt more welcome.

But she knew better than that. Anyway, her body did. Survival instincts kicked
in. She got to her feet quickly and stumbled away into the nearest pool of
welcoming dark she could find.

Chapter 8
    "Pick up. Pick up."
Annja hated when people told her answering machine that. Now she was repeating
it as fervently as a prayer, listening to the ring through her cell phone.

She'd found herself a nice, dark, narrow alley. The smell of garbage was
appalling enough, she imagined hopefully, to discourage even street bums.

She was covered head to toe in blood drying to a sticky second skin. Although
she was beginning to come down from the adrenaline rush, feeling shaky and
clammy and not so happy in the stomach, her nerves still just stood out all
over her like porcupine quills.

She had fumbled and almost dropped the phone as she punched in the number. She
cursed herself for not having put it on speed-dial.

"Hello?"

Her knees buckled. Never in any moment of her existence had she ever expected
to hear sweet music in the voice of a man like Leif Baron.

"It's me," she said.

She wasn't sure if hostile ears might be listening to her conversation—which
was, after all, being broadcast over the airwaves like any other radio
transmission. She had to presume that any hitters heavy enough to plant a bomb
on a man as high-ranking as a general, and send three goons in a
top-of-the-line Mercedes to sweep the street of any witnesses, could well swing
the resources to listen in on cell phone calls.

There was a pause. Then, "Hello, me. What's gone wrong?"

A breath she didn't even realize she was holding gusted out of her in a sigh.
Her hands were shaky with relief. Hang on, girl, she commanded herself