Hunt Through Napoleon's Web

by Gabriel Hunt

  Gabriel reached out and touched one wall. It wasn’t genuine stone—it felt like cast resin, painted over to look like stone.

  “Do not touch,” Kemnebi snapped.

  “Disney’s got nothing on you guys,” Gabriel murmured.

  They reached the end of the corridor, where the wall was painted to look like a large sandstone block. Kemnebi grabbed a concealed handhold and pulled it open. The wall swiveled toward them, revealing a chapel-sized space lit by torches. Gabriel stepped through. He suspected they were in the adjacent building now. He turned to ask—but Kemnebi pushed the section of the wall closed behind him.

  Gabriel was alone.

  The interior was designed to resemble the King’s Chamber from an Egyptian pyramid. Gabriel had seen the real thing several times and this was not a bad facsimile. The pyramids had been built as elaborate tombs for the pharaohs, intended to provide them with a comfortable home in the afterlife, though ancient notions of comfort had never struck him as all that comfortable. You’d generally have a large throne made of a single piece of carved stone; the one here was set upon a pedestal with six steps leading up to it from the floor. You’d have your statues of Egyptian gods—here, several man-sized ones stood flanking either side of the throne and much larger ones in each corner of the room were posed as if holding up the ceiling. Smaller statuettes were scattered around, alongside pedestals bearing basins filled with water. A sarcophagus stood on the right side of the chamber, its stone cover intricately decorated with jewels and gold inlay.

  “Bow, American. Bow before your pharaoh.”

  The voice echoed through the room. It was crisp and commanding, with a hint of a Middle Eastern accent, but only a hint.

  Gabriel moved toward the throne. He was off to one side and could see that it was still empty—and there was no one behind it, either. But as he watched, a man suddenly appeared, stepping out from a patch of shadow.

  Khufu was as Lucy had described him, dressed in the vestments of an Egyptian pharaoh, from the wood-soled sandals up to the ornate nemes, the striped royal headdress. The nemes had fine accordion pleating on lappets, folds that were held to the forehead with a metal band. And below that band, covering his face, the man wore a carved mask of a falcon. Gabriel recognized it as the face of Horus, the god of pharaohs. The man also wore an ankle-length transparent robe—transparency once signified an Egyptian’s wealth and importance—and beneath the robe he wore a loincloth. Aside from several gold bracelets on his arms, the rest of his sinewy body was bare. He held a golden scepter in his right hand, its head curved like a cobra about to strike.

  “You shall bow to me, American,” Khufu said. “Willingly or no.”

  Gabriel didn’t move. “This is quite a display,” he said, “but that’s all it is. A display. Any man could build it, if he was rich enough and had a thing for King Tut. I’m not impressed.”

  “You are insolent,” the masked man said, advancing toward him. “Amun told me it was so.”

  “Good,” Gabriel said. “That’ll save us some time.”

  The man leveled the end of his scepter in Gabriel’s direction. “We agree: there is no point in wasting time.” He gestured with the scepter—and suddenly Gabriel found himself blinded with an agonizing wave of pain.

  It was as if he’d licked a finger and stuck it in an outlet. A jolt of high-voltage electricity shot through his body, making every hair stand on end and every nerve ending burn. He felt himself flung to the floor with tremendous force. He slid backward a few feet, stunned by the charge.

  Khufu stood motionless, still pointing the scepter.

  What the hell was that thing?

  He tried to stand but Khufu aimed the scepter at him again. Gabriel put his hands up before him. “Okay, okay, I get—”

  Another jolt of electricity shot through him, causing every muscle in his body to clench tight as a fist. He felt it in his eyelids and the soles of his feet. He could smell his hair singe.

  “Those who cultivate the seeds of disobedience,” Khufu said, “reap only pain.” He lowered the scepter. “Now, rise. If you can.”

  Gabriel slowly rolled over, groaned involuntarily, got to his hands and knees. He finally managed to stand. His entire body ached and his knees trembled.

  “You are strong,” Khufu said. “But no man is strong enough to withstand the fury of the gods. If I smite you once more, your innards will cook inside you, your bowels turn to water; once more again and your heart will burst. There are few worse deaths.”

  Gabriel didn’t answer.

  “I have done this to you for a reason,” Khufu said. “I wish to demonstrate that you are at my mercy. You live or die by my grace.”

  “Consider the point made,” Gabriel said.

  “Good. Now, Amun tells me you have agreed to help us find the Second Stone.”

  “I did agree,” Gabriel said. “I’m having second thoughts now.”

  “Don’t. You should be honored to be chosen. It will be an event celebrated throughout the course of history. Your name will be forever linked to its discovery. When the new world is born out of the ashes of the old, you will have been a part of it. You should rejoice in your good fortune.”

  “That’s all right. You can rejoice for both of us.”

  “Oh, I will. The Second Stone will allow me to lead Egypt into a new reign of power. First, the Middle East. Israel will bow at our feet. Saudi Arabia will acknowledge the true masters of Africa. Then the Mediterranean will be ours again. We will take back Rome and Constantinople. And finally your own distant borders will fall. Egypt will be the leader of the world once again.”

  “Well, no one can accuse you of thinking small,” Gabriel said.

  “The most satisfying conquest, of course, will be France. To exact revenge on the country that raped Egypt during Napoleon’s reign will be the sweetest victory. Napoleon was a monster and a thief. He and his brother Louis will be visited by Anubis in the afterlife and be subjected to excruciating torment. They already reside in hell, but their existence there will be made worse still, for they will see their people kneel to us. And after the destruction of France, Britain shall fall. We will take back what they hold in their so-called museums and then crush their country. Two new pyramids will rise, one in Paris and one in London, to mark their subjugation.”

  Khufu pointed the staff at him again, and Gabriel flinched slightly. “You will cooperate. You will do as Amun says, or you will suffer pain you cannot imagine—and your sister as well. You will find the Second Stone or you will both beg for death’s release.”

  Gabriel said nothing.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, yes, I understand.”

  The two men faced each other for a moment. “I believe you do,” Khufu said. “Go, then. Get the rest you require. You have much work to do beginning in the morning.”

  Gabriel heard the wall pivot open behind him. He had been dismissed. On unsteady legs, he walked out of the chamber. Kemnebi stood waiting—and caught him when Gabriel’s legs gave out.

  Chapter 13

  The Hunt Foundation jet was cavernous enough when full. With only one person on it other than Charlie in the cockpit, the emptiness was disquieting. Sammi Ficatier tried to put it out of her mind. She pressed buttons in the armrest of her seat until she found one that dimmed the cabin lights and another that put on some music, and then she put her head back and tried to sleep.

  But it was not to be. The music was interrupted by the sound of a phone ringing. It kept ringing till she found another button on the armrest labeled with a picture of a phone and pressed it.

  “Miss Ficatier?” It was Michael Hunt’s voice.

  “Yes?” she said, unsure whether he could hear her if she just spoke regularly.

  Apparently he could. “You promised you’d answer my questions,” Michael said. “When you had the time. As you have a few hours ahead of you now in the air . . .”

  “Certainly,” she said. “What would you like to k
now?”

  “How do you know my sister?”

  “We took classes together in Nice,” Sammi said. “We became friends.”

  “And my brother?”

  “We . . . met in Cifer’s apartment.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Cifer’s apartment,” Sammi said. “Lucy. Your sister.”

  “What are you talking about?” Michael said. “Cifer is a, is a computer hacker who has helped us out from time to time—what does Cifer have to do with my sister?”

  “Cifer is your sister,” Sammi said. “She hacks computers, she calls herself Cifer. I thought you knew that.”

  There was silence on the other end. Then the voice said, “No. I did not know that.”

  Sammi’s heart sank. Had she just said the wrong thing? She knew Cifer didn’t get along with her brother, hadn’t spoken to him for years; she hadn’t known he didn’t even know her name. The hell with it, she thought. Saving your life is more important.

  “So,” Michael said, softly, “tell me what happened to my brother.”

  She filled him in, from the ransacked apartment in Nice and the chase by the police to the flight into Cairo and her kidnapping at the bazaar. She described how she’d escaped from the men who’d grabbed her and how she’d gotten back just in time to see Gabriel bundled first into a limousine and then into a private plane. She told him how she’d found out where the plane was headed. She didn’t tell him how it had ended, with her facing the man in the control room at gunpoint and realizing there was nothing to tie him up with and no way she could trust him not to sound the alarm. She’d thought one shooting in a day, and that in self-defense, was her limit. She’d learned she was wrong.

  Michael asked many questions, forcing her to double back and retell parts of the story. He probed for details she’d forgotten or never known. But finally his questions petered out, like a wind-up toy running down.

  “And you haven’t heard from Gabriel since you saw him board the plane,” Michael said.

  “No. Have you?”

  “I’m afraid not. I tried tracking his phone—nothing. The signal’s dead.”

  “Maybe he has it turned off?” Sammi said.

  “Not this signal,” Michael said. “It can’t be turned off.”

  “Don’t worry,” Sammi said. “I’ll find him. I’ll find them both.” But she heard the empty bravado in her own voice.

  “Marrakesh is a big place,” Michael said.

  It was true—Marrakesh was large, and she’d never been there before.

  “Do you maybe know anyone there who could help?” she said.

  He hesitated before replying and even then seemed to be letting the words out only reluctantly. “There is . . . one man. I wish we had someone more reliable, but . . .”

  “Anyone is better than no one.”

  “Not necessarily,” Michael said. “This man . . . he did save my brother’s life once—he hid him in his cellar for nine days when the Royal Gendarmerie were after him. And he knows the country like a native. He is a native.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “He’s . . . Actually I don’t know what I’d call him. He’s a criminal, or at least he has connections to the underworld there.”

  “That sounds perfect,” Sammi said. “The men we are trying to find are criminals too.”

  “His ethics leave much to be desired. He only helped us because we paid him handsomely. If someone else had offered him more . . .”

  “Well, then, don’t let anyone offer more,” Sammi said. “You’ve got enough money, don’t you?”

  “Of course—the money’s not important,” Michael said. “If I knew for sure money was the only thing Reza cared about, we’d be fine. We can outbid pretty much anyone out there and he knows it. What worries me is that . . .”

  “What?”

  “Money’s not the only thing a man like that values, Miss Ficatier. There’s pride, there’s fame, there’s stature, power; there are sensual pleasures. Reza Arif is unpredictable, and that makes him dangerous. But he’s the only person we’ve got in Marrakesh.”

  “Then I think,” Sammi said, “he’s our man.”

  Michael sent an e-mail to the last address he had on file for Arif. To his surprise, he received a reply within a half hour. Arif supplied a telephone number and asked that Michael call him on a landline.

  “Michael Hunt! As I live and breathe!” Arif bellowed jovially. “How many years has it been?”

  “How are you, Reza?”

  “Happy, wealthy, and in good health. And you, sir?”

  “Not so well, Reza. I’m concerned about Gabriel. And Lucy. Our sister.”

  “Oh? What is the matter?”

  Michael briefly recounted the situation for him.

  “Michael, you are asking an awful lot,” Arif said, his voice suddenly cagey.

  “Are you saying you can’t help?”

  “No . . . not ‘can’t.’ But—the Alliance of the Pharaohs . . . this is not a minor organization. Nor is it a government operative who, even when corrupt, plays by his own corrupt rules. These are killers, Michael, plain and simple. No, strike that—they are neither plain nor simple. These are killers who relish what they do and revel in making it as painful as they possibly can.”

  “What are you saying, Reza?”

  “Merely that I would need to be well incented before I would consider tangling with them.”

  “You will be,” Michael said.

  “Let us discuss,” Reza said, “just how well.”

  Chapter 14

  They put him in a bedroom on the top floor. After picking briefly at a plate of chicken, rice, and hummus—it might have been brought to him intact from Lucy’s room—Gabriel collapsed on the bed and lay without moving for several hours, not sleeping, just recovering. He replayed over and over in his mind the events in Khufu’s chamber and came no closer to understanding what had happened. It was the scepter—it had to be, unless that was just stagecraft and misdirection and somehow the electrical charge had been shot up through the floor. But no—his soles were rubber and Khufu’s were wood with metal trim; if there were any electricity running through the floor, the pharaoh would have gotten it worse than Gabriel.

  So it must have been the scepter, concealing some sort of long-distance taser or stun gun—Gabriel did know of batons used by police in certain situations that delivered a similar charge. Hell, cattle prods did more or less the same thing, and could be used to subdue humans as well as animals. Not from a distance, true . . . but who could say that some sort of long-range wireless electroshock weapon hadn’t been developed? If one had, maybe the Alliance had gotten hold of a prototype in one of their heists . . .

  Or maybe it was a stick that channeled the wrath of Egypt’s ancient gods. Whatever it was, Gabriel knew one thing: he wanted to stay clear of it in the future.

  And that meant getting out of here now.

  The digital clock on the dresser told him it was four thirty in the morning. His whole body was sore, but he forced himself to get up from the bed. He found he could walk, if somewhat stiffly; could move his arms, his fingers. He went through a routine of stretches and then took a shower, first as hot as he could stand and then as cold. When he got back into his clothes, he felt almost human.

  He went to the window. Like Lucy’s, it was boarded up and fitted with bars outside the pane. Glancing through the cracks between the boards he could see that the sun hadn’t yet risen. Better yet, the shadowy sliver of wall he glimpsed across the way included copious bougainvillea—exactly the view he’d seen from Lucy’s window, just slightly higher up, which meant this room must be directly above hers.

  He opened the window and began the process of loosening the boards, hammering each swiftly with his palm. When one hand tired, he switched to the other. It took several hard blows apiece to knock out the screws holding them in, blows Gabriel was sure could be heard throughout the building. But no one showed up at his door, so maybe the sound
wasn’t carrying quite as much as he thought. One by one he pounded at the boards until they came free and plummeted the four stories to the street below. He could hear the distant cracks as the wood splintered.

  Next, Gabriel tested the strength of the bars. These were fastened more snugly. He moved the desk till it was directly below the window, lay on his back with his heels against the bars, and began methodically kicking at them. He felt them budge, first just a bit, then a bit more. He redoubled his effort. One by one, they came loose. He stopped short of kicking them out, though—the noise of a steel bar landing on the pavement from four stories up would wake everyone for sure. Instead, he worked each bar the last few millimeters by hand, wrenching it out and carefully pulling it back inside. He laid the first three bars quietly on the desk, then stowed the last one in his inside jacket pocket.

  Having cleared away the last barrier, he stuck his head out through the window and looked down. As he’d remembered: a smooth, straight shot down to the street. He would need rappelling rope of some kind.

  Gabriel looked around the bedroom for something that might work. The cable on the television wasn’t long enough. He didn’t have enough clothing to tie together. His eyes landed on the bed. Sometimes the old ways were the best.

  He yanked off the thin bedspread and the lower and upper sheets. He tied them to one another with secure sailors’ knots. Unfortunately, even tied corner to corner diagonally, the combined length was only around eighteen feet. Not enough to get down to the ground.

  But—it was enough to get down to Lucy’s window. One step at a time.

  As quietly as he could, Gabriel pushed the bed across the floor so that it butted against the windowed wall. He then twisted the top sheet and tied one end to the leg of the bed closest to the window. He tugged on the knot to make sure it would hold, then tugged once more on each of the other knots for good measure. Having satisfied himself that they were secure, or at least as secure as they were going to get, he tossed the loose end out the window. Gabriel positioned himself on the bed and crawled out backward, his legs dangling in the air. He put his weight on the rope slowly, cautiously. It held. He found the surface of the wall with his feet, planted his soles firmly. Clasping the sheet-rope tightly with both hands, he began to descend.