Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

by Gabriel Hunt

  “Gabriel,” Dayani said patiently, “if they find out I drove you, they’ll have all the reason they need. You may think you’re protecting me, but you’re not. At worst you’re endangering me and at best you’re annoying me.” She swerved onto the shoulder to give a wide berth to a truck that had loomed up out of nowhere. Honking, she swerved back on once it was past. “So for the sake of all that is holy, mon âme, would you please just tell me what the hell is going on?”

  Sheba put down the towel. “Oh, I like this one, Gabriel,” she said.

  So he told her—the whole story, starting with the call from Jim Kellen in Dublin and the midnight flight to Hungary, then the abduction in New York and the plane ride to Egypt, the secret chamber deep inside the Sphinx and the cavern beneath Anavatos. He told her about the two sculptures he’d found and the two coins, and the two maps, too, with their inscriptions pointing to ancient Taprobane. Dayani listened to it all without any change in her expression, concentrating on her driving, until finally she pulled to a stop in a lot behind the Golden Temple, put on the parking brake, and turned the keys in the ignition. The car’s engine grumbled once and was silent.

  “Gabriel,” she said, turning to face him over the back of the seat, “that’s the craziest story I’ve ever heard. It’s madness—sheer madness. Grown men chasing about, getting killed, over a fairy tale about monsters and treasures…how could anyone believe anything so, so détraqué?”

  “You asked,” Gabriel said. “You wanted to hear it. Now you’ve heard it. Maybe it’s crazy and maybe it’s not. But it’s true—I can promise you that. The men who are looking for this treasure are real, and the bullets in their guns are real, and they’re all of—” He checked the unit in his pocket. “—ninety-one miles away. Which probably means they’ve just landed in Colombo. We’d better get going again.”

  “You can’t even wait for the rain to let up?” Dayani said.

  “They won’t,” Gabriel said.

  She looked over at Sheba. “Have you tried to talk some sense into him?”

  “Hey,” Sheba said, “you spend some time with a gun to your head or a sword at your throat, sister, and then you can talk.”

  Gabriel saw Dayani’s eyes blaze and he put a hand up between the women. “We don’t have time for this. Dayani—can you let us borrow the car? Actually,” he said, “I guess I should start by asking whether you can even get there by car.”

  “You can get pretty close,” Dayani conceded after a moment. “You’ll have to walk the last half mile or so.”

  “Then you’ll let us borrow it?” Gabriel said. “Please, Dayani. It’s important.”

  Dayani stared into Gabriel’s eyes half regretfully, as though she could read there some terrible future consequences of her decision. “You think I can say no to you?” she said. “Just be careful, for heaven’s sake. Bad enough to get yourself killed over something real, something that matters. To die for a rich man’s fantasy…”

  “Many have died for less,” Gabriel said.

  “Oui. And many have died for nothing. But I don’t care about many. I care about you.” To Sheba she said, “Close your eyes, dear. You won’t want to see this.”

  Sheba didn’t close her eyes as Dayani planted a palm on each of Gabriel’s cheeks and pressed her lips to his, but when the kiss lasted past the ten-second mark, she turned to look out the window. At twenty seconds she said, without turning back, “Maybe you can enlighten me, Gabriel, on just what we do and don’t have time for.”

  “Sorry,” Gabriel said, pulling away.

  “Be safe,” Dayani whispered. “You, too,” she said to Sheba, and gripped her hand briefly. Then she was out of the car and heading through the pouring rain toward the back door of the administrative building by the Temple’s side. She looked back once, then went inside.

  “All of us,” Gabriel said, and he climbed into the front seat.

  Chapter 23

  The readout of the tracking unit, which Gabriel had propped upright between them, was slowly counting down. When they’d gotten back onto the highway it had said 83SW; now it was down to 77.

  The pitch-black sky overhead was lit suddenly by the jagged forks of a lighting strike, followed seconds later by a monstrous crack of thunder and the sound of a tree smashing through branches and leaves to the jungle floor. It sounded just yards away, and Gabriel half expected to see a portion of the tree’s massive trunk drop into view in their path. The car’s headlights illuminated only a few feet ahead of them; it felt like anything might be out there, just out of sight, a collision waiting to happen.

  He felt the slope of the road increase as they went, the little car’s brakes straining harder to grip the surface, its engine straining to make some of the steeper climbs. It was a Tata Motors import from India, the best Dayani could afford, no doubt, on the amount UNESCO paid her, and it probably did fine for ferrying her to and from work. It was waterproof; the windshield wipers worked. But it had surely never been tested under the sort of stress cars regularly were forced to endure under Gabriel’s hand, and he very much doubted this one could take the punishment. Just as well, then, that they’d be leaving it at a safe distance from their destination.

  They came to the turnoff from the highway and shot through a muddy patch at the start of a road whose paving was cracked and uneven. Municipal services were not the country’s strong suit and road repair took a backseat in the fight for what resources there were. But the rains kept coming, seven months out of the year, battering each manmade incursion into the jungle as if eager to erase its presence. They drove over potholes that would make even a New Yorker look twice. You could’ve bathed a baby in some of them.

  But even cracked pavement was preferable to an unpaved dirt road, and Gabriel braked to a halt when he realized that was what he was driving on. Already, the mud beneath their tires was dragging at them, making progress difficult—he didn’t want to get the car stuck entirely. Revving the engine, he switched into reverse and backed up out of the muck till he was on asphalt again and under the overhang of a healthy-sized tree limb. Pocketing the keys, he got out. Sheba followed, the towel held over her head.

  “We walk from here,” Gabriel said, and led the way.

  Their first sight of Sigiriya came with a sudden strobe of lightning overhead. The rock didn’t look like a lion. It looked a little like Devil’s Tower—that same impression almost of a geyser of stone spouting from the ground, like a gargantuan oil strike frozen in mideruption. In front of the rock, a space had been cleared in the jungle, a thousand feet of little square gardens and paths and ponds, all of them now awash with rainwater. He strode quickly along the main path, mud sucking at his boots, the bandage around his ankle waterlogged and cold. Sheba walked beside him, hugging the bag from the plane to her side. Gabriel reached into it and drew out the flashlight—rubber-sheathed and waterproof and with a beam roughly as ineffective as the car’s headlights had been. It was better than nothing.

  The rock grew in stuttering snapshot steps as they approached it, larger each time it was made visible by a crooked branch of lightning zigzagging through the sky. In certain spots the highest levels of the rock overhung the lowest, and Gabriel made for one of these. Though the wind continued to blow the rain against them, here at least was some small shelter from the storm. He could see how Sigiriya would have recommended itself to monks in the fourth century—BC or AD, it didn’t matter which—desperate for relief from the island’s thunderous deluges. That there were caves, too—warm, dry, possibly home to a local animal or two who could be cooked over a fire for dinner—was all the more reason.

  But he and Sheba didn’t have the luxury of crawling into a cave and waiting out the storm. Shielding it with one hand, he drew Lucy’s device from his pocket once more. Sixty miles exactly. That wasn’t much time at all.

  Squeezing through a narrow opening between two tall walls of rock, Gabriel found a set of shallow stone steps leading up along the side. He put out one hand to steady h
imself against the rock face and shouted back for Sheba to do the same. For a moment she held onto the waterlogged towel, then she crammed it in the bag. “Hell with it,” she said. She didn’t bother putting up the hood. Her hair was plastered to her scalp within seconds.

  They climbed slowly, carefully. The path wound around the huge boulder, narrowing as it went till there was no more than a person’s width of stone beneath their feet, and nothing to their left but a sheer drop. The rock they walked on was slick and slippery, and pitted with shallow depressions that had accumulated puddles but looked solid in the flashlight’s glare. A misstep, a loss of balance, a moment’s error, and they’d be falling through the darkness. But not for long. Gabriel thought of the man who’d plunged to his death in front of his eyes back in New York. Even a fall of a hundred feet would take just two or three seconds, not long enough even to mouth a prayer. Not that Gabriel was a praying man, and he didn’t think he’d turn into one at the end, but—

  He hugged the rock and climbed in minute steps. He didn’t want to find out.

  Behind him, Sheba was saying something but the powerful winds were snatching her words away before they could reach him. He hung back so she could catch up. When she did, he could hear the fear in her voice. “Can you see…how much farther…?”

  “Not much,” he said, though the honest answer would have been, No, I can’t see.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and reached out a hand to stroke her shoulder gently. “Just pretend you’re taking a walk down Grafton Street on a Sunday afternoon. Sidewalk there’s not a whole lot wider than this.”

  “Maybe,” Sheba said, “but stepping off the curb’s not such a big deal.”

  “I thought you said your father took you climbing and such,” Gabriel said, “and that you enjoyed it.”

  “I enjoyed it when he took me hunting and fishing and camping out,” Sheba said. “I always hated the climbing.”

  “Well, there’s not much of it left,” Gabriel said. “Just a little bit.”

  “You’re fucking lying to me, Hunt,” she said.

  “Yes,” Gabriel said.

  “Well, thank you,” she said. “Keep doing it.” And she put out a hand again to find the wall beside her.

  But it didn’t land on stone.

  A noise arose as her hand hit the side of something soft and fibrous, an angry buzzing sound like a hundred cell phones set to vibrate going off at once. Gabriel swung the beam of the flashlight around and it slid across a cluster of dark misshapen sacs hanging from the underside of a small ledge of rock. Sheba’s palm had landed directly on one of them, crushing the side, and through the hole was streaming a cloud of—

  “Move!” Gabriel shouted. “Now!”

  Wasps. The so-called “wild bees” of Sri Lanka were legendary for their viciousness—some years back there’d been a newspaper article about a wasp attack that had left two hundred tourists in the hospital with swollen limbs and constricted breathing passages. And if you had the misfortune to be allergic to their venom—

  He grabbed Sheba’s arm and pulled her around in front of him, putting himself in the raging insects’ path, an act of chivalry that was rewarded instantly when he felt a stinger plunge into the flesh of his neck. He swatted wildly over his shoulder till he felt the back of his hand collide with the wasp’s body, then slapped his hand against the rock, crushing it.

  But there were too many to kill one by one. There were too many even to see one by one—what he saw, silhouetted against the general darkness, was a cloud with undulating edges made up of hundreds of enraged wasps unleashed into the thunderstorm. The rain was probably confusing them, but not enough—several dozen came flying toward Gabriel, who threw up one leather-jacketed arm in front of his face and slapped a flurry of the bugs aside.

  “The towel,” he shouted, “hold it up and climb as fast as you can.”

  He felt Sheba move beside him, saw the white of the towel out of the corner of one eye, heard her taking small but rapid steps along the precarious path.

  A wasp darted in under his guard and jabbed into his chin. He could feel the swelling begin immediately.

  He turned and ran, the wasps screaming angrily behind him, and not far behind at that. He felt his injured foot slip and caught himself with one hand, digging his fingers desperately into a crevice in the rock. Wasps flung themselves by the dozen against his back and legs, unable to penetrate the thick leather of the jacket or the fabric of his pants. But he felt one in his hair as well and another at his neck, which was already swollen and painful from the earlier sting. He brushed the one in his hair away and kept going, urging Sheba along when he caught up to her.

  They rounded a corner and found themselves facing a passage between the rock face on one side and an artificial wall erected on the other. It was a huge barrier, like a restraining wall or a dam, five feet thick at the base and tapering toward the top some ten feet overhead. In the flashlight’s beam it looked like it was made of fired clay with some sort of glaze or veneer, and on the rock behind the wall, sheltered by it and by an overhang above, Gabriel glimpsed the paintings Dayani had mentioned, the maidens of Sigiriya with their jeweled headdresses and lotus blossoms between their fingers and no shirts on. He ran past them, Sheba in the lead and going even faster, neither of them at risk of falling off the mountain, temporarily, because of the wall to their left. The wasps continued to race after them—some hadn’t made the turn, but most had. Sheba came to a set of stairs carved into the rock and took them two at a time, and Gabriel followed, close on her heels. Then off to one side Gabriel saw the narrow entrance of a cave. Sheba ran past it, but Gabriel reached out, snagged her arm and pulled her back toward him. Squeezing inside the cave opening, he flattened himself against the wall on one side and motioned for Sheba to do the same on the other. He grabbed one corner of the towel from her hand and held it up against the wall at the edge of the opening. Sheba followed his lead, the towel hanging between them, covering the opening to about three feet down from the top. Gabriel shut off the flashlight and they waited in the dark.

  They heard the sounds of wasps winging past, felt small collisions as some hurled their bodies against the towel. It took a minute or two for the sounds to die down and the collisions to stop. Still, Gabriel whispered “Wait,” and gave it another two minutes. When he’d heard no sounds for that long, he switched on the light again and let his end of the towel fall. The flashlight’s beam revealed, hanging from the fabric, the bodies of ten or eleven fat wasps, their stingers trapped in the towel’s fabric. Sheba threw the towel to the ground. Then she stepped on each one, grinding it to a bloody smear on the cloth.

  “Did you get stung?” Gabriel asked.

  She nodded. “Hurts like hell. You?”

  He reached back to massage the inflamed lump on his neck. “I’ll live.”

  “I’m sorry—I should have been more careful—”

  “Stop it,” Gabriel said. He stepped outside. The storm was still raging, but the water almost felt good on his neck and chin. He glanced at the tracker. Fifty-two miles. It ticked over to fifty-one as he watched. Driving quickly, DeGroet might get here in less than an hour. “Come on,” he said and held his hand out. Sheba took it, and they continued along the winding path up the side of the rock.

  “Not much longer now,” Gabriel said after a bit. He’d just reached the top of a set of stairs and Sheba was a few steps behind.

  “I’m not falling for that again,” Sheba said.

  “Good for you,” Gabriel said. “Except this time it’s the truth.”

  And as Sheba climbed the last few steps a shattering bolt of lightning lit the sky, revealing the shelf of rock they stood upon—and at the far end, where the rest of the mountain still towered above them, two vast and trunkless feet of stone, the three carved claws on each gleaming, shining in the rain.

  Chapter 24

  They were better preserved than the paws of the Great Sphinx in Egypt—but as Dayani h
ad warned, the well-preserved paws were all that remained. The steep stone stairs between the paws led only to a rock ledge that in turn led to more stairs winding further up the mountain—the monumental head the stairs must once have passed through was completely gone.

  Gabriel walked over to what would have been the figure’s left paw and crouched beside it. Rainwater ran down its sides and pooled at his feet. He shone the flashlight on the wet surface and felt along it with one hand, inching his fingertips from the base of the claw all the way back to the rock wall the paw emerged from. Then he did the same thing again, a few inches lower.

  “What are you doing?” Sheba said.

  He didn’t answer, just kept feeling along the surface for any irregularity in texture, any indication of a seam. He stopped about halfway down. “The men of Taprobane,” he said, pulling from his belt the other tool he’d hung there on the way off the plane, a spring-loaded emergency window punch, “were creatures of habit.” He set the tip of the punch to the section of the stone where his finger had halted and triggered its action. The point shot out, chiseling into the stone. “Two temples, separated by hundreds of miles and hundreds of years, but they had matching maps and matching statues inside, matching inscriptions.” He pried the punch out, reset it, moved it a few inches away, and triggered it again. “I figure if they built a secret entrance into the Sphinx’s left paw in Giza, they’d probably—” He moved the punch once more, triggered it again. “—do the same thing here.”

  After a few more shots, the outline of a seam began to emerge. “Here, hold this,” he said, and Sheba took the flashlight from him, aiming it down to illuminate the surface. “A little higher.” The beam moved. “That’s it.” He drew the point of the punch along the seam, clearing it of the compacted stone dust that had filled it in for so long. The rain was helping, by washing particles away as he dug them out.