Free Pandora's Temple by Jon Land

and accept our place in it.”
    McCracken looked at Wareagle across the table, grinning. “Good. Because I was having trouble picturing you in a dress.”
    Wareagle looked down at the hand that had just set the water glass down on the table. “You’re not wearing your ring, Blainey.”
    “Neither are you.”
    “The difference being I never do.”
    “Maybe I don’t feel especially worthy of it right now.”
    Wareagle turned his gaze toward the soft case lying across the extra chair. “How old is the sword?”
    “Five hundred years, give or take a decade.”
    “How old was it yesterday?”
    “About the same.”
    Wareagle leaned back just enough to make his chair creak. “My point exactly.”
    “What about last week? Believe I was considerably younger before Juárez.”
    “Why us after so long, Blainey?”
    “Suit who came calling said he came to us because we were the only ones who could get it done.”
    “But you don’t believe him.”
    “I think he came to us because no one else would take the job. Suicide mission.”
    “Anything but, as it turned out.”
    “I don’t know what’s worse, Indian. The feeling we were done or the feeling maybe we should be.”
    Wareagle leaned forward, so fluidly that his chair didn’t make a sound this time. “There’s another story my people tell of a Sioux warrior who once defended his tribe single-handedly against a Cherokee raiding party. It was winter and the Cherokees were foraging for food when they came upon the village. But in snow and cold, the Sioux warrior struck them all down. The legend says he covered himself in ice and snow so the Cherokee looked past him into the air. And when it was over, instead of celebrating, he wept. Not out of guilt or remorse, but because there was no one left to kill.”
    “Did he live to fight another day?”
    “The legend doesn’t say, Blainey.”
    “Neither does ours.”

CHAPTER 15
New Orleans
    Katie DeMarco moved quickly down the sidewalk, cell phone glued to her ear, willing the connection to come through. She knew they’d found her again; spotting jacket-clad men on this blistering hot New Orleans day baking the asphalt beneath a sun-drenched sky was a dead giveaway there, even before she glimpsed them talking into their wrist-mounted microphones when she passed by.
    She’d ridden the eighteen-wheeler all the way to the Dupuy Storage and Forwarding facility, climbing down once the cargo door was raised open to the shocked stares of the workers. Katie paid them no heed, just hurried off before they could gather their thoughts.
    “Hey! . . . Hey! ”
    She never acknowledged the calls shouted her way, walking until she found a bus stop and climbed onto a bus bound for the nearby downtown district. She stank of coffee, the pungent aroma so imbedded in her nostrils that she couldn’t shake it.
    Upon reaching the French Quarter, Katie had purchased a throwaway cell phone in a drugstore, stepping outside to find more jacketed figures seemingly talking into their hands directly across the street from her. There was no choice now; she had to risk making the call while she still had the chance, convinced those at the other end were in at least as much danger as she.
    Katie dialed Todd Lipton’s satellite number, her pace kicked up to a fast walk just short of a jog. She heard a click, followed by a harsh buzzing sound that indicated his phone was ringing in Greenland.
    “Hello,” Lipton answered finally, through the static bursts clogging the line.
    “Todd, it’s me.”
    “Is that you—”
    “Don’t use my name. It’s not safe. None of us are safe.”
    “You’re breaking up. I can hardly hear you. Could you say that again?”
    Katie DeMarco moved the phone closer to her mouth, continuing to weave through pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk. “I said you’re not safe . I think Ocean Bore is on to us.”
    “I heard ‘on to us.’ Did you say on to us?”
    “Yes, Todd. You need to take—”
    “I can’t hear