Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

by Gabriel Hunt

  He felt men take hold of each of his elbows roughly, felt his wrists drawn together behind his back, felt a length of rope binding them together. A few feet away, he saw another pair of men take hold of Christos.

  Andras came forward, dragging Tigranes with him. He bent to pick up Gabriel’s gun.

  “That’s a very nice weapon,” he said. “An antique, isn’t it? I think I’ll keep it.”

  “You son of a—” Gabriel started, but Andras slapped him brutally across the face with the side of his Colt. He felt the slash on his cheek from DeGroet’s sword reopen and start bleeding again.

  “Take them away,” Andras said, wiping Gabriel’s blood off the cylinder.

  Chapter 14

  They were being held in Anavatos’ tallest building, a three-story tower near the cliff’s edge that during the town’s heyday had been the site of an olive oil press, a church, and a school. Today it was an empty shell with a few unbroken benches the only reminder of its earlier functions.

  From somewhere Andras’ men had found a pair of straight-backed wooden chairs, one with arms and one without, and Gabriel and Christos were tied to these, side by side. Tigranes was seated on the ground across the room, facing them, his hands free, his phorminx in his lap.

  On a bench against one wall, Gabriel’s Colt lay, tantalizingly out of reach. Andras had placed it there deliberately, Gabriel figured. Just to make a point.

  “Tell, old man,” Andras said, his Greek crude and heavily accented. He had a cell phone in his hand and, having dialed it a moment earlier, was holding it out in Tigranes’ direction. DeGroet was on the other end of the line, waiting silently.

  When nothing happened, DeGroet’s voice spat from the speaker, thin but clear. “Kill one of them.”

  “Which one?” Andras said.

  “The Greek,” DeGroet said. “He wouldn’t care about Hunt.”

  Andras nodded to the men standing behind Christos’ chair, and one of them drew a foot-long hunting knife from a scabbard at his waist. He held it to Christos’ throat.

  “Don’t do it,” Gabriel said, in Greek, to the man. “He’s done nothing wrong. He’s one of you.”

  “He chose his side,” the man muttered. His knife didn’t budge.

  “Boy,” came DeGroet’s voice, “can you understand me?” His Greek was better than Andras’, though still accented.

  “Yes,” Christos said.

  “Tell the old man to begin reciting the poem about the sphinx or my men will cut your head off. Tell him that.”

  “Tigranes,” Christos said. The old man looked over at him. “You heard what they want.” His voice trembled. “Don’t do it.”

  “They will kill you,” Tigranes said.

  “Lajos,” Gabriel called out, “you don’t need to do this. I know everything you want to know—I already got it out of him. Bring me to wherever you are and I’ll—”

  “Oh, now you wish to cooperate. Imagine that. The great Gabriel Hunt, within an inch of losing his life at last, and now he wants to make a deal. Well, no. I think not. You had your chance—plenty of chances. No more deals. Andras?”

  “Yes,” Andras said.

  “Start a little at a time,” DeGroet said in Hungarian. “Cut off the boy’s hand. Then the other, then a foot. We’ll make the old man talk.”

  Andras nodded again to the man with the knife and explained partly through gestures what DeGroet wanted. It wasn’t a difficult message to convey.

  Gabriel, meanwhile, was straining against the ropes holding him to the chair. There was one around his wrists and another tying his ankles to the front legs, and both were taut and unyielding. With enough time and privacy he might be able to introduce some slack, work the knots apart, maybe even inch over to the wall and work the ropes against the rock till the fibers came apart—but time and privacy were two things he didn’t have.

  One of the men untied Christos’ arms and then held them pinned to the wooden arms of the chair. The other, the one with the knife, said to Christos, “You right-handed or left? I’ll do the other first.”

  “No,” Tigranes said. “No. I cannot sit by while this boy is maimed or killed. Not when all you wish is to hear my poems. I will play.” Angrily, he strummed his instrument, and the melody that arose sounded dark, martial.

  “There,” DeGroet’s voice came from the cell phone. “You see?”

  “Raise your voice in song, O goddess,” Tigranes intoned, “and tell of Peleus’ mighty son, Achilleus, who rained misery untold upon the brows of his fellow Achaeans. Many a hero among them was laid low and brought to Hades, their flesh made carrion for the beaks of vultures and the jaws of wild dogs upon the blood-drenched plains of Troy—”

  DeGroet interrupted, his voice blasting from the tiny speaker in Andras’ hand: “Troy? Troy? I don’t want the Iliad, you old fool, I want the sphinx—”

  “I am very sorry,” Tigranes said, his voice soft, his music stilled, “but I am, as you say, old. My memory is not what it was. I cannot enter the old tales anywhere I wish, or that you might wish—I can only remember them from the beginning.”

  “You’re joking,” DeGroet said.

  “From the beginning,” Tigranes repeated. “And that means I have to start on the plains of Troy. And if I am interrupted, I will have to return to the plains of Troy once more, and start over again. From the beginning.”

  “I will have them kill the boy!” DeGroet shouted.

  “You can kill whomever you wish,” Tigranes said. “Him, me, yourself. But it will not change the fact that I can only tell the stories in one way: from start to finish, in their proper order.”

  DeGroet uttered an oath, a fevered Hungarian profanity. The language was rich with them.

  “All right,” he said finally. “Do it in whatever order you have to, but for god’s sake, do it quickly.”

  “For the gods’ sake,” Tigranes said, “I will do properly.”

  “Just start already,” DeGroet said. “Andras—call me back when he gets to the sphinx.” And the connection was broken.

  “You heard him,” Andras said, pocketing the phone. He looked around the room, the expression on his face making it clear that he’d have to be tied to a chair himself in order to sit through hours of Greek poetry being recited. “Start,” he said. “And you—” He pointed to the man with the knife. “Say me when he reaches the sphinx. I go up.” He strode out and they all heard his steps on the stairs.

  “Sit, gentlemen, sit,” Tigranes said, gesturing to their captors, Greek men all, ranging in age from their late twenties to a few in what looked like their late fifties. “We will be here for a while, you may as well be comfortable.” Some of the men sat; some remained standing. Tigranes smiled at them. “You know that Homer himself was once a captive, a hostage—it is from this experience that he got his name, homeros. He had another name at birth. You did not know this?” He made a clucking sound with his tongue. “You should be ashamed to know so little of your own heritage.”

  “Stop talking and begin reciting,” the man with the knife said. “We don’t want to be here all night.”

  Tigranes shrugged. “As you wish.”

  His fingers plucked at the strings.

  Two hours later, Tigranes had reached the bedroom of Helen of Troy and all the men sat at rapt attention. Their eyes were on Tigranes as he sang of her treachery and sadness, of her lover, Paris, and his cowardice, of their dalliance between the sheets while men were dying for them by the score on the battlefield below. His hands alternated between plucking the strings of his lyre and waving in midair to accompany the vivid word pictures he was painting. His voice grew quiet during moments of grieving and loud for the bloody battles, sped up when events took an unexpected turn and lingered painfully when a hero’s fatal wounds bled into the Trojan soil.

  Glancing to his left, Gabriel saw that Christos was mesmerized as well: he didn’t seem anxious for himself any longer, only for the fate of Hector and Ajax and Odysseus. As Gabriel himself mig
ht have been—Tigranes was an oddly compelling performer, and there might never be another opportunity to hear the Iliad recited in this way, as it was originally meant to be heard. But he had other priorities. He nudged Christos’ leg gently with his knee.

  It took two more nudges to break the spell. Then Christos looked over. Gabriel jerked his head back very slightly and cast his eyes downward, toward Christos’ hands. The man with the knife had retied them behind his back, but he’d done it swiftly—Tigranes’ tale had been underway and he’d been half listening to it already. Perhaps he’d done slightly less thorough a job the second time, had left a bit more slack.

  Gabriel’s arms were also tied behind his back, and he strained now, stretching as far as the ropes would permit over toward Christos. And after a moment or two Christos got the message and started straining back the other way. Gabriel felt the skin of the younger man’s knuckles brush against his own, then they were gone. He redoubled his efforts. He could feel it painfully in his shoulders and elbows, stretched almost to the point of dislocation, and he could see the boy beside him wincing as he tried to meet him more than halfway.

  Then Gabriel felt a knot beneath his fingertips.

  He seized it, pinched it between forefinger and thumb, grabbed hold and pulled the rope toward him, and Christos’ hands with it. Christos took in a sharp breath, bit down on his lower lip. Gabriel saw sweat bead on Christos’ forehead, saw the pain in his eyes, but Gabriel held on and mouthed two words: Untie me.

  Christos blinked tears out of his eyes and nodded, and then his fingers began moving, his nails picking at the rope binding Gabriel’s wrists. Gabriel, meanwhile, concentrated on not letting the rope out of his increasingly sweaty grip—if he lost his hold and Christos’ hands swung away, Christos might not have the strength to get them back over here again.

  Facing them across the room, Tigranes saw what they were doing, or suspected, anyway, and he redoubled his efforts. He stood up, braced the phorminx against his chest with one arm and swept the other in grand theatrical gestures, miming the swing of a sword, a man warding off blows, a wife wiping her husband’s battle-weary brow. His beard shook with passion, and the Greeks seated in double rows on the floor and benches before him never looked away.

  Half a minute more, a minute—and then finally the rope came free. It slipped from Gabriel’s wrists to the floor and he felt blood rush back in where the circulation had been cut off. He flexed his fingers, one hand at a time, then went to work on the rope around Christos’ wrists. When that fell to the ground he cautiously reached down to work on the knots at his ankles.

  He’d gotten one leg free when heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs outside the door. He and Christos looked at each other. Sitting upright again, they slid their hands behind them, doing their best to look as though they were still tied down.

  “Sphinx yet?” Andras asked, barging into the room.

  The men all roused, as if from sleep, looking around with a slightly embarrassed expression. Tigranes stopped his song, the last of his notes hanging still in the air. “Not yet,” he said. “Now go, before you make me lose my place.”

  Andras’ huge fist rose and he advanced on Tigranes for a step or two, forgetting himself—he was not used to being talked back to by a man twice his age and half his size. But the buzzing of the cell phone in his pocket reminded him of the fate in store for him if he lost his temper. All eyes were on him as he took the phone out and flipped it open, held it to his ear. “No, not yet,” he said. “I will. I will. Yes, sir.” He jabbed the “END” button with his thumb—and then Gabriel smashed him across the back with the chair.

  Chapter 15

  Andras fell forward onto two of the other men as Gabriel leapt for the bench with his gun on it. He slid across the surface on his belly and snapped the revolver up in one fist, spinning to face Andras as he went off the end of the bench and landed in a crouch.

  Christos had taken off the rope around his ankles as well. He ran over to Tigranes and began shepherding him toward Gabriel. He put the old man behind him, protecting him from the blows two of the other Greeks began raining down, getting in a punch of his own whenever one of the midsections before him was unprotected.

  “Step back,” Gabriel ordered Andras, who’d climbed to his feet once more. The cell phone was still in his hand, its screen broken now, its top half hanging at a crooked angle. He threw it at Gabriel and reached for the gun at his hip.

  “Uh-uh,” Gabriel said, catching the ruined phone in his free hand and pulling the Colt’s hammer back. “Hands up by your shoulders.”

  Andras sneered, disgusted—but he put his hands up.

  Gabriel moved toward the room’s one window, inching along the wall so no man could get behind him. He fanned the Colt left and right in tight arcs, sending each man who’d dared to venture a step forward shrinking back. He saw Christos inching toward him from the other direction, Tigranes shielded behind his broad shoulders. “Let him through,” Gabriel said, and the men pressing around Christos fell back a step or two, their hands up, as Gabriel’s gun swept over to cover them.

  “You’re a fool,” Andras said as Gabriel and Christos closed in from either side on the window, a narrow arched opening in the tower wall that looked out over a rear courtyard. “Where are you going to go?” They were on the ground floor, so even Tigranes could go out the window here—but ten yards away was the cliff where they’d been captured, and past it, nothing but open sky.

  “What, are you going to jump,” Andras said, “like those old Greeks did? Kill yourself to get away?”

  “Maybe,” Gabriel said. “Like someone once told me, what I do or don’t do is my problem, not yours.”

  “Kill yourself if you want, Hunt—I don’t care. But if you take the old man, that makes it my problem. My boss is not the sort of man you want to disappoint. He can be very nasty when someone disappoints him.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Gabriel said. Beside him, out of the corner of one eye, he saw Christos climbing out the window, then reaching back in to help Tigranes through.

  Andras darted an involuntary glance down toward where his gun hung at his side. Gabriel knew what he was thinking: could he get to it in time?

  “Don’t do it, Andras,” Gabriel said.

  “You’re going to have to leave the old man here, Hunt,” Andras said. “I don’t like the idea of being cut into little pieces by Lajos DeGroet.” And he went for his gun.

  He managed to get it out of its holster before Gabriel pulled the trigger. Andras spun toward the wall and collapsed, Gabriel’s last bullet in his chest. “Well,” Gabriel said softly, “you don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  The Greeks stood around for a moment in stunned silence, the man who’d been paying them and giving them their orders lying lifeless at their feet. Gabriel took the opportunity to vault over the sill of the window and into the courtyard. He hit the ground running. Christos and Tigranes were already twenty feet away, speeding for the cliff’s edge as fast as Tigranes could go. Which was pretty fast, Gabriel was happy to see.

  Would the Greeks follow? They had no real reason to—he’d have thought they’d have had more loyalty to a couple of their countrymen than to Andras and DeGroet.

  But a moment later the question was answered. A chorus of angry voices arose behind them and then gunfire followed as the Greeks poured out the window and gave chase.

  He hastened to the edge of the cliff, where Tigranes and Christos were on their hands and knees, facing away from the vertiginous drop. Tigranes had his phorminx slung across his back once more and his tough, gnarled hands wrapped tightly around a brown root, similarly tough and gnarled, that trailed across the ground and over the edge. “Follow me closely,” he said. “We are only going a short distance down.”

  “I certainly hope we are,” Gabriel said, looking at the long fall to the mountain’s base.

  “Hold tight,” Tigranes said and, letting himself down the root hand over hand, dro
pped out of sight. Christos looked up at Gabriel nervously and then followed suit, holding onto a neighboring root. That left Gabriel by himself on the clifftop—but not for long, since the first of the men who’d pursued them from the tower was upon him in seconds.

  It was the man with the knife, and he swung its blade before him, back and forth in wide sweeps, like a thresher looking for wheat to cut down to size.

  “Where are they?” he shouted.

  “Gone,” Gabriel said, stepping back to stay out of the blade’s reach. “Over the side.” With each step backwards he took, the other man took one forward, matching him stride for stride. And there wasn’t much striding room left.

  “You lie,” the man said. Then, looking down at the ground, he saw one of the roots shift slightly, as though under a heavy burden. “Or…maybe you don’t,” he said. “An old man, hanging like a child from a tree limb.” His voice rose to a shout. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Tigranes!” He raised his knife overhead and brought his arm down forcefully, releasing the blade so that it plunged downward and landed, quivering, in the center of the root. It was the thinnest of the roots, and it split as the blade went in. The severed portion snaked toward the edge of the cliff. Gabriel leaped after it, skidding along the ground and grabbing hold of the root just as it plunged over the edge. But when he grabbed it, he found it weighed practically nothing—and looking down he saw there was no one holding onto the other end.

  He heard a sound beside him—hsst!—and turned his head to see Christos just inches away, clinging desperately to the next root over. Tigranes was hanging onto one a few feet further down the rock face, his sandaled feet twined in its length, one hand feeling for something among the rocks beside him.

  “Now you, American,” came a voice from behind him, and Gabriel felt hands at his ankles, lifting his feet high in the air and tilting him forward. “You can join them.”

  Gabriel dropped the cut root and scrabbled with his hands at the rock before him, but he couldn’t get a grip as the Greek behind him tipped him over. His chest slid roughly down the stone surface till he was hanging headfirst, arms dangling toward the ground far below.