But they had wandered way too far from the beaten path. Annja's instincts were screaming.

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. Annja had the acute sense of being watched, from every dark hole of a doorway or gap between badly fitting stones. By eyes that were anything but friendly.

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.

Annja slapped her palms twice experimentally against the window. She couldn't remember if side windows were made from sugar glass the way windshields were, to minimize the risk of their turning into sprays of shrapnel sharper than any razor when broken. She wasn't too sanguine a Mexican taxicab would have such amenities anyway. Especially an outlaw cab – even an outlaw with official sanction.

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, Annja flew out of the cab almost as fast.

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, Annja had dropped flat on the ground, just catching herself, palms and toes. The bullets passed harmlessly over her. Two starred the taxi's rear windshield and made the red-and green-and-white fringe inside bounce. One knocked a maggot-colored divot in the pink wall on the driver's side. Two went who knew where.

The last smacked, audibly, into the forehead of the tall man coming up right behind Annja, a big 45 autopistol in his hand. The shot killed him so quickly his finger didn't even twitch enough to set off the sensitive single-action trigger.

When she heard the sixth shot crack Annja jumped. She snapped herself upright as if spring-loaded, then vaulted over the top of the car.

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 Annja by sheer luck, even at close range and closing fast. Annja felt the left side of her blouse, which had come out of her cargo pants during the proceedings, tugged as if by invisible fingers. Another shot brushed her right forearm.

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.

Annja brought her feet down and snapped herself standing again. Then she threw herself into another roll. As she did the pipe came whistling down in a two-handed overhead stroke meant to turn her skull to mush. Instead it glanced off her left buttock.

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 Annja had powerful legs. He doubled as if he'd sucked a slug to the belly and sat down hard.

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. Annja darted past the pipe wielder, who was struggling to breathe. She crouched by the front bumper as glass, blasted from the windshield by a back-to-front shot, rained down on her head and shoulders.

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

"Kill her!" someone shouted.

Things were getting tight for Annja. She had a machete coming up fast on her left. There was almost certainly another coming down the other side of the car to catch her. And all too soon the pipe man was going to suck enough air back into his lungs to kickstart his central nervous system and get back to the party.

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, Annja caught it with the sword, guided it past her and down. As momentum carried her attacker by she rotated her wrist and swung her weapon backhand. Right up the line of his extended arm.

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.

Annja was already looking the other way, brandishing the sword in a glittering horizontal arc over the cab's dented hood.

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 Annja's peripheral vision and her nose filled with the stench of stale sweat.

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.