by Gabriel Hunt
“So you’re saying,” Christos began again, “that—”
“I am saying nothing,” Tigranes corrected him. “It is Homer who said it. I merely recount what he reported.”
“And he reported,” Gabriel said, “that the island of Taprobane, source of cinnamon and spice, of coconuts and tea, also bred sphinxes for export to Egypt and Greece?”
“Not just sphinxes,” Tigranes said. “All manner of monstrous crossbreed. The men of Taprobane were the greatest breeders of the ancient world. You could not get a sphinx anywhere else—not for all the gold and rubies in the richest treasury on earth. So great men came to Taprobane in secret, and not only the rulers of Egypt and Greece, either—every kingdom from the Indies to Ultima Thule came.”
“To the cradle of fear,” Gabriel said.
“Yes. The cradle of fear. The place every king and sultan and emperor the world over sent to for his guardian beasts, his fearsome defenders of temples and labyrinths, of secrets great or small.”
“And how did this island come to develop this…specialty?” Gabriel said.
“How did the men of Arabia come to tame stallions? Who knows? Homer does not say. He merely tells us that they played this role for longer than man’s memory can tell.”
Gabriel pondered the story. No doubt it had its roots in some germ of truth, but how much or how little those roots resembled the distant branches that had flowered elaborately in the millennia since, there was no way to know. No doubt the early Sri Lankans had bred something, perhaps a variety of fearsome beasts, perhaps ones their visitors from far-flung lands found strange and unfamiliar, and that fact had blossomed in the telling into a reputation for breeding monsters. Or maybe, who knows, the men of Sri Lanka might have been extraordinary sculptors, ones who traveled the world overseeing the creation of monumental statues like that of the Great Sphinx at Giza, and over time their reputation for fashioning beasts of stone and clay got transmuted into a reputation for breeding their living, breathing counterparts. It was easy to imagine how that might happen.
Still…the story, true or false, unquestionably had the power to compel the imagination, to enthrall—and perhaps not just credulous youths such as Steve McQueen here. Even a worldly sort like Lajos DeGroet might find his attention seized by all this talk of holy treasure.
“Do you have any idea what the treasure is that the inscription speaks of? And who it was that was supposed to return it to Taprobane?”
“The story goes,” Tigranes said, “that the men from Taprobane made the long voyage here themselves to collect it, and left behind them the map and the inscription you see as a reminder that they’d been. Directions, if you will, that they might be found again should the need for their services once more arise. But as for what the treasure was, no one knows. Some have speculated that it was wealth that our sphinx had received in tribute, some that it might have been a religious artifact created in her honor. Some…”
“Yes?”
“Some think it refers to some part of the sphinx herself, collected at the time of her death—her heart, perhaps, or her eyes. They were thought to be the seat of her power, you see.”
“Power? What power?”
“All sphinxes were said to have the power to destroy their enemies with a glance,” Tigranes said. “By rendering them physically paralyzed with fear.”
Gabriel thought of the Great Sphinx of Egypt, called Abul-Hôl, the Father of Fear. And his Greek counterpart, called “Strangler” after her method of putting victims to death—perhaps the ancient Greeks had meant not literal, physical strangulation but the inducement of a terror so extreme its victim couldn’t breathe?
The children of the cradle of fear, bringing fear to the four corners of the world.
Gabriel felt a chill go down his spine. Was Lajos DeGroet simply after new trophies for his collection or was he searching for something considerably more sinister—more dangerous? Certainly the amount of firepower he’d flown over to Egypt had suggested something deadlier than your average relic-hunting expedition. But what could this man possibly have hoped to find in the belly of the Sphinx? Some artifact that might give him this legendary power of the sphinx, the power to terrify with a glance? And if so…to what end? To what use would a man in possession of ungodly wealth, a private army, a staggering ego and unmatched ambition put such a power? Gabriel didn’t know the answer—he just knew he was glad DeGroet hadn’t yet found what he was looking for.
But of course now—
Damn it, now he would find it. The one advantage Gabriel had had was that back in Egypt DeGroet hadn’t found the coin in the statue’s mouth. He’d only found the partial map the chamber had contained, and no clue as to where the remainder might be located. But now he knew that Gabriel was on Chios…and soon his men, in searching for the three of them, would stumble upon this temple. And then the rest of the map would be his.
They heard a sound then.
It came from outside, where the tunnel began. It was the sound of a heavy rope uncoiling and slapping against the stone wall. And then a second one.
They all looked at each other.
“Come on,” Gabriel said.
“What are you going to do?” Christos whispered.
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I’ll think of something.”
They retraced their steps through the tunnel, watching the white patch in the distance grow larger as they neared it. They could see the two ropes, hanging in front of the opening, and as they watched, a figure carefully let itself down on one of them in a mountaineering harness. The figure was brightly backlit, so Gabriel couldn’t make out the person’s features; he only hoped this meant he had the benefit on his side of being hidden in relative darkness. He flattened himself against the tunnel wall and drew his Colt, empty though it was. Sometimes you played a weak hand just because all your chips were in the pot and it was the hand you had.
He cocked the pistol loudly. “Set one foot in here and you’re a dead man,” Gabriel said, his voice bristling with as much self-confidence as he could project.
“That’s a hell of a way to greet an old friend,” a familiar voice replied, somewhat unsteadily.
And then Sheba unlatched herself from the rope and stepped into the tunnel.
Gabriel rushed forward. He swept her up in his arms and lifted her off her feet, buried his face in her hair. He could feel that she was trembling. “How…how did you get here?”
“A girl could grow old waiting for you to bring her a pair of shoes.”
He unzipped the pocket of his jacket, found the pair of loafers crumpled beside Andras’ broken cell phone. He took them out. “I got you these.”
“That’s all right,” Sheba said. She took a deep breath, let it out. Her voice steadied. “I took care of myself.”
She had. She was wearing khaki pants and a ribbed white tank top under a lightweight jacket, and on her feet she had what looked like steel-toed climbing boots. Gabriel tossed the loafers aside.
“Sheba,” Gabriel said, switching back to Greek for the purpose of making introductions, “this is Christos.” The young man extended a hand, and she shook it. He seemed to be having some difficulty raising his eyes higher than the snug fabric of her tank top. “And this is Tigranes.”
“Tigranes?” she said. “That’s an interesting name. You know they say that was Homer’s name, originally, before—”
“Before his captivity, yes. I know.” Tigranes smiled. “I am surprised, however, that a young woman such as yourself, a foreigner, would know this.”
“Sheba’s a surprising young woman indeed,” Gabriel said, “and she knows practically everything.” He pulled her to one side. “I think,” he whispered in English, “you just made a friend for life.”
“Who are they?” she whispered back.
“They’re on our side. That’s all that matters.” Gabriel walked closer to the ledge, inspected the ropes. Reaching out, he tugged on each in turn. They were both solidly anchored. Bu
t thinking back to Sheba’s terror on the battlements in Hungary, he knew that climbing down the face of a cliff—even a short distance, even on a well-anchored rope—couldn’t have been easy for her.
“Where did you get the equipment?” he asked.
“Same place I picked up your trail. You’d said you were going to Avgonyma, so I followed you there—”
“Barefoot?”
“I found a pair of sandals in the house,” Sheba said. “Pretty flimsy, but good enough to get me to Avgonyma.”
“Where you found…?”
“Everything you see. The boots were the hardest to come by, but I found a merchant who had hiking and climbing gear. The most interesting thing happened while I was there haggling with him, though—these two trucks drove up and a dozen men poured out with a story of having been through a gun battle and trapped ‘the American’ on the side of the mountain.”
“The American,” Gabriel said. “You didn’t think it might be some other American?”
“Trapped on the side of a mountain after a gun battle? Not for a moment.”
“And all this equipment—how did you get your hands on it? I would have expected the Greeks to grab whatever the guy had.”
“Oh, they did,” Sheba said. “They grabbed it and loaded it into one of the trucks.”
“And?”
“And I stole the truck,” Sheba said.
“You stole the truck,” Gabriel said.
“That’s right.”
“But didn’t you say they had another truck?” Gabriel said.
“They did,” Sheba said. “What they have now is a gas tank full of sand.”
Gabriel kissed her, hard, on the lips. “You’re something else,” he said when they finally came up for air. “I owe you one.”
“You owe me two,” Sheba whispered. “But who’s counting?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you go up first? Christos and I can follow and then we can pull Tigranes up—”
“You don’t need to pull Tigranes anywhere,” Tigranes said. “I can climb a rope, young man.”
“All right,” Gabriel said. “Why don’t you go first, then.”
Tigranes clamped his weathered palms around the rope and was up it in a flash. Christos followed, more slowly, and then it was time for Sheba to go. She took care reattaching her safety harness.
“I appreciate what it meant for you to come here,” Gabriel told her, steadying the rope so she could climb on. “I know you’re no fan of heights.”
“Heights are okay,” Sheba said, her voice trembling again. “It’s just falling I can’t stand.” And she began the short climb, pulling herself up hand over hand.
Gabriel took one more look around, at the broken phorminx lying on the ground and the dark tunnel beyond. A more ruthless sort, he thought, might try to arrange some sort of rockfall, some way of closing up the opening forever so DeGroet’s men couldn’t find it. But DeGroet had been right, back in Giza. Even if there had been a way, he couldn’t bring himself to do it—not if it meant destroying something this precious and irreplaceable.
There’d be another way to stop DeGroet. There always was another way.
He grabbed hold of the rope with his hands and feet and climbed it to the top.
Chapter 18
The truck only had a quarter of a tank of gas and lousy brakes, but Gabriel figured the former would be enough to get them to the docks at Chios Town if the latter didn’t cause them to drive off the side of the mountain first.
Sheba was sitting in the passenger seat beside him, the two lengths of rope coiled in her lap. Tigranes and Christos were in the back of the truck, enjoying a bumpy ride. Gabriel kept the gas as close to the floor as he could while still making all the hairpin turns and switchbacks necessary to get to the bottom of the mountain. There was no telling how long they had before DeGroet’s men regrouped, found another truck and more supplies, and headed back up this narrow road. He really didn’t want to meet them head on.
As he drove, Gabriel filled Sheba in on what she’d missed. Her eyebrows rose quizzically when he came to the part about the living sphinxes.
“Really,” she said. “He told you there was a real sphinx.”
“Two of them. A boy sphinx in Egypt and a girl sphinx in Greece.”
“And they met.”
“Well, when Oedipus chased her out of Thebes, she had to go somewhere, didn’t she?” Gabriel slowed to take a particularly nasty turn, then sped up in the straightaway that followed.
“I thought the story was that she threw herself to her death off the side of a cliff after he answered her riddle,” Sheba said.
“She threw herself, but not to her death. Wings, remember?”
“Ah. Of course.”
“After a stop in Chios for, oh, a hundred years or so, she headed over to Egypt where she met her counterpart in Giza.”
“A hundred years? Just how long are these sphinxes supposed to live?”
“Oh, a few thousand years, give or take,” Gabriel said.
“According to the old man in the back of our truck,” Sheba said.
“According to Homer,” Gabriel said. He was silent for a moment. “If you ask the old man in the back of our truck.”
“All right, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that I buy it. The lady sphinx spends a hundred years in Chios, then heads over to Giza, where the old Father of Fear wines and dines her, shows off the nifty statue of him they’ve got over there, and then what?”
“Back to Chios. She stays there for the rest of her life, from about 900 BC till about 250 or so, inspiring art and architecture and lending her face to the city’s coins. And somewhere in there she meets a young local boy and tells him her story…and he eventually tells it to the rest of the world when he grows up to become Homer.”
“I see,” Sheba said.
“Well, that makes one of us,” Gabriel said. “I don’t know what’s crazier, the idea of a three-thousand-year-old monster telling her story to a young Homer or the idea of a seventy-year-old monster chasing around after her lost treasure today.”
“Well, crazy or not, we know at least the second part’s true,” Sheba said.
“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “And if we knew it was just some archaeological treasure he was after, maybe we could let him have it. But it’s not. Or maybe it’s not—nobody knows. But we can’t take the chance.”
“Of what, exactly?” Sheba said. “Letting DeGroet get his hands on something that would give him the power to terrify with a glance? It’s not like the man isn’t plenty scary as it is.”
“It’s not a question of being scary,” Gabriel said. “If you believe Tigranes, it’s the power literally to paralyze with fear. And not just one person—a hundred people, a thousand at once, however many the sphinx looked upon. And with modern technology at DeGroet’s disposal, the ability to broadcast to millions…”
Sheba laughed, then stopped when she noticed Gabriel wasn’t laughing along. “Come on,” she said. “You can’t be taking this seriously.”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. “I grant you, it could all be nonsense—DeGroet could be chasing after a myth. But if it’s not and he’s not…we can’t let him find what he’s after.”
“And how are we supposed to stop him?”
“By finding it ourselves first,” Gabriel said. “And while we’re at it, by finding him.”
“Oh, yeah? Did that map on the wall show you where he is?”
“No,” Gabriel said. “But I’ve got something that will.”
He reached into his pocket and held up Andras’ cell phone.
The sun was hanging low behind the mountains when they pulled up to the ferry landing. The ferry was there, bobbing in the water and bumping against the row of old Goodyears lashed to the pilings as a cushion. Across the way, through the late afternoon haze, the coast of Turkey loomed. He could see the battlements of Çeşme Castle faintly in the distance.
“B
ook passage for four,” Gabriel said, passing Sheba a handful of money, all he had left except for a single hundred-dollar bill. “I’ll join you in a minute.”
“They’re coming with us?”
“We can’t leave them here. We’ll find a safe place for them on the other side.”
“And where are you going?”
“To find a telephone,” Gabriel said, and he headed off toward a low bunker with cement walls that looked as though it served some official function. It was a law the world over: officials had telephones.
He had to ask several people dressed in crisp uniforms before being directed to a payphone hanging from a wall. Stickers on its side advertised taxi services and island tours. Gabriel dialed the operator and asked to place a collect call to New York.
The phone rang four times before Michael answered it. “Hello?”
“Will you accept a collect call,” the operator asked in heavily accented English, “from a Mr. Gabriel—”
“Yes, yes, absolutely, operator—put him through. Gabriel? Gabriel? Are you there? Are you okay?”
“Calm down, Michael. I’m fine.”
“Is Sheba…?”
“She’s fine, too. We’re both a little banged up—”
“I knew it,” Michael said miserably.
“—but nothing that won’t heal. Now, listen, Michael, I need something from you.”
“Anything.”
“I need the name of someone in this area who could hack into a busted cell phone and tell me what the last number it got called by was—and then trace that number.”
“Where are you?”
“Chios. But in a few minutes I’m going to be headed to Turkey.”
“Çeşme?”
“That’s right,” Gabriel said. He heard Michael typing on a computer keyboard.
“Mm,” Michael muttered to himself. “No, he’s…no…”
Gabriel turned to look out the window. Dusk was descending suddenly, as it always did in this part of the world; one minute it was still light out, the next you’d be looking at a starry sky.
“Do you think you could make it up to Istanbul?” Michael asked suddenly.