Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

by Gabriel Hunt

  Gabriel pointed Sheba toward the doorway and gave her a shove. It was all she needed—she was off and running. Gabriel followed close behind, but was pulled back by an arm around his throat. Karoly? Hanif? It didn’t matter which. He swung around and smashed whoever it was into the giant carved stone face behind him, which teetered from the impact. The man’s arm didn’t release, though. He smashed backwards again and then once more, and finally the man’s grip loosened and he tumbled off.

  The doorway was just steps away. Gabriel ran through—

  —and felt a long narrow blade slide deep into the flesh of his arm.

  He jerked free, saw DeGroet outlined by the torchlight from the other room. The sword blade flickered briefly in the darkness like a serpent darting. It caught him across the cheek, opening a gash. He tasted his own blood, running into his mouth.

  He remembered Karoly’s warning to Andras earlier, at the airport: Maybe he’ll use you for practice. Cut you to ribbons.

  “You’ve interfered with my plans for the last time, Hunt,” DeGroet said, his voice all the more frightening for being quiet and calm. “Now I rid myself of you once and for all.” And he gave a little salute with his sword before lunging in for the kill.

  Gabriel whipped the bandolier of rifle bullets over his head and caught the blade with it as DeGroet sent it stabbing toward his chest. Sidestepping, he yanked hard, pulling DeGroet’s sword arm wide. That gave him room to step in and swing a fist into the side of DeGroet’s skull. It wouldn’t have been quite as powerful a blow if Gabriel hadn’t been holding his gun in that hand; but he was, and DeGroet crumpled to the floor at his feet.

  He ran. His left arm ached where DeGroet’s blade had penetrated it; his sleeve was slick and heavy with blood. And his cheek felt like it had been split open to the bone. But he couldn’t think about any of that now. Behind him he heard voices shouting in Arabic, English, and Hungarian, angry shouts coming closer as he plunged down the stairs in the darkness. He raced across the long tunnel that would return him to the surface, heavy pounding footsteps clamoring behind him and lighter ones pattering desperately up ahead—Sheba’s. He caught up with her halfway up the staircase and they plunged through the hole in the Sphinx’s paw together.

  Dawn was just starting to break over the Nile, the rising sun’s rays streaking the sky a hundred shades of pink and purple and amber. It was a staggering sight and Gabriel would have given anything to be able to take pleasure in it. But he couldn’t. Their pursuers were only steps behind, and the workers out here, though temporarily startled to see them emerge, wouldn’t stay dumbstruck for long.

  He grabbed Sheba’s arm and steered her down to where the camels and cars stood side by side. The drivers’ seats of the cars were empty, but so were the ignition slots. One good thing about a camel, he thought, as he slung Sheba up onto the back of a particularly tall and hardy-looking animal and then vaulted up after her: no key required.

  He kicked the camel’s sides sharply and they took off into the desert.

  “They’re coming,” Sheba said, looking back.

  “Of course they are,” Gabriel muttered. “Why wouldn’t they be.”

  “They’re getting in the cars!”

  “Naturally,” Gabriel said. In the distance he could hear the engines revving. He was holding onto the reins for all he was worth and driving the animal forward at top speed. For the time being their lead was still widening—but that wouldn’t last long.

  “What are we going to do?” Sheba said, facing forward again. She was clinging tightly to Gabriel from behind. It was a pleasant sensation, her soft flesh pressing up against his back, but not quite enough to make him forget about the pain in his arm—or about the men coming up behind them.

  “Couple of options,” he said as they raced over the hard-packed sand. “We can’t outrun them, and we won’t be able to lose them if we head into Cairo—they’d have the advantage there. But if we can get into an area where this guy can travel but cars can’t…”

  “Do you know of one near here?”

  “No,” Gabriel said.

  “What’s the other option?”

  “Get captured,” Gabriel said. “Probably get killed.”

  “Oh,” Sheba said.

  Gabriel steered them toward a slightly rockier, more mountainous section of the desert in the middle distance. He wasn’t at all confident they could reach it before being overtaken.

  A gunshot split the air behind them and a bullet sped by near enough that they could feel the breeze from its passage.

  “Take my gun,” Gabriel said, gesturing with his elbow toward his hip. “Have you ever fired a gun before?”

  “Yes,” Sheba said, pulling the Colt from its holster. “What? You don’t think kids learn to shoot in Ireland?”

  “Not at all,” Gabriel said. “I just didn’t know you had. Glad to hear otherwise.” Another gunshot exploded near them. “You might want to start putting that learning to use now.”

  Sheba had already swiveled in place and braced her arm against the camel’s hump, and now she squeezed off a shot that left the windshield of the nearest car behind them shattered. The car wheeled off erratically, its driver losing blood from a wound in his shoulder.

  But there were more cars behind that one, more than there were bullets in the gun, and more guns in them, too; and though a racing camel wasn’t the easiest target in the world to hit from a moving car, it wasn’t the smallest target either, and they wouldn’t keep missing forever.

  The area of rocky outcroppings was getting closer. It had something of the quality of a canyon, and Gabriel thought it might just be possible to lose the cars in there, if only because it would be too dangerous for them to drive into it, for fear of cracking up against the narrow walls. But first he had to make it there. It was going to be close. He kicked inward with his heels again, demanding of the poor beast every last ounce of energy it had.

  They were within yards of the first outcropping when he heard the put-put-put-put of a helicopter’s blades.

  His heart fell. No. Not this close—

  As he watched, a black Sikorsky chopper rose up from behind the rocks, facing them. Beside the pilot, a man stood halfway out of the cockpit, one leg on the landing skid, a machine gun aimed down at them. And painted on the underside of the copter—it couldn’t be…

  “Gabriel, watch out!” Sheba shouted, pointing.

  “Hold onto me,” Gabriel said, and urged the animal forward. “Around my neck.”

  “What are you going to do?” she said, but she followed his direction, looping her arms around him.

  “Just hold on,” he said. “Don’t let go.”

  The copter was charging downward toward them at a steep angle. The gunman hadn’t started firing yet, but they saw him take aim. He was almost on top of them.

  “Gabriel!” Sheba screamed.

  Then the gunman kicked something with one foot, and it fell, unfurling as it came, dangling below the belly of the copter, and Gabriel let go of the camel’s reins to reach up and grab hold as it passed overhead. A rope ladder—and as Gabriel held tight with one good arm and one wounded one to the lowest rung, they were swiftly lifted off the camel’s back, Gabriel clinging to the ladder and Sheba clinging onto him, legs wrapping tightly around his waist.

  The gunman overhead cut loose with a flurry of bullets that brought the cars behind them to a screaming halt. A few of the drivers reached out through their open windows and fired up at them, but they were firing blind and the bullets missed by a mile.

  The copter sped off, rapidly gaining altitude. Looking up, Gabriel saw the man above them toss his smoking gun into the cockpit and begin hauling the rope ladder back aboard.

  Gabriel concentrated on holding onto the ladder until the skid was in reach, then carefully shifted his grip over. The man above him helped Sheba into the cabin, then stuck out a hand to help Gabriel.

  “Michael send you?” Gabriel asked. The man nodded. Shouting to be heard over t
he noise of the chopper’s blades and engine, he said, “Told me to give you a message. Said keep your cell phone charged next time. We had a hell of a time locating you.”

  Gabriel hauled himself up and inside. He fell back against the padded seat, breathing heavily.

  The gunman pulled the cabin door shut and Gabriel saw in reverse on the glass the same thing he’d spotted painted on the chopper’s belly from camelback below: the Hunt Foundation crest.

  The pilot called back over his shoulder. “Where we going now?”

  “You need a hospital?” the gunman asked, pointing to Gabriel’s bloody face and injured arm.

  “No,” Gabriel said. “I can take care of that myself.” He dug into his pocket, passed the ancient coin to Sheba. Her eyes widened as she recognized the symbol on it.

  “We’re going to Chios,” Gabriel said.

  Chapter 10

  Sheba stood on the balcony and looked out over the cove with its beach of tiny volcanic pebbles worn smooth by the rolling surf. There was no one on the beach; no one within half a mile of the beach, in fact, other than her and Gabriel. The chopper had let them off in a nearby clearing and they’d walked the rest of the way. The first thing she’d done when they reached the house was strip off the satin dress, fill the tub with warm water, and soak her feet. They’d been filthy and scraped and bruised and sore and she’d kept soaking them till at least they weren’t filthy anymore.

  Gabriel had explored the house, meanwhile, doing what he could to shore up the security of the place, which wasn’t much—it was a beach house on a Greek island, after all, not a fortress. Then he’d returned to the bathroom, where he’d taken off his shirt tenderly, wincing as the fabric pulled away from where it had stuck to the wound in his arm. He was for putting on a bandage and leaving it at that, but Sheba had insisted on dragging him into the tub and washing the wound, and the rest of him, too, while she was at it, and before either of them quite knew what was happening, her aching feet and his bruised and torn flesh were temporarily forgotten.

  Now she was standing in the salt breeze wafting off the Aegean, naked as Aphrodite, long hair lying in a damp tangle between her shoulder blades, and Gabriel was seated at a glass-topped table beside her, dressed once again from the waist down, waiting while his shirt dried on the balcony’s railing. He was flipping the ancient coin and catching it in his palm.

  “It’s impossible, Gabriel,” Sheba said. “You know that.”

  “You know it. You’re the Ph.D. All I know is that this coin was in the statue’s mouth.”

  “Chios was populated that early, but the Greeks didn’t start minting coins until the seventh century BC. The Great Sphinx is almost two thousand years older than that.”

  “Well, maybe it’s not,” Gabriel said. “Or maybe someone in Chios started making coins earlier than anyone thinks. Or maybe whoever dug that passageway and chamber did it two thousand years after the Sphinx was carved. There’s only one thing we know for sure.”

  She turned to face him. It was distracting to say the least. “What’s that?” she said.

  “I found this coin,” Gabriel said, “in the statue’s mouth.”

  She came over and took it from him. The design depicted a seated sphinx facing to the left beside a narrow wine jug—an amphora—overhung by a bunch of grapes. The sphinx’s face was in profile and clearly meant to be female. Her feathered wings coiled up from her shoulders. It was one of the most familiar images of ancient numismatics, the sphinx emblem of Chios.

  “What do you think, how did a Greek coin get into a hidden room deep inside the Great Sphinx in Egypt?” Gabriel said.

  “There was plenty of contact between their cultures,” Sheba said. “As soon as the Greeks started coming over by boat, you see influences from each civilization on the other.”

  “But a coin in a statue’s mouth—is that a ritual you’ve ever heard of?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Me, neither,” Gabriel said. He got up, grabbed his shirt, and headed inside. Sheba followed.

  “What about the map on the wall?” Sheba asked. He’d told her about the map during the flight over, while the gunman had been radioing ahead, trying to find an empty house the Foundation could rent on four hours’ notice.

  “No question about it,” Gabriel said, “it was crude, but it was clearly a drawing of the southern coastline of India with Sri Lanka below it.”

  “The dates are off there as well,” Sheba said. “We know there was trade between Egypt and Sri Lanka as early as 1500 BC, but not a thousand years earlier.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Gabriel said, “but I’ve found when you’re dealing with ancient history, plus or minus a thousand years can be well within the margin of error.”

  “Spoken like a man who flunked history.”

  “I aced math, though.”

  “Gabriel,” Sheba said, “you can’t deny there’s something funny going on here. A statue of a sphinx that’s carved in a realistic style that wouldn’t be developed till thousands of years later…a map of a place the Egyptians wouldn’t make it to for centuries…a coin that wouldn’t be minted for centuries…”

  “Yeah. Well, we’re not going to find an explanation sitting around here.” He pulled his shirt on over the thick pad of gauze tapped to his upper arm. Stitches would’ve been better, but stitches would have to wait. “We need to find someone who can tell us something about this coin. A local expert.”

  “Where are you going to look for one?”

  “Closest town’s probably Avgonyma,” he said. “Figured I’d head over there, scout around.”

  “Be careful,” Sheba said. “DeGroet might have men here.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “He never saw the coin. And no one followed us in the chopper.”

  “DeGroet’s even richer than you are, Gabriel,” Sheba said. “He could have men on every island in the Mediterranean.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Gabriel said. He buckled on his holster and put his jacket on over it. Ninety degrees outside and he was wearing a leather jacket.

  “Don’t act like you’re doing me a favor,” Sheba said. “Though actually you could do me one if you wanted to. While you’re in town.”

  Gabriel paused in the doorway. “What’s that?”

  “You could get me a pair of shoes,” Sheba said.

  Leather jacket or not, there were worse ways to spend an hour than on a two-mile walk through the sand and scrub of a Greek island, the midday sun shining down on you, no living soul in sight but a pair of goats, the iron bells around their necks clanking as they grazed. Chios lay in the Aegean Sea like a muscled forearm, its elbow jutting toward Turkey, its fist toward the Cyclades. Gabriel’s destination was just below the bicep, where a tattoo of an anchor or a mermaid might go if the arm in question belonged to a sailor—or of a sphinx if it belonged to one of the island’s traditionalists. The sphinx had been a symbol of Chios dating back to the island’s prehistory, when its rocky shores had been inhabited by primitive communities of fishermen and winemakers and farmers. Many amphorae from the period had survived, the clay surfaces of the vessels bearing the same sphinx-and-grapes design as the coin now in his pocket, scrapings of their interiors revealing the ancient residue of wine or olive oil or the peculiar mastic resin native to Chios.

  After climbing from sea level up into hills high enough to qualify as small mountains, Gabriel emerged in a clearing surrounded by pine forest, the dusty road leading into a warren of one- and two-story stone buildings. The stones looked to have been quarried from the hills he had just climbed and fit together with the most rudimentary sort of mortar; from their boxy shape and general construction, the buildings looked like they dated back to the medieval period. One or two had thatched awnings and wooden chairs out front, some with wooden tables between them; most of the seats were unoccupied, though in one an old woman slept, baking in the sun with a cat at her feet.

  The streets were largely empty, so Gabri
el was a bit surprised when, on walking through the arched doorway of one of the buildings, he saw a crowd of perhaps a dozen and a half men breathlessly clustered around a bar. Then he recognized the sound of a transistor radio behind the bar delivering a sports announcer’s play-by-play. At one exclamation from the device the men all groaned, except for one who went around the circle collecting money from all the others. The bartender, a bald man with prominent eyes and a heavy five-o’clock shadow even at noon, flicked off the radio and the men dispersed to separate tables around the room, all except for two particularly disconsolate-looking souls who remained at the bar.

  Gabriel took a seat beside them and ordered a glass of the local Ariousios Oinos. It was said that the city of Chios had been founded by a son of Dionysus himself, and the Chians were accordingly proud of their wine. It was heavy, heady stuff, a red so dark it was almost black. You tasted echoes, Gabriel thought, swallowing, of Homer’s wine-dark seas, on which Odysseus and Agamemnon and so many others came to grief.

  “Tourist?” the bartender said, in a thick accent and wearing a cheek-stretching grin. “American?”

  “American,” Gabriel answered, in Greek, “but not a tourist.”

  He saw the phony smile on the bartender’s face relax into something more like a normal human facial expression. It wasn’t a smile anymore so much as a tired grimace. “Would you look at me,” he said, “look at what I’ve come to, playing the monkey when someone comes in. Feh.” He spat on the floor from the side of his mouth. “No one comes here anymore. This used to be the high season. Now, maybe once every four days, five days, one tourist, one couple, maybe, they order one drink apiece and don’t tip. But I smile, smile, say thank you mister American, thank you for your dollar.” He spat again, then slopped some liquor from a jug into a water glass and sampled his own wares. “Cigarette?”