Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

by Gabriel Hunt

  “What exactly did you do to my . . . traveling companion?”

  “Miss Ficatier?” Amun said. “You were told to come alone to our rendezvous. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “If she’s been harmed—”

  “What? What, Mister Hunt? You are in no position to make threats. If I were you, I’d resign myself to cooperating. After all, I am sure your sister means more to you than some woman you just met in Nice.”

  “She’s my sister’s friend.”

  “She should have stayed home.” Amun snapped his fingers and the woman with the tray came forward again and collected their bowls. She vanished for a moment through the curtains, then returned with something new on the tray, a platter of rice topped with chunks of cooked lamb and onion. The dish smelled of marjoram and lemon juice. Once again, Gabriel eyed the utensils.

  “May I have a fork?” Gabriel asked.

  “It is customary to use your bread,” Amun said. He demonstrated by scooping up some of the food with a piece of pita.

  The woman was refilling their water glasses. As she turned back toward the kitchen, Gabriel shifted his foot to catch the hem of her garment, a full-body burqa. She took two steps before the tug on the fabric trapped under Gabriel’s heel overbalanced her and she tripped, sending the tray and extra utensils flying.

  Gabriel jumped up from the table to help her. “Are you all right?”

  Her veil—the niqab—had slipped to one side, revealing her features. Embarrassed, she pulled it back into place.

  He put a hand on her arm to help her up, but she jerked it out of his grasp. He gathered up the scattered utensils instead and put them back on the tray. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, in Arabic, as he handed the tray to her; it was one of the few expressions he knew. Behind the veil, he could only see her eyes as they glanced at the pile of knives and forks and then back at him. There was a question in her gaze. Gabriel shook his head minutely. She turned away and vanished through the curtains.

  “I apologize, Mister Hunt, for Nabirye’s clumsiness,” Amun said. “She will be disciplined.”

  “Don’t do that, it was my fault. I stepped on her dress by accident.”

  “You are kind to try to protect her, but I know you are lying,” Amun said.

  “I’m not—I did step on her dress—”

  “Yes,” Amun said. “But not by accident. Kemnebi, please search Mister Hunt’s sleeves.”

  Reluctantly, Gabriel submitted to his third pat-down of the day. Kemnebi found the long-handled dinner knife he’d shot up his right sleeve in the confusion. The big man brandished it in Gabriel’s face, tweaking the underside of his chin with the point.

  “How many times do I have to tell you,” Amun said, “that you won’t be able to put anything over on me? It is getting tiresome.”

  “All right,” Gabriel said, sitting at the table again. “Consider the lesson learned.”

  He scooted his chair closer to the table, his trouser leg neatly covering the second knife he’d grabbed. The blade was snug against his calf, the handle held in place by the elastic of his sock.

  Gabriel scooped some rice onto his piece of pita and stuck it into his mouth.

  “When we have finished,” Amun said, “Kemnebi will take us to the airport. We’re going to take a short plane ride.”

  “Where to?”

  “Morocco.”

  “If you wanted me in Morocco, why didn’t you just have me meet you there in the first place?”

  “I had business to attend to here in Cairo. Besides, I had to make sure that anyone you brought with you for protection could be disposed of. As we have seen, I was right to be concerned.”

  “And what’s in Morocco?”

  “Oh, many things are in Morocco,” Amun said. He ate another mouthful of the meat. “If you are well behaved, Mister Hunt, perhaps we shall let you see your sister.”

  Gabriel didn’t say anything.

  “We shall spend the night in Marrakesh. The following day we leave for Corsica. In between, we will provide you with access to all the materials we have in our possession on the subject of the Second Stone. We want you to be well prepared when you go after it.”

  Gabriel thought about the task they were proposing—if you could call insistence at gunpoint “proposing.” Was it really possible that there was a second Rosetta Stone, one that somehow held the secret to Napoleon’s world-dominating reign? Gabriel had learned long ago never to dismiss anything as impossible. He’d seen things in his travels that no sane man would believe if he hadn’t witnessed them himself. And yet . . . the thought of a mystical inscription from the time of the pharaohs that somehow gave the French emperor the ability to conquer millions? It was a lot to accept.

  On the other hand, even if the legend of the inscription was just that—a legend—the stone itself might well be real. And the traps protecting it.

  “How much do you know about the Stone’s hiding place? This vault you say Napoleon designed.”

  Amun looked up from his plate. “Not as much as we would like. But everything we do know, you will learn in the next twenty-four hours. We would prefer if you didn’t die in the attempt, Mister Hunt.”

  “That makes two of us,” Gabriel said.

  Amun waved at his nearly empty plate and at Gabriel’s nearly full one. “If you are finished . . . ?” Gabriel nodded, pushed his plate away from him. “Very well. Then we shall depart.”

  Sammi raced back to the Khan el-Khalili, parked the van down the street from Jumoke’s, and attempted to call Gabriel again. His phone wasn’t even ringing, just going directly to voice mail; there was definitely something wrong. She was tempted to walk into the carpet shop and see if she could turn up any sign of him, but she knew that would be a mistake. Free, she might be of some help; captured, she’d be useless.

  The two-hour time limit had long since passed, so the smart thing would be simply to call Michael Hunt. It’s what Gabriel had instructed her to do. But Michael was in New York, five thousand miles away. What could he do for them?

  Before she could decide on an alternative plan, a black limousine rolled up through the mass of people in the street and stopped in front of Jumoke’s. As Sammi watched, Gabriel appeared in the shop’s entryway. He was followed by the same two men who’d led him inside earlier. The three of them came out of the shop and headed straight for the limo. Gabriel looked unharmed, at least. The big man opened the back door and held it while the others climbed in. Then he climbed in after them. The driver leaned on the horn to scatter the pedestrians that had gathered around the car, then pulled away and drove slowly down the street.

  Sammi started the van and followed.

  The limo made its way out of the bazaar and onto Al-Azhar. Sammi stayed back several car lengths—the van belonged to the Alliance, after all, and she didn’t want them to spot and recognize it trailing them. Fortunately, it was difficult to lose a black stretch limo on the streets of Cairo.

  They made several turns until the limo reached the expressway leading south out of the city. Sammi followed them onto the ramp and picked up speed but kept a steady distance behind them. It wasn’t long until the skyscrapers gave way to low-rises and the urban sprawl grew thinner. Eventually the limo exited the expressway and drove along a stretch of road to an airfield surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Sammi stopped at the edge of the fence. Through the binoculars she watched the limo pull up to the gated entrance. A sign on the fence warned in Arabic and English, PRIVATE! NO TRESPASSING!, and a security camera watched anyone who drove up. After a moment the gate lifted and the limo rolled in. The driver parked just a few yards past the fence, in a small lot next to the control tower. Sammi watched the men get out of the car and go inside the building. She scanned the rest of the property. Beside the tower was a single hangar; a small twin-engine corporate jet sat on the only runway. It appeared to be ready to go—its hatch was open and a staircase attached to the fuselage led down to the tarmac.

  Sure enough, it wasn’t
three minutes before Gabriel and the other two emerged from the tower, together with a pair of men in flight uniforms. They walked toward the jet and climbed aboard. The staircase automatically withdrew into the fuselage and the hatch closed. Moments later the plane was in the air.

  Now what?

  Sammi took a deep breath, let it out slowly. She checked in the rearview mirror to make sure her hair was all tucked under the headscarf again, and drove up to the gate. When you didn’t want to be noticed, she’d learned, the best way was sometimes to just walk boldly through the front door. The key was to look like you belonged, like there was no reason to pay attention to you. In this case, the fact that the van she was driving was one of theirs should help—as long as they didn’t take too close a look at her.

  She waited, stared straight ahead, and tried not to look directly into the security camera. After a moment she honked the van’s horn.

  Come on . . . !

  She heard a click beside her and slowly the gate began to rise. With her heart racing, she drove inside and parked next to the tower. She slipped the handgun into her purse and got out. Past a pair of glass doors, she saw a reception desk, unmanned, and a flight of stairs. She climbed them two at a time.

  At the top of the stairs was the control room. One man sat in front of a bank of monitors, watching radar sweeps in glowing green. His eyes widened at the sight of her and he reached for a telephone.

  “Don’t move!” Sammi shouted, pointing the gun at him.

  The man cautiously raised his hands.

  “The plane that just left, where was it going?”

  He shook his head.

  She pointed the gun at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. The acoustic tiles splintered and rained down on the man and his monitors. He flinched.

  “Answer me!”

  “M-M-Marrakesh . . .”

  She approached him, the gun extended before her.

  “Please . . . don’t shoot me . . .”

  “I’ll only shoot you if you make me,” Sammi said. “Now: What other planes do you have at this airstrip that can make it to Marrakesh?”

  “None,” the man said. “That was the only plane here.”

  She’d had a bad feeling he was going to say that. Without lowering the gun, she dug her cell phone out of her purse and jabbed at the screen with her thumb.

  “Hello?” The voice on the other end of the phone was reedy and nasal.

  “Michael Hunt?”

  “Yes? Who is this?”

  “I’m a friend of your sister’s. And your brother’s. They’re both in trouble and I’m trying to help them.”

  “What? Who are you? Where are you calling from? What’s the—”

  “I’ll answer all your questions later,” Sammi said. “But right now I need you to get me on a plane to Marrakesh.”

  Chapter 10

  The Hawker 400 landed at another private airstrip near the foothills of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The sun cast an orange glow over a landscape that was already reddish to begin with; it wasn’t for nothing that Marrakesh was known as the Red City.

  Back in his misspent youth, Marrakesh had been one of Gabriel’s favorite places in Africa. It was too bad that his first time back in years had to be under such undesirable circumstances.

  As he was escorted down the steps to the tarmac, Gabriel felt the knife still pressing against his calf. It had been a gamble, not attempting to use it in the limo—a gamble that they’d be taking him to a private runway rather than a commercial airport with metal detectors. But he figured they had weapons of their own they wouldn’t want detected; if nothing else, Kemnebi was still carrying Gabriel’s Colt. And the prospect of a fight in the back of a moving car against two men bigger than he was had not greatly appealed. Besides, if Lucy was in Marrakesh, Marrakesh was where he needed to be.

  Another limousine, this one blindingly white, waited at the foot of the steps. Gabriel was ushered inside. He saw two men already there, seated on the long padded bench behind the driver’s seat.

  One of them, a thin man sporting a tidy pencil mustache, extended a hand. Gabriel ignored it. “Have you been to Marrakesh before, Mister Hunt?”

  “Once or twice,” he said drily.

  The limo pulled out of the airfield and onto a highway.

  “It is a beautiful city,” the man said. “Not like Cairo, of course. But it has many pleasures.”

  Gabriel merely stared, and the man, having run out of small talk for the moment, fell silent.

  After half an hour they came to the famed Djemaa el Fna, the central square in the medina. It was the largest of its type in Africa. Gabriel saw the traditional water sellers, the snake charmers, the acrobats and jugglers performing for the hordes of tourists who were gathered about, snapping pictures. He saw a group of Chleuh dancing boys and beside them an old man leading a troupe of trained Barbary apes through a comic routine. And then there were the peddlers, of course, vendors of everything from souvenirs to dubious medicines, and the food stalls offering every sort of edible. The smells drifted into the limousine through the air vents, as did the muffled sounds of traditional Berber music and the clamor of the crowd.

  The driver circled the square and went down a relatively empty side street. They stopped a block away and parked near what appeared to be an abandoned building made of sandstone and stucco. It was four stories tall, and the windows and front door were boarded up. Signs in Arabic looked to Gabriel like warnings to trespassers to keep out.

  Gabriel got out of the car with the other men. Amun pointed back toward the Djemaa el Fna. “This way.”

  “We’re going to buy souvenirs?” Gabriel asked. “I could use a pit viper or two.”

  They walked the block back, entered the square, and moved to the right along the perimeter. Gabriel knew that if he was going to make a break for it, now was the time to do it. He could easily lose himself in the crowd, or at least cause enough of a diversion to get away. But that wouldn’t help Lucy. In fact, it might put her in greater danger. So he kept walking.

  Kemnebi led the way around a wooden cabin with a striped fabric roof; under the fabric a fat man worked the lever of an ancient orange reamer, spilling an endless stream of juice into cups, which a boy who looked like his son sold to a line of thirsty tourists. Next to the cabin, a water seller insistently argued for the superiority of his beverage, shouting in thickly accented English, “Juice make you more thirsty! Clean water!” Looking at the man’s swollen leather pouch and the clattering tin cups he made his customers use, Gabriel questioned the truth of his claims. Even if the water was clean when it went into the cup . . .

  Amun took Gabriel’s arm and steered him toward a carpet shop. It looked more or less identical to Jumoke’s, except that the sign over the entryway here said NIZAN.

  Kemnebi strode up to a closed wooden door in the side of the building and rapped on it. After a moment, a man opened it and greeted first Kemnebi and then Amun in Arabic. This was Nizan, presumably; he might have been Jumoke’s brother.

  Amun and Kemnebi followed Nizan into the shop through the side door, Gabriel trailing behind them, and the two other men from the limousine coming after him. Nizan lifted a curtain and led them all into a back room. He then squatted, lifted the corner of a carpet on the floor, and revealed a hinged trap door with a metal ring in the center. The ring was secured with a hasp and a heavy padlock. Nizan fished a key out of his vest pocket and used it to remove the lock. He put both hands inside the ring and grunted as he lifted it. The door creaked open, revealing a staircase leading down.

  Kemnebi was the first to descend, then Amun prodded Gabriel to follow. The underground passageway he found himself in at the foot of the stairs was long and curving, but well lit by bulbs dangling overhead. Gabriel thought the tunnel itself looked old, despite the presence of electric lights; it might have been carved centuries ago, the markings on the stone suggesting blows from hand tools rather than any sort of heavy machinery. He wondered what its original pu
rpose had been. Something unsavory, he was sure.

  They walked for what felt like about a city block before coming to another staircase leading back up. Kemnebi pressed a button on an intercom box mounted on the wall. They heard a scuffling of feet above, then another trap door opened and the group ascended, single file.

  They emerged into a small room lined with shelves of food supplies—it looked like the pantry of a modern home, Gabriel thought. Two men stood waiting for them, guns in hand. They greeted Amun and Kemnebi warmly but regarded Gabriel with suspicion.

  The trap door was lowered and a carpet replaced over it. The men walked them into a living room furnished with a combination of modern and traditional Arabic fittings. In one corner, a large whiteboard stood, covered with scrawled diagrams and words Gabriel couldn’t read. There were curtains drawn over all the windows. Through the curtains Gabriel could see that the windows were boarded up from the outside.

  “We’re back where we started,” Gabriel said. “We just made a big circle.”

  “That is correct, Mister Hunt,” Amun said.

  “Why?”

  “I am sure you can appreciate that we prefer to keep our activities out of view of prying eyes,” Amun said. “The way we came is the only way in.”

  “I guess I’m supposed to feel fortunate that you’re letting me see the place,” Gabriel said.

  “You should, Mister Hunt. You are the first non-Egyptian who has.”

  “What about my sister?”

  Amun smiled thinly. “She was blindfolded, of course.”

  “And why do I get this special treatment?”

  “Because you work for us now,” Amun said. “We must begin trusting each other sometime.”

  “Can I ask you something? If your raison d’être—pardon my French—is resurrecting the glory of Egypt, why didn’t you set up this secret clubhouse there?”