“We made it!” screamed Kate, not believing it even as she shouted. She knew that most of the exhilaration she felt was a pure adrenaline high but she did not care. Lucian grunted something and fought the wheel.

The spare on the right front wheel gave way then with a pop louder than the gunfire had been, the Dacia slewed right, Lucian fought it left, and then they were sideways and flipping down the road. Kate threw her arms over her head, felt her knees bang the underside of the dash, and then she was watching through the broken windshield as the road, sky, road, and sky alternated past.

The Dacia rolled a final time, came to a stop on its wheels, and then slid sideways down a thirty-foot bank into the river.

The old car did not go fully into the water but stopped upside down and wedged between a boulder and a tree with the hood underwater and the left wheel spinning. The right wheel was only tattered rubber on a twisted rim. Kate realized that she was seeing all this from outside the car and she sat up, braced herself on a rock the size of her head, and looked at the Dacia upside down, its headlights under the water.

“Lucian!” She ran to the other side of the vehicle, found him half pinned under the driver's seat that had come out of its brackets and fallen on him, andignoring every rule she had learned as an emergency room internpulled him from the wreckage. There was no sound of pursuit yet from the highway above them.

“Lucian,” she whispered, dragging him to the shelter of trees downstream. “We made it. We got past them.”

“Yeah,” he grunted.

She laid him against the roots of the largest tree and scrambled back to the wreckage, feeling around for the pistol. She could not find it, but she came up with the binoculars that had been in the backseat. She put the leather strap around her neck and waded back to Lucian, listening hard. Still no sound of the vehicles.

Lucian was sitting up and was inhaling deeply as if to catch his breath after having the wind knocked out of him. She knelt next to him. “I think I'm all right. My God, what a mess. Are you all right, Lucian?” His face was very white in the dim light.

He steadied himself with one hand against the tree. “Not really,” he said. “I think I'm going to lie down a minute.”

She heard the armored car shifting gears and moving down the road toward them. A spotlight stabbed into the water two hundred yards away. “No, come on, we have to get across the river and into the woods there,” she hissed in his ear. “Come on, Lucian.” She lifted him to a sitting position and pulled her hands away thick with something.

“Just . . . rest a minute,” he muttered. “Am o durere aici, Kate. Uh . . . I mean, I have a pain right here. Ma doare pieptul.” He touched his chest.

Kate pulled him forward and ripped away the tatters of his shirt. As far as she could tell in the darkness, there were four large entry wounds high on his back, two near or above the spine, and another entry wound low and to the right. She felt his chest and stomach but found only one exit wound. It was very large and hemorrhaging badly.

“Ah, Lucian,” she whispered and used his tattered shirt as a compression bandage. “Ah, Lucian . . .”

“Tired,” whispered Lucian. “Ma simt obosit.”

“We'll rest here,” she whispered, cradling him and stroking his brow with her free hand. She felt him nod against her. The armored car was almost above them now. She smelled the diesel stink of its exhaust.

“Babe,” whispered Lucian, his voice urgent, “I forgot to tell you something.”

“It's all right,” crooned Kate, holding the crude bandage in place. The bundle was soaked with his blood and she could hear the bubbling. It was what they had called a sucking chest wound in the emergency room. Only the most immediate and extensive care could save someone with a sucking chest wound. “It's all right,” she whispered, rocking him.

“Good,” said Lucian in a relieved voice, and died.

She felt him go. She felt the energy and consciousness and spark go out of him like air from a ripped balloon. If she had been religious, she would have thought that she felt his soul leave him.

Kate knew CPR. She knew mouthtomouth. She knew a dozen hightech resuscitation techniques and a dozen basic ones. She knew that none of them would help Lucian now. She set her fingers on his eyelids, closed them, kissed them, and lowered him gently to the moss of the riverbank.

The armored car was chugging back and forth along the highway like some smelly dragon. Another vehicle had joined it and there were shouts back and forth. The searchlight swept the river thirty yards below, then twenty yards above where she crouched. Kate realized that the smashed Dacia was under a slight overhang of a boulder here and that they must have left a trail of tattered rubber and smashed metal for two hundred feet down the highway but evidently no major sign of where they went off the road.

It would not take them long. The searchlight was sweeping in a frenzied arc now and more voices were shouting up and down the highway.

Kate touched Lucian's cooling hand a final time and moved away along the riverbank, staying under the trees, freezing when footsteps pounded or searchlights stabbed through the bare branches. Two hundred yards upstream she stopped, gasping, and then pushed out into the water. The river was only four or five feet deep here but it was very fast and very, very cold. Kate gasped and kept wading, her shoes sliding across smooth rocks on the river bottom.

There were shouts from downstream and searchlights converged on the wreck of the Dacia. If Kate slipped now, the current would take her downstream to the light in seconds. She did not slip. By the time she reached the far side of the river, her legs were numb and her teeth were chattering uncontrollably. She ignored it and clawed toward the shallows.

More searchlights flicked across the river now. One slid over her just as she pulled herself from the water. It moved back immediately as if feeling for her, but she was crawling through the high reeds and mud toward the trees. There was an infinity of forest on this side of the water, stretching a half a mile or more between the river and the black hills. All dark. No roads here. No lights.

The sound of shots came across the water. They were shooting at her. Kate ignored it, stood, and staggered into the woods. There was just enough starlight there for her to check her watch. It was still working. It was ten twenty-seven.

She could see light far up the canyon, but the citadel was still two or three miles away according to Lucian. Staying deep within the protective screen of trees, Kate turned north and began walking.

Chapter Thirty-eight

1T took Kate an hour to walk to the lights, and the lights were only another village, not the citadel itself. She stayed in the trees, looked across the river at the tiny village busy with military traffic, police, and spotlighted roadblocks, and thought: Lucian mentioned this place . . . Capalineni. The citadel should be less than a mile north. But the river twisted under a bridge beyond the village, the highway ran along the west side of the river beyond that point, and the surrounding bluffs hid the citadel from sight. Kate could see an orange glow against the low clouds, but it seemed impossibly distant, impossibly high.

She glanced at her watch: 11:34. She would never travel that mile and climb that mountain in time. Lucian had said that there were steps switchbacking up the mountain crag to the citadel1400 steps. Kate tried to convert that to feet and height. A thousand feet above the river? At least. Exhausted, she leaned against a tree and concentrated on not weeping.

There was a shuffling, snorting sound to her left and Kate froze, then crouched with her fists clenched. She had no weapon, only the old binoculars strung around her neck. The sound came again and Kate slipped forward through the trees.